The following press release was issued yesterday:

Three in five Australians believe the United Nations should now recognise Palestine as one of its member States according to a poll conducted by Roy Morgan Research Pty Ltd.

The results are part of an independent national poll done by the respected Roy Morgan Research company.

"This is an outstanding result as it reflects the Australian people's overwhelming support for the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinians to be freed from 40 plus years of brutal military occupation" said Ms Samah Sabawi, Public Advocate, Australians for Palestine.

The poll also found that 63 percent of Australians do not support Israeli settlers building homes on occupied Palestinian land.

"Settlement building is without doubt the single biggest obstacle to peace. Israel continues to build and expand these settlements in direct violation of International Law" said Ms Sabawi.

With a vote on Palestine due at the United Nations before the end of November, the support for an Australian 'Yes' vote was more than three times that of a 'No' vote.

The Morgan poll asked respondents: "In order for Palestine to be recognized as a full member state of the United Nations, existing member Nations must enter a vote of 'yes', 'no' or abstain from voting. In your opinion, how should Australia vote?"

A majority - 51 percent - agreed Australia should vote "yes", whilst only 15 percent said "no". Twenty percent believed that Australia should abstain from voting.

"The strong support for a 'Yes' vote demonstrates that Australian voters support the bid by Palestine. This should encourage the Labor Government, led by Prime Minister Gillard, to position itself in-line with public opinion and on the right side of history" concluded Ms Sabawi.

As a collective of broad-based advocacy groups in Australia, we ask that the Government heed the call of the public and condemn the illegal settlements being constructed by Israel and support the rights of the Palestinians.

For comment or further detail, please contact Moammar Mashni (AFP): 0419 999 773.

This survey was commissioned by: Australians for Palestine (AFP, Melbourne), Australian Friends of Palestine Association (AFOPA, Adelaide), Australia Palestine Advocacy Network (APAN, Canberra), and Coalition for Justice and Peace in Palestine (CJPP, Sydney).

Our national interest requires a rethink on the Middle East.

The importance of Australia's candidature for election next October as a non-permanent member of the United Nations Security Council for a two-year term (2013-14) should be better understood and supported by our politicians and the Australian public.

Unfortunately, our prospects have been undermined by our recent vote against Palestine's admission to the United Nations Education Scientific and Cultural Organisation.

The Security Council is the principal organ of the UN with the power to impose sanctions and the responsibility for initiating peacekeeping operations. Like the G20's role in dealing with international economic and financial issues, the council deals with the maintenance of international peace and security. It is the world's pre-eminent crisis management forum.

Membership of the council is important to us. It will enhance our international standing as a responsible middle power. As I know from my experience in representing Australia on the council, membership offers an opportunity to make a difference, to influence situations in the direction of peace and to contribute to reforms.

The election, by secret ballot, will be contested. There are three candidates for two seats. When then prime minister Kevin Rudd announced our candidacy in March 2008, Finland and Luxembourg had already been in the field for well over a year.

Should we fail in our bid, the addition of two more western European voices, in addition to Britain and France, both permanent members of the council, would unbalance it, as happened in 1996 when we were defeated by Sweden and Portugal.

I have recently returned from two weeks in New York. Since my time at the UN, the global situation has changed enormously. Unprecedented economic growth, especially in China and India, and the increase in membership to 193 have driven change. The UN now reflects a different and much more complex, multipolar and interconnected world.

Australia has a proud record in the United Nations. We have played a major role in peacekeeping and peace-building since 1947. We have provided some 60,000 servicemen and police to more than 50 multi-lateral operations, including our major contribution to the UN Transitional Authority that brought peace and elections to Cambodia. We are in the top 10 contributors to the World Food Program, the World Health Organisation, UNICEF, the UN Development Program and the Human Rights Commission.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard has described the Security Council's work as ''vital''. She worked to secure the support of the Pacific Islands Forum in Wellington in September and again at the recent Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Perth. She will have more opportunities to seek support for our election at the APEC and East Asian Summit talks later this month.

In these circumstances, I find it both surprising and a decisive setback to our election prospects that the Prime Minister decided Australia should vote against the admission of Palestine to UNESCO.

The applications committee is to report to the Security Council today on Palestine's bid for statehood. If it is decided to vote in the council, the US is committed to a veto. Ultimately, however, the issue will presumably go to the General Assembly in the attempt to upgrade Palestinian representation. A positive approach to this issue is actually in the US and Israel's long-term interests.

