The Real China and the Olympics - Open letter by Chinese human rights activists Hu Jia and Teng Biao

"Chinese people know best about China's human rights situation"

–– Foreign Ministry spokesperson Jiang Yu, February 1st, 2008

Editor’s note: On September 10, 2007, two of China’s most celebrated human rights activists, Teng Biao and Hu Jia, issued the open letter translated below, calling for the international community to look beyond the veneer of munificence and normality put up in Beijing for the Olympics, and to seriously examine to what extent China had fulfilled the promises it made to improve human rights ahead of the Games. Three months after the publication of this letter, on December 27, Hu Jia was brutally arrested at his home, where he had been held under house arrest for the better part of two years. He is accused of "incitement to subvert state power," a charge regularly leveled against activists and dissidents.

The Real China and the Olympics

On July 13th 2001, when Beijing won the right to host the 2008 Olympic Games, the Chinese government promised the world it would improve China’s human rights record. In June 2004, Beijing announced its Olympic Games slogan, "One World, One Dream." From their inception in 1896, the modern Olympic Games have always had as their mission the promotion of human dignity and world peace. China and the world expected to see the Olympic Games bring political progress to the country. Is Beijing keeping its promises? Is China improving its human rights record?

When you come to the Olympic Games in Beijing, you will see skyscrapers, spacious streets, modern stadiums and enthusiastic people. You will see the truth, but not the whole truth, just as you see only the tip of an iceberg. You may not know that the flowers, smiles, harmony and prosperity are built on a base of grievances, tears, imprisonment, torture and blood.

We are going to tell you the truth about China. We believe that for anyone who wishes to avoid a disgraceful Olympics, knowing the truth is the first step. Fang Zheng, an excellent athlete who holds two national records for the discus throw at China's Special Sport Games, has been deprived of the opportunity to participate in the 2008 Paralympics because he has become a living testimony to the June 4, 1989 massacre. That morning, in Tiananmen Square, his legs were crushed by a tank while he was rescuing a fellow student. In April 2007, the Ministry of Public Security issued an internal document secretly strengthening a political investigation which resulted in forbidding Olympics participation by 43 types of people from 11 different categories, including dissidents, human rights defenders, media workers, and religious participants. The Chinese police never made the document known to either the Chinese public or the international community.

Huge investment in Olympic projects and a total lack of transparency have facilitated serious corruption and widespread bribery. Taxpayers are not allowed to supervise the use of investment amounting to more than US$40 billion. Liu Zhihua, formerly in charge of Olympic construction and former deputy mayor of Beijing, was arrested for massive embezzlement.

To clear space for Olympic-related construction, thousands of civilian houses have been destroyed without their former owners being properly compensated. Brothers Ye Guozhu and Ye Guoqiang were imprisoned for a legal appeal after their house was forcibly demolished. Ye Guozhu has been repeatedly handcuffed and shackled, tied to a bed and beaten with electric batons. During the countdown to the Olympic Games he will continue to suffer from torture in Chaobei Prison in Tianjin.

It has been reported that over 1.25 million people have been forced to move because of Olympic construction; it was estimated that the figure would reach 1.5 million by the end of 2007. No formal resettlement scheme is in place for the over 400,000 migrants who have had their dwelling places demolished. Twenty percent of the demolished households are expected to experience poverty or extreme poverty. In Qingdao, the Olympic sailing city, hundreds of households have been demolished and many human rights activists as well as "civilians" have been imprisoned. Similar stories come from other Olympic cities such as Shenyang, Shanghai and Qinhuangdao.

In order to establish the image of civilized cities, the government has intensified the ban against and detention and forced repatriation of petitioners, beggars and the homeless. Some of them have been kept in extended detention in so-called shelters or have even been sent directly to labor camps. Street vendors have suffered brutal confiscation of their goods by municipal agents. On July 20, 2005, Lin Hongying, a 56-year-old woman farmer and vegetable dealer, was beaten to death by city patrols in Jiangsu. On November 19, 2005, city patrols in Wuxi beat 54-year-old bicycle repairman Wu Shouqing to death. In January 2007, petitioner Duan Huimin was killed by Shanghai police. On July 1, 2007, Chen Xiaoming, a Shanghai petitioner and human rights activist, died of an untreated illness during a lengthy detention period. On August 5, 2007, right before the one-year Olympics countdown, 200 petitioners were arrested in Beijing.

