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Open Letter to the US Mass Media
Yousef Abudayyeh, Palestine Think Tank 12/31/2008
     Dear Editor,
     Imagine if more than 63 thousand Americans were massacred in a couple of hours' campaign of F-16 bombing. This number represents (by way of percentage) the number of Palestinians killed by Israel when it launched its massive air strikes in Gaza on Saturday. A friend of mine in Gaza tells me that hundreds are still buried under the rubble and the toll of deaths could easily reach thousands. Already there are more than 1,700 injured with many in serious conditions.
     Imagine if all this carnage is being paid for by your tax money.
     Israel is carrying out an all out massacre in the Gaza Strip and the Arab American Community is outraged because neither the US Media is covering and reporting the facts nor do the Bush Administration and Congress have the backbone to order Israel, which gets almost 11 Billion Dollars a year from the US, to stop carrying out these war crimes. more.. e-mail

Killing for Votes
Gilad Atzmon, Middle East Online 12/30/2008
     In order to grasp the latest devastating murderous Israeli expedition in Gaza one must deeply comprehend the Israeli identity and its inherent hatred towards the Arabs. This hatred is imbued in the Israeli curriculum, it is preached by political leaders and implied by their acts, it is conveyed by cultural figures.
     I grew up in Israel in the 1970’s; people of my generation are nowadays the leaders of the Israeli army, politics, economy, academia and the arts. We were trained to believe that ‘a good Arab is a dead one’. A few weeks before I joined the IDF in the early 1980’s, General Rafael Eitan, the Chief of Staff at the time announced that the “Arabs were stoned cockroaches in a bottle”.He got away with it; he also got away with the murder of many thousands of Lebanese civilians in the 1st Lebanon war. In a word, Israelis manage to get away with murder.
     Luckily enough, and for reasons that are still far beyond my comprehension, at a certain stage I woke up out of that lethal dream. At one point I left Israel and become an opponent of the Jewish state. However, I am utterly convinced that it is my primary duty to inform every being that is willing to listen about that which we are up against. more.. e-mail

Israeli electioneering with bombs
Jonathan Cook, Electronic Intifada 12/30/2008
     Of the three politicians who announced the military assault on Gaza to the world on Saturday, perhaps only the outgoing Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert has little to lose -- or gain -- from its outcome.
     Flanking the Israeli prime minister were two of the main contenders for his job: Tzipi Livni, the foreign minister and the new leader of Olmert’s centrist party, Kadima, and Ehud Barak, the defense minister and leader of the left-wing Labor Party.
     The attack on Gaza may make or break this pair’s political fortunes as they jostle for position against Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing party, Likud, before a general election little more than a month away.
     Until now Livni and Barak have been facing the imminent demise of their ruling coalition as Netanyahu and the far Right have surged in the polls and looked set to form the next government.
     Both have strenuously denied that the election has any bearing on the timing of the Gaza operation. But equally they hope a successful strike against Hamas may yet save them from electoral humiliation. more.. e-mail

Israel’s Lie Machine is Working Flat out
Stuart Littlewood - London, Palestine Chronicle 12/30/2008
     Firefighters try to extinguish flames at a medicine storehouse bombed by Israel. (Xinhua) While the murderous assault on Gaza continues, I notice there’s a briefing document on the website of the Israeli Embassy in London which has a lie in every line. The West’s mainstream media repeat them, and even the most senior TV and radio interviewers don’t bother to challenge them.
     The document is a transcript of Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni’s statement to the Israeli press dated 27 December 2008 -- a day that will live in infamy. It is a perfect example of the falsehoods used to dupe not only us westerners but Israel’s own people. The statement shows how the regime’s view of itself is constructed on a web of dishonesty and self-delusion.
     For example:
     • "Israeli citizens have been under the threat of daily attack from Gaza for years."
     Palestinians have been under harsh Israeli occupation for 60 years.
     • "Only this week hundreds of missiles and mortars shells were fired at Israeli civilian communities." more.. e-mail

Peace Trees of Palestine - Poem
Lise Brouillette, Palestine Chronicle 12/30/2008
     Standing upright branches lifted up
     swaying in the wind in a prayer to Allah
     silently waiting for
     raining death or retribution
     If every olive of every tree
     that was uprooted and burned was pressed
     it yet would not produce enough tears
     to cry for Al-Nakbah
     If every drop of oil was dropped
     in the hearts grieving for Al-Nakbah
     the fire would be high enough
     to create a sun for the night
     If every grain of sand in a desert
     created by the killing of the trees
     was lifted by the wind if would twist
     in a funnel that could engulf the world... more.. e-mail

Victims of Israel’s Latest Experiment
Nadia W. Awad, MIFTAH 12/29/2008
     There is no point in preparing an introduction to this article. Why waste words on compositional niceties when the only thing I can offer is that I’m at a total loss. There are no words or expressions that could ever fully explain what I and other Palestinians are feeling at this moment in time. Since Saturday afternoon, most of us here have been glued to the television, mutely taking in details of the latest bombed target andwatching horrific footage of bloodied men, women and children, body parts strewn about, and people offering last minute prayers in the rubble of their homes because they think they’re about to die. The hospital scenes offer no consolation, as doctors and nurses wearing bloodied scrubs attempt to aid the injured, knowing full well that they do not have the medical supplies to do so effectively.
     Rage, disgust, impotence, disbelief… these are just a few of the feelings swirling around in our hearts and minds for the moment.Those feelings are not just addressed to Israel, but to the international community as well. The UN gathered in an emergency session to issue yet another lukewarm resolution calling on all sides to stop the fighting. Of course, the resolution was missing what should have been a key component, condemnation of Israel’s actions. There was no mention of an excessive use of force, no mention of Israel’s responsibilities as an occupying power. The US and the UK did not even bother to demand a halt to the violence, instead merely requesting that Israel try to avoid racking up civilian casualties. Israel hasn’t even acquiesced to that request, and how could they? Gaza is one of the most densely populated areas in the world. There are no wide expanses of land. Houses are built on top of each other. Government buildings and police stations are nestled in and amongst residential neighborhoods. It would be like trying to pluck out one card from beneath a house of cards, and expecting the whole structure to stay intact. Besides, Israel is not merely targeting government buildings and security compounds as first thought. Looking at the latest reports, Israel has bombed the Gaza port, a local university campus, an Olympic committee building, greenhouses, a school, homes, parked cars, mosques, prisons (full of prisoners), a graduation ceremony for traffic police, and medical storehouses. And still the bombing continues. more.. e-mail

Gaza: the logic of colonial power
Nir Rosen, The Guardian 12/29/2008
     As so often, the term ’terrorism’ has proved a rhetorical smokescreen under cover of which the strong crush the weak.
     I have spent most of the Bush administration’s tenure reporting from Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Somalia and other conflicts. I have been published by most major publications. I have been interviewed by most major networks and I have even testified before the senate foreign relations committee. The Bush administration began its tenure with Palestinians being massacred and it ends with Israel committing one of its largest massacres yet in a 60-year history of occupying Palestinian land. Bush’s final visit to the country he chose to occupy ended with an educated secular Shiite Iraqi throwing his shoes at him, expressing the feelings of the entire Arab world save its dictators who have imprudently attached themselves to a hated American regime.
     Once again, the Israelis bomb the starving and imprisoned population of Gaza. The world watches the plight of 1.5 million Gazans live on TV and online; the western media largely justify the Israeli action. Even some Arab outlets try to equate the Palestinian resistance with the might of the Israeli military machine. And none of this is a surprise. The Israelis just concluded a round-the-world public relations campaign to gather support for their assault, even gaining the collaboration of Arab states like Egypt.
     The international community is directly guilty for this latest massacre. Will it remain immune from the wrath of a desperate people? So far, there have been large demonstrations in Lebanon, Yemen, Jordan, Egypt, Syria and Iraq. The people of the Arab world will not forget. The Palestinians will not forget. "All that you have done to our people is registered in our notebooks," as the poet Mahmoud Darwish said. more.. e-mail

