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Recent News..     7/2/2009     7/1/2009                 News Headlines News & Articles in text format Headlines in text format News Archives Get daily News & Articles by e-mail         Palestine Diaries courtesy The Electronic Intifada This webpage uses Javascript to display some content. Please enable Javascript in your browser and reload this page. EI: Human Rights courtesy The Electronic Intifada This webpage uses Javascript to display some content. Please enable Javascript in your browser and reload this page.

Sound bombs and tear gas at nonviolent demonstration in Sarra
International Womens’ Peace Service 6/29/2008
     On Saturday 28th June, IWPS volunteers joined Palestinians and other internationals in the village of Sarra for a demonstration against Israel’s policies of land confiscation and closure.
     The village is located in the Nablus district of the West Bank and has a population of`3000. In 2002 the Israelis cut off the village’s access to the main road from Qalqilya to Nablus by building an earth mound at the entrance to the village. Now unable to cross the road, many of the village farmers cannot reach their olive trees. The road closure also means that what used to be a 15 minute journey to Qalqilya now takes 2 hours as the villagers have to travel to Nablus and cross through various checkpoints. Even to get to Nablus the journey now takes 30 minutes where it used to take only 7 minutes.
     The demonstration began at around 3pm with around 200 villagers and internationals walking down to the road block where an army jeep was already waiting. The demonstrators climbed on to the earth mound with an anti-apartheid banner and began chanting resistance songs, while some tried to remove the earth mound using spades. Another five military jeeps and armoured personnel carriers then arrived. After only a few minutes the soldiers threw a sound bomb directly in front of the anti-apartheid banner which was being carried by young boys, this was quickly followed by tear gas, despite the fact that the protest was non-violent. When the demonstration regrouped on the earth mound several youths from the village dressed in traditional Palestinian costumes performed the Dabka, a traditional Palestinian dance. more.. e-mail

Tactics that ended apartheid in S. Africa can end it in Israel
Bill Fletcher, Jr, Electronic Intifada 6/29/2008
     The Israeli-Palestinian conflict often inspires a sense of powerlessness. What can average Americans do to bring an end to this decades-old conflict when our leaders have failed so miserably?
     And what good is speaking out about Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land as the primary obstacle to peace when even former President Jimmy Carter and Nobel Laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu are condemned for their criticism of Israeli policies?
     This month in San Jose, California, average Americans will have the opportunity to take a stand for peace and justice in the Middle East. The Presbyterian Church US’s General Assembly began Saturday and runs through Sunday at the San Jose Convention Center. At the meeting, which takes place once every two years, delegates will make policy decisions for the 2.3 million-member denomination.
     They will consider corporate engagement, up to divestment, with companies that profit from the obstacles to a just peace in Israel and Palestine. The church is considering approaches to Caterpillar, ITT Industries, Motorola and United Technologies. more.. e-mail

Sarkozy’s Ambition in the Middle East
Randa Takieddine, MIFTAH 6/28/2008
     The visit by French President Nicholas Sarkozy to Jerusalem and Bethlehem proves that France has not changed its policy vis-à-vis the Middle East conflict. It proves that the fundamental principles that differentiate it from the US policy remain intact, with an insistence that Jerusalem should be the capital of two states, that a Palestinian state should be established, the Israeli settlement activity halted, and the obstacles before the Palestinian people removed.
     However, what has changed with Sarkozy involves form, and not content. There is also the huge ambition to secure a role in terms of a Middle East settlement. The form involved a message of affection to the Jewish people and Israel, and the use of Biblical passages in his address to the Knesset. In this speech, Sarkozy said that his grandfather was Jewish and was unable to use the word "Germany" because of the Holocaust. Sarkozy said that after everything that had happened, the German and French peoples reconciled, affirming the inevitability of coexistence between the Palestinian and Israeli peoples in two states. more.. e-mail

Palestinian Conference in Berlin Falls Flat
Michael Scott Moore, MIFTAH 6/28/2008
     Everyone agreed on Tuesday that the Palestinians need help. And dozens of nations agreed in Berlin to donate money. But the Palestinians still don’t have a state, and the Middle East is still a powderkeg.
     A major, slightly disorganized 40-nation conference in Berlin arrived at a slightly underwhelming agreement on Tuesday, hoping to budge the peace process between Israel and the Palestinians forward. The glamorous but dull-sounding "Berlin Conference in Support of Palestinian Civil Security" squeezed promises of money and equipment to buck up Palestinian judicial and police infrastructure to the tune of €156 million ($242.7 million) from the international community over the next three years.
     US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was there, along with Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the Middle East Quartet’s special envoy. They raised €30 million more than expected. The idea was to strengthen Palestinian law and order, on the assumption that peace will be impossible without security in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. more.. e-mail

Are bodies that monitor corruption…. corrupt too?
Iqbal Tamimi, Palestine Think Tank 6/28/2008
     I was looking for information for some research about international corruption. I found Israel is almost always classified with European countries, while the Palestinian authority is classified with Middle Eastern countries, even though both are occupying the same geographical area.
     Such classification does not appear on a personal blog so that one might consider such deviation is due to a person’s lack of knowledge of geography, but such information happens to appear even on the websites of reputable organizations including … guess what? The website that monitors and reports on International corruption, like TRANSPARENCY INTERNATIONAL.
     Transparency International is busy keeping an eye on everyone to find how corrupt organizations or countries are, but they had no time to do their homework to classify Israel and the Palestinian authorities under the same geographical classification. -- See also: Transparency International more.. e-mail

Israeli forces harvest British seeds of violence in Palestine
Jake Norris, Palestine News Network 6/29/2008
     The military moves into a Palestinian village, demolishing whole areas of housing as a way of collectively punishing inhabitants accused of harbouring "terrorists." Villagers are arrested without explanation and taken to military prisons, while others are forced to ride on the front of trains to test the tracks for mines.
     This description could easily be mistaken for one of the daily raids carried out by the occupying Israeli forces in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.In fact, it is an example of the tactics employed by British soldiers during the Palestinian Thawra Al Kubra (Great Revolt) of 1936-1939.
     In Nablus alone, the last week has seen Israeli forces carrying out a number of invasions of the city, with two Palestinians assassinated on Tuesday and two more detained at dawn on Thursday. Meanwhile, some 70 years previously, British Mandate forces were employing exactly the same methods to control the Great Revolt, with Nablus once again suffering heavily as one of the centres of the resistance. more.. e-mail

Israeli Settlement Activity Surges Despite Peace Talks
Dion Nissenbaum, MIFTAH 6/28/2008
     Blue and yellow signs advertising new homes pepper the narrow West Bank roads that wind up to gated hilltop Jewish settlements.
     "A new stage is on its way," boasts one billboard promoting a dozen homes being built in this small Israeli settlement not far from Ramallah, the de facto Palestinian capital.
     As construction workers press ahead with work on these modest townhouses, telephone salesmen dismiss any concerns that Israel’s pledge to restrict settlement construction in the West Bank could halt the building.
     "We have all the permits we need," said Alon, a salesman for the new homes who fielded a call from McClatchy but didn’t give his last name. "All of our projects can continue."
     In the six months since President Bush launched his late-term diplomatic initiative at Annapolis, Md., Israel has dramatically accelerated the construction of homes on land that’s central to any peace deal with the Palestinians.
     In the 11 months before the Annapolis summit, Israel sought bids to build fewer than 100 homes in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which Israel took from Jordan in the 1967 Six-Day War, according to Israeli government figures. Since Annapolis, Israel has asked companies to start building more than 1,700 homes, a 1,600 percent increase. more.. e-mail

Mona (a Jerusalemite) tells about the silent ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their land
Palestine Think Tank 6/28/2008
     This is the story of all Palestinians - Message from Mona (a Jerusalemit:
     Dear Friends and Family,
     I am writing to share a little about what is happening in my life lately.As most of you know, I have been in Jerusalem since March 18 with Ramzi who at the time had barely turned 5 months.We left Habib and made the sacrifice to be apart for the coming 4 months for the sake of preserving my Jerusalem ID, to keep my residency status.I know this might sound strange, but as a Palestinian who has lived her whole life in Jerusalem, and despite the fact that my family has lived in Jerusalem and Palestine for centuries, according to the Israeli law, Palestinians living in Jerusalem are only residents but not necessarily permanent residents, and therefore are at risk all the time of losing their residency rights.
     For the past 3 years, I have been married to Habib, a Palestinian by blood but an American by citizenship, because Habib’s Jerusalem residency was revoked in 2004- although Habib was born in Jerusalem, and has lived there until his adult life. Anyways, now it was my turn to renew my entry visa to “Israel” (yes, I needed a visa in my own country)- I met with a lawyer who asked for a substantial amount to help me renew my entry visa, which would preserve my residency until the next time I have to renew (a maximum of 3 years), but this time the Israelis refused to renew it and instead told me that since I made the decision to marry an “American”, who can’t reside in Jerusalem... more.. e-mail

Is Riad Hamad’s case as dead as his body??
Adib Kawar, Palestine Think Tank 6/28/2008
     92 years after the martyrdom of his grandfather for the cause of Arab nationalism, a man was killed for devoting his efforts to his people, the Arabs of the Middle East. He was hanged in slightly different manner by the new colonialists of Palestine. Riad was born in Beirut in a Lebanese family; his grandfather, Omar Hamad, was hanged by the Ottoman Turkish ruler of what is now Syria and Lebanon, because he was an Arab nationalist who struggled for the liberation of the Arab homeland and its unity. Hamad, the grandfather, and his comrades resisted the Ottoman occupation of most of the Arab homeland. He was among 14 others who were hanged in Martyrs Square in Beirut and 23 were killed in Martyrs Square in Damascus by the Ottoman Ruler of this Turkish occupied Arab land, Jamal Pasha known Al-Jazzar (The Butcher).
     The Martyrs’ Statue, on which Riad’s name should be engraved besides that of his grandfather.
     Riad inherited the struggling resistance sprit of his Arab nationalism from his grandfather, Omar, and when he emigrated to the U.S. he carried with him this spirit and ideas. Riad the Lebanese by birth, and now American by nationality, still kept his spirit and conviction and started his fight for the pan Arab cause of occupied Palestine and its displaced indigenous Arab population, and concentrated on the welfare of the unfortunate Palestinian children scattered throughout occupied Palestine and its Arab surroundings. more.. e-mail

A chilly experience - Confronting the reality in Hebron through Breaking the Silence tour
Anne Paq, International Middle East Media Center News 6/28/2008
     The tour of Hebron and its settlements, organized by the organization "Breaking the Silence" was once again disrupted by a group of settlers on Friday, 27 of June. "Breaking the Silence" is an organization made of discharged Israeli soldiers who work to expose the reality of the occupation in the Palestinian territories.
     Even before the start of the tour, the organizer warned the group that it was not certain that the tour could proceed as planned. In the previous visit, the settlers attacked the group and threw some boiling liquid to the group, injuring one Spanish photographer. He also asked the participants not to answer to settlers’ provocations no matter what happens.
     At the first stop in Kyriat Arba settlement, located next to Hebron, a whole groupe of settlers, including children, were obviously waiting for the bus of Breaking the Silence. They quickly surrounded us and started to shout and prevented the organizer, Yehuda, to move around. The police intervened but let the settlers continue their show. One of the settlers had a loudspeaker blasting that made the tour guide comments impossible to hear. more.. e-mail

Historical memory fades as quickly as last weeks news
Kristen Ess, Palestine News Network 6/28/2008
     The Israeli press is continuing to place the onus of the "breach in calm" on Islamic Jihad’s armed resistance wing. Saraya Al Quds launched projectiles from the Gaza Strip after Israeli forces assassinated two people in the northern West Bank, including its leader.
     However that was not the breach in ’calm.’ Israeli forces shot a Palestinian farmer in the Gaza Strip the day before the West Bank assassinations.
     Today Yediot Ahranot, an Israeli news service, wrote that Islamic Jihad cannot seem to understand that the ’calm’ does not extend to the West Bank, therefore they breached the ’calm.’ On the day of the Israeli assassinations in the West Bank and the Palestinian projectile launches in the Gaza Strip, the Israeli daily Ha’aretz printed a similar story; at least blaming Saraya Al Quds for breaching the ’calm,’ when only the day before Israeli forces opened fire on a Palestinian farmer in the Gaza Strip. more.. e-mail

Doha unravelling
Lucy Fielder, Al-Ahram Weekly 6/26/2008
     As political wrangles play out on the streets, the brief accord hatched in Doha is in danger, reports from Beirut Click to view caption A Sunni fighter responds to a source of fire during clashes in Bab Al-Tebbaneh neighbourhood in the northern Lebanese port city of TripoliUnresolved disputes and sectarian rancour have bubbled to the surface in Lebanon this week, jeopardising the brief respite provided by the Doha agreement to end the 18-month political crisis. Having filled a six-month presidential void by the election of Michel Suleiman on 25 May, the country may be on the brink of yet another political vacuum. Lebanon’s leaders have returned to what they do best -- squabbling over cabinet seats and jockeying for position.
     In a possible taste of things to come in the event of a breakdown, clashes broke out in the northern city of Tripoli between Sunni anti-Syrian government supporters in Bab Al-Tebbaneh and supporters of the opposition in Alawis. At least nine people were killed and 50 injured.
     Sectarian fighting between the two areas has been common for years, but exacerbated when the country polarised between the pro-Western ruling faction and their opponents three years ago. Security incidents have been frequent over the past couple of weeks, and last week, at least three people were killed in clashes in the eastern Bekaa Valley, also an area with mixed Sunni-Shia pockets. more.. e-mail

The past as prelude? Negotiating the Palestinian refugee issue
Rex Brynen, Chatham House, ReliefWeb 6/26/2008
     Summary points:
     The question of Palestinian refugees has long been one of the most difficult issues in dispute in the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. With the onset of renewed peace talks following the Annapolis summit of November 2007, it is once again an issue that the Israeli and Palestinian negotiators must address.
     The two sides are in a worse position to resolve the issue than they were during the last rounds of permanent status negotiations in 2000–01. The political weakness of the Israeli and Palestinian governments is compounded by heightened mistrust between the two societies, as well as by a hardening of Israeli public attitudes against even the symbolic return of any refugees to Israeli territory.
     There is now a substantial accumulated body of work on the Palestinian refugee issue to guide and inform negotiators and policy-makers. This includes past official negotiations among the key parties, wider discussions among regional states and the international donor community, unofficial and Track II initiatives and a considerable body of technical analysis. more.. e-mail

Taking a cue from Israel
Khaled Amayreh, Al-Ahram Weekly 6/26/2008
     Fatah’s change of tune is better late than never.
     Despite continued blame-casting, Hamas and Fatah are getting themselves ready for Arab-mediated reconciliation talks aimed at restoring Palestinian national unity and ending the year-long rift between the two largest political factions in the occupied Palestinian territories.
     No concrete date has been designated for the intensive talks, but reliable sources in the Gaza Strip have intimated that Egypt is about to extend the invitations to both Hamas and Fatah for the resumption of the inter-Palestinian dialogue. The sources said the commencement of the talks was only a matter of days or one week at the maximum.
     Efforts to end the enduring crisis between Fatah and Hamas acquired a new momentum recently when Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas announced his willingness to restart reconciliation talks with Hamas without any preconditions. Hamas welcomed the announcement, made on 6 June, saying it was willing and ready to sit down with Fatah any time and in any place to end the long-standing rift between the two sides. more.. e-mail

Relief or calm before the storm?
Saleh Al-Naami, Al-Ahram Weekly 6/26/2008
     Though Israel’s motives aren’t clear, its inability to cow Hamas is.
     Rihab, 39, wasn’t able to convince her husband Saleh Abu Samha, 42, to buy curtains last Friday in Al-Maghazi refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip, where they reside. Abu Samha told Al-Ahram Weekly that the logic he was working by in denying his wife’s request was that the price of curtains, like all other goods, is incredibly high because of the siege. He argued that they should wait until a comprehensive truce is reached so that goods can be imported in a natural manner at lower prices.
     Many people in the Gaza Strip are working by the same logic as Abu Samha. Jamal Hamid, 45, is a civil servant, and says that throughout the siege he has been unable to buy clothes for his six children because of the insanely high prices. He hopes that he will be able to purchase clothing as soon as the commercial crossings fully open, and prices return to their normal levels. more.. e-mail

Preferring Hamas and Hezbollah
Zvi Bar'el, Ha’aretz 6/29/2008
     it is impossible not to be impressed by the skilled work that we have witnessed in recent weeks. A German mediator ran between Israel and Hezbollah; an Egyptian mediator came and went between Hamas and the government of Israel. A taboo subject was broken and oaths evaporated. It appears that the official agreement between Israel and Hezbollah on how prisoners and captives will be exchanged will be signed today. An agreement on a package deal for the release of Palestinian prisoners in exchange for Gilad Shalit is also on the verge of being concluded (verbally) - and in both these deals public opinion is fully involved. The Internet and television are full of views on the deals, T-shirts are being printed with photos of the abducted soldiers, rallies are held, Shalit’s book is being sold, stickers are stuck on motorbikes and public service announcements...
     ...But the closeness, which is very focused and therefore highly effective, distorts the background from which it emerged. First of all, it distorts the fact that Israel is negotiating with groups and not states. The Palestinian Authority, like the Lebanese government, had nothing to do with these negotiations. They watched from afar how those groups, Hamas and Hezbollah, are taking onto themselves the authority of states and holding negotiations that are not only about the release of prisoners. Every such negotiation has diplomatic and political aspects. After all, if only Hezbollah. not the government in Beirut, can gain the release of Lebanese prisoners, and if only Hamas and the rest of the Palestinian factions have the power to bring about the collapse of Israel’s policy of sanctions and opening the crossings into the Gaza Strip - what’s left for the state above them to do. more.. e-mail

Citizenship law makes Israel an apartheid state
Amos Schocken, Palestine Monitor 6/28/2008
     The [Israeli] government’s decision last week to extend the validity of the Citizenship Law (Temporary Order), for another year, is evidence that the legal barriers preventing severe discrimination against Israel’s Arab citizens and harm to their civil rights have been removed.
     This extension is the eighth since the law was first passed in 2003, and it shows just how naive Justice Edmond Levy’s position was when he refused to join in the 2006 decision by five judges from the High Court of Justice, who stated that the law was unconstitutional, that it contravened the Basic Law on Human Dignity and Freedom, and that it must be removed from the law books. Levy explained his refusal by saying that he saw no need to intervene because only two months remained until the law expired. However, at the end of the two months, the law was extended by a year, and now they want to extend it for yet another year.
     Had Levy known that the law’s limited validity was nothing but a deception aimed at preparing a discriminatory and unconstitutional law, there is no doubt he would have joined the five justices’ majority opinion that it was unconstitutional and should be removed. We must hope that the High Court of Justice, when it rules on the new petition submitted against the law after it was extended in 2006, will take into account that the term "temporary provision," which both the government and Knesset take pains to stress, is a deception. We are talking about, in effect, a permanent law. more.. e-mail

Israel’s dead end
Jonathan Cook, Al-Ahram Weekly 6/26/2008
     Zionist dreams of clearing "Greater Israel" of all Palestinians continue to be played out via insidious and violent means, but they won’t be realised, writes In 1895, Theodor Herzl, Zionism’s chief prophet, confided in his diary that he did not favour sharing Palestine with the natives. Better, he wrote, to "try to spirit the penniless [Palestinian] population across the border by denying it any employment in our own country... Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly."
     He was proposing a programme of Palestinian emigration enforced through a policy of strict separation between Jewish immigrants and the indigenous population. In simple terms, he hoped that, once Zionist organisations had bought up large areas of Palestine and owned the main sectors of the economy, Palestinians could be made to leave by denying them rights to work the land or labour in the Jewish-run economy. His vision was one of transfer, or ethnic cleansing, through ethnic separation.
     Herzl was suggesting that two possible Zionist solutions to the problem of a Palestinian majority living in Palestine -- separation and transfer -- were not necessarily alternatives but rather could be mutually reinforcing. Not only that: he believed, if they were used together, the process of ethnic cleansing could be made to appear voluntary, the choice of the victims. It may be that this was both his most enduring legacy and his major innovation to settler colonialism. more.. e-mail

A village fighting for survival
International Womens’ Peace Service 6/22/2008
     This week IWPS volunteers visited the small village of Al Aqaba in the Jordan Valley. The village falls into Area C as designated under the Oslo Agreement, so is under full Israeli administrative and security control. The existence of the village is under threat as the Israeli government have issued demolition orders on 73% of its buildings and have banned the construction of any more buildings in the village. It is thought that the Israeli government wants to use the land belonging to the village to expand existing military training bases that currently surround the village. Approximately 700 people have left the village as a result of Israeli activities in the area leaving a current population of 295.
     Following Israel’s occupation of Al Aqaba in 1967, three military training bases were established in the immediate vicinity of the village. One base has been evacuated as a result of a legal challenge by the village, but two remain. The military uses helicopters, tanks, heavy vehicles and live ammunition in the immediate vicinity of the village. To date 50 people have been killed or injured during Israeli training exercises on the land farmed by villagers and a number of livestock have been killed. more.. e-mail

So as not to be an apartheid state
Amos Schocken, Ha’aretz 6/27/2008
     The government’s decision last week to extend the validity of the Citizenship Law (Temporary Order), for another year, is evidence that the legal barriers preventing severe discrimination against Israel’s Arab citizens and harm to their civil rights have been removed.
     This extension is the eighth since the law was first passed in 2003, and it shows just how naive Justice Edmond Levy’s position was when he refused to join in the 2006 decision by five judges from the High Court of Justice, who stated that the law was unconstitutional, that it contravened the Basic Law on Human Dignity and Freedom, and that it must be removed from the law books. Levy explained his refusal by saying that he saw no need to intervene because only two months remained until the law expired. However, at the end of the two months, the law was extended by a year, and now they want to extend it for yet another year.
     Had Levy known that the law’s limited validity was nothing but a deception aimed at preparing a discriminatory and unconstitutional law, there is no doubt he would have joined the five justices’ majority opinion that it was unconstitutional and should be removed. We must hope that the High Court of Justice, when it rules on the new petition submitted against the law after it was extended in 2006, will take into account that the term "temporary provision," which both the government and Knesset take pains to stress, is a deception. We are talking about, in effect, a permanent law. more.. e-mail

The bridge and the wall
Meron Benvenisti, Ha’aretz 6/27/2008
     The Strings Bridge, inaugurated two days ago in a giant, spectacular and expensive extravaganza, was not drafted for its modest task, but rather for its aesthetic and symbolic value. After all, those who decided to bridge the modest height difference between Romema and Zion Valley via a quarter-billion-shekel monument did not seriously consider a plan that would cost one-tenth of this.
     The planner of this monument (calling it a "bridge" is a lame excuse) defined its purpose very well: This is a "landmark: a city’s symbol of identity or myth." And indeed, the different opinions about its significance - "secular symbolism," or perhaps the profile of "David’s harp, or a shofar" - its appropriateness to the crowded and neglected urban landscape, financial and other considerations, divert attention from the "landmark" site and its significance for Jerusalem’s urban fabric.
     Santiago Calatrava’s monument was put here because this is, on the face of it, the city’s entrance, so it is in fact a gate, not a bridge. But this gate was built at a time when its city already had fled. more.. e-mail

Dramatic pause
Hassan Nafaa, Al-Ahram Weekly 6/26/2008
     While the relief of eased regional tensions is welcome, signs point to an unprecedented upheaval and possible catastrophe ahead.
     Recent weeks have brought a series of unexpected and exciting developments that may just form a turning point in the mode of interactions this region has experienced for so long. Suddenly, after sharp and intensifying polarisations that seemed at times to be propelling the region towards an immanent inferno, the blackened skies have begun to clear, the roar of thunder and flashes of lightening have receded, and one can sniff a freshness in the air as though a new dawn were at hand. Since Lebanon has always served as the riverbed in which regional parties have poured their tensions and refuse, it has naturally become a kind of finely tuned meteorological testing station capable of detecting subtle shifts in regional temperatures, shifts in the direction of winds and even seismological vibrations indicative of benign tremors or impending quakes and volcanic eruptions.
     It was no coincidence that the dormant Lebanese volcano should awake again within a few months of the American invasion and occupation of Iraq. After the US accomplished its immediate aim of toppling the regime and when it became clear to all that it had come to Iraq to stay and that it was not so much interested in Iraq per se but in Iraq as a staging post for executing its plans for redrawing the regional map to suit its post-11 September global enterprise, other world powers, including those that had previously opposed the American invasion and occupation, soon caved in to Washington’s will and ambitions and signalled their readiness to cooperate. No observer of events at the time could escape the conclusion that Washington would soon turn its sights on other regimes and forces hostile to its Middle Eastern policies and that the next phase would naturally require: first, the disarmament of Hizbullah, which could not be accomplished until Syria was ousted from Lebanon; second, giving Israel the go-ahead to destroy Palestinian resistance factions and, if necessary, to eliminate Yasser Arafat; and third and most importantly, slaying the regional serpent, Iran. more.. e-mail

What kind of Palestine?
Javier Solana, Al-Ahram Weekly 6/26/2008
     Security and the rule of law must be the cornerstones of a fledgling Palestinian state, writes Israeli and Palestinian negotiators have now been talking to each other for more than six months, since the peace process was re-launched at Annapolis in November 2007, with the stated aim of reaching agreement on a Palestinian state before this year is out. The final status issues of borders, Jerusalem and refugees are back on the agenda and the outlines of a two-state solution are visible. There have been recently some encouraging signals: Egypt has mediated a truce between Hamas and Israel in Gaza, there are signs of inter- Palestinian dialogue and there appears to be movement on the Israeli-Syrian track. We have to grasp the opportunity for peace.
     Comprehensive peace in the Middle East is the strategic goal of the European Union and resolving the Israeli-Arab conflict on the basis of a two-state solution is the key to achieving this. Europe wants, and needs, to see the creation of an independent, democratic and viable Palestinian state living in peace alongside Israel. For this, the foundations and the structures of a Palestinian state have to be created and this is where the European Union is playing a distinctive role. It is leading international efforts to assist the Palestinians with their state-building efforts under a major strategy adopted by the EU last year. An important part of this strategy is devoted to developing security and the rule of law, which are the cornerstones of the fledgling Palestinian state and the theme of a large international conference of foreign ministers hosted in Berlin on 24 June. This conference aims to secure the finance needed to implement a civil police and criminal justice package over the coming year as part of the international community’s efforts to help the Palestinians with their Reform and Development Plan. more.. e-mail

Nonie Darwish and the al-Bureij massacre
Jim Holstun, Electronic Intifada 6/26/2008
     StandWithUs is a Zionist advocacy group in Los Angeles. It concentrates on US colleges and universities, offering fellowships, book donations, lectures, training and hands-on activism. I first heard about the group in 2005, after its Executive Director, Roz Rothstein, wrote my university’s president, provost and Arts and Sciences dean to warn them that I was teaching courses in Palestinian culture. She passed along some hysterical libels from anonymous community members (not my students), gave a detailed critique of my syllabuses, encouraged them to investigate me and two other colleagues, and helpfully suggested a few questions they might want to ask.
     StandWithUs manages an impressive stable of Zionist speakers, including several who are Arabs, Muslims, or ex-Muslims: Brigitte Gabriel, Ishmael Khaldi, Walid Shoebat, Khaled Abu Toameh, and Nonie Darwish. Darwish, born an Egyptian Muslim, now an American Evangelical Christian, is one of the most energetic. She manages the website Arabs for Israel and has appeared on FOX News, on the website Frontpage Magazine, and in the film Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West. She is also the author of Now They Call Me Infidel: Why I Renounced Jihad for America, Israel, and the War on Terror. Penguin Books publishes it under its Sentinel imprint -- a special line of conservative titles. Since her book’s publication in 2006, Darwish has toured extensively, speaking primarily at colleges and universities. more.. e-mail

You Don’t Mess With the Racism
Remi Kanazi, Middle East Online 6/26/2008
     What we are to believe by watching this film is that if everyone would just stop ‘hating’, Israelis and Palestinians could effortlessly live together in harmony. But ‘hate’ has little to do with a conflict rooted in a people’s desire for basic human rights and an end to oppression.
     I love Adam Sandler. From Billy Madison to Happy Gilmore to the Chanukah Song, the predecessor of the Superbad generation has effortlessly conquered the domain of slapstick comedy and inappropriate jokes. But damn you Scuba Steve! If you’re going to propagate misinformation about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, do it quietly—or at least in your non-comedic life.
     You Don’t Mess With the Zohan, Sandler’s new flick, takes Hollywood chicanery and stereotypes that denigrate Arabs to an unprecedented level—surpassing hit flicks like the Kingdom, the Siege, and every Arnold Schwarzenegger and Chuck Norris movie that came before it. I group Zohan with other shamelessly racist action movies because a film should at least be minutely funny to be categorized as a comedy. For the Sandler diehards and hilarity-loving skeptics, I should clearly state: using race and prejudices to engender laughter is not the problem. Mel Brooks and the creators of South Park exploit stereotypes far beyond anything Sandler has ever done, but unlike Zohan, I don’t think insidious propaganda and underlying racism drive their comedy. After all, if this hebetudinous clunker was just comedy, Sandler and company wouldn’t have, as the New York Times reported, sought out Arab actors to give the movie “legitimacy.” Their search was successful and a few token Arabs showed their presence to innocuously inform the public that it is okay to vilify the crazy towel-headed terrorists once again. more.. e-mail

