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Israel targeting the boycott movement Electronic Intifada: 9 Nov 2009 - For nearly six weeks now Mohammed Othman, a prominent Palestinian activist and an outspoken advocate of the nonviolent boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement, has been held in an Israeli military prison without charges. On 22 September 2009 Othman, 34, was detained at the Allenby Crossing as he attempted to enter the occupied West Bank from Jordan. He was returning from a trip to Norway, where he met with Finance Minister Kristin Halvorsen, amongst other officials. Mya Guarnieri reports for The Electronic Intifada. Who killed Abu Mazen? Reuven Kaminer, Ma’an News Agency 11/9/2009, Hillary Clinton killed Abu Mazen. Barack Obama set him up last June in his Cairo speech and Hillary killed him dead. Her repeated declarations last week regarding "unprecedented concessions" by Netanyahu on the settlement issue finished the job., Are we exaggerating? Is Abu Mazen still alive? One would hope that as just another pensioner, Abu Mazen will enjoy a healthy and vigorous private retirement. But politically he has become, despite illustrious chapters in his younger years, a political corpse. He simply bet everything on the US, and when it turned out that all the services he rendered to were used and exploited by Obama to increase pressure against his own people, he was forced to understand that the game was over., Abu Mazen was not born to deceive his people. But he (and many others) deceived themselves regarding Clinton, her boss and her associates. Is it clinically possible that Abu Mazen died of shame., Of course, Clinton is a highly regarded figure. But the Clinton aura is just another trap. For her own convenience, she can turn the most faithful ally into a political non-entity. Abu Mazen began the descent to his own elimination last month when he issued orders to connive with Clinton to prevent the UN Human Rights Council from discussing the Goldstone report. And Mrs. Clinton, speaking words of adoration for Bibi during her recent trip to the Middle East, finished him off., There are three major lessons here, if you will. The first is the danger and the illusions of the theory which holds that since we live in a unipolar world, nothing can be done without an alliance with the US, which supposedly holds all the cards. Let the case of Abu Mazen be a lesson to all that hitching your wagon to the US train is the best way to go nowhere. Ending Israel’s Occupation John F. Mahoney, Americans for Middle East Understanding - AMEU 11/9/2009, September - October 2009, Drive along Indian School Road, between University Boulevard and US-25, in downtown Albuquerque, on April 8, 2009, and you’d be hard-pressed not to catch sight of a particular billboard displaying a young Palestinian girl on one side and an Israeli tank on the other., Turn left onto University Boulevard, then left again onto Candalaria Road, then right onto 2nd Street, and you’d come across a similar billboard, and you might read the message between the images: “Tell Congress: Stop Killing Children. No More Military Aid to Israel.”, And were you to continue north on 2nd Street and turn right onto Montano Road, then merge onto I-25S, then onto I-40W until you came to Coors Boulevard NW, you would come upon yet another billboard with the same message, and you might have noticed that it was sponsored by Stop $30 Billion.com., The signs—10 of them in all—definitely caught commuters’ attention. Lamar Outdoor Advertising, which owns the billboards, and whose graphics department helped design the ads, reported hundreds of responses, although it never gave a breakdown of those for and those against., Then, three weeks later, with five weeks left of a two-month contract to display the message, Lamar Outdoor Advertising covered or removed all 10 ads, charging they were misleading and factually inaccurate. Specifically, said a company official, “We know money is going to Israel but it is not going there with the purpose of killing children.”, A spokeswoman for the Coalition to Stop $30 Billion to Israel, sponsor of the advertisements, countered that they were not saying that U.S. monetary aid is being sent to kill children. “We’re saying it is killing children.” Portuguese water company's immoral collaboration with Israel Electronic Intifada: 9 Nov 2009 - The management of Portuguese water company EPAL recently informed its workers about its collaboration with the Israeli national water company Mekorot on "water security issues." An EPAL intern who recently visited the occupied West Bank reacted to the news by informing colleagues about how Israel is depriving Palestinians from water. EPAL responded by sacking the intern within one hour. Adri Nieuwhof reports for The Electronic Intifada. Vast majority of Gaza children suffer PTSD symptoms Electronic Intifada: 9 Nov 2009 - More than 40 years of Israeli military occupation have had a devastating impact on Palestinians in Gaza. Air strikes, artillery shelling, ground invasions, jet flybys and other acts of violence have all led to an epidemic of suffering among Gaza's most vulnerable inhabitants. The most recent studies indicate that the vast majority of Gaza's children exhibit symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. The Gaza Chronicles: Part 3 - Shattered Minds And The Children of Gaza Aditya Ganapathiraju, Palestine Monitor 11/5/2009, It’s the most terrifying place I’ve ever been in… it’s a horrifyingly sad place because of the desperation and misery of the way people live. I was unprepared for camps that are much worse than anything I saw in South Africa.– Professor Edward Said 1993 [1], They may be living but they’re not alive. – Journalist Philip Rizk [2], Gaza is a place that needs a million psychologists.— Ayed, a psychotherapist from Northern Gaza [3], Over 40 years of Israeli military occupation have had a devastating effect on Gaza; airstrikes, artillery shelling, ground invasions, jet flybys and their sonic booms have all led to an epidemic of suffering among Gaza’s most vulnerable inhabitants.[4], Soon after the recent winter Israeli assault, a group of scholars at the University of Washington discussed different aspects of the situation in Gaza and the occupied Palestinian Territories. Dr. Evan Kanter, UW school of medicine professor and the current president of Physicians for Social Responsibility, delivered a somber talk describing the mental health situation among Gaza’s population.[5], Dr. Kanter cited studies that revealed 62 % of Gaza’s inhabitants reported having a family member injured or killed, 67% saw injured or dead strangers and 83% had witnessed shootings. In a study of high school aged children from southern refugee camps in Rafah and Kahn Younis, 69% of the children showed symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress (PTS), 40% showed signs of moderate or severe depression, and a whopping 95% exhibited severe anxiety. Seventy percent showed limited or no ability to cope with their trauma. All of this was before the last Israeli invasion., Links:, and, -- See also:, and peak hour 4 Nov 2009 - Children swarming the streets coming from school, men and women going to market, people employed as traffic police, police –many who worked for the former government and continued with the current government –people on bikes, in taxis, afoot… These were the scenese when Israel began dropping bombs all over Gaza on December 27 and kept it up for the next 22 days, indiscriminately targeting civilians at a peak hour, in their homes, schools, cars, mosques, kindergartens… Think of these children, and justice for Palestinians. And ask, what more than supporting the Goldstone report (important, but certainly not marking Israel’s first violations of international human rights) can we do? … BDS :... Obama Must Deliver on His Promises 8 Nov 2009 - By George Hishmeh - Washington DC The first nine months of US President Barack Obama's tenure at the White House have been pregnant with thought-provoking ideas and commendable aspirations aimed at improving the tarnished US image and bringing the world closer together in every way possible — especially in the Middle East, where an unresolved Arab-Israeli conflict has been simmering for more than 60 years. But there is increasing fear in Europe and the Arab world that Obama may fail to deliver on his potential. "Trans-Atlantic relations are again clouded by doubts", the New York Times reported on the eve of a United States-European Union meeting in Washington this week. "Europe and the United States remain at least partly out of sync on Afghanistan, the Middle East, Iran and climate change". Coincidentally, Obama will next week be addressing major Jewish organizations in Washington. Many hope he will use the opportunity to put an end to the hesitation within his administration over the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The signs so far are not encouraging. US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has caused mayhem this week with her inelegant pronouncements in the Middle East, a development which makes one wonder whether she realizes that she is no longer the senator from New York, having to cater to her large Jewish constituency there, but a senior official of the Obama administration, which is committed to a ‘new beginning' with the Arab and Muslim worlds. Netanyahu's Proposal Arab anger was touched off by Clinton's untimely... How Eurocentric Is Your Day? 8 Nov 2009 - By M. Shahid Alam At the outset of the classes I teach, I always address the question of bias in the social sciences. In one course – on the history of the global economy – this is the central theme. It critiques Eurocentric biases in several leading Western accounts of the rise of the global economy. This fall, I began my first lecture on Eurocentrism by asking my students, How Eurocentric is your day? I explained what I wanted to hear from them. Can they get through a typical day without running into ideas, institutions, values, technologies and products that originated outside the West – in China, India, the Islamicate or Africa? The question befuddled my students. I proceeded to pepper them with questions about the things they do during a typical day, from the time they wake up. Unbeknownst, my students discover that they wake up in ‘pajamas,’ trousers of Indian origin with an Urdu-Persian name. Out of bed, they shower with soap and shampoo, whose origins go back to the Middle East and India. Their tooth brush with bristles was invented in China in the fifteenth century. At some point after waking up, my students use toilet paper and tissue, also Chinese inventions of great antiquity. Do the lives of my students rise to Eurocentric purity once they step out of the toilet and enter into the more serious business of going about their lives? Not quite. I walk my student through her breakfast. Most likely, this consists... The White Man's Mess 9 Nov 2009 - By Aijaz Zaka Syed- Dubai My apologies for returning to Rudyard Kipling in every discussion about Afghanistan! But the man, who gave us such enduring classics as Jungle Book and an endless repertoire of tales, ballads, ditties and just about everything on the Raj, remains eminently relevant on this untamed frontier of civilization. Kipling may have been Poet to the Empire and its best apologist (or worst?). But having spent most of his life in Her Majesty’s Service in the Indian Sub-continent as a soldier and journalist, Kipling knew the redlines that were not to be crossed -- ever. And Afghanistan and most of today’s Pakistan constituted the forbidden territory the English poet and writer repeatedly warned his fellow Westerners against. Here’s one such advice: It is not wise for the Christian white To hustle the Asian brown; For the Christian riles And the Asian smiles And weareth the Christian down. At the end of the fight Lies a tombstone white With the name of the Late deceased; And the epitaph drear, A fool lies here, Who tried to hustle the East Kipling who famously justified the Western colonization and European imperialism in the now infamous poem, The White Man’s Burden, was nothing if not a pragmatist. He knew the limits of the imperialism project. Kipling recognized the fact that the white man’s so-called burden to “civilize the natives” could wreak unspeakable havoc if he barges into the forbidden territory where angels fear to tread. These days, Kipling’s immortal words... The Gaza Chronicles: Part 3 - Shattered Minds And The Children of Gaza Aditya Ganapathiraju, Palestine Monitor 11/5/2009, It’s the most terrifying place I’ve ever been in… it’s a horrifyingly sad place because of the desperation and misery of the way people live. I was unprepared for camps that are much worse than anything I saw in South Africa.– Professor Edward Said 1993 [1], They may be living but they’re not alive. – Journalist Philip Rizk [2], Gaza is a place that needs a million psychologists.— Ayed, a psychotherapist from Northern Gaza [3], Over 40 years of Israeli military occupation have had a devastating effect on Gaza; airstrikes, artillery shelling, ground invasions, jet flybys and their sonic booms have all led to an epidemic of suffering among Gaza’s most vulnerable inhabitants.[4], Soon after the recent winter Israeli assault, a group of scholars at the University of Washington discussed different aspects of the situation in Gaza and the occupied Palestinian Territories. Dr. Evan Kanter, UW school of medicine professor and the current president of Physicians for Social Responsibility, delivered a somber talk describing the mental health situation among Gaza’s population.[5], Dr. Kanter cited studies that revealed 62 % of Gaza’s inhabitants reported having a family member injured or killed, 67% saw injured or dead strangers and 83% had witnessed shootings. In a study of high school aged children from southern refugee camps in Rafah and Kahn Younis, 69% of the children showed symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress (PTS), 40% showed signs of moderate or severe depression, and a whopping 95% exhibited severe anxiety. Seventy percent showed limited or no ability to cope with their trauma. All of this was before the last Israeli invasion., Links:, and, -- See also:, and Who killed Abu Mazen? Reuven Kaminer, Ma’an News Agency 11/9/2009, Hillary Clinton killed Abu Mazen. Barack Obama set him up last June in his Cairo speech and Hillary killed him dead. Her repeated declarations last week regarding "unprecedented concessions" by Netanyahu on the settlement issue finished the job., Are we exaggerating? Is Abu Mazen still alive? One would hope that as just another pensioner, Abu Mazen will enjoy a healthy and vigorous private retirement. But politically he has become, despite illustrious chapters in his younger years, a political corpse. He simply bet everything on the US, and when it turned out that all the services he rendered to were used and exploited by Obama to increase pressure against his own people, he was forced to understand that the game was over., Abu Mazen was not born to deceive his people. But he (and many others) deceived themselves regarding Clinton, her boss and her associates. Is it clinically possible that Abu Mazen died of shame., Of course, Clinton is a highly regarded figure. But the Clinton aura is just another trap. For her own convenience, she can turn the most faithful ally into a political non-entity. Abu Mazen began the descent to his own elimination last month when he issued orders to connive with Clinton to prevent the UN Human Rights Council from discussing the Goldstone report. And Mrs. Clinton, speaking words of adoration for Bibi during her recent trip to the Middle East, finished him off., There are three major lessons here, if you will. The first is the danger and the illusions of the theory which holds that since we live in a unipolar world, nothing can be done without an alliance with the US, which supposedly holds all the cards. Let the case of Abu Mazen be a lesson to all that hitching your wagon to the US train is the best way to go nowhere. Ending Israel’s Occupation John F. Mahoney, Americans for Middle East Understanding - AMEU 11/9/2009, September - October 2009, Drive along Indian School Road, between University Boulevard and US-25, in downtown Albuquerque, on April 8, 2009, and you’d be hard-pressed not to catch sight of a particular billboard displaying a young Palestinian girl on one side and an Israeli tank on the other., Turn left onto University Boulevard, then left again onto Candalaria Road, then right onto 2nd Street, and you’d come across a similar billboard, and you might read the message between the images: “Tell Congress: Stop Killing Children. No More Military Aid to Israel.”, And were you to continue north on 2nd Street and turn right onto Montano Road, then merge onto I-25S, then onto I-40W until you came to Coors Boulevard NW, you would come upon yet another billboard with the same message, and you might have noticed that it was sponsored by Stop $30 Billion.com., The signs—10 of them in all—definitely caught commuters’ attention. Lamar Outdoor Advertising, which owns the billboards, and whose graphics department helped design the ads, reported hundreds of responses, although it never gave a breakdown of those for and those against., Then, three weeks later, with five weeks left of a two-month contract to display the message, Lamar Outdoor Advertising covered or removed all 10 ads, charging they were misleading and factually inaccurate. Specifically, said a company official, “We know money is going to Israel but it is not going there with the purpose of killing children.”, A spokeswoman for the Coalition to Stop $30 Billion to Israel, sponsor of the