Issue no 116

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Issue No : 116 8th JANUARY , 2014

Palestinian Cultural Organization Malaysia | 1


Palestinian Cultural Organization MalaysiaMalaysiaM

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Palestinian Cultural Organization Malaysia

Netanyahu re-elected Likud leader

PCOM sends Palestinian relief teams to flooded areas

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FEATURED STORY

Articles & Analyses

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Palestine›s wasted time at the UN

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UN Security Council rejects Palestinian statehood resolution

Israel detained 1,266 Palestinian children in 2014

UN setback reflects ‹failure› of peace process: Hamas

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Palestinians join war crimes court, U.S. strongly opposes

P10Israel Insider

Sharif Nashashibi

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CONTENTS

News of Palestine

PCOM sends Palestinian relief teams to flooded areas 4

UN Security Council rejects Palestinian statehood resolution 5 UN setback reflects ‘failure’ of peace process: Hamas 6

After Killing of Gaza Teenager, Calls for Egyptian Inquiry 7

Israel detained 1,266 Palestinian children in 2014 8

Palestinians join war crimes court, U.S. strongly opposes 9

Israel Insider

Netanyahu re-elected Likud leader 10

Israel detains 10 Palestinians in New Year›s raids across West Bank 11

Unity government delegation leaves Gaza 12

Palestine›s wasted time at the UN 13

Palestinian Cultural

Organization Malaysia

Articles & Analyses

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News of Palestine

Palestinian Cultural Organization Malaysia (PCOM) initiated yesterday (Friday 2/1/2015) a relief cam-paign in solidarity with the people affected by floods in Malaysia.

According to Muslim Imran (PCOM’s Chairman), the campaign named (Hands 4 Malaysia) comprises communicating with concerned authorities to conveying messages of solidarity and sending voluntary support teams to flooded areas to assist in the ongoing relief efforts.

Two support teams of 50 Palestinians were already sent; the first team departed yesterday night (10pm) from PCOM’s office in Taman Tasik Titiwangsa heading to Kelantan, while the other team departed this early morning (7am) from Serdang heading to Pahang.

Imran stressed that such efforts express the depth of brotherhood between Palestinian and Malaysian Peoples recalling the significant role of Malaysians towards the cause of Palestine.

“Malaysian Government, NGOs and people have always stood by the Palestinian cause and supported it with all their efforts and capabilities. The Hands4Malaysia campaign is the least of what we can do to express our appreciation to Malaysia” Imran added.

It is worth mentioning that many schools and institutions in Palestine organized last week various solidar-ity events to show their support and sympathy with Malaysia in facing the flood crisis.

Malaysia has faced the worst floods since three decades which forced more than 250,000 people to flee their homes.

3-12-2015 Source: PCOM

PCOM sends Palestinian relief teams to flooded areas

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The UN Security Council has re-jected a resolution demanding an end to the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories within three years.

Jordan submitted the motion af-ter it had been agreed upon by 22 Arab states and the Palestinian Authority.

The USA voted against, but with-out the required nine votes in sup-port of the resolution, Washington was not required to exercise its veto power. Australia joined the U.S. in rejecting the text.

Russia, China, France, Jordan,

UN Security Council rejects Palestinian statehood resolution

Chad, Luxemburg, Argentina, Chile voted in favour of the draft resolution. The UK, Rwanda, Lithuania, Nigeria, South Korea ab-stained.

The resolution, condemned by Israel as a “gimmick”, needed the support of at least nine members in order to pass.

Even if it had secured the required nine votes, the US would have used its veto power to stop the adoption of the resolution.

The resolution, which was submitted by Jordan - currently the only Arab member of the security council -had called for occupied East Jerusalem to be the capital of Palestine, an end to Israeli settlement building and settling the issue of Palestinian prisoner releases.

The resolution also called for negotiations to be based on territo-rial lines that existed before Israel captured the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip in 1967.

31 December 2014 Source: Agencies

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UN setback reflects ‘failure’ of peace process: Hamas

Palestinian group Hamas has de-scribed the UN rejection of a resolu-tion setting a deadline for ending the decades-long Israeli occupation as a “failure” of peaceful settlement.