Israel, EU and the US disregard international law
Adri Nieuwhof, Electronic Intifada 6/26/2008
     After the announcement of the Israeli government to put out new tenders for construction in illegal settlements in East Jerusalem, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon issued a statement expressing his deep concern, stating that "the government of Israel’s continued construction in settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory is contrary to international law and to its commitments under the Road Map and the Annapolis process."The shameless Israeli expansion of its illegal settlements also caught the attention of the Arab League.Representatives of the UN’s Arab bloc met on 12 June at UN headquarters in New York for a final discussion on a proposal for the UN Security Council calling to halt the expansion of illegal West Bank settlements.
     In the 12 months before the US-sponsored Annapolis conference last November, the Israeli government invited tenders for the construction of "only" 138 housing units in settlements. However, as demonstrated by the table below, in the six months since, Israel has put out 11 tenders for the construction of the staggering number of 1,731 settler housing units.
     [List of Israeli tenders for housing in Jerusalem and West Bank, December 2007 to June 2008.]
     Israel further demonstrated its determination to transfer part of its population to the occupied territory in open violation of international law on 13 June when the Regional Committee for Construction and Planning approved the construction of 1,300 homes for settlers in Ramat Schlomo near Beit Hanina, a Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem. Ramat Schlomo currently has 2,000 housing units. more.. e-mail

Witnessing ’horrendous humiliation’ put former head of state on anti-Israel path
Cnaan Liphshiz, Ha’aretz 6/27/2008
     NIJMEGEN, NETHERLANDS - The emotion in Andreas van Agt’s voice as he lambastes Israel’s behavior seems puzzling for a man of his status. It’s especially intriguing considering that this blue-eyed professed idealist is an astute statesman who presided as the Dutch prime minister for five years until 1982. "My involvement in the Middle East is certainly unusual," Van Agt confessed in an interview with Haaretz about Israel at his home in Nijmegen. Currently, Van Agt is writing a book about the Israeli-Arab conflict. He recently launched an info site about the subject, in which he accuses Israel of racism and violating international law.
     He speaks at controversial solidarity events alongside Hamas officials, lamenting the Dutch government’s boycott of the Islamist organization branded by numerous governments as terrorist. He is also outspoken in accusing Israel of state-terror. "Some say my demeanor owes to my advanced age; that I’m not fully in my right mind anymore," says the 77-year-old with a snicker, sitting under an outdated portrait of the Queen in his taupe-colored den. more.. e-mail

Obama’s Palestinian problem
Hamid Dabashi, Al-Ahram Weekly 6/26/2008
     In his 4 June speech to the American Israeli Political Action Committee, Democratic Party candidate Barack Obama betrayed the hopes that had been invested in him, writes The evening of Tuesday 3 June 2008 will go down in history as one of the most electrifying moments in American political culture -- changing the normative landscape of its racial imaginary beyond anything anticipated before, and only dreamt of in a euphoric moment of myth almost half a century ago when the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his prophetic "I have a dream" speech.
     The historic air of expectation was so voluminous that night that CNN and MSNBC were happily competing in their sharp wits and technological wherewithal as to which one could cut thicker into the historic forays and call Senator Barack Obama the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party before the other. The jigsaw puzzle of boxes and colours and numbers and statistics on the bottoms of their screens competed for attention with their anchors and pundits and their excited words and wide-eyed amazement at the momentous occasion: History in the making.
     Even the AIPAC-seasoned and marinated Wolf Blitzer of CNN had to concede his championing for Golda Clinton Meir to the historic moment and let the events roar, as the delegate count got closer and closer for Obama to clench the nomination for the Democratic Party ("he only needs 12 more, 11 more, 8 more, . . ."); while at the same time not even the sharp-shooting wit of Keith Olberman of MSNBC could keep pace with the enormity of the occasion. more.. e-mail

Twilight Zone / Karmel’s happy campers
Gideon Levy, Ha’aretz 6/26/2008
     The water is the same but the children are not. Diving into the pool is just as daring and dangerous as it used to be, the water just as stagnant, the pool just as spectacular, but now there are fish. Many fish, mainly fingerlings, dart about, as many as 20,000 according to Anan al-Mahani, a fisherman from the village who breeds them.
     The vast, ancient pool, built generations ago to store water, which becomes a pitiful day camp for the children of Karmel in the summer, has now also become a fish pond. Exactly eight years ago, photographer Miki Kratsman and I happened on this place by chance. Kratsmans series of photos won him acclaim. Back then, in the July 7, 2000 issue of Haaretz Magazine, I wrote: "Our hearts skip a beat: The sight is hallucinatory. The children stand atop the walls, at least 10 meters high, which surround the terrifying reservoir, and leap out into space. The bottom seems to be covered with grass. Only when the children land on the green carpet does it become apparent that this is not a lawn, but water, covered with a thick layer of green scum. When they rise from the depths, black bubbles surround their ascending heads, and their bodies are covered with a layer of green slime. Seen from above, the sight of their dark heads poking through the green is very strange. The risky jump, the stench, the filthy water; this is summer camp for the children of Karmel, an ancient Palestinian village in the Hebron hills. more.. e-mail

Hamas and Hizballah gain, almost hand in hand
Adam Morrow and Khaled Moussa al-Omrani, Electronic Intifada 6/26/2008
     CAIRO (IPS) - Hizballah’s dramatic seizure of Beirut last month stunned observers and dealt a heavy blow to Washington’s Lebanese allies. In Cairo, analysts compared the episode to last year’s takeover of the Gaza Strip by Palestinian resistance faction Hamas, noting that both actions were pre-emptive -- rather than offensive -- in nature.
     "Both instances were legitimate cases of self-defense," Magdi Hussein, political analyst and head of Egypt’s frozen Socialist Labour Party, told IPS. "Neither Hamas nor Hizballah was trying to seize political authority -- they were merely reacting to aggression against them."
     On 7 May, Hizballah -- along with allied Shia movement Amal -- seized control of the Lebanese capital, blocking highways and occupying strategic areas. Fighters associated with Lebanon’s 14 March movement, Hizballah’s chief political rival, were easily routed.
     After three days of clashes that left scores dead, Hizballah and its allies returned control of the city to the Lebanese army.
     he US, along with most of the western media, depicted Hizballah’s temporary seizure of the capital as a "coup d’etat". On 14 May, the US House of Representatives tabled a bill condemning the resistance group’s "illegitimate assault on the sovereign government of Lebanon. more.. e-mail

Palestine is illegal
Sumia Ibrahim writing from occupied Palestine, Electronic Intifada 6/26/2008
     The young, dark-haired woman behind the glass stamped the American passport in front of her. "Welcome to Israel," she said cheerily. The line in front of me receded quickly as passport after passport was stamped, and traveler after traveler admitted entry. I made my way to the desk and slid my passport under the glass.
     "Hello," I said smiling. After over a 15-hour flight from Philadelphia, US, which included a two-and-a-half-hour layover in Barcelona where I was searched and questioned, and where my bags were carefully examined by hand, I was anxious to breathe fresh air and catch up on sleep. Given the fact that I was extensively questioned and searched by Israeli airline security in Barcelona, I expected to undergo minimal additional security measures at Ben-Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, if any. The woman scrutinized my passport, which held a red sticker placed by Israeli security in Barcelona, and called over another airport official. "Come with me," this woman said, leading me to a nearby seating room. Rows of people waiting for their passports to be stamped stared at me as I walked by. Most of them, American and European Jews, would have no trouble entering. It’s quite a different story for an Arab American. more.. e-mail

Beyond the truce
Dina Ezzat, Al-Ahram Weekly 6/26/2008
     With the newborn Hamas-Israel truce looking fragile, officials scramble to make progress on phase two issues. The fate of the Egyptian-sponsored truce struck earlier this month between Israel and Hamas and other Palestinian factions in Gaza is already in question. Over the past 48 hours, Israel and Palestinian factions in Gaza exchanged accusations of truce violations as Israeli aggression on Islamic resistance groups in the West Bank -- yet to be included in the truce -- prompted rocket attacks Tuesday evening on the western Negev. Wednesday, Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak ordered crossings linking Gaza to Israel closed. According to the terms of the truce these crossings were supposed to be opened as of 8am Wednesday.
     Informed Egyptian officials who spoke to Al-Ahram Weekly Wednesday morning on condition of anonymity said that Egypt was "very disturbed" by current developments and that General Intelligence Chief Omar Suleiman -- the architect of the truce -- is already in direct contact with both sides to make sure that the situation does not escalate. Egypt, officials say, is determined to bolster the truce that took months to negotiate. more.. e-mail

Ayoon wa Azan (He Never Says that he Guarantees Peace)
Jihad El-khazen, MIFTAH 6/26/2008
     President Mahmoud Abbas and Khaled Meshaal have at least one point in common. They do not want reconciliation to be solely restricted to Fatah and Hamas. Instead, they seek a Palestinian reconciliation with the participation of all Palestinian sides and an Arab blessing.
     A few days ago, I conveyed the stance of Hamas’ politburo chief following the meeting we had in Damascus. Today, I will report some of what I heard Abu Mazen say during the dinner we had the following day in Amman. The dinner was hosted by Palestinian Ambassador Atallah Khairi and attended by a number of the President’s aides and other friends, including Basel Akl and Nabil Abu Rudaina.
     Abu Mazen denied any consultations prior to launching the reconciliation initiative. The PLO’s Executive Committee met for three days and agreed on the formula it announced. Condoleezza Rice called the next day to ask him about it; he read the initiative text to her. Then the State Department voiced its support for the initiative. more.. e-mail

Denied the Right to Go Home
Zeina Ashrawi Hutchison, Palestine Think Tank 6/26/2008
     A Palestinian woman’s story - Zeina Shrawi Hutchison is Hanan Ashrawi’s daughter.
     I am Palestinian - born and raised - and my Palestinian roots go back centuries. No one can change that even if they tell me that Jerusalem, my birth place, is not Palestine, even if they tell me that Palestine doesn’t exist, even if they takeaway all my papers and deny me entry to my own home, even if they humiliate me and take away my rights. I AM PALESTINIAN.
     Name: ZeinaEmile Sam’an Ashrawi; Date of Birth: July 30, 1981; Ethnicity: Arab. This is what was written on my Jerusalem ID card. An ID card to a Palestinian is muchmore than just a piece of paper; it is my only legal documented relationship to Palestine. Born in Jerusalem, I was given a Jerusalem ID card (the blue ID), an Israeli Travel Document and a Jordanian Passport stamped ’Palestinian’ (I have no legal rights in Jordan). I do not have an Israeli Passport, a Palestinian Passport or an American Passport. more.. e-mail

Land confiscation continues in Tammun, Jordan Valley
International Womens’ Peace Service 6/23/2008
     On Wednesday, the 18th of June 2008 residents of Tammun and Khirbet ’Atuf, Tubas district, accompanied by international solidarity and peace activists gathered in a protest action at a trench that imposes an artificial border between Khirbet ’Atuf and the illegal Israeli settlement of Bega’Ot. This 30km long trench prevents the residents of the region from accessing hundreds of dunums of their land behind it.
     The municipality of Tammun has recently received a letter from the Israeli Ministry of Defense, informing them that 356 dunums of the Tammun land will be confiscated for the purpose of establishing a new military base in the area. The letter reads that the landowners will be allowed time to prove their ownership by the year 2012. Yet, the title deeds for 95000 dunums of land, amounting to 75% of the land belonging to the Tammun municipality, have not stopped the Occupation confiscating the land for three illegal settlements and three military bases built in the area since 1967. more.. e-mail

Beit Sahour reclaims military base site
Nora Barrows-Friedman, Electronic Intifada 6/24/2008
     USH GHRAB, West Bank (IPS) - East of Beit Sahour in Ush Ghrab, the tree line stops and the bronze, rocky desert begins. In a flat clearing on this hilltop, a small, abandoned military post is being slowly transformed from an assorted collection of cement-grey barracks into a virtual oasis for the region’s children, families and tourists.
     A former watchtower now has bright flowers painted on the roof; what was once a stark administrative office is now painted blue and pink, with a sign above the entrance reading "The Nest Cafe" in red block letters.
     The revitalization of this remote area is important, local activists say, not just to reclaim land used in the past to control and intimidate the people of Beit Sahour, but also to pre-empt a possible land steal by radical Israeli settlers. Palestinians have come here with international activists, bringing with them paintbrushes and hand tools, to spark a new kind of protest movement against illegal settlement expansion. The protest is rooted in community and creativity rather than explosive confrontation. more.. e-mail

Occupation by Bureaucracy
Saree Makdisi, MIFTAH 6/25/2008
     A cease-fire went into effect in Gaza last week, offering some respite from the violence that has killed hundreds of Palestinians and five Israelis in recent months. It will do nothing, however, to address the underlying cause of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
     Intermittent spectacular violence may draw the world’s attention to the occupied Palestinian territories, but our obsession with violence actually distracts us from the real nature of Israel’s occupation, which is its smothering bureaucratic control of everyday Palestinian life.
     This is an occupation ultimately enforced by tanks and bombs, and through the omnipresent threat, if not application, of violence. But its primary instruments are application forms, residency permits, population registries and title deeds. On its own, no cease-fire will relieve the beleaguered Palestinians.
     Gaza is virtually cut off from the outside world by Israeli power. Elsewhere, in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the ongoing Israeli occupation comprehensively infuses all the normally banal activities of Palestinians’ everyday lives: applying for permission to access one’s own land; applying for what Israel regards as the privilege - rather than the right - of living with one’s spouse and children; applying for permission to drive one’s car; to dig a well; to visit relatives in the next town; to visit Jerusalem; to go to work; to school; to university; to hospital. There is hardly any dimension of everyday life in Palestine that is not minutely managed by Israeli military or bureaucratic personnel. more.. e-mail

Surrounded on All Sides and Living in Fear
Palestine Monitor, Palestine Monitor 6/25/2008
     Israeli settlers from the settlements of Yizhar and Bracha attacked the Palestinian village of Bureen and its lands on Thursday, May 19, burning huge amounts of farmland and entering the village to attack residents with stones.The settlers, including children, teenagers, and adults, burned olive groves as they moved into the village.
     "These settlers are dangerous; they are aggressive and extremist,"� said Bureen resident Jalal Imran (38).
     During the attack Thursday a 63-year-old Palestinian woman was assaulted by the settlers, sustaining wounds that required hospitalization.The settlers also set fire to olive groves spanning the width of the mountain.When Israeli soldiers reached the village they prevented the residents from trying to put out the fires for two hours. Residents said the soldiers were only there to protect the settlers and not the Palestinian people.
     Imran said events like this happen one to two times a year. Other residents commented on the fact that they have never done anything to provoke the settlers. Imran said, "We are a peaceful, simple people. Many of us are farmers. We have no weapons. So why do they attack us?" more.. e-mail

Recycling love, weaving hope
Palestine Monitor, Palestine Monitor 6/25/2008
     A visit to the Al-Basma Special Education Center for Youth and Young Adults in Beit Sahour
     Mr. Abdullah Awwad pushes open the gate to the Al-Basma Special Education Center for Youth and Young Adults in Beit Sahour, and is soon greeted inside by a cheerful chorus shouting "Marhaba,"� looking up from their projects with broad smiles. Mr. Awwad passionately returns all the greetings, making his way into each room to encourage the diligent craftsmanship of the workers.
     Mr. Awwad and a small group of people began the Al-Basma Center in 1988, in order to provide care for the developmentally challenged in and around Bethlehem, Beit Sahour, and Beit Jala. The center, which now cares for thirty children and adults between the ages of fifteen and thirty-five, has been in its present facilities for eight years.
     Mr. Abdullah Awwad is the director, and one of the founders, of the Al-Basma Center in Beit Sahour
     "We started from scratch,"� Mr. Awwad said. "In the beginning, we had only one small room, and we sat on the floor because we had no tables or chairs. But where there is a will, there is always a way. And we had a will to serve." more.. e-mail

Israeli forces broke calm in Gaza by shooting farmer on Monday, not Saraya Al Quds
Kristen Ess, Palestine News Network 6/25/2008
     It is being reported in the Israeli media that Saraya Al Quds, who claimed responsibility for launching projectiles from the Gaza Strip at Sderot last night, "broke the calm."
     Others are reporting that it was justified after Israeli forces assassinated the northern West Bank’s leader of the Islamic Jihad-linked armed resistance wing, in addition to a fourth year student at Nablus’ An Najah University.
     But what is not being reported is that on Monday Israeli forces opened fire on a farmer in Gaza who was working in his fields, critically injuring him. That was the "break in the calm."
     The Hamas government in Gaza is calling for a preservation of the "calm" regardless of anything that has happened, while Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said on Tuesday night that the crossings in the Strip would not be reopened due to the projectile launches.
     However, earlier in the day, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said that the Rafah Crossing would not be opened at all until the Israeli soldier captured while invading the southern Gaza Strip in June 2006 was released. more.. e-mail

Slippery-Slope Ceasefire
Joharah Baker, MIFTAH 6/25/2008
     No ceasefire can ever hold if it is constantly being nudged towards the edge of a precipice. For the Israel-Hamas ceasefire, designed to sustain for six months, it has taken less than a week for its walls to crack, contaminating the shaky calm enjoyed by the people of Gaza for five glorious days.
     While no one could possibly be surprised that a ceasefire between the two arch enemies would hold as long as the core issues dividing them are not addressed, it is worth questioning Israel’s intentions in first, agreeing to the tahdi’ah and then sabotaging it soon after.
     In the early morning hours of June 23, Israeli army troops raided a student dormitory in Nablus, shooting in cold blood two young men, Iyad Khanfar 24 and Tareq Abu Ghali 23. The later was reportedly a commander of the Quds Brigades, the armed wing of the Islamic Jihad while Khanfar was a fourth year student at Nablus’ Al Najah University. According to eyewitnesses, Israeli troops stormed into the apartment where the two men lived and riddled them with bullets. Both Abu Ghali and Khanfar were unarmed at the time. more.. e-mail

Crossing the Line focuses on Gaza’s hospitals
Podcast, Crossing the Line, Electronic Intifada 6/24/2008
     This week on Crossing The Line: Since the Israeli siege on Gaza began in June 2007, 184 critical care patients have died waiting for travel permits from Israel to leave the Gaza Strip and receive urgent medical treatment. Hospitals in the Gaza Strip are facing acute shortages of medical equipment and supplies, as well as important medicines such as drugs to treat cancer patients, insulin and anesthesia. Crossing The Line contributing producer and investigative journalist Nora Barrows-Friedman speaks to host Naji Ali on the crisis facing Gaza’s hospitals.
     Also this week, the Israeli army imposed a ban on West Bank residents from traveling to the Dead Sea after Israelis who manage the popular vacation site complained that mixed groups are bad for business. Melanie Takefam, International Media Coordinator of The Association for Civil Rights in Israel, speaks to Ali about the Israeli decision that discriminates against Palestinians from the occupied territories. more.. e-mail

Zochrot Hosts 'Right of Return'� Conference in Tel Aviv
Palestine Monitor, Palestine Monitor 6/24/2008
     People gathered from many backgrounds yesterday in Tel Aviv to discuss the Right of Return of Palestinian refugees, and to hear discussions about the practicalities of implementing this right.
     Panel members and speakers ranged from artists, to philosophers, to architects, both Israeli and Palestinian. The audience was also diverse, consisting of activists and reporters from Palestine, Israel and the international community.
     The conference was organized by Zochrot - meaning "remembering" - an Israeli organization dedicated to raising awareness about the Palestinian Nakba among the Jewish population of Israel. Among the aims of Zochrot is the "Right of Return"� of Palestinian refugees.
     The meeting opened with an address from a representative of Zochrot, who discussed the importance of the Right of Return of Palestinian refugees. Zochrot asserts that the Right of Return is a "moral and political basis for peace between Israelis and Palestinians. more.. e-mail

Israel training to attack Iran
Peter Hirschberg, Electronic Intifada 6/25/2008
     JERUSALEM, (IPS) - Israeli defense experts were not surprised by a New York Times report over the weekend that the Israeli air force had recently conducted what appeared to be a rehearsal for an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
     Israel, the experts say, has never taken the military option off the table and they therefore expect the air force to be training for a strike in Iran. "It is logical that the army is training for an Iranian mission," says Efraim Inbar, head of the Begin-Sadat Centre for Strategic Studies near Tel Aviv. "We are preparing for it. The air force is in charge of this file."
     Over 100 Israeli F-16 and F-15 fighter jets, as well as helicopters and refueling tankers, took part in the exercise over the eastern Mediterranean and Greece in early June, according to The New York Times. Quoting unnamed US officials, the report said that the helicopters and tankers covered 1,400 kilometers, approximately the distance between Israel and Iran’s uranium enrichment plant at Natanz. more.. e-mail

No Defense: Soldier Violence against Palestinian Detainees
Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI, Palestine Monitor 6/22/2008
     A report by the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI) published this morning reveals the widespread phenomenon of violence against bound Palestinian detainees by IDF soldiers and the almost absolute indifference of the IDF, the Ministry of Defense and the Knesset towards the existence of this phenomenon and the need to take action in order to eradicate it completely.
     The report titled "No Defense: Soldier Violence against Palestinian Detainees"� focuses on a large number of incidents of violence against detainees after they had been arrested, bound, and no longer present a danger to the soldiers. Abuse occurs at various junctions - immediately following arrest, in the vehicle transporting the detainees, and during the time they are held in IDF military camps prior to their transfer to interrogation and detention facilities. At times abusive practices involve dogs that are employed by the military forces during arrest operations and transported in vehicles along with Palestinian detainees. On certain occasions, the ill treatment of Palestinian detainees is highly violent resulting in serious injury. At other times, abuse manifests itself in a routine of beating, degradation and additional abuse. Minors, who must be granted special protection under both Israeli and International Law, are also victims of abuse. The soldiers who carry out arrests do not treat minors with special care and at times - as revealed by various testimonies - exploit their weakness. more.. e-mail

’To place a flower on the grave after 60 years’
Jack Khoury, Ha’aretz 6/23/2008
     Salwa Salaam-Kubati will celebrate her 60th birthday at the end of next month. As a birthday gift, she would like one wish to come true: to be able to visit the grave of her father, in what was once a Christian cemetery in the village of Malul. On the ruins of the village, next to Nazareth, the Israel Defense Forces set up a military base.
     Kubati, who is a social worker for the city of Nazareth, never had the chance to know her father, Fares Salaam, nor has she ever visited his grave. A train engineeer during the time of the British Mandate, Salaam was murdered in 1948, while her mother was pregnant with her.
     "On March 24, 1948, my father was on his way to work in Haifaú in a bus from Nazareth," says Kubati, as she takes a picture of her father from her purse, the only memento she has of him. "When the bus was near Kiryat Tivon, Jews opened fire at it. My dad and one other passenger were killed and several people were wounded."
     "My mother was near the end of her pregnancy, and I am sure that as a fetus in the womb I felt that trauma and heard her screams when they brought the body to our home," she says. Her father was buried in the Christian cemetery of his village, "close to the grave of my cousin who had been killed a few months prior to that," she adds. more.. e-mail

Stolen days in Israel
Stolen Words Stolen Days blog, International Solidarity Movement 6/23/2008
     I never anticipated these problems. I asked so many people, so many questions. When I entered Israel I thought I might be questioned because of my name but not what ended up happening. When I approached the non-Israel passport stand, the woman asked me my father’s name, probably because I was born in Iran that questions started coming. When I said Mohammad Reza I was pretty sure I would be questioned further. She asked me my grandfather’s name, I didn’t know, I didn’t have relations with him. She told me to stand on the side of the counter. I waited. Then I was taken to an office to be questioned. They asked me why I was coming there, where I was coming from, what I was doing there, who I knew here, how I knew them, did I have family here, what I studied, where I studied, my contact info, my friends’ contact info. Then I was asked to wait in this room. I was then questioned again, this time more aggressively. The woman again asked me the same questions, asked me about my flights, then she saw my papers, some of my papers were about volunteering in Nablus. The woman accused me of lying, saying I wanted to volunteer instead of sight see or visit friends. She wanted me to log into my email so she could go through it because she didn’t believe me and said since I emailed my friend that she wanted to see. I refused, saying I couldn’t “as an American.” This meant nothing here.
     You mean nothing here. This was then followed by her taking my papers then me waiting more. Then I was taken to find my bag, they then went through all my things, x-rayed them, wiped them down for explosives, everything. They kept questioning me, the same questions, different people. Emptied my bags, excavated them. I was padded down, or frisked as well. They also x-rayed my jacket and shoes. Then after this humiliation I was made to wait again. I was told I wasn’t getting into Israel. I asked them why and the woman said that I lied, when I asked what I lied about she just told me to sit in the room. There’s a high arrogance about them. As if I was being let into the Garden of Eden or something. They are also extremely ignorant. For people with such official positions, I feel they barely had a high school degree. The women at the passport counters just looked like housewives. It is like a military state, where everyone has to run it, with no training except to intimidate and be aggressive. My mistake is to assume good, being naïve, being honest and open. more.. e-mail

A window into Gaza
Simon Allison, Asia Times 6/24/2008
     JERUSALEM - Sometimes, the devil’s in the details. And sometimes, when the Israeli security forces make you practice shot put in an X-ray machine rather than cross into Gaza, the smallest details are all there is to work with.
     Erez border crossing, a modern steel and glass construction, a jewel set in the northern part of the long, grey concrete wall between Israel and Gaza, is the principal Israeli crossing point for people going to and from Gaza, and has been closed for more than a year. On Sunday, it opened for business again, as part of Israel’s ceasefire agreement last Thursday with Hamas, reached after several months of three-way talks between Israeli officials, Palestinian delegations and Egyptian mediators.
     But the crossing is not open for much business. The list of people given permission to leave Israel from this point is very select: diplomats, humanitarian aid workers, and journalists who have been through the 15-day screening process to receive an Israeli press card. I was not among this distinguished company, but I thought I would try my luck anyway, along with a couple of other journalists without the necessary paperwork, or the patience to wait more than two weeks for the right document. more.. e-mail

Nobody’s Perfect but they are Still Human
Yasmin Abou-Amer, MIFTAH 6/23/2008
     This weekend, I spent a lot of time travelling around Palestine, which inevitably meant having to cross through many of the Israeli-manned checkpoints scattered throughout the West Bank.I was travelling on public transport, sharing the bus with predominantly Palestinians.Being a British citizen, however, means that, unlike the Palestinians, I do not have to get down and walk through the checkpoint terminals.The Qalandia checkpoint, serving as a border between the West Bank town of Ramallah and Jerusalem, is perhaps one of the most glaring examples of the separative manner of the Israeli army.
     Once the bus arrives at the checkpoint, any Palestinians who have a permit to travel to Jerusalem or possess a Jerusalem ID but are under 60 years of age, must alight from the bus and walk through hostile and uninviting metal turnstiles whereby the soldiers sitting behind the reinforced glass windows check the validity of their passes. Of course, this could easily be done if all the passengers remained on the bus.Certainly, the Israelis offer the timeless pretext of “security reason” for having to ask Palestinians to leave the bus and go through the terminal.However, it is actually purely for political reasons; surely if security is that much of an issue, everybody, regardless of their nationality or age, would be required to get off the bus.After all, terrorism is surely not confined to Palestinians under the age of 65, in possession of a Jerusalem ID or a travel permit.If security was truly the priority, every person on the bus would get down to go through the terminal and have their luggage scanned. more.. e-mail

All Quiet on the Gaza Front
Uri Avnery, MIFTAH 6/23/2008
     AND SUDDENLY: quiet. No Qassams. No mortar shells. The tanks are not rolling. The aircraft are not bombing.
     In Sderot, sighs of relief. Children venture out. Inhabitants who have exiled themselves to other towns return home.
     And the reaction? An outburst of jubilation? Dancing in the streets? Applause for the Prime Minister and the Minister of Defense, who at long last have come to their senses?
     Not at all. The expression on the nation’s face is a grimace of disgust. What kind of thing is that? Where is our victorious army?
     The people of Sderot are really angry. OK, so there are no Qassams, but this was supposed to happen only after the army had entered Gaza and wiped it out.
     Haaretz headed its front page with the mendacious headline: "Israel pays with deeds - and gets promises".
     "It’s fragile," Ehud Olmert soothes us, it can come to an end any minute. And the other Ehud, Barak, who pushed for the cease-fire, has an excuse: we have to go through the motions before starting the Big Operation in Gaza. For the sake of Israeli and international public opinion. more.. e-mail