advertisements, countered that they were not saying that U.S. monetary aid is being sent to kill children. “We’re saying it is killing children.” Portuguese water company's immoral collaboration with Israel Electronic Intifada: 9 Nov 2009 - The management of Portuguese water company EPAL recently informed its workers about its collaboration with the Israeli national water company Mekorot on "water security issues." An EPAL intern who recently visited the occupied West Bank reacted to the news by informing colleagues about how Israel is depriving Palestinians from water. EPAL responded by sacking the intern within one hour. Adri Nieuwhof reports for The Electronic Intifada. Vast majority of Gaza children suffer PTSD symptoms Electronic Intifada: 9 Nov 2009 - More than 40 years of Israeli military occupation have had a devastating impact on Palestinians in Gaza. Air strikes, artillery shelling, ground invasions, jet flybys and other acts of violence have all led to an epidemic of suffering among Gaza's most vulnerable inhabitants. The most recent studies indicate that the vast majority of Gaza's children exhibit symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Israel targeting the boycott movement Electronic Intifada: 9 Nov 2009 - For nearly six weeks now Mohammed Othman, a prominent Palestinian activist and an outspoken advocate of the nonviolent boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement, has been held in an Israeli military prison without charges. On 22 September 2009 Othman, 34, was detained at the Allenby Crossing as he attempted to enter the occupied West Bank from Jordan. He was returning from a trip to Norway, where he met with Finance Minister Kristin Halvorsen, amongst other officials. Mya Guarnieri reports for The Electronic Intifada. peak hour 4 Nov 2009 - Children swarming the streets coming from school, men and women going to market, people employed as traffic police, police –many who worked for the former government and continued with the current government –people on bikes, in taxis, afoot… These were the scenese when Israel began dropping bombs all over Gaza on December 27 and kept it up for the next 22 days, indiscriminately targeting civilians at a peak hour, in their homes, schools, cars, mosques, kindergartens… Think of these children, and justice for Palestinians. And ask, what more than supporting the Goldstone report (important, but certainly not marking Israel’s first violations of international human rights) can we do? … BDS :... How Israel Won the Settlement Battle Again 10 Nov 2009 - By Ramzy Baroud When British Foreign Secretary David Miliband uttered a few words regarding the illegality of the Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, many wanted to believe that London was taking a sharp stance against Israel’s continued violations of international law. Alas, they were wrong. The fact is Miliband’s statement, made during a press conference that followed talks with Jordan’s King Abdullah II, in Amman, was merely tactical, aimed at lessening the negative impact of the feeble position adopted by Washington regarding the same issue. This is what Miliband had to say: "Settlements are illegal in our view and an obstacle to peace settlement in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The settlements challenge the heart of... a Palestinian state." But then, he added: "It's so important for all those who care about security and social justice in this region that discussions about borders and territory are restarted in a serious way, because if you can progress on border and territory, you can resolve the settlements issue." This is classic Miliband. While his clear and decisive statement regarding the illegality of the settlements and the fact that their construction is an obstacle is to be welcomed, one cannot decipher a politician’s statement in increments; to be truly appreciated, they must be understood as a whole. The danger lies in Miliband’s follow up statement, where he purposely changed the order of the proposed solution to the Middle East crisis to be "discussions about borders and territory are restarted in... A Line In The Sand 10 Nov 2009 - By Uri Avnery Mahmoud Abbas is fed up. The day before yesterday he withdrew his candidacy for the coming presidential election in the Palestinian Authority. I understand him. He feels betrayed. And the traitor is Barack Obama. A year ago, when Obama was elected, he aroused high hopes in the Muslim world, among the Palestinian people as well as in the Israeli peace camp. At long last an American president who understood that he had to put an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, not only for the sake of the two peoples, but mainly for the US national interests. This conflict is largely responsible for the tidal waves of anti-American hatred that sweep the Muslim masses from ocean to ocean. Everybody believed that a new era had begun. Instead of the Clash of Civilizations, the Axis of Evil and all the other idiotic but fateful slogans of the Bush era, a new approach of understanding and reconciliation, mutual respect and practical solutions. Nobody expected Obama to exchange the unconditional pro-Israeli line for a one-sided pro-Palestinian attitude. But everybody thought that the US would henceforth adopt a more even-handed approach and push the two sides towards the Two-State Solution. And, no less important, that the continuous stream of hypocritical and sanctimonious blabbering would be displaced by a determined, vigorous, non-provocative but purposeful policy. As high as the hopes were then, so deep is the disappointment now. Nothing of all these has come about. Worse: the Obama administration has shown by its... The White Man's Mess 9 Nov 2009 - By Aijaz Zaka Syed- Dubai My apologies for returning to Rudyard Kipling in every discussion about Afghanistan! But the man, who gave us such enduring classics as Jungle Book and an endless repertoire of tales, ballads, ditties and just about everything on the Raj, remains eminently relevant on this untamed frontier of civilization. Kipling may have been Poet to the Empire and its best apologist (or worst?). But having spent most of his life in Her Majesty’s Service in the Indian Sub-continent as a soldier and journalist, Kipling knew the redlines that were not to be crossed -- ever. And Afghanistan and most of today’s Pakistan constituted the forbidden territory the English poet and writer repeatedly warned his fellow Westerners against. Here’s one such advice: It is not wise for the Christian white To hustle the Asian brown; For the Christian riles And the Asian smiles And weareth the Christian down. At the end of the fight Lies a tombstone white With the name of the Late deceased; And the epitaph drear, A fool lies here, Who tried to hustle the East Kipling who famously justified the Western colonization and European imperialism in the now infamous poem, The White Man’s Burden, was nothing if not a pragmatist. He knew the limits of the imperialism project. Kipling recognized the fact that the white man’s so-called burden to “civilize the natives” could wreak unspeakable havoc if he barges into the forbidden territory where angels fear to tread. These days, Kipling’s immortal words... Obama Must Deliver on His Promises 8 Nov 2009 - By George Hishmeh - Washington DC The first nine months of US President Barack Obama's tenure at the White House have been pregnant with thought-provoking ideas and commendable aspirations aimed at improving the tarnished US image and bringing the world closer together in every way possible — especially in the Middle East, where an unresolved Arab-Israeli conflict has been simmering for more than 60 years. But there is increasing fear in Europe and the Arab world that Obama may fail to deliver on his potential. "Trans-Atlantic relations are again clouded by doubts", the New York Times reported on the eve of a United States-European Union meeting in Washington this week. "Europe and the United States remain at least partly out of sync on Afghanistan, the Middle East, Iran and climate change". Coincidentally, Obama will next week be addressing major Jewish organizations in Washington. Many hope he will use the opportunity to put an end to the hesitation within his administration over the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The signs so far are not encouraging. US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has caused mayhem this week with her inelegant pronouncements in the Middle East, a development which makes one wonder whether she realizes that she is no longer the senator from New York, having to cater to her large Jewish constituency there, but a senior official of the Obama administration, which is committed to a ‘new beginning' with the Arab and Muslim worlds. Netanyahu's Proposal Arab anger was touched off by Clinton's untimely... Heroism in a Vanishing Landscape Ellen Cantarow, CounterPunch 11/10/2009 1948 Again, in Sheikh Jarrah "Disputed” is a word often used about East Jerusalem and homes in Sheikh Jarrah. Would the international community have considered the homes of American blacks attacked by the Ku Klux Kla as “disputed”? Or those of Jews ejected by Brown Shirts in the early 1930s? The rule of law exists to protect the victims of war and occupation by imposing sanctions and responsibilities on invaders. It is not to be stretched for the convenience of the US at Guantanamo, Russia in Chechnya, Israel in Gaza, or in East Jerusalem. Under the law East Jerusalem and all the Arab homes it contains are part of the occupied West Bank. Despite endless palm-greasing, casuist apologetics, semantic distortions and brute force, Israel’s responsibilities towards the territories it occupies remain articulated in the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 and Chapter 5 of the 1907 Hague Convention IV. Occupying states are forbidden to seize the land and property of those they occupy, and forbidden to settle their citizens on occupied soil. But Israel and its US patron have small regard for legal niceties, instead preferring Thucydides’ maxim: “The strong do what they can, and the weak do what they must.” Late afternoon, October 16, 2009. Nasser Ghawe, 46, barrel-chested, with an expressive face and a ready smile, calls out to his little girl when she strays too far down the street. “Come here, darling,” he says, scooping her up in his arms and cradling her. We’re seated on plastic chairs in the gathering dusk at one side of a street in East Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood. The mother watches tiredly as Nasser talks with us. Link: Stand Up For Jeruslaem -- See also: Stand Up For Jeruslaem more.. e-mail Bipartisan Attack on International Humanitarian Law Stephen Zunes, Foreign Policy in Focus 11/4/2009 In a stunning blow against international law and human rights, the U.S. House of Representatives overwhelmingly approved a resolution on Tuesday attacking the report of the United Nations Human Rights Council’s fact-finding mission on the Gaza conflict. The report was authored by the well-respected South African jurist Richard Goldstone and three other noted authorities on international humanitarian law, who had been widely praised for taking leadership in previous investigations of war crimes in Rwanda, Darfur, the former Yugoslavia, and elsewhere. Since this report documented apparent war crimes by a key U.S. ally, however, Congress has taken the unprecedented action of passing a resolution condemning it. Perhaps most ominously, the resolution also endorses Israel’s right to attack Syria and Iran on the grounds that they are "state sponsors of terrorism." The principal co-sponsors of the resolution (HR 867), which passed on a 344-36 vote, included two powerful Democrats: House Foreign Relations Committee chairman Howard Berman (D-CA) and Middle East subcommittee chairman Gary Ackerman (D-NY). Democratic majority leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) successfully pushed Democrats to support the resolution by a more than 6:1 margin, despite the risk of alienating the party’s liberal pro-human rights base less than a year before critical midterm elections. The resolution opens with a series of clauses criticizing the original mandate of the UN Human Rights Council, which called for an investigation of possible Israeli war crimes only. This argument is completely moot, however, since Goldstone and his colleagues — to their credit — refused to accept the offer to serve on the mission unless its mandate was changed to one that would investigate possible war crimes by both sides in the conflict. more.. e-mail 'Israeli Apartheid – A Beginner’s Guide' Qunfuz, P U L S E 11/7/2009 That there are striking parallels between white rule in apartheid South Africa and Zionist rule in Palestine – an analogy made by such mainstream figures as President Jimmy Carter and Archbishop Desmond Tutu – should no longer be controversial. But calling Israeli apartheid by its name will occasion the usual screams of anti-Semitism and ignorance from Zionist quarters, and for comprehensible reasons: the most politically inept American student knows that apartheid is a bad thing, a crime to be battled, not supported with weapons, vetoes in the Security Council and billions of dollars in ‘aid.’ Therefore the apartheid label must be vigorously resisted by Zionists and their fellow travellers. Ben White’s “Israeli Apartheid – A Beginner’s Guide” begins by quoting Article II of the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid, UN General Assembly Resolution 3068, which defines the crime as “inhuman acts committed for the purpose of establishing and maintaining domination by one racial group of persons over any other racial group of persons and systematically oppressing them.” The rest of White’s book leaves the reader in no doubt that the Zionist instance of apartheid fits the bill even better than the erstwhile South African version. At the start of the twentieth century four percent of the population of Palestine was Jewish. Today all of Palestine is controlled by the Jewish state. Muslim and Christian Palestinians live behind wire, more than half of them outside the country. How did this happen? Zionism was a 19th Century response to anti-Semitism which internalised many anti-Semitic assumptions – that the Jews were a race, for instance, and that a race must have a nation state – as well as the imperialist-racist discourse of the Europe it sprang from. Despite the opposition of Orthodox and integrated liberal Jews, Zionists were able to reach an understanding with the British Empire. Britain, which occupied Palestine between the world wars, viewed “with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” (the Balfour Declaration).... Link: Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner’s Guide -- See also: Israeli Apartheid: A Beginner's Guide more.. Palestinians symbolically dismantle sections of the wall Electronic Intifada: 11 Nov 2009 - Two decades after the fall of the Berlin wall, walls of separation still exist throughout the world. Israel's wall in the West Bank is much bigger than the Berlin wall ever was, as it encloses more than two million Palestinians inside the occupied West Bank. This wall separates Palestinians from their families, land, natural resources and communities. However, in a symbolic action documented in video and photographs, Palestinians managed to symbolically dismantle part of the wall. Activist confronts Netanyahu at Washington conference Electronic Intifada: 10 Nov 2009 - At the Annual Conference of the United Jewish Federations in Washington, DC, during the plenary session by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, CODEPINK peace activist Midge Potts stood up with a banner that said "End the Siege of Gaza" and shouted "Stop the blockade of Gaza, Shame on you, Netanyahu." She was dragged out of the meeting by security guards. Israeli Jews and the one-state solution Electronic Intifada: 10 Nov 2009 - One of the most commonly voiced objections to a one-state solution for Palestine/Israel stems from the accurate observation that the vast majority of Israeli Jews reject it, and fear being "swamped" by a Palestinian majority. Across the political spectrum, Israeli Jews insist on maintaining a separate Jewish-majority state. Does this mean that a peaceful one-state outcome is so unlikely that Palestinians should not pursue it, and should instead focus only "pragmatic" solutions that would be less fiercely resisted by Israelis? Ali Abunimah comments for The Electronic Intifada. Bilin's legal struggle continues Electronic Intifada: 10 Nov 2009 - The villagers of Bilin are pushing forward in their nonviolent struggle against the Israeli occupation by appealing a Quebec Superior Court ruling in their case against two Canadian companies. The residents of Bilin are suing Green Park International and Green Mount International, two companies that, they argue, should be held legally accountable for illegally building residential homes and settlement infrastructure on the village's land. Jillian Kestler-D'Amours reports for The Electronic Intifada. peak hour 4 Nov 2009 - Children swarming the streets coming from school, men and women going to market, people employed as traffic police, police –many who worked for the former government and continued with the current government –people on bikes, in taxis, afoot… These were the scenese when Israel began dropping bombs all over Gaza on December 27 and kept it up for the next 22 days, indiscriminately targeting civilians at a peak hour, in their homes, schools, cars, mosques, kindergartens… Think of these children, and justice for Palestinians. And ask, what more than supporting the Goldstone report (important, but certainly not marking