Days before Israel’s military assault on Jericho prison it warned Britain and the United States that it would seize Palestinians held there under an international agreement for killing an Israeli Cabinet minister if the two countries withdrew their monitors. Dov Weisglass, one of the Israeli prime minister’s advisers, told Britain and the US that it would be better for international supervision at the prison to continue.
Israelis have always been horrified at the idea of parallels between their country, a democracy risen from the ashes of genocide, and the racist system that ruled the old South Africa. Yet even within Israel itself, accusations persist that the web of controls affecting every aspect of Palestinian life bears a disturbing resemblance to apartheid. The Guardian Middle East correspondent Chris McGreal reports.
During World War II, the future South African prime minister John Vorster was interned as a Nazi sympathiser. Three decades later, he was being feted in Jerusalem. In the second part of a remarkable special report, Chris McGreal investigates the clandestine alliance between Israel and the apartheid regime, cemented with the ultimate gift of friendship — A-bomb technology.
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/ 18 November 2005
For once, the circumstances of a boy’s death from an Israeli bullet are not in dispute. The army concedes that one of its soldiers shot 12-year-old Ahmed Khatib during a raid on Jenin refugee camp in the occupied West Bank earlier this month. Other Palestinian children playing with Ahmed have backed up the military’s statement that he was waving a toy gun.
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/ 6 September 2005
Four Arab Israelis shot dead by a soldier opposed to the closure of the Gaza Strip settlements are not victims of ”terror” because their killer was Jewish, Israel’s Defence Ministry has ruled, and so their families are not entitled to the usual compensation for life.
It turns out that Jews do expel Jews after all, and without the descent into anarchy predicted by leaders of Israel’s once indulged settlers. Following dire warnings that the forced removal of 8 000 settlers from the Gaza Strip and northern West Bank would provoke civil war, opponents of the pullout have been left reeling by its speed and relative ease.
The bond was forged more than 30 years ago when Israel’s security preoccupation meshed with the visions of a messianic minority to claim the spoils of war as a God-given right. The rush to establish Jewish settlements on the newly-occupied West Bank hilltops.
Chaya Belogorodsky, a slight, fair-haired and devout 14-year-old girl, is considered such a grave ”danger to public peace”’ that Israel’s highest judges dare not let her out of prison and back to her home in a Jewish settlement. Chaya and two other teenage girls have been the only prisoners in a special women’s wing of Maasiyahu jail since their arrest a month ago during a right-wing demonstration against the pullout.
The last time Julia Segal was forced from her home it was by Adolf Hitler. As Jews, her parents had particular reason to fear the Nazi assault that drove the family from Ukraine in 1941. Segal settled in Moscow and in time made her name as a sculptor of mournful but non-political works. They can still be seen in the hilltop art gallery of her latest home, the isolated Jewish settlement of Sa Nur in the West Bank.
Asma (16) and her younger brother, Ahmad, were collecting laundry from the roof of their home in the south of the Gaza Strip in May last year when they were felled by an Israeli army sniper. Neither child was armed or threatening the soldier, who fired unseen through a hole punched in the wall of a neighbouring block of flats. The army said the two were blown up by a Palestinian bomb planted to kill soldiers.