Breathing Space
Safwat Kahlout, MIFTAH 6/23/2008
     Ever since Hamas won an overwhelming victory in parliamentary elections in 2006, Palestinians have been paying the price for practicing democracy.
     From the beginning, the international community refused to deal with the result of the elections and preferred to treat them as an atonal interlude in the international political symphony. Instead of engaging Hamas, the international community imposed the three well-known Quartet conditions that Hamas, for equally well-worn reasons, rejected.
     Accordingly, international financial assistance to the Palestinian Authority stopped and along with it ended the salaries of state employees. Public sector employee salaries are the engine of the Palestinian economy and as they ended, others felt the knock-on effect and unemployment and poverty rose.
     At the time it was felt that that was as bad as it was going to get, but after Hamas ousted Fateh-affiliated security forces in Gaza, people here discovered that it could get a whole lot worse. more.. e-mail

Divide and Conquer
Ghassan Khatib, MIFTAH 6/23/2008
     The ceasefire agreement that was reached between Israel and the Hamas leadership through Egyptian mediation and that has been observed successfully by the two parties since Thursday marks a very significant development with potentially far reaching consequences.
     The fact of the agreement spurned a lot of contradicting reactions and analysis mainly because Israel has always expressed a principled position that it will not deal with "terrorists". Secondly, on previous occasions the several ceasefire arrangements that were reached in the past under the auspices of the Palestinian Authority were always unilateral and were never recognized or even acknowledged by Israel.
     Perhaps one of the greatest ironies of the agreement is thus the fact that Israel was able to reach such an agreement with Hamas over Gaza-related issues while it hasn’t been possible to reach any kind of agreement on anything with the PA over West Bank-related issues. That includes political issues that are being negotiated between PA President Mahmoud Abbas and Chief Negotiator Ahmed Qureia on the Palestinian side and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni on the Israeli, with extensive mediation from US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. It also includes the practical day-to-day economic and security issues that are being dealt with by Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad and Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, with extensive mediation and facilitation by the Quartet’s envoy Tony Blair. more.. e-mail

Our vision for peace in the Middle East
Miguel Angel Moratinos, Daily Star 6/24/2008
     I just returned from accompanying His Majesty the King of Spain on his tour of several Gulf countries, and I was recently in Lebanon for the election of its new president. I also just made a brief visit to Syria. The week before, I had traveled to Egypt and also to Israel, where I spoke with the Israelis and the Palestinians.
     In all of these places, I have been able to confirm my impression that in this spring of 2008, the Middle East has entered a new phase, when, for the first time in a long time, our reasons for hope can prevail over the shadows that - let us not forget - still hang over the peoples of this region. Everything seems to indicate that we are witnessing the birth of a new paradigm.
     A string of major advances has occurred these days. Lebanon has elected, by consensus, President Michel Sleiman, and I believe that he is a figure capable, with the help of all the other political forces, of bringing the Lebanese people together around a common project. The agreement was reached in Doha, resulting from the successful Arab mediation presided over by Qatar and the Arab League, with a European role, as well, especially on the part of Spain, France, and Italy. more.. e-mail

On Humiliation, and Gaza’s Dying Children
Ramzy Baroud, Middle East Online 6/23/2008
     A six-year-old Palestinian girl from Gaza was killed by Israeli fire on 12 June. "Medics say the girl was decapitated by a [tank] shell," Associated Press (AP) reported the next day. The Israeli military said the soldiers opened fire in retaliation against "militants launching rockets into Israel". AP dispassionately elaborated that, "Gaza militants fire rockets and mortars into Israel almost daily." The story of a few lines ended with another corroboration of the claims made by the Israeli military: "The shelling occurred near the border where militants fired 30 rockets into Israel on Tuesday."
     This is not another tirade about dehumanising media reporting in which the death of innocent Palestinians is so often blamed, one way or another, on the "militants". Neither is the evoking of this freshest tragedy -- the child victim is later named Hadeel Al-Smeiri -- intended to underscore the daily crimes committed by the Israeli military against Palestinians in the occupied territories, crimes that largely go unnoticed, buried in the not-so-important news items, nor to accentuate cold-hearted assertion that the Palestinians are to blame for forcing Israel to carry out such tragic "acts of retaliation". more.. e-mail

Burnt land policy, the language of settlers with Palestinian villages
Amin Abu Warda, Nablus, Translated & Edited by Saed Bannoura, International Middle East Media Center News 6/21/2008
     Black burn spots covered vast areas of farmlands that belong to residents of Boreen and Aseera Al Qibliyya villages, south of the northern West Bank city o Nablus; hours after Israeli settlers burnt their lands and uprooted hundreds of trees.
     The residents managed to enter their lands several hours after the settlers, who came from Yitzhar settlement, return to their colony after vandalizing the Palestinian lands while the Israeli army watched and listened without any intervention.
     The soldiers were there, and eyewitnesses said that the army just stood there and watched the settlers burning the lands. They even bared for several hours Palestinian fire-trucks and civil defense teams from entering the area in an attempt to distinguish the fire .
     After the firefighters were allowed through , they started fighting the blaze which already ate most of the lands that became a daily target for those extremist settlers. more.. e-mail

Palestine Popular Conference and two petitions
Mazin Qumsiyeh, International Solidarity Movement 6/22/2008
     The walls of silence, hatred, and pettiness are crumpling all around us. The hot winds of wars dissipate as they encounter the rooted resilience of the spirit of community. People who act on their good conscience are standing up everywhere to make a better future. It is great to be living at this historic time of dramatic change as power shifts from colonizers to colonized and from the few to the many. There are a number of conferences this summer that are relevant and that we will attend including the Ramallah Federation Convention (Detroit, July 4th), the Green Party Convention (Chicago, July 10), and the National Assembly against the War in Cleveland (next week). But especially exciting is the the last conference I will attend before moving to Palestine: the popular conference in Chicago, IL, August 8-10 (see registration info below). This is because it is not organized by a single group/political strand of thought but a grass root effort focused on productive team work. Over 20 workshops from participants ensure engagement as activists (not spectators or pupils to be talked to) and collective and inclusive decision making. Hundreds of younger open-minded individuals are taking matters into their own hands and deciding that their voices will not be silenced by self-appointed “leaders”. Just like the two young women in the Hijab who refused to be told not to sit on the stage behind Senator Obama, these activists are saying: no one can tell us where to sit and what to do. This strengthens our hope in the future of Arab Americans, all Americans, and all of humanity. Anyway, I hope to see ALL (even those skeptics) join and participate in inclusive events that advance activism for justice. After all, as Kahlil Gibran once wrote (and John F Kennedy later used in a speech): “ask not what your country can do for you but what you can do for your country.” Here are two petitions to sign and the info to register/attend the Chicago Palestine Popular Conference. more.. e-mail

Christian Zionist gathering mired in controversy
Bill Berkowitz, Electronic Intifada 6/17/2008
     OAKLAND, California (IPS) - The battle lines over Pastor John Hagee have been drawn, redrawn, and are no doubt being drawn again as this is being written. The San Antonio, Texas-based mega-preacher with the multi-million-dollar empire has always been controversial, but these days, the pastor is a lightning rod for critics.
     And as the days pass leading up to Hagee’s annual Christians United for Israel (CUFI) conference in Washington next month, new revelations of his anti-Semitism have come to light.
     At last year’s CUFI conference, US Senator Joseph Lieberman called Hagee "an Ish Elochim," saying he is "a man of God, and, like Moses, he is the leader of a mighty multitude."
     When it was first revealed that Hagee had made a series of anti-Catholic remarks, critics, including Bill Donohue of the conservative Catholic League, went ballistic. Hagee apologized. When Hagee blamed gay people for causing Hurricane Katrina, many were offended. Hagee offered up a half-hearted apology and quickly moved on. more.. e-mail

Stunted growth
Richard Silverstein, The Guardian 6/18/2008
     Israel’s high-tech industry is robust, but the country’s economy could be doing even better.
     You remember that famous quote: "Everything for the best in this best of all possible worlds." Well, that defines Tom Friedman’s perspective on Israel and his perspective on the ability of global trade to triumph over the all the world’s ills. Ostensibly, the subject of Friedman’s recent New York Times column was to compare the indomitable economic engine Israel has become with the lumbering "dinosaur" that is Iran. Friedman’s proof positive was Iscar, one of the newer additions to Warren Buffett’s stable of companies. Here is some of his cheerleading:
     From outside, Israel looks as if it’s in turmoil, largely because the entire political leadership seems to be under investigation. But Israel is a weak state with a strong civil society. The economy is exploding from the bottom up. Israel’s currency, the shekel, has appreciated nearly 30% against the dollar since the start of 2007. more.. e-mail

Forced apart by law
Toni O'Loughlin in Jerusalem, The Guardian 6/20/2008
     Toni O’Loughlin reports on the fate of an Israeli-Arab man and his Palestinian wife, which reflects what some see as a wider effort to banish Palestinians from Israel.
     Morad Asonah’s honeymoon ended abruptly when he returned home to Israel with his bride, Abir, to discover they - and thousands of other Israeli-Arab and Palestinian couples like them - had been banned from living together.
     The government said the ban, which forced Palestinians like Abir back to the West Bank and Gaza and separated parents from children, was a temporary measure to combat suicide bombers when it introduced the law in 2003.
     But now the law is set to be renewed a fourth time amid growing concern among human rights groups that couples like the Asonahs will be consigned to a permanent limbo. more.. e-mail

Quiet is muck
Gideon Levy, Ha’aretz 6/23/2008
     A great disaster has suddenly come upon Israel: The cease-fire has gone into effect. Cease-fire, cease-Qassams, cease-assassiations, at least for now. This good, hopeful news was received in Israel dourly, gloomily, even with hostility. As usual, politicians, the military brass and pundits went hand in hand to market the cease-fire as a negative, threatening and disastrous development.
     Even from the people who forged the agreement - the prime minister and defense minister - you heard not a word about hope; just covering their backsides in case of failure. No one spoke of the opportunity, everyone spoke of the risk, which is fundamentally unfounded. Hamas will arm? Why of all times during the cease-fire? Will only Hamas arm? We won’t? Perhaps it will arm, and perhaps it will realize that it should not use armed force because of calm’s benefits.
     It is hard to believe: The outbreak of war is received here with a great deal more sympathy and understanding, not to say enthusiasm, than a cease-fire. When the warmongers get started, our unified tom-toms drum out only encouraging messages; when the all-clear is sounded, when people in Sderot can sleep soundly, even if only for a short time, we are all worried. That says something about society’s sick face: Quiet is muck, war is the most important thing. more.. e-mail

Hamas’s wise step
Khalid Amayreh, Palestinian Information Center 6/20/2008
     The Egyptian-mediated ceasefire agreement between Israel and the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) is, ostensibly at least, a wise, dignified and expedient step for several reasons.
     To begin with, the ceasefire deal would suspend the daily acts of murder and terror carried out by the Israeli occupation forces against the nearly totally unprotected people of the Gaza Strip.
     For years, the Gestapo-like Israeli army used excessive force, including tanks, warplanes, heavy artillery and other lethal machines of death  to wreak death, havoc and terror on the  civilian population of Gaza, resulting in the murder and maiming of thousands of innocent people.
     Thus, the latest arrangement  would give the thoroughly tormented Gazans a certain respite, however uncertain, from Israeli terror and criminality. more.. e-mail

Face to Face with the Wall in Tulkarem
Palestine Monitor, Palestine Monitor 6/21/2008
     At 8 o’clock in the morning, Dr. Faraq Al-Taych and nurse Khadeje Aknaar are preparing themselves to leave their base at the Palestinian Medical Relief Society (PMRS) clinic in Tulkarem, for a day providing residents of the small villages around the city with medical care through PMRS’ mobile clinic.
     Founded in 1979 to fill the gap in health services left by the deliberate de-development of the health sector by Israeli Occupation Authorities, PMRS has been working in the Tulkarem district for over 20 years.
     Since the Apartheid Wall was built in 2003 however, the stories the doctors tell about their work have changed significantly. While they continue to face the usual problems in their daily work - occupation-induced poverty and underdevelopment, and injuries, and the associated impacts on health - they now regularly face situations where the absurdity of the entire occupation unveils itself.
     Six days a week, the mobile clinic travels through the surrounding areas, stopping in specific places each day. On Saturday, the team first unloads at a community health post in Falami, a village at the southern edge of Tulkarem district, where children, women and men suffering from colds, headaches, allergies, rheumatism or other ailments visit the doctor. The same procedure is repeated a few hours later in Kufr Aboush, the next village to which the team travels. more.. e-mail

Don’t travel on Route 443: The Apartheid Road - Silence of the Judges
Boaz Okon, Yediot Aharonot, June 10, 2008, International Solidarity Movement 6/21/2008
     Boaz Okon is a prominent jurist, was a judge on the Jerusalem District Court and registrar of the Supreme Court, and since his resignation in 2006 is the juridical commentator of Yediot Aharonot. The following article appeared not only on the op-ed page, but also with a box, containing a summary, placed conspicuously on the paper’s front page - which is quite exceptional. Exceptional in the opposite direction is the fact that this article, unlike many others of Okon’s, was not included in the Y-net website nor translated to English. This I have decided to do myself. - Adam Keller
     There are acts for which in retrospect we would not be able to forgive ourselves. Moments for which we would ask ourselves how we could have been so stupid.
     Our Supreme Court is approaching such a moment. On its desk is the appeal against the decision of the Defense Minster to block to Palestinian traffic the part of Route 443 which goes through the West Bank, and allowing passage to Israelis only. The Defense Minster gave the order to create a network of alternative roads for the Palestinians, which came to be knows as the “Fabric of Life Roads”. Which means: in the 1980’s, a narrow village road was widened into a full-fledged inter-city highway, the present Route 443. In order to achieve that, the land of Palestinian villagers was confiscated; now, these villagers are forbidden to use that route, and face new confiscation of lands in order to have new routes, with a tempting and cynical names, created for their use. more.. e-mail

Israeli forces terrorize Deheisheh refugee camp
Dr. Marcy Newman writing from Deheisheh refugee camp, occupied West, Electronic Intifada 6/20/2008
     It started out as a normal Saturday morning. We were hanging out in Ibdaa Cultural Center in Deheisheh refugee camp in Bethlehem. I had plans to leave later to visit friends in Jerusalem and was hanging out with friends here. We were all sitting in the cafe at Ibdaa, which is on the fourth floor and has windows around three sides of the building. We were drinking coffee, chatting, watching television and all of a sudden there was a loud sound like a grenade or a bomb. We rushed to the window and all we could see at first was smoke rising up from the street about a block away. One by one we watched Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) invade the street surrounding Deheisheh and then across the street in the Doha neighborhood where a few of the IOF jeeps parked in front of a house and then went inside, to arrest someone from the Abu Akar family (fortunately, he escaped).
     Much of this was obscured from our view. We could only see the soldiers enter and then park their jeeps out front. Then several of these tanks and jeeps came down the main Jerusalem-Bethlehem road and stopped in front of Deheisheh. The youth started throwing stones at the Israeli army jeeps and then the shooting started. For five hours the youth threw stones at the jeeps and the occupation soldiers fired live ammunition, including steel rubber-coated bullets (which can be just as lethal as the regular kind) and tear gas grenades, all of which injured five people from the camp. In the middle if all this a huge Caterpillar bulldozer came down the road and went up towards the house in Doha, which we thought was going to be used to demolish the house (thankfully, it did not). But the soldiers were in there for the entire five-hour period and they took some political prisoners away. more.. e-mail

A life trapped
Najwa Sheikh writing from the occupied Gaza Strip, Live from, Electronic Intifada 6/20/2008
     In 2000 the UN General Assembly declared 20 June "World Refugee Day," a day during which the world can focus on the experience and plight of refugees. It is a day that not only recognizes Palestinian refugees but also other unfortunate people whose lives have been disrupted by war and injustice.
     I am a Palestinian refugee; my parents as well as my grandparents are refugees too, who fled from our village al-Majdal and settled in one of the eight refugee camps in the Gaza Strip. My grandparents passed away 15 years ago, without any chance for them to see their homeland again. My parents are old and sick now, and probably will face the same destiny as their parents and die without any chance of having a look to what was once their homeland. Looking at the hard lives of my grandparents and my parents brings me nothing but a bleak vision of my future and the future of my children as refugees for life.
     Sixty years have passed since the Nakba -- our forced displacement -- and we, the Palestinians, are still called refugees. Knowing this fact -- and recognizing the lack of privileges and denial of rights that a refugee must endure -- being identified as a refugee in general, and as a Palestinian refugee in particular, means that there is no open horizons, no path for the future. There are only limited images that flow around one’s head. From the lives of one’s ancestors, where they lived and died in the same refugee camp, under the same circumstances, and how they face the same sufferings and injustice by Israel and the indifference of the world at large. more.. e-mail

Rays of hope from the Gaza ceasefire
Ali Abunimah, Electronic Intifada 6/20/2008
     After the unremitting hell that Israel has inflicted on Palestinians in Gaza, one can only feel relief and even joy at the ceasefire agreed between Hamas and the Jewish state that took effect this week. Its significance extends well beyond Gaza and opens new possibilities as the disastrous Bush Doctrine begins to lose influence.
     Since the beginning of this year, Israeli occupation forces and settlers have killed over 400 Palestinians, including dozens of children and several babies, already exceeding the entire death toll for 2007. One hundred and fifty were killed during a few days of Israeli bombing of Gaza in early March. This year seven Israelis have been killed in conflict-related violence, including four by mortars or rockets fired from the Gaza Strip.
     Some have sought to exclusively blame Hamas for the high Palestinian death toll, saying that the rockets resistance fighters were firing into Israel were "useless" and "toys," and gave Israel the excuse to "retaliate" implying that resistance itself was to blame for the occupier’s violence. But the fallacy of this claim is exposed by the fact that the absence of rockets fired from the West Bank and the renunciation of resistance by the US-backed Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah, has not spared Palestinian communities there from daily and escalating Israeli violence. more.. e-mail

Exile, Exclusion and Isolation: the Palestine Refugee Experience
Karen AbuZayd, Commissioner-General, UNRWA, ReliefWeb 6/20/2008
     To Mark World Refugee Day: 20th June 2008
     The horrors of the Second World War gave impetus to a quest for universal peace, justice and human dignity, with the United Nations at the fore. It is a disturbing commentary on our quest that as we commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Palestinians mark six decades of what they refer to as the Nakba, or catastrophe, with many languishing in conditions of exile, exclusion and isolation. This is a testament to our collective failure to give meaning to human dignity for Palestinians and to achieve a lasting, just peace in the Middle East. We who serve Palestine refugees believe that there is time to make amends.
     Exile: for sixty years, Palestine refugees have been in exile from their ancestral lands. Nowhere is this more starkly visible than in the West Bank, where the illegal barrier, hundreds of checkpoints and physical obstructions daily reinforce the exile. And in Gaza, the policies of closure and indiscriminate punishment devastate lives, causing mass despair, threatening to destroy hopes for peace.. more.. e-mail

Anything for a bath, anything for fuel
Mohammed Omer, Electronic Intifada 6/20/2008
     GAZA CITY (IPS) - The girl, about 16, is wandering about Jabaliya refugee camp, picking up anything she thinks can burn. She cannot find enough bits of wood, so she gathers plastic bags, old notebooks and even a pair of broken plastic sandals.
     "I want to heat some water," she said. "I want a bath."
     Not far away, Mohammed Abu Elenin, 23, exhaustion all over his face, prepares for a fourth night outside a gas station to refill his canister. His brother Nour has sat up with him. Earlier he could get half a fill. Now he doesn’t know what may come, but waits.
     "Some weeks ago, I managed to get a half cylinder of cooking gas," he says. "It lasted just one week. Now we have nothing to cook with."
     His family, like others, have turned to cooking over makeshift fires. That fills houses with smoke, and it is dangerous. And now firewood too is scarce.
     Umm Othman, 43, mother of nine, waits like the others. "It’s become impossible for me to feed and take care of my children and my husband," she says. Her sons are not at home, she has sent them to wait for gas. more.. e-mail

Politics mostly responsible for Palestinian food insecurity - UN
Report, Electronic Intifada 6/20/2008
     JERUSALEM (IRIN) - Lower incomes and the increasing cost of food have contributed to higher food insecurity in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. However, without a change in the political situation the only solution remains emergency humanitarian aid, a new UN report has said.
     "The main driver of Palestinian food insecurity is of a political nature," said a joint food security survey conducted by the World Food Program (WFP), the Food and Agriculture Organization and the UN agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA). It cited Israeli-imposed restrictions on movement, and land and water access, as well as the extension of the West Bank wall and Israeli settlements as the main causes.
     Israel has said restrictions on movement and the wall are needed for security purposes and efforts are being made to make life easier for Palestinians.
     Food insecurity was up four percent in 2006, affecting 38 percent of the population, though in Gaza it extended to more than half the people. Some 44 percent of UNRWA-registered refugees, the report said, were food insecure. more.. e-mail

Humiliation redefined
Ramzy Baroud, Al-Ahram Weekly 6/19/2008
     Conflicts between Palestinian factions are being allowed to overshadow the plight of Palestinians.
     A six-year-old Palestinian girl from Gaza was killed by Israeli fire on 12 June. "Medics say the girl was decapitated by a [tank] shell," Associated Press (AP) reported the next day. The Israeli military said the soldiers opened fire in retaliation against "militants launching rockets into Israel". AP dispassionately elaborated that, "Gaza militants fire rockets and mortars into Israel almost daily." The story of a few lines ended with another corroboration of the claims made by the Israeli military: "The shelling occurred near the border where militants fired 30 rockets into Israel on Tuesday."
     This is not another tirade about dehumanising media reporting in which the death of innocent Palestinians is so often blamed, one way or another, on the "militants". Neither is the evoking of this freshest tragedy -- the child victim is later named Hadeel Al-Smeiri -- intended to underscore the daily crimes committed by the Israeli military against Palestinians in the occupied territories, crimes that largely go unnoticed, buried in the not-so-important news items, nor to accentuate cold-hearted assertion that the Palestinians are to blame for forcing Israel to carry out such tragic "acts of retaliation". more.. e-mail

Twilight Zone / The Gypsies of Jerusalem
Gideon Levy, Ha’aretz 6/19/2008
     A filthy yard, pungent cooking smells wafting out of the shabby dwelling, snot-nosed children, a one-legged man wandering aimlessly, flies everywhere - this is a Gypsy home in the heart of the Old City of Jerusalem. It’s the perfect setting for a Nissim Aloni play, but this is not "The Gypsies of Jaffa" by the renowned Israeli playwright. This home contains nothing of the mysterious, the romantic or the magical, no violin strings and no sorcery. It’s just another rundown building in the Old City whose occupants, apart from one worker, are "Nawari," as the Gypsies of Jerusalem are called in Arabic.
     There are 400 to 500 by one unofficial count, about 200 households by a different count, belonging to four clans - Sleem, Nimr, Shakr and Ba’rana. Until recently they married only within the community, but they have begun to open up to intermarrying with their Palestinian neighbors. Many are sanitation workers - this week one man rushed off to repair a blocked sewer drain; another was off to haul garbage for a municipal subcontractor.
     Very little of the Gypsy cultural heritage has been preserved here, although one young woman is trying to salvage what she can. But she is shunned by the community, which is unwilling to accept activism on the part of a woman. more.. e-mail

Nuclear find raises the ante against Iran
Ehsan Ahrari, Asia Times 6/18/2008
     If the world had any doubts that the genie of advanced nuclear weapons proliferation was out of the bottle, those doubts have been removed by a report that American and international investigators have found the electronic blueprints for an advanced nuclear weapon on computers that belonged to the nuclear smuggling network run by the father of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program, Abdul Qadeer Khan.
     What is not yet known is whether Iran or other countries have purchased that blueprint from the nuclear smuggling network. The United States-led pressure on Iran, the 21st century version of "nuclear brinkmanship", is likely to be further intensified as a result of this new disclosure.
     The US is an old practitioner of nuclear brinkmanship, a term coined by president Dwight D Eisenhower’s secretary of state John Foster Dulles. Under this practice of diplomacy, pressure tactics and ambiguous threats to use nuclear weapons - short of firing a nuclear weapon - were used to bring about results to America’s liking. Its detractors called this exercise pushing a dangerous situation to the brink of disaster. British philosopher Bertrand Russell likened it to a "game of chicken", whereby one party is forced to "chicken out".
     In a similar situation, the administrations of presidents Bill Clinton and George W Bush exercised more of a policy of carrots and sticks than of nuclear brinkmanship against North Korea. The chief reason for that was a general understanding that Kim Jong-il already possessed nuclear weapons. more.. e-mail

The Fallacy of Islamic ’National Suicide’
George Bisharat, MIFTAH 6/16/2008
     A new buzzword is arising from the network of Israeli think tanks and security-oriented academic departments bent on instigating a US attack on Iran: "national suicide." The term describes a supposed Arab Muslim tradition of politically motivated suicide at the national, not just individual, level. Arab Muslim regimes have purportedly launched ruinous wars they could not have reasonably hoped to win, condemning their nations to destruction.
     The notion of an "irrational" and thus untrustworthy Iranian regime has already been widely discussed in the US. It is regularly invoked by Sen. John McCain on the stump. The term "national suicide" advances the notion and gives it a patina of academic respectability.
     Israeli jurist and former Knesset member Amnon Rubinstein recently editorialized on "national suicide" in The Jerusalem Post. Citing Israeli army Lt. Col. Ari Bar Yossef, Rubinstein offered Saddam Hussein, Yasser Arafat and the Taliban in Afghanistan as exemplars of this new construct. Hussein could have avoided overthrow by giving UN arms inspectors free rein to search his country. Arafat, after the failure of the Camp David peace talks, could have continued negotiating but resorted to violence. Finally, the Taliban could have given up Osama bin Laden to the US but instead invited self-destruction. All this because, per Rubinstein, these leaders prefer dying to "negotiating with infidels." more.. e-mail

Bomb Iran? What’s to Stop Us?
Ray McGovern, Middle East Online 6/20/2008
     It’s crazy, but it’s coming soon – from the same folks who brought us Iraq.
     Unlike the attack on Iraq five years ago, to deal with Iran there need be no massing of troops. And, with the propaganda buildup already well under way, there need be little, if any, forewarning before shock and awe and pox – in the form of air and missile attacks – begin.
     This time it will be largely the Air Force’s show, punctuated by missile and air strikes by the Navy. Israeli-American agreement has now been reached at the highest level; the armed forces planners, plotters and pilots are working out the details.
     Emerging from a 90-minute White House meeting with President George W. Bush on June 4, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said the two leaders were of one mind:
     “We reached agreement on the need to take care of the Iranian threat. I left with a lot less question marks [than] I had entered with regarding the means, the timetable restrictions, and American resoluteness to deal with the problem. George Bush understands the severity of the Iranian threat and the need to vanquish it, and intends to act on that matter before the end of his term in the White House.” more.. e-mail

Just make-believe
Akiva Eldar, Ha’aretz 6/20/2008
     When civilians on both sides are getting killed and 1.5 million people are under siege, a cease-fire is good news. But a cease-fire is not an end in itself; especially when one side declares in advance that it does not believe it will endure over time.
     The declared goal of the current government is to reach a permanent-status agreement with the Palestinians. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has even warned that without a two-state solution, there will be no more Jewish state. Therefore, he should gauge his steps based on how much they contribute to this important strategic goal. In other words, if the temporary arrangement with Hamas jeopardizes the effort to reach a permanent agreement with Fatah, then the cease-fire should have been obtained in another way.
     A few years ago, Ehud Barak told Gideon Levy in an interview that if he had been a Palestinian, he would have joined a terrorist organization. Who would Barak have joined this week? Hamas? - which has once again proved that force is the only language Israel understands. Or Fatah? - which once again watched the Egyptian-sponsored game between Israel and Hamas from the sidelines, as though there were no Oslo Accords, no Palestinian Authority, no road map and no Annapolis. more.. e-mail

Palestinians prisoners in Israel isolated from outside world
Press Release, Al Mezan, Electronic Intifada 6/19/2008
     On 17 June 2008, Adalah filed a petition to the Israeli high court on behalf of eight family members of Palestinian political prisoners from the Gaza Strip, the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights (Gaza) and the Association for the Palestinian Prisoners demanding that residents of Gaza be permitted to visit their relatives being held in Israeli prisons on a regular basis. The case was filed by Adalah attorney Abeer Baker against the defense minister, the commander of the Israeli army for the southern district and the interior minister.
     Since June 2006, following the capture of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, the Israeli security authorities began to impose even greater obstacles and constraints than in the past on family visits to prisoners from the Gaza Strip. These restrictions culminated in a decision by the Israeli army in June 2007 to place a total ban on visits by the families of prisoners from Gaza, alongside the severe restrictions imposed on all residents of Gaza.
     Prohibiting family visits in practice means that Palestinian prisoners are prevented from receiving basic necessities in prison, including clothing and money, as visits are the prisoners’ sole means of contact with the outside world. The transfer of money to a prisoner’s account necessitates the presence of a member of the prisoner’s family in the prison. more.. e-mail

