PSG Chicago

Chicago Sister Cities head refuses to discuss Israel’s Guantanamo

Chicago, IL, November 16, 2009 – Five activists with the Palestine Solidarity Group-Chicago (PSG) were removed by security from the office of Leroy Allala, Executive Director of the Chicago Sister Cities International Program, where they demanded a meeting regarding Chicago’s Sister City relationship with Petach Tikva, Israel.

Five months prior, PSG sent a letter to the Chicago Sister Cities International board of directors calling on the committee to drop its relationship with Petach Tikva in support of the Palestinian civil society call for boycott, disinvestment and sanctions on Israel until it ceases its violations of Palestinians’ rights. Repeated attempts to schedule a meeting to highlight PSG’s concerns were ignored.

The first Jewish-only settlement in historic Palestine, part of Petach Tikva’s municipality is located on the lands of Fajja village, ethnically cleansed and destroyed in 1948, when more than 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homeland. The city is also the site of a major Israeli military detention center where Palestinians are routinely tortured and detained indefinitely without charge — not unlike the conditions at Guantanamo.

Allala immediately acknowledged that the committee had received the group’s letter and stated that the committee’s board of directors was “very happy” with its relationship with Petach Tikva, and said that there would be no severing of ties with the city. Furthermore, Allala said he was unwilling to listen to PSG’s concerns and would not have or schedule a meeting.

After a robust exchange between Allala and PSG activists, Allala returned to his office and called security to have the five individuals escorted out of the building. On the way out a PSG activist slid a copy of the memo detailing human rights abuses connected to Petach Tikva under his door.

Since January 2009, during Israel’s massacre of Gaza, PSG has embarked on a campaign calling on Chicago Sister City International to drop Petach Tikva from its program. The campaign has been endorsed by social justice and community organizations such as the 8th Day Center for Justice, Jewish Voice for Peace, CCAWR, Students for Justice in Palestine-DePaul chapter, and the US Palestine Community Network.

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An Open Letter to the City of Chicago’s Sister Cities Committee
June 15, 2009
To the Honorary Chairman of the Chicago Sister Cities Committee, Mayor Richard M. Daley
To all Members of Chicago’s Sister Cities Executive Committee and Board:

We believe that the relationship between the City of Chicago and the City of Petach Tikva, Israel does not adhere to the spirit and goals of the Sister Cities program. We therefore demand that Petach Tikva be dropped from the Chicago Sister Cities.
The mission statement of the Sister Cities International Program, to which the Chicago Sister Cities Program adheres, is to promote peace through mutual respect, understanding and cooperation — one individual, one community at a time. In the spirit of President Dwight D. Eisenhower ‘s “People-People Initiative,” the Sister Cities program calls upon cities to unite with
communities around the world in building a solid structure of world peace. We applaud the Sister Cities Committee of the City of Chicago for becoming the most active sister cities organization in the world. Nevertheless, we deplore that one of the Chicago
partnerships includes the City of Petach Tikva, Israel. We believe that this relationship does not adhere to the spirit and goals of the program in promoting peace. First, the City of Petach Tikva carries a heavy symbolism with respect to the dispossession of the Palestinian people through the seizure and occupation of the Palestinian people’s historic homeland. Second, the City of Petach Tikva actively contributes to the occupation of Palestinian territories by hosting the infamous interrogation and detention center of Petach Tikva. This facility is widely known for its human rights abuses on Palestinians detainees, including torture.

Petach Tikva, known in Israel as the “Mother of all settlements,” is the very first Jewish- exclusive settlement established in Palestine, before the founding of the State of Israel, on the land previously owned by the Palestinians of Mlabbes village. To this day, Petach Tikva remains a symbol of the ongoing confiscation and occupation of Palestinian land, a practice recently
condemned by the Obama administration. As such, the Sister City partnership between Chicago and Petach Tikva is a slap in the face to the large community of Palestinian descent living in the City of Chicago.

In the Palestinian territories, Petach Tikva is best known for the infamous Israel Security Agency interrogation and detention center. Petach Tikva is one of the main locations used by the ISA to detain and interrogate Palestinians.  It is well-documented that Palestinians are routinely tortured and detained indefinitely without charge – not unlike the conditions at Guantanamo — in this facility.  As such, Petach Tikva actively contributes to the occupation of Palestine and oppression of Palestinians. The Sister City partnership between Chicago and Petach Tikva provides legitimacy to these practices and works against the goals of the Sister Cities Program in promoting peace. Instead of providing a veneer of legitimacy to a city that symbolizes and contributes to the ongoing dispossession of the Palestinian people, and where Palestinians struggling for freedom and national self-determination are detained and abused, we hope the Chicago Sister cities program will join the growing worldwide movement calling for the end of business-as-usual with the State of Israel until it ends its crimes against the Palestinian people.

