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Democracy in Crisis: Who is Really in Control?
By Ramzy Baroud, Palestine Chronicle 2/28/2007
     The group’s name is the Off The Record Club. Hohlt is designated as "keeper of the flame." This travesty has apparently been going on for over 15 years.
     Years back, an old and astute professor at the University of Washington ended a fascinating lecture to a small group of freshmen with the following contention: "Our country might find itself in a position that could force it to deprive its citizens from certain freedoms to preserve basic rights."
     The political atmosphere in the United States then was hardly tense; moreover, the professor was not essentially alluding to a political topic; his argument was meant to assert an environmental concern: the government must interfere, mustering its entire legal prowess to contain human activities that have for long harmed our increasingly fragile environment; even if such intervention can theoretically be qualified as one that curbs certain freedoms, as long as by doing so, we preserve basic but fundamental rights, the right to a good life, health and collective preservation. Utilitarianism at its best; partly, I agreed.
     But a question, nonetheless, lurked within and I simply couldn’t wait until the following lecture to raise it. I followed him to his office. He sat in front of me, gasping for air and desperately probing the top drawer of his ailing desk for a cigarette; I hesitantly overlooked the irony and retorted: Your point made a lot of sense, but it was too generalised; what if the freedoms being denied are those of political dissent, civil rights and the like? Would any fundamental right be a worthy prize to compel such compromises?
     His answer was simple: our democratic system simply wouldn’t allow it. more..

The metamorphoses of legitimization
By Meron Benvenisti, Ha’aretz 3/1/2007
     Among the conditions for ending the boycott of a Palestinian government headed by or including Hamas, the condition of recognizing Israel stands out. This can be expressed either in ideological terms (recognizing its right to exist) or diplomatic terms (recognizing the state and honoring agreements with it). At first glance, such a condition is self-evident: Someone who does not recognize the existence of the Jewish state seeks its destruction, and therefore, it would be wrong to aid this existential enemy, even if holding back humanitarian aid hurts millions of innocents.
     Hamas leaders’ insistence on not deviating from their refusal to recognize Israel, "regardless of how much the United States and the Quartet pressure us," is not only a position that rests on religious principles. It also reflects a basic Palestinian worldview: Only the Palestinians, the victims of Zionism, are capable of granting the Jewish state legitimacy. Granted, they are an occupied and defeated people, but as long as they insist on the illegitimacy of the Zionist enterprise and maintain that Israel, having been founded on stolen Palestinian lands, has no right to exist, the cloud of guilt over the fact that fulfilling the Zionist enterprise entailed destruction of the Palestinian nation will not dissipate.
     Denying the legitimacy of the Jewish state, 60 years after its establishment and its consolidation as a regional power, seems at first glance like a blunt, rusty weapon. And indeed, it has already been said that it is not Israel that needs Hamas’ recognition, but the opposite: It is Hamas that needs Israel’s recognition. But the fact is that Israel, which is haunted by the nightmare of the "return" of Palestinian refugees and bewails urgings that it "live by the sword," insists on obtaining Hamas’ recognition and demands that the Quartet members not concede on this point. more..

Prepare for the Great Arab Unraveling
By Rami G. Khouri, Daily Star 2/28/2007
     Seymour Hersh, investigative journalist for The New Yorker magazine, has sparked fresh debate with his latest article alleging that the Bush administration’s new policy to confront Iran has led it to send American money and other forms of assistance to extremist Sunni groups, sometimes via the Lebanese and Saudi governments, in order to confront and weaken Hizbullah, Syria and Iran.
     Do not pity or jeer Washington alone, for every single player in this tale - the United States, Hizbullah, the Lebanese government, Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia - wriggles uncomfortably in the mess they collectively created through their shortsighted policies of recent years. I suspect this mirrors something much bigger: We are in the midst of a potentially historic moment when the modern Arab state order that was created by the Europeans in circa 1920 has started to break down, in what we might perhaps call the Great Arab Unraveling.
     Shattered Iraq is the immediate driver of this possible dissolution and reconfiguration of an Arab state system that had held together rather well for nearly four generations. It is only the most dramatic case of an Arab country that wrestles with its own coherence, legitimacy, and viability. Lebanon and Palestine have struggled with their statehood for half a century; Somalia has quietly dropped out of this game; Kuwait vanished in 1990 and quickly reappeared; Yemen split, reunited, split, fought a war, and reunited; Sudan spins like a centrifuge, with national and tribal forces pushing away from a centralized state; Morocco and the Western Sahara dance gingerly around their logical association; and internal tensions plague other Arab countries to varying degrees. more..

Iran: Switching the nuclear tracks
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi, Asia Times 2/28/2007
     President Mahmud Ahmadinejad has compared Iran’s nuclear program to a train that has left its station, adding that "we have thrown away the brakes". In reaction to Iran’s defiance, the United Nations is on the verge of imposing tougher sanctions, and there are new, alarming reports about a planned air offensive against Iran by the US.
     All this raises the question of whether or not at least switching the tracks is possible or even desirable, since the speed bumps of punitive measures by the international community may in fact derail Iran’s civilian nuclear program.
     On the diplomatic front, the momentum for the various options floating around is on the fast track of disappearing, with Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki, who only two weeks ago spoke warmly about the proposals by Javier Solana, the European Union’s top foreign-policy diplomat, and the Swiss, now all but dismissing them as mere suggestions and far below the bar of serious "proposals".
     At a conference on "Persian Gulf and Iran’s Peaceful Nuclear Program" held in the city of Isfahan this week, Mottaki’s deputy for foreign relations, Kazem Gharibabadi, outlined Iran’s latest stance by arguing that "there is no guarantee in the international arena for the supply of nuclear fuel to Iran and no international and regional mechanism is capable of delivering nuclear fuel to Iran". Insisting that "we are not willing to reduce even one link from the chain of complete nuclear-fuel cycle", Gharibabadi assured the audience that Iran has no intention of exiting the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and has been fully transparent. more..

The Case for Withdrawal from Afghanistan
By Tariq Ali, Palestine Chronicle 2/28/2007
     There is no way NATO can win this war now. Sending more troops will lead to more deaths. And full-scale battles will destabilise neighbouring Pakistan. Musharraf has already taken the rap for an air raid on a Muslim school in Pakistan.
     It is Year 6 of the UN-backed NATO occupation of Afghanistan, a joint US/EU mission. On 26 February there was an attempted assassination of Dick Cheney by Taliban suicide bombers while he was visiting the ’secure’ US air base at Bagram (once an equally secure Soviet air base during an earlier conflict). Two US soldiers and a mercenary (’contractor’) died in the attack, as did twenty other people working at the base. This episode alone should have concentrated the US Vice-President’s mind on the scale of the Afghan debacle. In 2006 the casualty rates rose substantially and NATO troops lost forty-six soldiers in clashes with the Islamic resistance or shot-down helicopters.
     The insurgents now control at least twenty districts in the Kandahar, Helmand, Uruzgan provinces where NATO troops have replaced US soldiers. And it is hardly a secret that many officials in these zones are closet supporters of the guerrilla fighters. The situation is out of control. At the beginning of this war Mrs Bush and Mrs Blair appeared on numerous TV and radio shows claiming that the aim of the war was to liberate Afghan women. Try repeating that today and the women will spit in your face.
     Who is responsible for this disaster? Why is the country still subjugated? What are Washington’s strategic goals in the region? What is the function of NATO? And how long can any country remain occupied against the will of a majority of its people? more..

A political solution won’t save the Palestinian economy
By Mohammed Samhouri, Daily Star 2/28/2007
     The resignation of the Hamas-led government on February 15, and the expected formation of a new government based on the deal reached in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, between Hamas and Fatah may finally bring an end to internal Palestinian divisions and the internecine violence that followed last year’s stunning rise of Hamas to power. It may also herald the beginning of a process that could lead to a reversal of the crippling year-long Israeli and Western measures against the Palestinians. This would be a break for the 4 million residents of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, who have seen their lives shattered by a continued lack of basic needs and rising levels of lawlessness and anarchy.
     A more serious question, however, is whether a future Palestinian unity government can deal with the widespread poverty and unemployment plaguing the Palestinian territories. In the best of circumstances, the government would be operating under conditions similar to those existing on the eve of the January 2006 elections that Hamas won. On the social and economic front, therefore, there is little ground for optimism.
     The crisis conditions dating back to the outbreak of the second intifada in September 2000 have led to extensive damage to the Palestinian economy, so that a return to the pre-2006 state of affairs may no longer be sufficient to revive the deeply stagnant economy. Two signs in particular are disturbing, both for their adverse impact on the long-term stability of Palestinian areas, and, by extension, for their impact on a Middle East that has already had its fair share of trouble. more..

Coming Home: Palestinian Cinema
By Annemarie Jacir, Electronic Intifada 2/27/2007
     In the late 1960s, a group of young Arab women and men devoted to the struggle for Palestinian freedom chose to contribute to the resistance through filmmaking -- recording their lives, hopes, and their fight for justice. Working in both fiction and documentary, they strived to tell the stories of Palestine and to create a new kind of cinema.
     These filmmakers included founders Mustafa Abu Ali, Sulafa Jadallah, and Hani Jawhariya. Others were Khadija Abu Ali, Ismael Shammout, Rafiq Hijjar, Nabiha Lutfi, Fuad Zentut, Jean Chamoun and Samir Nimr. Most were refugees, exiled from their homes in Palestine. And additionally there were fellow Arabs who stood in solidarity with them, devoting their work to a just cause. Their films screened across the Arab world and internationally but never in Palestine. None of the filmmakers were allowed into Palestine, or what became known as Israel, let alone their celluloid prints.
     And more than thirty years later, their films had still never been screened in Palestine. As artistic director of the Dreams of a Nation film festival in Palestine in 2003, I knew it was both appropriate and essential to try to open the festival with these films in the heart of Palestine -- Jerusalem -- to honor the work of these brave filmmakers. more..

Finding the Silver Lining
By Joharah Baker, Palestine Chronicle 2/28/2007
     It is truly unfortunate that it takes a major Israeli army incursion and the assassination of three young men to wake us from our slumber, but if we have learned our lesson once and for all from these events, then we have at least found the proverbial silver lining to this cloud.
     Unfortunately, Israel never fails to bring us back to the dismal reality in which we live just in the nick of time. For months now, Palestinians across the board have been watching a train-wreck in waiting, a civil war at the brink of eruption along with the demise of our entire national cause. The Mecca Agreement signed between Hamas and Fateh in early February was a small glimmer of hope in an otherwise increasingly hopeless situation whereby the two sides pledged to lay down their arms and sit together at the table.
     While there have been developments in this regard – national unity talks have so far proceeded uninterrupted since the agreement – bursts of factional violence have still continued to take place in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. Ironically, it is Israel that has brought us to our senses, reminding us of what we are fighting for and why now more than ever, it is extremely crucial for us to stand as one.
     On February 25, Israeli occupation troops raided the West Bank city of Nablus in a predawn incursion under the cover of a 120-strong military force. The army, which claimed it had gone into Nablus to arrest a list of wanted men and uncover explosives factories, has yet to withdraw, even though troops did pull back for a few hours yesterday before returning Wednesday morning.
     The incursion is being considered the largest Israeli military intervention in Nablus for over six months and it has yet to end. As of this morning, the troops were back in full force, especially in and around the old city, which is the most densely populated area of Nablus and also reportedly the most resistant. more..

IDF prohibits fishing off Gaza coast and abuse fishermen
B’tselem 2/23/2007
     B’Tselem’s research indicates that, since the abduction of Cpl. Gilad Shalit, on 25 June 2006 , Israel has forbidden boats, including fishing boats, to sail off the Gaza coast. The prohibition has struck a severe blow to the fishing sector, which provides a livelihood for tens of thousands of residents of the Gaza Strip. Lacking other means of employment, and despite the Israeli navy’s patrol of the coast and occasional shooting at Palestinian fishermen, some fishermen have risked their lives and violated the prohibition.
     ’Adnan al-Badwil described the naval gunfire at his fishing boat:
     Last Wednesday [12 December], around five in the evening, I went to sea in a small, seven-meter motorboat I own. My brother Sa’id and another fisherman who works with us, Hamdan Barhum, were also in the boat….We threw out the nets and waited for the fish to get caught…. After waiting about ninety minutes, I felt that fish were in the net, and we began to lift them out of the water….Then we started back to shore.
     When we got to about one hundred meters from shore, I heard shooting. It was about seven o’clock and it was dark. The boat started shaking a lot, we fell into the sea. I didn’t see where the shots came from, but I am sure it came from the Israeli warship that was at sea. I didn’t see anything else in the water….The boat was hit, apparently by a shell. The three of us were injured by shell fragments…Sa’id and I were hospitalized for three days. Hamdan was very seriously injured, so he is still in the hospital.
     In addition to shooting, in recent months Israel Navy crews have used a new method of humiliating and abusing the fishermen. B’Tselem has learned of many cases in which the sailors stopped fisherman off the coast, particularly opposite Rafah, forced them to go further out to sea and then ordered them, under threat of firearms, to undress and swim dozens of meters in the sea to the navy ship, despite the bitter cold. The sailors threatened to shoot anyone who did not want to jump in because he didn’t know how to swim... more..

The Democratic Constitution
By Professor Marwan Dwairy, Adalah 2/27/2007
     A Word from the Chairman of the Board of Directors
     On the tenth anniversary of its founding, Adalah is issuing “The Democratic Constitution,” as a constitutional proposal for the state of Israel based on the concept of a democratic, bilingual, multicultural state. This proposed constitution draws on universal principles and international conventions on human rights, the experiences of nations and the constitutions of various democratic states.
     In recent years, Israeli groups have put forward different constitutions for the state of Israel. However, these proposals are distinguished by their lack of conformity with democratic principles, in particular the right to complete equality of all residents and citizens, and their treatment of Arab citizens as if they were strangers in this land, where history, memory and collective rights exist only for Jewish people. It is no coincidence therefore that these proposals have been preoccupied with the question of, “Who is a Jew?” and neglecting the primary constitutional question of, “Who is a citizen?”
     Thus, we decided to propose a democratic constitution, which respects the freedoms of the individual and the rights of all groups in equal measure, gives the proper weight to the historical injustices committed against Arab citizens of Israel, and deals seriously with the social and economic rights of all. If “The Democratic Constitution” succeeds to underscore the enormous gap between it and the other proposals, and to create an objective public debate and dialogue on the nature of rights and freedoms in the country, then we will have taken an important step forward in the issues of racial equality, freedoms and social justice. -- See also: The Democratic Constitution - text more..

Court asked: Israel still ’occupying’ Gaza?
By Joshua Mitnick, Christian Science Monitor 2/26/2007
     Israel’s Supreme Court must weigh the country’s security concerns against Palestinians’ commercial livelihood.
     TEL AVIV -- US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice last week held up improvements in Gaza’s only commercial link to the outside world as evidence of progress in Israeli-Palestinian relations.
     But Sunday the Karni crossing at the Israel-Gaza border became the focus of a dispute in Israel’s Supreme Court between human rights groups and the government. At issue: Does Israel have a responsibility to alleviate delays – lasting up to three months – in imported goods?
     The debate highlights Gaza’s murky legal status and whether Israel’s control over the impoverished strip’s key access points still determines it as an occupying power, even though it withdrew troops a year and a half ago.
     The Supreme Court has yet to rule on the petition, submitted when Israel had shut down most crossings amid a military offensive there.
     Human rights groups say Israel exercises an "invisible hand" in Gazans’ daily lives because it can regulate commercial goods coming or leaving the territory. "The only way Gaza residents can receive a crate of milk ... and a shipment of medicines is through Israeli-controlled crossings,’ " says Sari Bashi, the director of Gisha, an Israeli human rights group that cosponsored the petition. "Only Israel can fulfill this obligation to the residents of Gaza."
     According to a Palestinian commercial group, the Karni crossing was open an average of five hours a day in December, despite Israel’s commitment under a US-brokered accord on borders and access to ensure "continuous" operationover the terminal. Some 182 trucks carrying goods have been allowed in each day in the last half of 2006, compared with nearly twice that number in February 2006. more..

Settlements in Focus: Olmert’s First Year - February 2007
By Lara Friedman and Dror Etkes, Peace Now 2/27/2007
     In general, how would you characterize Olmert’s policy toward settlements in the West Bank during his first year in office?
     Ehud Olmert took over the Prime Minister’s office on January 4, 2006 (as acting Prime Minister, after the incapacitation of then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon). Thus, even though he was not elected to office until March 2006, Olmert bears responsibility for all settlement activity in 2006.
     Overall, Olmert’s tenure in office has been characterized by two phenomena. First, there has been a complete halt to any actions by Israel -- or even plans for action – with respect to evacuating settlements or outposts. Second, construction in settlements and outposts has continued unabated.
     Today it appears that Olmert – and Israel – are paralyzed with respect to settlements. Bilateralism (i.e., negotiating with the Palestinians over the future of land and settlements) is viewed as too “costly” in terms of compromises Israel would have to make, and in any case, current Palestinian politics have made it easy for some to argue that there is no partner with whom to negotiate. At the same time, unilateralism (in terms of withdrawals from land and evacuation of settlements) has fallen out of favor (discussed below). With neither bilateralism nor unilateralism viewed as an option at present, the Olmert government has elected to maintain the longstanding status quo policy in the West Bank – permitting and supporting the growth of settlements, with the consequences of this growth to be dealt with at some undetermined time in the future. -- See also: Summary - Peace Now Settlement / Outpost Report 2006 more..

Who the witches are
By Gideon Samet, Ha’aretz 2/28/2007
     Yesterday, associates of Yisrael Beiteinu MK Esterina Tartman finally came to the banal refuge of politicians in trouble. They said that the inquiries into her embarrassing explanations in the matter of her disability and her forged degree are "a witch hunt." They could have chosen a more appropriate description of the alleged plot against Tartman, who has engaged quite a bit in the hunt for Arab witches in this country. She did this industriously despite, and perhaps because of, "physical and mental" limitations inflicted on her by a traffic accident. But Tartman’s story is not just one of false claims. Her story is another chapter in the problematic profile of Israel’s right.
     The defensive claims of the tourism minister-designate of course attribute the criticism of her to the fact that she is a rightist. It is the left that is ganging up on her because of her opinions. This is absolutely ridiculous. It is not the left that inserted the lies about a master’s degree into her curriculum vitae. Despite the left’s efforts, she might still become a minister - a demanding role. She has already received national insurance compensation for the fact that she will be incapable of carrying out such a job. The left would sit with her in the government, as it does with her leader, Strategic Affairs Minister Avigdor Lieberman.
     There is no need to be a member of the left to feel repulsed by Tartman’s comments on the appointment of an Arab government minister ("We need to cleanse this terrible affliction from our midst, with the help of the Holy Name, blessed be He"). But yes, indeed, she embodies the classical extreme right. Tartman wants to return the evacuees to Gush Katif and, again with the help of the Holy Name, to impose Israeli sovereignty there. Like quite a number of politicians from the center, she wants the death penalty for terrorists. "Here, too, the Jewish sources serve as my inspiration," says the MK who for years now has been researching the kabbalistic secrets of the Hebrew alphabet. Which has not prevented her Hebrew from being seriously flawed. -- See also: MK Tartman holds no B.A. from Bar Ilan, despite claims in her CV more..

Strong delusions and weak memories
By Robert Fisk, The Independent 2/24/2007
     Maurice Papon, lowered into his grave along with his precious Légion d’honneur last week, proved what many Arabs have long suspected but generally refuse to acknowledge: that bureaucrats and racists and others who worked for Hitler regarded all Semitic people as their enemies and that - had Hitler’s armies reached the Middle East - they would ultimately have found a "final solution" to the "Arab question", just as they did for the Jews of Europe. Papon’s responsibility for the 1942 arrest and deportation of 1,600 Jews in and around Bordeaux - 223 children among them, all shipped off to the Drancy camp and then to Auschwitz - was proved without the proverbial shadow of a doubt at his 1998 trial.
     Less clear were the exact number of Algerians murdered by his police force in Paris and hurled into the Seine in 1961. Of course, he was not tried for this lesser but equally unscrupulous crime. He organised the police repression of the independence demonstration by 40,000 Algerians; in the cities of Algiers and Oran and Blida and other areas of modern-day Algeria where this atrocity festers on among elderly relatives, they say that up to 400 Algerians were massacred by Papon’s flics. Some historians suggest 250. Papon preferred to claim that only two were killed - in much the same way as he later insisted at his trial that he did not know the fate of the Jews he dispatched so efficiently to Drancy and onwards to Poland.
     The same was always claimed of Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem. He it was who fled to Iraq during the Second World War, escaped again after the British crushed the pro-Axis government that had taken power in Baghdad and who ended up in Nazi Berlin, shaking hands with Hitler and working enthusiastically for the Third Reich’s propaganda machine. From Hitler, he obtained a promise that "when we (the Germans) have arrived at the southern Caucasus, then the time of the liberation of the Arabs will have arrived - and you can rely on my word." Haj Amin gratefully recorded how Hitler insisted that the "Jewish problem" would be solved "step by step" and that he, Haj Amin, would be "leader of the Arabs" after entering Egypt and then Palestine with the Italian army. more..

In Iraq, the killing of 18 teenagers is a horrible routine
By Robert Fisk, The Independent 2/28/2007
     This is a story with a caution. Eighteen teenagers were killed on Monday at a football field east of Baghdad. On Sunday, equally young students of Mustansiriya University - the oldest in Baghdad - were blown up by a suicide bomber. It has become a routine, at one and the same time more horrible and more normal each day. Only two years ago, a suicide bomber drove into an American convoy in Baghdad, killing 27 civilians, half of them children taking sweets from American soldiers. What price innocence?
     Well, as usual, nothing is as it seems in Iraq. Within hours of the mass deaths in Ramadi yesterday came a disturbing statement by the US military. They knew of no deaths in Ramadi, although - and here was the sinister part of the whole thing - it was true, the Americans said, that 30 people had been "slightly wounded" in Ramadi when US troops set off a "controlled explosion" near a football field. "I can’t imagine there would be another attack involving children without our people knowing," an American officer announced. Quite so.
     Then he apparently half-acknowledged that there was another explosion near the soccer field, a "barbaric crime" by al-Qa’ida. The police said it was a car bomb. The American-funded Iraqi television service said it was a roadside bomb. A local tribal leader said that of the 18 dead, six were women - not, presumably, football players.
     In Iraq, as we all know now, they go for the jugular. The old, the young, pregnant women, infants, soldiers, gunmen, murderers. They all die violently, the innocent along with the guilty. One of the insurgents’ principal financial supporters - we had met in Amman, of course, not in Baghad - put it very succinctly to me. "A decision was made that we have to accept civilian casualties. If we attack the Americans, the innocent will die. We know that. What do you people call it when you kill women and children? Collateral damage?" more..

Theater empowers Palestinians
By Amelia Thomas, Christian Science Monitor 2/28/2007
     Within the West Bank’s impovershed Jenin camp, the Freedom Theater provides troubled youths with a grounding in performing arts.
     JENIN, WEST BANK - It’s early morning in the troubled Jenin refugee camp, an isolated, impoverished stronghold for Palestinian resistance movements in the West Bank. Deep within the camp, a lively meeting is in progress in a freshly painted backroom. Its participants, however, are armed neither with Kalashnikovs nor hand grenades, but solely with the power of theater.
     Presiding is Juliano Mer-Khamis, a well-known actor in Israel, the son of an Israeli mother and Palestinian father. His mother, Arna Mer, began working with the children of Jenin camp in 1988, eventually earning the Alternative Nobel Prize – the Right Livelihood Award, bestowed annually by Sweden’s Parliament – for her work in 1993. The prize money was put toward financing a children’s theater named "Arna’s House." But when Arna died in 1995, the theater was shut down.
     Later, during the violent 2002 "Battle of Jenin" – when Israeli troops clashed with Palestinian militants for several days – the camp was left in ruins and with it, the building containing "Arna’s House." But in 2006, Mr. Mer-Khamis returned to Jenin to follow in his mother’s footsteps. He launched the Freedom Theater to provide Jenin camp’s troubled youths with a grounding in the performing arts.
     "This is just the prologue," says the charismatic Mer-Khamis. "There has never been any theater in this area. There is no culture of theater or even art in general. So our most important work is not theatrical performance in the traditional sense, but to create a ground for future generations, so that they can one day speak in a clear theatrical language." more..

EGYPT: Traditional Influence Begins to Decline
By Adam Morrow and Khaled Moussa al-Omrani, Inter Press Service 2/27/2007
     CAIRO - The Mecca Agreement was hailed throughout the Arab world earlier this month for putting an end to Palestinian infighting, which had claimed scores of lives. But some local analysts see the deal -- which was sponsored by Egypt’s diplomatic rival Saudi Arabia -- as an indication of Cairo’s waning influence as the principal mediator in inter-Palestinian disputes.
     "Egypt’s diplomatic role has declined and has turned into that of a spectator," Abdel-Halim Kandil, editor-in-chief of opposition weekly al-Karama told IPS. "It now boasts the diplomatic weight of a tiny island-nation like Comoros."
     On Feb. 8, leaders of the two Palestinian movements met in the Saudi Arabian city Mecca, where they signed an agreement renouncing all forms of internecine violence. The pact also spelt out the parameters of a proposed national unity government, according to which Hamas will appoint seven ministers and Fatah six. Nine other ministerial portfolios will be distributed among other political factions and independents.
     The contentious post of interior minister will be filled by a by a Hamas-appointed independent candidate, pending the approval of Fatah. The foreign minister will be a Fatah-appointed independent approved by Hamas.
     "This agreement proscribes the spilling of Palestinian blood...and confirms the importance of national unity as the basis for opposition to the (Israeli) occupation and the realisation of our national goals," Nabil Amr, advisor to Fatah-affiliated Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said at the signing ceremony.
     Although the event was hosted by Saudi Arabia and presided over by Saudi monarch Abdullah bin Abdel-Aziz, leaders of both Palestinian factions were quick to express appreciation of Egypt’s substantial contributions to arbitration efforts. more..

"You and I and the Next War"
By Uri Avnery, Gush Shalom 2/24/2007
     "WE ARE ready for the next war," a reserve soldier told a TV reporter this week, on the scene of a brigade-size maneuver on the Golan Heights.
     What war? Against whom? About what? This was not stated, and not even asked. The soldier saw it as self-evident that war will break out soon, and it seems that he did not particularly care against whom.
     Politicians are used to expressing themselves more cautiously, in words like "If, God forbid, a war should break out…" But in Israeli public discourse, the next war is seen as a natural phenomenon, like tomorrow’s sunrise. Of course, war will break out. The only question is against whom.
     AND INDEED - against whom? Perhaps Hizbullah again?
     Quite possibly. In the Knesset and the media, a lively debate took place this week about whether Hizbullah has already regained all the capabilities it had before the Second Lebanon War, or not yet. In a Knesset committee, there was an altercation between one of the Army Intelligence chiefs, who vigorously insisted that this was so, and the Minister of Defense, who voiced his opinion that Hizbullah has only the "potential" to get there.
     Hassan Nasrallah, who has a wonderful talent for driving Israelis up the wall, poured oil on the flames by announcing, in a public speech, that arms were flowing to him from Syria, and that he transfers them to the south in trucks "covered with straw". Let them all know. more..

