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Israel has been stealing nuclear secrets and covertly making bombs since the 1950s. And western governments, including Britain and the US, turn a blind eye. But how can we expect Iran to curb its nuclear ambitions if the Israelis won't come clean?
Israel's nuclear reactor at Dimona. Photograph: Getty Images
Deep beneath desert sands, an embattled Middle Eastern state has built a covert nuclear bomb, using technology and materials provided by friendly powers or stolen by a clandestine network of agents. It is the stuff of pulp thrillers and the sort of narrative often used to characterise the worst fears about the Iranian nuclear programme. In reality, though, neither US nor British intelligence believe Tehran has decided to build a bomb, and Iran's atomic projects are under constant international monitoring.
The exotic tale of the bomb hidden in the desert is a true story, though. It's just one that applies to another country. In an extraordinary feat of subterfuge, Israel managed to assemble an entire underground nuclear arsenal – now estimated at 80 warheads, on a par with India and Pakistan – and even tested a bomb nearly half a century ago, with a minimum of international outcry or even much public awareness of what it was doing.
Despite the fact that the Israel's nuclear programme has been an open secret since a disgruntled technician, Mordechai Vanunu, blew the whistle on it in 1986, the official Israeli position is still never to confirm or deny its existence.
When the former speaker of the Knesset, Avraham Burg, broke the taboo last month, declaring Israeli possession of both nuclear and chemical weapons and describing the official non-disclosure policy as "outdated and childish" a rightwing group formally called for a police investigation for treason.
Meanwhile, western governments have played along with the policy of "opacity" by avoiding all mention of the issue. In 2009, when a veteran Washington reporter, Helen Thomas, asked Barack Obama in the first month of his presidency if he knew of any country in the Middle East with nuclear weapons, he dodged the trapdoor by saying only that he did not wish to "speculate".
UK governments have generally followed suit. Asked in the House of Lords in November about Israeli nuclear weapons, Baroness Warsianswered tangentially. "Israel has not declared a nuclear weapons programme. We have regular discussions with the government of Israel on a range of nuclear-related issues," the minister said. "The government of Israel is in no doubt as to our views. We encourage Israel to become a state party to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty [NPT]."
But through the cracks in this stone wall, more and more details continue to emerge of how Israel built its nuclear weapons from smuggled parts and pilfered technology.
The tale serves as a historical counterpoint to today's drawn-out struggle over Iran's nuclear ambitions. The parallels are not exact – Israel, unlike Iran, never signed up to the 1968 NPT so could not violate it. But it almost certainly broke a treaty banning nuclear tests, as well as countless national and international laws restricting the traffic in nuclear materials and technology.
The list of nations that secretly sold Israel the material and expertise to make nuclear warheads, or who turned a blind eye to its theft, include today's staunchest campaigners against proliferation: the US, France, Germany, Britain and even Norway.
Whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu. Photograph: AP
Meanwhile, Israeli agents charged with buying fissile material and state-of-the-art technology found their way into some of the most sensitive industrial establishments in the world. This daring and remarkably successful spy ring, known as Lakam, the Hebrew acronym for the innocuous-sounding Science Liaison Bureau, included such colourful figures as Arnon Milchan, a billionaire Hollywood producer behind such hits as Pretty Woman, LA Confidential and 12 Years a Slave, who finally admitted his role last month.
"Do you know what it's like to be a twentysomething-year-old kid [and] his country lets him be James Bond? Wow! The action! That was exciting," he said in an Israeli documentary.
Milchan's life story is colourful, and unlikely enough to be the subject of one of the blockbusters he bankrolls. In the documentary, Robert de Niro recalls discussing Milchan's role in the illicit purchase of nuclear-warhead triggers. "At some point I was asking something about that, being friends, but not in an accusatory way. I just wanted to know," De Niro says. "And he said: yeah I did that. Israel's my country."
Milchan was not shy about using Hollywood connections to help his shadowy second career. At one point, he admits in the documentary, he used the lure of a visit to actor Richard Dreyfuss's home to get a top US nuclear scientist, Arthur Biehl, to join the board of one of his companies.
According to Milchan's biography, by Israeli journalists Meir Doron and Joseph Gelman, he was recruited in 1965 by Israel's current president, Shimon Peres, who he met in a Tel Aviv nightclub (called Mandy's, named after the hostess and owner's wife Mandy Rice-Davies, freshly notorious for her role in the Profumo sex scandal). Milchan, who then ran the family fertiliser company, never looked back, playing a central role in Israel's clandestine acquisition programme.
He was responsible for securing vital uranium-enrichment technology, photographing centrifuge blueprints that a German executive had been bribed into temporarily "mislaying" in his kitchen. The same blueprints, belonging to the European uranium enrichment consortium, Urenco, were stolen a second time by a Pakistani employee, Abdul Qadeer Khan, who used them to found his country's enrichment programme and to set up a global nuclear smuggling business, selling the design to Libya, North Korea and Iran.
For that reason, Israel's centrifuges are near-identical to Iran's, a convergence that allowed Israeli to try out a computer worm, codenamed Stuxnet, on its own centrifuges before unleashing it on Iran in 2010.
Arguably, Lakam's exploits were even more daring than Khan's. In 1968, it organised the disappearance of an entire freighter full of uranium ore in the middle of the Mediterranean. In what became known as the Plumbat affair, the Israelis used a web of front companies to buy a consignment of uranium oxide, known as yellowcake, in Antwerp. The yellowcake was concealed in drums labelled "plumbat", a lead derivative, and loaded onto a freighter leased by a phony Liberian company. The sale was camouflaged as a transaction between German and Italian companies with help from German officials, reportedly in return for an Israeli offer to help the Germans with centrifuge technology.
When the ship, the Scheersberg A, docked in Rotterdam, the entire crew was dismissed on the pretext that the vessel had been sold and an Israeli crew took their place. The ship sailed into the Mediterranean where, under Israeli naval guard, the cargo was transferred to another vessel.
US and British documents declassified last year also revealed a previously unknown Israeli purchase of about 100 tons of yellowcake from Argentina in 1963 or 1964, without the safeguards typically used in nuclear transactions to prevent the material being used in weapons.
Israel had few qualms about proliferating nuclear weapons knowhow and materials, giving South Africa's apartheid regime help in developing its own bomb in the 1970s in return for 600 tons of yellowcake.
