position:cabinet minister

  • Palestinian teen hiking with friends was killed in Israeli army ambush. He posed no danger
    Gideon Levy, Alex Levac | Feb. 1, 2019
    https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-palestinian-teen-hiking-with-friends-was-killed-in-idf-ambush-he-p

    The soldiers hid behind the tallest oak tree in the valley. That’s where the six teenagers were headed, as they descended from their town, Silwad, northeast of Ramallah, into the deep, steep valley to hang out together on that Friday afternoon. On the way, they bought potato chips, sunflower seeds and chocolate, and they planned to boil water for tea over a campfire. Suddenly, without warning, a gunshot rang out. The teens had no idea where it came from. Ayman collapsed, rolling over and landing on his back. A bullet had sliced through his chest from the left, below his neck, and exited from his hip. When Mohammed tried to approach, to pull him out of the line of fire, another shot rang out. Mohammed was hit in the arm and ran for his life.

    Ayman lay on the ground, dying.

    The firing grew more intense. The shooters emerged from the ambush site behind the oak tree. They were joined by two more soldiers who came out of an Isuzu jeep parked on the other side of Highway 60. Bursts of automatic gunfire, aimed at the teens who were fleeing for their lives, echoed through the valley. The group rushed up the hill on which Silwad – meaning “above the wadi” in Arabic – is perched.

    That evening, the Israel Defense Forces returned Ayman Hamad ’s body to his family. He was 17 years old and was buried the next day in the town.

    Not far away, on that same day, last Saturday, January 26, settlers from the outpost of Adei Ad, and/or soldiers who joined them – it is still not clear – killed Hamdi Na’asan , 38, as he was plowing his field next to his village, Al-Mughayyir. Last weekend was particularly lethal for the Palestinians. Four of them were killed by Israelis, in the Gaza Strip, Jerusalem and the West Bank.

    It was raining when we visited Silwad on Monday, and the killing field in the valley that separates the town from Highway 60 was draped in thick fog. Through the fog a stunning view could be made out – of olive trees, the towering oak and the verdant valley. The last house in town, on the wadi’s edge, belongs to Qadura Fares, head of the Palestinian Prisoners Club, a former cabinet minister and prisoner. Fares, fluent in Hebrew, is one of the more impressive leaders in the Palestinian Authority, an associate and good friend of the jailed Palestinian leader Marwan Barghouti.

    The Silwad community center – above which looms the turret of the local mosque that locals say is the tallest in Palestine – had been turned into a venue of mourning and condolences. The dead teenager was a relative of Fares’, who, in an elegant wool coat, was among those welcoming the guests who had come to comfort the family. Next to him was the bereaved father, Ahmed Hamad, 44, a metalworker who once had four daughters and two sons. Now, he has four daughters and one son.

    According to the dead teen’s history teacher, Aouni Fares, Ayman, a high-school senior, was well-informed and knew a lot about the Nakba, the Palestinians’ suffering and the history of the occupation that began in 1967. Ahmed Hamad says his son promised him that he would always be proud of him. Ayman’s uncle Mohammed Othman was the first fatal casualty in Silwad during the first intifada; two other uncles, Akram Hamad and Rifat Hamad, are serving life sentences in Israeli prisons.

    Last Friday morning, Ayman had coffee with his father and then attended prayers in the mosque. At midday the family drove to its olive grove in the valley for a picnic, not far from the place where their firstborn would be killed a few hours later. The weather was ideal, under the winter sun, and Ayman was in high spirits, the mourners recall. The family ate stuffed vegetables prepared by the mother, Inas; Ayman cleared away the dishes.

    When they got home, around 2:30 P.M., Ayman asked his father, who was driving to the nearby village of Rammun to shop, for money to buy snacks; he was given 20 shekels ($5.60). At the end of the day, two shekels would be found in the teen’s cellphone case.

    Almost every Friday they would head out to the valley, Ayman and his buddies, all of them about the same age. There, amid the olive trees, about a kilometer or two from their homes, is the local gathering place.

    When they arrived, the group split up. Ayman and two friends went on ahead, the other three stayed behind for some reason. Later on some of the eyewitnesses, among them the wounded Mohammed Hamad, would say that the group did not throw any stones, although one authoritative source admitted that they had. Iyad Hadad, a field researcher for the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, noted that Ayman was shot at around 4:30 that afternoon – almost Shabbat – so there were certainly no religious settlers’ cars on Highway 60 at the time. Candle-lighting time in the nearby settlements was 4:31 P.M. in Beit El, 4:40 P.M. in Shiloh and 4:49 P.M. in Ofra.

    Many questions remain about what happened this week, and they are very disturbing – even if stones were thrown. The Israel Defense Forces soldiers shot Ayman Hamad from a distance of between 50 and 100 meters, from which he could not have posed any threat. When he was shot, he was also more than 100 meters from the highway, again a distance from which no stone could have hurt anyone traveling on the road. The soldiers fired live ammunition from an ambush with no prior warning, hitting him directly in the chest. They shot to kill, of that there’s no doubt. A teenager, a high-school student, who maybe did throw stones (which hurt no one), or maybe didn’t throw stones, was executed. The soldiers went on shooting even after they had hit him. Fortunately, they didn’t kill anyone else.

    The IDF Spokesman’s Unit made do with a laconic, dry response to Haaretz’s query, one that only raises additional questions: “A Military Police investigation has been launched into the matter, and at its conclusion the findings will be conveyed for further examination to the office of the military advocate general.” We’re unlikely to hear any more about this incident – either about the conclusion of the “investigation” or about a trial of those deemed responsible for the killing of the teen from Silwad.

    After the incident, the wounded Mohammed Hamad made his way into town, where he was taken to the local clinic and from there by ambulance to the Government Hospital in Ramallah. Ayman was still on the ground, with the soldiers gathered around him. A Palestinian ambulance driver who happened to pass by and saw what was going on offered to evacuate Ayman, but the soldiers told him to leave. It’s not clear whether Ayman was still alive at that point. Mohammed said he saw him take a few heavy breaths before he himself fled the scene, as did the third one in their group. The other teens were far off and didn’t see what was going on.

