Sunday, September 9, 2018

Showdown looms for IGP

METHMALIE DISSANAYAKE-SEP 08 2018

The Constitutional Council yesterday (7), gave the National Police Commission (NPC) and the Inspector General of Police (IGP) Pujith Jayasundara 14 days to solve all disputes between them.

The Council met with Speaker Karu Jayasuriya presiding at the Parliament Complex to discuss the reports submitted by the independent commissions and the administrative problems of the commissions.

One of the key issues taken up for the discussion was the ongoing dispute between the NPC and the IGP where the latter declined to follow some recommendations of the NPC about the promotion of Kilinochchi Senior Superintendent of Police Palitha Siriwardena, the promotions of 129 officers subjected to political victimization, the removal of Officer-In-Charge (OIC) Narammala from his post, investigations into the educational qualifications of Deputy Inspector General of Police Nalaka de Silva and the suspension of the OIC of the Statistics Division.

The NPC complained to the Council earlier that they could not compel the IGP to implement their recommendations. The NPC Chairman had complained that with the IGP refusing to implement their recommendations, the NPC is unable to take any further action to ensure the implementation of its proposals as it does not have the powers to do so.

In response, IGP Jayasundara informed the Council that he could not implement some recommendations on various grounds. One of the Police officers in the list of 129 directed by the NCP for promotions is known to have close connections with the previous Government although the list mentions that he was politically victimized by the same Government.

This has created serious doubts regarding the process used by the NPC to recommend promotions for these officers, the IGP said.

The Council then informed both parties to come to a conclusion on the matters within 14 days and to inform the Council of their progress.

On Capital Punishment

DEVANESAN NESIAH-09/01/2018

The diverse profusion of contributions on this subject reminds me of an apocryphal story of a man of Abrahamic faith (Christian/Muslim/Jewish), ship- wrecked on a land unknown to him. He kept wandering, hoping to find human beings but also nervous that they could be of other faiths and could harm him. Before he met any living being he stumbled on the scene of several dead men and women hung from trees in an orderly manner, which, he interpreted as a sign of systematic execution. He went on his knees and thanked the Lord for bringing him to a land of civilised (Abrahamic) faith.
Execution is prescribed in the scriptures of Judaism, Islam and in the case of Christianity in the Old Testament but to my knowledge not in the New Testament. To the best of my knowledge, Hindu, Buddhist and Jain scriptures do not prescribe the death penalty for any crime.

Religious scriptures apart, a very major problem with capital punishment is the possibility of wrongful convictions, of which many cases have been identified in the past. A judge may sentence a person to death if that person is found guilty, in the opinion of the judge, “beyond all reasonable doubt”. This phrase is imprecise and open to subjective interpretation. Some judges have the reputation of being “hanging judges” i.e. those whose threshold of what is “reasonable doubt” may be biased in favour of a death sentence relative to many other judges. In my opinion the only acceptable level of doubt is zero. This may be so in the case of the rape and murder of children including Seya, Vidya and Kavindu mentioned by father J.C.Pieris in his thoughtful contribution titled ‘Listen to the voice of the silenced’.

There may be no extenuating circumstances in these three cases but in many others there are other considerations to be taken into account. For example, in the cases of political assassinations and in the cases of assassination under extreme provocation, there are other facts to be considered. Similarly, there maybe lack of intention to kill. There could also be exceptional cases such as Saul/Paul who was clearly implicated in a lead role in many killings. If the Old Testament rule had been applied, he would have been executed. In the event he was not, and, in the opinion of many Christians, is remembered not as a murderer but possibly the greatest of Christian Saints and Apostles. Many judges would have applied the death penalty in several of these cases including that of Paul. We need to listen and pay consideration to the voices of many other than those of the silenced.

The problem cannot be resolved merely by redefining the requirement for a death sentence. An institutional mechanism is required. For example, the Supreme Court could establish a rule that in every case of a death sentence by a single judge or even a panel of judges, the entire Supreme Court will revisit the case after hearing such evidence and opinions as it thinks fit, and the death sentence should be carried out only if it is endorsed unanimously by the full bench of the Supreme Court. It may be argued that only a tiny fraction of the death sentences will pass this test and that many murderers will get away with lengthy imprisonments. Perhaps, that is as it should be.

Whereas I have focused on my own views on the death penalty with passing references to some landmark Sri Lankan cases, I will conclude by citing two eminent articles that focus on the changing situation in South Africa. The first, by Jack Greenberg who was Director counsel of NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund from 1961 to 1984 and went on to become a law professor at Columbia University.