The Redirection
By Seymour M. Hersh, The New Yorker 2/25/2007
     Is the Administration’s new policy benefitting our enemies in the war on terrorism?
     A Strategic Shift
     In the past few months, as the situation in Iraq has deteriorated, the Bush Administration, in both its public diplomacy and its covert operations, has significantly shifted its Middle East strategy. The “redirection,” as some inside the White House have called the new strategy, has brought the United States closer to an open confrontation with Iran and, in parts of the region, propelled it into a widening sectarian conflict between Shiite and Sunni Muslims.
     To undermine Iran, which is predominantly Shiite, the Bush Administration has decided, in effect, to reconfigure its priorities in the Middle East. In Lebanon, the Administration has coöperated with Saudi Arabia’s government, which is Sunni, in clandestine operations that are intended to weaken Hezbollah, the Shiite organization that is backed by Iran. The U.S. has also taken part in clandestine operations aimed at Iran and its ally Syria. A by-product of these activities has been the bolstering of Sunni extremist groups that espouse a militant vision of Islam and are hostile to America and sympathetic to Al Qaeda.
     One contradictory aspect of the new strategy is that, in Iraq, most of the insurgent violence directed at the American military has come from Sunni forces, and not from Shiites. But, from the Administration’s perspective, the most profound—and unintended—strategic consequence of the Iraq war is the empowerment of Iran. Its President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has made defiant pronouncements about the destruction of Israel and his country’s right to pursue its nuclear program, and last week its supreme religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, said on state television that “realities in the region show that the arrogant front, headed by the U.S. and its allies, will be the principal loser in the region.” more..

The Wall – The Battlefield in Bil’in
By Abdullah Abu Rahme, International Solidarity Movement 2/22/2007
     Bil’in is a small, peaceful village surrounded by hills and valleys, lying halfway between Yaffa and Jerusalem and is among the villages that fall under the governorate of Ramallah, 16km west of Bil’in. It has a population of 1800 in an area approximately 4000 dunums in size. Its people are known for their simplicity, hospitality and for being good neighbors to each other. They love peace and freedom, and reject injustice and oppression.
     The territory which makes up Bil’in has stood up to confiscation time after time, exploited for the purpose of illegal settlement. At the beginning of the 1980s, the Matityahu settlement was built on a portion of Bil’in land and, at the beginning of the 1990s, another portion of land was confiscated on which the Kiryat Sefer settlement was built. And at the start of the millennium in 2002, yet another new settlement (this one named Matityahu East) was built on Bil’in’s land.
     In April 2004, Bil’in’s Village Council relayed the Israeli government’s intention to build a “separation wall” on the village lands. The Council delivered this message to the citizens of the village, who in turn compelled them to form a committee to resist this wall and additional resulting settlements. The committee’s aim was to represent the largest section of the village’s residents, to prepare daily and weekly actions, maintain close relations with international and Israeli solidarity activists, keep track of the legal suit filed on behalf of the citizens, and keep in contact with the lawyers and legal advisers in relation to this.
     The Israeli army bulldozers began work in Bil’in on February 20, 2005. The wall now traverses the village at a length of 2 kilometres, a breadth of 30 metres, and is 5 kilometres inside the “green line”, the supposedly legal border separating the West Bank and the lands occupied by Israel in 1948. The wall is being built under the pretence of protecting Israel, but as the citizens of Bil’in have made no threat to the lives of the settlers, the goal is not truly security (as claimed) but rather theft of land and settlement construction on that land once stolen. Approximately 1000 olive trees, the life-blood of the community, have been uprooted and destroyed to make way for this wall, which separates the citizens from their own land and orchards. Most of the village’s land (2300 dunums) lies west of (i.e., inside of) the wall, and is planted with olive trees, which is considered the primary source of livelihood. The actual number of olive trees falls somewhere between 100,000-150,000. The rest of the land is used for sowing seeds/grains, planting vegetables, and sometimes as grazing land for livestock. more..

Apartheid looks like this
By Jonathan Cook, Electronic Intifada 2/23/2007
     The scene: a military checkpoint deep in Palestinian territory in the West Bank. A tall, thin elderly man, walking stick in hand, makes a detour past the line of Palestinians, many of them young men, waiting obediently behind concrete barriers for permission from an Israeli soldier to leave one Palestinian area, the city of Nablus, to enter another Palestinian area, the neighbouring village of Huwara. The long queue is moving slowly, the soldier taking his time to check each person’s papers.
     The old man heads off purposefully down a parallel but empty lane reserved for vehicle inspections. A young soldier controlling the human traffic spots him and orders him back in line. The old man stops, fixes the soldier with a stare and refuses. The soldier looks startled, and uncomfortable at the unexpected show of defiance. He tells the old man more gently to go back to the queue. The old man stands his ground. After a few tense moments, the soldier relents and the old man passes.
     Is the confrontation revealing of the soldier’s humanity? That is not the way it looks -- or feels -- to the young Palestinians penned in behind the concrete barriers. They can only watch the scene in silence. None would dare to address the soldier in the manner the old man did -- or take his side had the Israeli been of a different disposition. An old man is unlikely to be detained or beaten at a checkpoint. Who, after all, would believe he attacked or threatened a soldier, or resisted arrest, or was carrying a weapon? But the young men know their own injuries or arrests would barely merit a line in Israels newspapers, let alone an investigation.
     And so, the checkpoints have made potential warriors of Palestine’s grandfathers at the price of emasculating their sons and grandsons.
     I observed this small indignity -- such humiliations are now a staple of life for any Palestinian who needs to move around the West Bank -- during a shift with Machsom Watch. The grassroots organisation founded by Israeli women in 2001 monitors the behaviour of soldiers at a few dozen of the more accessible checkpoints (machsom in Hebrew). more..

Hamas makes haste
By Khaled Amayreh, Al-Ahram Weekly 2/22/2007
     Palestinians are expected to have a national unity government in place by 1 March
     The time has come for a focus on the Palestinian cause. United States Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s meeting with Olmert and Abu Mazen comes at a most opportune moment. Above, a Palestinian holds his country’s flag while the Dome of the Rock appears from behind during clashes in Arab Jerusalem with Israeli border policemen
     Worried about incessant American and Israeli plots to thwart the Mecca Agreement, Hamas is seeking to speed up the process of forming a national unity government in which the Islamic movement and Fatah will be the main coalition partners.
     During the Saudi-brokered talks Hamas and Fatah agreed on 8 February to form a national unity government as part of the wider arrangements that ended the bloody showdown between the two groups which had pushed the Palestinians to the brink of civil war.
     Palestinian sources told Al-Ahram Weekly that the Prime Minister-designate Ismael Haniya had asked "negotiating teams" to work "day and night" to facilitate the formation of the government.
     Along with the rest of the Palestinian political class, Hamas is increasingly apprehensive that the Bush administration may be unwilling to allow the process to be completed without attempting to foment more problems, hence their determination to form the government as quickly as possible, before corrosive American efforts go too far.
     Hamas leaders in both occupied Palestine and the Diaspora have vowed to "save and shield the government of national unity from foreign pressure". Damascus-based Hamas official Mahmoud Abu Marzuq, who describes the national government as "an important achievement based on partnership" has warned against "incessant American efforts" to "sow sedition" and "discord" not only in Palestine but throughout the Middle East. more..

Why the US should talk to Hamas
By Jamil Dakwar, Al-Ahram Weekly 2/22/2007
     As the 40th anniversary of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza approaches, the US must ensure justice for the Palestinians if it is to wrest its image from the dustbin
     The US government has shown wisdom enough in the past to recognise when liberation movements designated as "terrorist organisations" make worthy partners for peace talks. The Irish Republican Army in Northern Ireland and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam in Sri Lanka are two good examples. Now the US has such an opportunity in the Middle East.
     Last week, Palestinian Fatah leader Mahmoud Abbas asked Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas to form a unity government based on the Mecca Accord under which Hamas has committed itself "to respect international resolutions and the agreements signed by the Palestine Liberation Organisation." By accepting the Mecca Accord, which was brokered by America’s ally in the region, Saudi Arabia, Hamas is de facto recognising Israel and is showing serious willingness to pursue negotiations to achieve peace in place of armed resistance.
     Over the past year, the US and other Western countries have sided with Israel in suspending all contacts with the Hamas- controlled Palestinian Authority, including freezing foreign assistance to the Palestinian people. The result has been a deteriorating economic situation that has worsened the living conditions of the Palestinian civilian population and made the possibility of any political solution more distant than ever.
     While European reaction to the Mecca Accord has been by and large positive, diverging from the Quartet’s conditions, raising hopes of an end to the political impasse and the economic boycott on the Palestinian people, the US position has unfortunately remained unchanged. more..

Do Something Good
By Kathy Kelly, Palestine Chronicle 2/23/2007
     As the Occupation Project develops, we carry, shoulder to shoulder, the responsibility that comes with hearing an agonized cry, epitomizing the horror of the consequences of war: "It doesn’t go away."
     This past Tuesday, in Fairbanks, Alaska, nine people entered the office of Senator Ted Stevens to deliver their "emphatic request" that the Senator vote against supplemental funding for the war and then began reading the names of Iraqis and U.S. people who had died because of this war. They separated the names of U.S. troops by age. When ordered to leave, they were only half way through the commemoration of the twenty-one year old U.S. troops who died in Iraq. They began by reading the ages of the younger troops.
     Seth Warncke, a University student, was issued a citation; Rob Mulford and Don Muller were taken to the Fairbanks Correctional Unit. They were released after being in jail for 23 hours.
     Senator Steven’s staff worker in the Fairbanks office assured the nine peace activists occupying the office that their efforts were worthless. "The Senator’s aide told us that our action wouldn’t do any good," said Rob Mulford, "but when we were locked up I knew we’d done something good because a woman jailer spotted us in our cells and she said, ’Oh! You guys are my heroes!’"
     On a more somber note, Rob Mulford and Don Muller told me of a fellow prisoner whom they encountered in the correctional center. He was an Iraq war veteran, age 21. The guards were kind to him, but the young man was very disturbed and ended up fracturing his hand and fist, pounding a wall. After falling asleep, he repeatedly woke up, shouting and cursing, "You killed my friend, - I’m gonna’ kill you," and intermittently sobbing, "It doesn’t change. It never goes away." more..

Rice Jerusalem Summit about Regime Change
By Ira Glunts, Palestine Chronicle 2/23/2007
     Secretary Rice....had hoped to offer tangible incentives to Abbas to continue the armed civil insurrection against the ruling Hamas government at their Monday meeting.
     Despite the grand and hopeful proclamations of Condoleeza Rice [1] in which she pledged a major US commitment to promoting a two-state solution in the region, the real reason for her visit to Jerusalem this week was to continue the relentless pressure on the Palestinians to replace the democratically- elected Hamas government with one led by Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah party.
     The United States, who considers Hamas to be a terrorist group, has refused to recognize its government and has worked toward its removal since Hamas first came to power. Toward this end, the Americans have enlisted the European Union, UN, and Russia (the four known as the Quartet) in imposing an economic and political boycott that has had a crippling effect on both the Palestinian government and society. This boycott has isolated the government internationally and caused great economic hardship upon a people already dealing with the ravages of an ongoing Israeli military occupation. Recently, the political rivalry between Hamas and Fatah escalated into large-scale violence, which has already caused at least 80 deaths, hundreds of injuries and threatens to mushroom into a extremely destructive civil war.
     The Arab population in the Israeli occupied West Bank and Gaza is mired in a truly desperate economic and security situation. In addition, Hamas is weak due to internal political pressure for improved living conditions and for progress in achieving even a temporary political accommodation with the Israelis. It is because of these reduced circumstances that the Hamas government would permit the bizarre situation where a bitter political rival is allowed to negotiate with the Americans and Israelis while they themselves, are ignored and vilified. Hamas hopes that through Abbas, they will be able to reach a compromise with the Quartet and Israel, which would lead to removal of the sanctions. more..

Look West for the Middle East’s violence
By Rami G. Khouri, Daily Star 2/24/2007
     I had the pleasure this week of spending a few days in Doha and Dubai, two booming Gulf emirates that contrast sharply with the tensions and occasional turbulence of my home in Beirut. Without exception, on this trip and during our daily lives throughout the Middle East, the one question that continuously reasserts itself - especially in discussions among Arabs themselves - is: Why is the region so volatile, violent, unstable, prone to extremist rhetoric and actions, and riddled with instability and militarism?
     The opportunity to engage in long conversations with learned people and a few more suspect political types in the heady, hyper-growth atmosphere of the emirates of Dubai and Qatar also offers a useful perspective on the strengths and weaknesses of the Arab world. Qatar and Dubai have planned and implemented impressive developmental programs that have started to catch the attention of the world for more than their dramatic architecture or occasional eccentricities. The order, excitement and ongoing expansion of these cities contrast starkly with the ravages and tensions that define much of the rest of the region.
     We are all well aware of the problems of grief-stricken lands like Palestine, Iraq, Lebanon, Sudan, Algeria, Yemen, and Somalia, plagued by war, civil strife and perpetual stagnation. Even countries that are renowned for their stability and strict security, like Egypt, Jordan and Tunisia, suffer a combination of intermittent political violence and terror attacks, alongside pent-up domestic political and social tensions. The latest example was last week’s shootout between police and terrorists in Tunisia, which should only heighten our acknowledgement that even the most efficient police states ultimately generate their own forms of instability, insurrection and incoherence.
     Why is this so? Why is the entire Arab world - even some Gulf countries like Saudi Arabia and Bahrain - susceptible to chronic tension that manifests itself in regular outbursts of terrorism or domestic strife? Simple and occasionally sinister minds in faraway lands would explain this by culture, religion or values, or by claiming that masses of ordinary Arabs have simply allowed their emotions to overcome them and thus have not permitted themselves to engage in the joys of modernity, democracy and liberty. more..

Who needs Israel bonds?
Globes Online 2/22/2007
     Is the State of Israel Bonds now a redundant entity? President and CEO Joshua Matza says no. -- “It’s hard to get Israelis to part with the perception that the Bonds is a redundant, unwarranted organization, designed to help friends in high places,” says Development Corporation for Israel/State of Israel Bonds president and CEO Joshua Matza, chomping at the end of his cigar. The weather was warm, and the massive yacht splashing about in the water off the shores of the Boca Raton Resort Club in South Florida, blocked the saline spring-like breeze from the nearby Atlantic Ocean. A fitting location to host wealthy Jews, once a year, who lend money to Israel’s government without asking too many questions.
     ....Besotted with their own image
     It appears that between the Grand Marnier and Kosher sushi at the gala dinner at the Boca West Country Club, a total of $153 million was received in pledges to buy State of Israel Bonds. Of this sum, $102 million was from the US, $36 million from Canada, and $15 million from Europe and Latin America. “An all-time high,” Matza called it. Another year, another record. The Bonds’ annual event routinely raises 10-15% of the annual target set by the Ministry of Finance (the target for 2007 is $1 billion). Matza: “I called Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and told him, Ehud, I wish you as good a year as I am having with the Bonds.”
     Behind closed doors, several Bonds customers and activists talk of Matza as having created a money factory, and they should know since, after all, they are the means of production. If the organization is a money factory, then the annual gala dinner at a swank location in Florida is the main production floor. And the technology? The technology of emotional manipulation is the best sales promotion tool that the Jewish brain could conceive.
     The Bonds of 2007 is a lean, dedicated organization that sells Jews overseas a lot of hope, emotional gratification, guilt-free solidarity and social status all wrapped up in bonds with a medium rate of return. But people don’t buy these bonds in order to laugh all the way to the bank. “The Bonds’ marketing basis is emotional,” says Israel Bonds spokesman Raphael Rothstein. “You need to know how to sentimentalize the sales pitch. ‘Israel is in distress,’ ‘Israel, as a source of hope, ‘Israel, as continuity for a lost world.’ These are expressions that are crucial to sales promotion. Now they’re talking of Israel as ‘a focus for innovation,’ and this is also familiar too. more..

DJ Revolutions: Spinning Beats for Freedom
By Ismail Khalidi, Electronic Intifada 2/23/2007
     With the announcement earlier this month that the British group Massive Attack was holding a series of concerts in London to support Palestinian refugee communities was another piece of good news: that Checkpoint 303 was going to be performing a DJ set to open the three benefit shows.
     The international group of DJs or SCs ("Sound Catchers" and "Sound Cutters") and musicians that make up Checkpoint 303 has quietly been bringing the noise on the internet by unleashing wickedly original sound tapestries and instrumentals (free of charge) on their website, www.checkpoint303.com for over two years now.
     And despite their previous near-anonymity they have officially hit the scene running as a part of successful, sold out, three-concert run in London to raise money for The Hoping Foundation (which helped to organize the event) that support Palestinian refugee youth throughout the MiddleEast.
     For those of us who have been following the growth of Checkpoint 303’s sound on the web, it is clear that last week’s concerts were more than just another gig (they also played the week before in Paris), but rather, marked the major-performance debut of a refreshingly intelligent and sophisticated sound in the electronic music scene. And it is sound to be reckoned with judging from their sudden leap onto the international stage -- a leap which, like the success of recent Palestinian films such as Paradise Now, bodes well for those artists worldwide who wish to create work around the issue of Palestine and do so while also enjoying a wide audience for that work.
     In other words, Checkpoint 303’s mounting exposure is a testament not only to the reach of the internet, but also the stubborn potency and much needed voice of the underground (musical, artistic, political and so forth) as well as the persistence and urgency of the question of Palestine, not to mention the international support that the cause garners. -- See also: Checkpoint 303 website more..

Cluster Bomb Victims Push for Ban
By Tarjei Kidd Olsen, Electronic Lebanon 2/22/2007
     OSLO, Norway, Feb 22 (IPS) - As Branislav Kapetanovic brushes aside some grass to get a better view, his arms and legs are ripped off by a cluster bomb dropped by NATO. His eardrums burst. On the way to hospital his heart stops, but he survives to tell the tale.
     Four years and more than 20 surgical operations later, he recounted the fateful day to delegates at a large non-governmental organisation and civil society forum in Oslo Wednesday.
     In his wheelchair, gesticulating with stumps where hands and arms once were, Kapetanovic laid out the case against cluster bombs.
     As Kapetanovic points out himself, he was a military man, and on that fateful day in November 2000, 18 months after the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s 11-week bombing of Yugoslavia, he was disarming cluster bombs for the Serbian military.
     But the truth, documented by NGOs, is that most casualties of cluster bomb strikes and, even more ominously, unexploded bombs, are civilians street-shopping, relaxing in their living rooms, on way to school, kindergarten or work, ploughing their fields, and returning home after war.
     According to estimates by the NGO Handicap International, 98 percent of cluster bomb casualties in the last three decades have been civilian.
     Many cluster bombs do not explode on impact, remaining more or less visible landmines. more..

Inch by inch
By Lucy Fielder, Al-Ahram Weekly 2/22/2007
     As Lebanon’s crippling political crisis continues, all sides fear a return to violence but none seems prepared to compromise
     Forecasts of a breakthrough in Lebanon’s political deadlock looked optimistic at best this week. A meeting between the 14 March leader Saad Al-Hariri and Shia speaker of parliament Nabih Berri, a key figure in the opposition, is anticipated. At the time of going to press, it is by no means clear that it will go ahead.
     A Western diplomat told Al-Ahram Weekly that polarised Lebanese politicians should take the initiative instead of depending on diplomacy. "Yes, there is outside intervention, and Syria’s position is a major obstacle, possibly a decisive obstacle. But the two sides could also be making progress by meeting each other," he said. "The bottom line is that they don’t trust each other."
     Berri seems unwilling to waste time in a meeting where a good chance of success is not assured. In an interview with Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, he said the governing coalition must cede the "blocking third" of cabinet seats demanded by the opposition, which is led by Hizbullah, and in return he would prevail on it to drop its call for early elections.
     Berri warned: "there are many escalatory steps and I use the brakes quite a lot, as I did before and will do later. I do not know, however, for how long I can succeed given the mutual intransigence."
     Opposition protesters have been camped out in downtown Beirut since the start of December, demanding a greater say in government following Israel’s war on Lebanon last summer. Reuters reported this week that the opposition was considering upping the ante with a civil disobedience campaign. Loyalists in the public service would cease to go to work, pay bills and taxes. more..

The Final Punch
By Ramzy Baroud, Palestine Chronicle 2/22/2007
     As the voice of reason, from a traditionalist viewpoint, is being hushed or sidelined, the warmongers’ hold on Washington is still as tight as ever, one of whom is Israel and its dedicated friends on Capitol Hill.
     The configuration of the New Middle East — as envisaged by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during the Israeli war against Lebanon in July-August 2006, most certainly has no place for more than one regional power broker, namely Israel.
     Under such an arrangement — subservient Arabs and Iran governed by an all powerful Israel and supervised, even from afar by the seemingly philanthropic United States — would ensure Israel’s ‘security’, which has for long served as a casus belli, and supposed American interests in the region; regardless of what one thinks of such logic, in Washington, it is still prevailing.
     With the elimination of Iraq — not just Saddam Hussein and his Baath Party as some in the mainstream media tirelessly reiterate, but rather Iraq as a strong Arab nation with immense regional influence — the long sought pact is close at hand. Iran, however, remains the only menacing reality that stands between Israel and its powerful Washingtonian allies and this New Middle East.
     This means that the war of words between Teheran and Washington is mostly inspired by this redoubtable strategic chasm: where Washington strives to knock the Iran factor out of the regional equation, and Teheran pushes with all of its might to keep itself pertinent, indeed equally relevant to the shaping of the region’s future.
     This conflict has been reduced, as required by rhetorical necessity, to that of Iran’s alleged intent to manufacture nuclear weapons, a right that has been exclusively reserved for Israel, who possesses hundreds of nuclear heads and the technology to deliver them, even past the threshold of its intended targets, neighbouring Arab capitals.
     Iran might in fact be aspiring to obtain nuclear technology to produce the lethal weapon, to assert itself regionally, to create an equilibrium of terror, and to — in this age of global unipolarity — shield itself from the troubling fate of its neighbour to the West. more..

Twilight Zone / Quality time
By Gideon Levy, Ha’aretz 2/22/2007
     The Jordanian MIRS chirps on the table. "Where’s Nur?" asks the woman on the line from Amman. "She’s standing next to me," replies her husband in Azariyeh, east of Jerusalem. A chirp every few minutes. Yihye Bassa, a 40-year-old date merchant, has for several years been forbidden for security reasons to travel to Jordan; Nibin, his wife, 26, is forbidden to come here. He barely knows the two girls, 4-year-old Nur and 1-year-old Talin. They are with their mother in Jordan. Yihye met Nur for the first time two years after her birth, when he was still allowed to travel to Jordan; he met Talin for the first time a few weeks ago, on the Allenby Bridge.
     In an unusual and very moving humanitarian gesture, Israel let the couple meet for three hours on the Allenby Bridge, after preventing them from seeing each other at all for about two years. Family reunification: a half-meeting on the bridge, without refreshments, as a "pre-High Court of Justice petition" gesture. Moreover, Israel allowed Nur to join her father for a few months, and now she is here, in Azariyeh. But 18-month-old Talin was not allowed to join her father. All for security reasons. Yihye says that his problems began when the Shin Bet security services wanted to recruit him as a collaborator and he refused. Since then he has been refused permission to leave.
     Now Yihye is sitting in the offices of the new community center in Azariyeh that he runs on a voluntary basis. Nur is still confused by the new person in her life and the foreign landscape, and Nibin chirps from Jordan on her MIRS every few minutes to ask if everything is all right. Oh, the Israeli occupation. more..

The Tragedy of Condoleezza Rice
By Patrick Seale, Middle East Online 2/22/2007
     Condoleezza Rice’s efforts to initiate meaningful peace talks between Olmert and Abbas were probably doomed at the outset, given the preordained neo-con and pro-Israeli positions and Iraqi-Iranian distractions of the Bush administration. Meanwhile, Europe has a chance to assist the Israeli-Palestinian process if it follows Norway’s lead. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice appears to be an intelligent, well-intentioned woman who, like a number of her predecessors, would genuinely like to make a personal contribution to the cause of Arab-Israeli peace. But after no fewer than eight visits to the region, she has failed to advance the peace process by the tiniest of tiny steps. Why?
     The reasons are many and complex, of which the most glaringly obvious is that she has been knifed in the back by the hawkish pro-Israeli Eliott Abrams, the White House’s main adviser on Middle East affairs, but also that President George W. Bush himself has failed, at a critical moment, to support her.
     Rice headed last weekend for Jerusalem, Ramallah and Amman declaring that she wished to discuss the contours of a future Palestinian state and provide the Palestinians with a "political horizon." This was widely read to mean that the United States had taken note of the Mecca agreement, concluded between Fatah and Hamas under Saudi auspices earlier in February, and was prepared to give the proposed new Palestinian national unity government a chance.
     ....The outcome had in fact been decided before Rice even touched down in Israel. Olmert had phoned George Bush on 16 February, and had secured a private assurance from him that the Mecca agreement changed nothing and that the United States would join Israel in continuing to shun Hamas. In the Israeli view, Mecca had actually set back the cause of peace by legitimizing Hamas. Olmert was able to crow that the US and Israeli positions were identical. His spokeswoman, Miri Eisin, ruled out any talks on a final peace deal with Abbas, if he went ahead with plans to form a new cabinet that included Hamas. "We’re not talking about negotiations on final-status issues," Elsin said. more..

Against Israeli rationality
By Gideon Samet, Ha’aretz 2/23/2007
     The principal foe of a rational Israeli policy today is not the prime minister. It’s America.
     Not everything the government does is a failure. The big success this week - apart from apprehending a terrorist in Bat Yam, after he had succeeded in carrying six kilos of explosives on a bus from Jerusalem to Rishon Letzion and then dumping his makeshift bomb in a public garbage can - belongs to Ehud Olmert. In a surprise move, he trapped the U.S. secretary of state on her inconsequential visit to Jerusalem.
     Olmert placed a bomb under the chances of extracting anything that might result in an understanding emerging out of his meeting with Palestinian Authority (PA) Chairman Mahmoud Abbas and out of the Mecca summit. It was a speedy achievement and also one of the peaks of the prime minister’s style of governmental arrogance.
     Although Olmert constantly sees the media as axing him and his ministers, it was interesting to see that, in this case, the media behaved quite politely. Most commentators accentuated Olmert?s statement about the usual suspects in the PA leadership. They don?t deserve any other treatment until they announce the cessation of terrorism and meet the Quartet’s three conditions. Yes, he will meet with Abu Mazen again, but it’s not clear when.
     The leading newspapers in the Quartet countries actually wonder why Israel insists on not taking advantage of the opportunity created by the Saudi monarch.
     While the British prime minister again proposed, on Wednesday, with English politeness, that Israel should talk to Hamas, the headline of a New York Times editorial, for example, termed the meeting in Jerusalem a "charade."
     The moderate meaning of that is a game of illusions.
     A more appropriate gloss would speak of deception. Condoleezza Rice came without any new ideas. She yielded to Olmert, who struck a deal behind her back in a phone call to President George W. Bush. more..