Respectfully,
Palestine Solidarity Group
Chicago, IL

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Israeli doctors colluding in torture of Palestinian detainees
Jonathan Cook, The Electronic Intifada, 30 June 2009

Israel’s watchdog body on medical ethics has failed to investigate evidence that doctors working in detention facilities are turning a blind eye to cases of torture, according to Israeli human rights groups.

The Israeli Medical Association (IMA) has ignored repeated requests to examine such evidence, the rights groups say, even though it has been presented with examples of Israeli doctors who have broken their legal and ethical duty towards Palestinians in their care.

The accusations will add fuel to a campaign backed by hundreds of doctors from around the world to force Yoram Blachar, who heads the IMA, to step down from his recent appointment as president of the World Medical Association (WMA).

More than 700 doctors have signed a petition arguing that Dr. Blachar has disqualified himself from leadership of the WMA, the profession’s governing ethical body, by effectively condoning torture in Israel.

The campaign against Dr. Blachar has gained ground rapidly since his appointment as president in November. Critics said his alleged complicity in the use of torture in Israeli detention facilities can be traced to 1995, when he became chairman of the IMA.

Until 1999, when Israel’s high court restricted torture, Israeli doctors routinely supervised the medical treatment of abused detainees, mostly Palestinians from the occupied territories.

During that period Dr. Blachar surprised many colleagues by expressing support for Israeli interrogators’ use of “moderate physical pressure” in a letter to The Lancet, the British medical journal. The phrase covers a wide range of practices from beatings and binding prisoners in painful positions to sleep deprivation. It is regarded by human rights organizations as a euphemism for torture.

Despite the 1999 court ruling, a coalition of 14 Israeli human rights groups known as United Against Torture concluded in its latest annual report in November that Israeli detention facilities are still using torture systematically. Israeli doctors are also being relied on to treat the resulting injuries.

Last week, Physicians for Human Rights-Israel (PHR-I) and the Public Committee against Torture in Israel (PCATI) published a joint report examining hundreds of arrests in which Palestinians were bound in “distorted and unnatural” ways to inflict “pain and humiliation” amounting to torture.

The report noted instances where prisoners, including a pregnant woman and a dying man, were shackled while doctors carried out emergency procedures in a hospital.

According to the report, the doctors violated the Tokyo Declaration, the key code of medical ethics adopted by the WMA in 1975 that bans the use of cruel, humiliating or inhuman treatment by physicians.

Ishai Menuchin, the head of PCATI, said his group had been lobbying strenuously against Israeli doctors’ complicity in torture since it issued a report, “Ticking Bombs,” in 2007, arguing that torture was routine in Israel.

PCATI highlighted the testimonies of nine Palestinians who had been tortured by interrogators. The report also noted that in most cases Israeli physicians treating detainees “return their patients to additional rounds of torture, and remain silent.”

In June last year, PHR-I drew the IMA’s attention to two cases in which the attending doctor failed to report signs of torture on a Palestinian.

Anat Litvin of PHR-I told the IMA: “We believe that doctors are used by torturers as a safety net — take them out of the system and torture will be much more difficult to enact.”

The groups stepped up their pressure in February, writing to Avinoam Reches, the chairman of the IMA’s ethics committee. They demanded that his association investigate six cases of doctors who failed to report signs of torture.

In one case, a prison doctor, under pressure from interrogators, agreed to retract a written recommendation that a detainee be immediately hospitalized for treatment.

Reches promised to conduct an inquiry. However, last month the two human rights groups criticized him for failing to investigate their claims, accusing him of holding only “amicable and unofficial” conversations over the phone with a few of the doctors concerned.

“We have sent to the IMA many testimonies from victims of torture who were referred to doctors for treatment,” Dr. Menuchin said. “But the IMA has yet to do anything about it.

“A significant number of doctors in Israel, in detention facilities and public hospitals, know torture is taking place, but choose to avert their gaze.”

This month, Defence for Children International-Palestine Section issued a report on the torture of Palestinian children, noting that in several of the cases it cited, Israeli doctors had turned a blind eye. A boy of 14 who was beaten repeatedly on a broken arm reported the abuse to a doctor who, he said, replied only: “I had nothing to do with that.”

The report stated that the group “has not encountered a single case where an adult in a position of authority, such as a soldier, doctor, judicial officer or prison staff, has intervened on behalf of a child who was mistreated.”

Campaigners against Dr. Blachar’s appointment as the head of the WMA say its Israeli sister association’s inaction on torture is unsurprising given its chairman’s public stance.

Derek Summerfield of the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London, said: “The IMA under Dr. Blachar is in collusion with the Israeli state policy of torture. Its role is to put a benign face on the occupation.”

Dr. Blachar told the Israeli website Ynet last week that such criticisms were “slanderous,” saying he and the IMA denounced all forms of torture.

The WMA, with nine million members in more than 80 countries, was established in 1947 as a response to the abuses sanctioned by German and Japanese doctors during the Second World War.

In 2007, the WMA’s general assembly called on doctors to document and report all cases of suspected torture.

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.The National, published in Abu Dhabi.

A version of this article originally appeared in

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