China has consistently persecuted human rights activists, political dissidents and freelance writers and journalists. The blind activist Chen Guangcheng, recipient of the 2007 Ramon Magsaysay Award and named in 2006 by Time Magazine as one of the most influential 100 people shaping our world, is still serving his sentence of four years and three months for exposing the truth of forced abortion and sterilization. The government refused to give him the Braille books and the radio that his relatives and friends brought to Linyi prison in Shandong. Chen has been beaten while serving his sentence. On August 24, 2007, Chen's wife, Yuan Weijing, was kidnapped by police at the Beijing airport while waiting to fly to the Philippines to receive the Ramon Magsaysay Award on behalf of her husband. On August 13, 2007, activist Yang Chunlin was arrested in Heilongjiang and charged with subversion of state power "for initiating the petition ‘Human Rights before Olympics.’"

China still practices literary inquisition and holds the world record for detaining journalists and writers, as many as several hundred since 1989 according to incomplete statistics. As of this writing, 35 Chinese journalists and 51 writers are still in prison. Over 90 percent were arrested or tried after Beijing's successful bid for the Olympics in July 2001. For example, Shi Tao, a journalist and a poet, was sentenced to ten years in prison because of an e-mail sent to an overseas website. Dr. Xu Zerong, a scholar from Oxford University who researched the Korean War, was sentenced to 13 years’ imprisonment for "illegally providing information abroad." Qingshuijun (Huang Jinqiu), a freelance writer, was sentenced to a 12-year term for his online publications. Some writers and dissidents are prohibited from going abroad; others from returning to China.

Every year in mainland China, countless websites are closed, blogs deleted, sensitive words filtered. Many websites hosted abroad are blocked. Overseas radio and television programs are interfered with or strictly prohibited. Although the Chinese government has promised media freedom for foreign journalists for 22 months, before, during, and after the Beijing Olympics, and ending on October 17, 2008, an FCCC (Foreign Correspondents Club in China) survey showed that 40 percent of foreign correspondents have experienced harassment, detention or an official warning during news gathering in Beijing and other areas. Some reporters have complained about repeated violent police interference at the time they were speaking with interviewees. Most seriously, Chinese interviewees usually become vulnerable as a result. In June 2006, Fu Xiancai was beaten and paralyzed after being interviewed by German media. In March 2007, Zheng Dajing was beaten and arrested after being interviewed by a British TV station.

Religious freedom is still under repression. In 2005, a Beijing pastor, Cai Zhuohua, was sentenced to three years for printing Bibles. Zhou Heng, a house church pastor in Xinjiang, was charged with running an "illegal operation" for receiving dozens of boxes of Bibles. From April to June 2007, China expelled over 100 suspected US, South Korean, Canadian, Australian, and other missionaries. Among them were humanitarian workers and language educators who had been teaching English in China for 15 years. During this so-called Typhoon 5 campaign, authorities took aim at missionary activities so as to prevent their recurrence during the Olympics.

On September 30, 2006, Chinese soldiers opened fire on 71 Tibetans who were escaping to Nepal. A 17-year-old nun died and a 20-year-old man was severely injured. Despite numerous international witnesses, the Chinese police insisted that the shooting was in self-defense. One year later, China tightened its control over the Tibetan Buddhism. A September 1, 2007, regulation requires all reincarnated lamas to be approved by Chinese authorities, a requirement that flagrantly interferes with the tradition of reincarnation of living Buddhas as practiced in Tibet for thousands of years. In addition, Chinese authorities still ban the Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibet and a world-renowned pacifist, from returning to Tibet.