Where Do We Go from Here?
By Joharah Baker, Palestine Chronicle 2/22/2007
     Political developments are speeding up in the Palestinian arena, and this time, seemingly in the right direction. The Hamas-led government and the Fateh-led presidency have finally put down their guns and are sitting down to hammer out the formation of national unity government. This step follows the signing of the Mecca Agreement earlier this month between the two political giants in which both sides committed to forming this government and halting the destructive infighting that has left scores of Palestinians dead.
     Not long after, the trilateral meeting between US Secretary of State Condeleezza Rice, President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, took place in Jerusalem. Two days ago, the three leaders discussed ways in which to jumpstart peace talks, which foundered long ago.
     On the face of things, the situation looks as if it could only go one way: up. However, scratch beneath the surface and age-old complexities and enmities flare up, proving that this is one of the most difficult conflicts in history to resolve. For one, not all Palestinian factions have hopped on board the “unity government” bandwagon. The PLO’s second largest faction and the largest leftist party, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine announced yesterday it would not participate in any new government. Its spokespeople claim that although they appreciate the efforts being put forth and completely back the Mecca Agreement’s consensus over prohibiting the “spilling of Palestinian blood” it cannot compromise its principles and accept the clause on a renunciation of violence or honoring all previously signed agreements with Israel. The Islamic Jihad has also declined participation in any newly formed government for largely the same reasons.
     Nonetheless, this does not mean a unity government will not be successfully created. Eventually, the ministries will be distributed and a government will be formed even if Hamas and Fateh are still bickering over who gets which ministry. President Abbas and Prime Minister Haniyeh have both pledged their commitment to safeguarding Palestinian interests and forming a unified front in the face of the Palestinians’ political challenges. Time will only tell if they will remain true to their word. more..

’We are the ones who will pay for the damage’
By Sabihuddin Ahmed, The Independent 2/19/2007
     I invite anyone who remains cynical about the impact of climate change on the planet to visit Bangladesh. We have more floods. Our droughts have become more intense. The biggest mangrove forests in the world - the Sundarbans - are dying. We are losing precious biodiversity. You can see the effects of global warming with your own eyes.
     The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s report released last month made clear the impact climate change could have on the world. But the terrible fact is that, even if all countries signed up to protect the environment, climate change will take its toll because the damage has been done.
     For Bangladesh, a low-lying and densely populated country, the consequences are serious and unavoidable. We have learned to live with the kind of floods that come sporadically and last maybe three or four months. But it is estimated that by the end of the century up to 20 per cent of its land will be under water. We are talking about millions of people being displaced by permanent flooding.
     These people - those who will be affected the most by climate change - are not the ones who caused it. It is time for the international community to realise that the countries that have damaged the environment will now have to pay for it.
     ....In this, the question of accountability is paramount. At the moment most Bangladeshis are not angry with anyone in particular because they do not understand the science behind what is happening. But slowly their frustration may turn into anger because this poor country had absolutely nothing to do with global warming. And yet, as ever, it is they who suffer. more..

Zionist Logic
By Malcolm X, Malcolm-X.org/The Egyptian Gazette 9/17/1964
     By Malcolm X (Omowale Malcolm X Shabazz)
     The Zionist armies that now occupy Palestine claim their ancient Jewish prophets predicted that in the "last days of this world" their own God would raise them up a "messiah" who would lead them to their promised land, and they would set up their own "divine" government in this newly-gained land, this "divine" government would enable them to "rule all other nations with a rod of iron."
     If the Israeli Zionists believe their present occupation of Arab Palestine is the fulfillment of predictions made by their Jewish prophets, then they also religiously believe that Israel must fulfill its "divine" mission to rule all other nations with a rod of irons, which only means a different form of iron-like rule, more firmly entrenched even, than that of the former European Colonial Powers.
     These Israeli Zionists religiously believe their Jewish God has chosen them to replace the outdated European colonialism with a new form of colonialism, so well disguised that it will enable them to deceive the African masses into submitting willingly to their "divine" authority and guidance, without the African masses being aware that they are still colonized.
     .....The modern 20th century weapon of neo-imperialism is "dollarism." The Zionists have mastered the science of dollarism: the ability to come posing as a friend and benefactor, bearing gifts and all other forms of economic aid and offers of technical assistance. Thus, the power and influence of Zionist Israel in many of the newly "independent" African nations has fast-become even more unshakeable than that of the 18th century European colonialists... and this new kind of Zionist colonialism differs only in form and method, but never in motive or objective.
     At the close of the 19th century when European imperialists wisely foresaw that the awakening masses of Africa would not submit to their old method of ruling through force and fears, these ever-scheming imperialists had to create a "new weapon," and to find a "new base" for that weapon.
     DOLLARISM
     The number one weapon of 20th century imperialism is zionist dollarism, and one of the main bases for this weapon is Zionist Israel. The ever-scheming European imperialists wisely placed Israel where she could geographically divide the Arab world, infiltrate and sow the seed of dissension among African leaders and also divide the Africans against the Asians. more..

The Fatal Flaw
By William Thomas, willthomas.net - Blog 2/21/2007
     What if “Made In China” microchips inadvertently installed in American weapons systems throughout the Persian Gulf were to suddenly fail during a U.S. attack on Iran? While the consequences depicted here by a former member of the U.S. military are hypothetical, there is little fiction in this scenario.
     April 2007, Persian Gulf: Close off the coasts of Iran, three American attack carriers—Enterprise, Eisenhower and Stennis, as well as the marine helicopter assault ship, Boxer—are awaiting a strike order from the National Command Authority who ordered them there.
     Besides deploying the biggest U.S. naval fleet since the Second World War, G.W. Bush has replaced his top commanders in the Persian Gulf, appointing Admiral William Fallon as the new head of Central Command (CENTCOM) for the entire Middle East Theater of Operations. A favorite of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (the JINSA lobbyists who largely determine the neocon’s agenda for Middle East dominance), besides overseeing two disastrous ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the former Navy pilot will now supervise Bush’s career-capping catastrophe in Iran....
     .....While the above account is obviously hypothetical, this scenario presents a true and precise depiction of US and Israeli military vulnerabilities from Chinese-supplied microchips. So far, numerous “broken arrow” nuclear weapons accidents have not resulted in a detonation as described here. But in-flight fuel system shutdowns and accidental ordnance releases are regularly triggered by accidental electronic interference—sometimes with calamitous results (Google JEMI; see Scorched Earth by William Thomas). The raid on North Korea, the “womb room” tests, the nano-graffiti, the destruction of an advanced “Keyhole” spy satellite by a Chinese EMP, 9/11’s implanted false radar returns, and the shootdown of Flight 93 over Pennsylvania are factual events—just as a White House plan to invade Iran under the guise of offering assistance for a precipitated nuclear catastrophe, and Israel’s atomic response already secretly in place in Iran are likewise confirmed by multiple, trusted sources. Is anybody listening? more..

Truth and Fiction in Elie Wiesel’s Night: Is Frey or Wiesel the Bigger Moral Poseur?
By Alexander Cockburn, CounterPunch 4/1/2006
     Did Oprah Pick Another Fibber?
     When in trouble, head for Auschwitz, preferably in the company of Elie Wiesel. It’s as foolproof a character reference as is available today, at least within the Judeo-Christian sphere of moral influence. One can easily see why Oprah Winfrey and her advisers saw an Auschwitz excursion in the company of Wiesel as a sure-fire antidote to salve the wounds sustained by Oprah’s Book Club when it turned out that James Frey had faked significant slabs of his own supposedly autobiographical saga of moral regeneration, A Million Little Pieces.
     Published in 2003, Frey’s irksome book swiftly became a cult classic. (The present author was offered it in the summer of 2004 by a young relative, presumably to assist in his moral regeneration, but after glancing through a few pages returned it, on the grounds that it wasn’t his kind of thing.) Winfrey picked it for her Book Club in September 2005, and it rocketed to the top of the bestseller lists.
     For Frey the sky fell in when, on January 7, 2006, the Smoking Gun website published documents showing that Frey had fabricated many facts about himself, including a criminal record. There were later charges of plagiarism. Frey ran through a benign gauntlet of trial-by-Larry King on January 11, and Oprah called in to stand by her Pick of the Month. She said that what mattered was not whether Frey’s book was true (the Fundamentalist claim for the Holy Bible) but its value as a therapeutic tool (the modern Anglican position on the Good Book). more..

What a strange ’abroad’
By Amira Hass, International Womens’ Peace Service/Ha’aretz 2/14/2007
     The Gaza Strip is "abroad" in a strange way. Israelis need a passport to get there, and Palestinian Jerusalemites need a laissez passer - the same one they need to present when they fly to Paris via Ben-Gurion International Airport. But when these same Jerusalemites go to Jordan via the Allenby Bridge, they use a Jordanian passport. And the Palestinians who live in that "abroad" - the Gazans - are, for the meantime, exempt from crossing with a Palestinian passport; this exemption also applies to residents of the West Bank, by order of the interior minister.
     The confusing multiplicity of procedures is still more remarkable in light of the fact that Israel allows only a few people to enter and leave the Strip. Only a small number of Israelis receive this permission - mainly those with relatives in Gaza or people, primarily women, who have been married to Gaza residents for years. Receiving a permit requires prior coordination, which is very cumbersome, and it sometimes takes days until the request for a permit or a permit extension finds a fax line without a busy signal at the "office for Israeli affairs" in the Civil Administration, a military body to which the interior minister has granted the authority to continue operating the crossing Crossing the approximately half a kilometer that separates the Palestinian side from the Israeli one requires additional coordination, on the phone, and an hours-long wait until the soldiers and clerks on the Israeli side allow permit holders to walk through. But this is not what makes the strangeness of the Gazan "abroad" unique; to many, this is simply reminiscent of the difficulties that totalitarian regimes imposed on travel between countries in Eastern Europe.
     The "abroad" of Gaza is strange primarily for a different reason, a more fundamental one: All its residents are listed in the same population registry as residents of the West Bank, which is not "abroad," and the entire list is controlled by Israel’s Interior Ministry. This control gives Interior Ministry representatives in the Civil Administration authority that the Palestinian interior minister lacks. This control allowed Israel to deprive hundreds of thousands of Palestinians of their residency status after 1967. It allowed the continuation of marital, social, economic, religious and cultural ties between Gaza and the West Bank until 1991 - and then, it severed those ties. This control allows Israel to prevent the addition of foreign residents to the population registry; it allows Israel to intervene in, and even decide, the choice of a partner, place of study, type of medical treatment, address, quality time with children, participation in celebrations and funerals, the writing of wills and distribution of family property. Israel has the authority to ban the entry of friends or family members who are not Palestinian residents - not just their entry into Israel, but also into the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Since October 2000, the ban has been comprehensive. more..

The nuclear ambiguity route
By Avner Cohen, Ha’aretz 2/13/2007
     It is difficult not to see a historical similarity between Iran and Israel’s nuclear situation.
     On May 30, 1961, at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York a fateful meeting was held between Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion and the new U.S. president, John F. Kennedy. At stake was the future of the Dimona project, the Israeli nuclear initiative, to which Kennedy was vehemently opposed. Ben-Gurion repeatedly promised, both publicly and privately, that the Dimona initiative was for peaceful purposes only, but Kennedy did not seem convinced.
     The minutes of the meeting were classified for 30 years on both sides of the Atlantic; in the mid-1990s they were released for publication, first in the United States and afterward in Israel. Only the first 15 minutes of the meeting were devoted to the nuclear issue, the issue of Dimona, but it was the heart of the entire discussion.
     Kennedy emphasized the importance of the Israeli promise that the atomic initiative was for peaceful purposes only, and the importance of this commitment being not only declared but seen as well. Ben-Gurion explained Israel’s future energy problems, repeated his promise that the Dimona initiative was for peaceful purposes, but concluded his words in a somewhat vague manner: "They are asking us if it [Dimona] is for peaceful purposes. And in fact, at the moment the only purposes are peaceful, but we do not know what will happen in the future ... It does not depend on us ... Maybe Russia won’t give bombs to Egypt, but maybe Egypt will be able to develop them on its own." There is no doubt that he wanted to leave himself and Israel a way out of his commitment. more..

It’s Time to Visit Gaza
By Miko Peled, Palestine Chronicle 2/13/2007
     In America people still speak of a ‘peace process’, and the situation in Gaza and in the West Bank is characterized as a conflict between two people who can’t find a fair compromise. Few dare to mention that the only process that is taking place is oppression for the sake of expansion.
     The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one area where liberals and neo-conservatives in America find common ground. From Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton all the way to George Bush and Condoleezza Rice one and all are united in supporting Israel’s assault on the Palestinian people and their land.
     The criticism of Jimmy Carter’s book ‘Palestine, Peace Not Apartheid’ is a case in point. The hysteria on the Right is not worthy of repetition, but House Speaker Nancy Pelosi outdid herself by issuing a statement that: "It is wrong to suggest that the Jewish people would support a government in Israel or anywhere else that institutionalizes ethnically based oppression.’ Wrong to suggest? Here is something right to suggest: Madam Speaker, it is time for you to visit Gaza.
     In ‘The Tribes Triumphant’, arguably one of the best books ever written about the Middle East, journalist Charles Glass describes children in Gaza on their way to school: “..little girls with white fringe collars, boys leading their younger brothers’ with canvas bags of books on their backs, hair brushed back and faces scrubbed .. Thousands and thousands of children’s feet padding the dusty paths between their mother’s front doors and their schools’. Beautiful youngsters so innocent that they could laugh even in Gaza.”
     Glass reveals that 56.6% of the 1.4 million people living in Gaza (if you can call it living) are under the age of 18. That means 792,400 children; Gaza has no cinemas, no theatres, no concert halls, and no space for entertainment or amusement. Where then do these children play? Israel controls all access to, from and within Gaza, never allowing these children to see the world outside this tiny crowded strip of sand they call home. If this, Madam Speaker, is not ethnically based oppression, what is? more..

Now It Is Lack of Food Security
By Dahr Jamail and Ali al-Fadhily, Inter Press Service 2/19/2007
     The lack of security in Iraq is leading now to a collapse in food supplies.
     BAGHDAD -- "Look at us begging for food despite the fortunes we have," 60-year-old Um Muthanna from Baghdad told IPS. Standing at a vegetable market in central Baghdad where vegetable supplies are not what they used to be, Um Mahmood despaired for Iraq.
     "A country with two great rivers should have been the biggest exporter in the world, but now we beg for food from those who participated in killing us." Iraq is rich in oil and agricultural resources.
     Local and international aid flooded into Iraq in 2004, the year following the invasion, but much of the supply was blocked off after the kidnapping of many aid activists in the country.
     The food the Iraqis did get was often not what they needed, or wanted.
     "Iraqis do not feel at ease receiving food aid when they exported food in the past," economist Dr. Jassim al-Rikabi told IPS.
     "Iraq has been a field of aid NGOs since the U.S. occupation began, and many of those NGOs brought foodstuff that is not what Iraqis were used to, but they had to take it due to the need they were facing."
     Barley, wheat, pulses and the famous Iraqi dates are staple diet, and are also exported. Common meals in Iraq include rice, lamb, chicken and locally grown vegetables like cucumbers, onions and tomatoes.
     Under the occupation, Iraqis are getting much of their food from companies in Australia and other countries who assisted the United States during the invasion and occupation. This food has often been of low quality. more..

Washington’s weird way of trying to make friends in Lebanon
Editorial, Daily Star 2/22/2007
     Washington’s latest salvo in the laughably named and prosecuted "war on terrorism" provides yet another example of just how profoundly it misunderstands the issues at hand. On Tuesday, the US Treasury announced sanctions against Jihad al-Binaa, a construction company affiliated with Hizbullah. On the surface the tactic means very little since Jihad al-Binaa is unlikely to hold substantial assets in the United States that can be frozen under the sanctions. As a gambit in the battle for hearts and minds that US President George W. Bush joined by declaring his intent to democratize the Middle East, however, the Treasury’s move could not be more counter-productive.
     In July 1993, an Israeli military onslaught in South Lebanon demolished or badly damaged more than 4,700 homes; Jihad al-Binaa restored virtually all of them. Three years later, the Israelis went on an even more destructive rampage that completely or partially destroyed about 7,000 residences; Jihad al-Binaa rebuilt or repaired 6,714. This past summer, Lebanon’s wrathful neighbor to the south lost all sense of proportion and damaged or destroyed at least 86,000 homes; Jihad al-Binaa sent some 1,000 engineers and 5,000 volunteers to conduct site surveys (although actual rebuilding has been delayed by the current political impasse in Beirut). Leaving aside questions of right and wrong, what can the Bush administration hope to achieve with an empty statement of hostility toward an organization that has done so much good for so many Lebanese who have suffered so much heartache because of so many bombs and shells supplied by the United States.
     Is America ready to take care of all those made homeless by the munitions it has lavished on its troublesome ally? This is an important question for any US policymaker hoping to wean great swathes of Lebanon’s population off affection for and/or reliance on Hizbullah, and history is not encouraging about the answer. Successive US governments did absolutely nothing, for example, to end the 1978-2000 occupation of South Lebanon. And far from reining in the Israelis last summer, the current administration actually rushed them extra bombs - and provided them with diplomatic cover so they could extend a vicious offensive that accomplished no important military goals (unless one considers women and children legitimate targets). more..

A Genre in the Service of Empire:
By Niki Akhavan, Golbarg Bashi, Mana Kia and Sima Shakhsari, ZNet 2/2/2007
     An Iranian Feminist Critique of Diasporic Memoirs
     In a time of pending war against Iran, after the catastrophic consequences of the US-led invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq (with more than 655,000 deaths in Iraq alone), a particularly lucrative industry of Iranian and Muslim women’s memoirs has mushroomed in the aftermath of the 9/11 atrocities. These women’s memoirs have assumed center-stage in appropriating the legitimate cause of women’s rights and placing it squarely in the service of Empire building projects, disguised under the rhetoric of the "war on terror."
     As feminist scholars of Iran and its diaspora, we suggest that these memoirs and their authors must be understood not only in terms of the politics of reception in the United States but also in terms of the U.S. imperialistic project that is informed by the historical Euro-American colonial discourses of civilization. At a time when the neo-colonial and imperialistic projects seek to build a case for military attack or "regime change" in Iran, we ask, how are these memoirs complicit with these projects?
     We identify this memoir genre as a part of industries of knowledge-production that reinforce and fuel the gendered and raced context of global capitalist relations, where the binarized notions of "freedom" and "progress" in the "West" are juxtoposed to "backwardness" and "barbarism" in Iran and in the rest of the Muslim world. Identified as an authentic and authoritative site where the "silenced" Iranian woman finally finds a voice with which to speak, these memoirs reproduce reductive but familiar narratives which pin the constructed "Third-world woman" against her male counterpart while setting the stage for what is presumed to be her salvation.
     In this context, the patronizing language of women’s rights as human rights presumes and actively constructs the category of the oppressed "traditional" Iranian woman, often unaware of her own imprisonment by Islam and patriarchy. The "sombre" woman, in this narrative, must be trained to realize her rights as an individual, imagined as a "modern woman" who embodies an idealized middle class norm of Euro-American consumption. more..

Chomsky on Iran, Iraq, and the Rest of the World
ZNet/Foreign Policy in Focus 2/20/2007
     Noam Chomsky interviewed by Michael Shank Noam Chomsky is a noted linguist, author, and foreign policy expert. On February 9, Michael Shank interviewed him on the latest developments in U.S. policy toward Iran, Iraq, North Korea, and Venezuela. Along the way, Chomsky also commented on climate change, the World Social Forum, and why international relations are run like the mafia.
     Chomsky:...The Iranian issue I don’t think has much to do with nuclear weapons frankly. Nobody is saying Iran should have nuclear weapons –nor should anybody else. But the point in the Middle East, as distinct from North Korea, is that this is center of the world’s energy resources. Originally the British and secondarily the French had dominated it, but after the Second World War, it’s been a U.S. preserve. That’s been an axiom of U.S. foreign policy, that it must control Middle East energy resources. It is not a matter of access as people often say. Once the oil is on the seas it goes anywhere. In fact if the United States used no Middle East oil, it’d have the same policies. If we went on solar energy tomorrow, it’d keep the same policies. Just look at the internal record, or the logic of it, the issue has always been control. Control is the source of strategic power.
     ....Shank: So when the United States considers a potential invasion you think it’s under the premise of gaining control? That is what the United States will gain from attacking Iran?
     Chomsky: There are several issues in the case of Iran. One is simply that it is independent and independence is not tolerated. Sometimes it’s called successful defiance in the internal record. Take Cuba. A very large majority of the U.S. population is in favor of establishing diplomatic relations with Cuba and has been for a long time with some fluctuations. And even part of the business world is in favor of it too. But the government won’t allow it. It’s attributed to the Florida vote but I don’t think that’s much of an explanation. I think it has to do with a feature of world affairs that is insufficiently appreciated. International affairs is very much run like the mafia. The godfather does not accept disobedience, even from a small storekeeper who doesn’t pay his protection money. You have to have obedience otherwise the idea can spread that you don’t have to listen to the orders and it can spread to important places. more..

Building Palestine
By Joharah Baker, Palestine Chronicle 2/15/2007
     If the political conditions are not conducive to long-term economic stability - that is, a viable, sovereign and independent Palestinian state - then no investments, man-made cities or international-funded projects will be able to sustain for long.
     In tandem with the hopes for a successful formation of a Palestinian national unity government, following the Fateh-Hamas signing of the Mecca Agreement last week, cautiously optimistic voices calling for the rebuilding of a tattered and torn Palestine are starting to be heard.
     For years, as Israeli occupation measures and internal disputes ravaged the West Bank and Gaza, potential investors and businesspeople were forced to put their plans on hold until the conditions were ripe for any real nation building. Today, with the hopes that a viable and unified Palestinian government may finally come to fruition, these plans are back in the headlines, including a plan to build a new Palestinian city between Ramallah and Jericho at a cost of $33 million.
     According to Abdel Malik Jaber, executive director of the Paltel Group, the proposed city would include 7,000 housing units that could accommodate up to 50,000 people. The new city would also be home to schools and health centers and would create job opportunities for thousands of unemployed Palestinians.
     The plan is ambitious, to say the least, and depends on a myriad of factors and conditions. Palestinians know all too well how fragile any investment in the Palestinian territories is given the volatility of the political situation. They also know that any money flowing into the territories could literally go up in smoke in the blink of any eye.
     These lessons were learned long ago, after the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993. Late President Yasser Arafat made a hero’s homecoming to the Palestinian territories in 1994 after years of exile, bringing with him the hopes of freedom and the long-awaited dream: an independent and free Palestine.
     For the next six years, on the surface, prospects for a lasting peace seemed closer than ever, although anyone who looked twice would have realized that the Palestinians along with the Israelis and the international community were only contributing to the creation of a façade, which would soon come crashing down around us. more..

Talk is cheap: Bush is pushing the Palestinians toward civil war
Editorial, Daily Star 2/19/2007
     US President George W. Bush likes to remind people that he is on record as officially supporting the creation of a Palestinian state. The most powerful man on the planet boasts, too, that his policy is to work with "moderate" Arabs in order to advance the Palestinian-Israeli peace process. For these reasons and a host of others, his administration’s unaccommodating reaction to the intra-Palestinian deal on forming a unity government is profoundly disappointing, if not terribly surprising.
     President Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah and Prime Minister Ismail Haniyya of Hamas reached their agreement at talks hosted by Saudi Arabia, one of the countries credited by Washington with making positive contributions to the cause of regional stability. Others like Egypt and Jordan have beseeched the United States to move quickly lest the current window of opportunity be closed for the foreseeable future. Despite the frequency with which such governments have toed the American line (at great risk to their own domestic and regional credibility), however, it now seems that the Hamas-Fatah deal is insufficient to satisfy America’s conditions for recognizing a new Palestinian Cabinet.
     This part of the world is intimately familiar with Washington’s habit of seeking to impose double standards, and no one has been on the wrong end of such attempts more regularly than the Palestinians, but the Bush administration is breaking new ground in terms of duplicity and inconsistency. Not satisfied with having starved and intimidated a freely and fairly elected government into sharing power at home, the Americans are now trying to dictate the new government’s foreign policy as well. Officially stated "respect" for previous interim peace accords signed with Israel, for example, is not enough: The Palestinians must vow to abide in perpetuity by the terms of the Oslo process. It does not matter to Bush that key items of Oslo have been altered (in Israel’s favor) under US pressure, that the Jewish state has used the peace process to radically increase the number of colonists living in the West Bank, that it has militarily reoccupied the same piece of land, or that a then-Israeli prime minister has already declared the Oslo Accords "dead." Instead, the Palestinians are expected to follow the rules that their occupiers are paid to flout, to renounce the use of force against a well-armed enemy that frequently kills more children than combatants, and to promise full recognition of a state that refuses to so much as sign - let alone obey - the Geneva Convention on protecting civilians. more..

ANALYSIS: The summit - a slap in the face to the Palestinians
By Avi Issacharoff, Ha’aretz 2/20/2007
     One of the senior Palestinian Authority officials at Monday’s summit sounded upbeat. "The Americans did not raise a white flag and the political horizon is still there. Olmert may reject the unity government but does not reject negotiations with the PLO chairman, Mahmoud Abbas," the senior official told Haaretz.
     However, it’s hard to tell on what concrete facts the Palestinian official is basing his assessment. Several hours after the meeting, Al-Ayam, a Palestinian daily, published an interview with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in which she said that there is no certainty that a Palestinian state would emerge during the tenure of President George W. Bush.
     For many in the Palestinian camp this statement was regarded as a slap in the face for Abbas, and raised much concern about the future of negotiations. This was proof to them that the American administration was giving up on the two-state vision and on efforts to reach a final status agreement.
     The summit also appeared to have been forced. On the eve of the summit, Rice tried to downplay expectations. S., a Palestinian journalist from Ramallah, commented on the Secretary’s visit with an Arab idiom - "you left the same way you came over," or in other words, Rice’s visit was unnecessary.
     Rice promised to return and that the American efforts to renew the negotiations would continue, but for most in the Palestinian leadership this was merely keeping up appearances. In their view, the Americans were going through the motions to appease the Arab world in order to receive support in Iraq, and to appease the European Union so that the Quartet’s unity would continue. more..