Israel’s first violations of international human rights) can we do? … BDS :... How Israel Won the Settlement Battle Again 10 Nov 2009 - By Ramzy Baroud When British Foreign Secretary David Miliband uttered a few words regarding the illegality of the Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, many wanted to believe that London was taking a sharp stance against Israel’s continued violations of international law. Alas, they were wrong. The fact is Miliband’s statement, made during a press conference that followed talks with Jordan’s King Abdullah II, in Amman, was merely tactical, aimed at lessening the negative impact of the feeble position adopted by Washington regarding the same issue. This is what Miliband had to say: "Settlements are illegal in our view and an obstacle to peace settlement in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The settlements challenge the heart of... a Palestinian state." But then, he added: "It's so important for all those who care about security and social justice in this region that discussions about borders and territory are restarted in a serious way, because if you can progress on border and territory, you can resolve the settlements issue." This is classic Miliband. While his clear and decisive statement regarding the illegality of the settlements and the fact that their construction is an obstacle is to be welcomed, one cannot decipher a politician’s statement in increments; to be truly appreciated, they must be understood as a whole. The danger lies in Miliband’s follow up statement, where he purposely changed the order of the proposed solution to the Middle East crisis to be "discussions about borders and territory are restarted in... A Line In The Sand 10 Nov 2009 - By Uri Avnery Mahmoud Abbas is fed up. The day before yesterday he withdrew his candidacy for the coming presidential election in the Palestinian Authority. I understand him. He feels betrayed. And the traitor is Barack Obama. A year ago, when Obama was elected, he aroused high hopes in the Muslim world, among the Palestinian people as well as in the Israeli peace camp. At long last an American president who understood that he had to put an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, not only for the sake of the two peoples, but mainly for the US national interests. This conflict is largely responsible for the tidal waves of anti-American hatred that sweep the Muslim masses from ocean to ocean. Everybody believed that a new era had begun. Instead of the Clash of Civilizations, the Axis of Evil and all the other idiotic but fateful slogans of the Bush era, a new approach of understanding and reconciliation, mutual respect and practical solutions. Nobody expected Obama to exchange the unconditional pro-Israeli line for a one-sided pro-Palestinian attitude. But everybody thought that the US would henceforth adopt a more even-handed approach and push the two sides towards the Two-State Solution. And, no less important, that the continuous stream of hypocritical and sanctimonious blabbering would be displaced by a determined, vigorous, non-provocative but purposeful policy. As high as the hopes were then, so deep is the disappointment now. Nothing of all these has come about. Worse: the Obama administration has shown by its... The White Man's Mess 9 Nov 2009 - By Aijaz Zaka Syed- Dubai My apologies for returning to Rudyard Kipling in every discussion about Afghanistan! But the man, who gave us such enduring classics as Jungle Book and an endless repertoire of tales, ballads, ditties and just about everything on the Raj, remains eminently relevant on this untamed frontier of civilization. Kipling may have been Poet to the Empire and its best apologist (or worst?). But having spent most of his life in Her Majesty’s Service in the Indian Sub-continent as a soldier and journalist, Kipling knew the redlines that were not to be crossed -- ever. And Afghanistan and most of today’s Pakistan constituted the forbidden territory the English poet and writer repeatedly warned his fellow Westerners against. Here’s one such advice: It is not wise for the Christian white To hustle the Asian brown; For the Christian riles And the Asian smiles And weareth the Christian down. At the end of the fight Lies a tombstone white With the name of the Late deceased; And the epitaph drear, A fool lies here, Who tried to hustle the East Kipling who famously justified the Western colonization and European imperialism in the now infamous poem, The White Man’s Burden, was nothing if not a pragmatist. He knew the limits of the imperialism project. Kipling recognized the fact that the white man’s so-called burden to “civilize the natives” could wreak unspeakable havoc if he barges into the forbidden territory where angels fear to tread. These days, Kipling’s immortal words... Delusional Self-Defense, Delusional Congressional Vote Jimmy Leas and Noura Erakat, Huffington Post 11/10/2009 The 344-36 House vote last week condemning the Goldstone Report, which encourages Israel and Hamas to conduct "credible" independent investigations of war crimes committed in Gaza, may help Israeli leaders avoid prosecution in the short-term. However, the House vote and the negative US votes at the UN will have long-term detrimental effects both on Israel and on the U.S.’s moral authority. Consider that within the General Assembly, 110 nations endorsed the Report, while the U.S. was among the minority of 18 nations that voted against the endorsement. The Congressional vote will increase the likelihood of a worldwide campaign to push the UN General Assembly, the International Criminal Court, or other countries, under universal jurisdiction, to hold Israel to account for war crimes committed in Gaza. Self-defense is of utmost concern because self-defense was a central element of Israel’s ongoing argument for the war and is the heart of the U.S.’s rejection of Goldstone. Israeli officials have featured that claim in every forum leading up to Operation Cast Lead’s pummeling strikes. It was Israel’s justification in its letter to the UN Secretary General when Israeli State officials announced the war on December 27, 2008. It was the main theme of Netanyahu’s recent speeches to the General Assembly and to the Knesset. It was the main theme of the most recent House Resolution. It will be the U.S.’s main reason to veto the forthcoming Security Council vote. The self-defense claim is not just a matter of public relations; it is essential. Absent self-defense, political and military officials in Israel are subject to charges that go beyond those in the Goldstone Report, including, but not limited to, the crime of war of aggression. However, the self-defense claim propagated by Israeli and U.S. politicians since the initiation of Operation Cast Lead is inconsistent with both the facts and the law. Within weeks of entering into the Egyptian-brokered ceasefire agreement, Hamas rocket fire had come to a halt. According to the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the ceasefire was so successful that it brought "normal life and "calm" back to Israeli towns near Gaza..... more.. e-mail Is Israel threatened by the BDS movement? Mya Guarnieri, Ma’an News Agency 11/11/2009 For nearly six weeks now Mohammed Othman, a prominent Palestinian activist and an outspoken advocate of the nonviolent boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement, has been held in an Israeli military prison without charges. On 22 September 2009 Othman, 34, was detained at the Allenby Crossing as he attempted to return home to the occupied West Bank from Jordan. He was returning from a trip to Norway, where he met with that country’s Finance Minister Kristin Halvorsen, amongst other officials. At the beginning of September, Finance Minister Halvorsen announced Norway’s divestment from the Israeli company Elbit due to "ethical concerns." Elbit provides security systems for Israel’s separation wall in the West Bank, for illegal settlements as well as unmanned aerial vehicles (commonly known as drones) and other technology for the Israeli military. According to many Middle East analysts and human rights groups, Othman played a pivotal role in Norway’s decision to disassociate from Elbit. Norway’s severing of ties with Elbit is just one of the recent successes of the BDS campaign. The Africa-Israel Group, a company led by Israeli diamond mogul Lev Leviev, involved construction of illegal Israeli settlements, has recently plummeted in value as investors have pulled out. While Africa-Israel’s recent decline has been due in large part to the global economic downturn, the attention of BDS activists has made associating with the company and its chairman politically unpalatable. Amongst those who have distanced themselves from Africa-Israel is the United Kingdom’s government. In March, the UK cancelled plans to move its Tel Aviv embassy into a building owned by the company. more.. e-mail Land First, Then Peace Turki al-Faisal, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs 11/10/2009 2009 November Jeddah, Saudi Arabia—The United States and other Western powers have for some time been pushing Saudi Arabia to make more gestures toward Israel. More recently, the crown prince of Bahrain urged greater communication with Israel and joint steps from Arab states to revive the peace process. Saudi Arabia is the birthplace of Islam, the custodian of its two holy mosques, the world’s energy superpower and the de facto leader of the Arab and Muslim worlds—that is why our recognition is greatly prized by Israel. However, for all those same reasons, the kingdom holds itself to higher standards of justice and law. It must therefore refuse to engage Israel until it ends its illegal occupation of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and the Golan Heights as well as Shabaa Farms in Lebanon. For Saudis to take steps toward diplomatic normalization before this land is returned to its rightful owners would undermine international law and turn a blind eye to immorality. Shortly after the Six-Day War in 1967, during which Israel occupied those territories as well as East Jerusalem and the Sinai Peninsula, the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution stating that, in order to form “a just and lasting peace in the Middle East,” Israel must withdraw from these newly occupied lands. The Fourth Geneva Convention similarly notes “the occupying power shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.” Now, Israeli leaders hint that they are willing to return portions of these occupied territories to Arab control, but only if they are granted military and economic concessions first. For the Arabs to accept such a proposal would only encourage similar outrages in the future by rewarding military conquest. more.. e-mail Palestinian students at Israeli universities support academic boycott Electronic Intifada: 11 Nov 2009 - We are Arab students at the Israeli universities writing to you in support of the proposed academic boycott of Israeli academic institutions. We believe that the boycott is timely and hopefully will help in upholding moral values of fairness, justice and equality which have been sorely missed in our region. Goldstone report met with muted enthusiasm in Gaza Electronic Intifada: 11 Nov 2009 - Tareq Abu Daya, owner of a popular souvenir shop in the heart of Gaza City, has recently offered his customers a new kuffiyeh , or traditional checkered scarf, on which the name of Judge Richard Goldstone is inscribed. "When the famous UN report of Judge Richard Goldstone was first made public, I thought of something that would be in honor of such a significant report that accuses Israel of war crimes against Gaza during the last war," Abu Daya said. Rami Almeghari reports from the occupied Gaza Strip. Palestinians symbolically dismantle sections of the wall Electronic Intifada: 11 Nov 2009 - Two decades after the fall of the Berlin wall, walls of separation still exist throughout the world. Israel's wall in the West Bank is much bigger than the Berlin wall ever was, as it encloses more than two million Palestinians inside the occupied West Bank. This wall separates Palestinians from their families, land, natural resources and communities. However, in a symbolic action documented in video and photographs, Palestinians managed to symbolically dismantle part of the wall. Activist confronts Netanyahu at Washington conference Electronic Intifada: 10 Nov 2009 - At the Annual Conference of the United Jewish Federations in Washington, DC, during the plenary session by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, CODEPINK peace activist Midge Potts stood up with a banner that said "End the Siege of Gaza" and shouted "Stop the blockade of Gaza, Shame on you, Netanyahu." She was dragged out of the meeting by security guards. peak hour 4 Nov 2009 - Children swarming the streets coming from school, men and women going to market, people employed as traffic police, police –many who worked for the former government and continued with the current government –people on bikes, in taxis, afoot… These were the scenese when Israel began dropping bombs all over Gaza on December 27 and kept it up for the next 22 days, indiscriminately targeting civilians at a peak hour, in their homes, schools, cars, mosques, kindergartens… Think of these children, and justice for Palestinians. And ask, what more than supporting the Goldstone report (important, but certainly not marking Israel’s first violations of international human rights) can we do? … BDS :... Which Way Obama? 11 Nov 2009 - By George S. Hishmeh – Washington DC Like most of his predecessors, Barack Obama has failed to come up with a logical approach to resolving the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, now in its 62nd year. Many optimists on both sides of the great divide had believed that he would this month take his first, tough step towards bringing the two sides to agree on the outlines of a settlement. The American president had an opportunity to do that when he was scheduled to address last Tuesday an annual general assembly of 50 American Jewish groups. But apparently he was not prepared to do that and he must have been relieved that he can skip that much-awaited opportunity by participating in a memorial service for 12 American soldiers and a civilian massacred at a Texas army post by an American-born army psychiatrist of Arab origin and a Muslim. It was glaringly clear that Obama was not yet willing to plunge into the anticipated confrontation, certainly with Israel and the influential American Jewish community, which reportedly contributes 40 percent of the budget of the president’s political party. Surprisingly, he did not discuss the Middle East with the spokesmen of these Jewish groups whom he invited to the White House. This was the second meeting he had with American Jewish leaders since assuming the presidency earlier this year. Meanwhile, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, was left wondering – – or sweating, as one Israeli paper reported – till the last moment before he knew... How Israel Won the Settlement Battle, Again 10 Nov 2009 - By Ramzy Baroud When British Foreign Secretary David Miliband uttered a few words regarding the illegality of the Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, many wanted to believe that London was taking a sharp stance against Israel’s continued violations of international law. Alas, they were wrong. The fact is Miliband’s statement, made during a press conference that followed talks with Jordan’s King Abdullah II, in Amman, was merely tactical, aimed at lessening the negative impact of the feeble position adopted by Washington regarding the same issue. This is what Miliband had to say: "Settlements are illegal in our view and an obstacle to peace settlement in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. The settlements challenge the heart of... a Palestinian state." But then, he added: "It's so important for all those who care about security and social justice in this region that discussions about borders and territory are restarted in a serious way, because if you can progress on border and territory, you can resolve the settlements issue." This is classic Miliband. While his clear and decisive statement regarding the illegality of the settlements and the fact that their construction is an obstacle is to be welcomed, one cannot decipher a politician’s statement in increments; to be truly appreciated, they must be understood as a whole. The danger lies in Miliband’s follow up statement, where he purposely changed the order of the proposed solution to the Middle East crisis to be "discussions about borders and territory are restarted in... A Line In The Sand 10 Nov 2009 - By Uri Avnery Mahmoud Abbas is fed up. The day before yesterday he withdrew his candidacy for the coming presidential election in the Palestinian Authority. I understand him. He feels betrayed. And the traitor is Barack Obama. A year ago, when Obama was elected, he aroused high hopes in the Muslim world, among the Palestinian people as well as in the Israeli peace camp. At long last an American president who understood that he had to put an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, not only for the sake of the two peoples, but mainly for the US national interests. This conflict is largely responsible for the tidal waves of anti-American hatred that sweep the Muslim masses from ocean to ocean. Everybody believed that a new era had begun. Instead of the Clash of Civilizations, the Axis of Evil and all the other idiotic but fateful slogans of the Bush era, a new approach of understanding and reconciliation, mutual respect and practical solutions. Nobody expected Obama to exchange the unconditional pro-Israeli