Month: February 2014

All too often, the details of Palestinian life under Israeli occupation are glossed over. But recently, during a Knesset speech by the German Speaker of the European Parliament, Martin Schultz, one detail of such a life came under increased scrutiny.

Schultz brought up the issue of water insecurity in the West Bank, which led Israel’s right-wing representatives like Naftali Bennett to walk out in protest. Schultz worried that Palestinians don’t have sufficient control of or access to their own water resources, given that Israel essentially exercises control over their sovereignty. Bennett slammed the notion as ludicrous and the controversy became a debate over data and numbers.

The Jerusalem Post tries to clear up the facts:

The truth is that on average the Palestinians in the West Bank are allocated 60-70 liters of water per day, though there are areas in Zone C where there is no running water and the daily water consumption is only 20 liters per day. According to Mekorot(2011 figures), the average water consumption in Israel is 100-230 liters per day (including desalinated water).

There are no official figures regarding the average water consumption of the Jewish inhabitants in the territories (why?), but it is assumed to be much higher (some say even double) the figure for Israelis within the Green Line.

Anecdotes about West Bank Palestinians lacking access to sufficient water supply while they peer over the walls of a Jewish settlement block with pristine blue swimming pools are not exaggerated. A complex network of infrastructure leaves hundreds of thousands of Palestinians unconnected to the West Bank’s water networks when, of course, the Israeli settlements are not so unconnected.

More importantly, note the Post’s explanation of how Palestinians in the West Bank are allocated certain amounts of water by Israel. Palestinians can have water when and how Israel says they can. That is the central indignity of living under occupation.

And as Amira Hass at Haaretz notes, “Israel doesn’t give water to the Palestinians. Rather, it sells it to them at full price.”

“The Palestinians would not have been forced to buy water from Israel if it were not an occupying power which controls their natural resource, and if it were not for the Oslo II Accords, which limit the volume of water they can produce, as well as the development and maintenance of their water infrastructure,” Hass adds.

The overwhelming reality of the Israeli occupation is that it controls the excruciating minutia of every detail of Palestinian life, from access to water, to building permits, to freedom of movement and expression. It is suffocating. And yet, Israel manages to frame the U.S.-led peace negotiations in a way that depicts Israel as the weaker, more vulnerable side.

AP reporter George Jahn has an article up that is typical of the extreme bias of U.S. news media (the “respectable” kind, not Fox News) on the Iran nuclear talks. The headline seems intended to shock: “Iran at Talks: No Scrapping Any Nuclear Facility.”

Readers less knowledgeable on the details of the Iran talks would get the impression that this is (1) news, and (2) an act of insolent defiance on Iran’s part. In reality, it is not news because Iran never said it would be dismantling its nuclear facilities and, I could be wrong about this but, I don’t remember any Western negotiator suggesting that was one of the P5+1’s demands. Rather than defiance, furthermore, Iran’s refusal to “scrap” its nuclear facilities lies completely within its rights and privileges as afforded to it by the NPT.

Jahn:

Iran insists it is not interested in producing nuclear weapons but the six powers want Tehran to back its words with concessions. They seek an agreement that will leave Iran with little capacity to quickly ramp up its nuclear program into weapons-making mode with enriched uranium or plutonium, which can used for the fissile core of a missile.

For that, they say Iran needs to dismantle or store most of its 20,000 uranium enriching centrifuges, including some of those not yet working. They also demand that an Iranian reactor now being built be either scrapped or converted from a heavy-water setup to a light-water facility that makes less plutonium.

As part of the 6-month interim deal, Iran has already made major concessions on its nuclear enrichment program in terms of the rate at which they enrich, and to what concentration, and the frequency of international inspections (virtually every day). The Arak reactor has been one of those red herrings that hawks point out as proof of Iranian aims to someday shoot for the bomb.

But as Reuters pointed out back in November, in order to extract the plutonium from Arak, “Iran would also need to build a reprocessing plant,” which “it has no declared plans to do.” In addition, Arak construction is not scheduled to be completed until late 2014. Following that, Iran would have to construct a whole new reprocessing plant if the Arak reactor were to be an actual proliferation threat, something that would take several years.

In the article’s next segment, Jahn presents an obvious lie as a reported fact: “Iran is desperate to shed nearly a decade of increasingly strict sanctions on its oil industry and its financial sector but is fiercely opposed to any major scaling back of its nuclear infrastructure.”

Has Jahn been asleep? Has he gone all Rip Van Winkle on us? How has he missed the fact that the new Iranian government, under Hassan Rouhani, deliberately initiated intense international negotiations based on making a compromise on its nuclear program to assuage international concern over its intentions and then made major concessions in a 6-month interim deal? Is this really the behavior of a government “fiercely opposed to any” compromise on its nuclear infrastructure?

As Jessica Tuchman Matthews of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace recently wrote, to believe Iran is determined only to expand and intensify its nuclear program, “one would have to be able to explain why Rouhani, if his intention were to cheat, would sign a deal that focuses the world’s attention on Iran’s nuclear behavior and imposes unprecedented inspections and monitoring.”

“What would be the logic in that?” she asks. “Iran has inched forward successfully for years. Why invite severe retribution by making an explicit deal with the world’s major powers and then violating it?”

This isn’t Jahn’s first rodeo. He has been producing consistently bad reporting on Iran for years. His most recent hackery involved the leaking of a scary diagram that was intended to, but did not, prove that Iran has a covert nuclear weapons program.

Commentary like Jahn’s is the kind that demands absolute capitulation from Iran, or else. As former Carter national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski said recently on MSNBC, the arguments against the nuclear talks are “essentially designed to either humiliate [Iran] or to drive them into negativism so that then we are forced to act militarily.”

A surprisingly positive report this morning by CBS News:

Justin Raimondo reports on the NullifyNSA campaign here.

[h/t Matt Feeney]

Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) announced this week that he is suing the Obama administration in a class-action lawsuit over the surveillance excesses of the NSA, as revealed by documents leaked by Edward Snowden. Specifically, he is challenging the constitutionality of the NSA’s bulk collection of metadata.

“We think it may well be the largest class-action lawsuit ever filed on the behalf of the Bill of Rights,” Paul said on Wednesday. He compared, as he has many times before, the bulk collection of telephone metadata as precisely the kind of general warrant Britain subjected American colonists to in the lead up the the revolution.

We believe, he said, “that these decisions cannot be made in secret, by a secret court, but they need to be made in open by the Supreme Court.”

One day after this announcement, Paul senior, Ron, announced the launching of a petition calling for Edward Snowden to be granted clemency.

“Edward Snowden sacrificed his livelihood, citizenship, and freedom by exposing the disturbing scope of the NSA’s worldwide spying program,” Paul’s web page for the petition says. “Thanks to one man’s courageous actions, Americans know about the truly egregious ways their government is spying on them.”

Ron and Rand Paul are increasingly the subject of ridicule and marginalization from mainstream politicos. This is especially true among the left, which apparently sees the escalating libertarian bent on the right as a threat to the Democratic Party’s electoral viability. The right detests both Pauls for the same reason, it seems, in addition to finding anything that undercuts limitless government power distasteful.

Both initiatives have an uphill battle, to say the least. But the public is largely on the side of Snowden and transparency. One would be hard pressed to find two individuals in Washington’s political gamut more supportive of Snowden and of the reforms necessary to rein in the NSA. Still, it’s difficult even for leftists who lack fealty to Obama and the Democratic Party to acknowledge this about the Pauls.