Time to ask questions about Condi
Editorial, The Independent 2/19/2007
     The US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice, was in Jerusalem yesterday, preparing for today’s meeting between the Israeli Prime Minister and the President of the Palestinian Authority. It is a meeting she is expected to chair. But it is not at all clear how long it will last. Israel says it will not work with the new Palestinian government unless it recognises Israel, a position, it said, that had been agreed with President Bush.
     In principle, this stance is understandable. How can Israel, given its precarious geographical position, be expected to conduct negotiations with a government, part of which does not recognise it? Yet a part of the Palestinian coalition does accept Israel, and the other part - Hamas - has come close to doing so, while fearing lost support if it spells out a change of policy too explicitly. It is of such shifting definitions, subtle distinctions and double meanings that diplomacy is made. Neither side should start with too much clarity.
     Fresh from the talks in Mecca that hammered out the new unity government, the Palestinians understand this. Israeli leaders have also been adept at the small-print bargaining that has bought Israel the improved, but imperfect, security it now enjoys. And while Mr Olmert’s political weakness may tie his hands today, it is Ms Rice’s approach that should perhaps prompt most questions.
     As National Security Adviser in Mr Bush’s first term, Ms Rice was excused much responsibility for the ill-prepared Iraq war on the grounds that she was caught in the feuding between Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon and Colin Powell at the State Department. She was seen as a pragmatist, whose views contrasted with those of the neo-conservative ideologues supposedly pushing Mr Bush to war. more..

Bush and Olmert Get That Peace Process Hoodoo
By James Brooks, CounterPunch/James Brooks 2/17/2007
     Palestinians and the "Diplomatic Horizon"
     Who is not happy to see movement in the old dead limbs of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process? The Bush administration wants to give the Palestinians a "diplomatic horizon", and that must be better than "diplomatic isolation, economic blockade, and military occupation".
     Israeli PM Olmert, PA President Abbas, and US Secretary of State Rice will meet in Jerusalem next week for a summit. They may not actually discuss peace, but at least they’ll talk about the peace process. That will give folks back home a bit of good news, a welcome break from the war process. Maybe the old sentimental magic will work one more time: "The US has got the Israelis and Palestinians talking to each other. Perhaps the world is looking up!"
     In a universe more proximate to reality, Olmert’s poll numbers have been in the tank since Israel’s atrocious, inept, and illegal war on Lebanon last summer. Now he’s the subject of a police probe into multiple allegations of abuse of office. Like past Israeli prime ministers in a tight spot, Olmert seeks the rituals of the peace process to restore his respectability and importance and give his ratings a sorely needed boost.
     Olmert is being encouraged by Bush, who owes him one. In December, Olmert wanted to squeeze his peace process juice from Syrian President Assad’s offer of unconditional bi-lateral talks. Bush told him it was out of the question.
     But Bush needs the peace process hoodoo just as much as Olmert does, if not more. So the US has become uncharacteristically "engaged in the process", as if it could finally pull off some diplomacy in the Middle East that actually looks like diplomacy.
     Once the image hits the brain, however, we see this "push for peace" is merely "pushing peace", like selling a drug that takes the public to a Neverland where the military occupation of Iraq accomplishes its liberation. more..

Should the West dialogue with Islamists?
Conflicts Forum 2/18/2007
     Alastair Crooke interviewed by Abdullah Faliq, The Cordoba Foundation, October-December, 2006
     “…what Muslims hate is the West’s monopoly on the socio-economic implementation of values such as justice, freedom, good governance, which all Muslims share. Muslims don’t believe simply that the West is the only model of the implementation of these values, and the only way you can have good governance is to have Western good governance. In fact, they are not sure the West has good governance in many respects.” Alastair Crooke
     Abdullah Faliq: In an article posted on the Conflicts Forum website, you cited findings of a public poll in Egypt which asked a cross-section of Egyptians to name the two political leaders they most admired. Hizbullah’s Hassan Nasrallah came top of the list, followed by Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad. Why do you think this is and how does this bode for future stability of Arab governments?
     Alastair Crooke: I think it is extremely significant that we have seen in the wake of the Lebanon conflict a poll in the heart of the Sunni Arab world, that is articulating clear support, not only for the winner who seemed to have led the successful defence of the Lebanon, in terms of Hassan Nasrullah. More significantly the number two on this poll, was the President of Iran and I think that is very striking, and particularly that a Sunni country like Egypt should find its number two spot being occupied by an Iranian President. We see from this two things: the significance is first of all a strong sense among the streets of Egypt that there has been a successful challenge to Western hegemony. The psychology of military hegemony has been successfully confronted and broken in the case of Lebanon. That is going to have a long term and strategic impact on the thinking of not only Egyptians but people throughout the region.
     More importantly, we are seeing the acceptance of a leadership of what I call an “activist wing” of Sunni movements as opposed to a “quietist” model. I am borrowing from a Shi’a terminology, but if you think of movements like the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas as activist movements, I think the sense of the acceptance of Shi’a leadership is not particularly directed towards Iranian leadership but the activist leadership and it is a powerful element for the future and a swing and a move towards activism. No longer you just simply have to accept what is asked of you i.e. accommodation and acquiescence to Western hegemony; this can now be challenged. So this is a huge strategic change and the poll to a certain extent reflects that symbolically. It happens that the activist movement this time is led by Iran but I think for many Sunni Arabs the Shi’a-led struggle does significantly chime with the Arab streets. It’s an important change whereby you have, if you like, the Arab masses walking on one side of the street and certain Arab governments walking on the opposite side. more..

Facing Mecca
Gush Shalom 2/17/2007
     MUST A Native-American recognize the right of the United States of America to exist?
     Interesting question. The USA was established by Europeans who invaded a continent that did not belong to them, eradicated most of the indigenous population (the "Red Indians") in a prolonged campaign of genocide, and exploited the labor of millions of slaves who had been brutally torn from their lives in Africa. Not to mention what is going on today. Must a Native-American - or indeed anybody at all - recognize the right of such a state to exist?
     But nobody raises the question. The United States does not give a damn if anybody recognizes its right to exist or not. It does not demand this from the countries with which it maintains relations.
     Why? Because this is a ridiculous demand to start with.
     OK, the United States is older than the State of Israel, as well as bigger and more powerful. But countries that are not super-powers do not demand this either. India, for example, is not expected to recognize Pakistan’s "right to exist", in spite of the fact that Pakistan was established at the same time as Israel, and - like Israel - on an ethnic/religious basis.
     SO WHY is Hamas required to "recognize Israel’s right to exist"?
     When a state "recognizes" another state, it is a formal recognition, the acknowledgement of an existing fact. It does not imply approval. The Soviet Union was not required to recognize the existence of the USA as a capitalist state. On the contrary, Nikita Khrushchev promised in 1956 to "bury" it. The US certainly did not dream of recognizing at any time the right of the Soviet Union to exist as a communist state. more..

In Place of Appeasement
By Azmi Bishara, Palestine Chronicle/Al-Ahram Weekly 2/17/2007
     If the agreement that resulted from the Mecca meeting is to succeed -- and there is no question that it must -- they need to learn to work together towards the fulfilment of common Palestinian objectives instead of playing to an audience outside.
     For a people either rootless or under occupation, the Palestinians have made more than their share of diplomatic initiatives. The norm, one would think, would be for an occupied people to fight for liberation until they win or else maintain resistance, compelling the international community or the occupying power to come up with solutions to situations that are no longer tenable. The norm, then, is for the resistance to either accept the proposals and throw down its arms, or to reject them and keep on fighting until it is presented with more reasonable ones. The actions of the resistance, moreover, are presumed to be guided throughout by a central aim: liberation and the realisation of self-determination.
     In the Palestinian case we see the reverse: they have come up with so many initiatives and proposals that the Palestinians, themselves, find it difficult to recall the aims of their struggle; not only the original aim but the latest one too. In the process they have lost the distinction between strategies and tactics, between tactics and self-deception, and between tactical goals and pleasing others. Not that their attempts to please others have been very successful; rather, they have whetted the appetite of others, who believe such attempts that are a sign of weakness, to up their demands. Israel will never agree to Palestinian ideas because it finds them pleasing; it will agree only if implementing these ideas suits its interests or if it is forced to agree. For example, when suicide bombings reached their height during the second Intifada, Israeli capital and big business forced their government to choose between resuming the peace process until a settlement could be reached or building the separating wall. The government chose the wall.
     The Palestinians and Arabs have put forward more than enough initiatives and proposals for settlements and interim phases. Israel has consistently refused to take them up; clearly, it is waiting for more, undoubtedly out of the conviction that with every new proposal the ceiling of demands will lower. Surely it is about time for the Arabs to wait for Israel to come to them with proposals or initiatives that they can either accept or reject, as opposed to letting themselves be pushed around by the logic of unilateralism and the construction of separating walls. In the meantime, if they need some kind of unifying inspiration, they can always draw on the Palestinian national consensus document, which represents the broadest common ground, as well as the resolutions adopted by the PLO in successive National Council sessions. Since neither Israel or the US are about to produce an acceptable proposal for a solution in the foreseeable future, the Palestinians, especially following the agreement between Hamas and Fatah, should drive home the message that they, too, have no further proposals to make and that it is not their job to make proposals but rather to fight against the occupation, against the separating wall, against the Judaisation of Jerusalem and other national objectives. more..

Unforgettable Birthday in a Refugee Camp
By Philip Rizk, Palestine Chronicle 2/19/2007
     Outside a commotion had started and people were yelling at each other. Jamal, at first was unmoved, suddenly picked up his phone and rushed outside upon hearing Zaher’s announcement that it was the neighbors fighting over the electricity lines.
     I spent my 25th birthday in Jabalya, Gaza’s biggest refugee camp. I have known Jamal, a taxi driver in Gaza, for almost two years. I could only protest so many times at his neglecting to host me in his home. In spite of the pleas of his children, whom I had met on a number of occasions outside his home, I realized today why he never did. I have often entered the homes of refugees while distributing food across the Gaza Strip and yet what struck me that day was the familiarity of Jamal sitting by my side against the unfamiliarity of his home.
     Entering through the main door I had to duck under a torn cloth that veiled this private space from the world beyond. As I stood up straight I saw the entire house in the blink of an eye, a sensation came over me much like having caught site of something one was not meant to see, the sudden exposure could not be undone. There before me was the living room, court yard and dining room all in one, covered by open skies. Beyond this area were three broken, worn doors. The furthest to the left lead to a small kitchen, the inside of which was out of sight from where I stood, next was a small bathroom, made fully of cement except for a number of rows of tiles pasted to one of the walls thus aesthetically differentiating it from the other two rooms. The last room served as a bedroom for seven of the nine children, in which, Jamal’s wife explained to me, “they all sleep on top of each other.” The parents and the two youngest boys slept in a separate room to near the entrance.
     In the courtyard four cracked broken plastic chairs served as the living room furniture. I was quickly offered one of these while the children that entered throughout my visit would be seated on a knee, the floor, or a stone nearby while the eldest present child would occupy the one remaining chair after Jamal, his wife and I had been seated. Hamza, Jamal’s favorite boy, five and a half, was the first to great me. He was the most interactive, the most confident and yet the most shy of the nine children. Only Abdullah was younger and he came in crying, after learning that Hamza had greeted the guest before he had gotten a chance to do so. After sitting on my lap and being the first to receive the gift of a pen his tears were quickly forgotten. more..

The Rape of Sabrine...
Baghdad Burning 2/20/2007
     It takes a lot to get the energy and resolution to blog lately. I guess it’s mainly because just thinking about the state of Iraq leaves me drained and depressed. But I had to write tonight.
     As I write this, Oprah is on Channel 4 (one of the MBC channels we get on Nilesat), showing Americans how to get out of debt. Her guest speaker is telling a studio full of American women who seem to have over-shopped that they could probably do with fewer designer products. As they talk about increasing incomes and fortunes, Sabrine Al-Janabi, a young Iraqi woman, is on Al Jazeera telling how Iraqi security forces abducted her from her home and raped her. You can only see her eyes, her voice is hoarse and it keeps breaking as she speaks. In the end she tells the reporter that she can’t talk about it anymore and she covers her eyes with shame.
     She might just be the bravest Iraqi woman ever. Everyone knows American forces and Iraqi security forces are raping women (and men), but this is possibly the first woman who publicly comes out and tells about it using her actual name. Hearing her tell her story physically makes my heart ache. Some people will call her a liar. Others (including pro-war Iraqis) will call her a prostitute- shame on you in advance.
     I wonder what excuse they used when they took her. It’s most likely she’s one of the thousands of people they round up under the general headline of ‘terrorist suspect’. She might have been one of those subtitles you read on CNN or BBC or Arabiya, “13 insurgents captured by Iraqi security forces.” The men who raped her are those same security forces Bush and Condi are so proud of- you know- the ones the Americans trained. It’s a chapter right out of the book that documents American occupation in Iraq: the chapter that will tell the story of 14-year-old Abeer who was raped, killed and burned with her little sister and parents. more..

Depleted Uranium: Pernicious Killer Keeps on Killing
By Craig Etchison, Ph.D, Truthout 2/19/2007
     The Questions
     I live a few miles from an ATK (Alliant Tech) plant that produces depleted uranium (DU) tank shells for the military. Tank shells destroy and kill, and they, along with all military hardware, are a constant reminder of our failure as a civilization. But DU weapons and tank shells are only two of many items that raise questions that even our violence prone society needs to address. Since shortly after Gulf War I, soldiers and civilians have been questioning the safety of these weapons which are made of radioactive material. The more questions raised, the more the military-industrial complex has hauled out studies showing the safety of DU munitions. One CEO called DU the "skim milk" of uranium in an article penned for my local paper. An Air Force officer is even stalking the internet, trying to intimidate anyone who suggests DU is anything but benign.
     Yet the numbers suggested that something insidious happens when DU munitions are used. How to explain the exploding rates of cancer, birth defects, and radiation poisoning among Iraqis in the Basra region? How to explain a Department of Veterans Affairs study of 21,000 veterans of the Gulf War that found rates of birth defects were twice as great for male vets and three times as great for female vets who served in the Gulf War compared to vets who did not? How to explain a Washington Post report in January of 2006 that 518,00 of the 580,000 Gulf War veterans were on disability, over half on permanent disability. How to explain over 13,000 dead Gulf War veterans when only 250 were killed and 7,000 injured in the war itself?
     Finally, through the work of internationally recognized research scientist, Dr. Rosalie Bertell, we may have an answer to these questions. The answer has to do with using an analytical methodology appropriate to low level radiation, as opposed to inappropriate methodologies used to date that show DU is harmless, and, equally important, understanding that DU has both a radiological component as well as a heavy metal component, and the two in combination are far more toxic than either is singly. more..

Israelis Keep a Fishy Watch
By Jon Elmer, Electronic Intifada 2/16/2007
     GAZA CITY, Feb 14 (IPS) - In the driving rain, Suhail el-Amoudi stands on the wharf of the Gaza City port looking out over the aged and weathered fishing boats as they bob perilously amid the swells of a Mediterranean winter storm.
     But for el-Amoudi, a 30-year veteran fisher of Gaza’s waters, it is not the waves or the wind that concerns him. Rather, it is the Israeli naval vessel on the horizon, clearly visible despite the storm.
     Throughout the last three decades at sea, El-Amoudi has seen many changes -- but there is always one constant of life in Gaza: "The Israelis are the key to the experience," he said. "Their presence is always felt."
     Particularly since the Palestinian uprising began in September of 2000, Israel has been "tightening the noose" on Gaza’s fishers, said El-Amoudi. The fisherman added that while relations between the Israel Defence Forces and Gaza’s fishermen have never been good, "it has also never been this bad."
     Consequently, the wharfs are sparsely populated and the markets are all but completely empty of fish.
     Gaza port is now a museum of derelict fishing skiffs whose cost of repair far outpaces the resources of their owners.
     "My boat needs 20,000 dollars in maintenance," said el-Amoudi, adding that the predicament has condemned him to poverty. Emptying his pockets of two Israeli shekels (50 cents), el-Amoudi told IPS with a wry smile, "this won’t do."
     There are some 433 boats registered at the Gaza port, but only a tiny fraction of them are seaworthy.
     Fewer still risk the Israeli-imposed ban on Gaza’s fishermen. more..

East Jerusalem: life without permit
By International Committee of the Red Cross, ReliefWeb 2/14/2007
     14 Feb 2007 -- The last time Samah returned to her home from school was on 22 January 2007. The next day, the 14-year-old left her house in Jabal Al Mokaber, a neighbourhood in East Jerusalem, and went to school with her three sisters. When the girls returned in the afternoon, their home was gone and in its place was just a heap of debris.
     Only their little brother Ahmed and baby sister Shaima had stayed home.
     "For the bulldozer it was a two-hour job, for me it will be months of work," says Abu Ahmed, the father of the six children. He knows what he is saying since it is the second time the Israeli authorities destroyed his house in the past two years. In a way, it was better the last time in 2005 because it happened in summer.
     The decision about the second demolition was delivered to him in June 2006. On 23 January 2007 the time was up, and the house was brought down. The reason: no construction permit.
     It did not help that the house stood on Abu Ahmed’s private land and harmed nobody. Actually, following the previous demolition, Abu Ahmed managed to rebuild his house in just twenty days with the help of all his neighbours.
     Neither had it helped that it is winter now in Jerusalem. And, finally, it made no difference that Abu Ahmed is disabled, paralysed from the waist down. He can walk on crutches, but he cannot help his wife Izeyeh much, who is now sifting through the rubble. So far she has found a few chairs and a bed that are still useable. A fan and a fridge were also saved.
     Abu Ahmed’s family’s story is not an isolated case. It is actually quite typical in the area. Their neighbours’ house, just fifty metres away, was destroyed the same day. And then, there were at least six other houses, including one four-storey apartment building destroyed the previous month. Eleven Palestinian families lost their homes in East Jerusalem in January 2007 alone. more..

Returning to Gaza
Tabula Gaza 2/12/2007
     Last night I drove back into Gaza. It feels so strange somehow, this world that was filled with war has suddenly turned back to normal. Jamal explained that he witnessed the hardest days of his life during the past weeks in Gaza, “black days” he called them. Mohamed, my neighbor explained to me that after Abu Mazen’s announcement from Mecca that a unity government had been formed, old Hamas and Fatah rivals were greeting each other on the streets as if nothing had ever occurred. Something did.
     A university was used to stockpile large amounts of weapons which was then later attacked, the electricity company in Gaza City was burned down, one family near where I live had to leave their home after bullets ripped through a window and tore into their furniture only minutes after their young daughter had been trying to follow the activities on the street below.
     In a recent article Jonathan Kuttab explains what might lead to such madness. All this only starts to make sense when one has lived here and seen day in and day out the weight over occupation, the stagnation of a life lacking so many freedoms that I have taken for granted most of my life. more..

The Experience of Mohammad, 11-year-old in US Prison
By Greg Moses, Electronic Intifada 2/13/2007
     During the day Friday, the words of 11-year-old Mohammad Hazahza have filled him up and weighed him down. On Friday night, he pours the words back out, as if wanting to be lifted back up.
     "Mohammad is so protective of his mother," says Ralph Isenberg in a weary and reverent voice, recalling the day’s visits to Dallas reporters. "I watched as he got her chair and made her comfortable. And that’s what he did in jail. He protected her from forced labor. When she was ordered to clean the common area, he did that work for her. He really understands family and duty."
     For mother Juma, jail was a very difficult time. Because of her food allergies, she has come to rely on some foods. Tomatoes for example. Family supporter Riad Hamad of the Palestine Children’s Welfare Fund says Juma asked her jailers for tomatoes, but they never gave her any. Not one tomato in a hundred days. She lost 12 pounds.
     "I was shocked at what the jail has done to her physically," says Isenberg. "There were times when I thought she would pass out. They are both very traumatized. And all I can say is we’re cranking up real hard for the release of the rest of the Hazahza family."
     Like two other families of Palestinian heritage who were abducted by USA immigration authorities in early November, the Hazahza family had been split up. Juma and Mohammad were jailed at T. Don Hutto prison in Taylor, Texas, while father Radi was locked up at Haskell, Texas along with his four adult children.
     The mother and son recall a hard knock at the door and then a crash as men with guns filled their apartment in a pre-dawn raid on November 2. Mohammad describes the guns as AK-47s. If that’s not the model number, he was definitely looking down barrels of semi-automatic assault rifles. The family of seven were ordered out of the house. No time to change out of bed clothes. more..

Psychosocial Causes for Palestinian Infighting
By Dr. Eyad El-Sarraj, Palestine Chronicle 2/15/2007
     The formation of those political, partisan and religious identities and the view that ultimate force is the model of heroism are the major cause of the status quo of Palestinian armed conflict which finds its fuel in many causes such as division.
     Many questions even after Mecca meeting remain … what has become of us? Our people have suffered for 59 years from displacement, homelessness, discrimination, impoverishment and expatriation, but they withstood that suffering and never killed each other; so what happened to us? The late Arafat rejected a plan to kill Abu Nidal, who had already killed a number of Palestinian leaders, and said, “If we start this series of killings, we will never stop.” So what happened? I have heard stories about new forms of cold-blooded and callous murder, and about Palestinians denigrating and holding as infidel other Palestinians or accusing them of heresy and bigotry as a prelude to ostracizing or murdering them. I have also heard numerous stories about children who have been horrified and traumatized and have fallen victims to nightmares, loss of appetite, insomnia and fear of street-walking. What is happening to us? How could things amount to assaulting homes, mosques and universities?
     Politics and political difference alone do not provide the answer. There are several additional social and psychological factors for what is befalling this society. A safe and stable environment is one that produces normal children, while the environment we have been living in since the occupation is one in which violence proliferates and becomes rampant.
     I: Torture After the 1967 Israeli occupation, a legitimate national armed resistance movement emerged involving multitudes of freedom fighters. I can recall that, while I was working at Al-Shifa hospital in the early seventies, we received several murdered and injured freedom fighters every day. Reacting to that resistance and in order to contain and destroy it, Israeli forces arrested tens of thousands of Palestinians and subjected them to systematic and various forms of torture as documented by research teams of both Palestinian and Israeli institutions acting in the area of defending human rights. more..

The Makkah Agreement
By Ramzy Baroud, Palestine Chronicle 2/15/2007
     The next a few weeks will reveal the potency of the Makkah agreement, as opposing interpretations of what it in fact means and how such meaning should be implemented will determine the next step for all parties involved.
     The Makkah agreement, signed between rival Palestinian groups, Hamas and Fatah on February 8, under the auspices of the Saudi leadership, was welcomed by thousands of cheering Palestinians throughout the occupied territories, and seen as the closing of a chapter of a bloody and tumultuous period of their history.
     Officially, although more subtly, there is an equal eagerness to bring a halt to an oppressive command of economic and diplomatic sanctions that have rendered most Palestinians unemployed and living well below the poverty line.
     In fact, almost all Palestinians want to remember, if they must, the bloody clashes that claimed the lives of over 90 people since December as a distant memory, a bitter deviation from a norm of unity and national cohesion, according to which they want their struggle to be remembered.
     Diplomatically, aides to Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah, and advisors to Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh are fanning out across the globe, each group heading to its traditional political milieus: the former group to Western Europe and the United States, and the latter to Middle Eastern and Islamic countries. Both Fatah and Hamas are keen to demonstrate that by endorsing the agreement, their fundamental position remains unchanged, an arduous task indeed.
     The official reactions to the agreement, emanating from the four corners of the globe are hardly encouraging. The so-called Middle East Quartet -- consisting of the United States, the United Nations, the European Union and Russia -- although they welcomed the agreement, hoping that it might produce the desired ‘calm’, reiterated their conditions that must be unreservedly ratified by the Palestinian government if the sanctions are to be lifted; these conditions are the recognition of Israel, the renouncing of violence and the acceptance of past agreements signed between both parties, namely the Oslo Accords. more..

Mecca opens the way for Europe
By Henry Siegman, International Herald Tribune 2/14/2007
     PARIS: The recent agreement in Mecca between Fatah and Hamas demonstrates the fallacy of a widely held belief — that the United States alone holds the key to resolving the Israel- Palestine conflict. In fact, the Saudi-sponsored accord opens the door to a major European role in the Middle East peace effort. The question is whether Europe will walk through that door.
     Although Hamas has committed itself to "respect" previous agreements between the PLO and Israel, it is not yet clear whether the Mecca accord obligates Hamas to explicitly recognize Israel. What is clear is that if Hamas and Fatah implement the agreement, form a unity government and return the rule of law to Gaza and the West Bank, they will have withdrawn from the brink of a Palestinian civil war that would have ended for the foreseeable future remaining prospects for a peace process and Palestinian statehood. That is a major achievement for which Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah deserves great credit.
     What made this achievement possible was the realization not only by Hamas, but by Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas and King Abdullah as well, that no matter how far Hamas might go in meeting the conditions called for by the so-called Quartet — the United Nations, the European Union, Russia and the United States — Israel has no intention of returning to the 1967 border, and the United States has no intention of making the Israelis do so.
     There had been at least a theoretical plausibility to the notion that if Abbas could prove that the moderation he exemplifies yields major improvements in the lives of Palestinians, he might have been able to prevail over Hamas. But Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his government not only failed to make such improvements, despite repeated promises to do so, but humiliated Abbas and destroyed what credibility he had by pressing him to play the role of a Palestinian Pétain who accepts Israeli money and arms in order to kill fellow Palestinians. And the Bush administration has done nothing to press Israel to deliver on its commitments, beyond Washington’s empty rhetoric about a two-state "political horizon." more..

More than a walkway
By Daoud Kuttab, Electronic Intifada 2/13/2007
     If Israeli officials felt that the protest against work near Al-Aqsa mosque was a local problem that would soon go away, they were not watching Lebanese television.
     Some might think that the Arab world’s most popular TV program, Star Academy, is all about singing youth and half-dressed presenters. But on Friday, February 9, the students at Star Academy joined together in singing the song of Lebanese superstar Fairuz about Jerusalem.
     Dressed in chic black outfits, the entire class of Star Academy 4 joined hands in front of sets depicting Jerusalem’s Old City walls as they sang "Zahrat al Madain" (The flower of cities).
     Without making a single reference to the latest controversy over the Mughrabi Gate walkway, the directors of this musical program made a huge political sensation. The lyrics of the song, written just after the 1967 occupation, reminded the tens of millions of young Arab viewers of Jerusalem’s centrality to the Arab and Islamic cause more than any politician ever could have.
     Israeli spin doctors’ attempts to portray the dig by the Israel Archeological Authority as nothing more than a municipal action aimed at fixing a walkway did little to sway Arab opinions, which continue to see the struggle in Palestine, and especially in Jerusalem, in larger-than-life terms. more..