Putting it bluntly, I consider that if we again vote against Palestinian "statehood" when it comes to the General Assembly, we are most unlikely to be elected to the council. At worst we should abstain.

I have never argued that we should change policies to secure a vote. What I have argued is that policies should be changed if they are ineffective or overdue for change, which is the case on a number of our votes on Middle East issues. We will do considerable damage to the more even-handed and reasonable policies we have been moving towards in the Middle East if we continue to vote against Palestinian statehood. This is also illogical because we support a two-state solution.

Middle Eastern diplomats outside Israel have depicted the present situation as like two people arguing over a pizza, but before the argument is resolved one side (Israel through the acceleration of its settlements program) has started to eat the pizza.

I do not think the security of Israel, which we rightly support strongly, is at issue. Israel's security needs to be underpinned by a negotiated two-state solution. Statehood itself can only result from a negotiated settlement, as all sides know.

This is a historic moment although it will not create a state, as the Palestinians themselves know. It does, however, reinforce their moral position and progress towards the accepted two-state solution.

We can and should win a seat on the Security Council. But I fear we will be defeated again, as we were in 1996, if we continue to vote against upgrading Palestinian representation, especially when it comes before the General Assembly. This will be a matter for regret and it will not be in our national interest.

Richard Woolcott, former head of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, was Australia's ambassador to the UN (1982-88) and represented Australia last time it was elected to the Security Council in 1985-86.

The Russell Tribunal on Palestine (an international citizen-based Tribunal of conscience created in response to the demands of civil society) found earlier this week, that Israel subjects the Palestinian people to an institutionalised regime of domination amounting to apartheid as defined under international law.

This discriminatory regime manifests in varying intensity and forms against different categories of Palestinians depending on their location. The Palestinians living under colonial military rule in the Occupied Palestinian Territory are subject to a particularly aggravated form of apartheid. Palestinian citizens of Israel, while entitled to vote, are not part of the Jewish nation as defined by Israeli law and are therefore excluded from the benefits of Jewish nationality and subject to systematic discrimination across the broad spectrum of recognised human rights.

Irrespective of such differences, the Tribunal concludes that Israel's rule over the Palestinian people, wherever they reside, collectively amounts to a single integrated regime of apartheid.

ICAHD Co-Founder and Director, Dr. Jeff Halper, addressed the Tribunal and blamed the process of Judaisation of Palestine for the ethnic displacement of Palestinians. Halper said Judaisation referred to the Israel government's treatment of Palestine as a Jewish country. He said that 26,000 homes in the Occupied Palestine Territory had since 1967 been demolished by the government. "In Israel we use the term apartheid to refer to the separation of Palestinians from Jews."

To read Halper's submission to the Russell Tribunal 'House Demolitions, Apartheid and Israel's Policy of Hafrada' press here...

The Tribunal urged the state of Israel to immediately dismantle its system of apartheid over the Palestinian people, to rescind all discriminatory laws and practices, not to pass any further discriminatory legislation, and to cease forthwith acts of persecution against Palestinians.

The tribunal also called on the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court to accept jurisdiction as requested by the Palestinian authorities in 2009, and to initiate an investigation into international crimes committed in Palestinian territory.

The tribunal advised the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination to address the issue of apartheid in its forthcoming review of Israel in February 2012. ICAHD will submit a parallel report to the Committee, and appear before its members, when it convenes in Geneva.

For more on the Russell Tribunal on Palestine, press here...

Russell Tribunal Finds Israel Guilty of Apartheid

A US-based research institute will soon publish what it says is “indisputable” evidence that Israel stole weapons-grade uranium for its still-undeclared atomic weapons program from a nuclear reprocessing plant in western Pennsylvania.

The Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy (IRmep) will release this month a 300-page report detailing the initial findings of a multi-year research project investigating the disappearance of highly enriched uranium from the Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corporation (Numec) in Apollo, Pennsylvania in the 1950s and 1960s.

Grant Smith, the director of IRmep, told The Daily Star that the report would include a broad range of newly declassified and un-redacted government documents from various agencies – including the Department of Energy, Atomic Energy Commission, FBI and CIA – that prove that nuclear material was diverted from Numec to Israel.

“The story at this point is that there is no one smoking gun; there are many smoking pistols lying all over the place that we’ve painstakingly collected,” Smith told The Daily Star.