The dogs of war
Osamah Khalil, Electronic Intifada 12/29/2008
     Almost eight years ago, George W. Bush entered office in the early months of the second Palestinian intifada. Rather than resuming the negotiations facilitated by the Clinton Administration, he chose instead to "pull out" and allow Ariel Sharon, who was favored to win the upcoming Israeli elections, a free hand to end the intifada. According to former US Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, Bush asserted that "sometimes a show of strength by one side can really clarify things." [1] President Bush now leaves office with historically low approval ratings and an economy in shambles. As a consequence of his foreign policy misadventures, Bush also leaves the Middle East in flames and America’s reputation in tatters. Yet, one thing has remained constant for the aloof president: deference to an Israeli "show of strength" rather than diplomacy. Only a year ago, Bush hosted the Annapolis conference that "relaunched" the "peace process" and then predictably stood by as it stalled out. Unable to launch a war against Iran, capture Osama bin Laden, pacify Afghanistan or Iraq, or broker a Palestinian-Israeli peace, rather than ride into the sunset in the waning days of his presidency, Bush is determined to leave in a final blaze of malicious incompetence. As it has been so often over the past eight years, the site of his enmity is Gaza. more.. e-mail

Gaza and the World: Will Things Ever Change?
Ramzy Baroud, Palestine Chronicle 12/29/2008
     A Palestinian girl is carried into Shifa hospital in Gaza City following the strikes. (AP) In times of crisis, most Arabs tune in to Aljazeera television. Sometimes it’s comforting for the truth to be stated the way it is, with all of its gory and unsettling details, without blemishes and without censorship. When Israel carried out massive air strikes against Gaza on Saturday, December 27, terrorizing an already hostage and malnourished population, I too tuned in to Aljazeera.
     Within seconds I learned of the tally: 290 deaths and climbing, with 700 more wounded, all in one day. But as dramatic as this event may have seemed -- the highest Israeli inflicted death toll in one day in Palestine since Israel’s establishment in 1948 -- there was nothing new to learn. Tragedies anywhere - natural or manmade -- tend to lead to social, cultural, economic and political upheavals, revolutions even, that somehow alter the social, cultural, economic and ultimately political landscapes in the affected regions, save in Palestine.
     I gazed pointlessly at the screen. Learning of the aftermath of such tragedies seems more of a ritual than a purposeful habit. The Arab and international responses to the killings can only serve as a reminder of how ineffectual and irrelevant, if not complacent their timid mutterings are. more.. e-mail

Israel’s Wanton Aggression On Gaza
Stephen Lendman – Chicago, Palestine Chronicle 12/29/2008
     ’The Bloodiest Day in the History of Occupation.’ (Aljazeera) It’s not the first time and won’t be the last. On December 27, AP reported that: ’Israeli aircraft struck Hamas security compounds across Gaza on Saturday in unprecedented waves of simultaneous attacks, and Hamas and medics reported dozens of people were killed.’
     Haaretz headlined:
     "Israel launched (Operation Case Lead) Saturday morning (at around 11:30AM with no warning) the start of a massive offensive against Qassam rocket and mortar fire on its southern communities, targeting dozens of buildings belonging to the ruling Hamas militant group."
     AlJazeera.net reported that "Israeli missiles target Gaza," and continued:
     "Israel has launched air strikes on Hamas installations across the Gaza Strip, killing at least 155 people and causing heavy damage, according to officials and witnesses."
     "At least 30 missiles (later over 100 reported) were fired at targets on Saturday (morning), with the head of emergency services in Gaza saying at least 200 people were also wounded." more.. e-mail

U.S. Middle East Policy a Disaster
James J. David, Palestine Chronicle 12/29/2008
     ’President Bush and Secretary Rice both blamed Hamas for the violence.’
     If you’ve ever wondered why there is continued violence between the Israelis and Palestinians for the past 40 years all you need to do is look at U.S. Policy.
     Let’s take the current situation in Gaza. The Israelis claim that they have ended the 40 year seize in Gaza yet Israel’s blockade has forced 1.5 million people in Gaza to go without food, medical care, heating fuel, electricity, clean water and facilities and infrastructure necessary to life or even a half-way decent standard of living. Israel controls the land, sea, and air preventing anyone from entering or leaving.
     During the past 6 months there has been a cease fire between the two parties but just last month the Israelis violated the cease fire by firing missiles into Gaza killing 6 Palestinians. It was Israel who was the first to break the cease fire, not Hamas. more.. e-mail

The Israeli massacre of Gazans civilians
Mairead Maguire, Nobel Peace Laureate, Palestine Monitor 12/28/2008
     The Israeli cabinet approved a military operation against Gaza by the forces of Israel. The military massacre of Gazan civilians was launched on December 27th, 2008 in two separate waves of attacks when over 100 bombs were dropped on dozens of targets . Some 80 airplanes and helicopters took part in the assault destroying civil police compounds and civilian homes. Over 205 Palestinians were killed and at least 750 wounded, 125 of these with critical injuries, including women and children.
     This massacre of Gazan civilians by the Israeli military, is indeed a crime against humanity. It is all the more cruel considering the suffering of the People of Gaza, under the collective punishment policy of Israel which has cut Gaza off from the World for almost 2 years, and led its one an a half Million people to living in what is the world largest open air prison, and suffering one of the greatest humanitarian tragedies in the world.
     In November, when I visited Gaza with Free Gaza Movement, we met with the Hamas Leadership, and attended a meeting of representatives of all the Political Parties in Gaza, the 6 month ceasefire was holding and the Political Parties were ready to go to Cairo to meet with their Political colleagues from West Bank. There was great hope that Palestinian National Unity could be built, and that the ways of active nonviolence would help towards the goals of ending the Israeli occupation and self determination for the Palestinian people. more.. e-mail

Food shortages send prices through roof after farmers are forced to abandon their fields
Hazem Balousha in Gaza City and Rory McCarthy in Jerusalem, The Guardian 1/1/2009
     The vegetable market at the Beach Camp, a crowded warren housing refugee families in Gaza, was all but deserted yesterday. Subhi Saeda, 55, waited for customers but none came, save one man who stopped briefly to check prices but moved on once he heard how high they had risen. "You should have seen this stall in the past, now we have very few vegetables for sale," Saeda said. "It’s so frustrating for us. "
     Farmers near the border with Israel have stopped going into their fields for fear of being mistaken for militants and that, combined with severe limits on all but humanitarian imports, has pushed prices up dramatically in recent days.
     On his stall Saeda had only potatoes, peppers, onions and tomatoes. A box of tomatoes now sells for 30 shekels (£5), three times its price last week. Potatoes have doubled in price, onions too. Few stalls were selling any fruit because of shortages and higher prices.
     "I support the ceasefire," said Saeda, "and I’m expecting it will return again. But we need to have the crossings into Gaza open, with medicines available and a normal economic life. Under the last ceasefire the blockade went on and nothing changed." more.. e-mail