Media fall for pro-Israel hate group’s "Terror Free Oil"
By Ali Abunimah, Electronic Intifada 2/13/2007
     In recent days, National Public Radio and the BBC have been among the countless media outlets to give prominent publicity to an organization calling itself "Terror Free Oil," (TFO) which claims to have established gasoline filling stations in several US cities, that claim not to sell oil from the Middle East.
     Much of the coverage has read like a press release for the organization, or has treated it as a cute feature story, accepting at face value the claims made by its spokesman. The fundamentally racist nature of the claims TFO makes, and the long history of anti-Muslim statements and activities of its founder have been totally ignored.
     The Terror-Free Oil Initiative claims on its website that it is "dedicated to encouraging Americans to buy gasoline that originated from countries that do not export or finance terrorism." It states, "We educate the public by promoting those companies that acquire their crude oil supply from nations outside the Middle East and by exposing those companies that do not."
     Yet it does not specify anywhere which countries these are more precisely than the "Middle East," nor how buying oil from them supports terrorism.
     The initiative’s founders view all the people of the Middle East and their governments as supporters of terrorism. Emphasizing this, the website includes slogans that gas station owners are encouraged to display, such as "Our oil does not come from the Middle East, Your dollars do NOT finance terrorism." more..

Who is Muqtada al-Sadr?
By Patrick Cockburn, CounterPunch 2/15/2007
     The Most Powerful Man in Iraq
     Whatever else the US intended when it invaded Iraq in 2003 it was not to hand power to an Islamic militant in a black turban who denounces Washington and Israel in the same breath. The claim by two American officials yesterday that Muqtada al-Sadr, the radical Shia nationalist cleric, has left for Iran is a measure of how far the US would like to see him out of the Iraqi political scene.
     Allegations by US officials in Baghdad have little credibility after almost four years in which they have been repeatedly exposed as untrue. Supporters of Muqtada immediately denied that he was in Iran and either refused to say where he was or asserted that he was in the Shia holy city of Najaf. He has every reason to keep his location a secret, since in the past the US military has said it will either kill or capture him if it can. Two of his most important aides have been killed in mysterious circumstances in the past week.
     We may be close to a final confrontation between the US and Muqtada, perhaps the most important political figure in Iraq. The US and Iraqi governments are starting their much-heralded campaign to regain control of Baghdad from the Sunni insurgents and Shia militias, of which the most important is Muqtada’s 70,000-strong Mehdi Army. Iraq’s borders with Iran have been closed for 72 hours.
     Muqtada himself has no doubt that he is under threat. In an interview in January he said: "I have moved my family to a safe place. I have even made a will and I continually move around so they have trouble knowing exactly where I am." He has been trying to avoid becoming a US target. He plays down his own strength. Asked about claims that the army and police are infiltrated by his men, Muqtada said the reverse was true and "it is our militias [that] are swarming with spies. It doesn’t take much to infiltrate the army of the people." He denies that the death squads killing Sunni are really members of the Mehdi Army.
     Probably, Muqtada and the men around him believe that if he can avoid a direct clash with the US army then he will win in the end. His popularity among the Shia is great. In the past few weeks his men have stopped carrying their weapons so openly in the streets and have closed a number of their offices in Baghdad. But the militiamen are seldom far away. In Sadr City they have only retreated deeper into the vast shanty town of two million people that is the greatest bastion of Sadrist support. more..

Vermont Legislature Says Bring Them Home Now!
By James Marc Leas, CounterPunch 2/16/2007
     "I Swore to Uphold the Constitution. Instead, I Disgraced It"
     The Vermont Senate and House both passed resolutions "urging the President and Congress to commence immediately the orderly withdrawal of American military forces from Iraq."
     The resolutions also both urge Vermont "Governor [James] Douglas to enlist the support of other members of the National Governors Association to speak out against the war in Iraq and the announced troop surge and to support a withdrawal from Iraq of American troops."
     Vermont is the first state to pass a resolution calling for troops to come home from Iraq.
     Representative Mike Fisher, the lead sponsor of the resolution, told Democracy Now, "sometimes states have to step up and lead when Congress is not doing enough. And this was a time when Vermonters were able to speak up and say clearly that it was time to take some real leadership to end this war."
     The Vermont Senate resolution was sponsored by 18 of the 30 members and passed with a vote of 25 to 4 without any amendment. The Vermont House resolution was sponsored by 72 of the 150 members, and as amended, passed with a vote of 95 to 52. The resolutions gained the support of the leadership of both houses.
     While both resolutions oppose the escalation of troop levels in Iraq, the Vermont Senate version states that "this legislative body believes that an escalation of American troops in Iraq is exactly the wrong foreign policy direction, and that the presence of American troops in Iraq has not, and will not, contribute to the stability of that nation, the region, or the security of Americans at home or abroad." more..

Jordan Valley Isolated
By Jamil Husni, International Solidarity Movement 2/13/2007
     After having finished a hard-working day in the area, three Palestinian Water Authority employees reached al-Hamra checkpoint in the Jordan Valley, on their way to Ramallah. The Israeli army refused to let them through, claiming that their permits are for West Bank checkpoints only.
     Othman Sheikha, the wells’ observer in the West Bank said of his arguement with an Israeli soldier: “He demanded special permits to enter the Jordan Valley, other than the permits we have.”
     His colleague, who seemed to be less nervous than him said “in order to reach a village or agricultural area in the Jordan Valley, you have to prove to the Israeli army that you are not a West Bank resident.”
     He added: “Jerusalem and the Jordan Valley are one issue,” referring to Israeli intentions to dominate these two vital areas.
     Israel prevents all West Bank residents from entering the Jordan Valley under security pretexts. This is a real yet unofficial Israeli policy implemented by the army in an area they call the eastern isolation area.
     “The next goal for Israel is the Jordan Valley or 30% of the West Bank. There are procedures that Israel does in secret and in public to annex the Jordan Valley and to isolate it from the rest of the West Bank” says Hami al-Masri, a political analyst.
     Issa Zboon, director of Geographic Information Systems Unit in the Applied Researches Institute (Areej), said that the area of the eastern isolated zone, from the eastern mountains to the Jordan River, is about 1555 km². According to him, Israel has in effect completed its isolation of the Jordan Valley at the beginning of last year. Even before that, all West Bank residents were forbidden to enter the area due to a law commonly known as the “Identity Law. more..

Suzi Hazahza Imprisoned in Texas: Why Her Family Must be Freed
By Greg Moses, Electronic Intifada 2/16/2007
     Tasting the food that Suzi Hazahza cooked for him on that first Thursday in November, Reza Barkhordari couldn’t have been more joyful. He went to Suzi’s house every night after work, to sit with her whole family. And each night, the wedding drew a day closer.
     "We met at a local Middle Eastern coffee shop in Richardson, Texas called the Al-Afrah," recalls Reza over the telephone. "That’s where I saw her for the first time, and it was instant connection. It was so strong that Suzi’s mother noticed and helped in connecting the two of us. Shortly after that Suzi and I both realized it was something that was meant to be, and we would be spending our whole lives together. That was on August 6, 2005."
     "I proposed to her on August 6, 2006, our first anniversary. My mother encouraged me to do it, and she sent a diamond ring to Suzi. We were to be married over the Christmas holidays."
     In preparation for the wedding, Reza invited the Hazahza family to move closer to his home in Plano, where it would be easier to keep everyone in daily contact. On the first Monday in November, they were to close on a home in Frisco. What American dream could have seemed more complete?
     The first Friday of November, however, found Reza driving to the Dallas offices of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in search of the love of his life. Suzi and her entire family had been rounded up at gunpoint. more..

Palestinian Revolution Cinema Comes to NYC
By Emily Jacir, Electronic Intifada 2/16/2007
     Notes on Palestinian Revolution Cinema
     The New York Arab and South Asian Film Festival will pay tribute to a group of filmmakers who have made significant contributions to various categories of Palestinian Revolution Cinema between the years of 1968 and 1982. Given the current political environment in Palestine, Iraq, and Lebanon in 2007, it is especially important to screen these films which have slipped through the cracks of history. They are a visual testament to past events and offer us a glimpse of history from the perspective of the people who actually lived it, a perspective not sanctioned by the official US/European meta-narrative of the region. In the context of last summer’s Israeli invasion of Lebanon, screening Monica Maurer’s film Born Out of Death of the aftermath of the Israeli bombardment of Beirut in 1981 has an ever more present urgency. How does our frame of reference of the current dire and desperate situation for Palestinians shift when we see the 1974 Israeli destruction of the Palestinian refugee camp Nabatiya in Mustafa Abu Ali’s film They Do Not Exist?
     A brief history
     In 1968 in Jordan, the Palestine Liberation Organization founded Aflam Filasteen (Palestine Films). In the beginning, they focused on documenting the struggle through photography. Mustafa Abu Ali, a director with the Jordanian film department, along with photographer Hani Jawharia and cinematographer Sulafa Jadallah (incidentally the first camerawoman in the Arab world), were the force behind it. In 1969, they produced their first film, No to the Option of Surrender which was filmed by Mustafa Abu Ali and edited by Salah Abu Hannood. The film recorded the demonstrations taking place in Amman against the Rogers Plan. Also in 1969, at the invitation of al-Fateh, Jean Luc-Godard traveled to the refugee camps in Jordan and spent time with the film unit. Upon his departure from Amman he donated his video camera, (with a recorder/player vtr -- one of the first models of video) to the group. [*] The first cine camera, an Ariflex BL 16, was provided to the group by Abu Jihad, Khalil Al Wazeer, a Fateh Central Committee member. [**] Previous to this they had been borrowing cameras to do their work. Another key film and the last film from the period in Jordan was With Soul and Blood(1971), filmed and directed by Jawharia and Abu Ali. It was shot during the events of Black September in 1970 when the Jordanian Army massacred Palestinians. more..

Immobile Palestinians: ongoing plight of Gazans in Jordan
By Oroub El Abed, Ma’an News Agency/Forced Migration Review 2/16/2007
     Oroub El Abed, an independent researcher based in Amman, wrote the following piece on the ongoing plight of Gazans in Jordan for the Forced Migration Review, a publication based in the UK’s University of Oxford.
     Jordan’s decision not to legally integrate ex-residents of Gaza has led to long-term neglect of their civil rights and denied them opportunities to secure decent livelihoods. Statelessness leaves many in a permanent state of legal limbo.
     Palestinians who arrived in Jordan in the immediate aftermath of the Nakba (catastrophe) of 1948 were granted Jordanian citizenship. As Jordanian citizens they and their descendants hold passports valid for five years, enjoy the right to vote and have full access to government services. Each muwatin (citizen) has a ‘national number’, a civil registration number accorded at birth or upon naturalisation which is recorded on national ID cards and on the family registration books which are issued only to citizens.
     Gazans in Jordan are doubly displaced refugees. Forced to move to Gaza as a result of the 1948 war, they fled once more when Israel occupied the Gaza Strip in 1967. Guesstimates of the number of Gazans in Jordan range between 118,000 and 150,000. A small number have entered the Jordanian citizenship scheme via naturalisation or have had the financial resources to acquire citizenship. Many Gazan non-citizens live in Amman and other Jordanian cities. A significant proportion live in two camps run by UNRWA. Most of the 30,000 residents of Gaza (also known as Jerash) camp are Gazans while a few thousand of the residents of Hittin camp are 1948 refugees, subsequently displaced from Gaza.
     On arrival in Jordan, the ex-residents of Gaza were granted temporary Jordanian passports valid for two years but were not granted citizenship rights. The so-called ‘passport’ serves two purposes: it indicates to the Jordanian authorities that the Gazans and their dependents are temporary residents in Jordan and provides them with an international travel document (‘laissez-passer’) potentially enabling access to countries other than Jordan. more..

A chance to change direction
By Danny Rubinstein, Ha’aretz 2/13/2007
     The Israeli government can and should recognize the Palestinian unity government. Can recognize - because in his letter of appointment, Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas calls on Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh "to honor the legitimate Arab and international resolutions and to honor the agreements signed by the Palestine Liberation Organization." This could be seen as a call to abide by the Oslo Accords, including the three demands leveled by the Quartet (recognizing Israel, honoring prior agreements and denouncing violence). Should recognize - because recognition of the new government is the only way now to renew negotiations with PA head Abbas, who has received the backing of all the Palestinian factions to conduct the talks.
     Out of the plethora of declarations and reactions at the end of the Mecca conference, it was important to notice one headline, prominent in several media channels - the one concerning the comments by Hamas leader Khaled Meshal on the letter of appointment that Abbas wrote to Haniyeh. After promising that Hamas will be committed to this letter, Meshal added: "Hamas is adopting new political language."
     This does not mark a political turnaround in Hamas. No revolution of clear and official recognition of Israel occurred or will occur, certainly not in the near future. But there is some change. Meshal himself testifies to this change, though no political figure hastens to admit that he is changing his position. The change is evident in the route Hamas has traveled this year - a route that, for many Israelis, was not particularly dramatic, but for the Hamas leadership can be seen as a change in direction. more..

We Are Being Suffocated
By Sami Abdel-Shafi, Palestine Chronicle 2/12/2007
     It is one thing for the Quartet to demand a Palestinian rejection of violence, but unless pressure is brought to bear on Israel to release its military grip from the Palestinian territories it will suffocate Palestinian hope and show that the world is only chasing a phantom of peace.
     It was a surreal but telling reflection of how lonely Palestinians have become as their leadership has seemingly been pushed into breakdown and failure, while Israel watched from the sidelines. Late one night, I was suddenly yelled at to stop my car, turn the lights off and roll down the windows. Two masked men, without any identifying insignias, closed in from the sides; one pointed his machine gun at me while the other, two steps behind, shouldered a loaded rocket-propelled grenade launcher. That was a week last Thursday, hours after fierce clashes erupted between Hamas and Fatah, ending the seventh ceasefire between the factions, and ushering in the deadliest power struggle yet.
     To Palestinians it seemed sadly clear that the moral credit of their cause was being eroded: how must it look to the outside world that they had flip-flopped in one year between democratic elections and internecine violence?
     A day before this incident, a House of Commons development committee report warned of drastically deteriorating conditions in the occupied territories as a result of the US-led economic embargo in the wake of last year’s elections. The report questioned the proportionality of Israel’s own blockade and its implications for the prospects of a lasting peace. The Palestinian infighting only underlined the sense of those warnings. more..

As long as it’s just talk
By Aluf Benn and Shmuel Rosner, Ha’aretz 2/11/2007
     .....And now for the analysis. From what the official said, it appears Olmert is going for a diplomatic process with the Palestinians primarily for the sake of the international support it will bring him. The newspaper headlines may say, "They’re talking about a final status accord," but there won’t be much content behind them. The parties’ positions are very far apart, maybe too far. Abbas is insisting on "all or nothing," that is, a final-status accord without interim steps, but Olmert will not risk overly bold moves that could bring down his government.
     An ambassador from a Central European country corroborated this analysis last week. He felt that Olmert’s people were pleased with the success of the policy of isolating Hamas, which is proving itself: Now Fatah is fighting Hamas, and Israel is not involved. We don’t have any complaints about Israel, said the ambassador. You’re maintaining the cease-fire in Gaza, and that’s what there is for now. Israelis who have spoken with U.S. officials recently came away with a similar impression. They talk about a lot, but expect little. Rice’s visit at the end of next week, and the summit with Olmert and Abbas, will revive the diplomatic buzz. No more than that.
     Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee member Effi Eitam (NRP-National Union) visited the American capital this week, and met with a number of different people on Capitol Hill. He believes he is being listened to more seriously now, due to the expectation that the Israeli right will soon be returning to center stage. Kadima has no future, Eitam told his listeners at the Heritage Foundation, and the political system will again organize itself into two blocs: Likud-Labor, Bibi-Barak.
     He asked his American interlocutors to consider the following: Look at Gaza, and then look at the West Bank. There, in Gaza, where the occupation ended, there is only chaos, gunfire, bloodshed and war. But in the West Bank, it is relatively quiet. Not that Eitam is happy about the withdrawal from Gaza, but, he told the Americans, a lesson can be drawn from it. The occupation may not sound very nice, but it turns out that "for the Palestinians, it’s preferable to what’s happening now in Gaza." Eitam suggested that the best scheme to follow is this: In the coming years, the goal should be to preserve the status quo. No initiatives, no withdrawals, no promises, no deals. "Until when?," a dubious Congressman asked him. "Until there’s someone to give the key to," Eitam replied. And he thinks this will take a very, very long time. more..

Intelligence Briefings to NYT Notch Up Tension
By Alexander Cockburn, CounterPunch 2/10/2007
     Will They Nuke Iran?
     President Nixon, a very good poker player, once defined the art of brinkmanship as persuading your opponent that you are insane and, unless appeased by pledges of surrender, quite capable of blowing up the planet.
     By these robust standards George Bush is doing a moderately competent job in suggesting that if balked by Iran on the matter of arming the Shi’a in Iraq or pursuing its nuclear program he’ll dump high explosive, maybe even a couple of nukes, on that country’s relevant research sites, or tell Israel to do the job for him.
     In Washington there are plenty of rational people in Congress, think tanks and the Pentagon who think he’s capable of ordering an attack,-- albeit not a nuclear one -- with bombers carrying conventional explosive and with missiles from US ships in the Persian Gulf.
     Colonel Sam Gardner, who’s taught at the National War College recently sketched out on this site the plan as it could unfold: already the second naval carrier group has been deployed to the Gulf area, joined by naval mine clearing ships. "As one of the last steps before a strike, we’ll see USAF tankers moved to unusual places, like Bulgaria. These will be used to refuel the US-based B-2 bombers on their strike missions into Iran. When that happens, we’ll only be days away from a strike."
     Gardiner cautioned that "It is possible the White House strategy is just implementing a strategy to put pressure on Iran on a number of fronts, and this will never amount to anything. On the other hand, if the White House is on a path to strike Iran, we’ll see a few more steps unfold.
     "First, we know there is a National Security Council staff-led_group whose mission is to create outrage in the world against Iran. Just like before Gulf II, this media group will begin to release stories to sell a strike against Iran. Watch for the outrage stuff." more..

Iran ’Fooling’ U.S. Military
By Dahr Jamail and Ali al-Fadhily, Inter Press Service 2/12/2007
     NAJAF, Feb 12 (IPS) - New evidence is emerging on the ground of an Iranian hand in growing violence within Iraq.
     As the United States heads for a confrontation with Iran over allegations of Iranian involvement in bombings, the massacre in Najaf last month indicates that Iran could be working also through the Iraqi government, local leaders in Najaf say.
     The slaughter of 263 people in Najaf by Iraqi and U.S. forces Jan. 29 provoked outrage and vows of revenge among residents in and around the sacred Shia city in the south. The killings have deepened a split among Shias.
     Iran is predominantly Shia, one of the two main groupings within Islam along with the Sunnis. Iraq has for the first time a Shia-dominated government, comprising groups that have been openly supportive of Iran.
     The people killed were mostly Shias from the Hawatim tribe that opposes the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq as well as the Dawa Party. These two pro-Iranian groups control the local government in Najaf and the government in Baghdad.
     The Najaf attack has provoked strong reactions among members of the Hawatim tribe and among other Shia groups who are not loyal to Iran - and who became the target in those killings.
     An attack on a local tribal leader led to an assault on members of the tribe by U.S., British and Iraqi forces. The tribe was described by government officials as a "messianic cult."
     Abid Ali who witnessed the Najaf fighting told IPS that a procession of roughly 200 pilgrims from the Hawatim tribe had arrived in the Zarqa area near Najaf to celebrate the Ashura festival. Following a confrontation over the procession, Iraqi army soldiers at a checkpoint shot dead Hajj Sa’ad Sa’ad Nayif al-Hatemi, chief of the tribe, as he and his wife sat in their car.
     Members of the tribe then attacked the checkpoint to avenge the death of their chief.
     "It was after this that the Iraqi army called in the Americans, and the planes began bombing civilians," Ali said. "It was a massacre. Now I believe the internal Shia fighting has entered a very dangerous phase." more..

Israel, Iran and the Bush Administration
By Gabriel Kolko, Palestine Chronicle 2/12/2007
     Israel’s power after 1947 was based on its military supremacy over its weaker neighbors. It is in the process of losing it-if it has not already. Lesser problems, mainly demographic, will only be aggravated if tension persists.
     There has been a qualitative leap in military technology that makes all inherited conventional wisdom, and war as an instrument of political policy, utterly irrelevant, not just to the United States but also to any other state that embarks upon it. Nations should have realized this a century ago but they did not. But there have been decisive changes in balances of power, and more accurate and destructive weapons--and soon nuclear bombs and the missiles to deliver them-are becoming more and more available to the poorer countries. Technology is moving much more rapidly than the diplomatic and political resources or will to control its inevitable consequences.
     The United States should have learned its lesson in Vietnam, and its public is aware of it to a far greater extent than its politicians. The war in Iraq has reaffirmed the decisive limits of technology when fighting against enemies who are decentralized and determined. It has been extraordinarily expensive but militarily ineffective, and America is ineluctably losing its vast undertaking. Rivals are much more equal, and wars more protracted and expensive for those who persist in fighting them. America’s ambitions for hegemony throughout the globe can now be more and more successfully challenged. Nowhere is this truer than the Middle East, where the U.S.’ long-standing alliance with Israel, which shares its fascination with military power, has produced colossal political failures for both nations.
     The ultra-modern Israel Defense Force finally learned this in Lebanon last July, when Hezbollah rockets destroyed or seriously damaged at least 20 of its best tanks and they were fought to a draw-abandoning the field of battle and losing their precious myth of invincibility. Growing demoralization well before the Lebanon war plagued Israel, and the percentage of Jews with higher academic degrees that migrated grew steadily after 2002. Israel exports brainpower to a extent very high by world standards. The Lebanon war and talk-both from Israeli and Iranian leaders-- of "existential" threats to the state’s very existence only gravely aggravated this defeatism and the desire to leave. At the end of January, 78 percent of the Israeli public was "unhappy" with their leaders for a variety of reasons. more..

The source of Gaza fighting
By Daoud Kuttab, Palestine News Network 2/9/2007
     Ever since the outbreak of internal Palestinian fighting, that resulted in the death and injury of hundreds, two different points of view have surfaced. One simply put this shameful period on the front steps of the Palestinians. Those who think this way insist that it is impossible to blame the Israelis for it. They say that Palestinians need inner reflection and to stop blaming others for their fate.
     On the other hand, while calling for an end to brother-killing-brother some insist that the infighting, particularly in Gaza, is a direct result of living inside the prison that the Israelis have created for Palestinians.
     Israeli journalist Amira Hass writes bluntly in the liberal Israeli daily Ha’aretz that the Israelis are responsible. “The experiment was a success: The Palestinians are killing each other. They are behaving as expected at the end of the extended experiment called ‘what happens when you imprison 1.3 million human beings in an enclosed space like battery hens’.” There is also a feeling that the 39 years of forced military occupation has desensitized Palestinians; one killed here, one university burnt there is all in aday’s acceptable news. Senior Hamas adviser and Government Spokesperson, Ghazi Hamad, wrote a strong article a few months ago in a Palestinian newspaper talking about the culture of violence that has become prevalent in Palestine. It is no wonder then that 20-year-old Hamas or Fateh fighters try to solve their problems using violence. A quick look at the daily attempts by international and regional powers to solve their problems militarily makes it difficult to blame the Palestinians for doing the same.
     For years, learned Palestinians have been warning that it is difficult to expect that a community’s violent rebellion against an outside occupier will not translate, sooner or later, into a legitimization of rebellion against one’s own people. When a youth starts questioning authority and in fact rebels against it (and is honored for it) it is very difficult to put a stop when this rebellion takes an inward look. When a young Palestinian youth is hailed as a hero for confronting a military occupier, it is hard to expect this hero to respect his teacher, parent or boss at work. more..

One hurdle less
By Khalid Amayreh, Al-Ahram Weekly 2/8/2007
     Forming a Lebanese government of national unity may be easier than getting it to work
     A high-level Arab League delegation arrived in Beirut this week for consultations aimed at assessing the chances for reconciliation. Headed by Ambassador Hesham Youssef, Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa’s chief of staff, the delegation’s two-day visit, which started on Monday, included meetings with key political players.
     The visit comes amid the standoff between the Lebanese government and the Hizbullah-led opposition over the proposed international tribunal to try the assassins of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Al-Hariri. The exchange of accusations between the two sides has included the Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Al-Siniora and the Speaker of the Lebanese Parliament Nabih Berri, who is in the opposition camp.
     The delegation arrived in Beirut days before the second anniversary of Hariri’s death on 14 February, and against a backdrop of increasing Israeli provocation of Hizbullah. Yesterday Israel’s defence minister accused Syria of allowing Hizbullah to rearm, and said Israel reserved the right to take "forcefull" action to counter the threat.
     During his stay in Beirut, Youssef was keen to clarify his mission. His aim, he said, was to assess the possibility of Moussa visiting Lebanon to resume his mediation.
     Moussa placed his shuttle diplomacy on hold in late December, saying at the time that his efforts to encourage reconciliation had not succeeded, though the Arab League secretary-general did manage to contain any further escalation of the confrontation between the Lebanese government and opposition. more..

Occupation and Aid
By Shir Hever, Alternative Information Center 2/6/2007
     This paper was presented by AIC economist Shir Hever, at the United Nations Seminar on Assistance to the Palestinian People, held in Doha on 5-6 February 2007
     There is no need to go into details, once again, about the extensive damage caused to the Palestinians by the Israeli occupation forces. We have heard much already of the mounting poverty rate, that GDP has fallen by 9% during the first half of 2006, that 25% of the Palestinian work force is suffering from a severe loss of income due to the sanctions on the PA, and that welfare payments have fallen by US$180 million. Moreover, Per-capita consumption in Palestine has fallen by 12%. Deep poverty is reaching alarming proportions, in Gaza it is already at 79.8%. Additionally, food insecurity is also at very high levels, reaching up to 41% in Gaza.
     This information is readily apparent from the UN and World Bank reports. But, in this talk, I would like to focus on two separate questions.
     One, what are the economic interests behind the devastation of the Palestinian economy?
     Two, what can we expect to see as the long-term consequences of the occupation on the Palestinian economy?
     1. Israeli Interests
     Due to the “Paris Economic Protocols,” signed as the economic appendix to the Oslo agreements, Israel enforces a customs union on the OPT, and only goods moving between Israel and the OPT are exempt from customs while Israel alone has the right to collect customs. At the same time, Israel ’s promise to allow Palestinian workers to enter Israel freely and work there remains unfulfilled.
     The result of Israel ’s devastation of the Palestinian economy, accompanied by severe limitations on the movement of people and merchandise, is that the Palestinian economy has become hostage to the Israeli economy. more..