When contacted by The Daily Star, Zalman Shapiro, the founder and former president of the Numec, strongly denied that any diversion of materials to Israel had ever taken place at the plant.

“The story is fabricated. Absolutely fabricated,” said Shapiro, who is now 91 years old.
Smith said that among the evidence to be included in the report is a DOE document confirming that uranium samples picked up by the CIA outside Israel’s nuclear installation in Dimona bore the same isotopic signature as material produced by the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant in the U.S. state of Ohio. The Portsmouth plant was a supplier for Numec.

Victor Gillinsky, who was a commissioner for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission from 1975 to 1984, said that evidence of a link between samples found at Dimona and nuclear material produced at Portsmouth, if reliable, would be “very significant.”

“The [Portsmouth] plant was producing very highly enriched uranium, more highly enriched than the usual stuff produced anywhere in the U.S. or other countries because they were turning it out for Navy fuel. So if you found material of that high enrichment, I believe Portsmouth was the only place in the world that would be making it,” Gillinsky told The Daily Star.

The former NRC official cautioned, however, that such evidence should still be viewed with skepticism, since any samples picked up by CIA agents at the Dimona facility would have been extremely small.

“The question is, did they really pick up things that they could clearly identify as coming from Portsmouth?” said Gillinsky.

“If [IRmep] do have something that does nail it down that would be very significant,” said Gillinsky. “But I would look at [the evidence in the IRmep report] very carefully before concluding that it is nailed down.”

The DOE reported in 2001 that 269 kilograms of highly enriched uranium went missing from the Numec plant during the course of its operations under Shapiro’s management from 1957 to 1968.

Suspicion has long swirled around the possibility that the missing uranium was diverted to Israel. Both the FBI and CIA conducted years-long investigations into the missing uranium, but no charges were ever filed.

Previously declassified documents revealed that some of Israel’s most elite spies visited the Numec facility in 1968.

A request submitted to the AEC to gain approval for the visit identified the Israelis as Rafael Eitan, Avraham Ben-Dor, Ephraim Biegun and Avraham Hermoni.

A former director of operations for Mossad, Eitan headed in 1960 the mission that led to the capture of ex-Nazi official Adolf Eichmann in Argentina.

Eitan later served as director of Israel’s Bureau of Scientific Relations (known by its Hebrew acronym Lekem), an intelligence entity that specialized in acquiring scientific and military secrets from abroad through covert means.

As the head of Lekem, Eitan directly oversaw the activities of Jonathan Pollard, a U.S. Navy intelligence analyst who was in 1987 convicted and sentenced to life in prison on charges of spying for Israel.

Ben-Dor was Eitan’s right-hand man in the operation to capture Eichmann, and also served as a long-time Shin Bet agent before being forced to retire in 1986 for covering up the deaths of two Palestinian prisoners.

Biegun was the head of Mossad’s Technical Department, specializing in electronics and communication.

Hermoni was the technical director of the nuclear bomb project at RAFAEL, Israel’s armament development authority.

Smith said the question of whether highly enriched uranium was diverted from Numec to Israel is all the more relevant now in view of current U.S. efforts to halt Iran’s nuclear program.

“Why are we looking at nuclear weapons? Probably the biggest question that’s being asked in this town [Washington] right now is whether to get even more heavily involved in trying to suppress Iran’s nuclear program. And we think it’s extremely valuable to get the truth out about U.S. collaboration, intentional or not, in Israel’s program,” Smith said.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is currently carrying out a $170 million cleanup of the decommissioned nuclear site in Apollo that is scheduled to be completed in 2015.

Israel Stole Uranium From US - Report Will Show

The British government has raised concerns about Israel's treatment of Palestinian minors arrested and interrogated for stone-throwing and other crimes, highlighted in an article in the Guardian.

Alistair Burt, the Foreign Office minister for the Middle East, urged Israel to address the UK government's concerns when on a visit to the country a fortnight ago.

Burt told the Guardian he had "raised concerns about the treatment of Palestinian children in Israeli detention. I urged the Israeli government to address these concerns."

Burt was also asked in the House of Commons last week about the issue of solitary confinement for Palestinian minors. Labour MP Sandra Osborne called on the government to condemn the practice and demand the release of 106 children detained in the Israeli military prison system.

