| Are the Negev Bedouin "indigenous"? Posted: 05 Jul 2012 06:00 PM PDT From the latest issue of Middle East Forum: In the past few years, the Bedouin of Israel's Negev have begun claiming the status of an indigenous people, arguing that Israel like other colonialist regimes dominated their territory, refused to admit their lengthy presence in their native land, and denied their rights.[35] This line of argument is consistent with the position of the Arab leadership, voiced as early as the early 1920s, that disparaged the Jewish national revival as an alien, colonial intrusion into the pan-Arab patrimony. These arguments are both erroneous and misleading. To begin with, the Bedouin are by no means the only people who can lay claim to the notion of being a "first people" in Palestine: Jewish attachment to the land predates Arab presence there by millennia. Indeed, of the countless groups that have lived in Palestine since antiquity, Jews are the only nation that can claim an uninterrupted presence on the land from biblical times to date—for a significant amount of the time as its rulers.
...Until the twentieth century the Bedouin of the Middle East, including those of the Negev, were livestock-raising nomads whose movements were dictated by a constant search for pasture and water.[43] It has long been noted that what characterizes the Bedouin is their relationship to the tribe, rather than to a specific place or territory.[44]
Among the Bedouin tribes living in the Negev today, most view themselves as descendants of nomadic tribes from the Arabian Peninsula.[45] In fact, most of them arrived fairly recently, during the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, from the deserts of Arabia, Transjordan, Sinai, and Egypt.[46] Part of this migration occurred in the wake of Napoleon's invasion of Egypt and Palestine in 1798-99 and subsequent Egyptian rule under Muhammad Ali and his son Ibrahim Pasha (r. 1831-41). During this period, Egyptian forces moved through Sinai and into the Negev using the coastal road that runs through Rafah, accompanied by numerous camp followers, peasants, and Bedouin. Some of the Egyptian peasants who followed in the footsteps of the army established new settlements and neighborhoods in Palestine, others joined Bedouin tribes in the Negev.[47]
Ottoman tax registers demonstrate that the tribes which lived in the Negev in 1596-97 are not those residing there today.[48] According to historians Wolf-Dieter Hütteroth and Kamal Abdulfattah, the tax registers that reflect material collected in those years show names of forty-three Bedouin tribes living in what became Mandatory Palestine, including six in the Negev. There is not much information on what became of those tribes.[49] However, the names of the tribes currently living in the Negev do not appear on the tax registers from 1596.[50] The Ottoman government did not maintain reliable records for this area after 1596, so these registers are the best indicators of which tribes existed in the early Ottoman period. Clinton Bailey, a scholar of Bedouin culture, also found no evidence in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries of the continuity or existence of Bedouin tribes, which later lived in the Negev in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.[51]
Bedouin consolidation of their Negev foothold was achieved through armed intertribal struggles as well as raids on established Arab settlements that caused the latter's demise.[52] Although the nomads depended upon sedentary populations for survival, they looked down upon them while settled Arabs viewed the Bedouin as opportunists or worse, as cruel robbers.[53] Numerous authors have documented the Bedouin role in conquering the Negev as well as the plundering and expulsion of settled Arabs from other parts of Palestine.[54] British surveyor and archeologist Claude R. Conder, writing in the 1880s, described a situation of unending war between the Bedouin tribes and the settled villagers.[55]... (h/t zozosophie) 
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| Reuters photo-essay whitewashes terrorist Arafat Posted: 05 Jul 2012 01:15 PM PDT Now that the syphilitic terrorist Arafat is in the news again, Reuters put out a p hoto essay with 32 pictures going over his life. The photos seem really, really selective, though. . They include photos of Arafat with the Pope, Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela and others: The only photos that can be considered less than complimentary are those with Mubarak and Castro, but even so it made him looks statesmanlike. But in those 32 photos, they somehow missed Arafat's loving embrace of other prominent people. Like Ayatollah Khomeini:
