Preface

Censorship is incompatible with Israel’s claim to be a "democracy"

Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states:

"Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; the right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media regardless of frontiers."

Freedom of the press is a hallmark of a free and open democracy. It is inevitable that there will always be some restrictions on a free press; the most widely accepted being those pertaining to personal privacy and those relating to national security. However, in Israel today freedom of information is just one more area to come under attack by the Israeli establishment and the truth is another victim. Censorship, in its many forms, is being taken to an extreme degree, one most unbecoming of a so-called "democratic" nation. Under the guise of "security" Israel is taking quite extraordinary measures to censor news coming out of both Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPTs). Israel, in fact, has such a blatant disregard for   or to be more accurate, a blatant hostility towards   journalists  reporting on the "wrong side" of the conflict that it actually resorts to the deportation, banning, arrest, intimidation, physical abuse and even killing of journalists, seemingly with total impunity.

9th – 11th July 2010: Jerusalem, Occupied Palestinian Territories and Israel

Baroness Tonge (Liberal Democrat), Lord Ahmed (Labour) and Lord Hylton (Independent). Accompanied by Shazia Arshad (Parliamentary Officer, Middle East Monitor).

The trip was fully sponsored by the Middle East Monitor.

The trip was organised as an emergency visit to focus on the urgency of the plights of Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) Members who are currently faced with deportation. Muhammed Abu Teir, Ahmad Attoun, Muhammed Totah, and Khaled Abu Arafeh, Former PA Minister of Jerusalem Affairs have been served with deportation orders by the Israeli authorities under claims of disloyalty to the state. Although they are elected representatives they have been ordered to leave Jerusalem where they have lived all their lives and where their families continue to reside. Muhammad Abu Teir has already been arrested by the Israeli authorities. The remaining three PLC members have now sought refuge at the Red Cross.

In 1948, following the horrors of World War Two and the atrocities committed by the Nazis against millions of people across Europe, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide  to ensure that no such actions would ever take place or go unpunished again. 

However, in a strange twist of fate, the very people who the framers of the Convention had in mind, namely the primarily Jewish victims of the Holocaust, find themselves currently represented by a state, Israel, that claims to speak on their behalf and which is now the perpetrator of similar crimes against another group of innocent people, namely the Palestinians.

But what is genocide? Derived from the Greek word "genos" which means a race or tribe and the Latin word "cide" which means killing, the term "genocide" therefore literally means the killing of a group of people united by tribal, racial or ethnic ties.

1. Introduction: A call for the normalisation of relations.

A mere eleven minutes after Israel declared its independence in 1948, US President Harry Truman recognised the newly created state.  That instantaneous public support has never really wavered and ever since then the two countries have shared a "special relationship", one that is unlike any other. America has stood by Israel through thick and thin; right or wrong; supporting it on all fronts: financially, politically, diplomatically and militarily. However, many observers have for a long time now believed that this has become a toxic association, whereby America's entrenched and unwavering support for Israel is actually doing the United States more harm than good. In 2003 the European Commission conducted a poll across Europe in which 59% of those interviewed said they felt that Israel, America's staunchest ally, was in fact the greatest threat to world peace.