Israel's Treatment of Palestinian Children

Is it really much better than other extremist treatment?

Bedoin School Girls (See Wall Writings post below)

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"Children have been shot in other conflicts I have covered—death squads gunned them down in El Salvador and Guatemala, mothers with infants were lined up and massacred in Algeria, and Serb snipers put children in their sights and watched them crumple onto the pavement in Sarajevo—but I have never before watched soldiers entice children like mice into a trap and murder them for sport."

Right after 911 I was in a bookstore looking for something relevant and left the store with a Harper's Magazine which came out AFTER 911 - this was highlighted in an unusual way on the front cover with the quote above on this post from a particular Chris Hedges article which he'd written BEFORE 911...The entire article is a must read for any not yet familiar with the treatment of so many Palestinian children:
Chris Hedges, "A Gaza Diary", Harper's Magazine, October 2001 here

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Here's TODAY's - this is NINE years after Hedges article:

Israel Shooting and Electric-Shocking Palestinian Children

By Stephen Lendman
Al-Jazeerah, CCUN, October 25, 2010

Defence for Children International (DCI) Palestine Section (DCI/Palestine) "is a national section of the international non-government child rights organisation and movement (dedicated) to promoting and protecting the rights of Palestinian children," according to international law principles.

Two earlier articles addressed their work, accessed though the following links:

Imprisoning Palestinian Children
here

Israeli Soldiers Sexual Abuse of Children
here

Both covered Israel's systematic, institutionalized use of torture of Palestinian children as brutally as against adults. DCI/Palestine's latest September Bulletin adds more, saying:

"For the first time....three (documented) cases of children reporting being given electric shocks by Israeli interrogators (occurred) in Ari'el Settlement." Each was accused of stone throwing. Electric shocking extracted confessions although the boys maintain their innocence.

DCI and PACTI (the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel) demanded Israel investigate reports that a Gush Etzion settlement interrogator "attached car battery jump leads to the genitals of a 14-year old boy in order to obtain a confession to stone throwing."

The August 5 incident involved four boys walking near a road used by settlers when an Israeli jeep approached. "Just for fun," one boy waved. The jeep turned, was joined by others, and chased the boys. They were seized, blindfolded, painfully shackled, detained, and taken to the Zufin settlement, then to the Ari'el settlement where one boy, Raed, was interrogated.

Though innocent, "Threat of electrocution" made him confess to stone throwing, after which his head was slammed against a cupboard. He was also punched in the stomach, and a second interrogator shocked him with a handheld device, making him dizzy and shiver. He then signed a confession in Hebrew he couldn't understand, was transferred to Salem Interrogation and Detention Center, after which he was taken to Megiddo Prison, in violation of Fourth Geneva's Article 76, pertaining to the rights assured protected persons detained under occupation.

A second incident involved a 17-year old boy, Malek, falsely accused of throwing stones and Molotov cocktails. About 30 soldiers arrested and brutalized him like Raed before transferring him to Ofer Prison. On arrival, he was painfully struck on the head, then interrogated and threatened with physical violence and rape if he didn't confess. "He denied both accusations" during a two hour interrogation.

On September 15, 13-year old Khalil was arrested and accused of throwing a Molotov cocktail. At 1AM, Israeli soldiers smashed windows of his family's home, searched it, and took him to Ma'ale Adumin settlement. Though innocent, he was threatened with rape and intimidated to confess. He signed a six page document in Hebrew he didn't understand and has been detained at Ofer prison.

An earlier incident involved 16 year old Moatasem, arrested on March 20. He remains in administrative detention without charge or trial, at best hoping for a December release. Like the others, from arrest to detention, he was brutalized. During interrogation, he was asked about a plot involving a riot, bullets and weapons with no further explanation, something he knew nothing about and said so. On March 25, he was ordered administratively held for six months, then extended three more on September 26.

On average, from January 2008 - September 2010, Israel held over 300 Palestinian children captive, about 10% of them aged 12 - 15. Usually when complaints or requests for investigations into child arrests and mistreatment are submitted to the Judge Advocate General's Office (JAG), responses aren't forthcoming or issued raised are denied.

Shooting Children Collecting Building Gravel

Separately, DCI/Palestine reported on 12 incidents from May 22 - October 14, 2010, involving children aged 13 - 17, collecting gravel near Gaza's border fence with Israel. Under siege, Israel banned construction materials, forcing hundreds of men and boys to scavenge for what they can find, collecting gravel, placing it in sacks, loading it on donkeys, then selling it to builders for concrete.