Saddam Hussein:
Hamas terror chief Sheikh Yassin: Moammar Gaddafi:
Bashir Assad:
Gamal Abdul Nasser: Sometimes, media bias can be proven from what's missing. (h/t Lenny, also noted by Honest Reporting) 
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| Links (with lots of videos) Posted: 05 Jul 2012 12:00 PM PDT From Ian: UN Watch UN Watch Exclusive Report: Syria Running for the U.N. Human Rights Council, Says U.S. "U.S.-Sponsored Resolution Slams Syrian Candidacy" U.N. Day of Hate vs. Israel: Hillel Neuer Takes the Floor U.N. Debate: Hillel Neuer Challenges UN Palestine Expert Richard Falk New IDF Video: IDF Stories The Caracal Battalion's Final Test Stand with US: JLTV Israeli Heroes in Haiti with Photojournalist Joe Shalmoni and StandWithUs CEO Roz Rothstein Yoni Netanyahu movie inspires audiences, underwhelms critics 36 years after Entebbe, 'Follow Me' examines the mythology, the controversy and the legacy of Israel's lone fallen soldier from the daring raid Follow Me: The Yoni Netanyahu Story (2012) Movie trailer Fundamentally Freund: Anti-Semitism on the Temple Mount By MICHAEL FREUND "In recent weeks, there have been a string of incidents that should have sparked outrage across the Jewish world but instead were met with stony silence. On a number of occasions, Jews seeking to exercise their basic human rights such as freedom of worship and assembly, and freedom of speech, have seen their liberties callously disregarded, and even trampled upon." Former CIA Chief: Pretend Pollard Isn't Jewish, and Free Him "In a sharp letter to the Wall Street Journal, former CIA director James Woolsey called for the release of Jonathan Pollard." Saint Petersburg Jewish Agency offices defaced with swastikas "All of you – to Buchenwald' spray-painted on neighboring building; Russian city is home to 100,000 Jews" Israel, China agree to build Eilat railway Transport Minister Yisrael Katz and China's Minister of Transport Li Shenglin signed the memorandum of understanding in Beijing. A little comedy to finish with. Friedman: Mursi can bring 'real' Israel-Egypt peace "'NY Times' columnist says Islamist president gives opportunity to make peace with 80m. Egyptians rather than with single dictator." (See how Friedman is demolished at the Gloria Center - EoZ)
Also, see The Augean Stables on Deadheads and Israel. The Challenge of Alternative Tourism. (h/t Ardie) 
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| The unoccupied territories Posted: 05 Jul 2012 10:30 AM PDT From Israel Hayom: The biggest news story of the week, perhaps of the year, slipped under the media radar yesterday: Edna Adato of Israel Hayom revealed the main points of a report drafted by the Committee to Examine the State of Construction in Judea and Samaria, headed by retired Supreme Court Justice Edmond Levi. The report touches upon the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and makes sense of the matter. One can say that the government received permission to toss attorney Talia Sasson's report on settlement outposts into the dustbin of history.
Levi's report concludes that Israel has the right to settle Jews in Judea and Samaria, and that it is incorrect to say that building settlements is illegal according to international law: "According to international law Israelis have the legal right to settle in all of Judea and Samaria, and at the very least in territories under Israeli control based on agreements with the Palestinian Authority; and therefore the creation of settlements in and of itself is not an illegal act."
The committee also concludes: "From the viewpoint of international law, statutes regarding the 'occupation' are inapplicable due to the special legal and historical circumstances regarding the decades-long Israeli presence in Judea and Samaria."
Since the 1970s, senior jurists in Israel and abroad have argued that Israel is completely within its rights to settle its citizens in Judea and Samaria. Among them are the President of the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Judge Stephen Schwebel; Prof. Elihu Lauterpacht of Cambridge University; and Prof. Eugene Rostow, the former Deacon at Yale's school of law, all of whom, along with others, have voiced their clear opinions in regards to Israel's just claim over Judea and Samaria within the historical and legal circumstances.
Since the Six-Day War, however, Israel has refrained from declaring the permanent status of the territories it won, excluding Jerusalem and the Golan Heights.