    After almost an hour, after an Israeli ambulance evacuated Ayman, the soldiers left the site. The boy was taken to a military guard tower next to the nearby village of Ein Yabroud, where an intensive care ambulance arrived, lingered for about 10 minutes and then drove off, according to the testimonies. Ayman was apparently already dead.

    In the meantime, one of the friends phoned Ayman’s father to report that his son had been wounded and was with the soldiers. A few minutes later, he called back to say that Ayman had not been wounded, only arrested. Then Qadura Fares phoned to tell Ahmed to drop everything in Rammun and get back to Silwad fast. When Ahmed reached Fares’ house, he saw the crowd that had gathered there, among them his brother, Suheil, who was weeping bitterly, and he realized what had happened.

    Fares meanwhile contacted the District Coordination and Liaison unit in order to get Ayman’s body back; at about 7:30 that evening, the family were instructed to go to the military base at Beit El to retrieve the body. At the Government Hospital in Ramallah, where they brought the body, Ahmed saw the bullet’s entry hole in his son’s chest and the exit wound in the hip.

    While we are visiting, Mohammed Hamad, the survivor of the shooting, enters the community center. His entire arm is bandaged. This is his first encounter with Ahmed since the incident. The teenager had undergone surgery in the Government Hospital shortly after arriving there, but walked out the next day, against his doctors’ instructions, to attend Ayman’s funeral.

    Mohammed is clearly still in a state of shock. Ayman, he relates, walked about 30 meters ahead of the rest of the group toward his family’s olive grove. He denies that they threw stones. After Ayman collapsed on the ground, Mohammed says he saw that he was still moving his fingers, even as blood spilled out of his chest, but doesn’t remember anything else because he was then shot himself. At first, he didn’t feel anything as he was fleeing for his life, with bullets whistling around him. He didn’t feel any pain until a few minutes later. Now he tells us he’ll have to return to the hospital in a few days for additional surgery.

    https://seenthis.net/messages/755175
    #Palestine_assassinée

  • It’s even allowed to hate Israel

    If cabinet Minister Erdan, scourge of left-wing dissidents, visited Sweden, he certainly did not love the liberalism and equality there, yet Swedish airport officials wouldn’t have asked him about it

    Gideon Levy
    Oct 07, 2018

    https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-it-s-even-allowed-to-hate-israel-1.6532475

    News flash for the minister in charge of combating hatred, Gilad Erdan: One is allowed to hate Israel. Sometimes one must even hate its policies. A democratic country doesn’t ask new arrivals whether they love it. It’s none of their business. The gates of democracy are open to everyone, as long as they don’t endanger its security. That is the test.
    Erdan may also have visited a country whose policies he despised; he certainly did not love the liberalism and equality in Sweden, or Germany’s willingness to take in asylum-seekers – and nobody asked him what he thought. His colleague, Culture Minister Miri Regev, a sworn Arab-hater, intends to fly to Abu Dhabi soon. Will they deport her because of her hatred? If only. Maybe that way Erdan would learn.
    >>Ex-Shin Bet chief on questioning of foreigners at Israel’s borders: Shin Bet becoming a problem
    The world that Gilad McCarthy is building for us now, together with the Shin Bet security service that has long been in charge of this, is motivated by the darkness of a different worldview. Erdan described it well on Friday.
    “Everyone understands,” he wrote, “that these are hypocritical organizations uninterested in human rights. They will never act to help the citizens of Syria or Iran. It’s not human rights that motivate them, but hatred of Israel.” Erdan tried to excuse banning the entry to Israel of the student Lara Alqasem and in so doing revealed his worldview once again.
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    “Everyone understands,” Erdan? Well, almost everyone. Even the minister of strategic affairs can’t yet speak for everyone in Israel. Maybe he will be able to do so soon.
    Meanwhile, there are also some people who don’t understand. Not everyone here has been brainwashed by the propagandistic lies. The “hypocritical organizations” are more interested in human rights than anything else. They are people of conscience. Some are veterans of long-standing work against the Vietnam War and apartheid in South Africa, some are young people who should be a source of pride. At a time when most Israelis their age are not interested in anything that doesn’t involve them directly, they are fighting for something. They are certainly immeasurably more moral than any settler in the territories.

  • In Britain, Even Children Are Feeling the Effects of Austerity
    https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/26/world/europe/uk-austerity-child-poverty.html?partner=msft_msn

    The Conservative Party leaders who pushed through the austerity program dispute that it is the cause of rising child poverty, or that child poverty is increasing. They argue that a new system that bundles most payments into one, known as universal credit, is an improvement.

    The new system is “infinitely better than what it replaced,” said Iain Duncan Smith, the Conservative former cabinet minister who oversaw the changes. “The process of stepping into work is easier.”

    That rationale is being questioned. Though unemployment has been more than halved under the Conservatives, the overall child poverty rate has risen. And roughly two-thirds of poor children have at least one parent who works, the Institute for Fiscal Studies said.

    “We tell ourselves completely the wrong story about poverty in the U.K.,” Ms. Garnham said. “The government likes to focus attention on workless families, but there’s hardly any left. That’s a problem of the past.”

    #austérité #pauvreté #travailleurs #pauvres #Grande_Bretagne

  • Despite Iran’s threats, Israeli army pushes aggressive line against Tehran in Syria

    IDF believes Iran won’t strike back before Trump’s deadline on nuclear deal, elections in Lebanon

    Amos Harel May 04, 2018
    Haaretz.com
    https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/.premium-israeli-army-chief-eisenkot-stay-forceful-in-syria-despite-iran-1.

    Both the government and the military are sticking to an aggressive policy on Iran, arguing that Israel must continue to act in any way possible to stop Iran’s military consolidation in Syria.
    To really understand Israel and the Middle East - subscribe to Haaretz
    Even after the two latest airstrikes attributed to Israel in Syria, on April 9 and April 29, and despite Iran’s threats of revenge, there has been no sign of any change in Israeli policy.
    The person spearheading this activist policy in the north is Israel Defense Forces Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot, whose position is backed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman. Reportedly, no cabinet minister has voiced opposition to the IDF’s stance, despite the risks it entails.
    According to the defense establishment’s analysis, Iran continues to send advanced weapons systems to Syria. But these arms are no longer necessarily slated to be passed on to Hezbollah in Lebanon. Instead, they are being used to bolster Iran’s military deployment in Syria, and may even be meant to prepare an Iranian military response against Israel.