Historic Islamic Architecture Demolished by Occupation - Al-Aqsa in Peril
Stop The Wall 2/4/2007
     The Israeli occupation closed all entrances to Jerusalem’s Old City, barring anyone under the age of 45 from entering. This marked the arrival of Occupation bulldozers which are removing the ruins of Mamluk palaces and demolishing historic Muslim place in Bab Al-Maghrebi, the gate that connects two of the three most holy places for Muslims, the Dome of the Rock and Al-Aqsa mosque, with what is called among all Arabs “Haet al Buraq”, and which is now known as the Wailing Wall. These places of course are not only of great historical importance to Muslims, but to world heritage as well.
     People from all over Palestine gathered the previous day at al-Aqsa mosque to prevent the demolitions. According to participants, Occupation forces began preparing at 07:30 a.m. The demolition preparation started after the Occupation court permitted widening the road leading to al-Haram ash-Sharif, instead of the historic bridge to the Maghrebi Gate.
     The ruins below the Maghrebi Gate that will be removed are part of the wall around al-Haram ash-Sharif, and are the only ruins remaining from the Mamluk period in the south-west part of the mosque. This area is located in a now-demolished Moroccan neighborhood, which was re-named after the 1967 War “the Jewish neighborhood”. Removing those ruins not only destroys unique cultural heritage but will allow opening an access tunnel to the areas below al-Aqsa mosque. These works are part of continuing attempts by the Occupation authorities to undermine the foundation of the mosque.
     The Occupation thus forced a full closure on the Old City of Jerusalem; police and special forces installed checkpoints to prevent private persons and media from entering. Numerous Palestinian and Muslim authorities condemned this latest destruction by the Occupation of Palestinian cultural heritage and Muslim religious sites. This step is clearly intended to provoke and insult the people in Palestine and in the Arab and the Muslim worlds. It is further part of the Zionist plans to “Judaize” Jerusalem at the expense of other heritages. more..

Time to say no
By Hassan Nafaa, Al-Ahram Weekly 2/8/2007
     To continue kowtowing to the US administration’s demands over Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon and Palestine would be suicidal
     Gaping wounds in some of the most sensitive areas of the Arab world, most notably in Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine, have begun to suppurate. The current American administration, headed by a clique of anti-Arab Islamophobes, will stop at nothing, out of deference to Israel and commitment to the Christian-Zionist preaching in which they believe so fervently. This same administration believes the fact that neither the president’s nor the vice-president’s running for re-election gives them greater freedom of movement, at least until the electoral campaigns officially kick-off in February a year from now. Until then they will steamroll through measures in an attempt to complete an enterprise refuse to admit they have failed. And such is the catatonic stupor into which Arab regimes have fallen that they are prepared to allow the same doctor who caused the disease to treat their wounds.
     Two factors forced Bush to re-adjust his policy and plans for Iraq and the region. The Baker- Hamilton report, drafted by a joint Democratic- Republican commission, concluded the administration’s policy was a fiasco and demanded changes. Then, the Republicans lost their majority in both houses of Congress just as the growing anti-war movement was reminding the American public of the failings of the Vietnam era. In response, Bush dug in his heels. Instead of cooperating with Iran and Syria to restore an element of calm in order to pave the way for an honourable withdrawal, as the Baker-Hamilton report recommended, he did the opposite, ordering 20,000 more US troops to Iraq, two aircraft carriers to the Gulf, and furnishing his friends in the neighbourhood with anti-missile defence systems. Such moves were obviously in preparation for a military strike against Iran and the tightening of the siege around Syria, yet Bush was confident of his allies’ support. Just in case, though, he sent Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on another tour of the region.
     Here was the envoy of supposedly the greatest democracy on earth appealing to foreign friends in order to tip the scale of American public opinion back in favour of the executive after Congress had won the first round. The close observer might have detected Rice’s inward sneer as she discovered how immeasurably more malleable decision-makers in this part of the world are than lawmakers on Capitol Hill. Certainly she shed no tears. Quite the opposite: she was delighted, full of confidence, pleased to see eight Arab foreign ministers climbing over one another in Kuwait to declare their support for America’s "new" plans for Iraq and for the region. She had grounds for her confidence. She knows, after all, that she is the only person capable of getting this number of Arab foreign ministers to meet in any place she designates, in the Arab world or abroad, at the snap of her fingers. Perhaps, too, she felt a measure of malicious glee as she watched them fight to win her favour, in the full knowledge that while each and everyone of them is a member of the Arab League they would never come together on their own initiative in order to develop an independent policy to further their common interests. more..

Tair’s Palestinian peers
By Gideon Levy, Ha’aretz 2/13/2007
     A child a week, almost every week. In recent weeks, I again went out to document the circumstances of the killing of several children and teenagers, shot dead by Israel Defense Forces soldiers. A very ill wind is once again blowing in the army and no one is saying anything about it. An army that kills children does not concern the public. No committee of inquiry has been, and none will be, formed to deal with this matter. But the fact that the IDF kills children with such a light hand, and fully supports its soldiers who do so, should trouble us no less than the reserves of war supplies in the North. The ramifications of such behavior are not only moral - ultimately an army’s operational capability will be affected when children are the targets in its soldiers’ gunsights.
     Jamil Jibji, the boy from the Askar camp who loved horses, was shot in the head after soldiers in an armored jeep taunted a group of children who threw rocks at them. He was 14 years old. Jamil was the fourth child to be shot in that area under similar circumstances. Abir, the daughter of Bassam Aramin, a member of the "Combatants for Peace" organization, was leaving her school in Anata when a Border Police patrol jeep turned around near the school - no one knows why - and tossed tear gas grenades, one of which apparently struck her head. She was 11 years old. Taha al-Jawi touched the fence nearby the abandoned airfield at Atarot and in response, soldiers fired at his legs with live ammunition, and apparently left him to bleed to death. He was the eighth child to die in similar circumstances. He was not yet 17 years old.
     All of these children were killed in cold blood; they did not pose a threat to anyone’s life. With the exception of Jamil’s case, the IDF, as usual, did not even bother to open an investigation into these children’s circumstances of death. When it doesn’t even investigate, it is obvious that the army has no intention of putting an end to the killing of children. Its commanders are not even troubled by this. more..

A Plea for Peace From a Bereaved Palestinian Father
By Bassam Aramin, Forward 2/9/2007
     I fought with my daughter on the day she was shot.
     On her way out the door to school, Abir announced, in that way children have of doing, that she would be playing with a friend that afternoon rather than coming straight home to study for an exam scheduled for the next day. She was 10 years old, smart, dedicated to her schoolwork and still a little girl.
     She wanted to play. I told her to not even think about it.
     If I could tell her anything now, it would be: Go. Do whatever you want. Play.
     Because now, she never will. She will never laugh again, never hear her friends calling her name, never feel the love of her family wrapped around her at night like a warm blanket.
     Abir, the third of my six children, was shot in the head as she left school January 16, caught in an altercation between Israel Border Guard troops and older kids who may or may not have been throwing rocks. She died two days later.
     I know what the Israeli army has said about the incident, and I know what Abir’s older sister Arin saw with her own two eyes: Abir was running away from the troops when she suddenly stopped and fell, and blood splattered onto the ground. An independent autopsy confirms the most likely cause of death: a rubber bullet, through the back of Abir’s head. I have that bullet in my house, because poor Arin, watching her sister get shot, picked up the bullet and brought it home. I was not surprised when the Israeli army tried to blame Abir for her own death. First we were told that she was among the rock throwers; then we were told that “something” blew up in her hands — though her hands remained miraculously in tact— before she could toss it at the Border Guard jeep. more..

The Meanness of Separation: Politics and Apartheid
By Newton Garver, Palestine Chronicle 2/9/2007
     Why does Carter disdain peace through separation, so much that he leaves it out of account? Could it be because he addresses this problem, as well as others, with his focus on the needs of government and the requirements of welfare rather than the ideas and tools of politcs?
     "Now everyone is prouder--and poorer." --Orhan Pamuk
     Jimmy Carter’s most recent book, Palestine Peace Not Apartheid, has raised a storm of criticism from the Derschowitz-AIPAC wing of American Judaism, stung by his even-handed recounting of events and conversations, as well as his straightforward presentation of the failure to implement UN Security Council resolutions. From the criticism one might think that in the book Carter places all the blame on the Israelis, but that is far from the case. There is, in fact, at least one point (page 13) where he seems unbalanced in the other direction, citing the rise of Islamic fundamentalism as among continuing impediments to peace. Fair enough. But is not the rise of Jewish fundamentalism also a continuing impediment, responsible for the persistence and intransigence of settlement expansion, the massacre in the mosque in Hebron, and the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin? Of course not every detail can be included. The book is impressive for its plain speaking, its illumination of the big picture, Carter’s personal history in the discussions, and its careful attention to accuracy about the facts.
     One of the features of Carter’s style is to recount sympathetically and without judgment conversations he has had with key figures on all sides to the various controversies. It is this unjudgmental reporting that must be so infuriating to the AIPAC-Derschowitz crowd. One can readily understand that the facts and stories about what has happened and continues to happen in the supposedly Arab land of the West Bank and Gaza are on their face outrageous-unless the victims are themselves to blame for their distress. Carter refrains from expressing outrage, keeping instead his focus on the need for peace and reconciliation. But it is a feature of partisans and their pride in their side to regard evenhanded unjudgmental presentations as themselves intrinsically outrageous.
     But what about Carter’s opposition between peace and apartheid? Here there perhaps lies a perspective on the world that would be more alarming to world leaders than the even-handedness about Palestine. Does Carter mean to suggest that there can never be peace through apartheid? Is not the idea that you get peace through separation the principle behind a whole host of political sacred cows, including border fences, gated communities, bloated prisons, boycotts and blockades? Does enforced and ideologically buttressed separation lead to the sort of partisan pride that Pamuk has in mind, in the words above that he puts into the mouth of one of the wise minor figures in his recent novel. more..

The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappe (Part I)
By Stephen Lendman, Palestine Chronicle 2/9/2007
     Ethnic cleansing began in early December, 1947 when Palestinians comprised two-thirds of the population and Jews, mostly from war-torn Europe, the other third.
     The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Ilan Pappe. Oneworld Publications, Oxford, England, 2006.
     Ilan Pappe is an Israeli historian and senior lecturer at Haifa University. He’s also Academic Director of the Research Institute for Peace at Givat Haviva and Chair of the Emil Touma Institute for Palestinian Studies. Pappe is an expert on Israel and Zionism and the Palestinians’ Right of Return to their homeland, is considered "an honourable academic with integrity and conscience," and is a member of the Advisory Board of the Council for Palestinian Restitution and Repatriation (CPRR), an organization declaring that "every Palestinian has a legitimate, individual right to return to his or her original home and to absolute restitution of his or her property."
     Pappe is also one of Israel’s "new historians" whose scholarship and writings are based on access to material now available from British Mandate period and Israeli archives that provide the most accurate and authentic documented history of Israel before and after it became a state and which now serve to debunk the myths about the years leading up to the Jewish State’s founding and those following it to this day.
     Pappe has also authored, contributed to or edited nine books. His latest is the one this review covers in detail so readers will know about its powerful and shocking content, unknown to most in the West and in Israel that hopefully will arouse them enough to get the book and learn in full detail what Pappe documented. He proves from official records how the Israeli state came into being with blood on its hands from lands forcibly seized from its Palestinian inhabitants who’d lived on it for hundreds of years previously. Since the 1940s, they were ethnically cleansed and slaughtered without mercy so their homeland would become one for Jews alone. more..

The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappe (Part II)
By Stephen Lendman, Palestine Chronicle 2/9/2007
     Sooner or later conflicts and repression end when bloodshed and suffering from them no longer are tolerated and outside forces see the injustice and futility and are willing to help.
     The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Ilan Pappe. Oneworld Publications, Oxford, England, 2006.
     The Phony and Real Wars Over Palestine
     As explained in Part I, Jordan’s King Abdullah cut a deal with Zionists to get what turned out to be the West Bank in return for not committing troops to the short-lived conflict beginning in May although Abdullah, if fact, had to fight for what he got because of Jewish duplicity. Zionists needed to neutralize Jordan because it had the strongest army in the Arab world and would have been a formidable threat had it become part of the overall Arab force that went to war with the new Jewish state. Their staying out of it was the reason the Arab League’s English Commander-in-Chief, Glubb Pasha, called the 1948 war in Palestine the "Phony War." Pasha knew Abdullah cut a deal for his own territorial gain and other Arab armies entering the war planned to do it "pathetically" as some on the Arab interventionist side called their campaign.
     Cairo only committed forces the last minute on May 12. It set aside 10,000 troops for the engagement, but half of them were Muslim Brotherhood volunteers opposed to Egyptian collaboration with imperialism, and they’d just been released from prison because of their opposition. They had no training, were likely picked as convenient cannon fodder, and despite their fervor were no match for the Jewish military.
     Syrian forces were better trained, their political leaders more committed, but only a small contingent was sent, and they performed so ineffectively the Consultancy considered seizing the Golan Heights later gotten in the 1967 war. Even smaller and less committed were Lebanese units most of which stayed on their side of the border defending adjacent villages. Iraqi troops were also involved but only numbered a few thousand. Their government ordered them not to attack Israel but only to defend the West Bank land allocated to Jordan. Still, they defied orders, became more broadly engaged, and temporarily saved 15 Palestinian villages in Wadi Ara until 1949 when the Jordanian government ceded the area to Israel as part of a bilateral armistice agreement. more..

A Time to Speak Out: Independent Jewish Voices
By Independent Jewish Voices, Electronic Intifada 2/9/2007
     The statement below was issued by 100 high-profile British Jews, wishing to state their independence from institutions in Britain, which, claiming to represent all Jews, support Israeli occupation and oppression of the Palestinian people. All of the statement’s signatories can be viewed at the Independent Jewish Voices website.
     We are a group of Jews in Britain from diverse backgrounds, occupations and affiliations who have in common a strong commitment to social justice and universal human rights. We come together in the belief that the broad spectrum of opinion among the Jewish population of this country is not reflected by those institutions which claim authority to represent the Jewish community as a whole. We further believe that individuals and groups within all communities should feel free to express their views on any issue of public concern without incurring accusations of disloyalty.
     We have therefore resolved to promote the expression of alternative Jewish voices, particularly in respect of the grave situation in the Middle East, which threatens the future of both Israelis and Palestinians as well as the stability of the whole region. We are guided by the following principles... more..

The Twilight Zone / Victims of the fence
Ha’aretz 2/8/2007
     A still-life image: a building covered with Jerusalem stone, a large memorial poster hanging high up on one of the floors, and below, a sign in broken English over the "Paradise Cafe." Second image: a makeshift soccer field, empty, on which a huge puddle formed on Sunday of this week. Across the road a barbed-wire fence encircles the abandoned airfield of Atarot, once touted as "Jerusalem’s international airport." Along the fence runs a ditch - into which the boy fell and, according to witnesses, bled for a long time until he died. He was struck by a bullet in the leg and lay there, dying in agony.
     Was he only playing soccer? Did he just run to get the ball, which had fallen into the ditch along the fence, as his friends say? Or did he sabotage the fence and try to take the metal for his family’s livelihood, as the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said the next day?
     What difference does it make? What does make a difference is the appalling question of what prompted a soldier, or a Border Policeman, to open fire from a long way off at the boy and then to leave him bleeding on the ground until he died. What goes through the mind of the shooter, in the moments before and after he takes the life of an adolescent, who was in no way putting anyone at risk - even if he touched a fence that must not be touched? Three fences surround the abandoned airport, and last Sunday we saw no hole in any of them, three days after the unnecessary, criminal shooting. more..

Long-term environmental challenges ahead
Electronic Intifada/IRIN 2/8/2007
     Seven months after Israel bombed the coastal Jiyyeh power plant in the south of Beirut, the Mediterranean Sea still spews oil onto Lebanon’s shores, and beach sand shifts to reveal oil slicks that could not be detected before, fishermen say.
     With sparkling waves licking the golden sands, Jiyyeh beach looks pristine at first glance. But fisherman Ahmad Kojok stoops and pulls up the corner of a black slab in the sea. It is solid oil.
     "We found another huge patch of oil over there," said Kojok, waving towards a patch of sea by a rocky shelf that juts out into the bay. "It’s all oil just there."
     The team of eight or so fishermen on Jiyyeh beach pass bucketfuls of oil along in a chain. Given the slow, arduous nature of the work, it is hard to believe this coast was covered in an oozing black slick just a few months ago. On this bay, the worst hit in Lebanon’s most serious environmental crisis, only the odd, solidified pool remains. Behind it loom the huge fuel vats of the power plant, crumpled like cola cans.
     Stockpiles of chemicals
     According to the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), the disposal of toxic waste and other debris from Israel’s bombing last July and August still poses a major environmental challenge to Lebanon. Unexploded cluster bombs, sacks oozing oil on beaches, mountains of rubble and bombed-out factories with stockpiles of chemicals all may have a far-reaching impact on people and their environment unless treated urgently, says the agency. more..

Where to, after the Mecca agreement?
By Rami G. Khouri, Daily Star 2/10/2007
     The most significant thing about the national unity government agreement signed Thursday by Hamas and Fatah in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, under Saudi auspices was that it was signed in Mecca under Saudi auspices. This is probably more important for what it tells us about Saudi diplomatic stirrings than what it says about Palestinian-Israeli issues.
     If this is the beginning of a new era in which diplomatically dynamic Saudis and politically pragmatic Palestinians assert themselves more forcefully on the regional stage, we might be on the threshold of better days ahead for the Middle East. I would not bet the family savings on it, but neither can we ignore the potential that is there.
     Nobody should expect this accord to jumpstart a new Arab-Israeli peace process, mainly because Israel and the United States - with Western Europe increasingly in tow - have not seriously explored real openings for a negotiated peace in the past decade. The most forceful move ever made by the Quartet - the US, the United Nations, the European Union, and Russia - that is supposed to shepherd the peace-making process, was to slap sanctions and tough demands on the Hamas-led Palestinian government, without making equal demands of Israel. As such, the Quartet looks more and more like a legitimizing cover for Israeli-American positions that have killed any chance of a peace process.
     Israel and the US are likely to repeat the Quartet’s three demands: that the new Palestinian government explicitly renounce terrorism, honor all existing Palestinian agreements with Israel, and recognize Israel’s right to exist. These are reasonable and legitimate demands - but only if Israel is required to abide by the same rules, which is not the case. The Quartet must demand, simultaneously, that Israel stop its colonization of Arab lands, its expansion of settlements, and its routine killings or assassinations of Palestinian militants. more..

Conspiracy of silence in the Arab world
By Robert Fisk, The Independent 2/10/2007
     Where are the sheikhs when the Iraqi dead are fished out of the Tigris?
     Could Rifaat al-Assad’s day in court be growing closer? Yes, Rifaat - or Uncle Rifaat to President Bashar al-Assad of Syria - the man whose brother Hafez hurled him from Damascus after he tried to use his special forces troops to stage a coup. They were the same special forces who crushed the Islamist rebellion in Hama in February 1982, slaughtering up to - well, a few thousand, according to the regime, at least 10,000 according to Fisk (who was there) and up 20,000 if you believe The New York Times (which I generally don’t).
     Either way, I’ve always regarded it as a war crime, along with the massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Chatila camps in Beirut by Israel’s Lebanese militia allies a few months later. Ariel Sharon, who was held personally responsible by Israel’s own court of enquiry, is an unindicted war criminal. So is Rifaat.
     That’s why the faintest breeze blew through my fax machine this week when I received a letter sent to the UN Secretary General by Malik al-Abdeh, head of the London-based Movement for Justice and Development in Syria. Abdeh left his Syrian town of Zabadani before the Hama massacres - he works now as an IT consultant for a multinational - so he’s hardly able to breathe the air of Sister Syria. But then again nor can Rifaat, who languishes - complete with bodyguards - in that nice EU island of refuge called Marbella. And refuge he probably needs. Because Abdeh is asking the UN to institute an enquiry into the Hama bloodbath in the same way that it is powering along with its tribunal into the murder almost two years ago of Lebanese ex-prime minister Rafiq Hariri. more..

Iraqi insurgents offer peace in return for US concessions
By Robert Fisk, The Independent 2/9/2007
     For the first time, Sunni insurgents disclose their conditions for ceasefire in Iraq
     For the first time, one of Iraq’s principal insurgent groups has set out the terms of a ceasefire that would allow American and British forces to leave the country they invaded almost four years ago.
     The present terms would be impossible for any US administration to meet - but the words of Abu Salih Al-Jeelani, one of the military leaders of the Sunni Iraqi Islamic Resistance Movement show that the groups which have taken more than 3,000 American lives are actively discussing the opening of contacts with the occupation army.
     Al-Jeelani’s group, which also calls itself the "20th Revolution Brigades’’, is the military wing of the original insurgent organisation that began its fierce attacks on US forces shortly after the invasion of 2003. The statement is, therefore, of potentially great importance, although it clearly represents only the views of Sunni Muslim fighters.
     Shia militias are nowhere mentioned. The demands include the cancellation of the entire Iraqi constitution - almost certainly because the document, in effect, awards oil-bearing areas of Iraq to Shia and Kurds, but not to the minority Sunni community. Yet the Sunnis remain Washington’s principal enemies in the Iraqi war.
     "Discussions and negotiations are a principle we believe in to overcome the situation in which Iraqi bloodletting continues," al-Jeelani said in a statement that was passed to The Independent. "Should the Americans wish to negotiate their withdrawal from our country and leave our people to live in peace, then we will negotiate subject to specific conditions and circumstances." more..

Paired on a gallery wall, portraits and landscapes capture separation
By Kaelen Wilson-Goldie, Daily Star 2/10/2007
     Photographer Alan Gignoux turns a documentary eye on Palestinians’ plight in ’Homeland Lost’
     Interview
     BEIRUT: An elderly man sits cross-legged on a mat in his home in Lebanon’s Bourj Chemali refugee camp. In his hand is a certificate from the Palestinian police force. On his shirt pocket is pinned a medal from the British Army, which he once served. Abu Faisal Hayel Atteh Khalef was born in 1928 in the village of Al-Zuq al-Tahtani. When he was 20, there were 137 houses there. Now, nearly 60 years after the creation of the state of Israel and what Palestinians call the nakba, the catastrophe, Al-Zuq al-Tahtani lies in ruins, the crumbling walls of its houses dwarfed by an overgrowth of wildflowers. Its residents fled and to this day they have never been permitted to return.
     A portrait of Abu Faisal hanging alongside a landscape of his native village makes up just one of the many pairs of photographs that fill Alan Gignoux’s exhibition at Masrah al-Madina, entitled "Homeland Lost." The show is part of a long-term project - done in collaboration with the British Council and the A. M. Al-Qattan Foundation - that will eventually result in a book to be published on the 60th anniversary of the nakba next year.
     In the meantime, "Homeland Lost" is on tour. It opened at the Bethlehem Peace Center and traveled to the Al-Mamal Foundation for Contemporary Art in Jerusalem and the Dar al-Anda Art Gallery in Amman before arriving in Beirut. After February 14, it is moving on to the Contemporary Image Collective in Cairo and the Alexandria Contemporary Arts Forum in Egypt’s second-largest city. From there, it will decamp to Belfast and will finally end up in London.
     "I started in 2004," says Gignoux, 41. "What I really wanted to do was a humanistic project, you know, putting people and places together."
     The premise of "Homeland Lost" is to pair up portraits of Palestinians with pictures of the places they (or their parents or grandparents) left behind in 1948. Gignoux decided to build his project around the 1948 generation because that generation is still alive but aging fast. In practical terms, to take the 1967 refugees into account would have yielded a project too huge and too difficult to manage. more..

And What About The Palestinian Cause?
By Gilad Atzmon, Arabic Media Internet Network (AMIN) 2/5/2007
     The Palestinian activist Reem Abdehadi, when asked for her opinion about Jewish anti-Zionist campaigners, said sarcastically: “they are very nice, all fifteen of them…”
     I was rather happy to read in yesterday’s Guardian that; “A group of prominent British Jews will today declare independence from the country’s Jewish establishment, arguing that it puts support for Israel above the human rights of Palestinians.”
     It is indeed about time that Jewish people with influence in art, academia, business and the media raise their voices against Israel’s crimes and its supportive lobbies around the globe. It is rather crucial that Jewish people should openly succumb to true ethical and universal thinking rather than clannish monolithic discourse solely concerned with tribal maintenance.
     Earlier today, I logged on to check out what the Independent Jewish Voices (IJV) have to say. If to be honest, though I found more than a few of my friends enlisted, I was rather disappointed with the views expressed by the group.
     Once again it was an ‘image’ of moral thinking rather than an authentic ethical commitment. Once again it was a glorifying exposition of Jewish righteousness rather than simply acknowledging the Palestinian cause, i.e., the ‘right of return’. Disappointingly, the declaration wittingly avoids confronting the kernel of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
     Since it is rather established that the Palestinian cause is largely orientated around the mass expulsion of the indigenous Palestinians in 1948 and the failure to resolve the refugee catastrophe, avoiding the issue is nothing less than denying the Palestinians the most elementary human right: the right to live on one’s land. Avoiding the refugee issue is nothing less than dismissing the Palestinians of the most basic human rights. more..

Thinking beyond the US invasion of Iran
By Hamid Dabashi, Al-Ahram Weekly 2/8/2007
     As the world waits to see if US/Israel will attack Iran, Hamid Dabashi examines the state of war this game of waiting has generated
     Once again the drums of war are roaring in Washington DC. Once again the signs and signals of a pending US/Israeli attack on yet another country, this time Iran, are heard louder than ever. The build-up to an anxiety-provoking crescendo has already started to gain momentum. Direct threats, indirect allusions, guarded remarks, provocative bluffs -- no one knows exactly what the Bush administration has in mind -- and that precisely seems to be the point: generating and sustaining a general condition of suspenseful uncertainty, an atmosphere of amorphous fear and intimidation, and a perpetual state of war.
     The practice of anti-war activism throughout the world has hitherto been a periodic and scattered mobilisation against one war or other that the US/Israel has launched -- very much chasing after the evolving military designs of the neo- conservatives in the US, and the reinvigorated Zionists in Israel, and simply reacting to their proactive acts of global terrorism. As we are waiting for the Iran war to happen (or not to happen), it is now perhaps time to step back and take stock of what this transcontinental axis of global terrorism -- the United States of America and the Jewish state of Israel -- is up to and thus rethink the civic manners of opposing and resisting it. When the US launched its wrath on Afghanistan in October 2001, even such progressive and astute American observers as Richard Falk (seconded by the editorial staff of The Nation ) thought that it was a "just war". This argument was no mere act of historical folly. It was a singular sign of political naiveté.
     We are now way beyond those perhaps innocent yet angry misreadings of what has fast come upon us. After the mayhem of Iraq, instead of constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop and wonder if US/Israel will or will not attack Iran, will or will not bomb Syria, will or will not completely take over Somalia, will or will not militarily engage North Korea, will or will not try for yet another coup in Venezuela, we need to think beyond such probabilities, and reach into the heart of the state of war that this very waiting game entails. As all indications testify, a Democratic US congress will not make any significant difference in this state of war. Looking at the emerging patterns of this state of war, it is now safe to suggest, for example, that what the US is perhaps (and such conjectural phrases are the symptoms of this very state of war) planning to do in Iran is modelled on what Israel did to Lebanon last July -- hence the necessity of no longer treating these two imperial and colonial nexus of warmongering in the world as two separate political propositions and state entities, but in fact collapse them into a singular axis of state terrorism aimed at undisputed global domination. more..