The rotten state of Egypt is too powerless and corrupt to act
Robert Fisk, The Independent 1/1/2009
     There was a day when we worried about the "Arab masses" -- the millions of "ordinary" Arabs on the streets of Cairo, Kuwait, Amman, Beirut -- and their reaction to the constant bloodbaths in the Middle East. Could Anwar Sadat restrain the anger of his people? And now -- after three decades of Hosni Mubarak -- can Mubarak (or "La Vache Qui Rit", as he is still called in Cairo) restrain the anger of his people? The answer, of course, is that Egyptians and Kuwaitis and Jordanians will be allowed to shout in the streets of their capitals -- but then they will be shut down, with the help of the tens of thousands of secret policemen and government militiamen who serve the princes and kings and elderly rulers of the Arab world.
     Egyptians demand that Mubarak open the Rafah crossing-point into Gaza, break off diplomatic relations with Israel, even send weapons to Hamas. And there is a kind of perverse beauty in listening to the response of the Egyptian government: why not complain about the three gates which the Israelis refuse to open? And anyway, the Rafah crossing-point is politically controlled by the four powers that produced the "road map" for peace, including Britain and the US. Why blame Mubarak?
     To admit that Egypt can’t even open its sovereign border without permission from Washington tells you all you need to know about the powerlessness of the satraps that run the Middle East for us. more.. e-mail

Israeli shelling badly damages human rights offices
Press release, Gaza Community Mental Health Programme, Electronic Intifada 12/30/2008
     At about 1:50am Tuesday, 30 December 2008, Israeli F-16 fighter jets shelled a Palestinian police site in Gaza, which is 70 meters away from the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme’s (GCMHP) main building in Sheikh Ejleen on Gaza Beach. The shelling was part of the vicious military attacks that the Israeli army launched on Gaza starting 27 December 2008.
     This harsh shelling caused massive destruction in the GCMHP’s main building, where walls and four ceilings cracked completely and partially. Extreme damage done to the furniture, equipment, electrical and electronic devices as well as the files and documents that were in the four-floor building, which contains offices, training halls, the main library and financial and administrative departments.
     Luckily, the guard, who was in the premises, was not harmed. However, he was in a state of panic due to the strength of explosions.
     As a result, the tremendous destruction to the building and its contents and equipment will force GCMHP to suspend its operations for some time, due to the necessity for renovation, before it can resume its work. more.. e-mail

Palestine’s Guernica: An Illustrated Look at Israel’s On-going Massacre in the Gaza Strip
Palestine Monitor, Palestine Monitor 12/30/2008
     "There is not enough space for bodies; they lay on the floors of the hospitals and morgues. There is not enough blood for the wounded, and they will soon be joining their countrymen in death."�
     Aerial photo of the Gaza Strip. It is the most densely populated place on earth with 1.5 million people huddled into 360 km2, or 4,166 people per square kilometer. It is surrounded on all sides by a massive electric fence and watchtowers. Israel controls the air, land and water around the Strip, and every entry-point in.
     The median age in the Strip is 15.3, and 70% of the population are already refugees. 86% of the population is heavily dependant on foreign aid which has been denied them for over two years.
     A photo of Israel’s "˜Cast Lead’ operation in which 100 tons of bombs were dropped on the most densely populated space on the planet while the Gazans slept in their beds. more.. e-mail

The true story behind this war is not the one Israel is telling
Johann Hari, The Independent 12/29/2008
     The world isn’t just watching the Israeli government commit a crime in Gaza; we are watching it self-harm. This morning, and tomorrow morning, and every morning until this punishment beating ends, the young people of the Gaza Strip are going to be more filled with hate, and more determined to fight back, with stones or suicide vests or rockets. Israeli leaders have convinced themselves that the harder you beat the Palestinians, the softer they will become. But when this is over, the rage against Israelis will have hardened, and the same old compromises will still be waiting by the roadside of history, untended and unmade.
     To understand how frightening it is to be a Gazan this morning, you need to have stood in that small slab of concrete by the Mediterranean and smelled the claustrophobia. The Gaza Strip is smaller than the Isle of Wight but it is crammed with 1.5 million people who can never leave. They live out their lives on top of each other, jobless and hungry, in vast, sagging tower blocks. From the top floor, you can often see the borders of their world: the Mediterranean, and Israeli barbed wire. When bombs begin to fall – as they are doing now with more deadly force than at any time since 1967 – there is nowhere to hide.
     There will now be a war over the story of this war. The Israeli government says, "We withdrew from Gaza in 2005 and in return we got Hamas and Qassam rockets being rained on our cities. Sixteen civilians have been murdered. How many more are we supposed to sacrifice?" It is a plausible narrative, and there are shards of truth in it, but it is also filled with holes. If we want to understand the reality and really stop the rockets, we need to rewind a few years and view the run-up to this war dispassionately. more.. e-mail

Eine Kleine Nacht Murder: How Israeli Leaders Kill for their People's Votes
Gilad Atzmon, Palestine Think Tank 12/29/2008
     In order to grasp the latest devastating murderous Israeli expedition in Gaza one must deeply comprehend the Israeli identity and its inherent hatred towards anyone who fails to be Jewish and a hatred against Arabs in particular. This hatred is imbued in the Israeli curriculum, it is preached by political leaders and implied by their acts, it is conveyed by cultural figures, even within the so-called ‘Israeli Left’.
     I grew up in Israel in the 1970’s people of my generation are nowadays the leaders of the Israeli army, politics, economy, academia and the arts. We were trained to believe that ‘a good Arab is a dead one’. A few weeks before I joined the IDF in the early 1980’s, General Rafael Eitan, the Chief of Staff at the time announced that the “Arabs were stoned cockroaches in a bottle”. He got away with it, he also got away with the murder of many thousands of Lebanese civilians in the 1st Lebanon war. In a word, Israelis manage to get away with murder.
     Luckily enough, and for reasons that are still far beyond my comprehension, at a certain stage I woke up out of that Hebraic lethal dream. At one point I left the Jewish state, I evaded the Jewish hate mongering, I had become an opponent of the Jewish state and any other form of Jewish politics. However, I am utterly convinced that it is my primary duty to inform every being that is willing to listen about that which are we up against. more.. e-mail

Gaza and Israel: Interview with Amira Hass
Angel Ricardo Martinez, Palestine Chronicle 12/28/2008
     Hass: Gaza is a big prison, and it has been so for the last 18 years.
     This telephonic interview took place on December 12, when I spoke with Israeli journalist Mrs. Amira Hass from her house in Ramallah, the West Bank. Almost two weeks before, on December 1st, she was ordered to leave Gaza - where she had entered three weeks before on a boat - by Hamas. In this interview, we speak about the current state of Israeli journalism, the contradictions of Israeli society, life in the occupied territories, and the future of Palestinian politics.
     What motivated you to dedicate your life to this conflict and becoming the only Israeli journalist living in the territories?
     Let me correct you, I’m not the only Israeli journalist, I’m the only Israeli Jew journalist. But it’s not a decision, this conflict is our life. It’s not by choice, it’s there all the time. Also, before becoming a journalist I was very active in the Israeli left-wing and workers right advocacy groups. It has always been a part of my life. more.. e-mail

The self delusion that plagues both sides in this bloody conflict
Robert Fisk, The Independent 12/31/2008
     During the second Palestinian "intifada", I was sitting in the offices of Hizbollah’s Al-Manar television station in Beirut, watching news footage of a militiaman’s funeral in Gaza. The television showed hordes of Hamas and PLO gunmen firing thousands of rounds of ammunition into the air to honour their latest "martyr"; and I noticed, just next to me, a Lebanese Hizbollah member -- who had taken part in many attacks against the Israelis in what had been Israel’s occupation zone in southern Lebanon -- shaking his head.
     What was he thinking, I asked? "Hamas try to stand up to the Israelis," he replied. "But..." And here he cast his eyes to the ceiling. "They waste bullets. They fire all these bullets into the sky. They should use them to shoot at Israelis."
     His point, of course, was that Hamas lacked discipline, the kind of iron, ruthless discipline and security that Hizbollah forged in Lebanon and which the Israeli army was at last forced to acknowledge in southern Lebanon in 2006. Guns are weapons, not playthings for funerals. And Gaza is not southern Lebanon. It would be as well for both sides in this latest bloodbath in Gaza to remember this. Hamas is not Hizbollah. Jerusalem is not Beirut. And Israeli soldiers cannot take revenge for their 2006 defeat in Lebanon by attacking Hamas in Gaza – not even to help Ms Livni in the Israeli elections. more.. e-mail