Since 1999, the government has banned many religious beliefs such as Falungong and the Three Servants. Their followers have experienced extremely cruel and planned persecutions. Many died from abuse, suffered torture, brainwashing, imprisonment and labor camp internment for persisting in their faith, possessing religious books, making DVDs and writing articles to expose the truth of the persecution.

China has the highest death penalty rate in the world. Execution statistics are treated as "state secrets." However, experts estimate that 8,000-10,000 people are sentenced to death in China every year, among them not only criminals and economic convicts, but totally innocent citizens, such as Nie Shubin, Teng Xingshan, Cao Haixin and Hugejiletu, whose innocence was proven only after they were already dead.

Another eight innocent farmers, Chen Guoqing, He Guoqiang, Yang Shiliang, Zhu Yanqiang, Huang Zhixiang, Fang Chunping, Cheng Fagen and Cheng Lihe, who confessed their "crimes" after being cruelly tortured by the police, have been sentenced to death and are currently held in prisons in Hebei [province] and in Jingdezhen [in Jiangxi province].

Torture is very common in China's detention centers, labor camps and prisons. Torture methods include electric shock, burning, use of electric needles, beating and hanging, sleep deprivation, forced chemical injection causing nerve damage, and piercing the fingers with needles. Every year, there are reported cases of Chinese citizens being disabled or killed by police torture.

Labor camps are still retained as a convenient Chinese system which allows the police to lock up citizens without trial for up to four years. The detention system is another practice that the police favors, freeing them to detain citizens for six months to two years. Dissidents and human rights activists are particularly vulnerable targets and are often sent to labor camps, detention centers or even mental hospitals by authorities who want to simplify legal procedures and mislead the media.

China has the world's largest secret police system, the Ministry of National Security (guo an) and the Internal Security Bureau (guo bao) of the Ministry of Public Security, which exercise power beyond the law. They can easily tap telephones, follow citizens, place them under house arrest, detain them and impose torture. On June 3, 2004, the Chinese secret police planted drugs on Chongqing dissident Xu Wanping and later sentenced him to 12 years’ imprisonment for "subversion of state power."

Chinese citizens have no right to elect state leaders, local government officials or representatives. In fact, there has never been free exercise of election rights in township-level elections. Wuhan resident Sun Bu'er, a member of the banned political party the Pan-Blue Alliance, was brutally beaten in September 2006 for participating as an independent candidate during an election of county-level people's congress representatives. Mr Sun disappeared on March 23, 2007.

China continues to cruelly discriminate against its rural population. According to the Chinese election law, a farmer's right to vote is worth one quarter of that of an urban resident. In June 2007, the Shanxi kiln scandal was exposed by the media. Thousands of 8-13 year-old trafficked children had been forced to labor in illegal kilns, almost all with local government connections. Many of the children were beaten, tortured and even buried alive.

The Chinese judiciary still illegally forbids any HIV/AIDS lawsuits against government officials responsible for the tragedy. AIDS sufferers and activists have been constantly harassed by the secret police.

The Chinese government has been selling arms and weapons to Darfur and other African regions to support ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. The Chinese authorities have forcibly repatriated North Korean refugees, knowing that they would be sent to labor camps or executed once back home. This significantly contravenes China's accession to the "Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees" and the "Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees."

• Please be aware that the Olympic Games will be held in a country where there are no elections, no freedom of religion, no independent courts, no independent trade unions; where demonstrations and strikes are prohibited; where torture and discrimination are supported by a sophisticated system of secret police; where the government encourages the violation of human rights and dignity, and is not willing to undertake any of its international obligations.

• Please consider whether the Olympic Games should coexist with religious persecution labor camps, modern slavery, identity discrimination, secret police and crimes against humanity.

As the Beijing Olympics slogan says, we live in "one world" with "one dream." We hope that one day the Chinese people will be able to share universal human rights, democracy and peace with people from all around the world. However, we can see that the Chinese government obviously is not yet prepared to honor its promise. As a matter of fact, the preparations for the Olympics have provided the perfect excuse for the Chinese government to restrict civil liberties and suppress human rights!