line for a one-sided pro-Palestinian attitude. But everybody thought that the US would henceforth adopt a more even-handed approach and push the two sides towards the Two-State Solution. And, no less important, that the continuous stream of hypocritical and sanctimonious blabbering would be displaced by a determined, vigorous, non-provocative but purposeful policy. As high as the hopes were then, so deep is the disappointment now. Nothing of all these has come about. Worse: the Obama administration has shown by its... Bilin’s legal struggle continues Jillian Kestler-D'Amours, Electronic Intifada 11/10/2009 Abdullah Abu Rahme can no longer sleep in his own home. A member of the Bilin Popular Committee Against the Wall, Abu Rahme explained that since Bilin began its legal proceedings in Canada, Israeli soldiers have made life especially difficult for residents of the small West Bank village. "[Israeli soldiers] came to my home and they tried to arrest me. They’re destroying my home. It’s not allowed to me to sleep in my home. I feel very bad about this. I’m suffering from this case until now," he said. "I took my family to another place. It’s very difficult for me." Still, Abu Rahme and the villagers of Bilin are pushing forward in their nonviolent struggle against the Israeli occupation by appealing a Quebec Superior Court ruling in their case against two Canadian companies. The residents of Bilin are suing Green Park International and Green Mount International, two companies that, they argue, should be held legally accountable for illegally building residential homes and settlement infrastructure on the village’s land, and marketing these buildings for the purpose of transferring exclusively Israeli civilians therein. Bilin is a small Palestinian village of approximately 1,800 residents located 12 kilometers west of Ramallah in the occupied West Bank. Since the early 1980s, about 56 percent of Bilin’s agricultural land has been designated by Israel as "State Land." It has been used to build the Jewish-only settlement Modiin Illit, which holds the largest settler population in the occupied West Bank with more than 42,000 residents and plans to grow to up to 150,000. more.. e-mail Iraq’s precedent for a UNSC end to occupation Riziq Sammoudi, Ma’an News Agency 11/12/2009 On 5 November Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, in a press conference in Ramallah, urged for the "œending" of the Israeli occupation in the Palestinian Occupied Territories. The importance of such a call lies in that it, from the first impression, breaks from the standard line on ways to end the occupation. The statement, moreover, left me enthusiastic, and led me to rethink the ways any given occupation comes to an "œend" according to international law and whether the "œending" of occupation is possible. Even in their dictionary definitions, there is a huge difference between "œend" and "œending". The first term means the cessation of something, either by itself or after a period of time. The later, however, means imposing a force that results in the cessation of something. A similar difference exists in international law, and even in law around the legality of occupation and its cessation. There is, however, ambiguity in the practical aspects of the legal definitions. The rules of international humanitarian law and customary international law recognize, explicitly, only the normal ways for the termination of occupations. The most common of which are either via a treaty of peace or the withdrawal from an occupied territory by the occupying army; both ways are totally dependent on the will of the occupier. Still, what are the possibilities for the ending of occupation under international law? How can the occupied legally compel their occupier to leave in a way that is binding under international law and recognized by international organizations like the United Nations, for example. more.. e-mail Just in case Dina Ezzat, Al-Ahram Weekly 11/5/2009 Arab capitals are considering their alternatives should the US hit a wall on the settlements freeze. When US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met President Hosni Mubarak Wednesday in Cairo she was trying to garner support from Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world for a new US scheme for Middle East peace: resume peace talks between Palestinians and Israelis without the full freeze of illegal Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territories. Directly and indirectly Clinton has been telling senior Arab interlocutors for the past few days that it looks unlikely that Washington would ultimately prove unable to get Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to honour the 2002 roadmap which calls for a full halt of all settlement activities. Clinton, as Arab diplomats say, is now suggesting that it is not in the interests of the Palestinians or the cause of peace to get stuck on the settlement issue and waste the commitment of US President Barack Obama to deliver a historic peace agreement between Palestinians and Israelis in the next few years. What Clinton is now offering is the resumption of peace in return for a considerable containment of settlement activities and some US assurances. In Israel earlier this week the US secretary of state qualified as "unprecedented" the willingness of Netanyahu to slow down on current settlement construction and his intention to suspend the sequestration of further occupied Palestinian territories for new settlement projects. This, she had told a reluctant Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas during a meeting in the capital of the United Arab Emirates on Saturday, could offer an opening for the initial resumption of peace talks. A Palestinian source from Ramallah told Al-Ahram Weekly that Abbas told Clinton that he "cannot do it" unless he is offered considerable guarantees that the ongoing construction of illegal settlements would not prejudge a possible peace agreement -- neither in terms of the scope of territories that Palestinians would get for the future state nor in terms of the possible temporary or permanent boundaries of the would-be Palestinian state. more.. e-mail Yacov Ben Efrat, Challenge 11/13/2009 Sixteen years after signing the Oslo Accords, the Palestinians have concluded that there isn’t any point in continuing the peace process with Israel. That is the only way to understand the declaration by Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) that he won’t run in the next elections for the presidency of the Palestinian Authority (PA). I shall argue that he should have pulled out years ago, but better late than never. The Israeli side refuses to believe him, seeing the announcement as a public relations stunt. Just two months ago his Prime Minister, Salam Fayyad, announced his plan "for establishing a Palestinian state within two years," and here comes the boss and shuffles the cards. The Palestinians went astray, it seems, in their attempt to rescue something from the peace process, given a right-wing government that has arisen in Israel and contradictory signals from Washington. Abu Mazen’s resignation would be a big blast of no confidence where the peace process is concerned, but more than that, it expresses major disappointment with Barack Obama. Washington is largely responsible for the severe erosion in Abu Mazen’s position with the Palestinian public. It all began with Obama’s very promising speech in Cairo, where he committed himself to act for a Palestinian state with territorial continuity. On the heels of that speech he made a clear demand that Netanyahu stop construction in the settlements. Since then everything has been downhill, to the point where the US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, praised Netanyahu for his "unprecedented concessions regarding the settlements." Clinton’s statement was the last straw. It came amid a series of humiliations suffered by Abu Mazen, who had expected the Americans to stand by their call for a freeze. Because of the initial US position, Abu Mazen went out on a limb, conditioning the renewal of negotiations on a freeze. However, when the UN General Assembly convened in September, Obama made him sit together with Netanyahu at a three-cornered meeting. Apart from a weak handshake, it produced nothing. more.. e-mail The Disastrous Presidency of Mahmoud Abbas Rannie Amiri, CounterPunch 11/13/2009 Is It Really Over? After five long years, and at great expense to a state hoped-to-be-called Palestine, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has finally realized that subservience to the United States and Israel pays little in dividends. Indeed, what he has done to the cause of Palestine, the unity of its people, and the advancement of their rights has been nothing short of unmitigated disaster. Last week, Abbas said he would not seek re-election in polls scheduled for January 2010. His resignation however, was quickly rejected by the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and as of today, no one has announced their intent to run in his place. In truth, many consider the move a tactic to exert additional pressure on the Obama administration, especially after Abbas’ demand for an Israeli settlement freeze prior to talks went largely ignored. It came, after all, on the heels of Secretary of State Clinton’s meeting with Prime Minister Netanyahu, in which she rewarded Abbas for his years of servility with the following humiliating statement: “What the Prime Minister has offered in specifics of restraint on the policy of settlements ... is unprecedented.” Nevertheless, a host of regional leaders publicly urged him to stay on as president (the list of which is quite telling): Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Jordanian King Abdullah II, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak, and President Shimon Peres (who referred to him as “my old friend”). As quoted by the Ynet news website, an Israeli state official candidly stated, “It’s an Israeli interest to have Abbas stay in office.” more.. e-mail From the River to the Sea Gilad Atzmon, Dissident Voice 11/13/2009 Let’s once and for all stop getting excited about America mounting pressure on Israel to freeze West Bank settlements. The entire fascination with the topic is a product of Zionist spin. It is there to divert attention from the root cause of the conflict: The robbery of Palestine and Palestinians in the name of a ‘Jewish home coming’. The call to stop Israeli construction in the West Bank is there to leave us with the false impression that the robbery of Palestine started in 1967. The facts are known to many of us, but not to all. The vast majority of Palestinians were expelled from their towns, villages, fields and orchards in 1948. What seems as an American peace initiative putting pressure on Israel to halt its expansion into the West Bank is in fact an agenda that is promoted by Zionists within the US Administration who realise like the late Sharon, that the only chance for the Jewish state to survive the next decade, is to shrink into a little Jewish shtetle (ghetto). The Two state solution is indeed the last effort to keep Zionism alive. Netanyahu is far from being stupid. He understands it all. He knows that his Zionist Revisionist father’s dream of ‘greater Eretz Yisrael’ is unattainable. Haaretz reported that the Israeli PM admitted in Washington that he was committed to ‘two states living side by side’. However, he stressed that the “the right of Palestinian refugees to return to the homes from which they were expelled, would not be on the table.” Seemingly, an Israeli hawkish PM is voluntarily confronting the Israeli original sin namely the expulsion of the vast majority of the Palestinians people. However, the fact that he insists that it won’t be ‘on the table’ can only mean that it is on the table already. “They”, continues Netanyahu, “must abandon the fantasy of flooding Israel with refugees, give up irredentist claims to the Negev and Galilee, and declare unequivocally that the conflict is finally over”. Clearly, Netanyahu expresses here a wish that is shared by most if not all Israelis. They all dream to open their eyes in the morning just to find out that all Goyim, Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims just left the region. I am here to advise Netanyahu and every Israeli who is willing to listen that this is not going to happen. As much as being flooded by ‘refugee’ Palestinians is a deep Israeli nightmare, it is far from being a Palestinian fantasy. It is actually a reality waiting to happen. Israel has lost its opportunity to reconcile with its neighbours. It failed to settle its conflict with the indigenous people of the land. The fate of Israel will be determined by ‘facts on the ground’ namely demography. In terms of reconciliation, Israel has past the no return Zone. Its fate is doomed. One Palestine from the river to the sea is not any more a matter of ‘if’ but rather a question of ‘when’. Unlike most Israelis who dismiss the Palestinian cause, Netanyahu admitted today that Palestinians were indeed expelled. For the first time Palestinians’ “irredentist claims” are being addressed by an Israeli PM. And yet, Netanyahu should stop deluding himself and his people. It is not just the Negev and Galilee. It is actually every piece of land between the river and the sea: Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa, Be’er Sheva and every village, orchard, field, river and tree in between. The only question that is left open is how long will it take for the Shekel to drop? How long will it take before Israelis grasp that they dwell on stolen land? How long will it take before the Israelis realise that the battle is lost? How long will it take for the Israelis to internalise the obvious fact that they have once again managed to get on the wrong side of their Neighbours. more.. e-mail Qunfuz, P U L S E 11/12/2009 The hope invested by many in Barack Obama has dissolved. Dare I sing ‘I told you so’? I do. The audacious hope of Obamamania was always faith-based, founded on the believer’s premise that the handsome candidate didn’t mean what he actually said, that we should read his words esoterically, as code for profound radicalism. Now reality bites, and we discover that his promises to AIPAC and the military were solid and literal. It’s certainly something that a black man has become president of a country built by African slaves, although we must place this in the context of the fierce racist backlash since his election (would those guardians of the constitution raving about the tree of liberty being watered by the blood of tyrants be quite so eager to wear their guns on their sleeves if the president were white and not a jumped-up negro? I doubt it). But that’s the achievement of Obama’s skin colour, not his policy; in fact it’s the achievement of the people who voted for him. Another achievement is that – in the company of war criminals such as Shimon Peres, Yitzhak Rabin and Henry Kissinger – Obama has already won the Nobel peace prize. Hooray! But let’s get back to reality, the reality of blood and tears as suffered in the arc of American-led or funded conflict. As promised, Obama has escalated the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan and put no pressure at all on apartheid Israel as it gobbles up the few remaining slivers of Palestine. His address to the Muslims in Cairo was sweeter in tone than what we had become accustomed to, but remained an offensive imperialist lecture. He pontificated about hijabs (he called them hajibs) and the education of women, and repeated the Bernard Lewis-Dick Cheney orientalist line about “a self-defeating focus on the past”, instead of addressing American occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and backing for assaults on Lebanon and Somalia in the present. He mocked Palestinian resistance and misrepresented the history of black resistance in America while he was about it. He failed entirely to mention the enormous violence meted out to the Palestinians by Zionism. But he won applause for this: “The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. This construction violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace." more.. e-mail Debate on Gaza report shows growing resolve to challenge pro-Israeli stance James Zogby, The National 11/12/2009 WASHINGTON // The significance of the congressional debate of the Goldstone report on the Gaza conflict last week may have been ignored by many given what appeared to be the lopsided vote in favour of the anti-Goldstone resolution. It will be recalled that when the report was first released, members of Congress were quick to denounce it using, at times, near hysterical language. Since Goldstone had no vocal champions, when the foreign affairs committee chairman, Howard Berman, and the ranking Republican Ileana Ros-Lehtinen introduced their anti-Goldstone resolution, one might have thought that the matter would be quickly resolved with a near unanimous vote. But that was not to be the case. For his part, Justice Goldstone mounted a vigorous defence of his work. In an open letter to the congressional sponsors, the justice offered a point-by-point rebuttal of what he detailed as the misleading and factually incorrect statements in the resolution. In addition, two members of Congress, Keith Ellison, Democrat of Minnesota, and Brian Baird, Democrat of Washington state, who had visited Gaza after the war, wrote articles and pressed their colleagues urging a more thoughtful consideration of the Goldstone report. Leading human rights organisations, Arab-American and American-Jewish groups, a coalition of Christian churches and other non-governmental organisations mobilised their memberships and addressed