    For now, however, Tehran seems to be debating over the nature of its promised retaliation against Israel, and even more, over its timing.
    One theory being advanced is that Tehran may be reluctant to respond prior to Lebanon’s parliamentary elections this coming Sunday and U.S. President Donald Trump’s expected announcement on May 12 as to whether his country is quitting the nuclear agreement with Iran. Israel’s announcement of the theft of Iran’s nuclear archive by Mossad agents is likely to increase Iranian leaders’ embarrassment.

    • ’National day of shame’ : #David_Lammy criticises treatment of Windrush generation

      Labour MP says situation has come about because of the hostile environment that begun under Theresa May, as he blames a climate of far-right rhetoric. People who came to the UK in the 1950s and 60s are now concerned about whether they have a legal right to remain in the country. The government has admitted that some people from the Windrush generation had been deported in error, as Theresa May appeared to make a U-turn on the issue Some Windrush immigrants wrongly deported, UK admits.

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfy1mDdNtEQ

    • Amber Rudd’s resignation letter in full and the Prime Minister’s response

      Amber Rudd has resigned as home secretary amid increasing pressure over the way the Home Office handled immigration policy.

      Her resignation came after leaked documents undermined her claims she was unaware of the deportation targets her officers were using.

      Downing Street confirmed Theresa May had accepted Ms Rudd’s resignation on Sunday night. She is the fifth cabinet minister to have left their position since the Prime Minister called the snap election in June 2017.

      https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/amber-rudd-resignation-letter-full-transcript-windrush-scandal-theres

    • Black history is still largely ignored, 70 years after Empire Windrush reached Britain

      Now, 70 years and three to four generations later, the legacy of those who arrived on the Windrush and the ships that followed is being rightly remembered – albeit in a way which calls into question how much their presence, sacrifices and contributions are valued in Britain.

      https://theconversation.com/black-history-is-still-largely-ignored-70-years-after-empire-windru
      #histoire #mémoire

    • Chased into ’self-deportation’: the most disturbing Windrush case so far

      As Amelia Gentleman reflects on reporting one of the UK’s worst immigration scandals, she reveals a new and tragic case.

      In the summer of 2013, the government launched the peculiarly named Operation Vaken, an initiative that saw vans drive around six London boroughs, carrying billboards that warned: “In the UK illegally? Go home or face arrest.” The billboards were decorated with pictures of handcuffs and the number of recent immigration arrests (“106 arrests last week in your area”). A line at the bottom adopted a softer tone: “We can help you to return home voluntarily without fear of arrest or detention.”

      The Conservatives’ 2010 manifesto promise to reduce migration to the tens of thousands had been going badly. It was time for ministers to develop new ways of scaring immigrants into leaving and for the government’s hostile environment policy to get teeth. More than 170,000 people, many of them living in this country legally, began receiving alarming texts, with warnings such as: “Message from the UK Border Agency: you are required to leave the UK as you no longer have the right to remain.”

      The hope was that the Home Office could get people to “self-deport”, frightening them into submission. In this, politicians appeared to have popular support: a YouGov poll at the time showed that 47% of the public approved of the “Go home” vans. The same year, Home Office vehicles began to be marked clearly with the words “Immigration Enforcement”, to alert people to the hovering presence of border guards.

      Operation Vaken ran for just one month, and its success was limited. A Home Office report later found that only 11 people left the country as a result; it also revealed that, of the 1,561 text messages sent to the government’s tip-off hotline, 1,034 were hoaxes – taking up 17 hours of staff time.

      Theresa May’s former adviser Nick Timothy later tried to argue that the vans had been opposed by the prime minister and were only approved while she was on holiday. But others who worked on the project insisted that May had seen the wording on the vans and requested that the language be toughened up. Meanwhile, the Immigration Enforcement vehicles stayed, with their yellow fluorescent stripes and black-and-white checks, a sinister presence circling areas of high migration. Gradually, the broader strategy of intimidation began to pay off. Some people were frightened into leaving.
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      In my two years of reporting on what became known as the Windrush scandal, Joycelyn John’s experience was the most disturbing case I came across. Joycelyn arrived in London in 1963 at the age of four, travelling with her mother on a Grenadian passport as a British subject. She went to primary and secondary school in Hammersmith, west London, before working in hotels in the capital – including the Ritz and a Hilton.

      Some time around 2009, she lost her Grenadian passport, which contained the crucial stamp giving her indefinite leave to remain. She had trouble getting a new passport, because her mother had married and changed her daughter’s surname from Mitchell to John. Because she never registered the change, there was a discrepancy between Joycelyn’s birth certificate and the name she had used all her adult life. She spent several years attempting to sort out her papers, but by 2014, aged 55, she had been classified as living in Britain illegally. She lost her job and was unable to find new work. For a while, she lived in a homeless hostel, but she lost her bed, because the government does not normally fund places for people classified as illegal immigrants. She spent two years staying with relatives, sleeping on sofas or the floor.

      In that time, Joycelyn managed to gather 75 pages of evidence proving that she had spent a lifetime in the UK: bank statements, dentists’ records, medical files, tax records, letters from her primary school, letters from friends and family. But, inexplicably, this was not enough. Every letter she received from the Home Office warned her that she was liable to be deported to Grenada, a country she had left more than 50 years ago. She began to feel nervous about opening the door in case immigration officers were outside.

      A Home Office leaflet encouraging people to opt for a voluntary departure, illustrated with cheerful, brightly coloured planes and published about the same time as the “Go Home” vans were launched, said: “We know that many people living in the UK illegally want to go home, but feel scared of approaching the Home Office directly. They may fear being arrested and detained. For those returning voluntarily, there are these key benefits: they avoid being arrested and having to live in detention until a travel document can be obtained; they can leave the UK in a more dignified manner than if their removal is enforced.” This appeal to the desire for a dignified departure was a shrewd tactic; the idea of being forcibly taken away terrified Joycelyn, who saw the leaflets and knew of the vans. “There’s such stigma... I didn’t want to be taken off the plane in handcuffs,” she says. She was getting deeper into debt, borrowing money from a younger brother, and felt it was no longer fair to rely on him.