The South African Constitution Court unanimously invalidated capital punishment under its post-apartheid constitution. Rejecting the course taken by the United States Supreme Court, the South African court invoked the Bill of Rights provisions which prohibit “cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment.”

Court President Arthur Chaskalson’s opinion considered aspects of the death penalty: destruction of life and dignity, both guaranteed in the South African Bill of Rights; arbitrariness of application; possibility of error, and the alternative of life imprisonment as severe punishment. When weighing the argument that the death penalty is a greater deterrent to potential criminals than life imprisonment, he referred to American studies demonstrating that this has not been proved. He ruled also that retribution could not be accorded the same weight as the constitutional rights to life and dignity.

President Nelson Mandela’s office endorsed the decision as “sober and humane,” as did the African National Congress and Nobel laureate Bishop Desmond Tutu. How different from the drumbeating for the death penalty that we are accustomed to here. Sounding like an American, F.W. de Klerk, leader of the National Party that governed the country under apartheid, vowed to have the ruling overturned. But South African lawyers who brought the challenge to capital punishment believe he cannot succeed.

In this decision, South Africa had joined most of the world’s democracies. Canada, most of Latin America, all of Western Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Namibia prohibit the death penalty as have the Czech and Slovak republics, Hungary and Romania. Russia retains it virtually only in name: Clemency has revoked the few recent death sentences. A few years ago, the Soviet Union had thousands of executions annually. India, with its population of perhaps a billion, executed three men in recent years.

South Africa’s decision leaves the United States even further isolated. In the 1980s, South Africa executed over 1,100. In 1989, it executed 60 in Pretoria and unknown numbers in the “homelands” before a moratorium went into effect. When the Constitutional Court decision came down, 443 people were on death row; they will now be re-sentenced.

In recent years, the numbers executed in the United States has been in the 30s; in 1995, we may kill more than 40 death row inmates; hundreds more are sentenced each year. As other countries have been abolishing capital punishment, the United States has been revving it up. Bill Clinton advocated and Congress created about 60 new death penalty offenses in the last crime bill; Gov. George Pataki boasts that he signed New York’s new death-penalty law immediately following his election. The United States Supreme Court has relentlessly been making capital sentences more difficult to contest. Moreover, while more than 70 death-penalty countries have abolished it for offenders under 18, the United States, according to Human Rights Watch, “is a world leader in executing juvenile offenders.” (Nine since the death penalty was reinstituted in 1976, four in the last six months of 1993.)

Our Supreme Court has held this not unconstitutional unless discriminatory intent can be demonstrated–an impossible task.

Once, I was optimistic that the death penalty in America was on the way to extinction. South Africa’s humane decision has caused me to contrast it with what has been happening here. I am afraid that until we rid ourselves of the legacy of our own apartheid, we will have to contend with the arbitrary, irrational, racist regime of capital justice we have today.

From an article by Carolyn Hoyle:

South Africa had been renowned for its extensive use of the death penalty. The Society for the Abolition of Capital Punishment in South Africa had been established in 1971, but while apartheid persisted the government had rejected all calls for inquiries into the system.

However, with the release of Nelson Mandela in February 1990 and the beginning of negotiations for constitutional change, the death penalty became one of the touchstones of commitment to a new social order. President F. W. de Klerk announced an immediate moratorium on executions, the last one having taken place on 2 February 1989, and in July 1990 the Criminal Law Amendment Act abolished capital punishment for housebreaking with intent to commit a crime or with aggravating circumstances, and made the death penalty for murder discretionary rather than mandatory.

A tribunal was set up to review death sentences imposed before July 1990 and, as a result, the Minister of Justice announced in 1992 that all executions would continue to be suspended, pending the introduction of a Bill of Rights for the new South Africa.
Despite the fact that the South African Transitional Constitution of 1993 was silent on the matter of whether or not the death penalty was permissible, the Attorney-General, in line with President Mandela’s long-held belief that the death penalty was barbaric, brought a case before the Constitutional Court, arguing that the death penalty should be declared unconstitutional. The Court, in the landmark judgment of The State v T. Makwanyane and M. Mchunu in 1995 decided that capital punishment was incompatible with the prohibition against ‘cruel, inhuman or degrading’ punishment and with a ‘human rights culture’ which made the rights to life and dignity the cornerstone of the Constitution. A further influential argument was that it would be inconsistent with the spirit of reconciliation, post-apartheid.

Thus, despite widespread concern about a tide of violent crime, and strong political pressures to reinstate the death penalty, the South African Parliament endorsed the opinion of Judge Chaskalson, the President of the Constitutional Court, that the way to reduce violence was to create a ‘human rights culture’ which respects human life. In 1997 the Criminal Law Amendment Act removed all references to capital punishment from the statute book.