letters to Congress. As a result, instead of a quick and quiet vote, an extended debate took place. At least 16 members of Congress rose to speak about their opposition to the bill. more.. e-mail How to Press the Advantage With Iran Flynt Leverett And Hillary Mann Leverett, New York Times 9/29/2009 TEHRAN’S disclosure that it is building a second uranium enrichment plant near the holy city of Qum has derailed the Obama administration’s already faltering efforts to engage with Iran. The United States will now cling even more tightly to the futile hope that international pressure and domestic instability will induce major changes in Iranian decision-making. Indeed, the meeting on Thursday in Geneva of the United Nations Security Council’s five permanent members and Germany with Iran (the “five plus one” talks) will not be an occasion for strategic discussion but for delivering an ultimatum: Iran will have to agree to pre-emptive limitations on its nuclear program or face what Secretary of State Hillary Clinton calls “crippling” sanctions. However, based on conversations we’ve had in recent days with senior Iranian officials — including President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — we believe it is highly unlikely Iran will accept this ultimatum. It is also unlikely that Russia and China will support sanctions that come anywhere near crippling Iran. After this all-too-predictable scenario has played out, the Obama administration will be left, as a consequence of its own weakness and vacillation, with extremely poor choices for dealing with Iran. Because President Obama assembled a national security team that, for the most part, did not share his early vision for American-Iranian rapprochement, his administration never built a strong public case for engagement. The prospect of engagement is still treated largely as a channel for “rewarding” positive Iranian actions and “punishing” problematic behavior — precisely what Mr. Obama, as a presidential candidate, criticized so eloquently about President George W. Bush’s approach. more.. e-mail Haidar Eid, Ma’an News Agency 11/15/2009 Dear Mr President, You will probably not read this letter due to your busy schedule and the huge number of messages you receive from presidents, kings, princes, sheiks, and prime ministers. Who is a Palestinian academic from Gaza, after all, to have the guts and write an open letter to the president of the United States of America? What has triggered this letter is a picture of your excellency sitting with the late Palestinian intellectual Edward Said. That, of course, happened before 2004, i.e. before you underwent a process of metamorphosis which I personally think is unprecedented in history. Seeing you with Edward Said, I must say, surprised me. Said, a true public intellectual must have said something to you about the suffering of the Palestinian people. In the picture, you and your wife seem to be listening attentively, and admiringly, to him. But the point remains; did you really understand his eloquent, passionate defense of the rights of the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine? Judging from your recent policy shifts, I very much doubt it. It is precisely the incongruity between the photograph and these policy shifts that has prompted this letter. Mr President, The whole world celebrated your election as the first African-American president of the US. I did not. Neither did the inhabitants of the concentration camp where I live. Your sympathetic visit to Sderot"”an Israeli town which was the Palestinian village of Najd until 1948 when its people were ethnically cleansed"”three years after your first visit to a Kibbutz in northern Israel in support of its residents, and after your pledge to be committed to the security of the State of Israel and its "right" to retain unified Jerusalem as the capital city of the Jewish people"”to give but few examples"”were all clear indications of where your heart lies. more.. e-mail Scoundrel with permission Uri Avnery, Ma’an News Agency 11/15/2009 When the TV news starts with a murder, people are relieved. This means that no war has broken out, no suicide bomb has exploded, no Qassam rocket has been launched at Sderot. Ahmadinejad has not test-fired a new missile that can reach Tel Aviv. Just another murder. Not that Israel is the world"™s murder capital. We shall have to work much harder to reach the heights of New York or Moscow, not to mention Johannesburg. Statistics even show our murder rate is declining. But lately Israel has been shocked by a series of exceptionally brutal murders. A husband took revenge on his wife by killing his little daughter and burying her in a forest. A man who lived with the wife of his son killed her daughter, his own granddaughter, put her little body in a suitcase and threw it into Tel Aviv"™s Yarkon River. A son who quarreled with his wife killed her and her mother, cut up both bodies and dispersed the parts in garbage bins. A young man who had a quarrel with his mother killed her, and then went off to kill his brother, too. A man in his 70s killed his wife in her sleep with a hammer. In recent weeks, there were two cases that trumped even these atrocities. Damian Karlik, an immigrant from Russia who worked as head waiter in a Russian restaurant, was dismissed for theft and decided to take revenge on the owners, Russian immigrants like him. He went to their apartment and stabbed six people to death, one after another "“ the owner and his wife, their son and his wife and their two small grandchildren. more.. e-mail Spotlight on Palestine: an interview with Stuart Littlewood Angie Tibbs, Redress 11/15/2009 British writer and photographer Stuart Littlewood talks to Angie Tibbs about his experience of Israel’s occupation in Gaza and the West Bank, and comments on how British and American collusion, under the auspices of the Jewish lobby, is helping to sustain the world’s most lawless, brutal and unjust occupation regime. Stuart Littlewood is one of the most consistent and passionate writers on the continuing Israeli occupation of Palestine. His book, Radio Free Palestine, and his frequent articles, focus readers on the plight of the Palestinian people, on the occupiers who are responsible, and on the governments who support Israel’s slow-motion genocide and theft of an indigenous people’s homeland, culture and history. I spoke with him recently. [Angie Tibbs] Has your active support for the Palestinian people always been a part of who you are or was there a defining moment which caused you to speak out? [Stuart Littlewood] I’m new to this game. The Palestinians’ struggle for justice isn’t taught in school here and our politicians are afraid to discuss it, so the British people are kept in ignorance. I knew next to nothing until I had to research the subject for a newspaper column. The more I delved into it the angrier I became. The sheer evil! A short time later, in 2005, somebody who had read my column invited me to visit the West Bank and shoot pictures for a book. First impressions of Palestine under occupation [Question] What towns and villages did you visit in occupied Palestine and what were your impressions? [Answer] Much of the time was spent with Palestinian priests in their parishes. These are the Church’s front-line troops. They are abused and sometimes shot at by the Israelis, yet they remain focused and good-humoured. more.. e-mail Jonathan Cook In Nazareth, CounterPunch 11/16/2009 Academic Witchhunts in Israel Right-wing groups in Israel want to create a climate of fear among left-wing scholars at Israeli universities by emulating the “witch-hunt” tactics of the US academic monitoring group Campus Watch, Israeli professors warn. The watchdog groups IsraCampus and Israel Academia Monitor are believed to be stepping up their campaigns after the recent publication in a US newspaper of an Israeli professor’s call to boycott Israel. Both groups have been alerting the universities’ external donors, mostly US Jews, to what they describe as “subversive” professors as a way to bring pressure to bear on university administrations to sanction faculty staff who are critical of Israeli policies. “I have no hesitation in calling this a McCarthyite campaign,” said David Newman, a politics professor at Ben Gurion University, in Israel’s southern city of Beersheva. “What they are doing is very dangerous.” Last month, in what appeared to be a new tactic, IsraCampus placed a full-page advertisement in an official diary issued to students at Haifa University, urging them to visit its website to see a “rogues’ gallery” of 100 Israeli scholars the group deems an “academic fifth column”. “The goal is to transform our students into spies in the classroom to gather information and intimidate us,” a senior Israeli lecturer said. “It’s a model of ‘policing’ faculty staff that has been very successful in stifling academic freedom in the US.” Both Israel Academia Monitor, established in 2004, and the later IsraCampus, model themselves on Campus Watch, a US organisation founded by Daniel Pipes, an academic closely identified with the US neoconservative movement. more.. e-mail Lebanese Students Advise Obama on How to Get It Right Franklin Lamb in Beirut, CounterPunch 11/13/2009 "Is Your Government Stupid or Just What is the Problem?” If those in Lebanon watching the news on 11/12/09 blinked they might have missed an interesting news item. It appeared at approximately 4:20 pm on Narharnet.com, the pro-US/Saudi news website. The news item read “4:16 pm, American Ambassador Michele Sison (sp) departed Lebanon for her country.” Ten minutes later the item disappeared and, as it turned out, the ten minutes was exactly how long it took for the US Embassy security and press office to inform Beirut media outlets that “the American Ambassadors movements are to be reported at least one hour after they occur, not one minute.” The hasty departure of Ambassador Michele Sisson, according to the US Foreign Relations Committee office, may have been because the Obama administration is preparing for a ‘deep review’ of its 9 months effort in Lebanon and the region, debriefing key officials arriving from the area to participate. Ambassador Sisson will likely give the White House an earfull, including a report of what the Embassy Press Office referred to as the spectacle this week of former US friends and assets in the March 14 majority coalition warmly and very publicly embracing at various events marking the end of the five-month effort to create a government here of those “Iranian surrogates” in Hezbollah. The Ambassador may also report to the White House that Hezbollah in now the most popular and respected political party in Lebanon and the main pillar of the new government and that it is about to launch its social welfare initiatives in Parliament. The White House appears to know that Hezbollah is here to stay. If a plebiscite was held, polls show, the Lebanese public would agree that now more than ever the growing National Lebanese Resistance led by Hezbollah is needed as a deterrent to Israeli aggression, given the recent discovery of a vast Israeli spy network, daily violations of Lebanese sovereignty, as well as the serial threats from all manner of Israeli officials, extremist rabbis, settlers and their supporters in the US Congress who appear to be encouraging Israel to launch its seventh war against Lebanon. more.. e-mail How To Create A Terrorist Political Theatrics 11/16/2009 Going from Ramallah to Jerusalem by bus should only take about twenty minutes, but since Israel constructed the separation wall it usually takes up to one hour. In addition to the wall one has to negotiate Qalandia checkpoint, a hi-tech airport/border security style military facility. Everyone has to disembark from the bus, pass through the checkpoint and, assuming that everything went as planned, get back on the bus on the other side of the wall and continue on their journey to Jerusalem. The last Sunday of October 2009 it took me and a friend who was accompanying me more than three hours because of a dramatic incident that is going to change one girl’s life forever. After getting out of the bus, we arrived at the checkpoint’s entrance and went through a narrow, barred passageway that could be the entrance to hell. Then we passed through the first turnstile under the watch of a bored looking Israeli security guard and several sophisticated video cameras, and entered the heart of the checkpoint, it’s security area—where you are trapped until the Israeli soldiers allow you to exit. To do so, you have to proceed through several steps. The first is going through one of the six lanes, where you have to pass through a second turnstile before arriving at the lane’s “checking area”. There you have to put all your belongings through an x-ray machine, walk through a metal detector, present an identity document to a teenage Israeli soldier sitting in the lane’s control room behind bullet-proof glass. Of course, you can only pass if you have a foreign passport with a valid Israeli visa, an Israeli passport, a “Blue ID card” (for Palestinians who live inside the current borders of Israel but not in East-Jerusalem) or a “Jerusalem ID card” (for Palestinians who live in East-Jerusalem). This means that the vast majority of Palestinians living in the West Bank, who hold a “Green ID”, are not allowed to cross the checkpoint and go to Jerusalem. However, even if you have all the needed documents and everything goes right until that point, you are still at the whim of whichever young, generally female, soldier who is present in the control room that day..... more.. e-mail Hanna Braun, peacepalestine 2/13/2005 How did we get from there to here? This is an account of a personal Journey to try and help to explain how so many of us fell for the Zionist myth and how difficult it was -and still is- to see the truth beyond it. When I arrived in Palestine with my parents in 1937, the Jewish Community in Palestine was minute. The country was also in the midst of a bitter and violent revolt against the British Authorities and the new settlers. As soon as we arrived, my father’s relations who had come to Haifa’s port to welcome us, warned us of the dangerous, treacherous and backward Arabs, who were highly visible as dockworkers. These aunts and uncles also cautioned us never to employ Arabs nor to buy anything from them. This widespread slogan however, termed "Hebrew work for Hebrew workers", was frequently observed in the breach of it. My mother’s immediate reaction was "is this how you want to live with them in peace?" This remark earned her the pity, bordering on contempt, of most people for not being a true Zionist at all. At the time this was certainly true: my family on mother’s side were so deeply integrated into German society that they regarded Zionists as something for poor East European Jews who couldn’t make ends meet. Eventually she was persuaded to Zionism; albeit to a more humane and benign version that was very short lived. As to me, I started school immediately, learned Hebrew from scratch and was keen to fit in. The nationalistic songs we learned as well as the collection boxes for the Fund for Israel and the Settlement Redemption Fund, didn’t impinge much on my consciousness. My Zionist convictions grew almost imperceptively, mainly after I started secondary school in Haifa at the age of 13. Together with socialism, which many of us embraced to a greater or lesser degree, the vision of an idealised future of shared rather than owned property and of building our new land with our hands, if at all possible as pioneer founders of a new kibbutz (an agricultural commune), was beguiling. more.. e-mail Recognize Palestinian statehood now Ghassan Khatib, Ma’an News Agency 11/17/2009 The failure of the Obama administration to launch a serious negotiating process between the PLO and Israel has led to Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian Authority president, announcing that he will not seek re-election. He cited Washington’s inability to ensure an Israeli settlement construction freeze as well as American bias toward Israel as the main reasons. This has created a serious crisis not only for the peace process, but for US Middle East policy in general. It is a crisis that will be magnified because of the interrelation between the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and other Middle East conflicts, in addition to the fact that no vacuum is possible in this region: when there is no move toward peace, it only provides room for war and violence. At the same time, the crisis should give pause for reflection, especially for the US administration. Theoretically, we can go in one of two possible directions from here. The crisis can either lead us back to violent confrontations and the unmasked reality of military occupation, or it can move us forward toward ending the occupation, Palestinian statehood and a two-state solution. A two-state solution still appears to be the preferred goal of the international community. However, the international community is laboring under a problematic concept: that the only way to get there is through agreement between the two parties. This needs to be reconsidered. The concept presupposes Israeli consent. However, Israel has proven reluctant to embrace a two-state solution, certainly a reasonably just one, and has instead used the imbalance of power to prevent any agreement from emerging. For as long as Israel can do this, it has no incentive to end the occupation. more.. e-mail Who is funding the rabbi who endorses killing gentile babies? Akiva Eldar, Ha’aretz 11/17/2009 Right-wing spokesmen, including some elected officials, rushed to place Yaakov "Jack" Teitel in the fringe group alongside Yigal Amir, Eden Natan