      When the hostile environment policy is working well, it exhausts people into submission. It piles up humiliations, stress and fear until people give up. In November 2016, Joycelyn finally decided that a “voluntary” departure would be easier than trying to survive inside the ever-tightening embrace of Home Office hostility. Officials booked her on a flight on Christmas Day; when she asked if she could spend a last Christmas with her brother and five sisters, staff rebooked her for Boxing Day. She was so desperate that she felt this was the best option. “I felt ground down,” she says. “I lost the will to go on fighting.”

      By that point, she estimated she must have attempted a dozen times to explain to Home Office staff – over the phone, in person, in writing – that they had made a mistake. “I don’t think they looked at the letters I wrote. I think they had a quota to fill – they needed to deport people.” She found it hard to understand why the government was prepared to pay for her expensive flight, but not to waive the application fee to regularise her status. A final letter told her: “You are a person who is liable to be detained... You must report with your baggage to Gatwick South Virgin Atlantic Airways check-in desk.” The letter resorted to the favoured Home Office technique of scaring people with capital letters, reminding her that in her last few weeks: “YOU MAY NOT ENTER EMPLOYMENT, PAID OR UNPAID, OR ENGAGE IN ANY BUSINESS OR PROFESSION.” It also informed her that her baggage allowance, after a lifetime in the UK, was 20kg – “and you will be expected to pay for any excess”.

      How do you pack for a journey to a country you left as a four-year-old? “I was on autopilot,” Joycelyn recalls. “I was feeling depressed, lonely and suicidal. I wasn’t able to think straight; at times, I was hysterical. I packed the morning I left, very last-minute. I’d been expecting a reprieve. I didn’t take a lot – just jeans and a few T-shirts, a toothbrush, some Colgate, a towel – it didn’t even fill the whole suitcase.” She had £60 to start a new life, given to her by an ex-boyfriend. She had decided not to tell her sisters she was going; she confided only in her brother. “I just didn’t want any fuss.” She didn’t expect she would ever be allowed to return to Britain.

      In Grenada, she found everything unfamiliar. She had to scrub her clothes by hand and struggled to cook with the local ingredients. “It’s just a completely different lifestyle. The culture is very different.” She was given no money to set her up and found getting work very difficult. “You’re very vulnerable if you’re a foreigner. There’s no support structure and no one wants to employ you. Once they hear an English accent – forget it. They’re suspicious. They think you must be a criminal if you’ve been deported.”

      Joycelyn recounts what happened to her in a very matter-of-fact way, only expressing her opinion about the Home Office’s consistent refusal to listen when I ask her to. But her analysis is succinct: “The way I was treated was disgusting.” I still find it hard to accept that the government threatened her until she felt she had no option but to relocate to an unfamiliar country 4,300 miles away. The outcome – a 57-year-old Londoner, jettisoned to an island off the coast of Venezuela, friendless and without money, trying to make a new life for herself – is as absurd as it is tragic.

      *

      In April 2018, the leaders of 52 countries arrived in London for the Commonwealth heads of government meeting. The Mall was decorated with flags; caterers at Buckingham Palace prepared for tea parties and state dinners. In normal times, this summit would have been regarded as a routine diplomatic event, heavy with ceremony and light on substance. But, with Brexit looming, the occasion was seen as an important opportunity to woo the countries on which Britain expected to become increasingly reliant.

      A week before the event, however, the 12 Caribbean high commissioners had gathered to ask the British government to adopt a more compassionate approach to people who had arrived in the UK as children and were never formally naturalised. “I am dismayed that people who gave their all to Britain could be discarded so matter-of-factly,” said Guy Hewitt, the Barbados high commissioner. “Seventy years after Windrush, we are again facing a new wave of hostility.”

      Hewitt revealed that a formal request to meet May had been declined. The rebuff convinced the Caribbean leaders that the British government had either failed to appreciate the scale and seriousness of what was happening or, worse, was aware, but did not view it as a priority. It smacked of racism.

      By then, I had been covering cases such as Joycelyn’s for six months. I had written about Paulette Wilson, a 61-year-old grandmother who had been detained by the Home Office twice and threatened with deportation to Jamaica, a country she had left half a century earlier; about Anthony Bryan, who after 50 years in the UK was wrongly detained for five weeks; and about Sylvester Marshall, who was denied the NHS radiotherapy he needed for prostate cancer and told to pay £54,000 for treatment, despite paying taxes here for decades. Yet no one in the government had seemed concerned.

      I contacted Downing Street on 15 April to ask if they could explain the refusal to meet the Caribbean delegation. An official called back to confirm that a meeting had not been set up; there would be other opportunities to meet the prime minister and discuss this “important issue”, she said.

      It was a huge mistake. An article about the diplomatic snub went on the Guardian’s front page and the political response was instantaneous. Suddenly, ministers who had shown no interest were falling over themselves to express profound sorrow. The brazen speed of the official turnaround was distasteful to watch. Amber Rudd, then the home secretary, spoke in parliament to express her regret. The Home Office would establish a new team to help people gather evidence of their right to be here, she announced; fees would be waived. The prime minister decided that she did, after all, need to schedule a meeting with her Caribbean colleagues.

      There were a number of factors that forced this abrupt shift. The campaigner Patrick Vernon, whose parents emigrated from Jamaica in the 50s, had made a critical connection between the scandal and the upcoming 70th anniversary of the arrival of the Empire Windrush at Tilbury Docks. A fortnight earlier, he had launched a petition that triggered a parliamentary debate, calling for an immigration amnesty for those who had arrived as British subjects between 1948 and 1971. For months, I had been describing these people as “Caribbean-born, retirement-age, long-term British residents”, a clunky categorisation that was hard to put in a headline. But Vernon’s petition succinctly called them the “Windrush generation” – a phrase that evoked the emotional response that people feel towards the pioneers of migration who arrived on that ship. Although it was a bit of a misnomer (those affected were the children of the Windrush generation), that branding became incredibly potent.