Palestinians prisoners in Israel isolated from outside world
Press Release, Al Mezan, Electronic Intifada 6/19/2008
     On 17 June 2008, Adalah filed a petition to the Israeli high court on behalf of eight family members of Palestinian political prisoners from the Gaza Strip, the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights (Gaza) and the Association for the Palestinian Prisoners demanding that residents of Gaza be permitted to visit their relatives being held in Israeli prisons on a regular basis. The case was filed by Adalah attorney Abeer Baker against the defense minister, the commander of the Israeli army for the southern district and the interior minister.
     Since June 2006, following the capture of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit, the Israeli security authorities began to impose even greater obstacles and constraints than in the past on family visits to prisoners from the Gaza Strip. These restrictions culminated in a decision by the Israeli army in June 2007 to place a total ban on visits by the families of prisoners from Gaza, alongside the severe restrictions imposed on all residents of Gaza.
     Prohibiting family visits in practice means that Palestinian prisoners are prevented from receiving basic necessities in prison, including clothing and money, as visits are the prisoners’ sole means of contact with the outside world. The transfer of money to a prisoner’s account necessitates the presence of a member of the prisoner’s family in the prison. more.. e-mail

’Zionism, a very clear ideology of exclusion, racism and expulsion’ - exiled Israeli academic
Apostolis Fotiadis, Daily Star 6/20/2008
     Interview with Ilan Pappe
     Inter Press Service, ATHENS: Support for an academic boycott of Israeli universities exposed Ilan Pappe to death threats last year, forced him to resign as senior lecturer of political science at the University of Haifa, and leave the country. His argument that the creation of Israel in 1948 was followed by a policy of cleansing Israeli territory of Arabs, his support for the Hamas resistance despite rejecting its political ideology, and the denouncement of Israeli academia for justifying the occupation of Palestine have made him an unwanted person in Israel.
     But still he remains a firm believer that the only way to improve this reality is by exposing its worst aspects.
     In an interview with IPS, Pappe discusses the current situation in Palestine, and the Arab-Israeli conflict 60 years after it began.
     IPS: Can Barack Obama’s victory make a difference.
     IP: I think people who strive to hold the post of the strongest person in the world are not interested in moral issues, or are really moved by suffering and oppression. Obama is no different, and the morality of the issue or the suffering of the Palestinians would not move him. He would move in a different direction if he and his advisers would feel that showing less support for Israel enhances their political power. So far this is not the case. It is better to be pro-Israeli to win American elections and be re-elected for the second term. If there is any hope, this is from a second term, when the powerful men are brought back to their normal human size again, and may begin to think like you and me about injustice, oppression and occupation. more.. e-mail

’Zionism, a very clear ideology of exclusion, racism and expulsion’ - exiled Israeli academic
Apostolis Fotiadis, Daily Star 6/20/2008
     Interview with Ilan Pappe
     Inter Press Service, ATHENS: Support for an academic boycott of Israeli universities exposed Ilan Pappe to death threats last year, forced him to resign as senior lecturer of political science at the University of Haifa, and leave the country. His argument that the creation of Israel in 1948 was followed by a policy of cleansing Israeli territory of Arabs, his support for the Hamas resistance despite rejecting its political ideology, and the denouncement of Israeli academia for justifying the occupation of Palestine have made him an unwanted person in Israel.
     But still he remains a firm believer that the only way to improve this reality is by exposing its worst aspects.
     In an interview with IPS, Pappe discusses the current situation in Palestine, and the Arab-Israeli conflict 60 years after it began.
     IPS: Can Barack Obama’s victory make a difference.
     IP: I think people who strive to hold the post of the strongest person in the world are not interested in moral issues, or are really moved by suffering and oppression. Obama is no different, and the morality of the issue or the suffering of the Palestinians would not move him. He would move in a different direction if he and his advisers would feel that showing less support for Israel enhances their political power. So far this is not the case. It is better to be pro-Israeli to win American elections and be re-elected for the second term. If there is any hope, this is from a second term, when the powerful men are brought back to their normal human size again, and may begin to think like you and me about injustice, oppression and occupation. more.. e-mail

Israel’s very own Guantanamos
Khaled Amayreh in occupied East Jerusalem, Al-Ahram Weekly 6/19/2008
     The "death ride" -- welcome to 21st century torture.
     Israeli maltreatment of Palestinian captives and political prisoners has reached unprecedented levels of brutality, according to lawyers, human rights groups and newly-released prisoners.
     There are currently as many as 12,000 Palestinian detainees languishing in Israeli detention camps, many of them without charge or trial. They include hundreds of university professors, engineers, school teachers as well as religious and civic leaders, students, resistance fighters and women activists.
     Two years ago, the Israeli occupation authorities abducted hundreds of democratically- elected officials, including mayors, members of local city councils, law-makers, and cabinet ministers, many associate with Hamas’s political wing.
     Israel employs a set of draconian laws, some dating back to the British mandate era, to torment Palestinian prisoners. The same laws are also used to lend a façade of legality to other harsh treatment of Palestinians, such as house demolitions, land confiscation and deportation. more.. e-mail

Israel’s very own Guantanamos
Khaled Amayreh in occupied East Jerusalem, Al-Ahram Weekly 6/19/2008
     The "death ride" -- welcome to 21st century torture.
     Israeli maltreatment of Palestinian captives and political prisoners has reached unprecedented levels of brutality, according to lawyers, human rights groups and newly-released prisoners.
     There are currently as many as 12,000 Palestinian detainees languishing in Israeli detention camps, many of them without charge or trial. They include hundreds of university professors, engineers, school teachers as well as religious and civic leaders, students, resistance fighters and women activists.
     Two years ago, the Israeli occupation authorities abducted hundreds of democratically- elected officials, including mayors, members of local city councils, law-makers, and cabinet ministers, many associate with Hamas’s political wing.
     Israel employs a set of draconian laws, some dating back to the British mandate era, to torment Palestinian prisoners. The same laws are also used to lend a façade of legality to other harsh treatment of Palestinians, such as house demolitions, land confiscation and deportation. more.. e-mail

Book review: Philosophical essays on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
Raymond Deane, Electronic Intifada 6/19/2008
     Cumbersome though it already is, the subtitle of the new book The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Philosophical Essays on Self-Determination, Terrorism, and the One-State Solution could have been expanded to include "The Right of Return," the title of the second of its four long chapters, thus doing fuller justice to its impressive sweep. The authors, Raja Halwani and Tomis Kapitan, are philosophy professors in the US who seek to answer such "critical normative questions" as "When does a group of people have a right to govern or possess a certain territory? Under what conditions are people entitled to political self-determination? What rights accrue to those who have been the victims of territorial aggression? How do political institutions, states or resistance organizations gain moral legitimacy? Is a state ever entitled to territorial expansion and conquest of foreign territory? When is violent resistance to military occupation justified? Can recourse to terrorism ever be legitimate in the context of political struggles?
     Some potential readers may be deterred by the adjective "philosophical," which could without disadvantage have been omitted from the subtitle. While the reader’s concentration is tested by subtle and detailed argumentation, no former acquaintance with philosophical traditions or terminology is required, and abstractions are invariably confronted with their material consequences in everyday political reality. More opinionated readers may feel that, in the authors’ terms, "philosophical discussion of these [normative] questions, especially when applied to particular political conflicts, is hopelessly inconclusive." However, the authors are surely correct in maintaining that "No legal system is the final word about how humans and societies ought to behave, and to restrict normative thought to enactment would immunize positive law from rational evaluation. more.. e-mail

Book review: Philosophical essays on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
Raymond Deane, Electronic Intifada 6/19/2008
     Cumbersome though it already is, the subtitle of the new book The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Philosophical Essays on Self-Determination, Terrorism, and the One-State Solution could have been expanded to include "The Right of Return," the title of the second of its four long chapters, thus doing fuller justice to its impressive sweep. The authors, Raja Halwani and Tomis Kapitan, are philosophy professors in the US who seek to answer such "critical normative questions" as "When does a group of people have a right to govern or possess a certain territory? Under what conditions are people entitled to political self-determination? What rights accrue to those who have been the victims of territorial aggression? How do political institutions, states or resistance organizations gain moral legitimacy? Is a state ever entitled to territorial expansion and conquest of foreign territory? When is violent resistance to military occupation justified? Can recourse to terrorism ever be legitimate in the context of political struggles?
     Some potential readers may be deterred by the adjective "philosophical," which could without disadvantage have been omitted from the subtitle. While the reader’s concentration is tested by subtle and detailed argumentation, no former acquaintance with philosophical traditions or terminology is required, and abstractions are invariably confronted with their material consequences in everyday political reality. More opinionated readers may feel that, in the authors’ terms, "philosophical discussion of these [normative] questions, especially when applied to particular political conflicts, is hopelessly inconclusive." However, the authors are surely correct in maintaining that "No legal system is the final word about how humans and societies ought to behave, and to restrict normative thought to enactment would immunize positive law from rational evaluation. more.. e-mail

The road to hell
Akiva Eldar, Ha’aretz 6/19/2008
     It is no coincidence that Dr. Matti Steinberg decided to conclude his book about Palestinian consciousness with a verse from Jewish sources: "Blessed is he who does not speak peace only with his tongue, and in his heart there is peace for all. Cursed is he who speaks peace with his tongue, and in his heart there is no peace" (2 Enoch). In Steinberg’s story, those who speak peace only with their tongue are not necessarily speakers of Arabic, and those who have peace in their heart are not necessarily Jews.
     There is no national ’other’ with whom we are more intimate than the Palestinian ’other,’" Steinberg, who was an adviser to three Shin Bet security service chiefs, writes. "Perhaps through them we will be able to learn about ourselves." Steinberg, an expert on Islamic and Middle Eastern affairs from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is considered one of the world’s leading authorities on the Palestinian national movement.
     Steinberg seeks to provide a response to Montaigne’s plaint that we would do well to examine ourselves and devote to the study of ourselves the same time we spend in observing others and getting to know what is outside ourselves. Steinberg has not made do with the academic study of the conflict and its history. For over two decades he has been trying to open the eyes of prime ministers and senior cabinet ministers, Shin Bet chiefs and ranking Israel Defense Forces officers. His jeremiads contain not a whiff of peacenik romanticism. "Even if peace is achieved with the Palestinians, this will not usher in an idyllic pastoral age," he writes, "but there is a big difference between a tolerable situation and an intolerable one. Israel’s avoidance or evasion of paying the set price of a settlement is fraught with far greater danger to its very existence as a democratic Jewish state than ceding part of the territory." more.. e-mail

The road to hell
Akiva Eldar, Ha’aretz 6/19/2008
     It is no coincidence that Dr. Matti Steinberg decided to conclude his book about Palestinian consciousness with a verse from Jewish sources: "Blessed is he who does not speak peace only with his tongue, and in his heart there is peace for all. Cursed is he who speaks peace with his tongue, and in his heart there is no peace" (2 Enoch). In Steinberg’s story, those who speak peace only with their tongue are not necessarily speakers of Arabic, and those who have peace in their heart are not necessarily Jews.
     There is no national ’other’ with whom we are more intimate than the Palestinian ’other,’" Steinberg, who was an adviser to three Shin Bet security service chiefs, writes. "Perhaps through them we will be able to learn about ourselves." Steinberg, an expert on Islamic and Middle Eastern affairs from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is considered one of the world’s leading authorities on the Palestinian national movement.
     Steinberg seeks to provide a response to Montaigne’s plaint that we would do well to examine ourselves and devote to the study of ourselves the same time we spend in observing others and getting to know what is outside ourselves. Steinberg has not made do with the academic study of the conflict and its history. For over two decades he has been trying to open the eyes of prime ministers and senior cabinet ministers, Shin Bet chiefs and ranking Israel Defense Forces officers. His jeremiads contain not a whiff of peacenik romanticism. "Even if peace is achieved with the Palestinians, this will not usher in an idyllic pastoral age," he writes, "but there is a big difference between a tolerable situation and an intolerable one. Israel’s avoidance or evasion of paying the set price of a settlement is fraught with far greater danger to its very existence as a democratic Jewish state than ceding part of the territory." more.. e-mail

'We could not even bury our daughter'
Report, PCHR, Electronic Intifada 6/19/2008
     On 11 June, eight-year-old Hadeel Al-Sumairi was killed when her home in southeastern Gaza was shelled by Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF). Less than a week earlier, eight-year-old Aya Hamdan al-Najjar was killed by a rocket fired from an IOF helicopter. These two young girls had been living just a few kilometers apart, both in villages in the southeastern Gaza Strip near the border with Israel. Their violent deaths highlight both the continual dangers facing families who live anywhere near the Israeli border -- and the grim and rising child death toll in the Gaza Strip. Sixty-two children have been killed by IOF in the Gaza Strip this year -- almost double the number of children who were killed by the IOF in Gaza during the whole of last year.
     The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) is still investigating the circumstances of Hadeel al-Sumairi’s death. Her uncle, Amin Suleiman Ahmad al-Sumairi, has given PCHR an eye-witness account of the IOF invasion of al-Qarara village near Khan Younis, where Hadeel was killed. "I was at home when I heard a huge explosion. I ran from my house and saw fire coming from the home of my brother, Abdul Karim. As I ran towards the house I could smell burning flesh." IOF had just fired two tank shells into al-Qarara village, and both shells struck the house where Abdul Karim al-Sumairi and his family lived. His daughter, Hadeel, was killed instantly, her small body dismembered. more.. e-mail

'We could not even bury our daughter'
Report, PCHR, Electronic Intifada 6/19/2008
     On 11 June, eight-year-old Hadeel Al-Sumairi was killed when her home in southeastern Gaza was shelled by Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF). Less than a week earlier, eight-year-old Aya Hamdan al-Najjar was killed by a rocket fired from an IOF helicopter. These two young girls had been living just a few kilometers apart, both in villages in the southeastern Gaza Strip near the border with Israel. Their violent deaths highlight both the continual dangers facing families who live anywhere near the Israeli border -- and the grim and rising child death toll in the Gaza Strip. Sixty-two children have been killed by IOF in the Gaza Strip this year -- almost double the number of children who were killed by the IOF in Gaza during the whole of last year.
     The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) is still investigating the circumstances of Hadeel al-Sumairi’s death. Her uncle, Amin Suleiman Ahmad al-Sumairi, has given PCHR an eye-witness account of the IOF invasion of al-Qarara village near Khan Younis, where Hadeel was killed. "I was at home when I heard a huge explosion. I ran from my house and saw fire coming from the home of my brother, Abdul Karim. As I ran towards the house I could smell burning flesh." IOF had just fired two tank shells into al-Qarara village, and both shells struck the house where Abdul Karim al-Sumairi and his family lived. His daughter, Hadeel, was killed instantly, her small body dismembered. more.. e-mail

No internal threats
Basel Oudat, Al-Ahram Weekly 6/19/2008
     The Syrian regime doesn’t have partners and doesn’t allow power sharing, but is willing to listen.
     No power struggle exists in Syria, simply because no group is strong enough to challenge the regime. There are no groups within the regime that band together for political purposes or seek to seize power. Although there are differences of opinion on domestic and foreign policy among top aides, those differences are insignificant. The Syrian regime "has no partners, but only groups of allies or advisers or senior functionaries who may offer an opinion when asked, but no one has a right to speak out of turn or take part in decision-making," one observer said.
     The Syrian regime depends on three major institutions to stay in power: the Baath Party, the army and the security and intelligence apparatus.
     The Baath Party is the sole decision- maker in the country, at least according to the constitution. In real life, however, the party’s National Command (NC, qiyada qotriya ) is little more than a rubberstamp committee. The NC approves without much debate the nomination of ministers, parliamentary members, governors and other top officials. It has never been known to oppose the president or make up its mind on public matters, whether political, economic, or cultural. In brief, the NC is a tool rather than a true associate in power. Its main role is bureaucratic and it doesn’t venture much into decision-making. more.. e-mail

No internal threats
Basel Oudat, Al-Ahram Weekly 6/19/2008
     The Syrian regime doesn’t have partners and doesn’t allow power sharing, but is willing to listen.
     No power struggle exists in Syria, simply because no group is strong enough to challenge the regime. There are no groups within the regime that band together for political purposes or seek to seize power. Although there are differences of opinion on domestic and foreign policy among top aides, those differences are insignificant. The Syrian regime "has no partners, but only groups of allies or advisers or senior functionaries who may offer an opinion when asked, but no one has a right to speak out of turn or take part in decision-making," one observer said.
     The Syrian regime depends on three major institutions to stay in power: the Baath Party, the army and the security and intelligence apparatus.
     The Baath Party is the sole decision- maker in the country, at least according to the constitution. In real life, however, the party’s National Command (NC, qiyada qotriya ) is little more than a rubberstamp committee. The NC approves without much debate the nomination of ministers, parliamentary members, governors and other top officials. It has never been known to oppose the president or make up its mind on public matters, whether political, economic, or cultural. In brief, the NC is a tool rather than a true associate in power. Its main role is bureaucratic and it doesn’t venture much into decision-making. more.. e-mail

AIPAC, The Jewish Holy Worriers
Sami Jamil Jadallah, Palestine Think Tank 6/19/2008
     Unlike the Rolling Thunder, the Veteran group that descends on Washington, DC every Memorial Day to remind us and the nation, certainly the Congress of the brave men and women who gave up their lives for the love of the country and to remind us and the nation of the millions of American men and women who served honorably in the US armed forces, certainly to remind our elected officials of the thousands of MIA’s, the Israeli lobby group, AIPAC and its army of Jewish Holy Worriers descend on Washington shaking the nation and creating a seismic waves in Washington, certainly rattling members of Congress and elected politicians and of course potential presidential candidates with demands for open and declared loyalty to Israel. What different reception each gets from our Congress and our elected officials?
     While some 10,000 Harley Davidson bikers comes to town with hardly any notice from members of Congress, members of AIPAC descend down on Washington making the city and its politicians tremble with fear, shock and owe from its power and influence and the death sentences it can hand down to members of Congress, leading politicians, members of the media certainly presidential candidates if found guilty of disloyalty to Israel. more.. e-mail

AIPAC, The Jewish Holy Worriers
Sami Jamil Jadallah, Palestine Think Tank 6/19/2008
     Unlike the Rolling Thunder, the Veteran group that descends on Washington, DC every Memorial Day to remind us and the nation, certainly the Congress of the brave men and women who gave up their lives for the love of the country and to remind us and the nation of the millions of American men and women who served honorably in the US armed forces, certainly to remind our elected officials of the thousands of MIA’s, the Israeli lobby group, AIPAC and its army of Jewish Holy Worriers descend on Washington shaking the nation and creating a seismic waves in Washington, certainly rattling members of Congress and elected politicians and of course potential presidential candidates with demands for open and declared loyalty to Israel. What different reception each gets from our Congress and our elected officials?
     While some 10,000 Harley Davidson bikers comes to town with hardly any notice from members of Congress, members of AIPAC descend down on Washington making the city and its politicians tremble with fear, shock and owe from its power and influence and the death sentences it can hand down to members of Congress, leading politicians, members of the media certainly presidential candidates if found guilty of disloyalty to Israel. more.. e-mail

Dividends of truce
Ian Black, The Guardian 6/19/2008
     Only a foolhardy observer would predict that peace is about to break out in the Middle East because of the ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas - snatched from the jaws of a large-scale Israeli incursion into the Gaza strip after weeks of intensive, rollercoaster, Egyptian mediation.
     Continuing Israeli attacks in Gaza, and Palestinian rocket fire across the border into Israel, are reminders that this is a conflict that will not be easily ended. And there is clearly room for substantial disagreement over key questions: will the Cairo deal include the release of Gilad Shalit, the Israeli corporal captured two years ago? Will the Rafah border crossing open at once and who will control it? What if weapons smuggling continues through the maze of tunnels under the border? And what is the link between the situation in Gaza and the West Bank, where the Israelis insist on the right to maintain security?
     Still, six months of tahdiya (the Arabic word means "quiet" rather than "ceasefire") would be a welcome change for ordinary people on both sides. Palestinians have suffered hundreds of dead and injured in recent Israeli raids. more.. e-mail

Dividends of truce
Ian Black, The Guardian 6/19/2008
     Only a foolhardy observer would predict that peace is about to break out in the Middle East because of the ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas - snatched from the jaws of a large-scale Israeli incursion into the Gaza strip after weeks of intensive, rollercoaster, Egyptian mediation.
     Continuing Israeli attacks in Gaza, and Palestinian rocket fire across the border into Israel, are reminders that this is a conflict that will not be easily ended. And there is clearly room for substantial disagreement over key questions: will the Cairo deal include the release of Gilad Shalit, the Israeli corporal captured two years ago? Will the Rafah border crossing open at once and who will control it? What if weapons smuggling continues through the maze of tunnels under the border? And what is the link between the situation in Gaza and the West Bank, where the Israelis insist on the right to maintain security?
     Still, six months of tahdiya (the Arabic word means "quiet" rather than "ceasefire") would be a welcome change for ordinary people on both sides. Palestinians have suffered hundreds of dead and injured in recent Israeli raids. more.. e-mail

Google Gags Uruknet - More internet censorship
Desert Peace, Palestine Think Tank 6/19/2008
     Editorial: One of my Associates, Uruknet.Info, is once again the victim of Google’s zionist inspired polices. Just a month ago, the co-founder of Google was in Israel to "˜celebrate’ its 60 years as an occupying power"¦ he obviously was inspired by his visit as his Company’s policies seem to have shifted even more to the right than they were before his trip.
     Uruknet has been hacked, taken off Google News indexing and now, the latest"¦ taken off Google completely. How can this be done? We really don’t know, but we do know that Google has refused to respond to the thousands of requests by readers to reinstate Uruknet on Google News. They came up with a response after weeks only to the site itself where it "reasoned"� that Uruknet was "only"� an aggregator. All of us know that it is an exceptionally important aggregator, but it is far more than that! It contains ... more.. e-mail

Google Gags Uruknet - More internet censorship
Desert Peace, Palestine Think Tank 6/19/2008
     Editorial: One of my Associates, Uruknet.Info, is once again the victim of Google’s zionist inspired polices. Just a month ago, the co-founder of Google was in Israel to "˜celebrate’ its 60 years as an occupying power"¦ he obviously was inspired by his visit as his Company’s policies seem to have shifted even more to the right than they were before his trip.
     Uruknet has been hacked, taken off Google News indexing and now, the latest"¦ taken off Google completely. How can this be done? We really don’t know, but we do know that Google has refused to respond to the thousands of requests by readers to reinstate Uruknet on Google News. They came up with a response after weeks only to the site itself where it "reasoned"� that Uruknet was "only"� an aggregator. All of us know that it is an exceptionally important aggregator, but it is far more than that! It contains ... more.. e-mail

Obama’s missteps
George Bisharat, Palestine Think Tank 6/18/2008
     On his first day as the presumptive Democratic candidate for president earlier this month, Barack Obama committed a serious foreign policy blunder. Reciting a litany of pro-Israeli positions at the annual meeting of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), he avowed: "Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided."
     In promising U.S. support of Israel’s claims to all of Jerusalem, Obama couldn’t have picked a better way to offend the world’s 325 million Arabs and 1.5 billion Muslims. Israel’s 41-year stewardship of the Holy City has alarmed Muslims from Morocco to Malaysia. Upon seizing East Jerusalem in 1967, Israel razed the ancient Muslim Maghribi quarter to make room for Jewish worshipers at the Western Wall. Since 1991, Israel has steadily ratcheted down Palestinians’ access to Muslim and Christian holy sites in Jerusalem. Most West Bank Palestinians can no longer worship there.
     Obama’s unnecessary promise deviates from nearly six decades of U.S. foreign policy that held Jerusalem to be occupied territory under international law. This long tradition was first broken in 2004 when President Bush acknowledged Israel’s demands to keep its illegal West Bank settlements in a final peace agreement, including those around Jerusalem. Thus Obama, a Harvard-trained lawyer, would both scorn the international legal system’s foundational principle - the inadmissibility of territorial acquisition by war - and echo President Bush, whose failed Middle East policies he has rightly deplored. more.. e-mail

Obama’s missteps
George Bisharat, Palestine Think Tank 6/18/2008
     On his first day as the presumptive Democratic candidate for president earlier this month, Barack Obama committed a serious foreign policy blunder. Reciting a litany of pro-Israeli positions at the annual meeting of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), he avowed: "Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided."
     In promising U.S. support of Israel’s claims to all of Jerusalem, Obama couldn’t have picked a better way to offend the world’s 325 million Arabs and 1.5 billion Muslims. Israel’s 41-year stewardship of the Holy City has alarmed Muslims from Morocco to Malaysia. Upon seizing East Jerusalem in 1967, Israel razed the ancient Muslim Maghribi quarter to make room for Jewish worshipers at the Western Wall. Since 1991, Israel has steadily ratcheted down Palestinians’ access to Muslim and Christian holy sites in Jerusalem. Most West Bank Palestinians can no longer worship there.
     Obama’s unnecessary promise deviates from nearly six decades of U.S. foreign policy that held Jerusalem to be occupied territory under international law. This long tradition was first broken in 2004 when President Bush acknowledged Israel’s demands to keep its illegal West Bank settlements in a final peace agreement, including those around Jerusalem. Thus Obama, a Harvard-trained lawyer, would both scorn the international legal system’s foundational principle - the inadmissibility of territorial acquisition by war - and echo President Bush, whose failed Middle East policies he has rightly deplored. more.. e-mail

Half of Palestinians in West Bank and Gaza malnourished
Donald Macintyre in Jerusalem, The Independent 6/18/2008
     Around 46 per cent of Gaza and West Bank households are "food insecure" or in danger of becoming so, according to a UN report on the impact of conflict and the global boycott of the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority.
     The unpublished draft report, the first of its kind since the boycott was imposed when the Hamas government took office last March, says bluntly that the problem "is primarily a function of restricted economic access to food resulting from ongoing political conditions".
     The report, jointly produced by the UN’s World Food Programme and the Food and Agriculture Organisation, paints a bleak picture of the impact on food consumption and expenditure throughout the occupied Palestinian territories. It says that the situation is "more grim" in Gaza where four out of five families have reduced their spending - including on food - in the first quarter of last year alone. more.. e-mail

The urgency of 1948
Hannah Mermelstein writing from occupied Palestine, Live from Palestine, Electronic Intifada 6/18/2008
     I’ve been thinking about the urgency of 1948. One of the most repeated quotes among Palestinian refugees is: "The old will die and the young will forget," words reputedly spoken by Israel’s founding prime minister David Ben-Gurion. However, the young have not forgotten. Everywhere I have traveled in the Arab world -- Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria -- Palestinian children tell me the names of their original villages that they still hope to see someday.Even the youngest of children will say things like, "If I don’t return to my village, then my children or their children will."
     Perhaps this is the nature of displacement, that the desire to return is compounded as long as the right to return is denied. But how to explain the urgency? Those who were young at the time of the Nakba, 60 years ago, are dying. Just as the Holocaust generation of Jews is slowly passing away, so is the Nakba generation of Palestinians. The difference is in the collective world memory of each tragedy. The Nazi Holocaust is denied by very few today (and even fewer with any kind of world power), whereas the Nakba continues to be denied by the powerful, as it has been for 60 years. Each time I visit with Nakba survivors who currently live inside ’48 (Israel) and have Israeli citizenship, I am astounded that the desperation in their voices far exceeds most of what I hear from Palestinians in the West Bank (Gaza, currently, is another story). Why is this? In all superficial ways, Palestinians with Israeli citizenship have a better standard of life than those in the West Bank. West Bank Palestinians, however, while continuously besieged and attacked, rarely find themselves face to face in conversation with people who deny their identities, their histories, and their experiences. Palestinians with Israeli citizenship face this every day. more.. e-mail

Superiority and separation
Priyamvada Gopal, The Guardian 6/18/2008
     In a world divided and made unequal by economic and military subjugation we need to think about points of commonality. From the series, ’Orientalism at 30’
     Is all enquiry into other cultures problematic? Though Edward Said’s original text of Orientalism was evasive on this question, in a later preface, Said made the clear distinction between knowledge "that is the result of understanding, compassion, careful study and analysis" and "knowledge that is part of an overall campaign of self-affirmation".
     Self-affirmation of this kind is everywhere and it is not harmless. Thirty years after Orientalism identified this phenomenon as one that was used to justify imperialism and invasion, "liberal" white British commentators still make magisterial pronouncements plucked from nowhere on the plight of Asian/Muslim/non-western women with no awareness of or, indeed, the slightest interest in, the history of women’s activism in these regions. Others call for war-ravaged societies to be partitioned on religious lines, oblivious to complex histories of co-existence, oblivious to the ways that polarities get sharpened by invasion and imperialism and, of course, the disastrous consequences of partitions in various former colonies. Then there are the endless encomiums to freedom and progress as distinctively "western" values to be protected as such. (Why do they let residual political correctness stop them short of making a genetic case?) more.. e-mail