We do not want China to be contained or isolated from the rest of the world. We believe that only by adhering to the principles of human rights and through open dialogue can the world community pressure the Chinese government to change. Ignoring these realities and tolerating barbaric atrocities in name of the Beijing Olympics will disgrace the Olympic Charter and shake the foundations of humanity. Human rights improvement requires time, but we should at least stop China's human rights situation from deteriorating. Having the Olympics hosted in a country where human dignity is trampled on, will not honor its people or the Olympic Games.

We sincerely hope that the Olympic Games will bring the values of peace, equality, freedom and justice to 1.3 billion Chinese citizens. We pray that the Olympics will be held in a free China. We must push for the 2008 Olympics to live up to the Olympic Charter and we must advocate for the realization of "one world" with "one human rights dream." We believe that only an Olympic Games true to the Olympic Charter can promote China's democratic progress, world peace and development.

We firmly hold to the belief that there can be no true Olympic Games without human rights and dignity. For China and for the Olympics, human rights must be upheld!

Teng Biao, a scholar and human rights lawyer in Beijing. Hu Jia, a human rights activist in Beijing.

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Budget 2008 - Climate change analysis

This Budget was an incremental step towards a safe climate future - but unfortunately, we don't have the luxury of time to get us there incrementally. We need to go much further, and we need to do it much much faster. This should have been the world’s first climate change budget, following on from the world’s first “climate change election”. In a democracy, the people’s priorities, rather than the fossil fuel lobby, should direct budgets.

With forty times as much being spent on defence as climate change, it seems that Kevin Rudd still hasn’t grasped the enormity of the problem we’re facing. The Stern Review on the economic costs of climate change found that not taking action to combat climate change could result in an economic crash as big as both World Wars and the Great Depression combined. This is about sound economic management.

The climate did receive one victory – the removal of one of Howard’s many fossil fuel subsidies – for condensate fuels. Condensate is a crude oil extracted from natural gas. Up until now, oil companies could reduce the excise they paid by subtracting the condensate used in their own crude oil. GetUp and other environmental orgainsations campaigned to remove this subsidy, and the fact it will no longer apply is a long-overdue testament to the power of people’s movements in creating change. But billions more remain - including the $1.1bn Fringe Benefits Tax concession for company cars. We will need to see much more of this in the next year if we are to defeat the powerful vested interests of the pollution lobby – coal, aluminium, cement, electricity generators, as well as their lobby groups like the Australian Industry Greenhouse Network.

Removing the condensate fuel subsidy will provide the Commonwealth Government with a windfall gain of $2.5bn over 4 years. But how much of this windfall found its way into the climate change budget?

The answer is very little. Overall, only $1856.3 million was allocated to climate change initiatives over the next 4 years, and $365.7 million of this will go to so-called “clean coal” (including carbon capture and storage). Only $ 227.5 million over the next 4 years was allocated to the Renewable Energy Fund, and funding for this program will not even kick in until next year.

The climate cannot afford to wait another year for significant funding for renewable energy. And the fact that in the forward estimates period (the next 4 years of the budget) there is more funding to the coal industry for its unproven CCS technology, than for renewable energy, is disappointing.

In the budget press release, Martin Ferguson, Minister for Resources and Energy, stated, “coal is vital to the Australian economy and the developing world as it lifts people out of poverty”. For a politician to be making statements like this when they know full well the extent of the climate emergency we are facing is surprising and short-sighted. Coal causes climate change. Climate change increases poverty. Climate change threatens to undo all of the development gains of the last hundreds years for the Global South.

There was some funding to support developing countries to adapt to the impacts of climate change, with the government delivering on its pre-election commitment of $150 million over three years. This level of funding hardly scratches the surface of what will be needed, as climate impacts begin to hit the Global South harder and more often. Oxfam Australia estimates that at least $300 million is needed in the current Budget for adaptation, building to $1.75 billion over the next five years. Adaptation spending should be prioritised in the areas of capacity building, disaster preparedness, livelihoods programming and migration.

If you’re one of the many Australians wanting to green your home, there are some positive signs but nothing groundbreaking, and very few announcements of new funding. Of the $500 million to help households become more energy efficient, the only new announcements were $14 million to change from a 6 star to a 10 star energy rating system for appliances, and $150 million to help landlords install insulation in rental properties.