Growing horror at the bloodletting in Gaza
Editorial, The Guardian 12/31/2008
     Israel’s continuing massive military strikes on Gaza are an outrage that the international community must not allow to continue (Reports, 30 December). Palestinian rocket attacks that traumatise the lives of communities in southern Israel are also utterly unacceptable. Both sides must cease fire. Israel’s actions are disproportionate and counterproductive to achieving either security for the people of Israel or peace in the Middle East. Physicians for Human Rights (Israel) have warned that "targeting of civilians and of medical facilities is a breach of international humanitarian law. The targets chosen by the Israeli military include also clearly civilian installations."
     Gaza is one of the poorest and most densely populated places on Earth. For the past two years, the blockade and previous Israeli strikes had already disrupted electricity supplies and access to clean water. Even before the current attack, Gaza’s health system was near collapse. Hospitals are short of medicines, blood and essential equipment. Only half of Gaza’s 58 ambulances are functioning. more.. e-mail

Falling into the moral abyss
Titus North, Electronic Intifada 12/30/2008
     The gradual process of ethnic cleansing in the occupied Palestinian territories is accelerating, and with it so is the moral culpability of Israel and the supporters of its policies in the United States. More and more people from the mainstream of Israeli politics are voicing alarm. In the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, former Knesset Speaker Avraham Burg compared the situation in Israel today to Germany on the eve of Nazis coming to power. Writing for The Huffington Post, former Israeli peace negotiator Daniel Levy likened Israel to a drunk and the US to a friend who gives them bottle of vodka and keys to his car. Even current Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who has ordered incessant attacks on Gaza since coming to power, has called recent attacks by Jewish settlers on Palestinians in the West Bank "pogroms."
     A state founded by Holocaust survivors should be a beacon of morality, not a black hole for it. Supporters of Israeli policy (and I distinguish between support for the Israeli people and support for its government’s policies) often justify their support by saying that Israel is the only democracy in the region. Leaving aside certain problematic aspects of that claim, I wonder if these people have ever thought of the implications of Israel, as a democracy, being engaged in continual violations of international law and human rights. Israelis, benefiting from a press that is far more open to the truth about government’s policies than the American media, know a great deal about what the leaders they elect are doing, yet they continue to elect them. Thus, the Israeli public has culpability for their government’s crimes that citizens under a dictatorship would not have. more.. e-mail

Gaza, a History of Hardship and Struggle
Hasan Afif El-Hasan, Palestine Chronicle 12/30/2008
     ’Frightened refugees brought nothing other than the clothes they had on their backs.’
     The most wrenching event that Palestinians encountered was the 1948 disaster (nekba), but for the Gazans it was not the only or the last one. Gaza was a battle ground in World War I (WWI), occupied twice by Israel, started the first uprising (intifada), created Hamas movement and opted for armed resistance rather than engage in endless negotiations, declared enemy entity by Israel and the US and today the Gazans are being massacred by Israel and abandoned by the so called Arab states.
     Gaza was a peaceful and prosperous town, but since WWI, it has become a frontline in the struggle for control of the region. The British and the Turks fought three bloody battles in WWI before the British conquered Gaza and the neighboring villages; and in the process, Gaza, the biggest town in the area was decimated and the lives of the Gazans were shattered. Thousands of Gazan civilians died or injured and thousands were forced to leave. On a personal note, my grandfather, Hasan, a soldier in the Turkish cavalry brigade, was killed in these battles. Herbert Samuel, the first British High Commissioner wrote that Gaza town, which used to be the third largest town in Palestine and home for forty thousand before the war, became "comparable to the devastated areas in France and Belgium..And its population dwindled to something like one third of its original population". Palestine which had been unanimously referred to as Southern Syria came into being officially in 1919 and the League of Nations that was dominated by the victorious powers mandated Palestine to be governed by Britain. more.. e-mail

How we like our leaders
Amira Hass, Ha’aretz 12/30/2008
     This isn’t the time to speak of ethics, but of precise intelligence. Whoever gave the instructions to send 100 of our planes, piloted by the best of our boys, to bomb and strafe enemy targets in Gaza is familiar with the many schools adjacent to those targets - especially police stations. He also knew that at exactly 11:30 A.M. on Saturday, during the surprise assault on the enemy, all the children of the Strip would be in the streets - half just having finished the morning shift at school, the others en route to the afternoon shift.
     This is not the time to speak of proportional responses, not even of the polls that promise a greater share of Knesset seats to the mission’s architects. This is, however, the time to speak of the voters’ belief the operation will succeed, that the strikes are precise and the targets justified.
     Take, for example, Imad Aqel Mosque in Jabalya refugee camp, bombed and strafed shortly before midnight on Sunday. These are the names of the glorious military victory we achieved there - Jawaher, age 4; Dina, age 8; Sahar, age 12; Ikram, age 14; and Tahrir, age 17, all sisters of the Ba’lousha family, all killed in a "precise" strike on the mosque. Another three sisters, a 2-year-old brother and their parents were injured. Twenty-four neighbors were wounded and five homes and three stores destroyed. This part of the military victory did not open our television or radio news broadcasts yesterday morning, nor did they appear on many Israeli news Web sites. more.. e-mail

Why bombing Ashkelon is the most tragic irony
Robert Fisk, The Independent 12/30/2008
     How easy it is to snap off the history of the Palestinians, to delete the narrative of their tragedy, to avoid a grotesque irony about Gaza which -- in any other conflict -- journalists would be writing about in their first reports: that the original, legal owners of the Israeli land on which Hamas rockets are detonating live in Gaza.
     That is why Gaza exists: because the Palestinians who lived in Ashkelon and the fields around it -- Askalaan in Arabic -- were dispossessed from their lands in 1948 when Israel was created and ended up on the beaches of Gaza. They -- or their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren -- are among the one and a half million Palestinian refugees crammed into the cesspool of Gaza, 80 per cent of whose families once lived in what is now Israel. This, historically, is the real story: most of the people of Gaza don’t come from Gaza.
     But watching the news shows, you’d think that history began yesterday, that a bunch of bearded anti-Semitic Islamist lunatics suddenly popped up in the slums of Gaza – a rubbish dump of destitute people of no origin – and began firing missiles into peace-loving, democratic Israel, only to meet with the righteous vengeance of the Israeli air force. The fact that the five sisters killed in Jabalya camp had grandparents who came from the very land whose more recent owners have now bombed them to death simply does not appear in the story. more.. e-mail

Deserted streets and fear as Israel demolishes Gaza
Rami Almeghari writing from the occupied Gaza Strip, Electronic Intifada 12/30/2008
     As Israel’s relentless bombardment of the occupied Gaza Strip has entered its fourth day, the number of dead and injured has exceeded 2,000. Speaking via Skype, The Electronic Intifada correspondent Rami Almeghari described the situation near his home in al-Maghazi refugee camp in the central Gaza Strip:
     I am in al-Maghazi refugee camp, in the central Gaza Strip. This afternoon Israeli drones targeted a house in al-Maghazi with three missiles. Fortunately there were no casualties. But unfortunately there have been many casualties elsewhere in Gaza where they have targeted houses and mosques.
     I went out of the house to deal with some urgent matters today. But movement is really risky right now. Anyone who moves could be a potential target for the Israeli warplanes that are buzzing overhead all the time. You don’t know what the next target is. It is terrible, horrible for the population here.
     Most of the shops and businesses are closed. Only a few food stores are open. There is very little movement in the streets. There are very few cars, for example, the on the Salah al-Din road, a main thoroughfare running through the Gaza Strip. People are staying in their houses, their neighborhoods. What is going on is unprecedented since Israel occupied Gaza in 1967. There is a great deal of fear, worry, anxiety. more.. e-mail