Zada, Eliran Golan, Asher Weisgan, Danny Tikman and a few other "political/ideological" murderers. True, they acknowledge, there are among us several lunatic rabbis who agitate to violence. Really, just a handful; even a toddler could count them. The more stringent will note that unlike the Hamas government, our government does not pay the salaries of rabbis who advocate the killing of babies. Is that so? Not really. For example, government ministries regularly transfer support and funding to a yeshiva whose rabbi determined that it is permissible to kill gentile babies "because their presence assists murder, and there is reason to harm children if it is clear that they will grow up to harm us ... it is permissible to harm the children of a leader in order to stop him from acting evilly ... we have seen in the Halakha that even babies of gentiles who do not violate the seven Noahide laws, there is cause to kill them because of the future threat that will be caused if they are raised to be wicked people like their parents." Lior Yavne, who oversees research at the Yesh Din human rights organization, checked and found that in 2006-2007, the Ministry of Education department of Torah institutions transferred over a million shekels to the Od Yosef Hai yeshiva in Yitzhar. more.. e-mail Jonathan Cook in Nazareth, CounterPunch 11/17/2009 Judge Rules Arab Teens Need Protection from Israeli Justice An Israeli judge made an historic ruling last week when he decided that an Arab teenager needed “protection” from the justice system and ordered that he not be convicted despite being found guilty of throwing stones at a police car during a protest against Israel’s attack last winter on Gaza. Prosecutors had demanded that the juvenile, a 17-year-old from Nazareth in northern Israel, be convicted of endangering a vehicle on the road, a charge that carries a punishment of up to 20 years’ imprisonment, as a way to deter other members of Israel’s Arab minority from committing similar offences. But Judge Yuval Shadmi said discrimination in the Israeli legal system’s treatment of Jewish and Arab minors, particularly in cases of what he called “ideologically motivated” offences, was “common knowledge”. In the verdict, he wrote: “I will say that the state is not authorised to caress with one hand the Jewish ‘ideological’ felons, and flog with its other hand the Arab ‘ideological’ felons.” He referred in particular to the lenient treatment by the police and courts both of Jewish settler youths who have attacked soldiers in the West Bank and who violently resisted the disengagement from the Gaza Strip in 2005, and of religious extremists who have spent many months battling police to prevent the opening of a car park on the Sabbath in Jerusalem. Abir Baker, a lawyer with Adalah, a legal group for Israel’s 1.3 million-strong Arab minority, said the ruling was the first time a judge in a criminal court had ackowledged that the state pursued a policy of systematic discrimination in demanding harsher punishments for Arab citizens. more.. e-mail Palestinians throw down challenge to Obama and UN Donald Macintyre, The Independent 11/17/2009 As so often in the Middle East, we have been here before. The latest suggestion – that a frustrated Palestinian leadership would unilaterally declare a state and invite international recognition for it – is not new. It was made a decade ago by Yasser Arafat when Benjamin Netanyahu, then as now, was Prime Minister. It was made again after the collapse of the Camp David talks a year later, when then Prime Minister Ehud Barak, like some of Mr Netanyahu’s more hawkish ministers now, threatened to annex the most populous settlements in the West Bank in retaliation. And as the second intifada – and Israel’s determined military response to it – gathered momentum, nothing came of it. The conventional wisdom is that nothing will come of it this time either. Nevertheless it is worth looking at what has changed since then. First, Palestinian state-building in the occupied West Bank has greatly advanced since then, thanks in large part to the determined efforts of an able Prime Minister, Salam Fayyad, efforts praised by Mr Netanyahu himself. Even the Israeli military has acknowledged the strides made on security. Indeed part of the Palestinians’ frustration is their belief that they have fulfilled their obligations under the six-year-old Road Map, while Israel has failed to fulfil its parallel obligations to halt settlement building and remove outposts. With the World Bank already saying that Palestinian service delivery exceeds that of several of its regional neighbours, Mr Fayyad is entitled to believe that when his two-year plan is completed in 2011, and if (and of course it’s a very big if) the daunting problems of Gaza can be overcome, the PA will be match-fit for statehood. So it’s hardly surprising that unilateralism has its attractions. Yesterday Saeb Erekat, whose raison d’etre is negotiations with Israel, denied that a unilateral declaration of independence was on the agenda, and insisted that all the Palestinians were seeking was a Security Council resolution in which the UN would for the first time establish clear terms of reference for negotiations for a state based on 1967 borders, with East Jerusalem as its capital, and an equitable solution for refugees. more.. e-mail The Drama and the Farce: Obama’s Mini Mideast Summit Uri Avnery, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs 11/1/2009 No point denying it: in the first round of the match between Barack Obama and Binyamin Netanyahu, Obama was beaten. Obama had demanded a freeze of all settlement activity, including East Jerusalem, as a condition for convening a tripartite summit meeting, in the wake of which accelerated peace negotiations were to start, leading to peace between two states—Israel and Palestine. In the words of the ancient proverb, a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. Netanyahu has tripped Obama on his first step. The president of the United States has stumbled. The threefold summit did indeed take place. But instead of a shining achievement for the new American administration, we witnessed a humbling demonstration of weakness. After Obama was compelled to give up his demand for a settlement freeze, the meeting no longer had any content. True, Mahmoud Abbas did come, after all. He was dragged there against his will. The poor man was unable to refuse the invitation from Obama, his only support. But he will pay a heavy price for this flight: the Palestinians, and the entire Arab world, have seen his weakness. And Obama, who had started his term with a ringing speech to the Muslim world from Cairo, now looks like a broken reed. The Israeli peace movement has been dealt another painful blow. It had pinned its hopes on the steadfastness of the American president. Obama’s victory and the settlement freeze were to show the Israeli public that the refusal policy of Netanyahu was leading to disaster. more.. e-mail Joshua Mitnick, Christian Science Monitor 11/18/2009 Israel settlements use more than four times as much water as Palestinians and the absence of a peace agreement is stalling negotiations to improve the situation. Auja, West Bank - The Hmoud family once prospered in this arid Palestinian farm village by cultivating banana and eggplant crops, earning enough to send a son abroad for medical school and to build a house with a showy staircase and a two-story window. But drought has decimated the spring that is Auja’s only agricultural water source, and fields once filled with palm trees are now empty. Village residents have been forced to find work in the greenhouses near Jewish settlements that are hooked up to Israeli water mains. "This before you is barren land," says Mahmoud Hmoud, standing in parched field littered with plastic sheeting. "Ten years go it was blooming." Long a hot-button in the parched Middle East, the need for a water-rights compromise here has become more acute after years of dry winters, as Palestinians struggle with what they say are insufficient quotas and Israel mulls steep tax hikes on home and garden usage. Both sides blame each other for failing to honor the 1995 interim agreement still in effect. Though potential solutions exist, little progress can be made until the peace process – stalled for nearly a year – is restarted. Two straws, one glass of water The dispute partly focuses on rights to a "mountain aquifer" underneath the hilltops of the Israeli-occupied West Bank. It collects rainwater, most of which then flows through subterranean rock formations across the Green Line into Israel proper. more.. e-mail A state for all its citizens, not a state of all the Jews Alan Philps, The National 11/19/2009 It is not often that an Israeli history book is translated into Arabic with a view to finding a mass readership. And it is even rarer when that book is to be translated into two other major languages of the Islamic world, Turkish and Indonesian, not to mention Japanese, Russian, German, Italian and Portuguese. The work is The Invention of the Jewish People by Shlomo Sand, a professor of history at Tel Aviv University. When it was first published in Israel last year, it spent 19 weeks in the bestseller list, thanks in part to furious denunciations by academic historians. It has just appeared in English, and the provocative title does not disappoint. Sand’s thesis is simple: the founding myth of Israel, set out in the 1948 declaration of independence, that the Jewish people were exiled by the Romans in the first century and have the right to return, is a lie. There was no exile. Judaism was a successful proselytising religion, taking advantage of a weariness in the Greco-Roman world with its pagan gods. So the Jews are a religious community, the vast majority being converts. The idea of a Jewish people, the author writes, was created in the 19th century at a time when the disparate peoples who lived in France, Italy or Germany were creating their own national myths as the basis for nation-states. The narrative of the Jews as a people descended from the Biblical Hebrews was hijacked by the Zionists. It is used to this day to bolster the settlement project in the occupied territories. Sand is a specialist in European history, so his work has been treated with condescension by specialists. Simon Schama, the historian and documentary maker, writes with academic hauteur that serious historians stopped believing in the exile many years ago, so Sand is presenting “truisms as though they were revolutionary illuminations”. more.. e-mail Bantustans and the unilateral declaration of statehood Electronic Intifada: 19 Nov 2009 - From a rumor, to a rising murmur, the proposal floated by the Palestinian Authority's (PA) Ramallah leadership to declare Palestinian statehood unilaterally has suddenly hit center stage. It's no exaggeration to propose that this idea, although well-meant by some, raises the clearest danger to the Palestinian national movement in its entire history, threatening to wall Palestinian aspirations into a political cul-de-sac from which it may never emerge. Virginia Tilley comments for The Electronic Intifada. Jahalin Bedouin suffer without representation Electronic Intifada: 19 Nov 2009 - Beyond the demolitions in its suburbs and the frequent, violent clashes around the al-Aqsa mosque, Jerusalem is the scene of a quieter shame. Southeast of the holy city live the Jahalin Bedouin, a community that has been repeatedly displaced and transferred, now enduring unimaginable poverty beside Jerusalem's largest garbage dump. Kieron Monks reports. British TV documentary tackles taboo of Israel's lobby Electronic Intifada: 19 Nov 2009 - For the first time a mainstream British television program has tackled the Zionist lobby head-on. Channel 4's Dispatches , broadcast on 16 November, promised to hold the pro-Israel lobby up to rigorous public scrutiny and it succeeded. Presented by Peter Oborne, former political editor of the right-wing weekly The Spectator , Dispatches revealed the cozy relationship between Britain's pro-Israel lobby and both the Conservative and Labour parties as well as its attempts to stifle criticism of Israel in the press. Diane Langford reports for The Electronic Intifada. Sounds and struggle: Solidarity through music Electronic Intifada: 18 Nov 2009 - On Wednesday, 11 November, more than 200 persons packed into La Sala Rossa, a slightly operatic Montreal venue, as part of the ongoing concert series "Artists Against Apartheid," which is held in solidarity with the call from Palestinian civil society for boycott, divestment and sanctions from Israeli apartheid and is organized by Tadamon!, a Montreal collective working in solidarity with Palestine. Tyler Nadeau writes for The Electronic Intifada. 19 Nov 2009 - At 8:30 on November 15, a number of young men went as usual to the land near Gaza’s northern border with Israel, intending to catch birds. Amjad Hassanain, 27, was among the bird-catchers hunting near the border fence when Israeli soldiers began shooting. The shots which missed the other bird-catchers hit Hassanain, grazing his shoulder. Cameraman Abdul Rahman Hussain, filming in the vicinity, reports having seen the group of bird-catches head north. “We were near the former Israeli settlement of Doghit,” said Hussain, referring to the area northwest of Beit Lahia in Gaza’s north. “I had gone to the border area to photograph a young bird-catcher. We were about 400... 19 Nov 2009 - By Aijaz Zaka Syed - Dubai Just when relations between the United States and the Islamic world appeared to be improving slowly but decisively, thanks to President Barack Obama, it seems we are back to square one. The Fort Hood shooting, allegedly by a second generation Arab American army psychiatrist killing 13 US Army men and women, has in one swift move undone all the hard work by Muslim Americans to bridge the gulf with mainstream America. Since Obama took over, the US media and officials have been uncharacteristically restrained, avoiding references to religion in discussions and comments on the war on terror. All that is history now. For the no holds-barred US media and the shrill Republican neocons, it's as though Fort Hood has opened floodgates to all the anger, hatred and sheer malice towards Muslims pent up for sometime. From personally blaming Obama for the attack to blasting politically correct pantywaists who are inviting the 'Islamofascists' to take over Christian, white America, the media and the bored Republicans have pounced on the usual suspects like hungry wolves. Kosher Joe Lieberman, who once dreamed of being the first Jewish president, wants the US military investigated for "dereliction of duty". Republican Peter Hoekstra vows to unmask "cover-ups in the White House." Columnist Michelle Malkin blasts the US Army for its "blind diversity" that embraces a faith like Islam, which "equals death." Another Jewish columnist Jonah Goldberg argues, "there's a powerful case to be made that Islamic extremism is not some... Zionist Control of Britain's Government: 1940-2009 19 Nov 2009 - By William A. Cook 'After so many years of setting the tone, bribing UK politicians and controlling the BBC they (Zionists) are used to being untouchable.' (Gilad Atzmon, “Britain Must de-Zionist Itself Immediately,” Nov. 17, 2009, MWC News). This week the British people listened to the Daily Mail’s Peter Oborne present, on Channel 4, his devastating account of the Jewish lobby’s control of their government. Now we know that virtually all the principal politicians in the UK of both parties, like their brothers across the lake in our House and Senate, take “contributions” from the Israeli lobby machine ensuring that the Anglo-American mid-east policies follow the dictates of the Israeli government. Gilad Atzmon responded to this report in his article “Britain must de-Zionise itself immediately,” noting that this control has been in place for so many years the lobby feels “untouchable.” How many years are “many” one might ask? In 1941, the High Commissioner of Palestine, Harold MacMichael, Senior Palestine Mandate officer for the British Mandate forces in Palestine, sent the following “Top Secret” “Memorandum on the Participation of the Jewish National Institutions in Palestine in Acts of Lawlessness and Violence” to the Secretary of State, dated October 16th, a report prepared by The Palestine Police, Criminal Investigation Department: The memorandum illustrates—indeed, brings into full limelight—the fact that the Mandatory is faced potentially with as grave a danger in Palestine from Jewish violence as it ever faced from Arab violence, a danger infinitely less easy to meet by the methods... Abbas Election Pullout Raises Questions 18 Nov 2009 - By Stu Harrison President of the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority (PA), Mahmoud Abbas, said on November 5 that he would not run in the presidential election scheduled for January 24. Abbas has been the United States and Israel’s favored negotiations partner. Since the Oslo accords between the Palestinian Liberation Organization and Israel in 1993, Abbas has been a key Palestinian negotiator pushing for a two-state solution to the Palestinian struggle. Under a two-state solution, Palestinians would accept a statelet based on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, divided from each other and cut up by growing Israeli-settlements and Jewish-only roads. Until Oslo, the demand of the Palestinian movement was for one state over historic Palestine in which all citizens, regardless of race or religion, could live in equality. A two-state solution would leave almost 80% of historic Palestine as the exclusive territory of the Jewish state of Israel, which was formed in 1948 after the expulsion of 800,000 Palestinians from their lands. The West Bank and Gaza were invaded and occupied by Israel in 1967. The US backed Abbas’s party, Fatah, in a 2007 coup over the Hamas led-unity government. Hamas had won the 2006 Palestinian Legislative Assembly elections. The coup was successful in the West Bank, but the elected Hamas-led government held on to power in Gaza. The US labels Hamas as a terrorist organization and an unsuitable partner for negotiations. Abbas’s willingness to act as a US-favored proxy, combined with Israel’s refusal to grant any concessions to Palestinian... Frustration with Obama Increasing 18 Nov 2009 - By George S. Hishmeh – Washington There is growing frustration, inside and outside the United States, with the otherwise attractive Obama administration primarily because of its failure to bring about any measurable change in U.S. policy especially in the Middle East. Hopes are continuously raised but have yet to be fulfilled. The spirited American leader has moved crowds with his ideas, here and abroad as illustrated during his current East Asia tour but none of these ideas have materialized. This has led some to look for alternative courses, skirting an American involvement, as hard as this may seem to be. ‘While much attention has been paid to the feud between the (rightist) Fox News Channel and the White House, The New York Times observed last Monday,’ the Obama administration is now facing criticism of a different sort from ... progressive hosts on MSNBC (a popular TV channel) who are using their nightly news-and-views-cast to measure what (Rachel Maddow, a liberal host) calls ‘the distance between Obama’s rhetoric and his actions.’ The paper continued: ‘While they may agree with much of what Mr. Obama says, they have pressed him to keep his campaign promises about healthcare, civil liberties and other issues.’ The same is true in the Arab world, where the lackluster Palestinian leadership agreed, reportedly at U.S. urging, to shelve the Goldstone Report that charged Israel, and to a lesser extent Hamas, of war crimes during the Israeli invasion of the Gaza Strip last December. The naive Palestinian expectation apparently was... Virginia Tilley, Electronic Intifada 11/19/2009 From a rumor, to a rising murmur, the proposal floated by the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) Ramallah leadership to declare Palestinian statehood unilaterally has suddenly hit center stage. The European Union, the United States and others have rejected it as "premature," but endorsements are coming from all directions: journalists, academics, nongovernmental organization activists, Israeli right-wing leaders (more on that later). The catalyst appears to be a final expression of disgust and simple exhaustion with the fraudulent "peace process" and the argument goes something like this: if we can’t get a state through negotiations, we will simply declare statehood and let Israel deal with the consequences. But it’s no exaggeration to propose that this idea, although well-meant by some, raises the clearest danger to the Palestinian national movement in its entire history, threatening to wall Palestinian aspirations into a political cul-de-sac from which it may never emerge. The irony is indeed that, through this maneuver, the PA is seizing -- even declaring as a right -- precisely the same dead-end formula that the African National Congress (ANC) fought so bitterly for decades because the ANC leadership rightly saw it as disastrous. That formula can be summed up in one word: Bantustan. It has become increasingly dangerous for the Palestinian national movement that the South African Bantustans remain so dimly understood. If Palestinians know about the Bantustans at all, most imagine them as territorial enclaves in which black South Africans were forced to reside yet lacked political rights and lived miserably. This partial vision is suggested by Mustafa Barghouthi’s recent comments at the Wattan Media Centre in Ramallah, when he cautioned that Israel wanted to confine the Palestinians into "Bantustans" but then argued for a unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood within the 1967 boundaries -- although nominal "states" without genuine sovereignty are precisely what the Bantustans were designed to be. more.. e-mail Defying Israeli Genocide at Home (in School) And Abroad (in Court) Mohammed Omer, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs 11/1/2009 Although ignored by much of the Western media, a battle which echoes the biblical story of David and Goliath is taking place in The Hague. In the modern-day version, young David is personified by a soft-spoken 15-year-old girl named Amira Alqerem. Goliath takes the form of the world’s fourth most powerful, nuclear-armed military state: Israel. At stake is victims’ rights the world over and the international commitment to “never again.” It is this commitment—as well as to international law, as laid down in the Fourth Geneva Conventions and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights—that Amira is asking the International Criminal Court (ICC) to recognize and uphold. The teenager’s story begins in the pre-dawn hours of Jan. 14, 2009, in the waning days of Israel’s murderous “Operation Cast Lead” assault on Gaza. Residents of the Tal Al Hawa neighborhood, her family awoke to the sound of a missile smashing into their home, killing Amira’s 42-year-old father, a shoe industry businessman with permission to enter Israel on business, and injuring her in the leg. With Amira wounded, her 16-year-old sister and 14-year-old brother left her in the damaged home and went to seek assistance. Both were killed by another Israeli missile before they could return to Amira. For several days the injured teenager lay in the rubble beneath the veranda, surviving on water dripping from a partially functioning faucet and drifting in and out of consciousness. Finally, realizing that help would not come to her, she stumbled to her father’s dead body, hoping his cell phone would work—but it no longer did. Looking out at the rubble of her former neighborhood, the young girl recognized a journalist’s home which was still standing. Painstakingly, dragging her injured leg, she made her way to the door, found it open and entered. Inside she found water bottles and clothing. Weak, she lost consciousness again. She was saved when the home’s occupants returned and discovered her. more.. e-mail Breaking the vessels Jeff Halper, Ma’an News Agency 11/20/2009 The Palestinian Authority will not unilaterally declare an independent Palestinian state. In fact, the whole issue seems a misunderstanding. Concerned that the US has backtracked on a two state solution based on the 1967 borders and that Israel was getting the world used to the "fact" that the settlements and the wall, rather than ’67 borders, now defined the parameters of a future Palestinian state (on only 15 percent of historic Palestine), the PA simply wanted the Security Council to reaffirm that principle. "What should we do while the Israeli government is busy with fait accompli actions," asked PLO negotiator Saeb Erekat, "but to turn to the Security Council to preserve the option of two states? We want the Security Council to declare that the two-state solution is the only option and that it would recognize the state of Palestine on the ’67 borders and to live side by side with the State of Israel." The PA hoped, perhaps even expected, that the US would go along. Through an escalation of rhetoric this simple clarification became the basis of speculation, against the background of President Mahmoud Abbas’ threatened resignation, that the Palestinians would attempt to force the hand of the international community and announce the establishment of their state. But what if it did happen? What if Abbas would actually announce the establishment of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders, ask the nations of the world to recognize it and then apply for admission to the UN? more.. e-mail Rachel Cooke, The Observer, The Guardian 11/22/2009 Colleagues laughed when a young journalist in Palestine announced his intention to tell the story of that region though cartoons. Twenty years later, Joe Sacco is one of the world’s leading exponents of the graphic novel form. In his books, Joe Sacco always draws himself the same way: neat and compact, a small bag slung across his body, a notebook invariably in his hand. At a single glance, the reader understands that he is both reporter and innocent abroad, an unlikely combination that propels him not only to ask difficult questions, but to go on asking them long after all the other hacks have given up and gone home. You sense in this black-and-white outline, too, a certain taut, physical alertness. Should there be trouble, he is, it seems, ready to run. The expression on his face, however, is more difficult to read. Sacco keeps his eyes permanently hidden behind the shine of his owlish spectacles; anyone wishing to gauge his deeper emotions must rely instead on his bottom lip. Basically, this lip has two modes. When he is frustrated, bewildered or angry, it moves stubbornly forward and its corners droop. When he is happy, contentedly drinking beer, say, or mildly flirting, it peels back to reveal his teeth, which are big and rabbity and exceedingly un-American, as if crafted from a piece of old orange peel. Is his eyelessness intended to send some kind of subtle message regarding the reliability of the reporter-narrator? Sacco, who in real life has elfin features and brown eyes, and is sitting next to me at a gleaming white table in the offices of his London publisher, winces. "It is deliberate now," he says. "But it certainly wasn’t in the beginning. If you look at the first few pages of [my first book] Palestine, you’ll see that I didn’t used to be able to draw at all! Also, back then, I really was more like a tourist than a reporter and I suppose the way I drew myself reflected that. I was this naive person who didn’t know where he was going or what he was doing. Since then, I’ve learned how to behave; nowadays, it would be a lie to make myself seem too bumbling. more.. e-mail What’s Next After the Goldstone Report? Ian Williams, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs 11/1/2009 Of course there is prima facie evidence that Judge Richard Goldstone is biased. He is Jewish, chair of Friends of the Hebrew University, president emeritus for the World ORT Jewish school system, and has a devoted Zionist daughter who made “aliyah” to Israel. But Hamas somehow neglected to make the allegations, even though Goldstone’s Sept. 15 report devoted over 70 pages to considering allegations of Hamas war crimes—compared with some 350 pages to allegations against Israeli forces, which the report suggested may have committed “acts amounting to war crimes and perhaps, in certain circumstances, crimes against humanity.” Bearing in mind the more than 100:1 ratio of Palestinian to Israeli casualties during Operation Cast Lead and in the months leading up to it, it shows remarkable forbearance on Hamas’ part not to have accused him in advance. They waited until afterwards to complain of the “imbalance” in the report. In fact, if Israel had deigned to present evidence to the U.N. Human Rights Council inquiry, Goldstone almost certainly would have devoted many more pages to Israeli allegations. However it was pro-Israel sources that pre-emptively and retroactively calumniated Goldstone, his committee and his report for being “one-sided” and, even more hilariously, “anti-Semitic.” It has long been a tactic of Israel and its apologists to refuse to cooperate with investigations, judicial or journalistic, and then to pounce on the result and declare it to be “one-sided,” or “biased.” Of course one breathlessly awaits any report from the Anti-Defamation League, NGO Monitor, Zionist Organization of America, U.N. Monitor, etc., ad nauseam, that has ever, ever, found an action of Israel worthy of investigation, let alone condemnation. “One-sided” in this libelous lexicon means any criticism of Israel whatsoever, as is indicated by the criticism of the Goldstone report, which concluded quite correctly that “the government of Israel had not carried out any credible investigations into alleged violations.” But then, it said the same thing about the Hamas-controlled authorities in Gaza. If that’s not even-handed, one wonders what is. more.. e-mail POEM - Cry Out Fares Khouri, Occupation Magazine 11/20/2009 Cry out in Arabic, Ahmed, and contaminate their ears Stand at Habima square, and cry out to your friend, who`s on Hertzel street, to bring you the shovel Disturb all those sitting in Rothschild boulevard with their coddled dogs Disturb them as they speak about yesterday’s party About this evening’s Macabi Tel-Aviv match About the (stinky) orthodox Jew that just got on the bus About the right-wing government that they aren’t a part of And about the intelligent Arab they met lately Cry out, ya Ahmed Defile their ears with your language They don’t like it They fear it They don’t like to hear your friend’s name It scares them, disturbs them as they read the leftist paper Cry out Ahmed, with all the voice that god gave you Cry out, don’t fear, cry out! After all, you need this shovel… No?! You need this shovel. Cry out, they won’t notice your existence until you cry out..... more.. e-mail Adam Shapiro, Redress 11/22/2009 How Tom Perriello became a slave of Israel - Adam Shapiro tells the story of a hitherto principled friend and campaigner for justice and human rights, Tom Perriello, who ran for Congress and, once elected, betrayed all of his principles and became a mere tool of the pro-apartheid American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, AIPAC. ”...the consistent lack of US credibility in the world spans Democrats and Republicans and is a consequence of our relationship with Israel and the exceptionalism applied to an occupier nation foisting apartheid on the Palestinians.” One year ago, I watched election results coming in for Virginia’s Fifth Congressional District, where my friend and colleague Tom Perriello was challenging incumbent Virgil Goode, Jr. CNN kept flipping the winner because the vote was close. Finally, Tom emerged with a 727-vote victory. I was elated, because I knew Tom and knew his deeply rooted principles. And daring to accept that there might be something to this overall atmosphere of change and hope espoused by the president-elect, I felt encouraged by the seemingly new direction and new leaders the country was embracing. Two years earlier, I met Tom in Afghanistan when he arrived as a consultant with the United Nations to explore transitional justice possibilities for the country. I was already working for a human rights organization, promoting rule of law, women’s rights and transitional justice. Tom had done similar work in Liberia helping launch a truth and reconciliation commission. more.. e-mail The Israeli Exception: Gilo and East Jerusalem Binoy Kampmark, CounterPunch 11/22/2009 In 1987, the conservative author Midge Decter described her association with Israel and those willing to place it above conventional judgment. ‘We know ourselves to be bound by ties so deep, so essential, so unconditional, that they are beyond daylight examination. To be a Jew is not an act, it is a fate. The existence of Israel is absolutely central to that fate. The rest is mere details – knowable, unknowable, makes no difference.’ This vein of thinking can be gathered from Israel’s leader David Ben-Gurion in a New York Times Magazine article in December 1960. On that occasion he was defending the illegal abduction of the war criminal Adolf Eichmann, who had been nabbed by Mossad agents from Argentina. ‘I know they [the abductors] committed a breach of the law, but sometimes they are moral obligations higher than formal law.’ This idea of Israel, and Jewish fate, being placed in the realm of an obligatory ‘higher law’, does lend itself to various, dangerous implications. Decter’s observations resonate with the recent decision by Tel Aviv to allow 900 new homes to be built in East Jerusalem in the sprawling Jewish neighbourhood of Gilo. 40,000 Israelis are already resident there. President Obama has gone so far as to see the move as ‘dangerous’. The Secretary General of the UN, Ban Ki-moon has publicly seen the gesture as one that undermines the peace effort. International conventions and views, which tend to find such settlements illegal, are considered inapplicable by the rank and file in Tel Aviv. The law of nations, that seemingly abstract body of customs and norms that are often more honoured than people might realize, are cast aside as undue hindrances to the functioning of the state. more.. e-mail Zionist control of Britain’s government: 1940-2009 William A. Cook, Redress 11/21/2009 William A. Cook charts the history of Zionist control of Britain’s government and argues "it’s time that Britain is reborn, free from the shackles that bind it to this corrupt power that flouts international law, wantonly commits crimes against humanity and in brazen arrogance tells the United Nations to shove its demands to comply with the civilized communities of the world". “After so many years of setting the tone, bribing UK politicians and controlling the BBC they [the Zionists] are used to being untouchable.” (Gilad Atzmon, “Time for Britain to reclaim its sovereignty and dignity by de-Zionizing itself”) This week the British people listened to the Daily Mail’s Peter Oborne present, on Channel 4 TV, his devastating account of the Jewish lobby’s control of the British government. Now we know that virtually all the principal politicians in the UK of both parties, like their brothers across the lake in our House and Senate, take “contributions” from the Israeli lobby machine, ensuring that the Anglo-American Middle East policies follow the dictates of the Israeli government. Gilad Atzmon responded to this report in his article “Time for Britain to reclaim its sovereignty and dignity by de-Zionizing itself,” noting that, because this control has been in place for so many years, the lobby feels “untouchable”. How many years are “many” one might ask? On 16 October 1941 the high commissioner of Palestine, Harold MacMichael, senior Palestine Mandate officer for the British Mandate forces in Palestine, sent the following “Top Secret” “Memorandum on the participation of the Jewish national institutions in Palestine in acts of lawlessness and violence” to the secretary of state, a report prepared by the Palestine Police, Criminal Investigation Department.... more.. e-mail Gilad Atzmon, Redress 11/23/2009 As a senior NATO official visits Israel to learn tricks of the killing trade to employ in Afghanistan, Gilad Atzmon warns that all the Israelis can offer NATO is the art of murdering civilians, and all NATO can look forward to in consequence is the prospect of war crimes charges. "The IDF [Israel Defence Forces] didn’t win a single war since 1967. Yes, it murdered many civilians, it flattened many cities, it starved millions, it has been committing war crimes on a daily basis for decades and yet, it didn’t win a war. Thus, the IDF cannot really teach NATO how to win in Afghanistan. If NATO generals are stupid enough to follow IDF tactics, like the Israeli generals, they will start to see charges of war crimes pile up against them. They may even be lucky enough to share their cells with some Israelis in due course, once justice is done." “Israel is the light onto the nations,” says the Torah. Indeed it is, and not just because the Torah says so. Israel is ahead of everyone else in many fronts. Take, for instance, terrorizing civilian populations and using some of the most devastating and murderous tactics against elderly people, women and the young. The Jerusalem Post reported yesterday that the chairman of NATO’s Military Committee, Admiral Giampaolo Di Paola, visited Israel earlier this week to study “IDF tactics and methods that the military alliance can utilize for its war in Afghanistan”. A senior Israeli military official added: "The one thing on NATO’s mind today is how to win in Afghanistan... Di Paola was very impressed by the IDF, which is a major source of information due to our operational experience." I would advise both the Israeli official and Admiral Di Paola to slightly curb their enthusiasm. The IDF didn’t win a single war since 1967. Yes, it murdered many civilians, it flattened many cities, it starved millions, it has been committing war crimes on a daily basis for decades and yet, it didn’t win a war. Thus, the IDF cannot really teach NATO how to win in Afghanistan.... more.. e-mail Federation? Why not? Uri Avnery, Ma’an News Agency 11/22/2009 Three days mark the 5th anniversary of the murder of Yasser Arafat, and bring back to me our last conversation at his Ramallah compound, a few weeks before his death. It was he who brought up the idea of a threefold federation "“ Israel, Palestine and Jordan. "And perhaps Lebanon, too. Why not?" "“ the same as he did at our very first meeting, in Beirut, July 1982, in the middle of the war. He mentioned Benelux, the pact between Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxemburg that predated the European Union. Lately, the term "federation" has come into fashion again. Some people believe that it can serve as a kind of compromise between the "two-state solution," now a world-wide consensus, and the "one-state solution" that is popular in some radical circles. "Federation" sounds like a miracle: there will be both "two states for two peoples" and a single entity. Two in one, one in two. The word "federation" does not frighten me. On the contrary, I was already using it in this context 52 years ago. On 2 June 1957, my magazine, Haolam Hazeh, published the first detailed plan for an independent Palestinian state that would come into being next to Israel. The West Bank was then under Jordanian occupation and the Gaza Strip under Egyptian occupation. I proposed helping the Palestinians get rid of the occupiers. According to the plan, the two states, the Israeli and the Palestinian, would then establish a federation. I thought that its proper name should be "the Jordan Union". more.. e-mail Saving Human Lives And Olive Trees In Palestine Mazin Qumsiyeh, PhD, Desert Peace 11/22/2009 Today over 150 Palestinians and internationals participated in an activity to reclaim and plant olive trees on a threatened hill in an area called Um Salamuna. Um Salamuna already lost significant amount of its land to colonial Jewish-only settlements like Efrata and Migdal Oz.The wall that includes the settlements has not been completed in this area and is slated to zig-zag to capture the hill we worked on to add it to the colonial settlement area that is already stolen. The village is one of over 20 villages and towns in the Bethlehem area that lost land to these illegal colonial settlements. In total the Bethlehem district had already been shrunk to about 20% of its original size. This 20% is a concentration camp with few openings (that could be closed at whim by the colonial occupiers) but 97% of its residents (including me) are not even allowed into occupied Jerusalem (a mere five miles away). On my way out of the area, I stopped by to take some pictures and talk with some of the occupation soldiers. Most would not talk to me. A black (Ethiopian) soldier exchanged a few words with me before his officer came and ordered me not to talk to him or other soldiers (lest they get a glimpse of the war crimes they are engaged in!). I think these grass-root Palestinian activities are critical but they have to be far better organized, planned, and managed. There were no instructions and many of the volunteers did not know what to do. Representatives of the PA (Palestinian authority who a friend jokes as standing Public Announcement) spent much of their time talking to the media. I urged them to speak to the people assembled and to organize better/bigger activities and most importantly to participate themselves (and their security staff) in planting and in clearing the land of the rocks etc. Many Palestinians want the PA to develop real influence instead of fictional authority under occupation (and we are here talking about both the West Bank and Gaza). They have lots of resources at their disposal: most of all people they could mobilize to organize and resist. Our options are not really restricted to endless useless negotiations or shooting home-made rockets..... -- Links: Photos -- See also: Photos more.. e-mail Jonathan Cook, CounterPunch 11/23/2009 South Africa Deports Airline Official After Investigation South Africa deported an Israeli airline official last week following allegations that Israel’s secret police, the Shin Bet, had infiltrated Johannesburg international airport in an effort to gather information on South African citizens, particularly black and Muslim travellers. The move by the South African government followed an investigation by local TV showing an undercover reporter being illegally interrogated by an official with El Al, Israel’s national carrier, in a public area of Johannesburg’s OR Tambo airport. The programme also featured testimony from Jonathan Garb, a former El Al guard, who claimed that the airline company had been a front for the Shin Bet in South Africa for many years. Of the footage of the undercover reporter’s questioning, he commented: “Here is a secret service operating above the law in South Africa. We pull the wool over everyone’s eyes. We do exactly what we want. The local authorities do not know what we are doing.” The Israeli foreign ministry is reported to have sent a team to South Africa to try to defuse the diplomatic crisis after the government in Johannesburg threatened to deport all of El Al’s security staff. Mr Garb’s accusations have been supported by an investigation by the regulator for South Africa’s private security industries. They have also been confirmed by human rights groups in Israel, which report that Israeli security staff are carrying out racial profiling at many airports around the world, apparently out of sight of local authorities. more.. e-mail School of Hard Knocks Kieron Monks, Ma’an News Agency 11/24/2009 As she awaits a final verdict, Bethlehem University student Berlanty Azzam (who was sent blindfolded and handcuffed back to Gaza last month) can at least take some consolation from the global campaign on her behalf. Human rights NGOs and the media have pushed her case enough to put genuine pressure on the Israeli government and their policy toward Gazan students. Most Palestinian students will not share the world’s shock at Azzam"™s case. To them there is nothing strange about suffering for their degree. Israeli restrictions seem designed to thwart academic potential, arresting lecturers, embargoing equipment and shutting down whole universities. Birzeit University, situated on the main road from Ramallah to Nablus, attracts the cream of Palestinian students. Entrance demands are comparable to Oxford and Cambridge. Its reputation is founded on liberal values that treat women as equals and leaves no intellectual stone unturned, including thorny political issues. This partly explains why 85 of its students are currently locked up in Israeli prisons, bringing the total detained to over 400 in the last six years. Ala Masalmeh, a final year English student, believes the reason for their treatment is both practical and symbolic. "Education is the main reason for the development of any society. They don’t want Palestinian people to be literate and intelligent. Very few of my friends take higher education because of the problems we face. If you tell a soldier at a checkpoint you are a student they will keep you for hours, searching and interrogating you. more.. e-mail Inside Israeli jails, the real victims of a cry for justice Jesse Rosenfeld, The National 11/24/2009 Amid the growing media fever over a possible prisoner swap involving the release of Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier held by Hamas, another young captive has a less visible public profile – but personifies Israel’s chokehold on Palestinian self-expression. Mohammad Othman, 33, from the West Bank town of Jayyous, and an activist with the grassroots Palestinian organisation Stop the Wall, was arrested on September 22 at the Allenby Bridge crossing on the Jordanian border. He was on his way home after a meeting in Norway with supporters of the global movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions on Israel (BDS). Adameer (Arabic for “conscience”), the Palestinian prisoners’ support and human rights organisation, contends that his arrest is a result of “his successful human rights advocacy and community activism”. Mohammad was interrogated for two months at the Kishon detention centre in northern Israel. His lawyer told me he was repeatedly asked about his meetings, contacts and political activities in Europe. He alleges that Mohammad was kept in isolation, deprived of sleep, questioned round the clock, and threatened with death. On Monday, Mohammad was formally placed in Israeli administrative detention for three months. He is the latest of more than 335 Palestinians held in this way, a practice based on a 1945 emergency British Mandate law and highlighted in a report last month by the Israeli human rights groups B’Tselem and HaMoked. I first met Mohammad Othman in Jayyous a year ago, during a protest against the annexation of the towns’s farmland to build Israel’s wall. Residents had just had their permits to cross the wall to their farms revoked, and had rekindled their earlier campaign of resistance.... more.. e-mail Jonathan Cook, Nazareth, CounterPunch 11/22/2009 A plan by right-wing legislators in Israel to commemorate the anniversary this month of the death of Meir Kahane, whose banned anti-Arab movement is classified as a terrorist organization, risks further damaging the prospects for talks between Israel and the Palestinians, US officials have warned. A move to stage the commemoration in Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, is being led by Michael Ben-Ari, who was elected this year and is the first self-declared former member of Kahane’s party, Kach, to become a legislator since the movement was banned 15 years ago. The US Embassy, in Tel Aviv, has sent a series of e-mails to Reuven Rivlin, the parliamentary speaker, asking that he intervene to block the event. According to US officials, pressure is being exerted on behalf of George Mitchell, the US president Barack Obama’s envoy to the region, who is concerned that it will add to his troubles as Israeli and Palestinian leaders clash over a possible move by the Palestinians to issue a unilateral declaration of statehood. Some Israeli legislators have warned that Mr Ben-Ari and his supporters are gaining a stronger foothold in parliament, in an indication of the country’s increasing lurch rightwards. “Ben-Ari and the advisers he has brought with him are unabashed representatives for Kach and Kahane’s ideas,” said Ahmed Tibi, an Arab legislator and the deputy speaker. “What we have is in effect a terrorist cell in the parliament.” Kahane, a US rabbi who emigrated to Israel in the early 1970s, advocated the expulsion of all Arabs from “Greater Israel”, an area that the far right believes encompasses not only Israel but also the occupied Palestinian territories of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and parts of neighbouring Arab states. more.. e-mail Palestine’s right to statehood Curtis Doebbler, Ma’an News Agency 11/22/2009 With the Palestinian authorities in Ramallah seeking recognition of a Palestinian state through the United Nations, we must consider what this means both to Palestinians and to the rest of the world. States are the predominant actors in the international community. They are the main actors who create and implement and are subject to international law, a system of rules initially established by Western states but now widely accepted as governing relations between states. As statehood will have a significant effect on how Palestine is considered, and likely treated, by the international community, it is important to consider what exactly is the Palestinians’ entitlement to a state and what statehood means. International law provides a common denominator that can be used to answer this question. The starting point for Palestinian statehood or independence is not UN General Assembly Resolution 181, which recommended, as the world body has no power to do more, that two states be created on Palestinian territory. It is this right to self-determination that belongs to the Palestinians as the indigenous people of Palestine. This right is perhaps the most notable human right recognized by the United Nations. It is the only human right expressly recognized in the Charter of the United Nations, acknowledged in articles 1, paragraph 2, 55 and 73. The right to self-determination is an essential, the most essential for many states, part of customary international law and has been declared one of the most basic principles by the UN General Assembly’s Declaration on the Principles of International Law concerning the Friendly Relations and Cooperation among States. more.. e-mail A Policy Paper on the Internal Palestinian Peace Plague Ayman Nijim, Palestine Think Tank 11/22/2009 The speculation upon the destiny of the Palestinian factions and the hope of a unified geographical Palestine (West Bank and the Gaza Strip), in this period, may seem spontaneous and easy, according to the facts of life in the Palestinian territories. But this is the challenging situation – Hamas governs the Gaza Strip and Fatah has the sovereignty on the West Bank and this has caused ‘Big Problems’ to which their political future will now be in question. The problems are severe because the two parties did not choose to reconcile, despite all their differences – in favor of the Palestinian people. Historically, unlike most liberation movements over the globe, Hamas and Fatah have failed to achieve a common ground regarding the outstanding issues since 1988. That stance started when Hamas rejected a proposal by Fatah-dominated Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) to get 5 seats out of 450 in the 19th Palestinian National Council. The stance continued. In August 1991, Fatah held a meeting with Hamas in Khartoum, the Sudanese capital, they wanted to join Hamas and then engage in the "Madrid conference”. This reconciliation did not happen. Then in 1995, the Palestinian Authority (PA) urged Hamas to participate in the Palestinian Legislative Elections or to have guarantees that Hamas would not spoil the electoral march. To this request Hamas responded that any election under the umbrella of Oslo Accords are taboo and should be boycotted by the Palestinian people; accordingly, they had not interfered in the elections. Over the 10th-13th November and January 4th -7th of 2003, many meetings were held between the Palestinian factions. It was on 15th-17th March 2005 that the Palestinian factions reached a covenant which "gives the right to fight the occupation and announcing Tahdeha”, calming down; holding legislative elections and activating the PLO on a "partnership basis" between all of the Palestinian political spectra. Unfortunately, after Hamas’s assuming full control of the Gaza Strip on 14th August 2006, reconciliation between the factions was again set back. more.. e-mail | ||||||||
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