The solar hot water rebate will almost double the number of Australian homes with solar from 4.4 per cent to 7.4 per cent. But this is still not enough, in one of the sunniest countries on Earth. Now the rebate is means tested also - inevitably discouraging wealthier households (who consume enormous amounts of energy) from making the change. Similarly, the green loans scheme is a positive step that will eventually make 200,000 homes more energy efficient, but it needs to be scaled up to address the scale of the problem - with the money spread over six years, only about 11,600 homes will benefit this financial year. We need dramatically accelerated expenditure on a major energy efficiency program to cut greenhouse pollution and help households and businesses reduce their electricity bills. The Australian Conservation Foundation argue at least $200 million is needed for this program, this year; and a total of $5 billion over 10 years.

The funding for water solutions is certainly a huge improvement on previous budgets. The ‘Water for the Future’ initiative implements the government’s election promise of returning water to the Murray-Darling, including $177 million for buying back water. However, much more is needed – probably at least $1.5 billion over the next three years to purchase water to put back into the Basin’s waterways.

Kevin Rudd and Wayne Swan had an opportunity to begin an historic shift in the nature of Australia’s economy last night. They missed that opportunity by not investing enough in climate solutions, by being distracted by the false solution of so-called “clean coal”, and by continuing to subsidise the fossil fuel industry to the tune of billions of dollars.

Of course, we’re expecting an announcement of greater funding for climate later this year, after the release of new research such as the Garnuat Review and the Wilkins Review. Last night’s budget has a surplus of $21.7 billion for 2008-2009. There’s still time for the government’s spending priorities to reflect the reality of our climate emergency, but we certainly can’t afford to wait until next year’s budget. The clock is ticking, and we are running out of time. This budget did not grasp the reality of the emergency we face. It also failed to understand the opportunities we could create in moving to a renewable energy economy – creating hundreds of thousands of new green-collar jobs and stimulating new, clean tech industries.

I know that I'll be directing my tax cut to invest in something that might help steer this ship to a safe climate future, as I wanted my Government to do on my behalf this Budget – the grassroots climate movement. I invite you to join me.


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U.S. looks set to offer Israel powerful new radar

The Bush administration appears set to offer Israel a powerful radar system that could greatly boost Israeli defenses against enemy ballistic missiles while tying them directly into a growing U.S. missile shield.

President George W. Bush is expected to discuss the matter during a visit to Israel starting on Wednesday to mark the 60th anniversary of the Jewish state amid mounting U.S. concern over perceived threats from Iran, people familiar with the matter said.

This is "probably the No. 2 issue" on Bush's agenda for the visit, second only to the Middle East peace process, said Rep. Mark Kirk, an Illinois Republican who has spearheaded calls in Congress for tighter U.S. missile-defense ties with Israel.

Gordon Johndroe, a White House spokesman, said in an e-mail, "While the U.S. and Israel cooperate closely on defense matters, there will not be any announcements during next week's visit." Bush is also to visit Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

Richard Lehner, a spokesman for the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency, which is developing the multibillion-dollar layered shield, said questions about a new radar system for Israel were a "policy issue" outside the agency's purview.

Riki Ellison, a prominent missile-defense advocate with close ties to the Pentagon and companies involved in building the hardware, said he understood giving Israel the missile-tracking system was "on the table right now."

The system Bush may offer is known as a forward-based X-band radar. Transportable by air, it uses high-powered pulsed beams for extremely high-resolution tracking of objects in space such as a missile that could be tipped with a chemical, germ or nuclear warhead.

Built by Raytheon Co, the system has been described by U.S. officials as capable of tracking an object the size of a baseball from about 2,900 miles away.

It would let Israel's Arrow missile defenses engage a Shahab-3 ballistic missile about halfway through what would be its 11-minute flight to Israel from Iran, or six times sooner than Israel's "Green Pine" radar is currently capable of doing, Kirk said in a telephone interview on Friday.