From the ashes of Gaza
Tariq Ali, The Guardian 12/30/2008
     The assault on Gaza planned over six months and executed with perfect timing, was designed largely as Neve Gordon has rightly observed to help the incumbent parties triumph in the forthcoming Israeli elections. The dead Palestinians are little more than election fodder in a cynical contest between the right and the far right in Israel. Washington and its EU allies, perfectly aware that Gaza was about to be assaulted, as in the case of Lebanon in 2006, sit back and watch.
     Washington, as is its wont, blames the pro-Hamas Palestinians, with Obama and Bush singing from the same AIPAC hymn sheet. The EU politicians, having observed the build-up, the siege, the collective punishment inflicted on Gaza, the targeting of civilians etc (for all the gory detail, see Harvard scholar Sara Roy’s chilling essay in the London Review of Books were convinced that it was the rocket attacks that had "provoked" Israel but called on both sides to end the violence, with nil effect. The moth-eaten Mubarak dictatorship in Egypt and Nato’s favourite Islamists in Ankara failed to register even a symbolic protest by recalling their ambassadors from Israel. China and Russia did not convene a meeting of the UN security council to discuss the crisis. more.. e-mail

Unmentioned Casualties of the Gaza Massacre
Abu Yussef, Palestine Monitor 12/30/2008
     Over the last three days the world has fixated upon the ever increasing body count in Gaza following the recent massacre. However, President Abbas, National reconciliation, the Annapolis Process, the Palestinian Non-Violence Movement and the Two-State Solution have all suffered near fatal, if not fatal wounds as a result.
     The Israeli sea and air bombardment of the Gaza Strip has done more than decimate the already suffering inhabitants of the world’s largest prison; it has led to a number of other important casualties that the press has failed to mention amidst the chaos and death of the last few days.
     1. The first casualty has been Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas. His attempt to walk the thin line between American and Israeli dictates on the one hand, and the needs and wants of the Palestinians on the other, has gone up in flames.
     At best he now looks incompetent and weak; in the worst light some are already calling him a ‘spy’ or ‘traitor’. It is unclear now, how he will receive the legitimate support to extend his Presidential mandate in the coming weeks as he can no longer even claim to be able to deliver peace through negotiations in the near terms, nor represent the Palestinian people. more.. e-mail

Bloodied in Gaza as the world silently watches
Laila El-Haddad writing from Durham, the United States, Electronic Intifada 12/30/2008
     "There is a complete blackout in Gaza now. The streets are as still as death."
     I am speaking to my father, Moussa el-Haddad, a retired physician who lives in Gaza City, on Skype, from Durham, North Carolina in the United States, where I have been since mid 2006 -- the month Gaza’s borders were hermetically sealed by Israel, and the blockade of the occupied territory further enforced.
     He is out on his balcony. It is 2am.
     "I can only see grey plumes of smoke slowly rising all over the city, everywhere I look," he says, as though they were some beautiful, comforting by-product of some hideous, malicious event.
     My father was out walking when the initial strikes began -- "I saw the missiles falling and prayed; the earth shook; the smoke rose; the ambulances screamed," he told me.
     My mother was in the Red Crescent Society clinic near the universities, where she works part-time as a pediatrician. Behind the clinic was one of the police centers that were leveled. She said she broke down at first, the sheer proximity of the attacks having shaken her from the inside out. After she got a hold of herself, they took to treating injured victims of the attack, before transferring them to al-Shifa hospital. more.. e-mail

’My cousin is still under the rubble’
Mona El Farra, The Guardian 12/30/2008
     It is extremely difficult for me to be here in the UK watching events unfold in Gaza from this distance. With a broken heart I watch the news of this unprecedented and savage Israeli attack on my friends, family, and colleagues in Gaza. Their "military targets" are mixed with homes, schools, hospitals, and universities.
     I am distraught thinking about the fate of these injured people. I know the hospital situation in Gaza well through my health and humanitarian work. The siege has left them without 100 basic medications and important diagnostic and laboratory equipment is not working because spare parts aren’t available. The fluctuation of current from our irregular power supply has left some equipment beyond repair. In this period of crisis, Gazan hospitals are also lacking crucial medications and supplies for their operating rooms.
     I’ve watched the chaotic scenes inside Gazan hospitals as staff struggle to find space for all of the injured and dead. The unprecedented numbers of casualties come in from ambulances and cars in a near-constant stream. But emergency situations are nothing new in Gaza; it is the impact of the siege that has changed the odds. I know that we would be facing a different situation if the 18 months of siege hadn’t drained our supplies of medicines and food, making it difficult to treat and feed patients. more.. e-mail

’I didn’t see any of my girls, just a pile of bricks’
Hazem Balousha Jabalia and Rory McCarthy in Jerusalem, The Guardian 12/30/2008
     The family house was small: three rooms, a tiny kitchen and bathroom, built of poor-quality concrete bricks with a corrugated asbestos roof, in block four of Jabalia refugee camp in northern Gaza. There are hundreds of similar homes crammed into the overcrowded streets, filled with some of the poorest and most vulnerable families in the Gaza Strip.
     But it was this house, where Anwar and Samira Balousha lived with their nine children, that had the misfortune to be built next to what became late on Sunday night another target in Israel’s devastating bombing campaign of Gaza.
     An Israeli bomb struck the refugee camp’s Imad Aqil mosque around midnight, destroying the building and collapsing several shops and a pharmacy nearby. The force of the blast was so massive it also brought down the Balousha family’s house, which yesterday lay in ruins. The seven eldest girls were asleep together on mattresses in one bedroom and they bore the brunt of the explosion. Five were killed where they lay: Tahrir, 17, Ikram 15, Samer, 13, Dina, eight and Jawahar, four. more.. e-mail

Robert Fisk: Leaders lie, civilians die, and lessons of history are ignored
Robert Fisk, The Independent 12/29/2008
     We’ve got so used to the carnage of the Middle East that we don’t care any more – providing we don’t offend the Israelis. It’s not clear how many of the Gaza dead are civilians, but the response of the Bush administration, not to mention the pusillanimous reaction of Gordon Brown, reaffirm for Arabs what they have known for decades: however they struggle against their antagonists, the West will take Israel’s side. As usual, the bloodbath was the fault of the Arabs – who, as we all know, only understand force.
     Ever since 1948, we’ve been hearing this balderdash from the Israelis – just as Arab nationalists and then Arab Islamists have been peddling their own lies: that the Zionist "death wagon" will be overthrown, that all Jerusalem will be "liberated". And always Mr Bush Snr or Mr Clinton or Mr Bush Jnr or Mr Blair or Mr Brown have called upon both sides to exercise "restraint" – as if the Palestinians and the Israelis both have F-18s and Merkava tanks and field artillery. Hamas’s home-made rockets have killed just 20 Israelis in eight years, but a day-long blitz by Israeli aircraft that kills almost 300 Palestinians is just par for the course.
     The blood-splattering has its own routine. Yes, Hamas provoked Israel’s anger, just as Israel provoked Hamas’s anger, which was provoked by Israel, which was provoked by Hamas, which ... See what I mean? Hamas fires rockets at Israel, Israel bombs Hamas, Hamas fires more rockets and Israel bombs again and ... Got it? And we demand security for Israel – rightly – but overlook this massive and utterly disproportionate slaughter by Israel. It was Madeleine Albright who once said that Israel was "under siege" – as if Palestinian tanks were in the streets of Tel Aviv. more.. e-mail