Pictures of the secret Dimona nuclear reactor in Israel, showing where the plant has allegedly been camouflaged. Photograph: space imaging
Israel's nuclear reactor also required deuterium oxide, also known as heavy water, to moderate the fissile reaction. For that, Israel turned to Norway and Britain. In 1959, Israel managed to buy 20 tons of heavy water that Norway had sold to the UK but was surplus to requirements for the British nuclear programme. Both governments were suspicious that the material would be used to make weapons, but decided to look the other way. In documents seen by the BBC in 2005 British officials argued it would be "over-zealous" to impose safeguards. For its part, Norway carried out only one inspection visit, in 1961.
Israel's nuclear-weapons project could never have got off the ground, though, without an enormous contribution from France. The country that took the toughest line on counter-proliferation when it came to Iran helped lay the foundations of Israel's nuclear weapons programme, driven by by a sense of guilt over letting Israel down in the 1956 Suez conflict, sympathy from French-Jewish scientists, intelligence-sharing over Algeria and a drive to sell French expertise and abroad.
"There was a tendency to try to export and there was a general feeling of support for Israel," Andre Finkelstein, a former deputy commissioner at France's Atomic Energy Commissariat and deputy director general at the International Atomic Energy Agency, told Avner Cohen, an Israeli-American nuclear historian.
France's first reactor went critical as early as 1948 but the decision to build nuclear weapons seems to have been taken in 1954, after Pierre Mendès France made his first trip to Washington as president of the council of ministers of the chaotic Fourth Republic. On the way back he told an aide: "It's exactly like a meeting of gangsters. Everyone is putting his gun on the table, if you have no gun you are nobody. So we must have a nuclear programme."
Mendès France gave the order to start building bombs in December 1954. And as it built its arsenal, Paris solds material assistance to other aspiring weapons states, not just Israel.
"[T]his went on for many, many years until we did some stupid exports, including Iraq and the reprocessing plant in Pakistan, which was crazy," Finkelstein recalled in an interview that can now be read in a collection of Cohen's papers at the Wilson Centre thinktank in Washington. "We have been the most irresponsible country on nonproliferation."
In Dimona, French engineers poured in to help build Israel a nuclear reactor and a far more secret reprocessing plant capable of separating plutonium from spent reactor fuel. This was the real giveaway that Israel's nuclear programme was aimed at producing weapons.
By the end of the 50s, there were 2,500 French citizens living in Dimona, transforming it from a village to a cosmopolitan town, complete with French lycées and streets full of Renaults, and yet the whole endeavour was conducted under a thick veil of secrecy. The American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh wrote in his book The Samson Option: "French workers at Dimona were forbidden to write directly to relatives and friends in France and elsewhere, but sent mail to a phony post-office box in Latin America."
The British were kept out of the loop, being told at different times that the huge construction site was a desert grasslands research institute and a manganese processing plant. The Americans, also kept in the dark by both Israel and France, flew U2 spy planes over Dimona in an attempt to find out what they were up to.
The Israelis admitted to having a reactor but insisted it was for entirely peaceful purposes. The spent fuel was sent to France for reprocessing, they claimed, even providing film footage of it being supposedly being loaded onto French freighters. Throughout the 60s it flatly denied the existence of the underground reprocessing plant in Dimona that was churning out plutonium for bombs.
Producer Arnon Milchan with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie at the premiere of Mr and Mrs Smith. Photograph: L Cohen
Israel refused to countenance visits by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), so in the early 1960s President Kennedy demanded they accept American inspectors. US physicists were dispatched to Dimona but were given the run-around from the start. Visits were never twice-yearly as had been agreed with Kennedy and were subject to repeated postponements. The US physicists sent to Dimona were not allowed to bring their own equipment or collect samples. The lead American inspector, Floyd Culler, an expert on plutonium extraction, noted in his reports that there were newly plastered and painted walls in one of the buildings. It turned out that before each American visit, the Israelis had built false walls around the row of lifts that descended six levels to the subterranean reprocessing plant.
As more and more evidence of Israel's weapons programme emerged, the US role progressed from unwitting dupe to reluctant accomplice. In 1968 the CIA director Richard Helms told President Johnson that Israel had indeed managed to build nuclear weapons and that its air force had conducted sorties to practise dropping them.
The timing could not have been worse. The NPT, intended to prevent too many nuclear genies from escaping from their bottles, had just been drawn up and if news broke that one of the supposedly non-nuclear-weapons states had secretly made its own bomb, it would have become a dead letter that many countries, especially Arab states, would refuse to sign.
The Johnson White House decided to say nothing, and the decision was formalised at a 1969 meeting between Richard Nixon and Golda Meir, at which the US president agreed to not to pressure Israel into signing the NPT, while the Israeli prime minister agreed her country would not be the first to "introduce" nuclear weapons into the Middle East and not do anything to make their existence public.
In fact, US involvement went deeper than mere silence. At a meeting in 1976 that has only recently become public knowledge, the CIA deputy director Carl Duckett informed a dozen officials from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission that the agency suspected some of the fissile fuel in Israel's bombs was weapons-grade uranium stolen under America's nose from a processing plant in Pennsylvania.
Not only was an alarming amount of fissile material going missing at the company, Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (Numec), but it had been visited by a veritable who's-who of Israeli intelligence, including Rafael Eitan, described by the firm as an Israeli defence ministry "chemist", but, in fact, a top Mossad operative who went on to head Lakam.
"It was a shock. Everyody was open-mouthed," recalls Victor Gilinsky, who was one of the American nuclear officials briefed by Duckett. "It was one of the most glaring cases of diverted nuclear material but the consequences appeared so awful for the people involved and for the US than nobody really wanted to find out what was going on."
The investigation was shelved and no charges were made.
A few years later, on 22 September 1979, a US satellite, Vela 6911, detected the double-flash typical of a nuclear weapon test off the coast of South Africa. Leonard Weiss, a mathematician and an expert on nuclear proliferation, was working as a Senate advisor at the time and after being briefed on the incident by US intelligence agencies and the country's nuclear weapons laboratories, he became convinced a nuclear test, in contravention to the Limited Test Ban Treaty, had taken place.
It was only after both the Carter and then the Reagan administrations attempted to gag him on the incident and tried to whitewash it with an unconvincing panel of enquiry, that it dawned on Weiss that it was the Israelis, rather than the South Africans, who had carried out the detonation.
"I was told it would create a very serious foreign policy issue for the US, if I said it was a test. Someone had let something off that US didn't want anyone to know about," says Weiss.