'PARTING GIFT' FROM BUSH?

Kirk is a commander in the U.S. Naval Reserves who confers with Israeli officials on missile defense. He serves one weekend a month as deputy director of intelligence in the Pentagon's National Military Command Center.

With an X-Band system at work, he said, a missile intercept theoretically would take place over Iran or a neighboring state and not over Israel.

"This is the best thing to lower tensions between Israel and Iran" because Iran presumably would be less likely to attack under such circumstances, Kirk said.

Nearly 70 members of Congress, including the top Democrat and Republican on the House of Representatives Armed Services Committee, sent a letter to Bush this week urging him to offer a warning radar that is "fully integrated" with the emerging U.S. shield.

The letter, dated May 5 and co-authored by Kirk and California Democratic Rep. Jane Harman, cited a call by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for Israel to be "wiped off the map" and said Iran's ballistic missile program was expanding.

An X-band radar would improve "battle management," adding to "early warning" from Israel's access since 2001 to the Defense Support Program military satellite network, hub of a U.S. system to detect missile launches worldwide, the letter said.

An Israeli defense official said Israel had discussed a range of "parting gifts" from Bush, who leaves office on January 20, including military pacts and technologies.

Lehner, the spokesman for the U.S. Missile Defense Agency, said the Pentagon was planning to have four transportable X-band radars, including one already set up near Shariki in northern Japan to guard against missiles that could be fired by North Korea.

A second is due to be deployed at an unspecified location near Iran, possibly in eastern Turkey or Georgia, assuming permission is granted. In addition, the United States is awaiting final approval for a large, fixed-site, tracking radar in the Czech Republic scheduled for deployment by 2013.

The transportable X-band radar sites could "go wherever they are needed" at the request of U.S. combatant commanders, Lehner said.

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Sinkable Israel

Next week Israel will celebrate the 60th anniversary of its declaration of independence in the presence of an enviable number of dignitaries and heads of state. One week later, on May 15, the Palestinians will commiserate their Nakba — the day they were driven from their homeland by Jewish paramilitary settlers who established the State of Israel.

While Israel will be showered with words of admiration and congratulation, principally by those countries that helped create it, the Palestinians will be huddled together in exile or under military occupation, encircled by the Israeli wall of shame that was probably inspired by the Nazi wall that enclosed the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw in 1940. The only statements making reference to them will be the empty rhetoric of Arab officials calling for peace and the establishment of a Palestinian state, and probably maligning Hamas. Victors will continue writing history, at least as long as they remain powerful.

At 60, Israel appears solid, focused, constantly expanding and basking in the adulation of its powerful supporters and the resignation of its intimidated neighbors. By contrast, the Palestinians, evicted from their homeland, appear weak, divided, starved, vulnerable and spurned by most Arab leaders. Israel, a warrior state armed to the teeth with conventional and nuclear weapons, represents a success for the great powers in more ways than one. Their most important achievement was offloading the centuries old “Jewish question” on the Arabs. Ever since, Israel has proved a belligerent state bent on aggression and expansion, which was also useful to the powers that nurtured it. However, Israel’s atrocities against the Palestinians and other Arabs, and its extensive settlement under occupation of their land, makes it appear more like a giant on stilts than a peace-loving nation that lives by the norms of international law.

In spite of the glow of success, two historical factors are corroding the underpinnings of Israel as a state. First, Israel was founded on the 17th century doctrine of settler colonialism — the New World migration model of which the United States is the unique surviving example. As European settlers arrived in droves in the New World that Christopher Columbus discovered in 1492, the land was ethnically cleansed of its indigenous population, especially North American Indians. Hundreds of tribes and ethnic communities were systematically devastated or driven west of the Mississippi River to make room for European colonists. In 1778, even before becoming the nation, new Americans signed a treaty with the Indian Delawares — the first of what would become a body of more than 380 treaties that never held in the face of the desire to expand. Under those treaties, the nascent US gained more than one billion acres of Indian land in North America, mostly by force, coercion and outright war, with some bought for as little as 10 cents an acre.