Despite the fact that political parties such as the Freedom Front Plus, the Christian Democratic Party, and the Pro-Death Penalty Party have argued for reinstatement of capital punishment in South Africa, on the grounds that it is necessary to reduce the country’s very high homicide rate, it is very unlikely that there would be a parliamentary majority for the constitutional amendment that would be necessary. Such is the legacy of Nelson Mandela.

Editor’s Note: Also read “Re-Imposing the Death Penalty” and “Say no to the Alugosuwa!“

Forests-Beyond the Wood - V

By Dr. Ranil Senanayake-September 7, 2018, 9:54 pm

The richness of forest ecosystems is not only the trees and the biodiversity that exits within, it also extends to the soil below

The world of soil is bizarre to us who live on the surface. It is opaque to light and mostly solid. Communication is by chemicals, e.g. pheromones or physical, e. g. vibrations. Movement is slow; the faster organisms like worms are the giants of this world, tunnelling through at a fairly rapid rate measured in centimetres per minute. More common are the fungi that move by growing through the soil at rates measured in centimetres per month, or the bacteria, which have rates, measured in centimetres per year.

It is a busy world, one gram of ordinary farmyard soil can contain over 1 billion individual bacteria, over 100 million individual actinomycetes and over 1 kilometre of fungal hyphpae, notwithstanding plants like algae and animals like collembolans, nematodes or worms. This massive diversity provides for the multitude of critical functions, that a living soil provides.

Understanding soil ecosystems and how they work is important for both production and conservation goals. In production systems this information will enable the optimization of inputs and help develop more sustainable agriculture. For instance, while phosphorus is needed as an amendment on most soils to produce good crops, the source of phosphorus used can make a great difference to both productivity and profitability. Phosphorus that has been acted upon by certain soil bacteria can produce a higher volume of crop than that produced by the same amount of phosphorus added as superphosphate. Developed commercially, it has the potential to reduce fertilizer bills significantly. In a submission to US Agriculture In 1938 Dr, William Albrecht a leading US soil scientist, made the following observation:

"Soil organic matter is one of our most important national resources; its unwise exploitation has been devastating; and it must be given its proper rank in any conservation policy as one of the major factors affecting the levels of crop production in the future… The Nation should be made aware of the rapid rate at which the organic matter in the soil is being exhausted. Farm-management practices should be adopted that will at least maintain, and in as many cases as possible even increase, the supply of this natural resource in the soil. The maintenance of soil organic matter might well be considered a national responsibility."

But In 2012 in Sri Lanka, we still have to appreciate this fact. The colonial experience robbed us of that precious organic matter, the felling of forests and clearing of land began with the colonial adventure, in 1820 all land without title ie. The forests and Forest Gardens were deemed 'crown land' and sold to international commercial interests. Emerson Tennent writes that ‘the 'coffee boom' of 1835 saw a rush for investment in land that was only equaled by the rush for land during the gold discoveries in the U.S.’ Thus, the organic soils of the mountains of this country, built over a period of twenty million years, was destroyed in a matter of decades.

The impact of this loss is conveyed by Fredrick Lewis in his book ‘Sixty-Four Years in Ceylon’, he makes this observation on the process of destruction of the mountain forests in the Agra Patna area:

"I know of no more awe-inspiring sight, than that of a thousand acres on fire. Sheets of flame appear to leap into the air, and yell with a sort of devilish delight at their victory over the magnificent trees they are reducing into charred masses of cinder and charcoal. It is more than impressive, it is fearful, yet grand ! After the fire has completed its work, the land is covered with. black logs, lumps of charred timber, masses, and often great fragments of stones, broken by the heat that has swept over them. A deep black covers the landscape; impressive, but depressing.

It was in a burned wilderness like this, that I found my new home. It lay at the extreme end of one of the many blocks of land that had been simultaneously burned off. My path, for road it could not be then called led over hundreds of fallen and charred logs, and followed the valley of the Agra stream.

When morning broke upon the day following the events recorded at the conclusion of the last chapter, I found myself gazing upon a scene not altogether unfamiliar to me. All around me lay hundreds of charred black logs, stumps in fantastic shapes and outlines: fallen branches, broken and distorted by fire: cinder heaps, and little rivulets of sodden ash: all indicative of the fierce, merciless fire that but a few weeks ago, had raged over a spot that so lately had been a beautiful forest land.