Israeli sources told Hersh the flash picked up by the Vela satellite was actually the third of a series of Indian Ocean nuclear tests that Israel conducted in cooperation with South Africa.
"It was a fuck-up," one source told him. "There was a storm and we figured it would block Vela, but there was a gap in the weather – a window – and Vela got blinded by the flash."
The US policy of silence continues to this day, even though Israel appears to be continuing to trade on the nuclear black market, albeit at much reduced volumes. In a paper on the illegal trade in nuclear material and technology published in October, the Washington-based Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS) noted: "Under US pressure in the 1980s and early 1990s, Israel … decided to largely stop its illicit procurement for its nuclear weapons programme. Today, there is evidence that Israel may still make occasional illicit procurements – US sting operations and legal cases show this."
Avner Cohen, the author of two books on Israel's bomb, said that policy of opacity in both Israel and in Washington is kept in place now largely by inertia. "At the political level, no one wants to deal with it for fear of opening a Pandora's box. It has in many ways become a burden for the US, but people in Washington, all the way up to Obama will not touch it, because of the fear it could compromise the very basis of the Israeli-US understanding."
In the Arab world and beyond, there is growing impatience with the skewed nuclear status quo. Egypt in particular has threatened to walk out of the NPT unless there is progress towards creating a nuclear-free zone in the Middle East. The western powers promised to stage a conference on the proposal in 2012 but it was called off, largely at America's behest, to reduce the pressure on Israel to attend and declare its nuclear arsenal.
"Somehow the kabuki goes on," Weiss says. "If it is admitted Israel has nuclear weapons at least you can have an honest discussion. It seems to me it's very difficult to get a resolution of the Iran issue without being honest about that."
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Thursday, 9 January 2014
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The United States will begin this week to present potential solutions to disagreements between Israel and the Palestinians as an April deadline for a peace deal approaches, a senior State Department official close to negotiations said Tuesday.
Secretary of State John F. Kerry will test U.S. proposals during meetings with Israeli and Palestinian leaders, set to begin Thursday when he returns to the region. The goal is an outline to guide the most intensive and difficult phase of the direct negotiations Kerry prodded the two sides to begin this past summer.
Kerry set a nine-month deadline for a final peace deal that would establish an independent Palestinian state. The framework agreement at issue now would commit the two sides to the parameters of a final deal.
Details would be filled in over the coming months, but the outline would be a milestone that shows the largely secretive discussions are worthwhile.
“The framework is a basis from which one could negotiate a final peace treaty because the outline or the guidelines of what the final deal would look like would be agreed upon,” the senior U.S. official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to preview Kerry’s discussions in Jerusalem and the West Bank.
The official said Kerry does not expect any “breakthroughs” this week but does want the two sides to agree to the framework terms fairly soon. Those terms would govern talks on the thorniest issues, such as the borders of a future Palestinian state on land Israel now occupies, and make it hard for either side to backtrack.
All sides have acknowledged that the ambitious timeline to resolve the decades-old conflict could slip, but Israeli and Palestinian negotiators have kept their word to remain at the table for talks that have now gone about 20 rounds.
Negotiators “have established very well where the gaps are but also established some, or generated some, ideas that could help to serve as ways of bridging those gaps,” the senior official said.
Israel held to a key condition for talks with the release starting Monday night of 26 Palestinian prisoners serving long sentences for killing Israelis. It was the third of four scheduled releases of a total of 104 Palestinian prisoners, all serving 19 years or more in Israeli jails for crimes committed before the 1993 signing of the Oslo accords.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, in turn, has held off on plans to seek further recognition of the Palestinian government through the United Nations, a path that could confer de facto statehood without input from Israel. The United States opposes that route.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Abbas have not met directly since talks resumed in July. A face-to-face meeting, possibly with Kerry as moderator, would be a significant sign of progress. The senior U.S. official said such a meeting would probably follow agreement on the framework terms.
The official acknowledged the risks of raising the profile of talks to that level, given that the last direct talks between Abbas and Netanyahu ended with each accusing the other of intransigence and obstructionism. All direct talks halted after that brief 2010 exchange.
U.S. negotiators are struggling with how to describe Kerry’s goal of an interim agreement without diluting his larger aim to get a final deal by the end of April. The senior official insisted Tuesday that the framework under discussion is not an end in itself but would exist purely to guide and push the parties to a final agreement.
Among the released prisoners were three men convicted of slitting the throat of Sara Sharon, an Israeli prostitute and mother of seven, and leaving a note warning that they would continue to kill Jews until all Palestinian refugees came home.
Also set free were Muammar Ata Mahmoud Mahmoud and Salah Khalil Ahmad Ibrahim, convicted of stabbing to death an Israel Prize-winning history professor, Menahem Stern, as he strolled the Hebrew University campus in June 1989.
There are about 4,700 Palestinian security prisoners in Israeli jails, most convicted in Israeli military courts of participating in or planning terrorist attacks.
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Tuesday, 31 December 2013
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To whom much is given, much is expected
As has been widely reported, the American Studies Association, the umbrella organization of academics devoted to the study of US literature, history and culture, recently voted to join the movement to boycott Israeli academic institutions.
In the days since that historic vote, numerous high-profile US supporters of the Jewish state have vehemently decried the scholarly association’s historic decision.
The first to do so was Lawrence Summers, one-time Harvard president and prime architect–in his role as deregulator-in-chief of the finance industry–of the recession that has robbed millions of Americans of their jobs, savings and homes. He has been followed by numerous others such as Leon Wieseltier of the New Republic and by Michael Roth president of Wesleyan University in Connecticut.
Reading their reactions to the democratically determined posture of the ASA, one particular argument appears with almost metronomic predictability. It goes something like this:
“Considering all the countries in the world where human rights abuses are rife, why in the world is the ASA so concerned about Israel, the only “democratic state” in the Middle East? Why is this organization, along with the millions of others who support the BDS movement, “singling Israel out” for such punitive treatment?”
One is left to wonder. Do these people always treat the intelligence of their audience with such contempt? Do they always assume that those to whom they speak are deeply ill-informed about the structural realities of contemporary politics and incapable of the most basic logical inductions in regard to the nature of Israel’s relationship with the US?
As anyone who has not been living under a rock for the last 50 years knows, Israel has, it is true, long been “singled out” in America…. for extraordinary levels of financial, military and diplomatic support from the United States government.