Opening young eyes
Tamar Rotem, Ha’aretz 6/18/2008
     Bedlam reigns in the Ramle kindergarten yard as the 5- and 6-year-olds await a visit by their peers from an Arab kindergarten in a distant neighborhood of the city. Their excitement is palpable as their diminutive guests finally enter the kindergarten gate, lined up one behind the other. The Jewish Bar Kokhba and Arab Danny Mas kindergartens will put on a play together, based on Ephraim Sidon’s adaptation of the biblical story of Noah’s Ark.
     This is the children’s first rehearsal of their roles as the animals that entered the ark in pair before the flood, roaring, yowling, making every sound imaginable. As they all run to take their places - children, parents, kindergarten teachers and one photographer - one girl leaves the line of children to practice her giraffe walk. On the tips of her toes, with chin in the air, she makes a futile attempt to attract her teacher’s attention. But the teacher is no less worried than she would be if this were a premiere.
     The kindergarten rehearsal on a recent morning was the culmination of year-long activities to promote reading in Ramle kindergartens. More than 80 Jewish and Arab kindergartens in the city participated in activities that incorporated theater. The Ramle Municipal Library initiated and sponsored the project with a budget of nearly NIS 80,000. more.. e-mail

Reason to Believe?
Joharah Baker, MIFTAH 6/18/2008
     The question lingering in the air right now is, "What will make this time any different?" Ceasefire agreements between Israel and Hamas have been reached before, all of which have flown right out the window with the slightest provocation. Nevertheless, it is nearly impossible for the Palestinians not to get their hopes up at the news that a "tahdiya" agreement has been reached through Egyptian mediation between the two warring parties, effective as of June 19.
     The agreement has been months in the making, with both Hamas and Israel copping out at the last moment, both citing the other side’s intransigence. This time, the deal went through, with an announcement on June 17 that both sides have agreed to "halt all hostilities and all military activities" in the Gaza Strip. According to the agreement, trade crossings will be opened and the blockade lifted off of essential goods. In week two of the ceasefire, Egypt will host representatives from Hamas, the Palestinian presidency and European parties to Cairo to discuss a mechanism for reopening the Rafah border crossing between the Gaza Strip and Egypt. Ostensibly, the ceasefire is to last for six months and will then be implemented in the West Bank, according to Egypt. more.. e-mail

Crossing the Line interviews professor Nasser Aruri about AIPAC conference
Podcast, Crossing the Line, Electronic Intifada 6/18/2008
     This week on Crossing The Line: Lawmakers made their annual pilgrimage to the the annual American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) policy conference to show their unyielding support of Israel. US presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama claim to both want a change in policy from the Bush Administration, but how will this apply to foreign policy, and more specifically the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Noted author and professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, Naseer Aruri, speaks with host Naji Ali about the importance of AIPAC in the US presidential elections.
     Also this week, as the humanitarian crisis in Gaza worsens by the day, residents of the world’s most densely populated area are suffering from a lack of fuel, food, water and medical supplies while Israeli politicians talk of another full-scale invasion into the coastal region. Crossing The Line contributing producer and investigative journalist Nora Barrows-Friedman speaks to Ali from the Gaza Strip. more.. e-mail

A law that must not pass
Haaretz Editorial, Ha’aretz 6/19/2008
     The Basic Law on the Knesset is meant to be a law that is not touched, changed or suited to the spirit of the moment or the changing desires of Knesset members. It is the Basic Law that ensures the fundamental right to vote and to be elected.
     But restraint is not a hallmark of the members of the present House, which is not overflowing with real parliamentarians. It is no surprise that MKs Zevulun Orlev and Esterina Tartman are the ones whose names are on this proposed amendment.
     The bill, which is to be presented to the legislature for its second and third readings in the coming days, would amend the Basic Law on the Knesset so that a person who has visited an enemy country would not be able to stand for election to the Knesset. Such a visit would be considered "supporting the armed struggle against the State of Israel". more.. e-mail

Israel has won the European cup: a special relationship
Arjan El Fassed, Electronic Intifada 6/18/2008
     During her sixth visit to Israel since last November’s Annapolis summit, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice complained that the thousands of new housing units, built in Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian land were damaging the peace talks with Palestinians. Meanwhile, at a joint press conference with Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni in Luxembourg, the same day, Slovenia’s Foreign Minister Dimitrij Rupel, whose country currently holds the rotating EU presidency, announced that the EU had decided to upgrade its political and economic relations with Israel. Rupel, who chaired the EU-Israel Association Council meeting, the body overseeing the relationship, stated that the EU and Israel are "elevating" their relations to a new level of "more intense, more fruitful, more influential cooperation." Israel has now been granted the highest level of relations available to a non-member state.
     The cooperation is based on the European Neighborhood Policy Action Plan, an initiative launched under the Dutch EU Presidency in 2004, aimed at bringing the neighboring countries closer to the EU. This European move might seem surprising since a progress report on the implementation of the European Neighborhood Policy stated clearly that "little concrete progress" has been made on issues raised between Israel and the EU, such as restrictions on movement, the construction of the West Bank wall (its route ruled illegal by the International Court of Justice), administrative detentions, the dismantling of settler "outposts," and the expansion of Israeli settlements. more.. e-mail

An Apology
Uri Avnery, Middle East Online 6/17/2008
     We cannot ignore anymore the fact that in the war of 1948 - which is the War of Independence for Israel - some 750 thousand Palestinians were compelled to leave their homes and lands.
     This week, the Prime Minister of Canada made a dramatic statement in Parliament: he apologized to the indigenous peoples of his country for the injustices done to them for generations by successive Canadian governments.
     This way, White Canada tries to make peace with the native nations, whose country their forefathers conquered and whose culture their rulers have tried to wipe out.
     Apologizing for past wrongs has become a part of modern political culture.
     That is never an easy thing to do. Cynics might say: nothing to it. Just words. And words, after all, are a cheap commodity. But in fact, such acts have a profound significance. A human being - and even more so, a whole nation - always finds it hard to admit to iniquities performed and to atrocities committed. It means a rewriting of the historical narrative that forms the basis of their national cohesion. It necessitates a drastic change in the schoolbooks and in the national outlook. In general, governments are averse to this, because of the nationalistic demagogues and hate-mongers who infest every country. more.. e-mail

Critique of Avnery’s 'Apology'
Henry Lowi, Palestine Think Tank 6/18/2008
     Gush Shalom is hosting a protest on the sea, coordinated with allies in besieged Gaza. Like usual, Gush Shalom does not demand that the siege be ended unconditionally. It wants a “ceasefire”, whatever that means in the context of ongoing Israeli oppression and domination of Palestine. The same week, Uri Avnery wrote an article entitled “An Apology”, taking as his reference point the dramatic events in the Canadian Parliament last week.
     It would have been good to reproduce, or at least review, the text of the apology delivered by the Prime Minister of Canada, and that of the Leader of the Opposition, on behalf of the Liberal Party (that has been the governing party for most of Canada’s history). [Links in article]
     The Canadian apologies to the aboriginal peoples are too little, and too late. Much will have to be done — much struggle will be required — to give the Canadian apologies any substance. But, all can recognize that these apologies are infused with the spirit of compassion and are an affirmation of democratic values. Furthermore, the Canadian apologies are framed not as the end of this issue, but as the introduction to a new beginning. The Canadian political leaders were not heard to be saying: “Here, you have our apology, now leave us alone and move on.” On the contrary, they hold open the promise, or at least the prospect, of a fresh start, of re-establishing relations on a new basis. As such, these apologies can be employed as levers for the struggle of the First Nations, and for all who want an inclusive Canada based on solidarity. more.. e-mail

Refugees are the essence
Azmi Bishara, Al-Ahram Weekly 6/12/2008
     The Palestinian national struggle began among the Palestinian refugees, whose lives are the ongoing reality of the Nakba. No national strategy for resistance is possible without them at the centre, writes Some have an almost religious faith that Israel will one day cease to exist. Others maintain that Israel will end if the Arabs optimise their conviction that it is an alien entity in the region, incapable of reaching a just peace because it seeks to dominate rather than to assimilate. Odder yet is the belief that peace is the key to Israel’s inevitable destruction. Unless Israel can be delivered a major defeat just once, proponents of this belief hold, normalisation is the most powerful weapon against it, because it would then be torn apart by its internal contradictions.
     There is no proof of the potential efficacy of either the major defeat concept or the normalisation weapon, even if Ben-Gurion had raised the spectre of the latter. Unfortunately, the reiteration of such unsubstantiated claims becomes a form of opiate for the people, a mystical alternative to the summoning of collective will, the formulation of a strategy for resistance, and the proactive exploitation of Israel’s internal contradictions. more.. e-mail

Aqaba: Past, Present, but is there a Future?
Yasmin Abou-Amer, MIFTAH 6/16/2008
     Last Sunday, I embarked upon a two and a half hour journey to the borders of the Jordan Valley, to a Palestinian village in the West Bank named Aqaba. Aqaba lies to the east of Tubas city and has an area of 3,500 dunums. It seems entirely set back from the rest of the West Bank and it even has it own entrance with a welcome sign. You need to drive along a long, sandy road in order to get there. This picture shows the entrance sign to Aqaba. Upon my arrival, I was warmly greeted by the wheelchair-bound head of the Village Council, Haj Sami Sadeq with whom I had scheduled an interview. He kindly invited me into his office so we could discuss the fate of Aqaba at the hands of the Israeli Civil Administration. Aqaba, this small, unremarkable village tucked away in the corner of the West Bank, whose inhabitants live a simple and quiet life, is currently in the headlines on a regular basis.
     Aqaba village is situated in Area C of the West Bank, between two Israeli military bases.A third base, which was located at the village’s western entrance was dismantled in June 2003. The area was declared a closed military zone in 1967. The population size has been diminished to only 300 people, down from above 1,000 prior to the 1967 War. The village was declared a military zone for purely strategic reasons, with Israel citing “security reasons” as its motive. A lot of the displaced families that left Aqaba left due to Israeli aggression towards them, choosing to go and live in the nearby cities of Tayaseer, Tubas and Nablus. more.. e-mail

Surgery under siege
Rami Almeghari writing from the occupied Gaza Strip, Electronic Intifada 6/17/2008
     Marzouq Mo’amar’s smile has returned to his face after he had almost lost hope because of thyroid cancer that had spread to his neck. Just a few weeks ago Palestinian doctors at the Gaza European Hospital in southern Gaza, were able to perform a life-saving surgery for the 62-year-old from Rafah.
     "I risked my life undergoing surgery under such hard circumstances with no proper medical care and inadequate medical staff as well as a crippling closure," Mo’amar said while sitting at his house in the Alghosain tribe’s village in Rafah city in the south of the Gaza Strip.
     "When I decided to undergo surgery, despite all the risks involved, I had no choice because I have no travel document," Mo’amar explained.
     "However, Thank God, for God has saved my life, with the help of great local doctors and under extraordinary conditions in the besieged Gaza Strip. I appeal to all free human beings in the world to stand by Gaza’s patients who die one after another because of the Israeli closure," the recovering Mo’amar said. more.. e-mail

Israeli authorities imprison Palestinian women even after their death
Iqbal Tamimi, Palestine Think Tank 6/17/2008
     Israeli occupation forces have arrested more than 10,000 Palestinian women of various backgrounds and ages since 1967.
     720 Palestinian women were arrested during the Al-Aqsa Intifada, 102 of them are still detained to this date.
     Arresting mothers, wives and sisters of wanted persons or detainees is one form of collective punishment, and it is aimed at forcing Palestinian men to confess or surrender under pressure. In many incidents Palestinian women were threatened in prisons to detain their children in order to force the mothers to cooperate.
     A report by the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (April 2008) reported 6 cases of Israeli forces threatening Palestinian prisoners to detain their family members this year. There are documented reports of detaining members of families of Palestinian prisoners without any valid legal reason to do so. This report has been submitted to the Knesset. The president of the Israeli International security service (Shin Bet) confirmed that one incident at least was confirmed by the Investigation Unit during the hearing of the case. more.. e-mail

Fureidis bus boycott
Ariel Rubinsky, Ha’aretz 6/18/2008
     Ibtisam Mahmid, a 48-year-old mother of three in the Arab town of Fureidis, devotes most of her time and energy to social activism on behalf of women in the region and to promoting peace. She puts together workshops and seminars, and is responsible for organizing the women’s tent for "Sulha" (Arabic for reconciliation), an annual event in which Jews, Arabs and religious figures from around the world meet. She puts Palestinian children in need of complex medical care in touch with Israeli hospitals, and organizes "listening circles".
     What exactly are listening circles?
     Mahmid: "The goal of the circles is for each side to present its version of an event while the other side listens. That way you create a dialogue between cultures. At first, you don’t want to hear the other side - you want to wallow inside your own pain. But you discover new things when you are exposed to the feelings of the other side. When a friend told me about the Holocaust, for example, I cried. I asked myself how it is possible that my people live under occupation and they show horrible scenes on television every day, and I sit here and cry over what happened to the Jewish people." more.. e-mail

A Trip Down Gaza’s Deadly Tunnels
Paul Martin, MIFTAH 6/17/2008
     Again and again the Gaza Strip is described as a prison.
     Israel controls access, and thanks to its long-running confrontation with groups like Hamas, it has made it near impossible for Gazans to come and go from the tiny strip of territory.
     But there is a very unofficial and well-known way in and out - the tunnels.
     The network is dug deep into the soft sand and runs under the border with Egypt.
     They are used to smuggle in everything from cigarettes to food to weapons.
     I have come to know some of the men who dig Gaza’s tunnels, and in so doing I have gone underground to explore their dark and dangerous world.
     The most disconcerting thing about crawling on hands and knees through these tunnels is the steady drip, drip of soft soil that keeps falling on you.
     You start to wonder just how soon it will be before the whole thing collapses.
     Usually it does not, in fact, collapse - despite the fact that many of the tunnels do not have anything to support the roof. more.. e-mail

Life in Gaza Today
Taghreed El-Khodary, MIFTAH 6/17/2008
     What is the situation in Gaza like a year after Hamas’ violent take over?
     This is the worst time that Gaza has ever gone through. The situation is deteriorating on a daily basis because of the harsh effects of the closure. It touches every element of daily life in Gaza.
     First, the fuel shortages. There are taxi drivers who are not getting the fuel they need. There are workers and students who never before had to question whether there would be gas at the station or if they might have to wait for hours to fill up only part of their tank. Now, if you go to any gas station, it is completely closed. So, you go to the black market and you pay a lot of money.
     Since there is no fuel, people are using cooking oil instead. It’s a short-term solution, but it is completely unhealthy. It is causing pollution and I talked to a doctor this week who said that people, especially those with heart conditions, are coming in complaining about the impact.
     The Mediterranean is a real gift for the people of Gaza. People are there at the beach all hours. Now that there is better internal security, they feel like they can stay as long as they want. It is their only escape from their daily frustrations. But when you talk to them you find out about fishermen who are using cooking oil, and about the sewage in the water. So you have people finding escape in highly polluted waters. more.. e-mail

A Girl from Gaza Identified by her ID
Haneen Zaqout - Grade 10, Friends School, Ramallah, International Solidarity Movement 6/17/2008
     We all spend a lifetime trying to figure out what makes someone who they are, and what defines them. Is it their characteristics, appearances, or behaviors? It may be a combination of all"¦for regular people. But for people who come from where I come from, figuring out who they are is not a choice for them. I come from Gaza City in Palestine, where surviving each day is a huge struggle for all Gazans. Leaving Gaza was the hardest thing I’ve ever done, partly because I miss my old life, and partly it is the guilt kicking in.
     When I left Gaza, I had to go through this checkpoint. It’s not ANY checkpoint. It is the Erez Checkpoint and its there to imprison the people of Gaza because as soon as the Israeli soldiers see a Gaza ID, that person is automatically considered an utter terrorist. Without knowing who they are, without any idea whatsoever about those people, they decide that they are criminals. Who has the right to take a person’s identity from them? Or to judge them based on a piece of paper or nationality? How can they take away people’s choice of trying to figure out who they really are? I don’t know"¦ but as I was walking through that long tunnel in that checkpoint, I realized that no matter what I do, no one will accept me for who I am. In that tunnel, they make no difference whether I am a terrorist or a person who is yearning for peace, not only for my people but also for the Israeli people. more.. e-mail

Hatred is too Heavy a Burden to Carry
Cathy Sultan, MIFTAH 6/16/2008
     Before leaving the United States for Israel-Palestine on 1 April, I had the privilege of hearing Representative John Lewis, leader of the Black Caucus in the US Congress. During his interview at the Washington Cathedral, which was part of a series of week-long events commemorating Martin Luther King, Congressman Lewis was asked how, in the face of the violence and persecution he suffered during the Civil Rights movement, he was able to practice non-violent resistance. He responded, "For me, non-violence resistance was never a technique I pulled out of my pocket when I needed it. Rather, it is a deeply held belief I have adopted as a way of life."
     During my recent visit to the Israeli-occupied West Bank I thought often of this incredible man who, despite being imprisoned and beaten to within an inch of his life, decided that hatred was too heavy a burden to carry. Visiting the cities in the West Bank under Israeli occupation I see the image of John Lewis everywhere I look. I see him in the Palestinians who are obliged to walk through checkpoints on a daily basis to get to work or school, in those same individuals who are forbidden access to Israeli-only highways because they are not Israeli citizens, and those who are separated from their family by a Separation Barrier and have now to drive several hours over tortuous, unpaved roads to visit them. I see John Lewis in every Palestinian who has been thrown off his land, had his house demolished and his three-hundred year old olive trees uprooted to make room for illegal Israeli settlements. I see him, too, in the faces of the Palestinian people who maintain their dignity, their humanity and most importantly their sense of humor in the face of daily humiliations. more.. e-mail

Keep Israel out of elite economic club
Ran HaCohen, Electronic Intifada 6/17/2008
     Israel’s ruling elite now has a major aspiration: to join the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) as a member country. For the sake of the Israelis and of their neighbors, this aspiration should be thwarted by an international campaign of all supporters of peace; and, in fact, by supporters of the free market as well.
     The Paris-based OECD, according to its own website, "brings together the governments of countries committed to democracy and the market economy from around the world." Established in 1961, the OECD has 30 member countries, including most European states, the US, Canada and Japan, but not Russia, Brazil or India -- at least not yet. With a huge budget of 342 million Euro it is one of the most prestigious clubs of nations. Indeed, membership is predominantly a matter of prestige, since unlike the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund, the OECD does not dispense grants or make loans. But prestige means investors’ trust, and investors’ trust means money. Big money. more.. e-mail

Kites rise above the divisions in Gaza
Mohammed Omer, Electronic Intifada 6/16/2008
     GAZA CITY, 15 June (IPS) - Mahmoud Abu Teior, 13, knows it’s Abdullah’s kite up in the skies, though he has never seen Abdullah. But that kite rises into the skies from across the Egyptian side of the border across from Gaza. And, Mahmoud knows Abdullah’s voice because they speak sometimes. They have never met, and likely never will, but they are connected through their kites.
     It’s that time of the year. The holidays bring scores of children to play together -- across the dividing line. And despite the iron wall of separation, they form friendships.
     Mahmoud has always known the border as a playground. This is where the family home was before it was demolished by Israel to make room for the border wall. "I always come here because this is where our house used to be," he says, launching his kite.
     Most children still play from "home," where Block O, Yebna, Block J, or the al-Salam neighborhood used to be. The playground is that strip of no man’s land known as the Philadelphia corridor, where more than 2,400 homes were razed ahead of the "disengagement" by Israel in 2005. That same "disengagement" made about 16,800 people homeless here, according to UN figures. more.. e-mail

Net tightens around Gaza fishermen
Nora Barrows-Friedman, Electronic Intifada 6/16/2008
     GAZA CITY, 16 June (IPS) - When the broiling sun sinks behind the rolling Mediterranean sea in Gaza, hundreds of fishing boats turn on their motors and assemble ragged nets to round up the evening catch. Flickering blue lights scatter across the shallow seas as the boats gather offshore in close quarters. Mackerel, sardine and grey mullet are caught in nets and dumped into plastic crates to be sold in the street markets. But under severe military occupation dominating the Gaza strip, it has become increasingly difficult to make a living as a Gaza fisherman.
     Since the Israeli-imposed sanctions against Gaza began in June 2007, extreme pressure intended to further isolate the democratically-elected Hamas leadership has resulted in massive fuel shortages and a near-total collapse of basic economic infrastructure. Factories have had to shut their doors, and all exports have ground to a halt as a result of the blockade policy.
     Electricity across Gaza is intermittent, and sewage treatment plants are having to cut back their processing schedules, or abandon operations altogether. Millions of gallons of raw sewage are being dumped, therefore, into the sea, creating serious health risks at a time when hospitals and clinics across the Gaza strip are also suffering medicine and equipment shortages due to the Israeli blockade. more.. e-mail

1,300 more settler units in defiance of international law
Mazin Qumsiyeh, Palestine News Network 6/16/2008
     Israel will build 1,300 more housing units in the illegal colonies in East Jerusalem.The US government over the past 6 decades had shifted its position from calling such settlement/colony activity "absolutely illegal", "illegal", "contrary to obligations under International law", "an obstacle to peace", "contrary to road map obligations", "a hindrance to peace", and finally "not helpful to the atmosphere between the Israelis and the Palestinians".The atmosphere!!?
     Let us look at the atmosphere: seven million Palestinian refugees and displaced people denied their right to return to their homes and lands, 93% of the Palestinian lands stolen in six decades of colonization, 600 checkpoints, an apartheid wall, half a million colonists living on stolen Palestinian land in areas illegally occupied since 1967, an apartheid wall, denial of right of families to live in their own lands, literal economic starvation/strangulation of remaining people, and denial of right to medical services, education, (e.g. in Gaza), etc. more.. e-mail

Further settlement and negotiations are still continuing ... Until when?
Editorial, Palestine News Network 6/16/2008
     Despite all the international pressure and laws, Israel is continuing settlement expansion, riding roughshod over all the conventions and items.
     Everyday we hear about new settlement units built, while international and Palestinian pressure is put forth in the resistance movement, both armed and nonviolent, but there are no practical steps on the ground taken by the Israelis to stop its process of ethnic cleansing.
     In a statement to PNN, Head of the Negotiations Affairs Department in the Palestine Liberation Organization, Dr. Sa’eb Erekat, said, "The Israeli government put forward bids to build 1,731 housing units in settlements as of December 2007 through June 2008; all of this since the convening of the Annapolis Conference."
     The ridiculous thing is that despite the statements denouncing the continuing refusal of the Palestinian Authority for this settlement scheme and the direct contravention to international law, the people see only an increase in settlements and further expansion work. more.. e-mail

What I Saw and Israeli Lies about Bil’in
Kim Bullimore, MIFTAH 6/16/2008
     Once again, the Israeli military lied to its citizens and the rest of the world.
     In an article publishedJune 6 on YNet, the online version of the Israeli mass daily Yedioth Ahronoth, the Israeli military claimed that it was justified in attacking an anti-wall and anti-occupation demonstration, in which an Irish Nobel Peace Laureate and the Vice President of the European Parliament participated, because demonstration participants were "rioting" and "throwing stones" at the Israeli military [1]
     In the YNet article about the weekly non-violent demonstration against the apartheid wall and the illegal Israeli occupation in Bil’in village located near Ramallah in the Occupied West Bank, the Israeli military claimed that "about 70 Palestinians and left-wing activists took part in the protest and hurled stones at security forces, who used crowd dispersal means in response". They went on to state that the IDF "regretted the fact that ’week after week large numbers of security forces need to deal with Israeli rioters, who turned public disturbances into a regular occurrence’. more.. e-mail

Israel’s gulag
Saleh Al-Naami, Al-Ahram Weekly 6/12/2008
     Already living atop of one another, Gaza’s people under siege are effectively inmates in a concentration camp.
     Zahir Abu Shaaban has been on edge for the last seven months. He is afraid that his life dream won’t come true -- his dream of completing his computer engineering postgraduate studies in the United States. He thought that his dream had come within reach when he was awarded a Fulbright fellowship, which the US State Department awards each year to a number of Palestinian students. Abu Shaaban and six other Palestinians were awarded the fellowship after competing with hundreds, and Abu Shaaban thought the State Department would guarantee his and his colleagues’ safe travel. He was sorely disappointed when Israel blocked his travel. Israeli domestic intelligence even attempted to bargain with him, stipulating that in order to be allowed to travel he would have to become an informer and provide information on resistance movements.
     Last Tuesday, Abu Shaaban applied at the Erez Crossing’s Shin Bet office for permission to travel to Jerusalem in order to obtain a US entry visa from the American consulate. He told Al-Ahram Weekly that he was surprised when the Shin Bet officer tried to blackmail him. The officer asked Abu Shaaban to inform him about all the employees at the Islamic University who are affiliated with Hamas, just because he works there as a teaching assistant. Abu Shaaban tried to convince the officer that he is an independent individual and doesn’t belong to any organisation, but the interrogator was stern and decisive: either Abu Shaaban agrees to cooperate with Israeli intelligence or he could forget about the idea of completing his education in the US. After Abu Shaaban rejected the threats and blackmail of the interrogator, who tried for two hours to convince him, Abu Shaaban was thrown out of the office and made to wait two hours until soldiers returned his identity card and told him to return to Gaza. more.. e-mail

Shouting in the hills
Basel Oudat, Al-Ahram Weekly 6/12/2008
     When Israel annexed the Golan, it claimed to be doing so for historical reasons. But its real motives had more to do with water resources, agricultural potential and tourist attraction.
     Two scenes are hard to forget for most Syrians. One is the scene of relatives having to communicate through loudspeakers across the no- man land in Ain Al-Tina, where 400 metres of barbed wired and landmines have left many families divided in the Golan. International troops and Israeli soldiers watch as parents, mothers, and grandchildren shout family news from hilltops. Some of those doing the shouting haven’t met in decades, others never.
     Another scene is that of a bride in flowing wedding gown, surrounded with family members on the Syrian side, waiting to make the crossing. On the other side is her bridegroom, watching and waiting. The bride is escorted by Red Cross officials, flanked by international troops. The family waves to the departing daughter, leaving for a land no longer accessible. The two newly-wedded may not have met before, their marriage having being arranged by mail or other means. Or maybe they had a brief encounter during a family reunion in Jordan, a land both sides of the family are allowed to visit. more.. e-mail

Existence is resistance
Serene Assir, Al-Ahram Weekly 6/12/2008
     A year of Israeli crimes and international complicity on the back of decades of occupation.
     With the deference of the international community, Israel has maintained a total blockade on Gaza since 9 June 2007.
     Amnesty International described conditions borne from the siege as the gravest humanitarian crisis Gaza has experienced to date. Barring the Hamas-instigated 10-day breach of the border with Egypt in January-February 2008, Gaza’s borders to the outside world have been blocked for the overwhelming majority of this time.
     The siege directly violates the freedom of movement of Gaza’s 1.5 million Palestinian residents. More than this, it also confirms and emboldens Israel’s illegal occupation while sharpening the effects of unjustifiable sanctions imposed by the international community following the democratic election of Hamas to government in 2006.
     It is the first time in history that the international community imposes sanctions on an occupied people. Effectively, what the Palestinian people of Gaza are subject to is a grotesquely perfected, long drawn-out war crime -- a crime with which everyone is rendered complicit if silent. more.. e-mail

Dialogue of the deaf?
Khaled Amayreh in Ramallah, Al-Ahram Weekly 6/12/2008
     Are Fatah and Hamas really going to talk?
     In a terse speech marking 41 years since the 1967 Arab- Israeli war, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas called for a broad national dialogue with Hamas that would bolster national unity and place the Palestinian people in a better position to end Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem.
     "I call for a comprehensive national dialogue in order to implement the Yemeni initiative [between Fatah and Hamas]... We are doing this in order to end the national division that has caused the worst damage ever to our cause and increased the level of suffering of our people in Gaza," said Abbas.
     quot;For this national dialogue to succeed I will act on the Arab and international levels to secure the support we need to augment the move in a way that will restore to our people their national unity and provide a stronger guarantee for the restoration of our inalienable rights to self determination, return and independent statehood." more.. e-mail