Maps, please, now
By Serene Assir, Al-Ahram Weekly 2/8/2007
     The US may have taken token steps towards scolding Israel for using cluster bombs in Lebanon, but where are the maps of where they were dropped?
     South Lebanon -- It was a somewhat surprising move given the historical "special relationship" between the United States and Israel and countless gratuitous acts of mutual interest protection in the Middle East. Last week, the US State Department sent a report to Congress outlining its preliminary findings on Israel’s controversial use of cluster bombs in South Lebanon during the last hours of the summer 2006 war. The findings, it has been reported, suggest that Israel may have violated the Arms Export Control Act, which governs the use of weapons sold by the US, the world’s biggest arms manufacturer and exporter.
     According to the Washington-based Arab American Institute, there are two options ahead concerning the matter of cluster bombs, should a final investigation prove Israel’s use of cluster bombs illegal. Either US President George W Bush imposes sanctions on Israel, or "Congress should take legislative action to sanction Israel to uphold the integrity of the law."
     A full six months after the end of the summer war that killed 1,400 people, injured over 4,000 others, and completely destroyed 15,000 homes, life for the inhabitants of South Lebanon continues to be plagued with the threat posed by unexploded cluster munitions. According to 16- year-old Samar, resident of Khiam, "The outskirts of the town are covered with bombs. My brother was badly injured by a bomb when he was out working on our olive farm. Now he is much better, but he still can’t walk for very long without being in a lot of pain." more..

Lebanon needs early elections
By General Michel Aoun, Daily Star 2/9/2007
     In the midst of this crisis looming over Lebanon and laden with disputes and quarrels, all logical thinking evaporates and instincts and emotions take over conscious reasoning in determining the reasons, components, results and solutions of this crisis. This is why it becomes paramount for all those working in the public sphere from an official and responsible stance to give their opinion in writing, since the latter form of expression is known for setting facts straight, controlling ideas and determining the author’s responsibility with respect to the form and content of his text.
     The crisis that we are witnessing today is made up of several detached and intertwining factors that are the offspring of a bad will that was able, in a certain phase, to corrupt the political reality and its ramifying consequences, which, in turn, have corrupted the relation between the constitutional institutions and led to their absolute paralysis.
     Today, we find ourselves lacking functional constitutional authorities that are capable of performing their duties per the edicts of our democratic system.
     Undoubtedly, parliamentary elections form the cornerstone for the establishment of a governmental authority, and any flaws tarnishing this operation will reflect on all future events.
     The main flaw that affected our democracy after the withdrawal of the Syrian troops from Lebanon is the electoral law under which the elections took place. These elections managed to bring to office those who lost in their own confession and to cast aside those who won.
     These same elections also managed to corrupt just representation and to establish the equilibrium of political forces on a fundamental disequilibrium. Further, the electoral process was accompanied by other flaws represented in transgressions that form a basis for the annulment of the results. more..

Growing bitterness in Gaza
By Amira Hass, Ha’aretz 2/9/2007
     The wave of killings in Gaza on Thursday of last week was sparked by a suspicion: Hamas members feared that containers Israel allowed to enter Gaza held weapons for the Presidential Guard. They fired on the trucks, killing four members of the Guard, and Gaza once again entered a lethal whirlpool: 30 dead and more than 200 wounded.
     No rifle or bullet was displayed for the TV cameras, which made it clear to everyone that Hamas propagandists either lied or relied on false information. The containers held only routine equipment, not weapons, for the Presidential Guard.
     Surely the attackers would have greeted the trucks with flowers had they known the trucks held equipment designed to "improve the fabric of their life." What is the connection between security equipment, the Presidential Guard and an improvement in everyday life? It can be found in a document the Defense Ministry and the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) presented on January 12 regarding the "easing of daily life." One of its headings: ’The comprehensive plan for improving the Palestinian population’s fabric of life."
     The first paragraph is "Steps to empower Abu Mazen," and it includes: "Coordination with the PA chairman’s office and those subordinate to him - Approving entry of donations (security equipment) for the Presidential Guard by expedited procedure; easing the movement of VIPs and senior Palestinians."
     From the document we cannot learn about "easing of conditions," but rather about the mentality of an occupier. The document demonstrates that the security establishment continues to adopt methods that played - and still play - a decisive role in the accumulation of tremendous bitterness among the Palestinian public toward senior Fatah officials. more..

Carter Enters Lions’ Den
By Paul Findley, Palestine Chronicle 2/7/2007
     Open discussion, where all perspectives are debated, leads to good policy. Carter took a stand for what is right: for Americans, for Palestinians and for Israelis. It is time for a sitting president and members of Congress to do the same.
     At the age of 82, Jimmy Carter entered the lion’s den. With the publication of his latest book, " Palestine : Peace not Apartheid," he did what a patriot would do: rally Americans to vigorous debate of a critical issue that affects our future. He deserves a hero’s praise. Instead, he has been attacked and defamed.
     I had the honor to serve as the senior Republican on the Middle East Subcommittee of the House International Relations Committee throughout the Carter administration. Carter frequently invited me to huddles in the White House; discussions that would ultimately lead to a lasting peace between Israel and Egypt . I know Carter well and consider him a friend.
     I also experienced firsthand what Carter now faces. Toward the end of my 22-year tenure in Congress, I spoke in favor of Palestinian rights and was critical of Israeli policies of Palestinian land confiscation and Jewish-only settlements on Palestinian lands. These actions were counter to American policy and values. They dimmed chances for peace.
     As a result of my evenhanded position, the pro-Israel lobby poured money into my opponent’s campaign. I overcame their challenge in 1980 but lost in 1982 by a narrow margin. Still, the message was heard loudly on Capitol Hill: Criticize Israel and pay with your congressional seat.
     In my 1985 book, "They Dare to Speak Out," I detailed the tactics used to silence criticism of Israeli policies. One of the groups employing these tactics is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. On its Web site, AIPAC calls itself " America ’s pro-Israel lobby" and boasts a New York Times description of it as "the most important organization affecting America ’s relationship with Israel ."
     All citizens have the right to band together and push for policies they believe are right. But AIPAC and other pro-Israel lobby groups do not plead the case for Israel on the stage of public opinion. Instead, they often resort to smear campaigns and intimidation to clear the floor so that only their side is heard. more..

Israel’s Bomb, Iran’s Pursuit of the Bomb and U.S. War Preparations
By Walter C. Uhler, Information Clearing House 2/7/2007
     The sins of the United States are quite well known. Acting on the advice of Albert Einstein, who feared that Nazi Germany might obtain nuclear weapons, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt authorized a crash program, the Manhattan Project, to develop the bombs that would be dropped at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Four years ago today, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell played a major role in persuading a gullible, stupefied and craven American news media and public - but not a cynical world - to support the Bush administration’s illegal, immoral invasion of Iraq. He did so by presenting a panoply of lies, false statements and exaggerations about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and ties to al Qaeda terrorists.
     Four years later, as both United States and Israel prepare their populations for an illegal, immoral preventive war against Iran -- allegedly to disrupt, if not destroy, the secret nuclear weapons program that both insist (without evidence) is well under way there -- Americans might do well to avoid being duped again. Thus, they might contemplate not only the allegations against Iran, but also the sins of the United States and Israel when it comes to developing, using and brandishing their own nuclear weapons.
     ....According to Scott Ritter, writing in his recent book, Target Iran, "the conflict currently underway between the United States and Iran is, first and foremost, a conflict born in Israel. It is based upon an Israeli contention that Iran poses a threat to Israel, and defined by Israeli assertions that Iran possesses a nuclear weapons program. None of this has been shown to be true, and indeed much of the allegations made by Israel against Iran have been clearly demonstrated as being false." [p. 208]
     Yet, given Israel’s own dishonorable record of deceit and lies attending the building of its own bomb, everyone should readily understand why Israel’s rulers today remain suspicious about Iran’s nuclear program. After all, how could any Israeli possibly believe that Iran’s leaders today are less dishonorable than their own leaders were. more..

Pre-Emptive Strike Against Chirac: Frenzy in France Over "Iranian Threat"
By Diana Johnstone, CounterPunch 2/6/2007
     Paris.
     Four years ago, French President Jacques Chirac saw the Iraq disaster looming and openly warned against it. It was by far the best thing he ever did in his political life, and he is not to be allowed to do it again.
     Today another, potentially even greater disaster is looming as Israel and the United States ostentatiously prepare to bomb Iran on the pretext of preventing "a second holocaust". But this time around there is a curious absence of the public opposition and mass protest demonstrations that preceded the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
     It is as though the enormity of events and the comforts of daily life have caused the Western world to give up thinking about grave matters and to take refuge in officially inspected and approved platitudes. Debate is replaced by an alarm system that sends up cries of scandal at any deviation from the accepted discourse.
     In France, where people pay a lot of attention to words, the denunciation of verbal heresy even goes so far as enacting laws punishing politically incorrect speech.
     But the more commonplace type of censorship was illustrated this week by an essentially trivial incident. During a presidential press briefing at the Elysée palace devoted to the Paris conference on climate change, a New York Times journalist changed the subject to ask the French President about the Iranian nuclear threat. Chirac began with the standard official "International Community" line, namely that Tehran’s refusal to give up its uranium enrichment program was "very dangerous". But then, Chirac (thinking, he explained later, that he was speaking off the record) gave in to the temptation to speak honestly. For Iran to have a nuclear weapon was not really so dangerous, he said. To make his point, he asked rhetorically what good it would do Iran to have a nuclear bomb, or even two. "Where would it fire that bomb? At Israel? It wouldn’t have traveled 200 meters through the atmosphere before Tehran would be razed." more..

A massacre and a new civil war
By Pepe Escobar, Asia Times 2/3/2007
     The massacre that occurred in Najaf, Iraq, last Sunday by now has been wildly deconstructed over the Arab press. What emerges has virtually nothing to do with the official Baghdad and Washington spin of Iraqi troops killing 250-odd heavily armed apocalyptic cultists dubbed "Soldiers of Heaven". They were said to be about to attack not only Shi’ite pilgrims but also the "Big Four" ayatollahs of Iraq - Ali al-Sistani, Bashir Najafi, Muhammad shaq Fayyad and Muhammad Said al-Hakim - who all sit in holy Najaf.
     When the embattled Nuri al-Maliki government in Baghdad gloats in unison with the Pentagon and US President George W Bush about such a masterful display by the Iraqi army, supported by the lethal firepower of US tanks and F-16s, something is terribly off the mark. Especially as the "Iraqi army" in question is composed in its majority by the Badr Organization, the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq’s (SCIRI’s) paramilitary wing, which is peppered with death squads.
     Najaf Governor As’ad Abu Gilel, a high-ranking SCIRI politician himself, has told Najaf Radio FM that no fewer than "300 terrorists were killed, 650 detained and 121 wounded, while 11 Iraqi soldiers were killed and 27 wounded". One thousand "terrorist" casualties suggest firepower comparable to the US raids in Tora Bora, Afghanistan, in December 2001.
     The official Baghdad spin maintains that the battle was provoked by an evil mastermind, Ayatollah Ahmad al-Hasani al-Sarkhi, also called al-Yamani, born in Diwaniya, a charlatan with a background in fine arts and the leader of the Mahdi Mahdawiya millenarian movement (a splinter Sadrist movement). It’s important to note that his offices in Najaf were closed 10 days before the massacre, and many of his aides arrested: this already suggests a government crackdown preceding the upcoming US surge/escalation. more..

How Neocon Shiite Strategy Led to Sectarian War
By Gareth Porter, Inter Press Service 2/6/2007
     WASHINGTON, Feb 6 (IPS) - The supreme irony of President George W. Bush’s campaign to blame Iran for the sectarian civil war in Iraq, as well as attacks on U.S. forces, is that the Shiite militias who started to drive the Sunnis out of the Baghdad area in 2004 and thus precipitated the present sectarian crisis did so with the support of both Iran and the neoconservative U.S. war planners.
     The U.S. policy decisions that led to the sectarian war can be traced back to the conviction of a group of right-wing zealots with close ties to Israel’s Likud Party that overthrowing the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq would not destabilise the region, because Iraqi Shiites would be allies of the United States and Israel against Iran.
     The idea that Iraqi Shiites could be used to advance U.S. power interests in the Middle East was part of a broader right-wing strategy for joint U.S.-Israeli "rollback" of Israel’s enemies. In 1996, a task force at the right-wing Israeli think tank, the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, under Richard Perle advised Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that such a strategy should begin by taking control of Iraq and putting a pro-Israeli regime in power there.
     Three years later, the former director of that think tank, David Wurmser, who had migrated to the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute, spelled out how the United States could use Iraqi Shiites to support that strategy in "Tyranny’s Ally". Wurmser sought to refute the realist argument that overthrowing Saddam Hussein would destroy the balance of power between Sunni-controlled Iraq and Shiite Iran on which regional stability depended.
     Wurmser proposed replacing the existing "dual containment" policy toward Iran and Iraq with what he called "dual rollback". He did not deny that taking down Hussein’s regime would "generate upheaval in Iraq", but he welcomed that prospect, which would "offer the oppressed, majority Shiites of that country an opportunity to enhance their power and prestige." more..

In Public View, Saudis Counter Iran in Region
By Michael Slackman and Hassan Fattah, MIFTAH 2/7/2007
     Jidda, Saudi Arabia — With the prospect of three civil wars looming over the Middle East — and Iran poised to gain from them all — Saudi Arabia has abandoned its behind-the-scenes checkbook diplomacy and taken on a central, aggressive role in reshaping the region’s conflicts.
     On Tuesday, the kingdom is playing host in Mecca to the leaders of Hamas and Fatah, the two feuding Palestinian factions, in what both sides say could lead to a national unity government and reduced bloodshed. Last fall, senior Saudi officials met secretly with Israeli leaders about how to establish a Palestinian state.
     In recent months, Saudi Arabia has also increased its public involvement in Iraq and its support of the Sunni-led government in Lebanon. The process is shaping up as a counteroffensive to efforts by Iran to establish itself as the regional superpower, according to diplomats, analysts and officials here and throughout the region. Some even say that the recent Saudi commitment to temper the price of oil is aimed at undermining Iran’s economy, although officials here deny that. “We realized that we have to wake up,” said a high-ranking Saudi diplomat who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the news media. “Someone rang the bell, ‘Be careful, something is moving.’ ” The shift is occurring with encouragement from the Bush administration. Its goal is to see an American-backed alliance of Sunni Arab states including Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt, along with a Fatah-led Palestine and Israel, opposing Iran, Syria and the radical groups they support.
     Yet Riyadh’s goals may not always be in alignment with those of the White House, and could complicate American interests. more..

Saving Jerusalem
By Joharah Baker, MIFTAH 2/7/2007
     For the past week, tensions have risen higher than usual in Jerusalem, possibly the most disputed city in history today. Once again, Jerusalem’s religious significance is at the heart of the conflict and has been woven into the intrinsic political complexities that define this troubled slice of the world.
     Recently, Israel announced it intended to carry out excavations at the Magharba (Dung) Gate of the Old City, which leads to the Aqsa Mosque Compound. According to Israeli officials, the work is routine renovations of a bridge constructed at the Magharba Gate that connects the so-called Western Wall to the Aqsa Mosque Compound. Palestinians say the elevated tunnel is built over a hill under the jurisdiction of the Waqf Authorities (the Islamic endowment that oversees the compound), under which there is Islamic archeological ruins. The Palestinians also claim the bridge is being built in order to give Israeli police and the army direct access to the Aqsa Compound to enable it to raid the area with more ease. The dirt hill, which is being torn down by Israeli authorities is also a main supporting wall to the compound, say Waqf officials and therefore threatens the destruction of the Aqsa’s very foundations.
     There have been years of bitter dispute over this piece of land in the center of Jerusalem’s Old City, sacred to Muslims all over the world. The Aqsa Mosque and the gold-plated Dome of the Rock is the third holiest place of worship to the Muslims, where it is said that Prophet Mohammed ascended to heaven on his winged horse Buraq. Hence, the name of the western wall, which Muslims call the Buraq wall, to which the prophet was said to have tethered the magical horse.
     Jewish tradition tells another story, claiming the wall is the last standing edifice remaining from the destroyed Second Temple and is therefore sacred to the Jews. more..

How Hezbollah defeated Israel
By Alastair Crooke and Mark Perry, Asia Times 10/1/2006
     Includes links to article in three parts
     PART 1: The intelligence war -- The Israeli government violated the first principle of war - it showed contempt for its enemy, Hezbollah, and the resulting intelligence failure during its July campaign was catastrophic. It meant that, after the inability of Israel’s air campaign to degrade Hezbollah assets in the first 72 hours of the war, a decisive victory for Israel became highly unlikely. This left Israel with no alternative but to invade Lebanon with ground troops in the hope of destroying Hezbollah’s will to prevail.
     PART 2: The ground war -- Israel’s call up of reservists was the first clear sign that its air strikes against Hezbollah had not been successful. Then came false claims of towns captured and battles won, and the indiscriminate use of cluster munitions. By any accounting - whether in rockets, armored vehicles or numbers of dead and wounded - Hezbollah scored a decisive military and political victory.
     PART 3: The political war -- The aftermath of the Israel-Hezbollah war will be felt for years, not months, and has redrawn the political map throughout the Middle East, not just in Israel and Lebanon. And the upshot of it all is that if and when the US attacks Iran, it will lose. more..

Samir Kassir’s Little Book of Big Ideas
By Rami Khouri, Middle East Online 2/7/2007
     Samir Kassir, even in death, radiates hope and self-confidence, anchored in that powerful, rich, irresistible combination of Arab-Islamic, Western and universalist values that still define most people in the Middle East.
     BEIRUT - The one person whose photograph hangs in my office is the late Lebanese writer Samir Kassir. He was assassinated in 2005, but his ideas are more relevant than ever, as Lebanon, Palestine and the entire Arab world that defined his life embrace greater tension and violence practiced simultaneously by the state, opposition groups and foreign armies. The British publisher Verso has just put out an English translation of his small book, an extended essay really, entitled Being Arab.
     Kassir’s enduring power reflects two core aspects of his life and work: his insistence on challenging the oppression and indignities that many Arabs suffered at the hands of their own regimes or foreign powers, while at the same time rejecting the tendency to wallow in a sense of victimization. Instead, he affirms faith in the modern Arab world’s capacity for national rejuvenation, cultural affirmation and humanistic progress.
     Kassir touched so many people because these sentiments are not the lone thoughts of a maverick Arab writer. Rather, this conviction of one’s worth and potential is a prevalent attitude in the heart of hundreds of millions of ordinary Arab men and women who, like him, refuse to submit to humiliation and powerlessness, and instead affirm their humanity and their rights as citizens. more..

Civil War or coup d’état in Palestine?
By Agustin Velloso, Palestine Chronicle 2/6/2007
     What role is the international community playing in the shootings? Is there a civil war going on in Palestine? Still, what is the relationship between sanctions and shootings? What is going to happen from now on?
     Is there a civil war going on in Palestine? No, but this question and an affirmative answer is what pro-Israeli media are disseminating all over the world. Hence, the average news consumer does not discuss the “reality” of the civil war.
     But, are not we seeing that Palestinians are killing each other in Gaza streets?
     What we are seeing is that since Hamas took power in the last legislative elections (January 2006), which were monitored by hundreds of foreign observers, Jimmy Carter amongst them, the Western powers have made all kind of political and economic maneuvers to oust the winner with the help of the loser, Abu Mazen and his Fatah party.
     However, Palestine is not Iraq, there are no Western armies in Gaza, is it not an internal Palestinian affair?
     It is not an internal affair. Palestine is just one more square of the big Middle East cheesboard. The international community plays in it to its advantage, namely: the control of oil and the support of its ally, Israel. The Western powers support Fatah because they say it represents the ‘moderate’ Palestinians and torpedo Hamas because its program does not fit with the Zionist and Imperialist agendas. Once Hamas obtained the majority of the Legislative Council seats, the powerful leaders, Bush, Rice, Blair, Olmert, Solana and others adopted plan B: to oust Hamas from government no matter the price (to be paid by rank and file Palestinians, of course).
     What role is the international community playing in the shootings?
     Shootings are the last movement in the chess game. Before this movement, the Western countries –allegedly democratic and the guardians of international law- invaded countries, flattened entire cities, bombarded families at weddings and in the beach, and forced Arab and Muslim prisoners in secret flights around the globe to torture them at will and put them in cages like animals. more..

Turmoil and Confusion
By Ghassan Khatib, Palestine Chronicle 2/6/2007
     Hamas, at this late stage in the game, cannot both accept the parameters of Oslo by running in elections for control of the PA and want to change them by denying the legitimacy of the Oslo agreement that created this body.
     Despite the surprise that greeted Hamas’ election victory in Palestinian parliamentary elections last year, the Islamic Resistance Movement did not come from nowhere.
     Hamas first emerged as a real player on the Palestinian social and economic scene during the first intifada that started in 1989. Even then it came from the ranks of the long-established Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood movement, which had remained relatively marginal until Hamas engaged in active resistance to the Israeli occupation.
     The movement strongly opposed the peace negotiations with Israel in 1991, the Oslo agreement of 1993 and all subsequent agreements between Israel and the Palestinian Authority that was established as a result of Oslo. The movement also boycotted the 1996 parliamentary elections.
     With this opposition, Hamas gained three advantages that allowed it to steadily increase its popularity with the public. The first, and maybe most important, was its heavy involvement in fighting the Israeli occupation at a time when Fateh, which had initiated and led that struggle until the peace process, was no longer involved. Hamas, in other words, strove to replace Fateh as the leading resistance movement.
     In this regard, Hamas was helped immensely by Israel’s refusal to end its expansion of illegal Jewish settlements during the years of the peace process. Thus, Hamas’ second advantage was the failure of the peace process to achieve its promised and declared objectives, whether in terms of ending the occupation or in terms of improving the lives of Palestinians and establishing the institutions of a future Palestinian state. more..

Fatal Kiss
By Uri Avnery, Gush Shalom 2/3/2007
     IT SOUNDS like a promo for a second rate soap opera: a 21- year old woman appears with a much older celebrity, who grabs her, forces a kiss on her and pushes his tongue into her mouth.
     This scene has been occupying the attention of the Israeli public for months now, more than any other topic, except perhaps the allegation that the President of the State sexually assaulted several of his employees. The war and its consequences have been pushed aside.
     The interest stems, of course, from the identity of kisser and kissee: Haim Ramon was at the time Minister of Justice and a central figure in the government; the young woman, who was identified only as H., was a lieutenant in the office of the "military secretary" of the Prime Minister, an important military-political liaison point. The fatal encounter took place at the Prime Minister’s office, shortly before a cabinet meeting.
     This week, three judges - two female, one male - unanimously found Ramon guilty of an indecent act. It seems that the prosecution will not call for the maximum penalty - three years in prison - but the political career of Ramon has, so it seems, come to an end.
     This might have been nothing more than a juicy piece of gossip, except for one small detail, which has hardly been mentioned: the fateful kiss took place in the room adjacent to that where a cabinet meeting was due to start, and in which it was decided to start the war in Lebanon.
     A short time before that, the Chief-of-Staff, Dan Halutz, also found the time and energy for an un-warlike act: he called his broker and instructed him to sell his shares. more..

Refugee parents despair as Gaza streets turn into battlegrounds
By Adnan Abu Hasna and Maysa Gayyussi, Electronic Intifada/UNRWA 2/6/2007
     Gaza, February 2007 - "Now life in Gaza is complete" says Um-Salim, a painful sarcasm tinging her words. Um-Saleem speaks as she run s towards the hospital after hearing that camp children were injured during recent factional infighting.
     "It is not enough that we have to live in deep poverty and sadness. Now death comes, without warning, to kill our children, our dreams and our hope."
     Umm-Salim has four children and lives in Shati refugee camp on the western edge of Gaza City. "I told my children not to go into the streets because the situation is really dangerous. There is shooting everywhere and bullets have no mercy".
     Um-Salim is one among thousands of refugee parents afraid to let their children go to school because of the internal fighting raging in the streets. Despite her fears, Umm-Salim admits she is powerless to stop her children’s desire to go out and play. "They are children", she says. "If they are not in school, they are full of energy and must do something."
     Clashes take place throughout the day, and after dark the nightmare continues, too. "We cannot sleep at night. The sound of bullets and explosions remind us of the Israeli invasions into Gaza. My children are terrified all the time. We don’t know what to do".
     Amal, a young university student, confirms Un-Salim’s fears. "My father swears to God that he will never allow me or my brothers to go to school under these circumstances." Six of Amal’s brothers attend UNRWA schools. "He says said that our lives are more important to him than education."
     As she speaks, Amal’s expression grows wistful. "I love and respect my father, but I miss classes and my friends at school so much! I waited so many years to finally begin university. I want the fighting to stop. I want to go back to school." more..

Beyond Factional Antagonism
By Rami Bathish, Palestine Chronicle 2/7/2007
     While Gaza is being buried alive by our own short-sidedness and inadequacy, and with it the realisation of our greater national aspirations of liberation and independence, a true dilemma presents itself before us
     Following some of the bloodiest clashes in a year between Hamas and Fateh loyalists in the Gaza Strip, in which at least 25 people were killed and 250 injured last week, the prospects of sustainable truce within the Palestinian territories seem more distant than ever. The looming threat of civil war is no longer a perceived nightmare, but rather a daily reality in which all Palestinians find themselves. Despite repeated appeals for calm by political leaders from both factions, violence continues on the streets of the Gaza Strip, and the chain of command is often lost at the outbreak of the slightest incident.
     Once again, top leaders of Hamas and Fateh have agreed to renew the truce, and President Mahmoud Abbas is due to meet with Hamas politburo Chief Khaled Mash’al in Saudi Arabia tomorrow in order to reach agreement over the formation of a Palestinian national unity government. However, on the streets of Gaza back home, volatility prevails and the threat of continued clashes is almost inevitable.
     Undoubtedly, there are underlying causes to this shameful internal strife, not least the paradoxical paradigm shift in Palestinian politics since Hamas’ rise to power in January 2006, and the shock effect it has generated both internally and externally. However, the intensity and concentration of factional confrontations between Palestine’s two giants in the Gaza Strip, which have been contained to a large extent in the West Bank, calls for deeper assessment of the social, cultural, political, and economic composition of the former.
     Throughout Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories (since 1967), the Gaza Strip, more so than the West Bank, has evolved into a conservative socio-political entity in which the absence of individual and communal security has given rise to a dominant alternative to a social order usually provided by the state, or government: the family, the neighbourhood, the clan, even the security forces have increasingly become the haven in which Gazans find refuge, and consequently, the protector to which they pledge their loyalty. more..