It was now a blackened wilderness, to be changed into fields of coffee, by the labour and patience of man. A strange picture; fascinating in one respect: fearful in another and yet so full of a strange mixture of possibilities was this wild heap of ruins, this uncouth mass of slaughtered giants of an inarticulate, yet eloquent world, to be transformed by, industry in the pursuit of fleeting wealth."

The process, eroded and destroyed most of the topsoil, undisturbed since the Jurassic, leaving plantations that cling to the subsoil and yield only with artificial fertilizer that we have to import. As the organic matter receded so did soil cohesion, such that at a slightest downpour, bit of the fields come loose and just fall away. The age and vastness of this incredible soil ecosystem is signified by the number of endemic, soil dwelling reptiles and amphibians, these were the top predators of the soil ecosystem and regarded as indicators of large soil reservoirs. Today, these unique animals are confined to the last patches of remnant forests or pockets of native soil.

Soils also store vast amounts of carbon, more than twice as much as in vegetation or the atmosphere. They do this by respiration processes, which use the energy fixed by photosynthetic activity, to create very long-lived soil carbon compounds synthesis such as humates. The more undisturbed the soil the more carbon it can accumulate and hold. Here, the effective rate of sequestering is dependent on the nature of the soil that it is being produced in.

Thus forested areas or areas with dynamic vegetation create the best soils in nature.

(To be continued )

Saturday, September 8, 2018

Trump cuts $25m in aid for Palestinians in East Jerusalem hospitals

Trump has made clear he is trying to force Palestinians to negotiate. 'You'll get money, but we're not paying you until we make a deal'

US President Donald Trump (right) with Israel's President Benjamin Netanyahu (AFP/file photo)

Saturday 8 September 2018

US President Donald Trump ordered that $25m earmarked for the medical care of Palestinians in East Jerusalem hospitals be directed elsewhere as part of a review of aid, a State Department official said on Saturday.

Trump called for a review of US assistance to the Palestinians earlier this year to ensure that the funds were being spent in accordance with national interests and were providing value to taxpayers, Reuters reported.

"As a result of that review, at the direction of the President, we will be redirecting approximately $25 million originally planned for the East Jerusalem Hospital Network," the State Department official said. "Those funds will go to high-priority projects elsewhere."

The aid cut is the latest in a number of actions by the Trump administration that have alienated Palestinians, including the recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital and moving the US embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv.

"This is not a formula of peace-building, this is a complete inhuman and immoral action that adopts the Israeli right-wing narrative to target and punish Palestinian citizens to compromise their rights to independence," AFP cited Ahmad Shami, a spokesman for Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, as saying.

"Such an act of political blackmail goes against the norms of human decency and morality," added Hanan Ashrawi, a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization executive committee.

That move reversed longtime US policy and led Palestinian leadership to boycott Washington peace efforts led by Jared Kushner, Trump's senior adviser and son-in-law.

Last month, the Trump administration said it would redirect $200m in Palestinian economic support funds for programs in the West Bank and Gaza.

At the end of August, Trump halted all funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), a decision that further heightened tensions with the Palestinian leadership.

Palestinian refugees have reacted with dismay to the funding cuts, warning they would lead to more poverty, anger and instability in the Middle East.

A statement from the Palestinian Foreign Ministry said the latest aid cut was part of a US attempt "to liquidate the Palestinian cause" and added that it would threaten the lives of thousands of Palestinians and the livelihoods of thousands of hospital employees.

"This dangerous and unjustified American escalation has crossed all red lines and is considered a direct aggression against the Palestinian people," it said.

At the gates of two of the East Jerusalem hospitals affected, medical staff were aware of the decision but declined to comment.

One of the centres, Al Makassed Islamic Charitable Society Hospital, said in statement the US aid cuts come as the "hospital is going through a suffocating crisis as a result of the lack of flow of financial aid, and the piling up of debts and funds held back by the Palestinian government".

It treats patients from the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.

READ MORE ►

'Trump wants to starve us': Palestinians in Gaza protest UNRWA cuts

In the past, the US funds made it possible for many Palestinians to seek specialized treatment - such as cardiac surgery, neonatal intensive care or children's dialysis - unavailable in the West Bank and Gaza, according to the World Health Organization.

In the statement hospital CEO Dr Bassam Abu Libdeh "questioned the justification behind mixing political issues with medical and humanitarian issues."

Still, Trump had made it clear on Thursday that he was trying to force the Palestinians to negotiate.

"You'll get money, but we're not paying you until we make a deal," he said in Washington. "If we don't make a deal, we're not paying."

Instead, Palestinians say his position has weakened moderates and encouraged radicals across the Middle East.