On a collision course
Saleh Al-Naami, Al-Ahram Weekly 6/12/2008
     Is Israel planning to launch a war against Gaza?
     Over the past 10 months, observers have been expecting an Israeli offensive in Gaza, notwithstanding Egyptian efforts to arrange a truce between the Israelis and Hamas. Yediot Aharonot ’s military analyst Ron Ben-Yishai says that it is impossible for Israel to agree to the Egyptian initiative, not after the recent attacks by the Palestinian resistance. Israeli leaders, commanders, and intelligence officials believe that a truce would be seen as a victory of Hamas. The latter says that the rocket attacks are its way of telling Israel to lift the blockade.
     A truce would only undermine Israel’s power of deterrence, as the Palestinians are likely to perceive Israel’s agreement as a sign of weakness, Ben-Yishai argues. He cites a senior Israeli officer as saying that Israel must strike at Gaza before accepting any truce with Hamas. Israel has made it clear that no truce is possible unless the smuggling of weapons stops and Hamas tones down its conditions for the release of the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit. more.. e-mail

The only hope for the people of the village of Beit Hanina
Maisa Abu Ghazaleh, Palestine News Network 6/15/2008
     Jerusalem -- Israeli forces are not only confiscating land from Beit Hanina for the Wall, but have now issued a new decision to confiscate even more land.
     The latest confiscation order will take large tracts of land into the Ramot Settlement. This will include the uprooting of olive trees that are thousands of years old and from which hundreds of Palestinians make their livelihoods.
     Ramot Settlement is situated on the opposite side of the East Jerusalem suburb of Beit Hanina. The resolution was issued one day before the Hebrew newspaper Ha’aretz revealed the addition of hundreds of new housing units to the settlement of Ramot.
     In turn, Adviser to the Prime Minister for Jerusalem Affairs, Hatem Abdel Kader, confirmed to PNN that the Palestinian government will not stand idly by and let the Israelis continue to loot Palestinian land, destroy the trees and lives of the people in Beit Hanina. more.. e-mail

A dubious Israeli spring in Europe
Gideon Levy, Ha’aretz 6/16/2008
     How pleasant it is to be an official representative of Israel in Europe right now. It hasn’t been so pleasant for a long time. And not just because of the spectacular spring in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, the crowded pubs in Athens or the young people sunbathing nude in Stockholm. This is about the fresh sympathy for Israel blowing in from almost every capital. French newspapers went all out for our 60th anniversary, Israeli women soldiers starred on the covers of magazines, and even the Swedish papers lost a little of their interest in the Palestinians’ suffering, which had for years won such deep sympathy.
     Last week, when the Olof Palme International Center in Stockholm held a symposium on peace in the Middle East, a scandal broke out because the organizers dared invite a professor of Islamic studies, Azam Tamimi, a Hamas sympathizer from London. Even in Sweden. This sympathy for Israel, along with seething antipathy for Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims, includes, of course, active European participation in the boycott of Gaza and Hamas, which may reach new heights this week. The Council of Foreign Ministers of the European Union is slated tomorrow to discuss upgrading Israel’s standing in the EU, and later in the week ministers of the EU member states will also do so. It only takes opposition by one country to prevent the upgrade of ties, which would have significant economic ramifications for Israel. more.. e-mail

Getting fed up
Akiva Eldar, Ha’aretz 6/16/2008
     Shaul Mofaz is not the first star to cast Iran in a part in the political game in Israel. Twelve years ago, in May 1996, on the eve of an election, the then head of Military Intelligence, Moshe Ya’alon, voiced an "assessment" that the rulers of Iran were hoping that the Likud headed by Benjamin Netanyahu would take over the government from Shimon Peres. At that time, there were those who assumed that the Labor Party would follow in the footsteps of Yitzhak Rabin, who had set up the goal of extending the circle of peace with the Arabs before Iran was able to complete its nuclear plans. Rabin believed this to be a more sensible policy than the method of simply shouting "gevalt."
     Since then, Iran has turned into a land of refuge for politicians who are rich in screwups and short on accomplishments. When Mahmoud Ahmadinejad threatens to wipe us off the map, how can one disturb the prime minister with trifles such as the Arab peace initiative? Can anyone expect the defense minister to free himself to take care of the hooligans manning the settlement outposts when a nuclear bomb is ticking in our ears? And how can Condoleezza Rice talk nonsense to us about building in East Jerusalem? She’d be better off spending her time assisting her president, George W. Bush, in enlisting the world’s support in combating the Israel-bashers. more.. e-mail

Hitler Youth in the West Bank
Khalid Amayreh, Palestine Think Tank 6/15/2008
     Last week, the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem released video clips showing masked Jewish settlers ganging up on and severely beating elderly Palestinian peasants near the town of Yatta, southwest of Hebron. At least three Palestinians were wounded in the unprovoked assault, including a man and his wife, both in their early sixties.
     The latest act of settler terror was not an isolated incident, as official Israeli spokespersons would often claim. It represents a disturbing and persistent phenomenon as young and usually heavily armed settlers continue to attack Palestinian farmers, peasants and shepherds and vandalize their property in an effort to drive them away from their lands and villages.
     We who live in the West Bank know too well what it means to live next to a Jewish settlement. It means constant harassment, unending vandalism and perpetual terrorism, both psychological and physical. -- See also: 'Jewish settler attack' on film more.. e-mail

What Exactly is pro-Israel?
Marc Gopin, Middle East Online 6/15/2008
     WASHINGTON—The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, one of the most powerful lobby groups in the United States, just concluded its annual Washington conference. It drew a long line of administration officials and the presidential candidates to its doorsteps, all touting orthodox lines on what it means to be pro-Israel—messages carefully crafted to please the lobby.
     Now is a good time to ask, what exactly does ‘pro-Israel’ mean, and who is pro-Israel in the United States today? The ones who twist every arm in Congress to be silent, to suppress what they know is right to do in terms of a fair Israeli-Palestinian deal? We have before us now a hair-trigger set of confrontations from Lebanon to the Persian Gulf, with long-range missiles, chemical and nuclear capable, aimed at Israel from a country in the Persian Gulf that has no business in Gaza. And yet, due to the unending festering of the Palestinian tragedy, Shiite Iran has stepped into Sunni Gaza, in addition to Iraq and Lebanon, primarily because the United States failed to engage fairly or at all in the last eight years. more.. e-mail

There is no archaeological peace
Meron Benvenisti, Ha’aretz 6/16/2008
     The unsuccessful attempt to breathe life into the deflated balloon of the peace process has given rise to reports on a plethora of initiatives for the resolution of the different issues comprising the morass of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Teams of Israeli and Palestinian professionals, funded by international foundations specializing in the peace industry, hold meetings, usually abroad, and work on drafts of agreements that profess to resolve problems in such sensitive matters as Palestinian and Israeli educational curricula, determination of sovereignty, the setting of borders, economic arrangements, and the like.
     Those behind the drafts acknowledge that the chances of their influencing the decision makers is not great, but they argue that the significance of the meetings lies in the very fact they are being held, and that they offer hope that a solution is possible, and only a matter of intellectual effort and goodwill. more.. e-mail

Israel’s colonization policy is a threat to peace - and to itself
Editorial, Daily Star 6/14/2008
     The supposedly "re-launched" Palestinian-Israeli peace process has had a phony feel to it from the beginning at Annapolis in November 2007. The Israelis have shown little willingness to abandon the maximalist positions that caused the Oslo process to break down in 2000, and the Americans have refused to demand a more helpful approach from their proteges. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, like the late Yasser Arafat before him, is effectively being asked to sign an instrument of surrender - and therefore his own death warrant - so the talks cannot succeed.
     Just to be sure, though, the Israelis continue to carry out all manner of provocations designed to finish off the peace process. The latest came on Friday when officials announced the approval of 1,300 new homes at an illegal colony in Occupied Jerusalem. That move, the second of its kind in the past month alone, hits squarely on the nexus between two of the biggest obstacles to any negotiated solution: the fate of the holy city and what to do with the half-million or so "settlers" living illegally on occupied land. more.. e-mail

Gaza conflict is a proxy war: From Gaza to Rome, part 2
Sameh Habeeb, Palestine Think Tank 6/14/2008
     These words will not be describing my tour in Italy. Rather, I need a lot of time to write, but unfortunately I don’t possess that time. I will be trying to shorten the adventurous political tour in Italy in my diaries that I have started to write.
     After the presentation in Perugia City, I moved on to Spoleto, Siena, Lucca, Poggibonsi, Cecina, Faenza, Florence, Bologna, Reggio Emilia, Milan, Turin, Padova, Venice, Osimo, Bari, Lecce, Naples, Comacchio, Rimini and finally once again to Rome. It was really incredible to move all around these cities for thousands of kilometers in such a short time!
     In Firenze, known as Florence in the Arabic language, I had a good meeting but with violent questions. I explained the Gaza Strip situation and how people are suffering. I told those present how people are being exposed to an obvious collective punishment policy. more.. e-mail

BREAKING NEWS! The Palestinian day lasts 23 H and 20 mins!
Adib Kawar, Palestine Think Tank 6/14/2008
     Could it be that a Palestinian’s day is only 23 hours and 20 minutes! I’ve always felt we’re special, somehow singled out in the world but never did it occur to me that while the sun took 24 hours from one sunset to another, that while Big Ben struck a new day every 24 hours, Palestinians are only given 23 hours and 20 minutes a day!
     In front of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee, Barak said, addressing the controversy surrounding Israeli roadblocks in the West Bank, and I quote here from Haaretz: “If a Palestinian day in not 24 hours long, but 23 hours and 20 minutes long because of the [wait at the] roadblocks, that’s the price of Israeli citizens’ safety.”
     When I first read the article I found myself laughing, thinking of all these funny scenarios, of Palestinians being confused by the fact that they are given a shorter day:
     “Hmmm, we’ll need to order customized watches that run a bit slower (or is faster)? … Does this put a new spin to the term Arab Time … so we need to introduce a new concept Palo Time… sorry I’m on Palo Time, my day is shorter… things to do… people to see… gotta go…” more.. e-mail

Israel Furthers Plans to Annex East Jerusalem through Ongoing Settlement Expansion
Palestine Monitor 6/14/2008
     Settlements are now growing 11 times faster than before Annapolis
     Ramallah: The announcement by the Israeli government yesterday of plans to build a further 1,300 settlement units in the Ramat Shlomo settlement in occupied East Jerusalem, is "a further reflection of the Israeli government’s strategy to de facto annex the city before a final status agreement can be reached," saidPNI Secretary General Mustafa Barghouthi MP today.
     The new construction comes in addition to the staggering 9,432 settlement housing units that have been approved since the Annapolis meeting on 27 November 2007.
     "The Olmert government claimed at Annapolis that it wanted peace, and yet settlements are now growing 11 times faster than before Annapolis," said Dr. Barghouthi.
     "In the meantime, the Israeli government continues constructing its Apartheid Wall. There is simply no explanation for this other than that it is using the peace process as a guise to further its expansionist project, through which it intends to leave Palestinians with just half of the West Bank on which to form a Bantustan, ghetto state," he added. more.. e-mail

Shelter from the siege
Rami Almeghari writing from the occupied Gaza Strip, Electronic Intifada 6/13/2008
     Tuesday morning at 9:00am, 220 Palestinian children gathered at al-Sherouq and al-Amal children’s club in southern Gaza’s Khan Younis refugee camp. Dressed in colorful clothes accompanied by cheerful smiles, the children lined up in rows to listen to their trainer. The children were attending their first day of a three-week-long program of training and activities at the club. "The circumstances around Palestinian society, particularly, the growing violence at many levels, have prompted us to hold this program to train children how to have less violent trends," explained Najwa al-Farra, chairwoman of the club.
     Funded by the Culture and Free Thought Society in Khan Younis, the program "attempts to decrease a great deal of the tension that many of our Palestinian children experience, especially because of sporadic Israeli gunfire and domestic violence," al-Farra added. She said that over the past year Palestinian society has seen increasing social and economic problems due to the Israeli blockade and repeated Israeli army invasions, which have had a negative impact on the children’s way of life and behavior. The Khan Younis area borders Israel, and has been the site of several invasions by the Israeli army over the past year. During this period, a number of young girls from Khan Younis were killed by Israeli army artillery fire. The latest casualty was nine-year-old Hadeel al-Semairy, who was hit by Israeli tank fire in front of her home on 5 June. more.. e-mail

Open letter: The separation barrier in Bil’in
Update and call for help, International Solidarity Movement 6/13/2008
     In a high-profile ruling of 4th September 2007, the Israeli Supreme Court concluded that the already built Separation Barrier in the West Bank village of Bil’in is illegal. The Court noted that the existing route was designed to accommodate plans for the future expansion of the settlement of Modi’in Illit and for the construction of a new 3,000 housing-units neighborhood therein, despite the fact that some of these plans require further approval before they can be realized. The judges ordered the State to redraw the barrier, so that the new route shall not take into account planning schemes not yet finally approved. In the ruling, the Court emphasized that "in light of the continuous harm to the residents of Bil’in"¦ the respondents should consider, within reasonable time, an alternative route".
     More than eight months since the Supreme Court ruling had been released, the barrier declared illegal has not been dismantled. Worse still, as of early May 2008, the State has not even presented its plan for the amended route. In other words, the Israeli government has been bluntly ignoring the ruling of the highest juridical authority in the Israel. Furthermore, recently construction has resumed in the new settlers’ neighborhood. If a decision on the new route is not taken soon, the settlers will likely establish irreversible facts on the ground, so that upholding the Court’s ruling will no longer be possible. more.. e-mail

Gaza is about to be wiped off the map
Steve Amsel Of Desert Peace, Palestine Think Tank 6/8/2008
     Art by LATUFF
     …. and not a word about the situation in any major newspaper today. Has AIPAC got all of them tied up in their pocket? Has it officially come to a point where it is treason to criticise Israel and their genocidal policies?
     Perhaps Israel timed this precisely to a time when the press is busy elsewhere… the U.S. Presidential election has captured the attention of the world, allowing the criminals to do their dirty deeds unnoticed.
     Even AlJazeera, the most despised news agency in Israel, has not a word about this impending crisis on their Website. Instead they discuss the ‘peace talks’ taking place between Israel and their ally, the Palestinian Authority. Peace talks that mean absolutely nothing as long as the elected representatives of the Palestinian people are not taking part in them. Has AlJazeera also been ‘bought out’ by the Lobby with promises of a ‘place in the sun’? more.. e-mail

Book review: 'Where Now for Palestine? The Demise of the Two-State Solution'
Ali Abunimah, Electronic Intifada 6/13/2008
     The impetus for Where Now for Palestine? The Demise of the Two-State Solution, as editor Jamil Hilal states in his introduction, is the increasing recognition within the Palestinian nationalist movement and among some Israelis that "the Oslo process has collapsed and the two-state solution has reached an impasse." This collection of eleven essays aims "to show in some detail why and how this collapse has happened, and why some new solution has to be found" (p. 20). Hilal, a research fellow at Muwatin, the Ramallah-based Palestinian Institute for the Study of Democracy, is the author of several books and numerous articles on Palestinian society, history, and politics. In this work, he calls for the formulation of proposals for a bi-national state, and says that such proposals should be examined by Palestinians and Israelis alike.
     Against a political and historical discourse where partition and separation are key themes, contributing historian Ilan Pappe offers an engaging essay arguing that by the time it became the target of the Zionist movement, Palestine was already a unitary political entity with a distinct and cohesive local culture. These continuities, Pappe argues, challenge "the dominant mainstream Zionist perception of Palestine as formed of two units: one Jewish and one not Jewish" (pp. 31-32). Political scientist As’ad Ghanem offers a clear analysis of how Israel’s obsession with demography (current projections suggest Jews will be only 26-35 percent of the population of historic Palestine by mid-century) has been the consistent driving force behind its policies. Thus, for example, Ariel Sharon’s shift from conflict resolution (on Israel’s terms) to a long-term conflict management paradigm constitutes continuity with rather than a break from previous Israeli approaches. more.. e-mail

If Silwan’s Stones Could Speak
Haitham Sabbah, Palestine Think Tank 6/12/2008
     A map showing the area of Silwan threatened with demolition and settlement expansion, including an indicator of the area in which settlements already exist. As highlighted on the map, Silwan as well as the adjacent villages of Tur and Ras Al Amud will be on the western side of the Wall, as Jerusalem is being isolated from the rest of the West Bank, in the Occupation’s continued plans to control the city. With most of Jerusalem outside the Walled-in areas, it is expected that the Apartheid Wall and therefore the isolation and ghettoization of Jerusalem, will act as a springboard for increasing land confiscation, settlement expansion and expulsion in the area.
     "Who controls the past, controls the future. Who controls the present, controls the past." (George Orwell, 1984)
     Historically, Jerusalem began as a small village where the Palestinian village of Silwan sits today. Currently, Silwan has a population of over 45,000 Palestinians. Underneath their homes and ragged streets lie the remnants of 5000 years of glorious nations who lived there.
     Silwan is located in East Jerusalem, which was occupied by Israel in 1967. Since then, behind the Zionist claim of reconnecting with the ancient heritage of the Jews, the truth is, archeology has become a weapon of dispossession of Palestinians. Archaeological excavations are being carried out as part of a concerted campaign to expel them from their ancestral home and history. more.. e-mail

Gaza hospitals in need of care
Nora Barrows-Friedman, Electronic Intifada 6/12/2008
     JABALIYA REFUGEE CAMP, Gaza, 11 June (IPS) - In the brightly painted new intensive care unit wing of al-Awda, northern Gaza’s only emergency medical facility in the massive Jabaliya refugee camp, doctors, nurses, aides and administrators are ready to provide emergency surgery services for the area’s 300,000 people.
     But the metal bed frames remain empty of patients -- and of mattresses, and IV bags, and heart monitors, and other basic supplies needed at any medical facility. The equipment has been purchased, but remains in the occupied West Bank city Ramallah, prevented by Israel from being taken into Gaza.
     "In the last year, the service burden on al-Awda was tripled. We had difficulty especially after the Fatah-Hamas fighting, and through the closures beginning last year," Nehal Mehanna, program officer at al-Awda tells IPS as she walks around the empty rooms.
     "Israel is not letting certain medication and supplies into Gaza, through any checkpoint. For example, we have been waiting for seven months to have the operation tables to be shipped and enter Gaza through the Erez checkpoint -- the equipment is only one hour away by car, but we’ve been waiting for seven months. Sometimes we can get supplies through the Red Cross, but they’re helping many organizations at the same time. They have limited supplies. It’s a long, complicated procedure, and it all has to be approved by the Israeli authorities." more.. e-mail

Israel Undermining Success of Any Ceasefire Agreement before it Begins
Palestinian National Initiative, Palestine Monitor 6/12/2008
     Ramallah, 12-06-08: "How can the Israeli government claim a genuine commitment to ceasefire talks when its military continues to kill Gazans - including children - on a daily basis, and while Israeli leaders continue to make preparations for a wide scale attack on the Strip?" said PNI Secretary General Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi today.
     Four Palestinians have been killed in separate Israeli air and artillery attacks on the Gaza Strip since Wednesday morning, including 60-year-old Hassan "˜Esseileh and 9-year-old Hadeel Abdel Kareem As-Sumeiri.She was killed when Israeli tanks invaded from near the Kisufim military crossing and shelled the As-Sumeiri family home while the family was inside.
     At least 6 others were wounded in the attacks, including 3-year-old Wa’ed Fayyad, who suffered serious shrapnel injuries from Israeli tank shelling.
     These attacks form part of a wider series of attempts by the Israeli government and its military to undercut the success of any ceasefire talks," said Dr. Barghouthi. "The offer of a comprehensive, reciprocal and immediate ceasefire has been on the table for more than a year, yet the Israeli government has responded by escalating its attacks not only on the Gaza Strip, but also on the West Bank," said the MP. more.. e-mail

Israel’s Twilight Years
Khalid Amayreh, Palestine Think Tank 5/15/2008
     As Israel ostentatiously celebrates the passage of 60 years since its creation in Palestine in 1948, more than nine million Palestinians at home and in exile are commemorating the Nakba, the violent seizure of their ancestral homeland by Zionist Jews and the dispossession, expulsion and dispersion of the bulk of Palestinians to the four corners of the globe.
     This year, activities are taking place in many parts of the world where Palestinian refugees and expatriates reside, dreaming of and awaiting a return to their homeland that appears nowhere on the horizon of political reality.
     Palestinians, irrespective of their political affiliations, are not only reasserting the legal and moral status of their right to return to the homes and villages from which they were expelled at gunpoint, or otherwise made to flee 60 years ago, but are also emphasising to all who will listen, including their own leaders, that the right of return remains — and will always be — the heart, soul and centrepiece of the Palestinian issue. more.. e-mail

Gilad Atzmon’s 'Jewish Experience': Time for a Paradigm Shift?
Mary Rizzo, Palestine Think Tank 6/12/2008
     There’s an old story that many children around the world have been told. Perhaps it wouldn’t be a bad idea to hear it again and reflect on what it might mean to us. It goes like this: Many years ago, a young man sold hats from village to village. He would walk from one end of Africa to the other, wearing all the hats piled high atop his head, hoping to sell them in every remote village he ventured to. One day, the sun was particularly fierce, and to his great joy, far in the distance, he could see a huge baobab tree. He walked there, laid down all the hats but one, and dozed off under the shade of the tree. When he awakened, he couldn’t believe his eyes. All of the hats that he had laid on the ground had disappeared. He squinted to the distance, but in no direction did he see anyone walking away with a mile-high pile of hats. Suddenly, he heard noises above his head, and for the first time, discovered that the tree was full of monkeys, and not only that, each one of them was wearing one of his hats. Confused as to what to do in order to get all those hats back, he took off his hat and scratched his head. He looked up, and there they were, 100 monkeys, each with a hat in his left paw and his right one scratching his head. The boy put the hat back on, and every one of those monkeys followed suit. Thinking himself very clever, the boy threw his hat down to his feet, and was relieved to have 100 hats come raining down, thrown down by the monkeys. He quickly gathered them and went on his way.. -- See also: The Jewish Experience more.. e-mail

On Iran And Mideast Peace: Who Is Obama Trying To Please?
Jalal Alavi, Middle East Online 6/12/2008
     When, in a recent AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) conference, Barack Obama revealed some of the specifics of his revised approach in dealing with Iran and its controversial nuclear program, many John McCain supporters interpreted it as either a sign of weakness or an indication of a flawed character on his part that is out to deceive the US electorate.It goes without saying that such interpretations as the above are no more than simplistic assessments of a rather complex situation, and thus not a proper analysis of the big picture in which Obama is but one player.In other words, a proper analysis of the situation would not have so much involved Obama as it would have the skewed nature of politics in the United States, as a result of which a liberal presidential nominee like Obama was eventually forced to speak in the manner of a hawkish neoconservative.
     The truth of the matter is that politics in the United States has for long been a victim of corporate greed, capitalist expansion, and proxies thereof, and that those who have vested interest in perpetuating the status quo have so grasped control of the US policymaking apparatus that even a self-proclaimed anti-lobbyist presidential nominee like Barack Obama cannot but eventually succumb to their cynical and at times outrageous demands. Value judgments aside, consider, for example, Obama’s altered attitude toward holding direct and unconditional talks with such figures as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, or his ahistorical view regarding the status of East Jerusalem, which he put forward in the AIPAC conference he recently attended. Here, it is all too clear that Obama’s careful maneuvering is a result of his concern for not antagonizing such pro-Israel organizations as AIPAC. more.. e-mail

The myth of the Shia crescent
Gaddy Weissman, Ha’aretz 6/13/2008
     AMMAN - Israel’s Vice Prime Minister Shaul Mofaz recently offered an unequivocal veto on a key issue in the Middle East peace process: Any return of the Golan Heights to Syria would result in an "Iranian foothold" on Israel’s border and would thus not only be politically naive but irrational.
     Mofaz’s statement is symptomatic of a perception that is now deeply entrenched, not only in the Middle East, but in the United States as well. That notion is of a hegemonic Iran that is attempting to dominate the region through an array of Shi’ite proxies. This Iranian fifth column is believed to stretch from Beirut via Damascus and Gaza to Baghdad and finally from Iran to Saudi Arabia to Yemen. Recent armed clashes between Hezbollah and the Lebanese government are, it is said, just another sign of Iran’s hegemonic reach.
     Ironically, this perception brings Israel some rather unlikely partners. President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt claims that Shi’ites are "always loyal to Iran," while King Abdullah of Jordan has coined the axiom about a rising "Shi’ite crescent." This "rise of the Shi’ites" and the resulting "Sunni-Shia divide" is alleged to be creating an ever-widening chasm in the region. more.. e-mail

Gaza ’genius’ helps beseiged city survive a year of Israel’s blockade
Donald Macintyre in Gaza City, The Independent 6/12/2008
     Fayez Annan turns the silver key to start the power, pushes the green button on the standard industrial jog-run-stop switch on the dashboard, and eases the white Peugeot 205 into the main east-west shopping street in Gaza City.
     With traffic abnormally sparse, thanks to the acute fuel shortages caused by the Israeli blockade, he soon reaches the distinctly un-urban and pedestrian-scattering speed of 37 miles per hour (60kph).
     But then Mr Annan is proudly trying to make a point that, while it might be electric, this Peugeot is no milkfloat. "It can do 100kph (62mph)," he says with a grin, as our knuckles whiten in the passenger seats. Whether or not Mr Annan’s friend Hesham Abu Sido, an electrical consultant, is justified in describing the electric vehicle as a "genius idea" which is "the most fantastic thing that has happened in Gaza", it is certainly a case of turning adversity into opportunity. more.. e-mail

The Unforgotten City and its Forgotten Suffering
Reham Alhelsi, Palestine Think Tank 5/28/2008
     Jerusalem, the holy city, a city once the religious, social and economic center of the Palestinians for thousands of years, has turned into a ghost city under Israeli occupation. Moslems, Christians and Jews lived peacefully here until the Zionists started implementing their plans of establishing a Zionist state in Palestine. A city that was open throughout the centuries has become a closed city under the rule of what Bush and others call "the only democracy in the Middle East"! In what other country in the world is the original Moslem and Christian population prevented from living in their own city and reaching their holy places?
     The last time I was in Jerusalem was almost four years ago. After the tiresome and somewhat dangerous trip, I remember how shocked I was to see a ghost city. This isn’t the Jerusalem I knew. I remember the daily trip to Jerusalem as a pupil, and sitting in a bus over-filled with people on their way to their schools and work places, to the old city, to Salah-Eldin Street or other streets in Jerusalem. Jerusalem was the center of our livelihood. Our first stop was always the newspaper stand at the central bus station, where my father used to buy Al-Quds newspaper, and on Mondays we were rewarded with the Samir and Micky Mouse magazines.... more.. e-mail

Israel accelerates settlement expansion after Annapolis
Adri Nieuwhof, Electronic Intifada 6/11/2008
     Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and US President George W. Bush follow contradictory policy tracks. In the major media offensive accompanying last November’s US-sponsored Annapolis peace conference both leaders presented themselves as the peace makers of the region. In Annapolis, Olmert committed to freezing settlement expansion. However, since that time according to numerous sources ranging from Israeli newspapers, to Peace Now, the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, as well as the websites of the Israeli Central Bureau, and the Ministry of Construction and Housing, Olmert’s government has been accelerating illegal settlement expansion on occupied Palestinian land.
     Six months since Annapolis the planning of settlements has accelerated. Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak approved the construction of almost 1,000 housing units in several settlements in the West Bank. Furthermore the Israeli authorities announced plans, approved by Olmert, for the construction of an additional 2,900 units in settlements in the West Bank, including 750 units in Giv’at Zeev, and 1,900 housing units to be built this year for settlers who had to leave Gaza in 2005. In addition, Israel worked on the advancement of another 9,500 housing units in and around East Jerusalem, of which over 5,000 units have already been submitted for public review. According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz the municipality of Jerusalem started the process of approving a plan for a new settlement complex with a synagogue in the Palestinian neighborhood of Silwan. more.. e-mail

Israel’s Ambassador to the UK and his deception
Khalid Amayreh, Palestine Think Tank 6/10/2008
     Israeli ambassador to Britain Ron Prosor has once again claimed that the United Kingdom is becoming a "hotbed"� of anti-Israeli propaganda.
     In an opinion piece published in Tuesday’s Daily Telegraph, Prosor alleged out that Israel was facing an intensified campaign of delegitimization, demonization and double standards.
     "Britain has become a hotbed for radical anti-Israeli views and a haven for disingenuous calls for a one-state solution,"� he ranted.
     Ignoring the criminal role Israeli universities and academic institutions are playing in consolidating the Israeli occupation and tormenting Palestinians, Prosor criticized efforts by the British University and College Union to sever links with Israeli universities.
     Finally, Prosor castigated "disingenuous calls"� for a one-state solution, which he called "a euphemism for the destruction of Israel. more.. e-mail

A Neocon Curtain Call
Rami Khouri, Middle East Online 6/11/2008
     WASHINGTON, D.C. -- On my first day in Washington, D.C. at the start of a two-month summer fellowship, I was reminded of the special and unique qualities that define erratic foreign policy-making in the United States. A story in Monday morning’s Washington Post reviewed remarks last week by former State Department senior official Elizabeth Cheney to the leading pro-Israeli lobby group, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
     What was striking about her remarks was her capacity to continue out of office the same intensity and breadth of incompetence and failure that defined her years as principal deputy assistant secretary of state until early 2006. The gist of her comments included statements that the Annapolis peace process was misguided. The United States had not pressured Syria enough. The United States was at its best when it was tough and decisive. more.. e-mail