      After months of very little coverage, the BBC and other media outlets began to report on the issue. On 16 April, the Guardian reprinted the photographs and stories of everyone we had interviewed to date. The accounts were undeniable evidence of profound and widespread human suffering. It unleashed political chaos.

      *

      It was exciting to see the turmoil caused by the relentless publication of articles on a subject that no one had previously wanted to think about. Everyone has moments of existential doubt about whether what they do serves a purpose, but, for two weeks last April, the government was held to account and forced to act, demonstrating the enormous power of journalism to trigger change.

      At the Guardian’s offices in London, a team of reporters was allocated to interview the huge number of emerging Windrush voices. Politicians were contacted by constituents who had previously been nervous about giving their details to officials; they also belatedly looked through their constituency casebooks to see if there were Windrush people among their immigration caseload; finally, they began to speak up about the huge difficulties individuals were facing as a result of Home Office policy.

      Editors put the story on the front page, day after day. Any hope the government might have had of the issue quickly exhausting itself was dashed repeatedly by damaging new revelations. For a while, I was unable to get through my inbox, because there were too many unhappy stories about the government’s cruel, bureaucratic mishandling of cases to be able to read and process. Caroline Bannock, a senior journalist who runs the Guardian’s community team, created a database to collect people’s stories, and made sure that everyone who emailed got an answer, with information on where to go for advice and how to contact the Windrush Taskforce, set up by Rudd.

      I found the scale of the misery devastating. One morning, I came into work to find 24 messages on my answerphone from desperate people, each convinced I could help. I wanted to cry at my desk when I opened a letter from the mother of a young woman who had arrived in Britain from Jamaica in 1974, aged one. In 2015, after being classified as an illegal immigrant and sent to Yarl’s Wood detention centre, she had taken an overdose and died. “Without the time she spent in Yarl’s Wood, which we understand was extremely unpleasant, and the threat of deportation, my daughter would be alive today,” she wrote. The government had been aiming to bring down immigration at any cost, she continued. “One of the costs, as far as I am concerned, was my daughter’s life.”

      Alongside these upsetting calls and letters, there were many from readers offering financial support to the people we interviewed, and from lawyers offering pro bono assistance. A reader sent a shoebox full of chocolate bars, writing that he wanted to help reporters keep their energy levels up. At a time when the reputation of journalism can feel low, it was rewarding to help demonstrate why independent media organisations are so important.

      If the scene at the office was a smooth-running model of professionalism, at home it was chaos. I wrote until 2am and got up at 5am to catch up on reading. I tapped out so many articles over two weeks that my right arm began to ache, making it hard to sleep. My dictaphone overheated from overuse and one of its batteries exploded. I had to retreat entirely from family life, to make sure I poured out every bit of information I had. Shoes went missing, homework was left undone, meals were uncooked. There was an unexpected heatwave and I was aware of the arrival of a plague of ants, flies and fleas (and possibly nits), but there was no time to deal with it.

      I am married to Jo Johnson, who at the time was a minister in May’s government. As a news reporter, I have to be politically independent; I let him get on with his job and he doesn’t interfere in mine. Life is busy and mostly we focus on the day-to-day issues that come with having two children. Clearly, there are areas of disagreement, but we try to step around anything too contentious for the sake of family harmony.

      But the fact did not go unnoticed. One Sunday morning, Jo had to go on television to defend Rudd, returning home at lunchtime to look after the children so I could talk on the radio about how badly the government had got it wrong. I can see why it looks weird from the outside; that weekend it felt very weird. I had only one brief exchange about the issue with his brother Boris, who was then the foreign secretary, at a noisy family birthday party later in the year. He said: “You really fucked the Commonwealth summit.”

      *

      On 25 April, Rudd appeared in front of the home affairs select committee. She told MPs she had been shocked by the Home Office’s treatment of Paulette and others. Not long into the session, Rudd was thrown off course by a question put to her by the committee’s chair, Yvette Cooper. “Targets for removals. When were they set?”

      “We don’t have targets for removals,” she replied with easy confidence. It was an answer that ended her career as home secretary.

      In an earlier session, Lucy Moreton, the head of the Immigration Service Union, had explained how the Home Office target to bring net migration below 100,000 a year had triggered challenging objectives; each region had a removal target to meet, she said. Rudd’s denial seemed to indicate either that she was incompetent and unaware of how her own department worked, or that she was being dishonest. Moreton later told me that, as Rudd was giving evidence, colleagues were sending her selfies taken in front of their office targets boards.

      Rudd was forced back to parliament the next day. This time, she admitted that the Home Office had set local targets, but insisted: “I have never agreed there should be specific removal targets and I would never support a policy that puts targets ahead of people.” But, on 29 April, the Guardian published a private memo from Rudd to May, sent in early 2017, that revealed she had set an “ambitious but deliverable” target for an increase in enforced deportations. Later that evening, she resigned.

      When I heard the news, I felt ambivalent; Rudd hadn’t handled the crisis well, but she wasn’t responsible for the mess. She seemed to be resigning on a technicality, rather than admitting she had been negligent and that her department had behaved atrociously on her watch. The Windrush people I spoke to that night told me Rudd’s departure only shifted attention from the person who was really responsible: Theresa May.

      *

      Joycelyn John was issued with a plane ticket from Grenada to England in July 2018. “A bit of me was ecstatic, a bit of me was angry that no one had listened to me in the first place,” she told me when we met at her still-bare flat in June this year. She had been rehoused in September, but the flat was outside London, far from her family and empty; council officials didn’t think to provide any furniture. Friends gave her a bed and some chairs, but it was months before she was able to get a fridge.

      In late 2018, she received a letter of apology from the then home secretary, Sajid Javid. “People of the Windrush generation who came to Britain from the Commonwealth, as my parents did, have helped make this country what it is today,” he wrote. “The experiences faced by you and others have been completely unacceptable.” The letter made her cry, but not with relief. “I thought: ‘What good is a letter of apology now?’ They ruined my life completely. I came back to nothing. I have had to start rebuilding my life from scratch at the age of 58.”