...If the territories aren't occupied, the Left has argued over the years, they must be annexed, including the populations there. But the reality isn't a polar one, it is complex. The current report recognizes an intermediate reality: At hand is a disputed territory; two entities hold it; none of the sides is considered an "occupier." There is disagreement regarding ownership, which needs to be clarified through different means, but there is no definition of "occupation" in the international legal sense of the word.
A perception of Belligerent Occupation occurs when one country conquers the territories of another country. In our case, the last sovereign power was the British Mandate, which received its legitimacy from the League of Nations to create a national home for the Jews in the Land of Israel.
The Jordanian occupation was never recognized (aside from Britain and Pakistan), and Israel never conquered "Jordanian territory." Moreover, Jordan renounced its sovereignty over these territories toward the late 1980s. Read the whole thing. I saw this first reported in the Jewish Press a couple of weeks ago, but I still have not seen the actual report, which I would love to analyze. (It is said to be 90 pages long and in Hebrew; hopefully it is being translated.) (h/t My Right Word) 
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| The numbers in the Arafat polonium report don't add up (UPDATED) Posted: 05 Jul 2012 08:45 AM PDT I just looked at the methodology of the Swiss institute that initially determined that there was far more polonium-210 in Yasser Arafat's urine than normal. Essentially the only personal items that had huge amounts of polonium were Arafat's underwear and toothbrush, with a bloodstain on his hospital cap having a significant amount as well. But the report found that the toothbrush bristles had similar levels of polonium as that of a control toothbrush (from an IRA collaborator). So most of the "smoking gun" comes from the urine sample in the underwear. Here is what the report says: The cumulative urinary excretion and the daily urinary excretion after acute intake by ingestion of 210- Po are shown in Figure 7 and 8. A good agreement was found between the values of cumulative urinary excretion reported by Harrison et al.[2] and those calculated in our study (see Figure 6).
Regarding the poisoning of Mr. Litvinenko by 210-Po in November 2006 in London, Harrison et al. [2] concluded that 0.1–0.3 GBq or more absorbed to blood of an adult male is likely to be fatal within 1 month. This range would correspond to an intake of 1–3 GBq or more, assuming f1=01. Based on their study, Li et al. [3] found that the estimated amount of 210-Po ranged from 27 MBq assuming f1=0.5 to 1.4 GBq assuming f1=0.1.
Considering a poisoning by ingestion of 1 GBq of 210-Po (f1=0.1), it is expected to find about 500 kBq/day in urinary excretion the first 10 days after intake, about 250 kBq/day between 10 and 20 days and about 150 kBq/day between 20 and 30 days, according to Figure 8. Note that for a daily urinary excretion of about 1000 ml/day, such a concentration of 210-Po might have been observed in the gamma spectrometry analysis of 2004 (we estimated the detection limit at 25 kBq/l). Then, assuming that about 2 ml of urine might be found in the underwear with urine stains, we expect that 1 kBq can be found in the underwear if it is worn during the first 10 days after intake. This activity of 1 kBq in October 2004 corrected for radioactive decay of 10 Po (T1/2 = 138.4 d) gives about 1.4 mBq in February 2012. For comparison, an activity of 180 mBq was found for the urine stain of underwear (A) (see Table 2). The authors note that 1 GBq will kill a man in a month. They then note that this amount would yield about 1.4 mBq in the urine after some 20 half-lives of decay, in February 2012. And then they say that they measured 180 mBq in February, over a hundred times more! But doesn't that mean that Arafat ("Mr. Louvet" in the report) would have ingested over 100 Gbq of polonium in 2004 - 100 times the dosage that kills within a month? If so, how did he survive as long as he did after he took ill? Moreover, if he would have taken a lethal amount, they note that the French doctors would have observed that in their gamma spectography analysis in 2004. Yet they didn't. Finally, and in addition to our alpha-spectrometric analysis, we re-analyzed the raw data of the
gamma spectrometry performed on urine samples by the French government before Mr Louvet's death. We did not detect any abnormal gamma activities. In particular, we checked the area around the energy 803 keV that is (weakly) emitted by 210-Po. We did not find any evidence of this nuclide in the spectra. Could it be that the samples were contaminated with trace amounts of polonium in the intervening years? This gets into the realm of conspiracy theories, which I am no fan of, but one other fact needs to be mentioned: You can buy tiny, but safe, amounts of polonium over the Internet. UPDATE: My theory isn't so far-fetched . An expert in Israel talked to the Jerusalem Post and came up with the same conclusion: The high levels of the radioactive poison polonium reportedly found on the belongings of the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat indicate that the toxin was planted on them long after Arafat's death, a senior counter-terrorism analyst told The Jerusalem Post Thursday.