In a Wednesday statement, Hamas spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri called on Palestinian Authority President Mah-moud Abbas to stop “manipulating” Palestinian rights and national aspira-tions.

The UN Security Council on Tuesday rejected a draft resolution calling for an end to the decades-long Israeli occu-pation of Palestinian territories within three years.

The motion, which was submitted on Monday by Jordan after being agreed upon by Arab states, failed to obtain the minimum nine votes from the 15-mem-ber council.

The U.S. and Australia both voted against the proposal.

The United Kingdom, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Korea and Lithuania abstained

from voting, while Jordan, France, Russia, China, Argentina, Chad, Chile and Luxembourg voted in favour.

The resolution sets the end of 2017 as the deadline for Israel to fully withdraw from the occupied territories and to declare East Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state based on pre-1967 borders.

Abbas had earlier threatened to sever “all forms of coordina-tion” with Israel and join the International Criminal Court if the UN Security Council failed to adopt the resolution.

Direct, U.S.-brokered Palestinian-Israeli talks came to a halt in April when Israel refused to release a group of Palestinian prisoners despite earlier pledges to do so.

The roots of the Israel-Palestine conflict date to 1917, when the British government, in the now-famous “Balfour Declara-tion,” called for “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people.”

Israel occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank during the 1967 Middle East War. It later annexed the holy city in 1980, claiming it as the capital of the self-proclaimed Jewish state – a move never recognized by the international community.

Palestinians want a state of their own in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, with East Jerusalem, currently occupied by Israel, as its capital.

31/12/2014 Source: MEMO

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Palestinian officials are demanding that the Egyptian government inves-tigate the fatal shooting of a 16-year-old boy from Gaza who they say was killed by Egyptian soldiers, condemn-ing what the officials called exces-sive force against a teenager who had been crossing the frontier to find work.

The shooting of the boy, Zaki al-Hobi, on Friday was the first time in several years that Egyptian security forces had been accused of killing a Palestinian on the border, according to Palestinian officials. It highlighted the Egyptian military’s intensifying clampdown to deter smuggling in an area that the government of Presi-dent Abdel Fattah el-Sisi increasingly regards as its most serious security threat.

An Egyptian military spokesman de-nied that soldiers had killed the boy, saying in a text message that “the shooting was not from our side.”

Palestinian officials and the boy’s family said he had been shot as he and three friends crossed the border. The friends, arrested by the Egyptian authorities, said they had been try-ing to buy cigarettes in Egypt to sell in Gaza, according to police officials quoted by Reuters.

“The child was defenseless and did not pose any threat to Egyptian secu-rity,” Iyad al-Buzom, a spokesman for the Ministry of Interior and National Security in Gaza, said in a statement.

In the past few months, Egypt’s mili-tary has moved aggressively to cre-ate a security zone along the border,

After Killing of Gaza Teenager, Calls for Egyptian Inquiry

demolishing houses and smugglers’ tunnels and displacing thousands of Egyptians. Palestinians say that the military’s actions, which followed the killing by militants of 31 soldiers in the Sinai Peninsula in October, have worsened the economic deprivation in Gaza. With border crossings tightly controlled by Israel and Egypt, the tunnels were the only passages to the outside world.

Zaki, who had left school to work odd jobs like selling ice cream and repairing shoes, was typical of those desperate to leave, his cousin Bassem al-Hobi said in an interview. Zaki had made his way to Egypt once before, about three months ago, and was arrested and sent home. He had not told his family about his trip on Friday.

He was not one of the militants Egypt has been so desperate to keep out, Mr. Hobi, his cousin, said. Mr. Hobi, a member of the militant Islamic Jihad group, said he had tried several times to persuade Zaki to join, to no avail.

“He was smart and energetic,” Mr. Hobi said as the family prepared for the funeral on Saturday. “But Gaza made him depressed, and he wanted to escape by any means.”

Source: NY times

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Israeli forces detained over 1,000 Palestinian children in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem over the course of this year, the Palestine Libera-tion Organization (PLO) said Tuesday.

Abdel-Nasser Farawna, who heads the PLO’s authority for prisoners’ affairs, said that Is-rael had detained 1,266 Pales-tinian children below the age of 15 in the occupied territories throughout 2014.