Indeed, it could be said without exaggeration say that no small and putatively sovereign nation in modern history has ever been the object of such lavishly favorable treatment from a Great Power. There is nothing remotely comparable to the US’s indulgent treatment of Israel in Spain’s or Great Britain’s long historical runs as the world’s hegemon.
But don’t take my word for it. Listen to the current US President who declared quite famously that the US and Israel must “work in lockstep” within the theater of international politics. Or, we could listen to the current Vice-President and current Secretary of State who frequently remind audiences that there is “no daylight” between the US and Israel when it comes to strategic goals in the world.
Is there any historical precedent—within a political establishment that constantly talks about how partisan politics must “stop at the water’s edge”– for the pledge made by house minority leader Eric Cantor to the Israeli Prime Minister in November 2010 that he would “serve as a check” on his own country’s presidential administration should it begin to consider policies that he deemed detrimental to Israel?
Is there another country that could purposely try to sink a US warship, the USS Liberty in 1967, and never suffer any sanction or recognizable alteration bilateral relations for doing so?
Is there any other country that could assassinate an unarmed US citizen in an act of piracy on the high seas–Furkan Dogan in 2010–and not only not be called onto the carpet for it, but also have the operation–patently illegal under the international laws of the sea–that led to the death be met with virtual silence by US State Department spokespersons and praise from a considerable part of the US Congress?
Can we imagine a situation where a person from another country who had become a billionaire working mostly in US industry could go on national TV in his native land and brag openly, and without apparent fear of consequence, about how he had helped steal nuclear secrets from the United States? This is exactly what happened a month ago with the Israeli film producer Arnon Milchan.
Is there another country (besides perhaps certain members of the so-called Five Eyes Group of English-speaking nations) that has direct access to the raw data from US citizen communications currently being swept up by the NSA?
Can we imagine the US allowing analysts in any of those “other” countries–whose situations everyone is now supposed to critique before ever deigning to critique Israel–to scrutinize virtually without limits and for their own particular purposes the private communications of American citizens?
And these are only a few of the many examples of the extraordinary US indulgence of Israel that could be adduced here.
No, for at least 46 years and arguably more, the US-Israel relationship has not been “normal” at all, which is to say, in any way comparable to any other bilateral relationship (with the possible exceptions of those it has with the UK and Canada) maintained by the US.
Summers and the small army of people echoing his message on letters-to-the-editor sections around the country know this quite well.
So why are they pretending this is not the case, and that, correspondingly, any systematic critique of Israeli behavior must first pass the test of comparability to that of various and sundry countries around the world?
Because they are interested in doing what many people do when they find themselves with a largely untenable long-term position: steer the conversation from going where they don’t want it to go.
And where is that?
Away from the matter of Israeli behavior, and more specifically, how the fundamental legal design and international comportment of the Israeli state corresponds (or not) to the democratic values most Americans claim to believe in.
If you can ball people up talking about the issue of the Israeli human rights record in relationship to other places that have nothing remotely approaching the privileged, 51st State treatment accorded to Israel–and thus clearly unable to be compared to it in any meaningful way–you can avoid having people talk about things like the following.
–That, despite the New York Times’s and much of the mainstream media’s attempts to convince Americans of the contrary, the only uninspected, which is to say, completely rogue and unaccountable nuclear program in the Middle East belongs to Israel. And it is not a small program, having, according to most reports, around 200 warheads.
Therefore, the only country really capable of “wiping” some other country “off the map” or coercing it into obeisance through nuclear blackmail in the eastern Mediterranean, the Mashriq and Iran is Israel.
And no amount of talk (are you picking up on the pattern of argumentation yet?) about Iran’s completely non-existent nuclear bomb program—the official assessment of the Directorate of National Intelligence of the US, not mine–can change this fact.
–That Israel is an ethno-state, which is to say, a place where one must possess certain blood lines to accede to the fullest possible level of citizenship. Those who do not meet these requirements can live there, but in a decidedly second-class status.
Israel is, of course, not alone among nations in offering citizenship on the basis of blood rights or jus sanguinis.
Where it does stand out in the international context, however, is in the way it does this while simultaneously denying full civic rights to millions of its native inhabitants. This means that a Jew from the USA or Russia can move to Israel and be granted that highest level of citizenship almost instantaneously. This, while the Palestinian whose family has lived in the territory now controlled by Israel for centuries is forced to inhabit a relative civic limbo in the same place, with all that that entails in terms of the potentially capricious encroachments of the state in his or her life.
As part of this approach to managing citizenship, Israel forcibly prevents its already second-class but quite native Arab citizens from living as united families within the borders of Israel after marrying fellow Palestinians from the occupied territories or any other place in the world.
So pervasive is the emphasis on ethnic belonging that security officials at Ben-Gurion Airport blithely slot passengers into differing security protocols–and here I speak from personal experience—according to how they answer the following thinly veiled question regarding one’s pertinence to the most legally favored group: “Are you an Israeli or do you have family in Israel? “
I don’t think that most Americans I know would associate this model of state, and these behaviors (and this is a very small sample), with any system they would be happy or proud to live in, nor as anything they understand to be truly democratic.
And no army of spinmeisters repeating the mantra that “Israel is the only Democracy in the Middle East” can change this salient fact.
–That Israel has a large and growing population of religious citizens that is not only every bit as intolerant and backward-looking as the worst Muslim fanatics in Arab countries, or the worst Christian fundamentalists in the US, but that has a considerably larger control over the political institutions of the country than is the case here or, for that matter, in the great majority of Islamic countries.
Yet, this is hardly ever talked about in our press, or by self appointed spokesmen for Israel such as those mentioned above. Rather, Israel’s most fervent supporters in the media constantly tell us (there’s that pattern argumentation again) about all those terrible Arabs that want to impose sharia law on the world. Nary a word about how the haredim are encroaching daily upon the democratic freedoms of secular Israelis.
–That the current Prime Minister of Israel, apparently unaware that he was on camera, openly bragged in 2001 about his ability to manipulate the very same Americans that, in no small measure, have funded his political career and have generally supported his government’s efforts at ethnic cleansing (that is my understanding of what it is called in other parts of the world when you take over lands by force, displace the autochthonous inhabitants and place settlers of a different ethnic or national background on the seized territory), as well as how he actively undermined the Oslo peace accords (brokered by the US) to which his government was a signatory.