Silencing Critics not Way to Middle East Peace
By Joel Beinin, Palestine Chronicle 2/6/2007
     I had participated in the civil rights movement in America , picketing Woolworth’s stores that wouldn’t serve African Americans. Yet in Israel I discovered the same, stark racism. How could this bring peace between Palestinians and Israelis?
     Last Sunday in San Francisco , the Anti-Defamation League sponsored "Finding Our Voice," a conference designed to help Jews recognize and confront the "new anti-Semitism." For me, it was ironic. Ten days before, my own voice was silenced by fellow Jews.
     I was to give a talk about our Middle East policy to high school students at the Harker School in San Jose . With one day to go, my contact there called to say my appearance had been canceled. He was apologetic and upset. He expected the talk would be intellectually stimulating and intriguing for students. But, he said, "a certain community of parents" complained to the headmaster. He added, without divulging details, that the Jewish Community Relations Council of Silicon Valley had played a role.
     [Editor’s note: Diane Fisher, executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Silicon Valley, says that although she left a message for the school principal, she never actually spoke to him, and any suggestion that the council was responsible for the cancellation of Beinin’s appearance at the school is inaccurate and an "unlikely inflation of JCRC’s influence."]
     I was raised a Zionist. I went to Israel after high school for six months to live on a kibbutz. I met my wife there. We returned four years later thinking we’d spend our lives on a kibbutz, working the land and living the Zionist dream. Why did the council feel the need to silence me?
     In fact, this was not our first run-in. I have long advocated equal rights for the Palestinians, as I do for all people. I criticize Israeli policies. I seem to have crossed the council’s line of acceptable discourse. Because I am a Jew, it is not so easy to smear me as guilty of this "new anti-Semitism." Instead, hosts like the Harker School , and others, are intimidated, and open dialogue on Israel is censored. more..

Olmert’s shelter
By Akiva Eldar, Ha’aretz 2/7/2007
     Ehud Olmert has apparently learned from Ariel Sharon that it is easier for a prime minister to maintain a hawkish policy if he has a minister or two to his left presenting dovish positions. This was Shimon Peres’ primary role in the Sharon government. Olmert has fine-tuned the concept. He granted Amir Peretz the empty title of "defense minister" and turned him into a significant player to his left. Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, who often talks of peace and influences Olmert as much as forecasters affect the weather, has also done her part. The leaks that the prime minister is on the brink of taking Peretz’s toy away from him and of putting Livni back in the Justice Ministry, have ensured that things will not go to their heads. Here are a few examples, which illustrate the phenomenon of a government steering rightward on left-wing crutches.
     Under the cover of the sound of explosions in Gaza and Olmert’s nice words to Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, the Kadima-Labor government is proceeding with a settlement strategy that explains why the minister of strategic affairs, Avigdor Lieberman, is so quiet. Construction of a police station in the area known as E1, between Ma’aleh Adumim and Jerusalem, is now nearing completion. Four floors have already been built and heavy equipment is energetically paving a highway to the new station. No other police facility has merited its own four-to-six lane highway. Dozens of settlements in the territories began in the same way. First came the rope, then the bucket. After the road come the houses.
     Because of U.S. opposition, the plans to build a neighborhood of 3,500 housing units in the area and to use it to link Ma’aleh Adumim to Jerusalem will have to wait. But the new building and the expansive road ensure that this area will remain for the time being outside the Palestinians’ area and will perpetuate the division of the West Bank from north to south (in addition to cutting off the Jordan Valley in the east, from the rest of the West Bank. more..

’Brzezinski’s showstopper’ - Full text
By Zbigniew Brzezinski, Commonweal blog 2/1/2007
     Statement delivered by Zbigniew Brzezinski in today’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing, suppressed by US media. Your hearings come at a critical juncture in the U.S. war of choice in Iraq, and I commend you and Senator Lugar for scheduling them.
     It is time for the White House to come to terms with two central realities:
     1. The war in Iraq is a historic, strategic, and moral calamity. Undertaken under false assumptions, it is undermining America’s global legitimacy. Its collateral civilian casualties as well as some abuses are tarnishing America’s moral credentials. Driven by Manichean impulses and imperial hubris, it is intensifying regional instability.
     2. Only a political strategy that is historically relevant rather than reminiscent of colonial tutelage can provide the needed framework for a tolerable resolution of both the war in Iraq and the intensifying regional tensions.
     If the United States continues to be bogged down in a protracted bloody involvement in Iraq, the final destination on this downhill track is likely to be a head-on conflict with Iran and with much of the world of Islam at large. A plausible scenario for a military collision with Iran involves Iraqi failure to meet the benchmarks; followed by accusations of Iranian responsibility for the failure; then by some provocation in Iraq or a terrorist act in the U.S. blamed on Iran; culminating in a "defensive" U.S. military action against Iran that plunges a lonely America into a spreading and deepening quagmire eventually ranging across Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.
     A mythical historical narrative to justify the case for such a protracted and potentially expanding war is already being articulated. Initially justified by false claims about WMD’s in Iraq, the war is now being redefined as the "decisive ideological struggle" of our time, reminiscent of the earlier collisions with Nazism and Stalinism. In that context, Islamist extremism and al Qaeda are presented as the equivalents of the threat posed by Nazi Germany and then Soviet Russia, and 9/11 as the equivalent of the Pearl Harbor attack which precipitated America’s involvement in World War II.
     This simplistic and demagogic narrative overlooks the fact that Nazism was based on the military power of the industrially most advanced European state; and that Stalinism was able to mobilize not only the resources of the victorious and militarily powerful Soviet Union but also had worldwide appeal through its Marxist doctrine. In contrast, most Muslims are not embracing Islamic fundamentalism; al Qaeda is an isolated fundamentalist Islamist aberration; most Iraqis are engaged in strife because the American occupation of Iraq destroyed the Iraqi state; while Iran -- though gaining in regional influence -- is itself politically divided, economically and militarily weak. To argue that America is already at war in the region with a wider Islamic threat, of which Iran is the epicenter, is to promote a self-fulfilling prophecy. more..

Putting Words in Ahmadinejad’s Mouth
By VIRGINIA TILLEY, CounterPunch 8/28/2006
     Is Iran’s President Really a Jew-hating, Holocaust-denying Islamo-fascist who has threatened to "wipe Israel off the map"?
     In this frightening mess in the Middle East, let’s get one thing straight. Iran is not threatening Israel with destruction. Iran’s president has not threatened any action against Israel. Over and over, we hear that Iran is clearly "committed to annihilating Israel" because the "mad" or "reckless" or "hard-line" President Ahmadinejad has repeatedly threatened to destroy Israel But every supposed quote, every supposed instance of his doing so, is wrong.
     The most infamous quote, "Israel must be wiped off the map", is the most glaringly wrong. In his October 2005 speech, Mr. Ahmadinejad never used the word "map" or the term "wiped off". According to Farsi-language experts like Juan Cole and even right-wing services like MEMRI, what he actually said was "this regime that is occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time."
     What did he mean? In this speech to an annual anti-Zionist conference, Mr. Ahmadinejad was being prophetic, not threatening. He was citing Imam Khomeini, who said this line in the 1980s (a period when Israel was actually selling arms to Iran, so apparently it was not viewed as so ghastly then). Mr. Ahmadinejad had just reminded his audience that the Shah’s regime, the Soviet Union, and Saddam Hussein had all seemed enormously powerful and immovable, yet the first two had vanished almost beyond recall and the third now languished in prison. So, too, the "occupying regime" in Jerusalem would someday be gone. His message was, in essence, "This too shall pass."
     But what about his other "threats" against Israel? The blathersphere made great hay from his supposed comment later in the same speech, "There is no doubt: the new wave of assaults in Palestine will erase the stigma in [the] countenance of the Islamic world." "Stigma" was interpreted as "Israel" and "wave of assaults" was ominous. But what he actually said was, "I have no doubt that the new movement taking place in our dear Palestine is a wave of morality which is spanning the entire Islamic world and which will soon remove this stain of disgrace from the Islamic world." "Wave of morality" is not "wave of assaults." The preceding sentence had made clear that the "stain of disgrace" was the Muslim world’s failure to eliminate the "occupying regime." more..

War with Iran is Coming
By John Pilger, Palestine Chronicle 2/5/2007
     The "threat" from Iran is entirely manufactured, aided and abetted by familiar, compliant media language that refers to Iran’s "nuclear ambitions," just as the vocabulary of Saddam’s non-existent WMD arsenal became common usage.
     The United States is planning what will be a catastrophic attack on Iran. For the Bush cabal, the attack will be a way of "buying time" for its disaster in Iraq. In announcing what he called a "surge" of American troops in Iraq, George W. Bush identified Iran as his real target. "We will interrupt the flow of support [to the insurgency in Iraq] from Iran and Syria," he said. "And we will seek out and destroy the networks providing advanced weaponry and training to our enemies in Iraq."
     "Networks" means Iran. "There is solid evidence," said a State Department spokesman on 24 January, "that Iranian agents are involved in these networks and that they are working with individuals and groups in Iraq and are being sent there by the Iranian government." Like Bush’s and Blair’s claim that they had irrefutable evidence that Saddam Hussein was deploying weapons of mass destruction, the "evidence" lacks all credibility. Iran has a natural affinity with the Shi’ite majority of Iraq, and has been implacably opposed to al-Qaeda, condemning the 9/11 attacks and supporting the United States in Afghanistan. Syria has done the same. Investigations by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and others, including British military officials, have concluded that Iran is not engaged in the cross-border supply of weapons. General Peter Pace, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said no such evidence exists.
     As the American disaster in Iraq deepens and domestic and foreign opposition grows, "neocon" fanatics such as Vice President Cheney believe their opportunity to control Iran’s oil will pass unless they act no later than the spring. For public consumption, there are potent myths. In concert with Israel and Washington’s Zionist and fundamentalist Christian lobbies, the Bushites say their "strategy" is to end Iran’s nuclear threat. In fact, Iran possesses not a single nuclear weapon nor has it ever threatened to build one; the CIA estimates that, even given the political will, Iran is incapable of building a nuclear weapon before 2017, at the earliest. more..

Gaza Unrest Paralyzes Movement
By Rami Almeghari, Palestine Chronicle 2/5/2007
     In many parts of Gaza, driving by car or walking on foot has become difficult for the locals, as roadblocks are spread every where, as unknown militants check people identities on main roads in the city.
     Gaza -- As internal unrest in Gaza City, due to clashes between Fatah and Hamas supporters that has claimed lives of 25, wounded dozens others and caused destruction to many public utilities such as universities and governmental buildings, since last Thursday, movement in Gaza city is almost paralyzed.
     The United Nations Works and Relief Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) announced it would keep all schools, administered by it, closed starting from February 3 until a further notice, pending restore to calm.
     The Palestinian Authority institutions were almost empty on Saturday, as employees refrained from going to work places out of fear they come across fire.
     Fathi Tobail, director of Translation Department at the State Information Service said that he had no employees today, following the Friday ceasefire agreement between Hamas and Fatah, as clashes renewed in Gaza despite such an announcement.
     Most of stores and shops in the city were closed today as streets appeared almost empty of passersby, but gunmen everywhere, either official security personnel, Fatah militants, and Hamas’s executive force.
     A local Gaza resident, who refused to give his name, said “this is unbearable situation as we can not sleep, walk or live. Why they are fighting? For power? Where is this power as we are besieged, while our economy is deteriorating? We don’t need either Hamas or Fatah” more..

The American proxy war in Gaza
By Ali Abunimah, Electronic Intifada 2/3/2007
     In recent days the unremitting, murderous brutality of the Israeli occupation has been eclipsed by the carnage in Gaza as dozens of Palestinians have been killed in what is commonly referred to as "interfactional fighting" between forces loyal to Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah faction on the one hand, and the Hamas-led government on the other.
     The airwaves have been filled with anguished calls from every sector of Palestinian society -- political parties, nongovermental organizations, and Christian and Muslim religious leaders -- for the fighting to cease and for a return to dialogue.
     Perhaps for fear of exacerbating the already bitter situation, few of these voices have directly confronted the engine of this violence.
     In the fevered minds of Bush administration ideologues, Palestine has become another front in what they conceive of as a new Cold War against "Islamofascism." They see Iran as the central target and proxy battles are being waged against a phantom enemy from Afghanistan and Pakistan, through Iraq into Palestine, Lebanon, Somalia and ever onwards wherever Arabs and Muslims are to be found. In every case, local conflicts with specific histories are being escalated and marshalled into this grand narrative .
     Mahmoud Abbas and Gaza warlord Muhammad Dahlan have become the willing proxies for the Palestine franchise of this wider project, as their tactics and loyalists’ statements reveal.
     The latest round of fighting began on February 1, when forces of the Palestinian Ministry of Interior, run by the Hamas government, attempted to interdict a convoy of trucks that crossed into Gaza from Israel. Officials alleged that the trucks were carrying weapons destined for the Presidential Guard, the militia loyal to Abbas.
     See also: Elliot Abrams’ Uncivil War more..

Israel’s Kafkaesque ‘Matrix of Control’
By Stephen Lendman, Palestine Chronicle/Zmag 2/2/2007
     Repression can never be sustained forever and won’t be. The sooner Israel accepts that, the quicker real peace will come to the Middle East, and it can’t happen any too soon.
     Finding an equitable solution to the intractable, festering decades-long Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the Gordian Knot that must be cut to achieve peace overall in the Middle East. Today, no solution is in sight nor are any serious efforts planned to find one despite occasional rhetoric to the contrary like what’s now being heard from Washington with similar disingenuous echoes inside Israel.
     Palestinians know otherwise from long experience. They’ve heard this siren song before. It’s the same old tired refrain going nowhere and not intending to. The so-called "road map" goes nowhere, and the "peace process" guarantees only more conflict because Israel wants it that way to justify its harshness and refuses to discuss the most fundamental Palestinian concerns. Unless they’re resolved there can never be peace. They include a sovereign integral independent Palestinian state, the Right of Return, status of Jerusalem Palestinians want as their capital, settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) that must be removed, and established borders. They also include ending what Palestinian-American scholar and activist Edward Said once called Israel’s agenda of "refined viciousness" against the Palestinian people. Since Hamas’ Palestinian Authority (PA) January, 2006 legislative electoral victory, there’s been nothing "refined" about it.
     As long as these issues and present conditions go unaddressed, this long-running tragedy will go on without end destroying the lives of new generations of young Palestinians who nonetheless continue their valiant struggle for freedom and justice even against overwhelming odds. Today they’re greater than ever as the tiny Israeli state with six million Jews (including those in OPT settlements) is a world nuclear power compared to a virtually defenseless Palestinian population of about five million. Included are 1.4 million Arab Israeli citizens. They’re denied all rights Israeli Jews get and are subjected to constant abuse and neglect. They’re a fifth of the population but are forced to live on 2% of the land plus 1% more for agricultural use. The Jewish population gets nearly all the rest. more..

Israel’s Economic Stranglehold a Silent Killer
By Nora Barrows-Friedman, Inter Press Service 1/31/2007
     BETHLEHEM, West Bank - Over the last year, Palestinians have faced a siege that has taken its toll in every city across the West Bank and Gaza. It is not a siege of missiles and gunfire, but a calculated attack on the backbone of the entire occupied territories.
     Through the Israeli, U.S. and European move to paralyse the precarious Palestinian economy over the last year, daily life has become a constant struggle for the ordinary Palestinian trying to put food on the table or run a business within a choking, round-the-clock military occupation.
     The day after the swearing in of the duly-elected Hamas leadership in February 2006, Israel froze the release of tax revenues to the Palestinian Authority to the tune of 52 million dollars a month, as collective punishment against the millions of occupied Palestinians for electing the Hamas leadership.
     In parallel attacks just months later, the United States and the European Union slapped economic sanctions against the entire population, under the conditions that Hamas "recognise" Israel’s right to exist while "renouncing" violence.
     Additionally, since February 2006, Israel has worked hard to pressure international aid organisations and donor countries to suspend aid projects in Palestine.
     Financially sanctioning an occupied population is historically unprecedented, and has led to an irreparable trickle-down effect throughout the occupied territories.
     Since the beginning of 2006, the poverty rate in the West Bank and Gaza has skyrocketed. In November 2006, the United Nations Relief Works Agencies published a report on poverty statistics, and concluded that the number of "deep poor" (Palestinian families unable to meet basic human consumption needs) increased 64.3 percent in the first half of 2006 alone. In the West Bank, the unemployment rate is now a staggering 60 percent. more..

40 years of aggressiveness
By Meron Benvenisti, Ha’aretz 2/6/2007
     The date on which we will mark the 40th anniversary of the occupation of the West Bank in the Six-Day War threatens to inundate the public with endless summaries, assessments and political plans. After all, who can resist the temptation of discussing this decisive historical event and its consequences? And not surprisingly, all the summaries and all the lessons learned faithfully reflect ideological viewpoints that were frozen somewhere in the 1970s and have not changed in spite of the passing of time and in spite of the radical changes that have taken place on the ground.
     Naturally, the summaries are focused on Jerusalem, whose "unification" is still seen as significant, as opposed to the "liberation of Nablus and Hebron, the cradle of the nation," whose mention has long since become an embarrassment and a problem to be gotten rid of, except, of course, in the eyes of extremist circles.
     When it comes to Jerusalem, it is as though time had stopped. Issues such as the demographic balance, the boundaries of the united city, or discrimination in services to the Arab population, which gave rise to impassioned debate in the political establishment and among the public, continue to attract attention even after 40 years, and define the political affiliation of those engaged in the debate.
     The question of whether, shortly before his death, Teddy Kollek was for or against the division of the city, arouses interest even after his passing. The municipal boundary drawn in 1967, hastily and without any farseeing urban thinking, has been poured in concrete and has become a decisive urban and political factor, whose consequences will be felt for decades. This, a fictitious formula for a demographic balance between Jews and Arabs, continues to serve as a dominant factor in city planning, as new generations of scholars and politicians continue to discuss the same dilemmas that engaged their older, tired colleagues, and prove that time solves nothing. The enigma of Jerusalem has thus remained unsolved. more..

The Twilight Zone / By the book
By Gideon Levy, Ha’aretz 2/5/2007
     There’s no question about it - everything was done by the book. The gate was locked at 7 P.M. and 16,000 people, residents of the villages of Beit Furik and Beit Dajan, were imprisoned behind it until 6 A.M. That’s the procedure. A woman who wants to cross the checkpoint at night has to go on foot, to wait until a female soldier comes to do a body check, even if she is about to give birth; that, too, is procedure. And only cars with permits are allowed to enter Nablus, even if dying people are sitting inside them; that is also according to procedure. No soldier deviated from the procedure, everything was done by the book, the book of the occupation.
     That is how it happened that a cancer patient was delayed for about an hour and a half at the Hawara checkpoint, until he died in a taxi that was not allowed to enter Nablus, a taxi in which he was trying to get from the hospital to his home, his final request. That is also what happened when the young woman in labor was forced to stand in the cold and the rain for about half an hour and to make her way on foot for several hundred meters while in labor. That’s the procedure.
     The death of cancer patient Taysir Kaisi was inevitable, but why in such pain, waiting endlessly in a "non-permitted" taxi at the checkpoint? And the young woman from Beit Furik who was about to give birth, Roba Hanani, finally arrived at the hospital in Nablus and successfully gave birth there to her first child, but why with such torture? Why did they deserve it? What would we think if our loved ones were to die or suffer labor pains at a checkpoint separating the city and the village? Life and death are in the hands of the checkpoint: The story of the death of Taysir Kaisi and the birth of Raghad Hanani, between the Hawara checkpoint and the Beit Furik checkpoint, during an easing of restrictions at the checkpoints, less than an hour’s drive from Tel Aviv, is a story that should disturb our equanimity. more..

Nkwenkwezi Bil’in: The Star of Bil’in
By Abdullah Abu Rahme, International Solidarity Movement 2/4/2007
     By Abdullah Abu Rahme, Coordinator of the Popular Committee Against the Wall in Bil’in. Translated By Nasir Samara
     Throughout the history of the occupation, Palestinians have sought every means to resist, to make their voices heard to the world, and to raise international support for the Palestinian struggle for freedom and independence. One of these means includes promoting solidarity with Palestine through international volunteers, whom we consider as ambassadors for our struggle in their own countries.
     Yet the lives of these volunteers also bring inspiration to us. Take the story of Anna Wicks, 30, as an example. Anna fought against discrimination in her native South Africa, and came to Palestine with the International Solidarity Movement on five occasions to stand with the Palestinian people in their struggle against the occupation and the Apartheid Wall, one of the most visible forms of open discrimination in the world, one which separates citizens from their lands and which prevents them from moving freely in their own homeland.
     Anna stood with farmers and citizens of the villages of Nas’ha, Budrus, Jayyous and Bil’in. She participated in demonstrations and direct actions against the Wall, and accompanied students in Hebron in order to help them reach their schools. She stayed awake with the Bedouins living in caves in Khirbat Qawawis in South Hebron in order to protect them from settler attacks. She also acted as a human shield to protect civilians from Israeli military attacks. When the Israeli army tried to arrest one Palestinian youth, she and her friends exerted all their physical energy to secure his release. Her life was endangered many times in this way, and she herself was injured and arrested in Bil’in, and eventually deported from the village by the Israeli military and prevented from returning. more..

Iran Poses Multiple Problems for Arab Nations
By Meena Janardhan, Inter Press Service 2/3/2007
     DUBAI, Feb 3 (IPS) - As Iran vies with the United States for dominance in the Middle East, the smaller Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries are left with several anxieties -- the consequences of a U.S./Israeli military attack on Iran; the rising stock of a Shiite country that has long posed a religio-ideological threat; and sectarian strife in Sunni-ruled countries with significant Shiite communities.
     Delivering a policy statement in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) -- which has a running feud with Iran over the occupation of the Abu Mussa and Greater and Lesser Tunbs islands -- U.S. undersecretary of state for political affairs Nicholas Burns said his country has always had the stability of the ‘‘strategic’’ region in mind, but Iran has been trying to ‘‘alter’’ it by attempting to dominate.
     ‘‘The U.S. will not let this happen. We don’t want Iran to dominate the region. The Gulf isn’t a body of water to be controlled by Iran. When challenged, the United States will do everything to defend its interests. We will respond -- economically, financially, politically, and not necessarily just through military means," Burns said on Jan. 23.
     ....‘‘What we are not interested in is another war in the region,’’ said Mohammed Al-Naqbi of Gulf Negotiations Center in the UAE. ‘‘Iraq is the U.S.’s problem, not the problem of the Arabs. The U.S. destroyed a country that had institutions. It handed that country to Iran. Now it is crying to Europe and the Arabs to help them out of the mess.’’
     Munir Diar, a Yemeni analyst, recommends a regional plan. ‘‘Arabs in this region and Iran must negotiate regional security arrangements far from any American influence or dictates. Iran is a de facto regional power, its role a fait-accompliàthe Sunni-Shiite split must be done away (with),’’ he wrote in the UAE’s ‘Gulf News’ on Jan.18. more..

Hamas is not going away
Editorial, Ha’aretz 2/6/2007
     he terrible disturbances unfolding in the Gaza Strip, the killings of members of the security organizations of both Fatah and Hamas, the lack of control of the twin leaders - Mahmoud Abbas on one hand and Ismail Haniyeh on the other - are too easily being called "civil war." This is a term that apparently offers Israel refuge from the need to act on the diplomatic front. However, Israel has never needed excuses. With or without Palestinian infighting, Israel has usually said that it has no partner on the Palestinian side, irrespective of whether Yasser Arafat, Abbas or Haniyeh were in power. Once more we should treat the claim of there being "an absence of [Palestinian] leadership" and the excuse of the "fighting in the territories" with skepticism.
     During the past year, a new political reality emerged, both in the territories and in Israel, which the Quartet refuses to acknowledge. Hamas, not Fatah won the elections, and Hamas is the one that has a hold on the Palestinian institutions of government, while Fatah is behaving as a rebel movement that refuses to accept its defeats. Lately, Arab states like Egypt and Saudi Arabia, considered moderates, recognize the fact that the general embargo on the Palestinian Authority is not only ineffective in altering this political reality - it contributes to dangerous developments that may have an influence on them.
     It appears that Hamas also recognizes the fact that purely ideological views cannot serve a political organization that is trying to rally broad public support. Therefore, Hamas is prepared to relinquish, to a certain degree, control over all senior Palestinian government positions; Khaled Meshal murmured that "Israel is a fact"; the political statements of Hamas have made it clear that it aspires to establish a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders; and now there is a Saudi/Egyptian effort to convince Hamas to adopt a moderate formula regarding the agreements signed between Israel and the Palestinian Authority. more..

Please spare me the word ’terrorist’
By Robert Fisk, The Independent 2/3/2007
     Lebanon is a good place to find out what tosh the ’terror’ merchants talk
     So it was back to terror, terror, terror this week. The "terrorist" Hizbollah was trying to destroy the "democratically elected government" of Fouad Siniora in Lebanon. The "terrorist" Hamas government cannot rule Palestine. Iranian "terrorists" in Iraq are going to be gunned down by US troops.
     My favourite line of the week came from the "security source" - just how one becomes a "security source" remains a mystery to me -- who announced: "Terrorists are always looking for new ways to strike terror... There is no end of the possibilities where terrorists can try to cause terror to the public." Well, you could have fooled me.
     Lebanon is as good a place as any to find out what a load of old tosh the "terror" merchants talk. For here it is that the hydra-headed monster of Iran is supposedly stalking the streets of Beirut, staging a coup against Mr Siniora and his ministers.
     Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the Hizbollah leader, is the man Israel spent all last summer trying - vainly, of course - to kill, his black-bearded, turbaned appearance on Hizbollah’s own TV station a source of fury to both Ehud Olmert and - nowadays - to Siniora’s men in government.
     Now it’s true that Nasrallah - an intelligent, former military commander of Hizbollah in southern Lebanon - is developing a rather odd cult of personality. His massive features tower over the Beirut airport highway, a giant hand waving at motorists in both directions. And these days, you can buy Hizbollah T-shirts and Nasrallah key chains. But somehow "terror" is not quite the word that comes to mind.
     This is partly because the tens of thousands of Shia Muslims whom Hizbollah represents are staging a social revolution rather than a coup, a mass uprising of the poor who have traditionally been ignored by the great and the good of Lebanese society. more..

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