In border watch towers, Israeli soldiers at times shoot and kill donkeys. They also target workers, usually shooting at their legs. In recent DCI/Palestine-documented cases, children reported being shot while working from 50 - 800 meters from the border.

In addition, a UN January 2009 - August 2010 study reported at least 22 Gazan civilians killed and 146 injured by live fire adjacent to Israel's border, including 27 children...

READ more here

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October 23, 2010...2:00 pm
I Must Write As Long As Israeli Settlers Burn Palestinian Schools

by James M. Wall on his blogsite: "Wall Writings"

...The American public does not know about the Israeli settlers who set fire to a Palestinian girls’ school building near Nablus this past week. Juan Cole, whose Informed Comment blog is a flashing light of warning to the American public, tells the story of the attack on the school:

The phrase “ethnic cleansing” conjures up a swift, comprehensive act of expulsion. But in reality, moving a large population off its land is the death of a thousand cuts, a slow, inexorable process of stealing property, harassment, forcing people into a condition of malnutrition.

The Native Americans in the Americas, the Aborigines in Australia, and the Palestinians in Israel/Palestine were only sometimes forced off their land suddenly and en masse. The gradual processes told, in the long run.

The amazing thing about what is being done to the Palestinians in the Palestinian West Bank by Israeli illegal aliens is that it is happening in full view of the world, reported on by wire services, and yet remains invisible to Western publics.

The world reacts in horror when the Taliban in Afghanistan torch girls’ schools. But Israeli squatters just set fire to the store room of a Palestinian girls’ school, and the whole school would have gone up in flames if that warehouse had not been near a water main. The Israeli illegals left behind graffiti saying ‘regards from the hills.’...

...Ziad Abbas works for the Middle East Children’s Alliance on a project to bring clean water to the children of Palestine. He grew up in Palestine. He writes in Counter Punch, that his work is especially personal to him because of his own childhood experiences of growing up deprived of water...

...I write about these things because American churches are still hung up on not offending their Jewish neighbors, thus choosing interfaith harmony over justice.

I write about these things because major denominational meetings, like this past summer’s General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, USA, dickered and delayed and finally decided to study further how they might best deal with the “problems” in the Middle East.

Since that Presbyterian GA meeting, two-year-old Abu Lasheen died waiting for permission to travel to an Israeli hospital. Since that meeting, Israeli settlers set fire to a Palestinian girls school, leaving behind graffiti on the wall that said, “regards from the hills”. Something about the insensitive arrogance of that graffiti implies there was not enough room on the wall to add, in Clint Eastwoodian fashion, “we’ll be back.”

I write about the American media’s blindness to the narrative of the suffering in Palestine because Tom Friedman continues to fool his liberal readers by pretending to criticize Israel when his criticism always includes the AIPAC approved list of what he insists are “facts”, but which are either outright lies or distortions of reality.

The most recent example was Friedman’s October 20 column which calls on Israel to help President Obama line up world opposition to Iran by reaching a friendly agreement with Palestinian negotiators.

Friedman opens his column with a set of “stubborn facts” which are really just a repeat of the acceptable Israeli narrative which, of course, he assures his readers are “stubborn facts”. Only, they are not...

...Iran’s President Ahmedinejad never used the phrase, “wipe Israel off the map”. That was an initial mistranslation into English which the media loved and never let go. The media has refused, as Friedman does here, to go back and obtain the original statement by Ahmedinejad in a speech he gave to a Persian audience.

The Iranian president was quoting an ancient statement by Iran’s first Islamist leader, the late Ayatollah Khomeini, when he said that “this regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time” just as the Shah’s regime in Iran had vanished.

He was not making a military threat. He was calling for an end to the occupation of Jerusalem at some point in the future. The “page of time” phrase suggests he did not expect it to happen soon. There was no implication that either Khomeini, when he first made the statement, or Ahmadinejad, in repeating it, felt it was imminent, or that Iran would be involved in bringing it about.

...sources have confirmed that Israel’s invasion plans were already on the drawing board when a border skirmish erupted, giving Israel the excuse it wanted to launch a war that, indeed, “brought death, injury and destruction to thousands of Lebanese.”

Who brought those deaths, injuries and destruction to the Lebanese? Israel, of course.