Consciously or otherwise, this was the model adopted by the Zionist movement to seize Palestine under the fallacy of “a land without a people for a people without a land”, with the support of the British via the Balfour Declaration. This shared model of ethnic cleansing and land expropriation is the strongest bond between Israel and the US.

During its so-called “war of liberation”, Israel committed 70 massacres and atrocities against the Palestinian people as part of a methodical campaign of ethnic cleansing. It terrorized and expelled 85 percent of the population from 747 Palestinian towns and villages. Most of these were either obliterated to prevent the return of Palestinian inhabitants or given to immigrant Jewish settlers. At the time, this created a population of 900,000 refugees who were “temporarily” relocated to neighboring Arab countries. Palestinian refugees are now estimated at 4.5 million, half of them in host Arab countries.

According to Salman Abu Setta, general coordinator of the Right of Return Congress, 80 percent of the Jewish population of Israel lives in about 10 percent of the historic land of Palestine under the British mandate. Most of the territories extending from Beersheba in the south to the northern swathe of the Upper Galilee are scarcely populated. The density of the Palestinian population in Gaza is 6,000 individuals per one square kilometer — a total of 1.5 million Palestinians heaped upon each other under inhuman blockade conditions. Israel rejects the Palestinians’ right of return even to these vacant areas, justified by what amounts to a racist policy of maintaining the “Jewish” nature of the state — another echo of Nazi Germany under Hitler.

Immigration to Israel has become a matter of economic opportunity, not the claimed pseudo-religious Zionist ideology of “return to the Promised Land”. The population of Israel is 5.2 million out of a world Jewry population of 13 million, with about five million living in the US. Immigration to Israel is declining; the fertility rate among the Jewish population is 0.5 percent, far below the population replacement value, while the Palestinian fertility rate is nearly three percent. Israeli politicians regard this as a bomb ready to explode. Israeli concerns have prompted rising calls to declare Israel an exclusively Jewish state where only Jews are eligible for citizenship. The rest — that is, the Palestinians who have lived on that land since the time of the Canaanites — are regarded as a nuisance to be evicted when circumstances are favorable.

Israel’s main problem, however, is that unlike the American Indians or indigenous populations in other colonized lands, the Palestinians refuse to disappear or melt away. Despite the brutal occupation, genocide, mass detentions, numberless checkpoints, the economic blockade, daily humiliation and starvation, and the powerful support afforded to Israel by the US administration, Palestinians refuse to be amassed together in a reservation under the title of a Palestinian state. Palestinian elders keep the keys to their original houses, the deeds to their property, and teach their children about the horrors they had to endure at the hands of those they once embraced as neighbors in the historic land of Palestine.

Sixty years after its “independence”, Israel has lost its moral compass. Aggression, occupation and expansion have become its most vaunted practices. Hence it has no sense of security. It seeks regional recognition and cooperation but enforces a system of apartheid against the Palestinians.

It forces a stop at Yad Vashim on the schedule of every visiting dignitary but kills Palestinian men, women and children, bulldozes their houses and orchards, confiscates their land, pumps out their water, arrests and detains thousands of them indefinitely, violates every human dignity under the sun, and denies the nation it subsumed its legitimate rights. Israel is not planning on any just and lasting settlement with the Palestinians. Like its master, the US, it only believes in the force of arms — the ability to subjugate by destruction. That is what the Nazis did to the Jews and other minorities in Europe; and that is what the Jews of Israel are doing to the Palestinians. What Israel and the Western alliance call “acts of terrorism” by fundamentalists are the same acts they cheered as heroic by the resistance to Nazi occupation in Europe.

When the White Star Line launched the Titanic ocean liner on its maiden voyage from Southampton to New York in February 1912, it was widely promoted as a passenger ship “designed to be unsinkable”. It was equipped with the most sophisticated available technology and the best crew of the time.

While en route to New York the Titanic hit an iceberg on Feb. 14 and sank to the bottom of the Atlantic, to the shock of the world and the maritime industry. How long can Israel afford to behave as the unsinkable ship of the Middle East?

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