Two-state hypocrisy

Achieving justice means overcoming Zionism.JCActiveStills

Mohamed Mohamed-7 September 2018

Imagine the following scenario: In response to the peaceful African-American civil rights movement in the United States, led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. during the 1960s, a large segment of white Americans figured that the best solution to the issue would be to form a new country on a small part of US territory in the north, where African-Americans would be segregated and live on their own.

Any of these African-Americans who lived for generations in the American South, but at some point had to flee to the American North (or to Canada or Mexico) because of violence and discrimination perpetrated against them, would not be able to return to their homes in the South. They would only be permitted to “return” to this new African-American state.

Any of the African-Americans already in the South could stay there, but would become second-class citizens, facing institutionalized discrimination in a country dominated politically, economically and socially by white Americans – much as was the case during the Jim Crow era following centuries of enslavement.

On top of this, any of the white Americans who recently colonized parts of African-American territory could stay and continue to exploit the natural resources, whether the African-American population liked it or not. This new country would also be demilitarized, landlocked (or denied a port) and would have no true sovereignty over its territory.

In other words, the fate of this predominantly African-American country would largely remain in the hands of the white American one.

Unless one is a racist or white supremacist, this scenario would sound preposterous not only to most Americans, but also to most people in the world. Sadly, this imaginary situation is very similar to the one that many Israeli, and more disappointingly, American Zionists would like to impose on Palestinians – the so-called two-state solution.

Leading to peace?

One might ask, what is the problem with a two-state solution, if it will lead to peace between Palestinians and Israelis?

For one, Israel is unwilling to fully evacuate from the West Bank territory that it seized during the 1967 war, despite its obligation to do so under UN Security Council Resolution 242. This is land that Palestinians would expect for their own state.

However, since 1967, Israel established more than 200 settlements on tens of thousands of hectares of Palestinian land in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, with a total population of more than 600,000Israeli settlers.

Due to these “facts on the ground,” Israel would demand to keep much of this occupied land in a two-state solution scenario. But according to international law, as outlined by the principle that territory cannot be acquired by force, Israel has no right to one square inch of Palestinian land in the West Bank.

In a two-state solution, Palestinians would expect their capital to be East Jerusalem, which was seized by Israel during the 1967 war. However, Israel considers the entire city of Jerusalem to be its “eternal and undivided” capital and it has remained firm on this position.

It has been reported that Israel would try to make the nearby neighborhood of Abu Dis the future Palestinian capital. This would be completely unacceptable to Palestinians as Jerusalem has tremendous religious, cultural and historical significance for them.

Neutered state

Another major problem with a two-state solution is that Israel would agree to a Palestinian state only under the condition that it is demilitarized. This has been emphasized by numerous Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Even former US President Bill Clinton proposed in 2000 that Israel be able to maintain some military facilities in Palestine and to deploy military forces in cases involving a “national security” threat to Israel. In other words, Palestine would be a neutered state with no true sovereignty, and Israel would always maintain significant control over Palestinians.

Last but not least, a two-state solution would almost certainly be the final nail in the coffin for the issue of the right of return for Palestinian refugees. This right is a cornerstone of the Palestinian struggle.

Palestinian refugees who were forced to flee, both in 1948 and in 1967, have an inalienable right to return to their homeland as do their descendants.

This right is enshrined in international law. The UN General Assembly in December 1948 adopted Resolution 194, and in June 1967, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 237, both of which call on Israel to allow the return of refugees.

Yet Israel continues to violate its obligations under international law. It has no intention of correcting its historic injustices that created the Palestinian refugee problem.

The right of return has been one of the key issues preventing a just settlement of the conflict. In the rare instances that Israel even considers Palestinian statehood, it regards the right of return as out of the question, save for return to a new hypothetical – and truncated – state of Palestine rather than to the areas where refugees once lived.

Inherently intolerant

The problems with a two-state solution mentioned above lead to an obvious question: Why not form one democratic state where both Palestinians and Israelis could live with equal rights?
This would be the most fair and equitable solution.

The answer to this question is quite simple. Zionism, the political ideology that is the basis of the state of Israel, is inherently intolerant of equality. Its main goal was to create a Jewish state in Palestine, where Jews would be the majority and dominate all others.

Jews would receive special rights and treatment. For example, a Jewish person from China who has no connection to Palestine has the right to emigrate there and become an Israeli citizen, while a Palestinian refugee whose family lived there for generations has no right to do so.

If that seems racist or discriminatory, it’s because it really is.