“The vast majority of these ar-rests occurred in the second half of the year,” Farawna said in a statement.

He added that the arrests had increased significantly since the abduction and killing of

Israel detained 1,266 Palestinian children in 2014

three Israeli settlers in the West Bank in June.

Some 200 of the 1,266 children detained currently remain in Israeli detention facilities, Farawna asserted.

“The targeting of children by Israel, especially in occupied Je-rusalem, is rising significantly,” Farawna said, stressing that Is-raeli forces had detained 87 percent more children in 2011 than they had three years earlier.

“The children testified that they had been subjected to various forms of torture and deprived of their basic rights,” Farawna said.

He went on to urge international organizations to intervene to “protect the children from detention and torture.”

The PLO recently said that over 6,000 Palestinians had been detained by the Israeli army and police throughout 2014.

Israeli forces routinely conduct arrest campaigns targeting Pal-estinians in the occupied West Bank on claims they are “want-ed” by Israeli authorities.

Over 7,000 Palestinians are currently languishing in prisons located throughout Israel, according to the Palestinian govern-ment. 30/12/2014 SOURCE : MEMO

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The United States said on Wednesday it “strong-ly” opposed Palestine’s request to join the Inter-national Criminal Court, adding it would hinder peace talks with Israel, Agence France-Presse reported.

“We are deeply troubled by today’s Palestinian action regarding the ICC,” said Jeffrey Rathke, a State Department spokesman.

“Today’s action is entirely counterproductive and does nothing to further the aspirations of the Pal-estinian people for a sovereign and independent state.”

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas filed re-quests Wednesday for his government to join 20 international conventions, including the Rome Statute, which governs the ICC, each a step on the road to statehood.

Washington supports the Palestinians’ quest for a state, but sides with its ally Israel insisting that they not take unilateral steps in this direction be-fore reaching a peace deal with their neighbor.

Rathke said the Palestinians’ ICC request “badly damages the atmosphere with the very people with whom they ultimately need to make peace.

“The United States continues to strongly oppose actions -- by both parties -- that undermine trust and create doubts about their commitment to a negotiated peace.

“Our position has not changed. Such actions only push the parties further apart.”

The move paves the way for the court to take ju-risdiction over crimes committed in the Palestinian territories and investigate the conduct of Israeli and Palestinian leaders over more than a decade of bloody conflict.

It came a day after the U.N. Security Council re-jected a draft resolution that sought a deadline for Israel to end its occupation of territories sought by the Palestinians.

Abbas had warned that if the resolution failed, he would resume a Palestinian campaign to join in-ternational organizations to heighten pressure on

Palestinians join war crimes court, U.S. strongly opposes

Israel.

“We want to complain. There’s aggression against us, against our land. The Security Council disap-pointed us,” Abbas said as he gathered a meeting of the Palestinian leadership in the West Bank.

Israel says all disputes should be resolved through peace talks, and such actions are aimed at by-passing negotiations.

Responding to Abbas’s decision, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that the Pales-tinians have “more to fear” than his country from their newly signed request to join the International Criminal Court.

“The Palestinian Authority has more to fear, having formed a government with Hamas, a known terror-ist organization and which like the Islamist State of Iraq and Syria commits war crimes,” Netanyahu said in a statement published by his office.

The Palestinian campaign scored a major victory in 2012 when Palestine was admitted to the U.N. General Assembly as a nonmember observer state. This upgraded status gave the Palestinians the authority to join dozens of international treaties and agencies.

Still, turning to the International Criminal Court marks a major policy shift by transforming Abbas’ relations with Israel from tense to openly hostile. Abbas has been threatening to join the court since 2012, but held off under American and Israeli pres-sure. The Palestinians can use the court to chal-lenge the legality of Israeli settlement construc-tion on occupied lands and to pursue war crimes charges connected to military activity.

Palestinian leaders hope ICC membership will pave the way for war crimes prosecutions against Israeli officials. Israel has warned that joining the court could also expose Palestinians to prosecu-tion.

The Hague-based court prosecutes individuals ac-cused of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.

31 December 2014 Source: A-lArabiya

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Netanyahu re-elected Likud leader

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli prime minister, has won another term as leader of the ruling Likud party in the run-up to a snap election, easily de-feating his lone hard-right challenger.