All this from a man, and from there, a government apparatus, that constantly tells the US and the world (there’s that pattern or argumentation once again) that they have “no partner for peace” on the Palestinian side, no person of demonstrable good will ready to talk in serious and reasonable terms about the future of the region.
What Summers and those that echo his words want most of all to avoid is an honest and wide-ranging conversation among Americans about how, and to what degree (if at all), our joined-at-the-hip relationship with Israel benefits the average citizen of this country.
If they were really the great friends of Israel they claim to be, they would repeatedly, indeed doggedly, say to their friends living in the Jewish state, as well as those living here for whom it is a prime object interest and concern, what an old Jesuit, channeling the Gospel of Luke, one told me at the height of my youthful self-absorption:
“To whom much is given, much is expected”.
This is essentially what the ASA is saying to Israel.
It is a shame that instead of using their well-placed voices to second the call to have Israel live more fully within the parameters its publically proclaimed moral codes (you know, the only “democracy” in the Middle East), these prominent opinion leaders insist on throwing rhetorical smoke bombs designed to obscure the most important issues at play in the country’s present-day political and social drama.
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Saturday, 30 November 2013
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Mahmoud Khousa was 13 when he died. He was killed last November by an Israeli drone-fired missile on the last day of Operation Pillar of Defence, an eight-day Israeli military offensive on the Gaza Strip. More than 30 Palestinian children were killed. Yet one year on, despite well-documented evidence of war crimes and serious violations of international humanitarian law, there has been no accountability and no justice for Mahmoud’s family.
Israel’s military policy toward Gaza is one of deterrence. Just last week, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, speaking to the Israeli military Gaza division and marking the one-year anniversary of the assault, declared, “Deterrence is achieved by the enemy’s knowing that we will not tolerate attacks on our communities and our soldiers, and that we will respond in great strength.” The “great strength” that Mr. Netanyahu refers to is also known as disproportionate force.
Since 2006, the Israeli military has sought to achieve “deterrence” by implementing something known as the “Dahiya doctrine,” or “the application of disproportionate force and the causing of great damage and destruction to civilian property and infrastructure, as well as suffering to civilian populations.” It derives its name from the Hezbollah-controlled neighbourhood of Dahiya in Beirut, which Israeli forces leveled in the summer of 2006 during its assault on Lebanon. Following Operation Cast Lead in December 2008 to January 2009, which resulted in the death of over 350 children, the United Nations Fact-Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict found Israeli practices consistent with this doctrine.
The eight days of Operation Pillar of Defence were characterised by disproportionate force directed atgovernment and civilian infrastructure, residential neighbourhoods, and, in the case of Mahmoud, individual civilians. According to B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights organisation, 167 Palestinians diedduring the offensive, with 80 percent of uninvolved fatalities occurring in the last four days of the operation. In the deadliest single attack, 10 members of the al-Dalou family, including five children ages 1 to 14, were killed in an air strike that levelled the family home, according to evidence collected by Defence for Children International Palestine.
During the November offensive, the Israeli military relied heavily on unmanned aerial vehicles or drones to carry out many of the reported 1,235 strikes on the Gaza Strip. Israeli aerial drones are equipped with advanced sensors and cameras that “provide a clear image in real time of people on the ground, day and night,” according to Human Rights Watch. Rather than being indiscriminate, “Israeli strikes are conducted in a precise and surgical manner,” according to an Israeli military spokesperson statement issued during the attacks.
On November 21, 2012, Mahmoud Khousa was a victim of that precision in the street outside his home in Gaza City. Around 2 pm, he left his home to buy a pencil for his sister in a nearby shop. While walking in the street, which was reportedly calm with no military activity, he was targeted and killed by a drone-fired missile.
While both Israeli forces and Palestinian armed groups in Gaza unlawfully targeted civilians during the offensive, the use of drones in attacks on civilians, particularly children, is extremely troublesome. Israeli authorities boast that drones enable them “to carry out the most precise surgical strikes,” which suggests that Mahmoud was intentionally targeted and killed by an Israeli soldier that would have been able to seethat he was a child, according to Amnesty International.
Since the outbreak of the second intifada in 2000, more than 1,000 children have been killed as a result of repeated Israeli military offensives on Gaza. The current regime of collective punishment implemented through a six-year-old blockade, targeted assassinations and regular military offensives all but guarantees the situation for Gaza’s children will continue to deteriorate.
In a context where systemic impunity is the status quo, the need for justice and accountability is urgent. One year on from Operation Pillar of Defence, there has been no independent, impartial investigation into Mahmoud’s killing or any of the other civilian deaths.
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Tuesday, 20 November 2012
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An Israeli air attack has killed 12 members of one family in the Gaza Strip, just hours after Binyamin Netanyahu, Israeli prime minister, said his country was ready to “significantly expand” its operation against Palestinian fighters in the territory.
Barack Obama, the US president, said that while Israel had a right to defend itself, it would be “preferable” to avoid an Israeli ground invasion.
Sunday’s 30 deaths in Gaza, including the deaths of seven civilians on Monday, have brought the total number of Palestinians killed to 82 since the Israeli air strikes began targeting the Hamas-ruled territory six days ago.
On their part, fighters in Gaza continued to fire rockets into Israel. Two of them, aimed at the commercial hub of Tel Aviv, were shot down by Israel’s anti-missile system, police said.
“The operation in the Gaza Strip is continuing, and we are preparing to expand it,” Netanyahu said at the weekly cabinet meeting on Sunday.
“We are extracting a heavy price from Hamas and the terror organisations.”
Meanwhile, thousands of Israeli troops backed by armour massed along the Gaza border, fuelling fears that Israel is poised to expand its aerial bombing campaign into a ground operation.
Gaza fatalities
Ashraf al-Kidra, spokesperson of the health ministry in Gaza, said on Sunday that civilians accounted for half of the Palestinian death toll. More than 750 other Palestinians have been wounded.
In the single deadliest attack of the Israeli operation so far, 12 civilians were killed in Sunday’s air attack on a four-storey house in northern Gaza City, health officials said.
Two or three missiles fired by F-16 fighter jets reduced the house in the Sheikh Radwan neighbourhood to rubble, witnesses said.
Five women, including one 80-year-old, and four small children were among the dead, Kidra said.
The Israeli military said the target was a top rocket mastermind of the Islamic Jihad group. The claim could not be verified, and Kidra said the two men killed in the attack were also civilians.
Earlier, medical sources in Gaza said at least three children – including an 18-month-old infant - and two women were killed in a air raid east of Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza.