In response, Burt referred to an earlier statement in which he said the practice of shackling children was wrong. Minors are routinely shackled throughout court hearings in the Israeli military justice system.

Osborne told the Guardian Israel's treatment of Palestinian minors was "unjustified in the context of human rights". She had been appalled and distressed on visits to the Israeli military juvenile court at Ofer, near Jerusalem. "No civilised democracy should treat children in that way," she said.

The Israeli human rights group B'Tselem said the state should apply the same protection to Palestinian minors in detention that it allows to Israeli children.

B'Tselem confirmed that descriptions given to the Guardian by Palestinian juveniles of arrest, detention and interrogation under the military justice system were consistent with testimonies it had collected although mostly with over-18s.

"We have also seen long periods of solitary confinement in a small cell, with lights on 24 hours a day, with detainees unable to follow time and disconnected to the rest of the world," said B'Tselem spokeswoman Sarit Michaeli. "We have testimonies of detainees cuffed in painful positions while under interrogation and sometimes left for long periods.

"Throughout the military justice process, the rights of suspects are violated."

B'Tselem, she said, took issue with the claim by Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev that detainees alleging mistreatment would have complaints dealt with fairly. "This is disingenuous at best," she said.

A B'Tselem study last year showed that out of more than 700 complaints of abuse by Israeli Security Agency (ISA) interrogators brought between 2001 and 2011, none resulted in a criminal investigation.

The complaints were examined by an official of the ISA. "It is not surprising that in most cases the inspector determines that the complaint is not true," said B'Tselem.

In a few cases, the inspector found abuse had taken place but the file was closed without the state attorney's office ordering a criminal investigation. B'Tselem said this "transmits a message to ... the potential complainants that the chances of measures being taken against the persons responsible is zero".

Regev insisted anyone who had a complaint that an Israeli official had acted in an improper fashion should bring the information to the Israeli authorities and civil courts. "It will be thoroughly investigated," he said.

He added: "Minors deserve special attention, special consideration ... The test of a democracy is how you treat people incarcerated, people in jail, and especially so with minors."

B'Tselem said the provisions of Israeli youth law should formally be applied to Palestinian minors. Night-time arrests in military operations should cease; interrogations should be video-taped; minors should be questioned in the presence of a parent or lawyer; they should have their rights clearly read to them; and proper options for remand should be put in place.

UNICEF, the UN agency for children, also raised concerns following the Guardian's article. Children had the "right to protection against violence and abuse," it said in a statement. Unicef was "monitoring the arrest and detention of children and is currently in dialogue with the Israeli authorities to improve the protection of child detainees ... All children, at all times, must be treated with dignity and respect, in accordance with the convention on the rights of the child."

In the first 11 months of last year, 222 cases of stone-throwers were brought before the military court, according to a letter sent by the Israeli foreign ministry to Lady Scotland, who visited the Ofer court last autumn, and is writing a report on her findings.

The period from indictment to the conclusion of proceedings had dropped to an average of 92.5 days in 2011 from 167 days in 2007, the letter said.

It pointed out that "many crimes carried out by minors in [the West Bank] are of a violent ideological nature and pose a clear and imminent threat to the public ... Despite the unique dilemmas in the dealing with minor suspects in [the West Bank], Israel makes significant efforts to provide for just and fair treatment throughout the entire military legal process in accordance with international standards."

Human rights organisations say Israel's treatment of Palestinian minors breaches the international convention on the rights of the child and the fourth Geneva convention.

UK Raises Concerns Over Israel's Treatment Of Palestinian Children

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How Americans are effectively working to overcome Israel lobby demands to violate international law, undermine freedom of speech, reward Israeli militarism and denigrate peaceful Palestinian aspirations.

How voters can both support and field politicians, and keep them from succumbing to the lobby's coordinated campaign contributions and constant pressure for fealty.

Exploring important grassroots legislative and legal battles won by peace and justice allies, how they did it, and how you can, too.

The key differences between Jewish establishment Zionism and Christian Zionism, and common misunderstandings.

How to implement "non-Israel-centric" regional strategies to eliminate the crippling human and financial costs of unending wars.

For the first time ever, we are opening up our traditional "speaker dinner" as a public fund-raising gala! Join keynoters, speakers and a surprising lineup of entertainers for a delicious, educational and uplifting gathering the evening before the conference, on March 3! All gala proceeds go toward covering conference expenses!

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