General elections had been due in Israel in late 2017, but they were brought forward by Netanyahu in ear-ly December after the collapse of his coalition.

Netanyahu, who has been in power since 2009, will seek to win a third straight term in office and a fourth in total. He served a first stint as prime minister between 1996 and 1999.

The results of the ballot clear the way for Netanyahu to lead Likud into battle for the March 17 election.

“With nearly 60 percent of the ballots

Israel Insider

counted, Benjamin Netanyahu took 80 percent of the vote and Danny Danon 20 percent,” Noga Katz, Likud spokesperson, said.

Final results were due out later on Thursday.

Likud’s 96,651 members also voted to determine front runners on the party list, with 70 candidates in the running.

An interim count suggested the line-up was largely a reshuffle of the 18 faces who served in the outgoing government.

In a speech at the Likud’s headquarters in Tel Aviv on Thurs-day, Netanyahu described the vote as a success, saying the party had chosen an “excellent list” that would help him win re-election.

“It is a list of a governing party that can continue to lead Israel ... that will help us defeat the left under Tzipi [Livni] and Bujie [Isaac Herzog], a winning team that will help me return and con-tinue to lead Israel in security, with responsibility in the spirit of the true Likud,” Netanyahu said.

Source: Agencies

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Israeli media said on Thursday that 10 Palestinians were de-tained in a series of overnight raids across the West Bank on New Year’s Eve.

The Israeli military told state radio that a large number of weap-ons had been seized in one of the raids that took place in Jenin.

According to the military, the weapons included rifles, ammuni-tion, and locally-produced grenades, in addition to stolen military equipment.

Source: Ma’an

Israel detains 10 Palestinians in New Year›s raids across West Bank

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A delegation of ministers from the Palestinian national consen-sus government finished its trip to the Gaza Strip on Friday, amid expectations that it would return accompanied by Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah within the com-ing weeks.

Members of the delegation, which was composed of eight ministers and 39 civil servants, struck an upbeat tone as they headed back to the West Bank via the Erez crossing on Friday, after spending more than three days in Gaza.

“The visit included some diffi-culties,” Minister of Agriculture Shawqi al-Ayasa told Ma’an, “but it was generally positive and all difficulties must be confronted.”

Al-Ayasa added that he believes there is no other option but to re-sume work and fully achieve rec-onciliation between Palestinian political factions.

He also said that the positive out-comes of the visit will become apparent soon, highlighting that further visits to Gaza were in the works.

The visit was only the second by unity government officials since an April agreement that paved the way to reconciliation between the Fatah-led PA in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza.

Recent months have been plagued by tension and contro-versy between the groups, includ-

Unity government delegationleaves Gaza

ing just this last week when ministers attempted to meet with civil servants employed by the PA before 2007, when the political divi-sion between Gaza and the West Bank began.

Protests broke out Wednesday by civil servants employed by the Hamas-led government since 2007 and who fear that they will be fired in favor of the previous employees.

After Hamas took over, it hired more than 50,000 new people, whose fate has been up in the air since the government was sworn in. Of that number, around 24,000 are civil servants while the rest are employed in security functions.

Their fate has been at the heart of a bitter dispute between Hamas and the new government of prime minister Rami Hamdallah.

Hamas, which technically stepped down in June but has remained the de facto power in Gaza, has demanded that the government take responsibility for its employees.

But they have not been paid in seven months.

By contrast, the 70,000 workers laid off in 2007 have remained on the Palestinian Authority’s payroll, despite being unemployed.

Hamas and Fatah have yet to agree on a solution to pay employ-ees of the former Hamas-run government in the Strip who had gone without salaries for months before the unity deal.

The political division between Fatah and Hamas began in 2007, a year after Hamas won legislative elections across the Palestinian territories but was subjected to a boycott by Israel and Western countries that left the economy in a fragile state. Source: Ma’an

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Palestine›s wasted time at the UNEven by the standards of the Israeli-Palestinian peace pro-cess, the Palestinian Authority’s just-thwarted attempt at a UN Security Council resolution was a spectacular waste of time, and needlessly handed Israel a symbolic diplomatic victory.