An air raid before dawn in Gaza City targeted a building housing the offices of local Arab media, wounding several journalists from al-Quds television.
“At least six journalists were wounded, with minor and moderate injuries, when Israeli warplanes hit the Al-Quds TV office in the Showa and Housari building in the Rimal neighbourhood of Gaza City,” Ashraf al-Qudra, health ministry spokesman, told AFP news agency.
He said one journalist lost his leg.
Witnesses reported extensive damage to the building, and said journalists had evacuated after an initial strike, which was followed by at least two more on the site.
A second media centre was targeted later on Sunday morning. Sky News, Al-Arabiya and the official Hamas-run Al-Aqsa TV channel have offices in the building.
Russian television station RT said its office was destroyed, adding that none of its staff were injured.
The Israeli military said it had targeted “two Hamas operational communication sites” and had only targeted communication devices located on the roof to “minimise the damage to non-involved persons”.
Huge plumes of smoke were billowing in the sky after a security building in Gaza City was hit.
Two other attacks on houses in the Jabalya refugee camp killed one child and wounded 12 other people, medical officials said.
Hamas remained defiant, however, with Abu Ubaida, its military spokesperson, insisting that despite Israel’s blows the group “is still strong enough to destroy the enemy”.
“This round of confrontation will not be the last against the Zionist enemy and it is only the beginning,” he said on TV.
‘Ground incursion’
Gaza has been under attack since Wednesday, when Israel launched a military offensive with the declared goal of deterring fighters in the Palestinian enclave from launching rockets into its territory.
During this period, more than 500 rockets fired from Gaza have hit Israel, killing three people and injuring dozens.
Al Jazeera’s Nadim Baba, reporting from Gaza City, said some people who live near the northern and eastern borders with Israel had been leaving their homes to seek shelter with relatives elsewhere.
In Gaza City, streets were relatively quiet on Sunday.
“People still do think that the Israeli military might actually launch a ground incursion,” he said.
“They are of course also worried that they might be near targets of the Israeli military, and they might also be near to a place from where rockets are being launched.”
Our correspondent witnessed a rocket being launched from a waste ground in the city. “Then I saw civilians running away from that area,” he said.
Rocket fire from Gaza into Israel subsided during the night but resumed in the morning with at least 50 rockets fired, the Israeli army said.
At least 17 of them were intercepted by the so-called Iron Dome, Israel’s a missile-defence system meant to shoot down rockets and artillery shells fired at populated areas.
Two people were lightly injured by a rocket hitting a house in the coastal city of Ashkelon, the Magen David Adom emergency services said.
Coastal attacks
The military said Israeli aircraft had targeted dozens of underground rocket launchers overnight, “causing severe damage to the rocket launching capabilities of Hamas and other terror organisations”.
It also confirmed that its navy had shelled Gaza, hitting targets on the northern Gaza shore line.
Netanyahu told the Sunday cabinet meeting that he was holding talks with world leaders, “and we appreciate their understanding of Israel’s right to self-defence”.
Al Jazeera’s Hoda Abdel-Hamid, reporting from Sderot in southern Israel, said the Israeli leader had a lot of support for a ground operation, especially in the southern parts of the country.
However, a ground invasion would cost Israel much international sympathy and support, according to William Hague, UK foreign secretary.
Hague told Sky News television it was much more difficult to limit civilian casualties in a ground assault and it would threaten to prolong the conflict.
“A ground invasion is much more difficult for the international community to sympathise with or support – including the United Kingdom,” he said.
Hague said Britain would like to see an agreed ceasefire, with an end to the rocket attacks being an essential component of any peace deal.
Ghazi Hamad, a Hamas spokesperson, has told Al Jazeera that 90 per cent of the terms of a ceasefire currently being discussed in the Egyptian capital, Cairo, have been agreed upon.
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The following is a list of United Nations resolutions that concern Israel and bordering states such as Lebanon. The Human Rights Council has adopted more resolutions condemning Israel than it has all other states combined.[1]
From 1967 to 1989 the UN Security Council adopted 131 resolutions directly addressing the Arab–Israeli conflict. In early Security Council practice, resolutions did not directly invoke Chapter VII. They made an explicit determination of a threat, breach of the peace, or act of aggression, and ordered an action in accordance with Article 39 or 40. Resolution 54 determined that a threat to peace existed within the meaning of Article 39 of the Charter, reiterated the need for a truce, and ordered a cease-fire pursuant to Article 40 of the Charter. Although the phrase "Acting under Chapter VII" was never mentioned as the basis for the action taken, the chapter's authority was being used.[2]
The United Nations General Assembly has adopted a number of resolutions saying that the strategic relationship with the United States encourages Israel to pursue aggressive and expansionist policies and practices.[3] The 9th Emergency Session of the General Assembly was convened at the request of the Security Council when the United States blocked efforts to adopt sanctions against Israel.[4] The United States responded to the frequent criticism from UN organs by adopting theNegroponte doctrine.
November 2: UN General Assembly Resolution 997: Called for an immediate ceasefire in the Suez Crisis, an arms embargo on the area, and condemned Israel's participation in the conflict as a violation of the 1949 Israel-Egypt General Armistice Agreement.
November 4: UN General Assembly Resolution 998: Called for the Secretary-General to submit a plan for a United Nations peacekeeping force to secure and supervise a ceasefire in the Suez Crisis.
December 10: UN General Assembly Resolution 2535: UNRWA Report. "Reaffirms" the "inalienable rights" of the Palestinian people and requests the Security Council to take "effective measures" to force implementation of previous UN resolutions
December 11: UN General Assembly Resolution 2546: Condemns Israeli "violations of human rights and fundamental freedoms" in the occupied territories
1970:
November 4: UN General Assembly Resolution 2628: Urges the speedy implementation of UN Security Council Resolution 242 and recognizes that "respect for the rights of the Palestinians is an indisputable element in the establishment of a just and lasting peace in the Middle East"
December 5: UN General Assembly Resolution 2727: Calls on Israel implement the recommendations of the UN special committee investigating Israeli practices in the occupied territories
December 15: UN General Assembly Resolution 2728: Report of the Special Committee to investigate Israeli practices affecting the Human Rights of the population of the Occupied Territories.
December 6: UN General Assembly Resolution 2792: UNRWA Report. Calls for the implementation of UN General Assembly Resolution 194, stresses the "inalienable rights of the people of Palestine", and calls on Israel to stop resettling the inhabitants of Palestinian refugee camps.