      She still has nightmares that she is back in Grenada. “I can feel the heat, I can smell the food, I can actually taste the fish in the dream – in a good way. But mostly they are bad memories.” The experience has upended her sense of who she is. “Before this I felt British – I just did. I’m the sort of person who would watch every royal wedding on television. I feel less British now. I feel I don’t belong here, and I don’t belong there.”

      While a government compensation scheme has been announced, Joycelyn, like most of the Windrush generation, has yet to receive any money. Since the government apologised for its “appalling” treatment, 6,000 people have been given documents confirming their right to live in the UK. Joycelyn is one of them. But, although her right to be here is now official, she hasn’t yet got a passport – because she can’t afford the fee. And she remains frightened. “I’m still looking over my shoulder all the time. I’m a nervous wreck.”

      https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/sep/14/scale-misery-devastating-inside-story-reporting-windrush-scandal?CMP=sh

  • Secret 1970 document confirms first West Bank settlements built on a lie
    In minutes of meeting in then-defense minister Moshe Dayan’s office, top Israeli officials discussed how to violate international law in building settlement of Kiryat Arba, next to Hebron.
    By Yotam Berger | Jul. 28, 2016 | 10:17 AM

    1973 map of West Bank settlement Kiryat Arba credit:Peace Now
    http://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-1.733746

    It has long been an open secret that the settlement enterprise was launched under false pretenses, involving the expropriation of Palestinian land for ostensibly military purposes when the true intent was to build civilian settlements, which is a violation of international law.

    Now a secret document from 1970 has surfaced confirming this long-held assumption. The document, a copy of which has been obtained by Haaretz, details a meeting in the office of then-defense minister Moshe Dayan at which government and military leaders spoke explicitly about how to carry out this deception in the building of Kiryat Arba, next to Hebron.

    The document is titled “The method for establishing Kiryat Arba.” It contains minutes of a meeting held in July 1970 in Dayan’s office, and describes how the land on which the settlement was to be built would be confiscated by military order, ostensibly for security purposes, and that the first buildings on it would be falsely presented as being strictly for military use.

    Aside from Dayan, the participants include the director general of the Housing Ministry, the Israel Defense Forces’ commander in the West Bank and the coordinator of government activities in the territories.

    ’Construction will be presented as ...’

    According to the minutes, these officials decided to build “250 housing units in Kiryat Arba within the perimeter of the area specified for the military unit’s use. All the building will be done by the Defense Ministry and will be presented as construction for the IDF’s needs.”

    A “few days” after Base 14 had “completed its activities,” the document continued, “the commander of the Hebron district will summon the mayor of Hebron, and in the course of raising other issues, will inform him that we’ve started to build houses on the military base in preparation for winter.” In other words, the participants agreed to mislead the mayor into thinking the construction was indeed for military purposes, when in fact, they planned to let settlers move in – the same settlers who on Passover 1968 moved into Hebron’s Park Hotel, which was the embryo of the settler enterprise.

    2015 map of West Bank settlement Kiryat Arba credit:Peace Now

    The system of confiscating land by military order for the purpose of establishing settlements was an open secret in Israel throughout the 1970s, according to people involved in creating and implementing the system. Its goal was to present an appearance of complying with international law, which forbids construction for civilian purposes on occupied land. In practice, everyone involved, from settlers to defense officials, knew the assertion that the land was meant for military rather than civilian use was false.

    This system was used to set up several settlements, until the High Court of Justice outlawed it in a 1979 ruling on a petition against the establishment of the settlement of Elon Moreh.

    Participant: We all knew the score

    Maj. Gen. (res.) Shlomo Gazit, who was coordinator of government activities in the territories at the time of the 1970 meeting in Dayan’s office about Kiryat Arba, told Haaretz it was clear to all the meeting’s participants that settlers would move into those buildings. He said that to the best of his recollection, this constituted the first use of the system of annexing land to a military base for the purpose of civilian settlement in the West Bank. He also recalled Dayan as the one who proposed this system, because he didn’t like any of the alternative locations proposed for Kiryat Arba.

    Nevertheless, and despite what the document advocated, Gazit said, army officers told the mayor of Hebron explicitly that a civilian settlement would be established next to his city, rather than telling him the construction was for military purposes.

    Hagit Ofran, head of Peace Now’s Settlement Watch project, also said this appears to be the first use of the system of using military orders to seize land for civilian settlement. And while this system is no longer in use, she said, “Today, too, the state uses tricks to build and expand settlements. We don’t need to wait decades for the revelation of another internal document to realize that the current system for taking over land – wholesale declarations of it as state land – also violates the essence of the law.”

    Gazit said that in retrospect, the system was wrong, but that he was just “a bureaucrat, in quotation marks; I carried out the government’s orders, in quotation marks.”

    “I think this pretense has continued until today,” he added. “Throughout my seven years as coordinator of government activities in the territories, we didn’t establish settlements anywhere by any other system.”

    But government officials had no idea Kiryat Arba (pop. 8,000) would become so big, Gazit insisted. They only sought to provide a solution for the squatters in the Park Hotel, who “weren’t more than 50 families.”

    Today, even Kiryat Arba residents admit that this system was a deception. Settler ideologue Elyakim Haetzni, one of Kiryat Arba’s original residents, noted that during a Knesset debate at the time, cabinet minister Yigal Allon said clearly that this would be a civilian settlement.

    “It’s clear why this game ended; after all, how long could it go on? This performance had no connection whatsoever to Herut (the predecessor to Likud); it was all within Mapai,” Haetzni added, referring to the ruling party at the time, a precursor of today’s Labor Party.

  • Abbas Urges Netanyahu to ’Stop the Chaos’ at Al-Aqsa - Diplomacy and Defense - Haaretz Sep 23, 2015
    http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/1.677191

    (...) Senior Palestinian officials told Haaretz that the Palestinians have no expectation that the U.S. administration will present a new peace plan and so Palestinian efforts will focus on the international arena along with attempts to move things ahead in the Palestinian domestic arena. In that vein, Palestinian officials reported that a meeting will take place this weekend between Fatah and senior Hamas and Islamic Jihad officials ahead of a special meeting in October in Cairo of leaders of Palestinian factions.