Careful research would quickly demonstrate to Friedman and every other pro-Israel pundit and politician that Friedman’s “stubborn facts” are either false or distorted.

I will continue to write on Israel and Palestine as long as pundits like Thomas Friedman have access to the pages of the New York Times, and the American public remains ignorant of the actual facts on the ground in Israel and Palestine.

The photo at the top ... is of two Bedouin girls, in school uniform, returning to their houses after a school day in Abu Farda near the West Bank city of Qalqilia on October 6, 2010. (MaanImages/Khaleel Reash)

READ this article in full here

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found at electronicintifada with this article here A Palestinian teenager shot in the ankle while scavenging for building material, October 2010. (Anne Paq/ActiveStills)EREZ CROSSING, occupied Gaza Strip (IPS) - Crossing through the metal-caged tunnel that leads from the Israeli side of the boundary into northern Gaza towards the Palestinian checkpoint, several groups of young Palestinian men and boys can be seen scavenging through piles of rubble.

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Earlier this year, there was quite a piece on "Double Standards..." at Sabbah.biz here

"Right and wrong are the same in Palestine as anywhere else. What is peculiar about the Palestine conflict is that the world has listened to the party that has committed the offence and has turned a deaf ear to the victims."
–Prof. Arnold Toynbee, Foreword to the Transformation of Palestine, 1971

"Israel may have the right to put others on trial, but certainly no one has the right to put the Jewish people and the State of Israel on trial."
–Ariel Sharon

"Well, it's a trick, we always use it. When from Europe somebody is criticizing Israel then we bring up the holocaust. When in this country US) people are criticizing Israel then they are anti-Semitic. And the organization (Israel Lobby) is very strong and has lot of money. And the ties between Israel and American Jewish establishment are very strong – and they are strong in this country as you know. And they have power which is ok."
–Shulamit Aloni, Former Israeli Minister of Education, On Democracy Now, August 14, 2002

Honorable President of Harvard University Dr. Drew Faust
Honorable Members of the Board of Directors
Harvard Faculty Members
Harvard Student Organizations

Dear Madame President Faust;

I must strenuously and in the strongest terms possible protest the silence and inaction of Harvard University toward the outrageous, inhumane, offensive, even racist eugenic proposal that Dr. Martin Kramer, a Visiting Scholar at Harvard made during his speech at the Israeli Herzliya Conference on January 31, 2010.

In that speech Dr. Kramer implored the West to stop its Pro Natal services to the already besieged and starving Gaza Palestinian pregnant mothers and infants as a method of controlling the rapid birth rate in Gaza as a matter of political and social policy. To him such control will naturally lead to a decrease in the radicalization of Palestinian youth which he calls "superfluous men" as well as relieve the "demographic threat" to Israel's Jewish identity.

How racist is the term "superfluous men" to describe young Palestinian men who are constant fodder for Israeli soldier's bullets, missiles, and tank shells (as soldiers themselves have told "Break the Silence" group of former IDF Soldiers) as unnecessary and wasteful human beings.

Dr. Kramer's eugenic proposal not to provide Pro Natal care, which I take he means Pre and Post Natal care, is tantamount to genocide of fetuses and infants. Pregnant mothers would not receive the preventive care, regular OB exams, nutritional guidance (such as providing Folic Acid and Vitamins given their already malnourished state), appropriate vaccines or a healthy medically supervised delivery in hospitals, which all are damaged by Israel's assault on Gaza in 2008-2009. Infants would not receive the necessary medical care, or intensive care if necessary (difficult given the lack of electricity, oxygen, or antibiotics in Gaza), regular immunizations, nutritional guidance, or regular Pediatric checkups. Dr. Kramer shouldn't worry about a Palestinian population explosion; Israel's militarily with our tax dollars and weapons is determined not to leave any Palestinian child behind.

His proposal meets the accepted definition of eugenics, passive euthanasia, and genocide and no amount of spin cover up, rationalization, justification, taken out of context lies; nor the canard of Freedom of Speech that's available to Pro Israelite hate mongers to the exclusion of Pro Justice proponents for Palestinians and peace in the Holy Land.

In addition to Israel's three year physical devastating siege of Gaza, Dr. Kramer is proposing another physical and medical siege, this time of a Palestinian woman's womb that would ultimately result in a secondary ethnic cleansing of Palestinians that has continued unabated since 1947...

READ MORE here