Gaza: A Campaign to Perpetuate the Occupation
Yacov Ben Efrat, Palestine Chronicle 12/29/2008
     ’It is Israel that plunged Gaza into its present condition.’ (Reuters) Israel’s military operation called Molten Lead started on Saturday, December 27, 2008 and took more than 200 lives in its first day, much to the satisfaction of the Israeli public. Already on Friday there were cries of "Go get ’em!" from the columns of the leading newspapers, and on Saturday the Gazans got what Israelis have long been wishing them. This was no spontaneous operation, no mere response to the recent firing of rockets on the towns of the Negev. In the preceding half year of calm, while warning that Hamas was arming itself, Israel carefully planned the attack to extract the highest possible price.
     Officially, the campaign was intended to return that calm to the area under conditions more favorable to Israel. But the aims go farther. Israel is trying to bring Hamas back to the negotiating table with Egypt on terms that will be good for the Palestinian Authority (PA) and its president, Abu Mazen. Hamas failed to use the six months calm "constructively" by reaching a deal with Abu Mazen, and now it is paying the price. Israel wants it to end armed resistance, recognize the legitimacy of the Oslo Accords, and accept the terms of the Quartet. In other words, Hamas is supposed to yield its control over Gaza and blend into the PA as a minor partner. more.. e-mail

What is Israel’s Goal?
Neve Gordon, Palestine Chronicle 12/29/2008
     ’What exactly, one might ask, is Israel’s mission?’ (AFP) The first bombardment took three minutes and 40 seconds. Sixty Israeli F-16 fighter jets bombed 50 sites in Gaza, killing more than 200 Palestinians, and wounding close to 1,000 more.
     A few hours after the deadly strike, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert convened a press conference in Tel-Aviv. With foreign minister Tzipi Livni sitting on his right and defence minister Ehud Barak on his left, he declared: "It may take time, and each and every one of us must be patient so we can complete the mission."
     But what exactly, one might ask, is Israel’s mission?
     Although Olmert did not say as much, the "mission" includes four distinct objectives.
     The first is the destruction of Hamas, a totally unrealistic goal. Even though the loss of hundreds of cadres and some key leaders will no doubt hurt the organisation, Hamas is a robust political movement with widespread grassroots support, and it is unlikely to surrender or capitulate to Israeli demands following a military assault. Ironically, Israel’s attempt to destroy Hamas using military force has always ended up strengthening the organisation, thus corroborating the notion that power produces its own vulnerability. more.. e-mail

Massacre in Gaza: The Paradox of Peace
Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich, Palestine Chronicle 12/29/2008
     ’We can each save a life, collectively; we can save the people under siege.’
     Twice this year, the leaders of Hamas indicated their readiness to accept a Palestinian State within the 1967 borders. Khaled Meshaal, Hamas leader, informed former president Jimmy Carter of this decision in April 2008. In May 2008, it was revealed that Yves Aubin de La Messuziere, a retired senior French diplomat had held discussions with Ismael Haniyeh and Mahmoud Zahar, two prominent Hamas leaders who confirmed Hamas’ readiness to accept a Palestinian State within the 1967 border, reflecting an unofficial acceptance of Israel. But this truce is contrary to the Zionism ideals:
     "The settlement of the Land of Israel is the essence of Zionism. Without settlement, we will not fulfill Zionism. It’s that simple." (Yitzhak Shamir (Maariv, 02/21/1997).
     Thus, it became necessary to punish those who sought peace -- and wage war.
     Sadly, this was not the first time. History has repeated itself. Only our media has successfully managed to throw sands of ignorance in our eyes and blind us with bigotry, keeping our wits dull with misinformation. For the sake of the innocent victims everywhere, the truth must be exposed. We must revisit history. more.. e-mail

Israel’s Gaza assault wastes lives without changing anything
Editorial, Daily Star 12/29/2008
     It is highly unlikely that anything positive will emerge from the violent rampage Israel’s military launched against the Gaza Strip over the weekend. The only hope - a slim one indeed, based on past experience - is that some of the players on both sides of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict will finally learn some lessons that should have been absorbed long ago.
     For the Palestinians, the crux of the matter is that the bitter feud between Hamas and Fatah has made the dream of statehood more elusive than ever. So long as Palestine’s two largest parties cannot set aside their differences for the sake of its people’s national aspirations, the outside world will remain largely indifferent, even when Israel comports itself with wanton disregard for innocent lives and international law. If Fatah and Hamas cannot so much as keep the peace with each other, let alone agree on compromise visions for independence and how to get there, how can they expect the outside world to entrust to either of them the myriad responsibilities of statehood? The crucial support of democratic polities in the Western world cannot be gained by organizations that display so little political maturity and probity. more.. e-mail

Gratuitous Massacre
The Jordan Times, MIFTAH 12/29/2008
     Yesterday one could feel gloom and fury in the streets of Amman, as people were following with shock and horror news of Israel’s devastating, barbaric attacks on the Gaza Strip, which left more than 200 people dead and 300 wounded, 120 of them seriously.
     As soon as news of the attacks and their unprecedented toll were reported live by satellite television stations, Jordanians around the Kingdom took to the streets in spontaneous demonstrations to express solidarity with their helpless brethren in the impoverished, besieged strip.
     At the same time, His Majesty King Abdullah was reflecting the pain felt in the streets by issuing a swift clear condemnation. The King and the Jordanian government were also in contact with various leaders around the world in an effort to end the aggression and to find means to help the Palestinian people.
     The attacks were ostensibly triggered by rockets fired by Hamas into the Jewish state, killing one individual.
     In this case, disproportionate use of force is a cliché understatement; a tired phrase that doesn’t seem to ring any bell anymore to the outside world. Vicious cruelty would come closer to the ugly reality. more.. e-mail

Why would Israel bomb a university?
Dr. Akram Habeeb writing from the occupied Gaza Strip, Electronic Intifada 12/29/2008
     As a Fulbright scholar and professor of American literature at the Islamic University of Gaza (IUG), I have always preferred to keep silent about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. I always felt that it was my mission to preach love and peaceful coexistence. However, Israel’s massive offensive against the Gaza Strip has spurred me to speak out.
     Last night, during the second night of Israel’s unprecedented attack on Gaza, I was awakened by the deafening sound of intensive bombardment. When I learned that Israel had bombed my university with American-made F-16s, I realized that its "target bank" had gone bankrupt. Of course Israeli politicians and generals would claim that IUG is a Hamas stronghold and that it preaches terrorism.
     As an independent professor, not affiliated with any political party, I can say that IUG is an academic institution which embraces a wide spectrum of political affinities. I see it as prestigious university which encourages liberalism and free thought. This personal point view might seem to be biased; therefore, I would invite anyone who would doubt about my assertions to browse IUG’s website. more.. e-mail

Re-learning the biblical 40 years in Gaza
Rami G. Khouri, Daily Star 12/29/2008
     God punished the arrogance and hubris of the Hebrews in the Old Testament by making them wander the wilderness for 40 years, before allowing a later, more humble, generation to enter Canaan. The current generation of Israeli Jews is not as proficient at learning these 40-year lessons, it seems, to judge from Israel’s current ferocious attack on Gaza.
     It was exactly 40 years ago to the day - December 28, 1968 - that Israeli commandos raided Beirut airport and destroyed 13 Lebanese civilian aircraft, in retaliation for a Palestinian attack against an Israeli airliner in Athens. Israel aimed to inflict a revenge punishment so severe that it would shock the Arabs into preventing the Palestinians from fighting Israel.
     Today, 40 years and countless attacks and wars later, Israel again uses massive retaliatory and punitive force to plummet the Palestinians of Gaza into submission. Hundreds of Palestinians died in the first 24 hours of the Israeli attack, and several thousand might die by the time the operation ends. For what purpose, one wonders. more.. e-mail