    Abbas said this week that he sent a message to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently warning of the severe consequences of the ongoing diplomatic stasis. The message was sent via former cabinet minister Meir Sheetrit, whom Abbas invited to a secret meeting in Ramallah two weeks ago.

    Abbas revealed the fact of the message and his use of Sheetrit as an envoy during a meeting in Paris on Monday with four retired Israeli diplomats who served in the past as ambassadors to France: Daniel Shek, Nissim Zvili, Elie Barnavi and Yehuda Lancry. The meeting was hosted by Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo.

    Shek, who served as ambassador to France in 2006-2011, told Haaretz that Abbas said he is willing to meet with Netanyahu, but “a third party who isn’t Israeli” opposes holding such a meeting and has prevented it from taking place. The Israeli diplomats tried to find out who this third party is, but Abbas refused to say.

    #Anne_Hidalgo, #Mahmoud_Abbas , #Daniel_Shek, #Nissim_Zvili, #Elie_Barnavi

    • Réception à la mairie de Paris en l’honneur de Mahmoud Abbas
      A l’occasion de la Journée internationale de la paix, Anne Hidalgo reçoit ce lundi 21 septembre, Mahmoud Abbas, Président de l’Autorité Palestinienne
      Times of Israel Staff 21 septembre 2015
      http://fr.timesofisrael.com/reception-a-la-mairie-de-paris-en-lhonneur-de-mahmoud-abbas

      (...) Les anciens ambassadeurs d’Israël en France et à l’ONU, Nissim Zvilli, Eli Barnavi, Daniel Shek et Yehuda Lancry, seront également présents.

      Cette rencontre a été réalisée à l’initiative du Forum international pour la Paix.

      Son président, Ofer Bronchtein, a déclaré que : « les Israéliens et les Palestiniens doivent retrouver le chemin du dialogue et de la réconciliation, il est temps que la communauté internationale reconnaisse l’État de Palestine, et que les pays arabes et musulmans reconnaissent l’État d’Israël. »

      Le Forum international pour la paix tente de poursuivre un travail de coopération entre Israéliens et Palestiniens malgré l’échec des accords d’Oslo et la seconde Intifada. Il a été co-fondé en 2002 par l’israélien Ofer Bronchtein, ancien collaborateur d’Itzhak Rabin, et Anis El Qaq, représentant de l’Autorité Palestinienne en Suisse.

  • The obvious and curious South African angles of Israel’s FIFA challenge - West of Eden - -
    The irony of history: Former ANC leader and anti-apartheid activist Tokyo Sexwale is pegged to monitor Israeli policies towards Palestinian footballers.
    By Chemi Shalev | May 30, 2015 Haaretz Daily Newspaper | Israel News
    http://www.haaretz.com/blogs/west-of-eden/.premium-1.658781

    Former South African cabinet minister and African National Congress (ANC) leader Tokyo Sexwale figured prominently in Friday’s political drama at international soccer’s FIFA conference in Zurich. Palestinian football chief Jibril Rajoub explicitly mentioned Sexwale as having played a critical role in his decision to withdraw the motion to have Israel expelled. And FIFA President Sepp Blatter, shortly before being reelected to a fifth term in office, unilaterally appointed Sexwale from the podium to head the monitoring committee that will deal with Palestinian grievances, including the demand that five West Bank teams be barred from participating in official Israeli soccer leagues.

    In their rush to declare victory following the frustration of Rajoub’s plan to expel Israel outright, most Israeli politicians and analysts seemed to ignore the potential symbolism and irony of putting a prominent anti-apartheid activist to adjudicate Palestinian claims of Israeli racism and discrimination. The lapse is significant in light of the fact that Palestinians and the boycott divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement view the international boycott of apartheid South Africa – in which sports played a pivotal role – as a precedent and inspiration for their own anti-Israeli campaigns.

    In fact, though white South Africans were stung far more by subsequent boycotts in rugby, cricket and the Olympics, soccer was one of the first arenas in which non-white South Africa together with the rising Africa-Asian bloc of non-aligned nations scored initial victories against the apartheid regime. FIFA’s first suspension of South Africa in 1961 was temporarily lifted at the behest of Blatter’s apartheid-condoning predecessor, the English Stanley Rous, but was shortly reinstated thereafter until 1976, when the Pretoria regime was expelled altogether following the Soweto Uprisings. South Africa was only reinstated in 1992, after it abolished apartheid.

    Sexwale’s role in Israel’s FIFA drama seems far from straightforward. The 62-year-old Soweto-born ANC leader, who spent 13 years alongside Nelson Mandela in the Robben Island prison, is a former provincial premier, presidential candidate and cabinet minister. As head of his own foundation’s Global Watch, dedicated to fighting discrimination in sports, Sexwale recently toured the West Bank together with Rajoub in order to see the plight of Palestinian footballers first hand. But despite the Israeli government’s reluctance to facilitate his visit as well as a reported scuffle with Israeli soldiers in Hebron, Sexwale’s summation was markedly evenhanded: “What we saw in Palestine in relation to what is happening in Israel is shocking. Palestine is a swollen cheek with tears, but so is Israel. They are two cheeks on the same face, and a resolution to the problem has to be found beyond sport.” 

    Sexwale’s relationship with Blatter himself seems equally complex: In 2011 he helped save Blatter’s career by allowing himself to be photographed with the FIFA president, who was facing harsh criticism at the time after claiming that there was no racism in soccer, and if there was, it could be solved with handshake. More intriguing and current, however, is the fact that Sexwale was a member of the South African organizing committee of the 2010 World Cup that is now figuring prominently in the U.S. indictments of top FIFA officials on charges of corruption. While Sexwale has since assured South Africans that they were justly and legally awarded the right to host the coveted games, speculation is rampant about the identities of “Co-Conspirator #15” and “Co-Conspirator #16”, two “high-ranking South African football and government officials” who are suspected of offering cash for votes in order to make sure the World Cup was held in South Africa.