One might assume that such a prejudiced ideology is primarily espoused by a small segment of hard-line, right-wing Jews. Unfortunately, this is far from the truth.

A perfect example is J Street, which is a supposedly liberal lobbying organization that “mobilizes pro-Israel, pro-peace Americans who want Israel to be secure, democratic and the national home of the Jewish people.” The organization indicates that its policies reflect the views of the majority of American Jews.

But J Street is not shy about its support of the discriminatory philosophy of Zionism, as can be seen in its official policy regarding the two-state solution:

“With the Jewish and Arab populations between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea at near-parity, demographic trends preclude Israel from maintaining control over all of Greater Israel while remaining a democratic state and a homeland for the Jewish people. As then-Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said in November 2007, ‘If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights, then, as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished.’”

It might seem unbelievable, but J Street is in fact stressing that equality for Palestinians and Israelis would spell disaster for Israel. It also adds that “there is no such thing as a ‘one-state solution,’ only a ‘one-state nightmare.’”

If this is the “liberal” Zionist position, and the position of Americans who theoretically should be more democratically minded, one can only imagine how bigoted the hard-line conservative Zionist view is. Indeed, hardcore right-wing Zionists would like nothing more than to permanently annex the West Bank and proceed with the “transference” of Palestinians to Jordan.

These people do support a one-state solution, but it is one that involves ethnic cleansing and no equality whatsoever.

Ironically, President Donald Trump made a remark that fittingly illustrates why Zionists are so opposed to a one-state solution. During a recent meeting in June, Trump half-jokingly told King Abdullah of Jordan that a one-state solution would lead to an Israeli prime minister named Muhammad.

This is the “demographic threat” that motivated Netanyahu to warn Israeli voters in 2015 that “Arab voters are heading to the polling stations in droves.” And this is the nightmare scenario that a former director of the Mossad, Israel’s foreign spy agency, referred to when he warned that the “Jewish and Palestinian populations in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip are nearly equal, and Israel must act to separate itself.”

Zionism simply cannot stand the idea of equality between Jews and non-Jews.

The fact of the matter is that Israel was established at the expense of the non-Jewish indigenous Palestinian population – Muslims, Christians, and others – and it continues to subjugate and discriminate against them. This is precisely what Israel started in 1948, when at least 750,000 Palestinians were expelled and denied their right to return.

Since then, it has methodically engaged in the near starvation of Palestinians in Gaza, occupied and oppressedthose in the West Bank and Jerusalem, and imposed institutional discrimination against the Palestinian citizens of Israel. Through other tactics, such as the confiscation of Palestinian property and the demolition of homes, Israel has forced many Palestinians to emigrate, resulting in subtle ethnic cleansing.

As long as Israel remains committed to this racist, Zionist system, there will never be a truly just solution, no matter the number of states.

Mohamed Mohamed is the executive director of The Jerusalem Fund and Palestine Center in Washington, DC. Views expressed are his own.

Bob Woodward’s meticulous, frightening look inside the Trump White House

By Jill Abramson-September 6

Jill Abramson, the former executive editor of the New York Times, is a columnist for the Guardian and senior lecturer in Harvard’s English department. Her book “Merchants of Truth: The Business of Facts and the Future of News” will be published in January.

It’s hard to imagine a more disturbing portrait of a president than the one Bob Woodward painted of Richard Nixon in his final days: paranoid, poisoned by power, pounding the carpet and talking to the portraits on the walls. But the early days of Donald Trump’s presidency, as recounted by Woodward in his new book, “Fear,” are strikingly similar and in some ways even more gut-wrenching. Then, as now, the country faced a crisis of leadership caused by a president’s fatal flaws and inability to function in the job.

In both “Fear” and “The Final Days,” which he co-authored with Carl Bernstein, Woodward shows how a federal criminal investigation clouds and then comes to obsess a president and paralyze the operations of the White House. At a moment when feverish talk of presidential impeachment dominates the political discourse, “Fear” is full of Nixonian echoes, including Trump’s childishly short attention span and refusal to read briefing papers. Nixon’s aides were instructed not to give him anything more complicated than a Reader’s Digest article.

“Fear” is an important book, not only because it raises serious questions about the president’s basic fitness for the office but also because of who the author is. Woodward’s dogged investigative reporting led to Nixon’s resignation. He has written or co-authored 18 books, 12 of them No. 1 bestsellers; broken other major stories as a reporter and associate editor of The Washington Post; and won two Pulitzer Prizes. His work has been factually unassailable. (His judgment is certainly not perfect, and he has been self-critical about his belief, based on reporting before the Iraq War, that there were weapons of mass destruction .)