Dr. Ely Karmon, of the Herzliya Interdisciplinary Center's Institute for Counter-Terrorism, is a specialist in chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear terrorism.
Responding to an Al Jazeera report published Wednesday, which said that specialists at the Institut de Radiophysique in Lausanne, Switzerland, discovered abnormally high levels of polonium on Arafat's belongings, Karmon said that the half life of the substance would make it impossible for polonium to have been discovered at such high levels if it had been used to kill Arafat eight years ago.
According to the Al-Jazeera report, polonium has a half-life of 138 days, "meaning that half of the substance decays roughly every four-and-a-half months."
And yet, eight years after Arafat's death, the Swiss scientists reported finding polonium levels of 54mBq and 180mBq on his belonging, considered to be high levels.
"If it had been used to for poisoning, minimal levels should be seen now. Yet much higher levels were found. Someone planted the polonium much later," Karmon said.
"Because of the half life of the substance, the conclusion is that the polonium is much more fresh," he added.
....After Arafat's death, "why did neither Suha nor the PA agree to release the French hospital's medical file?" he added. (h/t CHA and Sasha) 
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| Another UNRWA scandal Posted: 05 Jul 2012 07:15 AM PDT In he wake of my expose yesterday that UNRWA schools were teaching Islam, teaching terror and glorifying "martyrdom," against their own published standards, comes this from the Institute for Middle Eastern Democracy: Human Appeal International (HAI) is a "British International development and relief charity", founded in 1984. According to the United Kingdom Charity Commission, the charity's goals are "The relief of poverty and sickness and the protection of good health and the advancement of education of those in need or from impoverished countries overseas and in particular Sudan, Mauritania, Ethiopia, Lebanon and Afghanistan." Most recently HAI has teamed up with the UN agency that deals with Palestinian refugees, UNRWA, to launch an education project in Gaza. Should we be surprised that a United Nations body is taking part in a joint venture with a charity the USA has deemed complicit with terrorism? Human Appeal International is accused of a number of Hamas connections. In 2005, Hamas openly admitted receipt of funds from HAI on their website. Later that year, HAI was named on the charge sheet against Ahmed Saltana – a Hamas activist from Jenin, and head of the Jenin Zakat Committee – who was imprisoned after being found guilty of providing some £6.2 million of funds to Hamas suicide bombers and their families in order to glorify their actions. Saltana has previously been involved in transferring bomb making materials in 1992, a car bombing in Jerusalem's Sbarro Restaurant in 1993, and recruiting young men working for his charity committee into Hamas. This is not the first time Human Appeal International has been accused of funding terrorist actions: a 1996 CIA report identified Human Appeal International as one of a number of Islamic charities used as conduits for funds to terrorist organizations, and tied it to the Saudi-based Muwafaq, an Al-Qaeda front group. Not only is Human Appeal International accused of transferring funds to Hamas; but here in Europe, it also has close relations with extremists who openly support Hamas. One of the Human Appeal's current trustees is Dr. Nooh al Kaddo, who also serves as the executive director of the Islamic Cultural Centre of Ireland (ICCI), and is a member of the Federation of Islamic Organisations in Europe. Both of these are considered to be part of the Muslim Brotherhood's European network, with the ICCI hosting the European Council for Fatwa and Research, which is headed by the notorious anti-Semitic hate preacher Yusuf Al-Qaradawi. Qaradawi is a supporter of suicide bombings in Israel. Recently, HAI hosted an event with the Federation of Student Islamic Societies (FOSIS), featuring the hate preacher Dr. Haitham al-Haddad as a guest speaker. Al-Haddad regards Jews as "enemies of god, and the descendants of apes and pigs", and disregards any form of peace until "Allah's law [will] govern the whole earth, and for no other law to remain." Haddad deems homosexuality a crime and supports the subjugation of women,telling them: "you must obey [your husband]." Read the whole thing. (h/t Ron) 
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| Israeli diplomat asked to leave energy forum in Cyprus Posted: 05 Jul 2012 05:30 AM PDT This outrageous story from last week was universally ignored, and it shouldn't have been. From the Cyprus Mail: ISRAEL'S Ambassador to Cyprus was rather indecorously asked to leave an Energy Forum yesterday after the Lebanese Energy Minister complained to organisers.