The draft - which called for peace with Israel within a year, and an end to the occupation by 2017 - fell one yes vote short of the minimum nine required in the 15-member Council. Five countries abstained, and two - the US and Australia - voted no.

Draft resolutions are usually preceded by consultations with Council members, so whoever submits them knows, beforehand, which way the vote will go. This draft was no different. In fact, insufficient support among Council mem-bers was the initial reason given months ago by the PA for a delay in the vote.

As such, it must have known prior to presenting the draft that it would fail, so why go through with it?

In fact, why did the PA try to push through a resolution in the first place? Even if it mustered the minimum votes, the US would have used its veto, and the PA knew it. Not only have the Americans consistently scuppered any resolution that places even the slightest criticism or pressure on Is-rael, but Washington had been explicit about its intention to use its veto this time round if necessary.

More time needed

As such, it is puzzling that Jordan’s UN Ambassador Dina Kawar, whose country submitted the draft with the backing of the PA and the Arab League, said she thought Council members should have had more timeto discuss the pro-posal.

What would be the point in the face of an assured Ameri-can veto?

The only way Washington would acquiesce was if the reso-

Articles & Analyses

lution called for an end to the Palestinian oc-cupation of Israel. This makes PA President Mahmoud Abbas’s recent statement that he had repeatedly postponed the resolution due to US pressure equally puzzling.

Did he actually think anything he could say or do would lead to the US dropping such pres-sure, or that it would accept the draft that was presented?

In any case, months of consultations and various reasons for delays only resulted in the continued watering down of the text. This led to widespread Palestinian condemnation, from the public and from every faction.

Among the most prominent critics is the widely popular senior Fatah figure Marwan Barghouti, whose party dominates the PA and includes Abbas. Barghouti described the text as an “unjustified fallback which will ad-versely affect the Palestinian position”.

Sharif Nashashibi

Sharif Nashashibi

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Moreover, the draft was not put forward as a Chapter VII resolu-tion, which would entail punitive measures for lack of compliance. As such, even if it was passed, Is-rael - which flatly condemned the PA’s push from the outset - would be free to ignore it without conse-quence, as it has done with all the numerous Security Council reso-lutions over the decades.

Indeed, the draft did not contain any wording that would cause Is-rael to worry.

Given that the US veto shields Is-rael, and that existing resolutions are ignored with impunity, it is as-tounding that the PA had any faith left in the Council to attempt its latest futile exercise at statehood.

Unlikely place for Palestinians

Even the response of its UN Am-bassador Riyad Mansour was telling in this regard; “The Secu-rity Council has once again failed to uphold its charter duties to ad-dress this crises and to meaning-fully contribute to a lasting solu-tion in accordance with its own resolutions.”

It has long been clear that the UN is a highly unlikely place for Pal-estinians to seek justice, as the consistent wishes and support of the international community for their cause is held hostage by just one country. The very notion of Security Council vetoes makes the UN an inherently and woefully

undemocratic institution. The iro-ny is that in the case of Palestine, a democracy is to blame.

The US ambassador to the UN, Samantha Power, had the gall to say the resolution undermined efforts to “achieve two states for two people”. The entire point of the resolution was to create a state that the existing state is de-termined to deny.

As such, one wonders if she even read the draft. It seems the mere mention of Israel automatically triggers an American veto.

This whole months-long affair was an obvious exercise in futil-ity, during which time Israel has further entrenched its occupa-tion and colonisation of Pales-tine. The day after the resolution failed, Abbas signed a document requesting membership of the In-ternational Criminal Court.

Given numerous previous threats to join the ICC, this is a wel-come development. However, he should have done this the mo-ment Palestine’s upgraded status at the UN allowed it do so more than two years ago. Amid Israel’s relentless colonisation and oc-cupation, and after more than 20 years of fruitless negotiations, the Palestinians do not have the luxury of waiting indefinitely for statehood.

As such, the PA must act with the necessary urgency and focus.

The US ambas-sador to the UN, Samantha Power, had the gall to say the resolution un-dermined efforts to “achieve two states for two people”. The en-tire point of the resolution was to create a state that the existing state is deter-mined to deny.

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Issue no 116