Chances for a Ceasefire are Minimal
Ghassan Khatib, MIFTAH 6/11/2008
     Egyptian efforts to secure a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel in Gaza are continuing, but the different parties’ interests and their definition of what a ceasefire should constitute are throwing obstacles in the way.
     Egypt simply wants a ceasefire. However, one of the issues that has to be settled is that of movement through Rafah, which is very problematic for Cairo. For one thing, opening Rafah while keeping almost all other crossings closed means that the Israeli strategy of handing responsibility for Gaza to Egypt is working. Secondly, such a situation will create certain domestic problems for Egypt, particularly by facilitating relations between Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas.
     The other problematic issue for Egypt is the Israeli position of holding Egypt responsible for what happens at the Gaza-Egypt border. Cairo might like to remind Israel that when the Israeli army was in charge of the border, neither Israel nor Egypt managed to stem weapons smuggling there. more.. e-mail

Hawks still circling on Iran
Jim Lobe, Asia Times 6/10/2008
     WASHINGTON - Once again, notably in the wake of last week’s annual American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) policy conference and the visit to the capital of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, there’s a lot of chatter about a possible attack by Israel and/or the United States on Iran.
     Olmert appears to have left the White House after meeting with President George W Bush and an earlier dinner with Vice President Dick Cheney quite satisfied on this score, while rumors - most recently voiced by neo-conservative Daniel Pipes - that the administration plans to carry out a "massive" attack in the window between the November elections and Bush’s departure from office, particularly if Democratic Senator Barack Obama is his successor, continue to swirl around the capital.
     What to make of this? Is this real? Or is it psychological warfare designed to persuade Tehran that it really does face devastation if it doesn’t freeze its uranium-enrichment program very, very soon and/or to warn Russia and China that they have to put more pressure on Tehran or deal with the consequences of such an attack? more.. e-mail

Wilful killing of baby by Israeli army in Gaza house raid
Defence for Children International - Palestine Section, Palestine Monitor 6/10/2008
     Name of victim: Amira A.
     Date of incident: 4 March 2008
     Age of victim: 20 days
     Location: Abu al-Ageen, southern Gaza
     On 4 March 2008, Israeli tanks under aerial helicopter coverage besieged the home of Youssef S., a wanted Palestinian combatant, near Khan Younis in southern Gaza [1] . For several hours, Israeli soldiers directed gunfire towards the house and its occupants, including 15 children, and subjected them to cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment. During the raid, Israeli soldiers fired upon unarmed civilians, including children, as they followed orders to exit the house. This unlawful act claimed the life of 20-day-old Amira, who was shot in the head while in her mother’s arms. DCI/PS strongly condemns the wilful killing of civilians, which constitutes a war crime under international humanitarian law.Description of incident
     In the early evening hours of 4 March 2008, Khaled A. and his wife Nadia arrived at the home of their friend, Youssef S., in Abu al-Ageen near Khan Younis in southern Gaza. They had come to visit Youssef’s mother, Alia’, who was suffering from renal failure and had recently been hospitalised. With them, were their two daughters Nadine (2), and Amira, just 20 days old. more.. e-mail

Where is the water? It is in the settlements
Najib Farrag and Kristen Ess, Palestine News Network, Palestine Monitor 6/9/2008
     Bethlehem - It is a well researched and reported fact that Israelis use a grotesque amount of water compared to that allotted to Palestinians. "Israelis control and utilize 89 percent of the total water resources," reports the highly respected Palestinian Academic Society for the Study of International Affairs (PASSIA).
     If the Israeli government had not already ensured this by controlling the supply, the well-planned Wall route to take in the wells, aquifers and fertile land above the water table, has made it a complete reality.
     The PLO NAD "Barrier to Peace: Assessment of Israel’s Revised Wall Route," updated in October 2007, reports that the Wall and settlements "seize vital land and water resources, and effectively pre-empt a fair and equitable future allocation of the West Bank’s water resources." This is not to mention the dire situation in the Gaza Strip, which has been much worse for years. more.. e-mail

Pledging allegiance to AIPAC
Khody Akhavi, Electronic Intifada 6/10/2008
     WASHINGTON, 9 June (IPS) - With the Iranian nuclear "threat" in the crosshairs, discussion of Palestinians or a Syrian-Israeli detente was virtually non-existent. But then again, one should not expect many overtures for peace when attending the annual policy conference for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC).
     As more than 5,000 Jewish-American activists ascended Capitol Hill last week, the most common word circulating through panel discussions, daily briefings, and remarks made by high-level officials and presidential candidates was "security" -- more accurately, Israel’s security.
     And most of the tough talk, whether substantive or merely stylistic, was directed at a nuclear Iran and its presumed proxies -- Lebanese Hizballah, Palestinian Hamas, and even Syria.
     The policy prescriptions, outlined in a draft proposal of AIPAC’s policy agenda, urge, among other things, that the US "take all appropriate measures to halt Iran’s pursuit of nuclear and 152 other weapons of mass destruction and the means to deliver them." more.. e-mail

A village in its death throes
Seth Freedman, Palestine Monitor 6/10/2008
     Scrambling up the rock-strewn hillside in the baking midday sun, we stumbled across two middle-aged men taking shade under an olive tree. As they bade my guide "Salaam aleikum", their eyes scanned my face for a hint of recognition. Finding none, one of the men ventured a tentative greeting in English and, when I responded in kind, proffered two items in my direction.
     One was a surgeon’s mask; the other a strip of alcohol-saturated prep pads: "You’ll need them for where you’re going", he assured me. As we edged closer to our destination, it was clear we had been well advised. Plumes of tear gas criss-crossed the air, trailing the canisters fired by the border police towards the scores of demonstrators. The pungent, acrid fumes filled our nostrils and mouths, while our ears resonated to the sporadic bursts of rubber bullets being shot in our direction.
     From our vantage point atop the hill, we had a perfect view of the operating table that lay beneath us, and our surgical accessories added to the sense of theatre that we were witnessing. As we looked on, we watched the obligatory rocks flung at the troops from youths wielding slingshots; the equally standard opening of fire by the police in response and the all-too familiar sight of wounded protesters being rushed by stretcher to waiting ambulances. more.. e-mail

A View From the Arab World
Rami G. Khouri, Middle East Online 6/7/2008
     BEIRUT - Now that the Republican and Democratic parties in the United States have chosen their presidential candidates, we might expect some thoughtful discussion of the issues that concern the American people at home and abroad. Viewed from the Arab world and the wider Middle East - including Turkey, Israel and Iran -- the results of the American election will have enormous impact on the condition of this region.
     The people and leaders of the Middle East follow the US election with special interest, for three main reasons: 1) America’s presence, policies and potential, i.e., its wide, deep and growing military presence and ideological ferocity in the region; 2) the Arab-Islamic-Iranian resistance to these; and 3) the potential for constructive, mutually beneficial American-Middle Eastern engagement.
     The American presence in the Middle East today is much more extensive, complex, and varied than it was a few decades ago when the Arab-Israeli and the Cold War conflicts were the only defining parameters of its engagement. Today the United States fights, and foments national transformations in Iraq and Afghanistan; rhetorically nudges Arab autocrats to reform (without resorting to any real muscle or sincerity); fights Islamist movements everywhere; and, essentially gives Israel everything it seeks -- militarily, economically, and diplomatically. more.. e-mail

Getting Back on Track
Joharah Baker, MIFTAH 6/9/2008
     I just returned from participating in the United Nation’s conference on the Question of Palestine, organized by its Committee for the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People, in Malta. Obviously, the audience, participants and organizers were comprised of a unique amalgam of nationalities, religions and perspectives, making the assembly extremely rich and diverse.
     The Palestinian representatives at the conference were also of diverse opinions, but with one common thread woven between all of those there. Getting Palestine’s house in order is the first task the Palestinian leadership must tackle before any other progress could be made.
     This was clearly the opinion of President Mahmoud Abbas, who on June 4 announced an initiative for a national dialogue based on the Yemeni Initiative last March, in a bid to bridge the treacherous and often bloody gap between Fateh and Hamas. It is no coincidence that his initiative took flight on the first anniversary of Hamas’ takeover of the Gaza Strip last June after a confrontation between Palestine’s two Titan rivals where brothers turned their arms against each other. more.. e-mail

Palestinian leaders take step towards reducing rift
Nora Barrows-Friedman, Electronic Intifada 6/10/2008
     GAZA CITY, 6 June (IPS) - In the early hours of Friday morning, Israeli warplanes targeted a Hamas-run security post in the northern town of Beit Lahiya, injuring 29 Palestinian civilians, according to Gaza medical sources. In the eastern Gaza City neighborhood of al-Shuja’iya, a 27-year-old man was shot dead by Israeli special forces during another invasion.
     As the Israeli military invasions and attacks continue unabated in the occupied Gaza strip, movement towards a so-called Palestinian national unity government seem possible, according to local politicians.
     On Thursday, Palestinian National Authority (PNA) Prime Minister Ismayil Haniyeh of the Hamas party extended an open invitation to PNA President Mahmoud Abbas, saying that Hamas’s hand "reached out" to the Fatah party to hold talks on national dialogue, reconciliation and political unity. more.. e-mail

Olmert has to go, but the impact may be substantial
Yossi Alpher, Daily Star 6/11/2008
     There is a broad consensus among non-political officials with frequent access to the Israeli Prime Minister’s Office that since the July-August 2006 Lebanon war Ehud Olmert has been an efficient and effective prime minister. Some would say that even initiating and balancing no fewer than five diplomatic negotiating processes at one and the same time is no mean feat.
     Israel is currently directly talking to the West Bank-based Palestinian leadership on two fronts: the Livni-Qorei final status talks and the Barak-Fayyad "road map" phase I contacts. And it is engaged in indirect negotiations with Syria (over peace), Hamas (over a cease-fire, a prisoner exchange, and over Gaza crossings) and Hizbullah (over prisoner exchange). Arguably, this is far too much. Olmert’s predecessors found that even parallel negotiations with the Palestinian Liberation Organization and Syria put too much strain on the system; when they did pursue both tracks simultaneously it was usually for tactical reasons, for example to signal the Palestinians that if they were not more forthcoming Israel had better things to do. more.. e-mail

Getting the Palestinian Legislative Council out of the freezer - an Interview with Dr. Mustafa Barghouti
Marian Houk, Ma’an News Agency 6/10/2008
     Ramallah - Ma’an - With a plan proposed by Palestinian lawmakers to resuscitate the long-dormant Palestinian parliament, the Legislative Council, and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ call for reconciliation talks between Hamas and Fatah, it appears that the year old Palestinian internal crisis may be begining to ease.
     Following on these developments, Ma’an contributor Marian Houk spoke with Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi, an independent member of the Palestinian Legislative Council and one-time presidential candidate.
     In an exclusive interview in his offices at the Palestinian Medical Relief Services in Ramallah, Barghouthi elucidates the sometimes Byzantine problems of Palestinian parliamentary situation.
     Q: Dr. Barghouthi, I wanted to ask you first of all about the Palestinian Legislative Council. It reportedly met for the first time in a long time on the 5th of June, last Thursday and welcomed the initiative of President Abbas.
     A [interrupting the question]: Not exactly, no. We did not have a meeting of the Legislative Council. And that was not the purpose of the meeting. The meeting took place as a follow-up of a previous meeting which we had had between heads of different groups in the parliament, because we are very worried about the fact that there is a concentration of all the powers in Palestine in the hands of the government – whether in Gaza or in the West Bank, and both governments practically have eliminated the role of the Legislative Council. And what we are seeing is the government practicing legislative authority in addition to executive authority, although its status, legally, is questionable.... more.. e-mail

Uri Avnery’s 1948: A Critique
Middle East Reality Check, Palestine Think Tank 6/8/2008
     If you want to sort the political sheep from the goats in the Palestine/Israel fold, just look at the positions taken by pundits on the Palestinian Nakba (Catastrophe) of 1948-1949, Uri Avnery is a case in point. Avnery is the 84 year-old veteran leader of Israel’s peace movement, Gush Shalom (Israeli Peace Bloc), and an often perceptive and insightful commentator on the Israel/Palestine conflict. Yet his recent essay, 1948* (10/5/08, www.gush-shalom.org), reveals a major blind spot. In fact, at many points, I thought I was reading Benny Morris.
     [*In which he states that his wartime reports from that era "will soon appear in English."]
     Avnery views the first Arab-Israeli war as two wars: that waged by Zionist forces against the Palestinians (from the UN partition resolution of 29/11/47 until the proclamation of the state of Israel on 14/5/48), and that waged by Zionist forces against Arab military intervention after 15/5/08. He misrepresents the first as an “ethnic war” of the kind that wracked the Balkans in the 1990s. In doing so he overlooks the fact that the great bulk of the Jewish community in Palestine had only entered the country over the previous 30 years, under British imperial sponsorship and protection, and against the wishes and interests of its indigenous Arab inhabitants. more.. e-mail

The Jewish Experience
Gilad Atzmon, Palestine Think Tank 6/10/2008
     For more than half a century, those who have been trying to combat the forces that are behind the Israeli paradigm have been identifying Israeli policies and practice with Zionism and Zionist Ideology. I am afraid to say that they were wrong all the way along. Indeed, Zionism’s project dictates the plunder of Palestine in the name of Jewish national aspiration. It is also true to argue that Israel has been rather efficient in translating the Zionist philosophy into a devastating oppressive and murderous practice. Yet, Israelis, or more precisely, the vast majority of Israeli-born secular Jews, are not motivated or fuelled by Zionist ideology. Its spirit or symbols are virtually meaningless to them. As bizarre as it may sound to some, Zionism is either a foreign or just an archaic notion for most Israeli-born secular Jews.
     Since the vast majority of Israelis are confused by the notion of Zionism, most forms of criticism that would label itself as anti-Zionist would have hardly any effect on Israel, Israeli politics or on the Israeli people. In other words, in the last sixty years, those who have been using the paradigm of Zionism and its antipode have been preaching to the converted. more.. e-mail

The most reliable path to freedom
Omar Barghouti, Electronic Intifada 6/9/2008
     "The idea is to put the Palestinians on a diet but not to make them die of hunger," said Dov Weissglas, Sharon’s closest advisor, a few years ago. Today, Israel is slowly choking occupied Gaza, indeed bringing its civilian population to the brink of starvation and a planned humanitarian catastrophe.
     If the US government is an obvious accomplice in financing, justifying and covering up Israel’s occupation and other forms of oppression, the European Union, Israel’s largest trade partner in the world, is not any less complicit in perpetuating Israel’s colonial oppression and special form of apartheid. At a time when Israel is cruelly besieging Gaza, collectively punishing 1.5 million Palestinian civilians, condemning them to devastation, and visiting imminent death upon hundreds of patients, prematurely born babies, and others, the EU is extending an invitation to Israel to open negotiations to join the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, instead of ending the EU-Israel association agreement due to Israel’s grave violation of its human rights clause. The US and European governments are not only providing Israel with massive economic aid and open markets, they are supplying it with weapons, diplomatic immunity and unlimited political support, and upgrading their relations with it specifically at a time when it is committing acts of genocide. more.. e-mail

Blue sky, toxic sea
Nora Barrows-Friedman writing from the occupied Gaza Strip, Electronic Intifada 6/9/2008
     For the three days I’ve been in Gaza I’ve heard nothing but horror stories. My friends, the journalists, the health workers, the students, the taxi drivers, the intellectuals, they all speak with a certain heaviness and a guttural frustration that gets trapped in the back of throats, in the smoke they exhale from chain-smoked cigarettes, over and over and over.
     Last night I saw a friend, Mohammed, whom I haven’t seen in three years and sadly lost touch with in between. Since I was here last, he got married, had a baby, and now has one more on the way. After a week-long trip to Europe last year as a part of his work with an international aid organization, he was held first for five days at the Cairo airport, in a small room with ten other Palestinians from Gaza, before they were transfered to a detention center and held for 60 days in al-Arish, in the seam zone between Egypt and Rafah crossing in southern Gaza. The Egyptians did this in an act of collaboration with the Israelis. With friends in the West Bank, the Jordanians use the same tactics of interrogation and humiliation at the border, but detention without reason doesn’t happen. Yet. more.. e-mail

Saying 'I didn’t know' is no excuse anymore
Reham Alhelsi, Palestine Think Tank 6/9/2008
     A couple of days ago I read an article by Haitham Sabbah entitled, "Murder at Huwara Checkpoint". It talks about the killing of a 15 year old Palestinian boy by the Israeli soldiers at the Huwara Checkpoint. It talks about the killing of a 15 year old Palestinian boy by the Israeli soldiers at the Huwara Checkpoint. What drew my attention to the article was the accompanying photo. It was a painting of a Palestinian boy lying dead with stretched arms, an image that is a companion to many Palestinians. While reading the article my mind was moving faster than my eyes. Unfortunately, it was all so familiar; young people waiting to cross a military checkpoint, a rush of bullets coming without any warning, keeping the rest of the people away, preventing the medical teams from saving lives, waiting till the person lying on the ground bleeds to death and then the real “show” begins. The Israeli soldiers take off the dead Palestinian’s clothes, they wash off the pool of blood to remove any traces of their crimes, and then hurry and announce that they have just killed a terrorist who intended to blow himself up. The sad thing is, this scenario has been taking place for decades now and the world still believes these lies and very few dare to question them, despite the existence of witnesses and proof to contradict these lies. more.. e-mail

No, I Can’t!
Uri Avnery, MIFTAH 6/9/2008
     AFTER MONTHS of a tough and bitter race, a merciless struggle, Barack Obama has defeated his formidable opponent, Hillary Clinton. He has wrought a miracle: for the first time in history a black person has become a credible candidate for the presidency of the most powerful country in the world.
     And what was the first thing he did after his astounding victory? He ran to the conference of the Israel lobby, AIPAC, and made a speech that broke all records for obsequiousness and fawning.
     That is shocking enough. Even more shocking is the fact that nobody was shocked.
     IT WAS a triumphalist conference. Even this powerful organization had never seen anything like it. 7000 Jewish functionaries from all over the United States came together to accept the obeisance of the entire Washington elite, which came to kowtow at their feet. All the three presidential hopefuls made speeches, trying to outdo each other in flattery. 300 Senators and Members of Congress crowded the hallways. Everybody who wants to be elected or reelected to any office, indeed everybody who has any political ambitions at all, came to see and be seen. more.. e-mail

So Sad to See Obama Surrender to AIPAC
Daoud Kuttab, MIFTAH 6/9/2008
     It was so sad. To see a grown tower of a man come to his knees. Just like everyone before him, the presumptive Democratic nominee followed the suit of all US political leaders before him and bowed down at the footsteps of the pro Israel lobby. What happened to the anti lobby nominee? On the day his nomination had been sealed, at a time when his chances of being elected had been all but ensured, Barack Obama failed the test. What happened to the nominee who was going to change the way Washington was run? What happened to the promise of "I will tell you what you have to hear, not what you love to hear?"
     Speaking at the pro Israel lobby, the first black presidential nominee, who is being seen world wide as a potentially global president, turned on every promise he made during the run up to the nomination.
     It wasn’t as if he needed the Jewish money or votes. This has been the first presidential run which succeeded in circumventing large donors and prided itself with the million donors who gave less than $100 was suddenly kowtowing to a sector of America whose major source of power has been their ability to raise large funds. On the day that he succeeded in getting the Democratic National Committee to announce that they will not accept lobbyist money, he was pandering to the most powerful of all lobbies. How can we believe that lobbyists will not run Obama’s administration. more.. e-mail

An Award for the Voiceless in Gaza
Mohammed Omer, MIFTAH 6/9/2008
     The siege of Gaza has many layers. I work here as a journalist, amid near-daily air and land assaults from Israel, amid the unending killings and destruction of land and livelihood, which are all made more unbearable by critical shortages of fuel, food, medicine, electricity for hospital machinery and electricity for my work. Recently I returned from fieldwork to find cheerful news from John Pilger: that I have won the 2008 Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, along with my respected colleague Dahr Jamail. This is the best news I have received for many months.
     As I write, I am still thrilled and honored at such recognition. But since those first minutes during which it was explained that I would have to be in London by 16 June to receive my award, my thoughts have been racing, seeking a way to get out of Gaza. How can I get out at a time when Israel is not allowing even the most urgent medical cases to leave for treatment, a policy that, according to Gaza’s ministry of health, has led to the deaths of more than 165 people? more.. e-mail

Olive Oil Until They’re Free
Brian Wood, Palestine Chronicle, MIFTAH 6/9/2008
     Mahmud was a tall, strong young man. His black hair and thick eyebrows hinted at a shy nature, but he was a born leader. His popularity reigned among the families of Jenin’s refugee camp, the West Bank, and the surrounding Arab countries. Mahmud feared nothing but submission to Israeli occupation. Working to end this occupation, which encapsulated his every breath on Earth, was how he spent his waking hours.
     When boys are learning how to drive a car in some countries, Mahmud was training to defend his siblings and parents and home from the thieves who came in the night with heavy weapons—by air and by the infamous Haifa road of Jenin, that which leads back to their original homes. The road back home is laid waste by tank tracks, but home, Haifa, can never be expunged from their blood or dreams.
     When the Israelis came on April 3, 2002, everyone knew it was going to be big. Mahmud led his fighters into the night, but not before holding his baby daughter close, kissing his wife, and praying with his mother. He rescued people from burning buildings, worked covertly to deliver food and bread to those trapped in their homes and valiantly defended the camp, all while fasting and praying. His legacy endures so large that no length of time will ever erase his name or deeds from the annals of Jenin’s valiant history. more.. e-mail

Solidarity with Bil’in: between football games and tear gas
Palestine Monitor, Palestine Monitor 6/9/2008
     Hundreds of demonstrators, both Palestinian and international, gathered in Bi’lin on Friday to peacefully protest the construction of the Apartheid Wall and the confiscation of Palestinian lands.
     The day began with a football game in an olive grove on a hill in Bi’lin just outside an Israeli settlement, a form of peaceful protest adopted by citizens of Bi’lin. The game came to a screeching halt however, when Israeli forces fired tear gas onto the makeshift field. Players and spectators scattered, seeking refuge in the town. Medical personal administered oxygen and handed out alcohol to those affected by the gas.
     As the protest leaders regrouped the scattered villagers, internationals from France, Italy, Canada, Holland, the USA and many other countries were arriving to take part in the peaceful protest scheduled later that afternoon. The most notable international presence was that of Luisa Morgantini, Vice President of the European Parliament. more.. e-mail

The Land, Not the People
Neve Gordon, MIFTAH 6/9/2008
     Israel has decided to alter its methods of upholding the occupation, replacing a politics of life, which aimed to secure the existence and livelihood of the Palestinian inhabitants, with a politics of death.
     On June 8, 1967, just a few hours after the Israeli military captured Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, Haram al Sharif, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan visited the site. Noticing that troops had hung an Israeli flag on the cap of the Al-Aqsa shrine, Dayan asked one of the soldiers to remove it, adding that displaying the Israeli national symbol for all to see was an unnecessarily provocative act.
     Those who have visited the Occupied Territories in the past years have no doubt noticed Israeli flags fluttering over almost every building Israel occupies as well as above every Jewish settlement. Ariel Sharon’s highly publicized visit to the Al-Aqsa compound in September 2000 – an act that served as the trigger for the second Intifada – could be considered the final step in a process that has ultimately undone Dayan’s strategic legacy of trying to normalize the occupation by concealing Israel’s presence. “Don’t rule them,” Dayan once said, “let them lead their own lives.” more.. e-mail

Slow death in Gaza
Margaret Kimberley, Electronic Intifada 6/6/2008
     Each American claim to moral authority becomes a foul excretion in light of US complicity in Israel’s barbaric and illegal treatment of the Palestinians. Washington deploys its superpower apparatus to smother dissent against its Middle East policy in Europe and elsewhere, leaving former president Jimmy Carter and Nobel laureate Desmond Tutu as lonely defenders of Palestinian human rights. No change in American policy is on the horizon, as "the rot in America goes beyond this administration, and so does the rot in Israel." The "abomination," as Desmond Tutu describes it, against 1.6 million people in Palestine shows the hypocrisy of American and Israeli pretenses to civilization.
     How would the civilized world react if 1.6 million people were kept imprisoned, denied access to food, clean water, sanitation facilities and electricity? If those people were also prevented from fleeing their oppression, would Americans and Europeans speak out in protest?
     If those aforesaid people lived in Gaza, and were oppressed by Israel, then the civilized world would say and do absolutely nothing. Israel is the Untied States’ number one client state, and fear of American power has silenced everyone on earth who has the power to stop this atrocity. more.. e-mail

One swift kick
Gideon Levy, Ha’aretz 6/5/2008
     Even now, six weeks later, his speech and movements are still halting. He says he is emotionally shattered. For him, the moment of crisis was when he awoke from surgery and noticed a plastic jar on the nightstand. The nurse wouldn’t tell him what was in it, but it quickly dawned on him: One of his testicles had been removed. Life will never be the same for Fadi Darabiya.
     Darabiya is a 24-year-old construction worker who supported his parents and his siblings. For two years now he has been sneaking into Israel, where he would work at various construction sites in the south for between 10 days and two weeks before returning home for a few days and then starting the cycle all over again. For about NIS 100 per day, almost any young Palestinian is ready to take the risk of infiltrating into Israel.
     There are policemen who hate Arabs so much and they constantly want to prove how loyal they are to the state that they would do anything," Darabiya says now, thinking of the Israeli officer who kicked him in the crotch; one hard kick that caused internal bleeding and led to necrosis, so that the doctors had no choice but to remove one of his testicles. When he sought to file a complaint with the police a few weeks later, he was threatened with arrest for having been in the country illegally. "Either we arrest you and you spend two months in jail and then you can file a complaint, or you give up on the complaint," a detective named Miriam at the Kiryat Arba police station said. Fadi turned around and walked out, abandoning the idea. The Israel Police are not investigating. more.. e-mail

Waste not, wall not
Shuki Sadeh, Ha’aretz 6/5/2008
     On September 4, 2007, the Supreme Court’s justices delivered a verdict that would impact life in the tiny West Bank village of Bil’in - a place which, more than any other, has come to symbolize the struggle against the separation fence. To the surprise of those in the courtroom, the judges ruled that the original route of the barrier as drawn up by defense officials was determined in order to accommodate the expansion of the nearby Jewish settlement of Modi’in Illit. The court therefore ordered the state to dismantle a 1.7-kilometer stretch of the fence, and noted that its route also put Israel Defense Forces soldiers in a vulnerable position.
     While the verdict was being read, IDF Colonel (res.) Shaul Arieli was meeting with senior Defense Ministry officials. For Arieli, who in recent years has devoted most of his time to the issue of the fence, this was yet another in a series of meetings whose aim was to change the route. "When I heard of the court’s decision, I told [the people I met with]: You see, NIS 20 million that was spent on the barrier in Bil’in, you certainly don’t have now for Sderot," he says. more.. e-mail

Dutch bank agrees: Jerusalem tramway is illegal
Adri Nieuwhof, Electronic Intifada 6/6/2008
     Last week, the managing director of SNS Asset Management, a division of the Dutch SNS Bank, sent me a letter explaining the bank’s position on divesting from Veolia. Veiola is a European company contracted to build a tramway on illegally seized Palestinian land that connects Israeli settlements on the West Bank, constructed in open violation of international law, with neighborhoods in West Jerusalem. Over the past two years, SNS Bank, ranked in the top-five of Dutch banks, received many letters from Israeli, Palestinian and Dutch organizations and international law experts calling for divestment from Veolia, because of the company’s involvement in the tramway project.
     In its letter, SNS Bank stated that "the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory is not consistent with international law. However, the bank does not consider the construction of the tramway as a direct, grave violation of human rights. Therefore excluding Veolia is considered disproportionate. Nevertheless, we see the activities as unwanted within the framework of a responsible peace process, and we will call upon Veolia not to engage with similar future projects. Noting the relative small interest of these activities for Veolia, such a request is not without a chance." more.. e-mail

Crossing the Line interviews professor Joel Beinin
Podcast, Crossing the Line, Electronic Intifada 6/6/2008
     This week on Crossing The Line: US President George W. Bush recently wrapped up a five-day visit to the Middle East meeting with Arab leaders at the World Economic Forum, pledging a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. However, given Bush’s dismal approval rating, what are the odds that Bush will have any real effect on the situation? Joel Beinin, Director of Middle East Studies at American University of Cairo joins host Naji Ali to talk more on the subject.
     Next, more than 100 countries came together in Dublin, Ireland for a two-week conference that will lead to the banning cluster bombs worldwide. But two key states, the US and Israel, which manufacture or use cluster bombs, did not attend the conference. Ali speaks with anti-cluster bomb activist Daniel Allen about their absence and the significance of this historic event.
     Lastly, US Senator John McCain has rejected the endorsement of the controversial right-wing minister John Hagee. But just who exactly is John Hagee? Why haven’t the mainstream media given his comments regarding Hitler being sent by God to drive the Jews to Israel as much scrutiny as those by Obama’s former reverend, Jeremiah Wright? Ali discusses the matter and the influence of Hagee’s pro-Israel lobby, Christians United for Israel (CUFI) with journalist Sarah Posner. more.. e-mail