Israeli ambassador Michael Harari, attending the 2nd Levant Energy Forum by special invitation, arrived at the venue - the University of Cyprus - around 10am.
At 11.15am, on schedule, President Christofias arrived with Gebran Bassil, Lebanon's Minister of Energy and Water Resources.
According to the agenda - which had been set well in advance - Christofias was to give a keynote speech, immediately followed by Bassil, whose address concerned the future of Lebanon as an energy producer.
Moments before the President was due to step inside the room, the attendees - industry delegates and media people - had been asked to stand up. It turned out to be a false alarm, because the crowd were then asked to retake their seats and to wait for the next cue to rise - which happened a couple of minutes later.
In the meantime, it seems, Harari was approached by organisers and asked to leave. He was told the Lebanese minister on arriving informed them he would not deliver his speech unless and until Harari left.
Once the Israeli ambassador exited the room, Christofias and Bassil walked in.
Harari confirmed he was asked to decamp the premises at the insistence of the Lebanese Energy Minister.
"It is a pity that it happened," Harari later told the Cyprus Mail.
"I decided to leave in order not to embarrass the President," he said, adding: "The organisers should have handled it differently." I'm not so sure that keeping this quiet was a smart idea for Israeli diplomacy. Both the conference organizers and Lebanese acted despicably and their actions should be deplored. Harari could have just said he'd love to hear what Israel's northern neighbor has to say and let the Lebanese minister make a fool of himself. No one would blame Harari for refusing to leave, not even Cyprus' president. And as we can see, even the Cypriot press was on Israel's side. UPDATE: Israellycool covered it. 
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| As PA faces splits, Palestinian Islamists look to unify Posted: 05 Jul 2012 02:20 AM PDT Ma'an has an essay in the wake of this week's protests and violence in Ramallah: Something deep and painful was broken in Ramallah this week: along with the bones broken by violent Palestinian plainclothes and official security officials dealing with a protest, Palestinian trust was permanently wounded.
...The fact that the latest protests came from young people that do not belong to either PLO factions or Hamas seems to have made the security apparatus feel that it can act with impunity against them. This has proved to be a mistake and if it continues, it will bring long-term damage to the Fatah leadership.
It is unlikely that the current protests will produce anything close to the two intifadas that shook the earth of the occupiers. If anything, the current protests and the dynamism created by the security's crackdown will produce large protests against the Palestinian Authority.
Palestinian resentment at the unending West Bank-Gaza split and the disgust with the negotiation process will most likely lead to a strengthening of this popular anti-PA movement. And if the demands and aspirations of these protesters are not taken seriously, the very foundation and legitimacy of the current Palestinian leadership will be seriously put to test. Meanwhile, Islamic Jihad is trying to get closer to Hamas: Palestinian factions will meet Thursday for reconciliation talks in Gaza City, an Islamic Jihad leader told Ma'an.
Khalid al-Batsch told Ma'an that Islamic Jihad invited parties to meet at its offices since the scheduled talks in Cairo were delayed and because of Hamas' decision to suspend voter registration in Gaza. If things keep going as they are, the Palestinian Spring will look a lot like the Egyptian. 
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