    According to the indictments, the two suspects served on both the 2010 World Cup organizing committee and on the 2006 South African World Cup bid committee. The reports in South Africa suggest there are only two other officials, in addition to Sexwale, who fit the bill.

    Sexwale also has another Israeli connection: according to press reports, he made a fortune at one time in the diamond and mining business and was involved in a convoluted joint venture in the Congo with controversial Israeli billionaire Dan Gertler, who has himself been at the focus of several criminal inquiries, including those related to former Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman. And his financial records have now been subpoenaed by his one time advocate and subsequent wife, with whom he is now embroiled in a widely covered and messy divorce.

    Politics and sports

    Though most historians dispute the narrative that economic sanctions “brought South Africa to its knees," as its proponents claimed, no one denies the devastating influence of the boycott in sports on the white public’s morale: In a 1977 poll, white South Africans listed the lack of international sports as one of the three most damaging aspects of apartheid. Sports are important everywhere, of course, but in mid-20th century South Africa, as in Australia and New Zealand at the time, they often attained a semi-religious status. In apartheid South Africa, the all-white teams were a source of national pride and racial defiance.

    Throughout its 30-year battle to maintain racially pure squads, the South African government used a slogan frequently uttered by Israeli officials and their FIFA defenders in recent days: “Keep politics out of sports.” Their non-white challengers, also South African, countered with a slogan that Palestinians have also adapted and adopted as their own: “No normal sports in an abnormal society.”

    Of course, despite the efforts of BDS supporters to draw a direct analogy between the two, Israel’s policy towards the Palestinians, arguable immorality notwithstanding, is no successor to South Africa’s racially motivated white supremacist regime. In fact, without detracting in any way from the existence of rampant racism in Israeli soccer in general and in teams like Beitar Jerusalem in particular, Israeli Jews and Arabs probably mix and collaborate in the Israeli football leagues more than they do in most other sectors of society. And while countless Israelis are soccer crazy, sports in Israel is viewed as no more than a hobby, as its international results attest. If FIFA had expelled Israel on Friday it would have dealt a stinging blow to Israel’s national pride, not necessarily to its sporting convictions.

    Nonetheless, the fear that Israel has reached the point that expulsion by FIFA seemed possible if not imminent is an ominous harbinger of things to come. As the South African precedent proves, sporting arenas offer infinite possibilities for activists to hassle Israel and its teams, in professional associations, official tournaments and bilateral matches, both official and friendly.

    Israelis have conveniently forgotten that their national soccer teams had already been placed in unofficial quarantine in the Asian arena after the 1973 Yom Kippur War and were only accepted to Europe’s UEFA soccer group in 1994 in the wake of the goodwill generated by the previous year’s Oslo Accords. With the current government’s record on peacemaking and general popularity, however, the credit accrued then seems to have finally run out.

  • Israël refuse un visa à un ministre sud-africain qui devait rencontrer l’Autorité palestinienne - Haaretz

    Israel refuses visa to South African cabinet minister en route to Palestinian Authority

    Minister of Higher Education Blade Nzimande says in response that he will call on all higher education institutions in his country to freeze their contacts with Israeli universities.

    http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/.premium-1.653391

  • #Kuwait Arrests Opposition MP for Criticizing Government Two Years Ago
    http://english.al-akhbar.com/content/kuwait-arrests-opposition-mp-criticizing-government-two-years-ago

    Kuwait authorities arrested a former liberal cabinet minister as he attempted to leave the country Saturday, after being sentenced to a week in jail over an article criticizing the government, his lawyer said. Saad al-Ajmi, information minister between 1999-2000, was detained at the airport as he was leaving for a pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia with his wife and daughter, his lawyer al-Humaidi al-Subaie said on Twitter. read more

    #freedom_of_speech #Human_Rights #Kuwait_Emir #Kuwaiti_opposition

  • #Iran says willing to give #IAEA wider powers in #nuclear program inspections
    http://english.al-akhbar.com/content/iran-says-willing-give-iaea-wider-powers-nuclear-program-inspecti

    Updated at 2:15pm: Iran suggested it was ready to address calls to give the UN atomic watchdog wider inspection powers as part of Tehran’s proposals to resolve a decade-old nuclear dispute with the West. Meanwhile, #Israel kept up its alarmist rhetoric on talks between world powers and Iran Wednesday, with a cabinet minister comparing the situation to pre-war Europe and the appeasement of Nazi Germany. read (...)

    #Top_News

  • Recession is a good time to exploit cheap labour, says Cameron aide
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2013/may/11/young-recession-cheap-labour

    The prime minister’s adviser on enterprise has told the cabinet that the economic downturn is an excellent time for new businesses to boost profits and grow because labour is cheap, the Observer can reveal.

    Lord Young, a cabinet minister under the late Baroness Thatcher, who is the only aide with his own office in Downing Street, told ministers that the low wage levels in a recession made larger financial returns easier to achieve. His comments are contained in a report to be published this week, on which the cabinet was briefed last Tuesday.

    #pique #fourche #rizière #goudron

  • #WikiLeaks #cablegate : US intervened in #Michael_Moore NZ screening | The Guardian
    http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/dec/22/wikileaks-cables-michael-moore-nz

    After a leaked cable from US diplomats in Havana falsely claimed Cuba had banned Moore’s documentary Sicko – when in fact it was shown on state television – another cable reveals US officials flying into a panic after hearing a rumour that a #New_Zealand cabinet minister was hosting a screening of Moore’s film Fahrenheit 9/11.

    Labelling the event a “potential fiasco”, the classified cable from the US embassy in Wellington in 2003 reads like a failed plotline for an episode of In the Loop, breathlessly reporting a series of calls to the New Zealand prime minister’s office and to the minister involved, Marian Hobbs.

    Cette info, assez anecdotique, confirme un aspect important des câbles diplomatiques : une grosse partie de l’activité « diplomatique » des ambassades consiste à lécher les bottes de la hiérarchie. Ici : faire montre d’un zèle ridicule pour faire annuler la projection d’un film. Ailleurs : transmettre les « hearsay » (témoignages indirects) les plus imbéciles du moment qu’ils vont dans le sens de la politique décrétée à Washington.