December 20: UN General Assembly Resolution 2851: Report of the Special Committee to investigate Israeli practices affecting the Human Rights of the population of the Occupied Territories. Condemns Israeli practices in the occupied territories.
December 15: UN General Assembly Resolution 3005: Report of the Special Committee to investigate Israeli practices affecting the Human Rights of the population of the Occupied Territories.
December 7: UN General Assembly Resolution 3092: Report of the Special Committee to investigate Israeli practices affecting the Human Rights of the population of the Occupied Territories.
November 29: UN General Assembly Resolution 3240: Report of the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Population of the Occupied Territories.
December 5: UN General Assembly Resolution 3414: Calls for economic sanctions and an arms embargo on Israel until it withdraws from all territories occupied in 1967 and grants the Palestinians their "inalienable national rights".
December 15: UN General Assembly Resolution 3525: Report of the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Population of the Occupied Territories.
November 24: UN General Assembly Resolution 31/20: Expresses deep concern that no "just solution" to the "problem of Palestine" has been achieved, refers to the problem as the core of the Middle East conflict, and reaffirms the "inalienable rights" of the Palestinians, including the right of return and the right to national independence.
December 9: UN General Assembly Resolution 31/61: Reaffirms previous condemnations of Israel, and calls for the Security Council to take "effective measures" against Israel, and requests sanctions on Israel.
December 16: UN General Assembly Resolution 31/106: Report of the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Occupied Territories.
October 28: UN General Assembly Resolution 32/5: Reaffirms previous condemnations of Israel, and stresses the "urgent need" to achieve a "just and lasting peace in the Middle East".
November 25: UN General Assembly Resolution 32/20: Reaffirms previous calls for a full Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories and an international peace conference with PLO participation.
December 2: UN General Assembly Resolution 32/40: Reaffirms the "inalienable rights of the Palestinian people", including the right to national sovereignty and the right of return.
December 13: UN General Assembly Resolution 32/91: Report of the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Population of the Occupied Territories. Calls on Israel to respect the Geneva Conventions
December 21: General Assembly Resolution 32/212-III: Implications of extending to certain former staff members coverage by the UN Joint Staff Pension Fund for service with UNRWA.
December 7: UN General Assembly Resolution 33/29: Reaffirms previous calls for a full Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories and an international peace conference with PLO participation.
December 18: UN General Assembly Resolution 33/113: Report of the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Population of the Occupied Territories.
December 6: UN General Assembly Resolution 34/70: Reaffirms previous calls for a full Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories and an international peace conference with PLO participation.
December 12: UN General Assembly Resolution 34/90: Report of the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Population of the Occupied Territories.
December 11: UN General Assembly Resolution 35/122: Report of the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Population of the Occupied Territories.
December 16: UN General Assembly Resolution 35/207: Reaffirms previous calls for a full Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories and the establishment of a Palestinian state.
December 9: UN General Assembly Resolution 36/98: Israeli nuclear armament. Demands that Israel renounce possession of nuclear weapons and submit its facilities to inspection.
December 16: UN General Assembly Resolution 36/147: Report of the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Population of the Occupied Territories.
December 17: UN General Assembly Resolutions 36/226 A & B: Reaffirms previous calls for a full Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories and the establishment of a Palestinian state.
November 16: UN General Assembly Resolution 37/18: Condamns Israel refusal to implement Security Council resolution 487, and demands Israel to withdraw its threat to attack nuclear facilities of neighbouring nations.
December 10: UN General Assembly Resolution 37/88: Report of the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Population of the Occupied Territories.
December 16: UN General Assembly Resolution 37/123: Condemnation of Israel on various topics including occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights, war in Lebanon and the annexation of Jerusalem.
December 17: UN General Assembly Resolution 37/135: Permanent sovereignty over national resources in the occupied Palestinian and other Arab territories.
November 10: UN General Assembly Resolution 38/9: Reiterates the demand that Israel withdraw its threat to attack nuclear facilities of neighbouring nations.
December 15: UN General Assembly Resolutions 38/79: Report of the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Population of the Occupied Territories.
December 19: UN General Assembly Resolution 38/144: Permanent sovereignty over national resources in the occupied Palestinian and other Arab territories.
December 19: UN General Assembly Resolutions 38/180: Calls all nation to suspend or sever all diplomatic, economic and technological ties with Israel. Condemnation of Israel on various topics including occupation of the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights, war in Lebanon and the annexation of Jerusalem.
1984:
November 23: UN General Assembly Resolution 39/14: Reiterates the demand that Israel withdraw its threat to attack nuclear facilities of neighbouring nations.
December 14: UN General Assembly Resolutions 39/95: Report of the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Population of the Occupied Territories.
December 16: UN General Assembly Resolutions 40/161: Report of the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Population of the Occupied Territories.
December 16: UN General Assembly Resolution 40/167: Decides to monitor Israel decision to construct a canal between the Dead Sea and the Mediterranean.
December 16: UN General Assembly Resolution 40/168: Reaffirmation of resolution 38/180 condemning Israel and calling all nations to cut ties with it.
December 3: UN General Assembly Resolutions 41/63: Report of the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Population of the Occupied Territories.
December 8: UN General Assembly Resolutions 42/160: Report of the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Population of the Occupied Territories.
December 6: UN General Assembly Resolutions 43/58: Report of the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Population of the Occupied Territories.
Resolution 42: The Palestine Question (5 March 1948) Requests recommendations for the Palestine Commission
Resolution 43: The Palestine Question (1 Apr 1948) Recognizes "increasing violence and disorder in Palestine" and requests that representatives of "the Jewish Agency for Palestine and the Arab Higher Committee" arrange, with the Security Council, "a truce between the Arab and Jewish Communities of Palestine...Calls upon Arab and Jewish armed groups in Palestine to cease acts of violence immediately."
Resolution 44: The Palestine Question (1 Apr 1948) Requests convocation of special session of the General Assembly
Resolution 46: The Palestine Question (17 Apr 1948) As the United Kingdom is the Mandatory Power, "it is responsible for the maintenance of peace and order in Palestine." The Resolutions also "Calls upon all persons and organizations in Palestine" to stop importing "armed bands and fighting personnel...whatever their origin;...weapons and war materials;...Refrain, pending the future government of Palestine...from any political activity which might prejudice the rights, claims, or position of either community;...refrain from any action which will endanger the safety of the Holy Places in Palestine."