How strong is their alliance?
Basel Oudat, Al-Ahram Weekly 6/5/2008
     The Syrian and Iranian regimes may have their differences, but their alliance is not going to end anytime soon.
     Syrian-Iranian relations didn’t start with the Khomeini revolution of 1979. Relations between the two countries started to move forward nearly 35 years ago, when Shah Mohamed Reza Pahlavi was still in power. Not long after Hafez Al-Assad came to power, he visited Tehran in 1973. The visit raised eyebrows across the region, for Syria was supposed to be a leftist country, an enemy to imperialism and a friend of the Soviet Union, while Iran was seen as a friend of the US and an enemy of communism and socialism. Furthermore, the shah wasn’t exactly a popular figure in the Arab world. He had occupied three UAE islands and at one point assisted the sultan of Oman in quashing leftist rebels. Al-Assad’s visit to Tehran was frowned upon by Arab progressive (and not so progressive) parties, and was considered controversial to say the least, but it had a point.
     The two countries had something in common: both hated Iraq. The Baathist regime in Baghdad was not just a rival and potential threat to the Syrians, it was dead set against letting the Iranians throw their weight around the Gulf. The Syrian regime was afraid the Iraqis would stage a coup against it, and that wasn’t mere paranoia. At the time the founders of the Baath Party, Michel Aflaq and Akram Al-Hurani, were political refugees in Iraq, and there was no love lost between them and the Syrian regime. So although Iran and Syria had little in common, they had enough reasons to stick together. more.. e-mail

Normalizing occupation: Syria, Israel, and 'peace talks'
Yaman Salahi, Electronic Intifada 6/5/2008
     It may be too early to determine what truly lies behind the secret Syria-Israel "peace talks." With Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert positioned to leave office under a cloud of scandal and after a rash of policy failures across the Middle East, the Bush Administration is now counting its last days in power.Thus, it appears that the Syrian government has chosen an opportune time to attempt to usher in a new positive period for itself. Whatever the intentions of the parties involved in these negotiations, at least one thing can be said that makes them irrelevant. That is, for those of us working for justice in Palestine, to position ourselves as either "for" or "against" these so-called "peace talks" is to obscure other important questions about, and facets of, the relationship between Syria and Israel, as well as the other implications of this ever-enduring "process."
     Time and again, it has been re-affirmed that these negotiations for "peace" have always been to the overwhelming advantage of one party, and to the disadvantage of the others. That is not to say that peace is undesirable, or that open and transparent communication should be rejected, but rather that this process does not bring peace as we might normally imagine it or as its proponents have claimed. Nor is it open or transparent. The Palestinians know this lesson more than any other participant in the "peace process" as they have watched the seemingly endless talks with Israel continue to weaken their struggle. If accepting "peace" were simply a matter of abhorring violence, then the term would not be separate from "cease-fire." more.. e-mail

A day like no other
Nesmahar Sayed, Al-Ahram Weekly 6/5/2008
     From the dream of victory to the reality of defeat, a turnaround compressed into just six days. Nesmahar Sayed speaks to some of those who remember the 1967 war.
     On 5 June 1967 Fatma Mohamed was in her final year in secondary school and, like many members of the public, she idolised Gamal Abdel-Nasser. "I used to stand on the balcony, we lived on 26th of July Street, on the anniversary of the revolution just to catch a glimpse of him going to the officers’ club in Zamalek," she recalls.
     She had assumed the day would be like any other, spent toiling in preparation for final exams, despite the exuberant public mood that had accompanied Nasser’s response to growing regional tension. The good feelings did not last for long. more.. e-mail

Breaking the rules
Saleh Al-Naami, Al-Ahram Weekly 6/5/2008
     Hamas is pushing ahead in Gaza, trying to force an end to the siege while conditions appear favourable, writes Click to view caption A Palestinian girl holds the photo of one of her relatives jailed in an Israeli prison during a protest at the Red Cross offices in Gaza Israeli army commander of the southern region General Yuav Galant was on his way home to attend a family celebration last Friday afternoon when senior officers told him to immediately return to the southern Gaza Strip. There, tens of thousands of Hamas activists were marching towards the Sufa commercial crossing on the Gaza-Israel border in protest of the ongoing siege. The Israeli army’s leadership was not taking any risks, dealing with the situation as though the protesters aimed to cross the border. Thousands of soldiers were called up for deployment along the border under cover of Apache helicopters and unmanned drones.
     Israeli army leaders confirmed that although Hamas has threatened several times to go to the border and attempt crossing it, they had not expected that Hamas could succeed in organising such a large demonstration only 500 metres from the border in an area considered highly sensitive due to its proximity to several Israeli settlements east of the border. Although the demonstration was broken up, the message was delivered and the Israeli army has begun to deal with Hamas’s threats to penetrate the border seriously... more.. e-mail

Generation intifada
Neve Gordon, Ha’aretz 6/7/2008
     It took me a moment before I understood why my story about a few relatively inconsequential incidents, which occurred years ago at my high school, had such an effect on the undergraduates taking my fall semester course in 2006.
     One of my anecdotes related to classmates of mine who lived in the Jewish settlements at the northern tip of the Sinai Peninsula. It was 1981, and the following year they would be forced to leave their homes as part of Israel’s peace agreement with Egypt, but at the time, I told my students, the evacuation did not seem imminent, at least to many teenagers for whom each year stretches without end. A particular issue that did preoccupy us, I continued, was learning to drive. I described to my students how my friends from the farming communities located in the Sinai and the small town of Yamit took their lessons in the Palestinian town of Rafah and were among the first to pass their driving tests.
     My students in the politics and government department of Ben-Gurion University found this story incomprehensible. They simply could not imagine Israeli teenagers taking driving lessons in the middle of Rafah, which, in their minds, is no more than a terrorist nest riddled with tunnels used to smuggle weapons from Egypt; weapons subsequently used against Israeli targets. more.. e-mail

Welcome to year 41
Michael Sfard, Haaretz, International Solidarity Movement 6/5/2008
     The military commander of the West Bank, Major General Gadi Shamni, is a busy man. He has a country to run, and he has no separation of powers to worry about. He is at once legislator, judge, and director general of his little government that comprises his minister-officers aged 20-something.
     Only a small portion of his activities are known to the public, because running occupied territory includes countless daily decisions, instructions and actions. The following are some examples of his recent activities.
     One day the commander declared war on the handicapped of Qalqilyah. In an order he signed, he declared organizations he suspects of terrorist activities to be outside the law: the Association for the Rehabilitation of the Handicapped in Qalqilyah, the Handicapped Association, the Handicapped Rehabilitation Association, the Qalqilyah Association for the Rehabilitation of the Handicapped, the Qalqilyah Association for the Handicapped, the Organization for Assisting and Caring for the Handicapped, the Qalqilyah Association for the Rehabilitation of the Handicapped. These organizations thus became illegal and their members criminals. more.. e-mail

With economic siege comes malnutrition
Rami Almeghari writing from the occupied Gaza Strip, Electronic Intifada 6/4/2008
     "Can you imagine that when a child of mine asks me for one shekel [USD 0.30], I can’t afford to give it to him? That’s why I hide from my children from early in the morning until evening."
     Naser al-Batran is a 41-year-old father of five children living in the central Gaza Strip. He used to work for a weaving factory inside Israel but found himself jobless after Israel’s total closure of Gaza’s travel and commercial crossings in June 2007, worsening an already difficult economic situation since Israel began shutting out Palestinian laborers years ago.
     "Life has become miserable, extremely miserable," he said.
     The crippling economic blockade of the Gaza Strip colors all aspects of life there. According to the Hamas-run Palestinian Health Ministry, 70 percent of Gaza’s 1.5 million residents suffer from anemia, including 44 percent of pregnant women.
     Malnutrition among Palestinian children has also increased over the past 11 months, affecting more than 10 percent of Gaza’s children under the age of 18, according to the Gaza City-based Ard al-Insan health organization. more.. e-mail

The stigmatization of anything Palestinian or Arab
Lilith Hope, Electronic Intifada 6/5/2008
     An article recently published on the BBC’s website told of a recent controversy regarding a Dunkin’ Donuts online commercial in which an American celebrity chef appeared wearing something that resembled the traditional kuffiyeh checkered scarf. The article stated that:
     "This fashion choice incensed at least one prominent conservative blogger, who said it evoked extremist videos.
     The blogger, Michelle Malkin, called the garment ’a regular adornment of Muslim terrorists appearing in beheading and hostage-taking videos.’"
     Admittedly, this is not a surprising reaction to come from a conservative American blogger, but it nevertheless sounds alarm bells in the minds of those who are aware of the increasing tendency to collapse everything Arab, especially Palestinian, into the category "terrorist." Moreover, the fact that the BBC offered no alternative analysis to Malkin’s comments indicates that it implicitly accepts them, another blow to representation of elements of Arab identity in the Western mainstream media. The visceral reaction of Malkin and her supporters, who succeeded in getting the Dunkin’ Donuts commercial removed from the web, should be shown for what it really is: another attempt at denying symbols of Palestinian resistance their history, and hence their legitimacy, and thereby relegating them to the category of irrational, violent incitements to terrorism. more.. e-mail

The Watch List Through the Prism of Global War on Terrorism
Ahmad Al-Akhras, PhD, Palestine Think Tank 6/5/2008
     Ahmad Al-Akhras has a collection of his boarding passes for the past four plus years. Most of these boarding passes were marked for "secondary screening."� Dr. Al-Akhras is the Vice Chairman of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, CAIR.
     Like racial profiling, the so-called Watch List hinges on a false premise that people commit crimes because of their racial, ethnic or religious background. This false premise caused huge suffering to African America, Japanese Americans and now Arab and American Muslims. The worst part of this is the assumption th at practicing Islam, never mind being an activist at that, gives one an appetite for terrorism. In the process, people who are in good standing who did not commit nor had a criminal record are treated as "posing a threat to civil aviation or national security"� or as "potential enemies of the state"�
     Karen DeYoung of the Washington Post reported last year that since 2003, a database that stores names of "individuals that the intelligence community believes might harm the United States"� has quadrupled from 100,000 to 435,000. I am sure the numbers now are way higher. The question is that if the US has these many "terrorists"� or "dangerous people,"� then we have a real and huge problem that cannot be solved by a watch list that selectively targets people. more.. e-mail

Losing ground
Ramzy Baroud, Al-Ahram Weekly 6/5/2008
     The agenda of US-Israeli hawks appears mired, for the time being, writes On 15 May, President Bush gave a speech before the Israeli Knesset decrying "radicals and terrorists" (basically anyone who opposes the United States and Israel). His archaic references to the "promised land" and "chosen people" certainly appealed to the equally outdated and exclusivist views of many, though not all, Israeli Knesset members who reportedly saw in Bush the quintessential Zionist.
     A few days later, Bush took his message to Sharm El-Sheikh, stating, "we must stand with the good and decent people of Iran and Syria, who deserve so much better than the life they have today. Every peaceful nation in the region has an interest in stopping these nations from supporting terrorism."
     Yet, on 21 May, media reports revealed that Israel and Syria were engaged in mediated peace talks in Turkey. Both sides sounded upbeat, with Syrian officials stating that Israel showed readiness to withdraw from the entire Golan Heights, which it occupied in 1967 and illegally annexed in 1981. more.. e-mail

Lest we forget
Amira El-Noshokaty, Al-Ahram Weekly 6/5/2008
     Sixty years of Israeli occupation are being defied stitch by stitch.
     In a bright, spacious room, Sana Al-Digani sits among a group of women examining embroidered garments that are kept neatly folded in a glass cabinet alongside traditional silverware. For these women the embroidered clothes are far more than items to be worn. Each stitch is a reaffirmation of identity, a setting down of the past, for these women are Palestinians and in practising their craft they are reminding the world of the land that they have lost. "Palestinians are fighting to keep their heritage while reminding the world and the future generations of the biggest lie in history, one that claimed that Palestine was a land with no people and Israelis were the people with no land," says Al-Digani, head of the heritage committee at the General Union of Palestinian Women (GUPW).
     A Palestinian flag marks the first floor of the building in Ramses Street where the women gather around a wooden table to sew stories of their homeland in vivid colours onto fabric. more.. e-mail

Reflections on the 1967-war anniversary
Khalid Amayreh in the West Bank, Palestinian Information Center 6/5/2008
     Today marks the passage of 41 years since the outbreak of the 1967 war, or the Six-day war, as it is  known in the Israeli political phraseology. However, despite overwhelming Israeli military and political advantages, mainly due to Zionist influence and predominance in the West, particularly the United States, it is amply clear that the Palestinian people are keeping up the struggle for freedom and justice and self-determination.
     This struggle, everyone must understand, will never come to an end, until racism and oppression come to an end.
     In this somewhat lengthy article, I will  present some of my personal  recollections in relation to life under the sinister Israeli occupation. Interestingly, the nightmares of the occupation have only become more ghoulish. Now Israel’s Nazi face is exposed to all and sundry. more.. e-mail

Bottomless basket
Khaled Amayreh, Al-Ahram Weekly 6/5/2008
     The Judaisation of occupied Jerusalem continues apace while the hapless Palestinian president refuses to quit "peace talks", reports from East JerusalemIsraeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is contemplating a large-scale invasion of the Gaza Strip which observers say is intended to deflect attention away from the corruption scandal in which he is increasingly mired. Speaking before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) convention in Washington on Tuesday night Olmert hinted at a wide-ranging "military campaign" in Gaza.
     "Israel will not be deterred from a large military operation in Gaza if and when we come to the conclusion that this is the best way to restore calm on our southern border," Olmert told the powerful American-Jewish pressure group. Earlier, Olmert had told representatives of Israeli settlers from the southern region bordering Gaza that "the moment of decision is imminent... the rockets will be stopped one way or another. more.. e-mail

Can Qatar do it again?
Khaled Amayreh, Al-Ahram Weekly 6/5/2008
     On the back of its success in mediating Lebanon’s political standoff, Doha may soon be placing a toe in Palestinian waters, writes in Ramallah Having succeeded in getting erstwhile warring Lebanese factions to get their act together, Qatar is now exploring the prospects of mediating between Fatah and Hamas in the hope of restoring Palestinian national unity.
     However, Qatari Emir Sheikh Hamed Bin Khalifa Al-Thani and his influential premier and foreign minister, Sheikh Hamad Bin Jasem, seem to be treading cautiously (some say too cautiously) in the more complicated "Palestinian minefield".
     According to reliable Palestinian sources, Qatar has voiced its "initial willingness" to help "the Palestinian brothers" overcome their differences and re-establish national unity. The same sources were careful, however, to add that Qatari officials -- especially Bin Jasem -- wouldn’t be in a position to help the Palestinians if they were not willing to help themselves. more.. e-mail

The ongoing Arab grief
Azmi Bishara, Al-Ahram Weekly 6/5/2008
     Until now, Arab denial of the reasons for the 1948 catastrophe leaves its meaning locked in echoes and beyond reach, writes The Nakba is a rupture in Palestinian history. Palestinian society was uprooted, the Palestinian city destroyed, and with each the dream harboured by Arab elites and middle classes between the world wars of building an independent Arab nation and catching up with the modern world. The Palestinian peasant who had vied with the forces of nature on his land with his hoe was ejected from that struggle and that harmony. Whereas once his dreams were woven with the fragrance of basil and olives, the lazy crawl of time and the seasons revolving slowly but surely like a waterwheel, his dreams fell into the hands of politicians, balances of power and international resolutions; his rites becoming seasonal conferences calling for return, the transistor radio proclaiming the promise of liberation and the fragrance of place evaporating in a haze of nostalgia.
     The Nakba is a rupture in modern Arab history because afterwards history became the repercussions of reactions to the Nakba in the course of which the dialectic of relations with the enemy supplanted and then became identified with the internal dialectic. The Arabs were stunned by what happened, but that collective shock marked the beginning of modern Arabism -- the Arabism of ruling regimes as opposed to the Arab nationalist ideas and movement of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They regarded what happened as an aberration of fate and insult that took the shape of the "alleged state of Israel".... more.. e-mail

The alternate lobby
James Zogby, Al-Ahram Weekly 6/5/2008
     Not before time, in Washington there has emerged a counter-balance to hardline pro-Israel groups, writes Last month’s launch of "J Street" marks the culmination of a two-decades old evolution within the pro-Israel community in the US.
     J Street, which defines itself as "the political arm of the pro-Israel and pro-peace movement", states that it was founded "to promote meaningful American leadership to end the Arab-Israeli and Palestinian-Israeli conflicts peacefully and diplomatically... [and] support a new direction for American policy in the Middle East."
     In what they refer to as their "family of organisations", J Street will include a lobbying arm that will advocate for peace on Capitol Hill, and an "unconnected" political action committee that will endorse pro-peace candidates for public office.
     While the hardline positions of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) have long-defined pro-Israel politics in Washington, in reality, American Jewish opinion has never been monolithic. AIPAC has always been opposed by those in the Jewish community who have argued for a more balanced approach to the Israeli-Arab conflict. more.. e-mail

Critical thinking
The Guardian 6/5/2008
     Celebrating Israel’s 60th anniversary this month has not been easy for me and many of my friends here who feel that Israel has taken a horribly wrong turn in the last 40 years. I am left with a feeling of desperation, and with a strong need to clarify the question what kind of criticism of Israel is constructive.
     Let me begin with a basic belief of mine: any criticism of Israel that does not actually incite racism and antisemitism is legitimate. Many supporters of Israel automatically play the card of antisemitism to muzzle criticism. This is intellectually and morally wrong and it is dangerous.
     Brian, I have been following the debate in the UK and the activities of Independent Jewish Voices (IJV), and I was happy to see a growing group of Jews liberate themselves from the stranglehold of Jewish organisations who, however sincerely, believe that Israel is best served by uncritically defending Israeli actions, whatever their human cost and long-term political consequences. more.. e-mail

Gaza’s 700 (and counting) stranded students
Report, PCHR, Electronic Intifada 6/5/2008
     Three days ago, on 1 June, Hadeel Abu Kwaik was sitting in her computer lab at al-Azhar University in Gaza looking worried, and perplexed. Today, having just been told her Fulbright scholarship has been reinstated, she says she is "Happy but still worried. I’m still not sure we will [all] be able to leave for the US."
     Hadeel is one of seven Gaza students who, on 29 May, received letters from the US consulate in Jerusalem, informing them that their Fulbright scholarship applications would not be finalized. The US consulate letter gave no reason for the sudden withdrawing of the seven scholarships; instead, all seven students, three women and four men, were "strongly encouraged" to re-apply for the same Fulbright scholarships the following year, and assured they would receive "priority consideration."
     The withdrawing of these Fulbright scholarships caused an international uproar, momentarily focusing the world’s attention on the plight of the seven Gaza Strip students. US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice intervened, saying she was "surprised" by the decision, and added, "If you cannot engage young people and give complete horizons to their expectations and their dreams, I don’t know that there will be any future for Palestine." more.. e-mail

LRB: Diary from Gaza
Louisa Waugh, London Review of Books, International Solidarity Movement 6/2/2008
     ’Don’t ask me how I am,’ a colleague said to me when I arrived at the office yesterday morning. ‘You know how bad things are here now, so please don’t ask.’
     Things are certainly very bad in the Gaza Strip. The fuel crisis grinds on, and though Israel has just allowed a small consignment of fuel in, nearly 90 per cent of private cars remain off the road. Bus and taxi services are overwhelmed, and since the taxis have more than doubled their rates, most of us are still walking. Black market fuel prices are extortionate, and the streets reek with gassy and oily fumes because drivers have resorted to converting their cars to use cooking gas, or even cooking oil. These crude conversions are potentially dangerous, liable to induce nausea, eye infections and asthma. The lack of industrial fuel has sparked widespread power cuts (Gaza’s sole power plant is operating at partial capacity), as well as shortages of drinking water: the electric pumps shut down when the power goes off. Up to half of Gazans only have access to drinking water at home for between four and six hours a day. Domestic cooking fuel is increasingly scarce, and on some days there are long queues for bread, because bakers have started turning off their ovens to save gas.
     The fuel crisis didn’t start last week, or even last month. Israel has been steadily reducing fuel supplies since October. In February, ambulances in the city of Rafah in southern Gaza were temporarily grounded when the diesel ran out. In April, Israel permitted 152,000 litres of petrol to enter and 33,280 litres of diesel, a tiny fraction of demand. more.. e-mail

East Sawahreh and the Apartheid Wall
Reham Alhelsi, Palestine Think Tank 6/2/2008
     Last week I got my new "Palestinian Passport"�. Palestinians need to renew their passports every three years, and it was time for me to renew mine. Living in Germany the next step for me would be to get my "residency permit"� transferred from my old to my new passport. As I prepared the documents I need, I checked my registry confirmation document and my eyes immediately went to the "Staatenlos"� - stateless stated in the field designated for nationality. This is how we Palestinians are defined here. Actually, as far as I know it comes in various forms; stateless to undefined to unknown. It seems to me every human being is defined in Europe, except the Palestinians; they are undefined. Most probably Martians would have been more welcome here than us Palestinians.
     It is somewhat funny and sad how a piece of paper can define who you are or to what you are entitled or not. As a holder of a German "residency permit"� I am able to enter Jerusalem, the city I was born in and where I attended school and spent most of my growing years, but as a Palestinian I am not allowed there any more. The last time I was in Palestine, I was allowed into Jerusalem only because of this "residency permit"�. So, a Palestinian who was born and grew up in Jerusalem is only able to enter the city through the residency stamp of a country that lies on another continent. Foreigners from the four corners of the world are allowed into Jerusalem, provided they are not Palestinian nationals and residents of Palestine. more.. e-mail

Between oppression and empowerment
Nimer Sultany, Electronic Intifada 6/2/2008
     Defining the status of the Palestinian citizens of Israel has alwaysbeen a puzzle for many scholars. One called the Palestinian citizens "semi-citizens" with accidental citizenship. Another distinguished between "liberal citizenship" granted to the Arabs and "republican citizenship" granted to the Jews. A third distinguished between "incidental citizenship" granted to the Arabs and "substantive citizenship" granted to the Jews. I have contributed to this discussion by claiming that the Palestinians are "citizens without citizenship." The "citizen without citizenship" is the citizen who is excluded from the political community, from the dominant public sphere and from the common public good. This citizen has rights within the state but does not have rights over the state, to use the terms usedby then Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. To this citizen, thestate is his home, but his home is not his national home, as Israeli Foreign Affairs Minister Tzipi Livni would have it. He is the citizenwho is supposedly equal as an individual but his equality is subordinated to the general condition of discrimination, as is evident in the liberal Zionist position and the Israeli high court’s approach. The Jewish state transforms the Arab citizens into citizenswithout citizenship: they are marginalized, their homeland is takenfrom them, their history is silenced and the public common good is achieved at their expense. more.. e-mail

Palestinians Trapped at Crossroads
Nicola Nasser, Middle East Online 6/2/2008
     Firing home-made primitive rockets at Israeli targets from the Gaza Strip, the mass sweeping through the Palestinian – Egyptian border crossing of Rafah in January and the series of ongoing peaceful demonstrations at Gaza’s crossing points with Israel are not an aggressive demonstration of self-confidence, but more a show of defensive despair and weakness against the tight Israeli military siege, as much as Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’ threats to resign are passive defensive reaction to the political siege imposed on him by the United States and Israel, who so far fail to deliver on their promises to bring about an agreement to create a Palestinian state by the end of 2008.
     Given the corruption investigations, which have already heralded either a premiership change or early elections that would lead to a government change in Israel, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is likely nearing the end of his term to join Abbas and US President George W. Bush, whose terms will come to their end next January, as outgoing leaders whom all their protagonists are counting down time until their departure, before they could deliver on their promised vision of a two-state solution for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. more.. e-mail

When the Kettle Calls the Pot Black
Uri Avnery, MIFTAH 6/2/2008
     I CANNOT say that I ever liked Ehud Olmert. But now I almost feel sorry for him.
     It is not pleasant to see how they pounce on him, like jackals and hyenas fighting over a carcass.
     And that also raises some questions.
     WAS OLMERT the only fallible human being in this paradise? Not at all. The stories about the envelopes stuffed with cash, the cigars and the luxury suites in posh hotels fire the imagination, but the hedonism of Olmert is no different from that of Binjamin Netanyahu or Ehud Barak. When Barak accuses Olmert it is like the kettle calling the pot black.
     Netanyahu lived like a king in expensive hotels paid for by kind donors who, of course, ask for nothing in return, whose sole purpose in life is to allow him to revel in luxury. As for Barak - after decades of service as an army officer with a salary that did not reach the sky and some years as a cabinet minister with a similar income, he disappeared from public view for a short while and reappeared as a rich man. He bought a luxury apartment in one of the most expensive buildings in Tel Aviv, a structure that is a byword for ostentatious wealth. more.. e-mail

Divide and Rule
Ibrahim Turner, Palestine Think Tank 6/2/2008
     Everywhere I look there are people and groups doing something about the warmongers and the arms manufacturers. Each group needs support, but as far as I can tell, there is no communication or co-operation between these various groups.
     There was that group in France who went to the judge to get an indictment against Donald Rumsfeld when he visited Paris, forcing him to duck and dive to get back to the American Embassy.
     There is that group of courageous Irishmen from Londonderry who raided the Raytheon corporation’s factory and trashed their main frame computer, because their bombs were used by Israel in Qana, Lebanon. You have all probably seen the pictures that were shown around the world. These people have been charged and are now referred to as the "˜Raytheon 9’. The powers that be first imposed a news blackout on the proceedings and made it illegal to demonstrate outside the court.
     You can see a video on Palestine Think Tank today with an interview of one of them and also some comments by a member of the antiwar movement in Ireland. more.. e-mail

Israeli police and special forces prevent Faisal Husseini memorial meeting in Jerusalem’s Hakawati Theater
Ma’an News Agency 6/2/2008
     Jerusalem - By Marian Houk - Israeli police and special services prevented the holding of a memorial meeting in honor of the memory of the late Jerusalem political figure, Feisal Husseini, who died in Kuwait on 31 May 2008. The memorial was scheduled to take place at 4 pm Sunday afternoon in East Jerusalem’s Hakawati Theatre.
     This would have been the seventh Faisal Husseini memorial meeting in Jerusalem. Last year’s event was held in the Dar al-Tifl school, originally established sixty years ago by Hind Husseini to house and educate 55 orphans who survived the 1948 massacre and expulsion of Palestinians from the village of Deir Yassin on the outskirts of Jerusalem by the Jewish Irgun and Stern Gang militias, during the fighting that surrounded the creation of the State of Israel.
     But, although all previous six annual Faisal Husseini memorial meetings went ahead without interference, this year’s event was not allowed to take place. more.. e-mail

Water project is a drop in the ocean on West Bank
IRIN, IRIN - UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs 6/2/2008
     SAMUA, 2 June 2008 (IRIN) - With the help of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the Palestinian Water Authority, one town on the West Bank now has access to plentiful water, giving Samua’s mayor and townspeople something to celebrate.
     "Samua will now have four times as much water," Mayor Jamal Abu al-Jadayel said.
     A large reservoir and pipeline connecting it to a pumping station some 8km away are now in use. Estimates had put daily water use at between 10 and 25l per person on average, far below World Health Organization recommendations. That figure would now reach 40l or even 70l a day.
     Improving water services for the town’s 22,000 people solves only a fraction of the problem, however. According to conservative estimates, about 200,000 Palestinians in the West Bank are not connected to water networks. The people must buy water and ship it in tanks or rely on cisterns and private wells. more.. e-mail

The upgrade state
Gideon Levy, Ha’aretz 6/2/2008
     Ehud Olmert isn’t alone. He did what everybody does. The prime minister tried to "upgrade" his life; we all try to do this. There is no dream like the Israeli dream of trading up. It has become our very raison d’etre. The problem starts when we lose all proportion. Olmert upgrades his flights, his luxury suites, his watches and his cigars, but the Israeli desire to upgrade is far more wide-ranging, and all-inclusive.
     Its begins, of course, with how we view ourselves. We’re a normal nation? Just like all the other nations of the world? Get real. "We are a unique people, no less." In truth, we are a society that is far from normal, with our fragile democracy that in many ways veers toward the theocratic. We are levantine in many ways, and no less militaristic. We are an uneasy combination of Western liberalism and totalitarianism, between socialism and cruel capitalism, nationalism and, at times, even racism. Yet, we are a people that declares itself "a light unto the nations. more.. e-mail

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