During Watergate, Woodward and Bernstein were often alone on the story. Now, the din of daily disclosure and opinion is almost deafening. But what was important about Woodward’s meticulous reporting in the 1970s is even more invaluable today: His utter devotion to “just the facts” digging and his compulsively thorough interviews, preserved on tape for this book, make him a reliable narrator. In an age of “alternative facts” and corrosive tweets about “fake news,” Woodward is truth’s gold standard.

At a moment when social media and cable television are filled with journalists spouting invective about the White House and Trump blasts the press as “the enemy of the people,” Woodward has clung to old-fashioned notions of journalistic objectivity. “My job is not to take sides,” he told a Vox interviewer in March. “I think our job is not to love or loathe people we’re trying to explain and understand. It is to tell exactly what people have done, what it might mean, what drives them, and who they are.”

President Trump reacted on Sept. 5 to Bob Woodward’s new book, “Fear,” saying the journalist "likes to get publicity." (TWP)

In his previous books about eight presidents, Woodward has always eschewed making judgments or inserting his own analytic spin. His insistence on relying on dialogue drawn from interviews has prompted harsh assessments from various critics, including the writer Joan Didion, who famously called him a “stenographer.” (A reviewer for The Post, writing about his book “The Price of Politics,” described his style as the “literary equivalent of C-SPAN3.”) But these days Woodward’s flat, reportorial tone seems like the perfect antidote to the adversarial roar on Fox or Twitter. The authority of dogged reporting, utterly denuded of opinion, gives the book its credibility.

The Post obtained an early copy of “Fear,” which will be published Tuesday.

There have been other insider accounts about the dysfunction of the Trump White House and the president’s personal shortcomings, but none have been as revealing or convincing as “Fear,” which is based on eyewitness recollections, often supplemented with dates and transcripts of conversations. Michael Wolff’s “Fire and Fury” was a major bestseller but seemed overly reliant on its chief source, Steve Bannon, among other flaws. Another recent bestseller, “Unhinged,” came from former White House aide and onetime “Apprentice” star Omarosa Manigault Newman, who had been fired and possibly had an ax to grind. The daily press, especially The Post and the New York Times, has offered periodic and tantalizing glimpses into the inner workings of the Trump White House and the psyche of Trump himself. But “Fear” provides a more complete picture, based on multiple interviews with some of the president’s closest advisers. Woodward resists the fast-paced reporting demanded by the Internet, visiting his subjects away from their offices and testing their memories again and again.

From the very first pages of the gripping prologue it is a shocking view. Woodward opens the book with a killer anecdote about how two of the president’s closest advisers purposely thwarted his directives. In one instance, Trump had ordered up a letter announcing the U.S. withdrawal from a trade agreement with South Korea. His then-chief economic adviser, Gary Cohn, and then-staff secretary, Rob Porter, who are both obviously major sources for the book, recognize the letter for the disaster it is, so Cohn filches it off the president’s desk. With Trump’s fitful attention span, out of sight is out of mind. The ploy buys time and short-circuits an impulsive presidential decision that had gone through none of the proper vetting channels. (If the reader should doubt the authenticity of the anecdote, the prologue ends with a facsimile of the unsigned letter.)

The suspenseful scene sets up the story to follow. “The reality was that the United States in 2017 was tethered to the words and actions of an emotionally overwrought, mercurial and unpredictable leader,” Woodward writes. “Members of his staff had joined to purposefully block some of what they believed were the president’s most dangerous impulses. It was a nervous breakdown of the executive power of the most powerful country in the world.”

(Simon & Schuster)

“Fear” supports this bracing assessment in a chronological trajectory, from the arrival of Bannon to lead the campaign in 2016 to the resignation, in March, of John Dowd, the lawyer representing the president in Robert S. Mueller’s probe. Over and over again, there are vivid scenes that show feckless decision-making by Trump and then mad scurrying by his aides to undo the damage.

The episodes from the campaign are more familiar and less compelling, as is some of the palace intrigue that fascinates Woodward, including strife between advisers and Cabinet secretaries who are long gone (like former national security adviser H.R. McMaster, former secretary of state Rex Tillerson and Bannon). When Trump recedes for too many pages, as when Woodward gets bogged down in policy details, the reader’s interest can flag.

Some of the more explosive anecdotes, including his current chief of staff calling Trump an “idiot” and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis ignoring an order from the president to assassinate Syria’s President Bashar al-Assad, leaked out before the book’s publication. Porter, the staff secretary, is consistently trying to derail and delay Trump’s efforts to withdraw from treaties, not only the South Korean trade deal but also NAFTA and even NATO. These and other illustrations convey the panicked frustration of aides who see themselves as protecting the public from an out-of-control president. This is a recurring theme.