Resolution 48: April 23, 1948, calls on all concerned parties to comply with UNSC Resolution 46 and establishes a Truce Commission for Palestine to assist the SC in implementing the truce. Approved 8-0, abstentions from Colombia, Ukrainian SSR and USSR.
Resolution 49: May 22, 1948 issues a cease-fire order to come into effect at noon, May 24, 1948, New York time. Orders the Truce Commission for Palestine previously set up to report on compliance. Adopted by 8-0, abstentions from Ukrainian SSR, USSR and Syria.
Resolution 50: May 29, 1948, calls for a four week ceasefire covering Palestine, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Transjordan and Yemen. Urges all to protect the Holy Places and Jerusalem. Offers the UN Mediator as many military observers as necessary. Further violations and the Council would consider action under Chapter VII of the UN Charter. Adopted in parts; no voting on the resolution as a whole.
Resolution 127: The Palestine Question (January 22, 1958) " ... 'recommends' Israel suspends its 'no-man's zone' in Jerusalem".
Resolution 138: (June 23, 1960) Question relating to the case of Israel's capture of Adolf Eichmann, concerning Argentina's complaint that Israel breached its sovereignty.
Resolution 162: The Palestine Question (April 11, 1961) " ... 'urges' Israel to comply with UN decisions".
Resolution 171: The Palestine Question (April 9, 1962) " ... determines flagrant violations' by Israel in its attack on Syria".
Resolution 228: The Palestine Question (November 25, 1966) " ... 'censures' Israel for its attack on Samu in the West Bank, then under Jordanian control".
Resolution 237: Six Day War June 14, 1967) " ... 'urges' Israel to allow return of new 1967 Palestinian refugees". and called on Israel to ensure the safety and welfare of inhabitants of areas where fighting had taken place.
Resolution 240 (October 25, 1967): concerning violations of the cease-fire
Resolution 242 (November 22, 1967): Termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgment of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area. Calls on Israel's neighbors to end the state of belligerency and calls upon Israel to reciprocate by withdraw its forces from land claimed by other parties in 1967 war. Interpreted commonly today as calling for the Land for peace principle as a way to resolve Arab-Israeli conflict
Resolution 250: (April 27) " ... 'calls' on Israel to refrain from holding military parade in Jerusalem".
Resolution 251: (May 2) " ... 'deeply deplores' Israeli military parade in Jerusalem in defiance of Resolution 250".
Resolution 252: (May 21) " ... 'declares invalid' Israel's acts to unify Jerusalem as Jewish capital".
Resolution 256: (August 16) " ... 'condemns' Israeli raids on Jordan as 'flagrant violation".
Resolution 258: (September 18) ... expressed 'concern' with the welfare of the inhabitants of the Israeli-occupied territories, and requested a special representative to be sent to report on the implementation of Resolution 237, and that Israel cooperate.
Resolution 259: (September 27) " ... 'deplores' Israel's refusal to accept UN mission to probe occupation".
Resolution 337: (August 15) " ... 'condemns' Israel for violating Lebanon's sovereignty and territorial integrity and for the forcible diversion and seizure of a Lebanese airliner from Lebanon's air space".
Resolution 338 (22 October 1973): " ...'calls' for a cease fire" in Yom Kippur War and "the implementation of Security Council Resolution 242 (1967) in all of its parts", and "Decides that, immediately and concurrently with the cease-fire, negotiations shall start between the parties concerned under appropriate auspices aimed at establishing a just and durable peace in the Middle East."
Resolution 339 (23 October 1973): Confirms Res. 338, dispatch UN observers.
Resolution 340 (25 October): "Demands that immediate and complete cease-fire be observed, per 338 and 339, and requests to increase the number of United Nations military observers
Resolution 341 (27 October): "Approves the report on the implementation resolution 340
Resolution 347: (April 24)" ... 'condemns' Israeli attacks on Lebanon".
Resolution 350 (31 May 1974) established the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force, to monitor the ceasefire between Israel and Syria in the wake of the Yom Kippur War.
Resolution 369 (May 28, 1975), expressed concern over the prevailing state of tension in the Middle East, reaffirmed that the two previous agreements were only a step towards the implementation of Resolution 338 and called on the parties to implement it, and extended the mandate of the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force.
Resolution 371, expressed concern at a lack of progress towards a lasting peace in the Middle East.
Resolution 381, expressed concern over continued tensions, extended the mandate of the United Nations Emergency Force, and scheduled a later meeting to continue the debate on the Middle East.
Resolution 390, considered a report regarding the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force and extended its mandate, noted the efforts to establish peace in the Middle East, but expressed concern over the prevailing state of tensions, and called for the implementation of Resolution 338.
Resolution 444: " ... 'deplores' Israel's lack of cooperation with UN peacekeeping forces".
Resolution 446 (1979): 'determines' that Israeli settlements are a 'serious obstruction' to peace and calls on Israel to abide by the Fourth Geneva Convention".
Resolution 449, regarding the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force.
Resolution 450: " ... 'calls' on Israel to stop attacking Lebanon".
Resolution 452: " ... 'calls' on Israel to cease building settlements in occupied territories".
Resolution 456, regarding the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force.
Resolution 493, regarding the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force.
Resolution 497 (17 December 1981), decides that Israel's annexation of Syria's Golan Heights is 'null and void' and demands that Israel rescinds its decision forthwith.
Resolution 498: " ... 'calls' on Israel to withdraw from Lebanon".
Resolution 501: " ... 'calls' on Israel to stop attacks against Lebanon and withdraw its troops".
Resolution 506, regarding the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force.
Resolution 508: demanded an end to hostilities between Israel and the PLO taking place in Lebanon, and called for a cease-fire.
Resolution 509: " ... 'demands' that Israel withdraw its forces forthwith and unconditionally from Lebanon".
Resolution 1435 (24 Sep 2002) demanded an end to Israeli measures in and around Ramallah, and an Israeli withdrawal to positions held before September 2000.
Resolution 1559 (2 September 2004) called upon Lebanon to establish its sovereignty over all of its land and called upon Syria to end their military presence in Lebanon by withdrawing its forces and to cease intervening in internal Lebanese politics. The resolution also called on all Lebanese militias to disband.
Resolution 1583 (28 January 2005) calls on Lebanon to assert full control over its border with Israel. It also states that "the Council has recognized the Blue Line as valid for the purpose of confirming Israel's withdrawal pursuant to resolution 425.
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