’We are all scared. My youngest daughter is panicked '¦ none of us sleep properly’
Salwa El Tibi, The Guardian 12/29/2008
     Save the Children UK’s Gaza programme manager, is in the Gaza Strip with her four children aged seven, 14, 15 and 19
     The situation is terrible. We haven’t been out of our home since the bombing started on Saturday. We hear the F16s coming in and the bombs fall. The Apache helicopters are precise but the F16 fighters cause widespread damage to buildings around their targets. It goes on day and night.
     We are all scared. My youngest daughter is panicked, talking in an agitated voice and has started to wet the bed. None of us are sleeping properly.
     We have to keep all the doors and the windows of our home open otherwise they could get blown in by the bombs. That means it is very cold. We have long periods without electricity. The children are complaining.
     I stocked up on food because we expected an attack and have enough for another three days or so. After that I don’t know. I might be able to get to the market but many bakeries have stopped producing bread because there is a severe shortage of flour. We are living from day to day. more.. e-mail

'They are wrong to think we are the terrorists'
Eman Mohammed writing from the occupied Gaza Strip, Electronic Intifada 12/29/2008
     Saturday was supposed to be a normal day -- at least as close to normal as we are allowed to enjoy in Gaza.
     Where else but in Gaza are students killed in air strikes on their classrooms? Where else does a humanitarian disaster unfold not because an earthquake, a volcano, or any other kind of natural disaster struck, but because of governmental policy, and the cooperation of world powers?
     From my desk in my university classroom we could see the smoke from Israel’s bombing and hear the most terrifying sound of non-stop explosions. Girls around me screamed in horror and I thought about my camera which I left back at home for fear that rain would damage it. It ended up being a sunny day and I regretted losing the opportunity to take photos, not for fame or for money, but to document what was happening to prove to people outside of Gaza that they are wrong to think we are the terrorists.
     Some of my classmates ran out of the university, fearing their lives, but were killed by Israeli missiles as they fled. more.. e-mail

Remi Kanazi - A Poem for Gaza
Remi Kanazi, Palestine Think Tank 12/29/2008
     I never knew death until I saw the bombing of a refugee camp
     Craters filled with disfigured ankles and splattered torsos
     But no sign of a face, the only impression a fading scream
     I never understood pain
     Until a seven-year-old girl clutched my hand
     Stared up at me with soft brown eyes, waiting for answers
     But I didn't have any
     I had muted breath and dry pens in my back pocket
     That couldn't fill pages of understanding or resolution
     In her other hand she held the key to her grandmother's house
     But I couldn't unlock the cell that caged her older brothers
     They said, we slingshot dreams so the other side will feel our father's presence
     A craftsman
     Built homes in areas where no one was building
     And when he fell, he was silent
     A .50 caliber bullet tore through his neck shredding his vocal cords
     Too close . more.. e-mail

Poems for Gaza
Sam Hamod and Remi Kanazi, Palestine Chronicle 12/29/2008
     The Palestine Chronicle is honored to feature the work of two very distinguished poets, Sam Hamod and Remi Kanazi.
     No Words Left
     By Sam Hamod
     Without words,
     Children screaming,
     Mothers wailing,
     Men cussing,
     Imam’s praying,
     Israeli bombs splaying blood,
     F16s ratcheting missiles everywhere,
     Buildings exploding,
     Hospitals shredded,
     University splintered,
     Shrapnel flying everywhere,
     No words from Bush,
     No words from Brown,
     No words from Obama... more.. e-mail

The longest night of my life
Safa Joudeh writing from the occupied Gaza Strip, Electronic Intifada 12/28/2008
     Here’s an update on what’s happening here from where I am, the second night of Israeli air (and sea) raids on Gaza.
     It’s 1:30am but it feels like the sun should be up already. For the past few hours there’s been simultaneous, heavy aerial bombardment of Gaza City and the northern Gaza Strip. It feels like the longest night of my life. In my area it started with the bombing of workshops (usually located in the ground floor of private/family residential buildings), garages and warehouses in one of the most highly condensed areas in Gaza City, "Askoola."
     About an hour ago they bombed the Islamic University, destroying the laboratory building.
     As I mentioned in an earlier account , my home is close to the university. We heard the first explosion, the windows shook, the walls shook and my heart felt like it would literally jump out of my mouth. My parents, siblings and cousins, who have been staying with us since their home was damaged the first day of the air raids, had been trying to get some sleep.We all rushed to the side of the house that was farthest from the bombing. Hala, my 11-year-old sister stood motionless and had to be dragged to the other room. I still have marks on my shoulder from when Aya, my 13-year-old cousin held on to me during the next four explosions, each one as violent and heart-stopping as the next. Looking out of the window moments later the night sky had turned to a dirty navy-gray from the smoke. more.. e-mail

’The injured were lying there asking God to let them die’
Fikr Shaltoot, The Guardian 12/29/2008
     Fikr Shaltoot is a programme coordinator for Medical Aid for Palestinians, a British non-governmental organisation that provides medical supplies in Gaza.
     Being a health worker, I had to check the needs of Shifa hospital and the other hospitals in Gaza. The situation in Shifa is really bad. There were corpses in corridors covered with blankets. The mortuary couldn’t cope with the number of bodies. Two bodies were left on stretchers, one wrapped in a blanket.They leave them until families can recognise them.
     There were mothers, fathers looking for children, looking for relatives. Everyone was confused and seeking support. Mothers were crying, people were asking about relatives, the medical team was confused.
     Some people were just lying there, some were screaming, some were very, very angry. There were a lot of injured arriving, ambulances coming in and out. The injured were coming by private cars and they were being left wherever. You could see blood here and there.
     There is talk [the Israeli air strikes] were targeting the police and security forces but in Shifa hospital, I saw many, many civilians, some dead, some injured, some were children, some were women, some were elderly people. more.. e-mail

’For the children, it is like living in hell’
Jerome Tyler, The Independent 12/29/2008
     As explosions echoed in the distance and Israeli aircraft roared overhead, many residents in Gaza City were hunkered down in their houses yesterday, praying the bombs would spare them and worrying about how to feed their families and keep them warm should they survive.
     "We still don’t dare go outside. Nowhere feels safe," Faysal Shawa, a construction engineer, said by telephone from the house where he lives with his wife and three children. "Gaza is so small that when the Israelis bomb us it feels like they are bombing our own houses. There is a government building about 100 metres from where I live and it has been hit a number of times. My children are completely terrified.
     "People in Gaza are used to dealing with hardship, but this time the bombings are absolutely terrifying, and what makes this attack worse is that for the past 18 months we have been living with little electricity, water and food. For the children it is like living in hell." more.. e-mail

Amira Hass / ’Gaza strike is not against Hamas, it’s against all Palestinians’
Amira Hass, Ha’aretz 12/29/2008
     At 3:19 P.M. Sunday, the sound of an incoming missile could be heard over the telephone. And then another, along with the children’s cries of fear. In Gaza City’s Tel al-Hawa neighborhood, high-rise apartment buildings are crowded close together, with dozens of children in every building, hundreds in every block.
     Their father, B., informs me that smoke is rising from his neighbor’s house and ends the call. An hour later, he tells me that two apartments were hit. One was empty; he does not know who lives there. The other, which suffered casualties, belongs to a member of a rocket-launching cell, but no one senior or important.
     At noon Sunday, the Israel Air Force bombed a compound belonging to Gaza’s National Security Service. It houses Gaza City’s main prison. Three prisoners were killed. Two were apparently Fatah members; the third was convicted of collaborating with Israel. Hamas had evacuated most of the Gaza Strip’s other prisons, but thought this jail would be safe. more.. e-mail