One vivid example involves the president’s impulsive decision to bar transgender people from military service. As was customary, a decision memo had been prepared for him outlining four possible options, from maintaining the Obama policy of allowing transgender people to serve openly to an outright ban. But before he had even read the memo, Trump tweeted his decision to ban them, catching his defense secretary and the entire military leadership completely off guard. So they rebelled. Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, promptly responded by sending out a letter declaring the old policy unchanged until Mattis could issue guidance. Meanwhile, the federal courts entered preliminary judgments against Trump’s decision. On Jan. 1, 2018, the Pentagon, under court order, began accepting transgender recruits. Woodward uses the scene to powerfully illustrate the chaos that invariably ensues from capricious governing by tweet.

As a profile of Trump, the book is devastating. Even the most jaded readers will be struck by numerous examples of his childishness and cruelty. He denounces his generals in such harsh language that his secretary of state cringes. He derides the suit McMaster dons for an interview as something a beer salesman would wear. He greets his national security adviser, whose briefings he finds tedious, by saying, “You again?” He imitates Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s Southern accent and calls him “mentally retarded.” He tells his 79-year-old commerce secretary, Wilbur Ross, that he has “lost it” and not to do any more negotiating.

Cohn, who comes as close as anyone in the book to being a principled character, is alarmed that Trump doesn’t understand the rudiments of the economy. The president thinks it’s inspired to call his tax cut measure, the only substantial legislation passed in his first year in office, the “Cut, Cut, Cut Bill.” In childish scrawl on his edit of a speech, and reprinted in his hand in the book, the president writes, “Trade is bad.” As Woodward explains it, “The president clung to an outdated view of America — locomotives, factories with huge smokestacks, workers busy on assembly lines.” When Cohn presses Trump on why he clings to such beliefs, the president simply responds: “I just do. I’ve had those views for 30 years.”

In previous books, Woodward has delved deeply into presidential decision-making and foreign policy. He devoted four books to President George W. Bush and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In “Fear,” he tries to explore how policies on North Korea and Afghanistan evolve. But the Trump administration’s approach is so inchoate and irrational that this proves difficult. The president seems completely detached and ill-informed about foreign affairs. He can’t follow briefings, and when McMaster tries to outline policy options on Afghanistan, Trump explodes at McMaster, Mattis and his generals: “I want to get out. And you’re telling me the answer is to get deeper in.” The president continually threatens to withdraw all troops but is also strangely obsessed with getting the country’s minerals. Woodward describes an elaborate attempt to school Trump on world affairs inside the Pentagon’s famous and secure Tank, which, unsurprisingly and somewhat hilariously, ends in abject failure. Predictably, Trump is impressed by the gold carpets and curtains.

There are small, fascinating details scattered throughout, including that Trump doesn’t ever touch a computer keyboard and that his answer in a deposition to what he did for a living took up 16 pages.

Jaw-dropping anecdotes are mostly told in Woodward’s signature, understated narrative voice. Some of the writing, which is also typical of the Woodward oeuvre, is hackneyed: “Victory was as sweet as it got,” “Sessions’s recusal was a wound that remained open.” Russian election interference is “another political football to kick around.”

Another familiar Woodward habit is making harsh assessments about people who don’t cooperate with him. (Trump, for one, was not interviewed for the book. In a phone conversation with Woodward in August, after the project was done, the president said that no one brought him an official interview request and that he would have talked.) Sources who play ball, on the other hand, get covered in kindness. Thus, it is unsurprising to find Porter described as someone who “ordinarily tried to remain an honest broker who facilitated the discussion.”

Readers hoping for inside accounts of the Mueller probe or clues about where it will lead will be disappointed. Mainly, what Woodward provides are Dowd’s worries that the president will surely perjure himself and wind up in an orange jumpsuit if he agrees to testify. Still, the lawyer doesn’t think Mueller has much of a case. The book was completed before the conviction of Paul Manafort or the plea deal with Michael Cohen, Trump’s longtime New York lawyer.

“Fear” ends on a cliffhanger, with Dowd’s resignation. “But in the man and his presidency Dowd had seen the tragic flaw. In the political back-and-forth, the evasions, the denials, the tweeting, the obscuring, crying ‘Fake News,’ the indignation, Trump had one overriding problem that Dowd knew but could not bring himself to say to the president: ‘You’re a fucking liar.’ ”

Lying, as it happens, was Nixon’s undoing.