Gaza Atrocity
Leila Diab, Middle East Online 12/28/2008
     Is this a civilized government - the bombardment of thousands of defenseless Palestinian men, women and children? Can these (Israeli) crimes against humanity (in Gaza) usher in a new year of a peaceful hope in 2009?
     As I awoke this morning and opened up my email to check my mail, I found several very disturbing and disheartening news of yet another atrocity in the Gaza Strip. As the sun rose over the Gaza Strip, on the 28th of December, 2008, the Israeli military government launched a massive wave of air attacks on the Gaza Strip people. At least 200 Palestinians have been killed, and more than 200 Palestinians have been wounded. According to an Israeli military spokesman, Avi Benayhu, he reported to the Israeli army radio that the massive bombardment of Gaza was only just beginning.
     Does anyone Care? "Truly don’t we care? And, why don’t we care?" decried my anguished Indian friend, Bindu, upon hearing of the news in Gaza. Is this a civilized government - the bombardment of thousands of defenseless Palestinian men, women and children? They can’t even possibly escape from the prison confines of its army controls and after it has starved the population for months and reduced it to absolute penury! Does "collateral dame" of women and children justify the Israeli government’s security manifestations and claims, while being - the world’s fourth largest army against the people of Gaza, a race of people who both physically, psychologically, and deliriously are suffering from hunger, economic deprivation and confinement? Will American politicians, Arab and Muslim leaders and the world community’s leaders condemn the Israeli military government’s attacks on a defenseless Palestinian population? more.. e-mail

Most Gaza casualties were non-combatants, civilians
Press release, Al Mezan, Electronic Intifada 12/28/2008
     In one of its bloodiest military operations, the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) initiated a wide-scale air strike operation against the Gaza Strip. Dozens of targets were attacked from the air simultaneously using heavy missiles and bombs. Mostly, the strikes targeted police and security installations across the densely populated Gaza Strip, which is indicative of IOF’s disregard for civilian life and well-being. More than 900 people have been killed and injured, most of whom are non-combatants. The number of casualties was because the timing of the strike, which coincided with the change in school shifts when tens of thousands of schoolchildren were on their way to or from school. Seven UNRWA [the United Nations agency for Palestine refugees] Gaza Vocational Training Center students were also killed in one of the air strikes in Gaza City.
     According to Al Mezan’s monitoring, at approximately 11:30am on Saturday 27 December 2008, Israeli military aircraft launched a coordinated series of air strikes targeting dozens of police, security and other premises across the Gaza Strip. The first wave of attacks lasted for less than five minutes, during which more than 100 missiles and bombs were dropped on Gaza. One of the largest strikes targeted the Arafat Police Town, which is located near several UNRWA schools. Dozens of people were killed in this attack, including tens of young men who were undergoing training to join the police. Moreover, Colonel General Tawfik Jabir, who is the Police General Director in the Gaza Strip, and Captain Ahmed al-Jabari, the Director of the Security and Protection Apparatus, were killed in the same attack. more.. e-mail

World Leaders Respond Timidly to Gaza Massacre
Dan Lieberman, Palestine Chronicle 12/28/2008
     ’Lebanon’s Prime Minister described the Israeli attacks as a criminal operation.’
     The tepid response of world leaders to Israel’s ferocious attack on a defenseless Gaza conveys a helpless feeling to all world citizens -- brutality rules and we are all vulnerable to attack. EU foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, commented that "the EU is very concerned by the events in Gaza." French President Nicolas Sarkozy was quoted as saying he "strongly condemns the irresponsible provocations which led to this situation as well as the disproportionate use of force."
     Are world leaders totally ignorant of the events leading to the massive destruction of Palestinian life? Are they unaware of Israel’s provocations and shrewd manipulation of the facts which allowed them to seem innocent and carry out a diabolical plan to destroy the Palestinians?The facts are:
     For two years Israel has illegally blockaded Gaza. The densest area of the world, which contains 1.5 million people, has received less than a quarter of the volume of imported supplies they received in December 2005 and has not been permitted to export many goods. A totally paralyzed economy has tried to exist with reduced fuel supplies, electrical outages and a lack of spare parts, all of which has caused hunger and severe psychological damage. Include impacts on sewage treatment, waste collection, water supplies and medical facilities. more.. e-mail

Journal: One family’s fear and heartbreak in Gaza
Journal by Sharon Lock, International Solidarity Movement 12/28/2008
     Photos - Sunday December 28, 5.30am, Jabaliya - In the basement, the family begins the night at their allotted sleeping spaces, but as the hours pass, draw closer together until women and children are huddled together in a pile of blankets. The women have slept little, and look exhausted. There are 5 or 6 children under the age of 5, tousled hair and solemn faces. The oldest boy’s face is pinched and distorted with anxiety.
     Explosions are sporadic; sometimes far off, sometimes close. The drone of Israeli aircraft is constant. Fragments of news come by the phone. Attack beside Al Shifa hospital; windows break onto patients. Security and Protection Forces attacked. Al Aqsa TV channel attacked. Plastic factory attacked. Al Asaraya building. The number of dead increases in small leaps.
     Multiple reports that Israel is phoning people at home, telling them “any house with weapons in it is a target and should be evacuated.” And the usual calls about “return Gilad Shalit and everything will be just fine”; as if any of these civilians know the first thing about his detention. If they answer “we don’t have any weapons in our house and we don’t have Gilad Shalit either,” will Israel just bomb the next door neighbours instead. more.. e-mail

Gaza: 'This is only the beginning'
Ewa Jasiewicz writing from the occupied Gaza Strip, Electronic Intifada 12/28/2008
     27 December 2008 As I write this, Israeli jets are bombing the areas of Zeitoun and Rimal in central Gaza City. The family I am staying with has moved into the internal corridor of their home to shelter from the bombing. The windows nearly blew out just five minutes ago as a massive explosion rocked the house. Apache helicopters are hovering above us, while F-16s soar overhead.
     United Nations radio reports say one blast was a target close to the main gate of al-Shifa hospital -- the largest medical facility in Gaza. Another was a plastics factory. More bombs continue to pound the Strip.
     Sirens are wailing on the streets outside. Regular power cuts plunge the city into blackness every night and tonight is no exception. Only perhaps tonight it is the darkest night people have seen here in their lifetimes.
     As of this writing, more than 220 people have been killed and at least 400 injured through attacks that shocked the Strip in the space of 15 minutes. Hospitals are overloaded and unable to cope. These attacks come on top of the already existing humanitarian crisis that came about because of the 18-month Israeli siege which has resulted in a lack of medicines, bread, flour, gas, electricity, fuel and freedom of movement. more.. e-mail

Hanukkah Games in Gaza
Belén Fernández, Palestine Chronicle 12/28/2008
     I was surprised to learn on Saturday afternoon that Israel’s latest assault on Gaza, though not even half a day old, already boasted a Wikipedia entry. I was even more surprised to learn the origins of the assault’s codename.
     At first glance, Operation Cast Lead appeared to be quite straightforward in its evocation of imagery, at least in comparison to Operation Summer Rains—Israel’s 2006 foray into Gaza, the title of which may have functioned more appropriately on the cover of a romance novel in the checkout lane of a supermarket. According to Wikipedia, however, the significance of Cast Lead was not readily discernible by superficial symbolic analysis; in other words:
     - the term lead did not refer to harmful munitions made of heavy metals.
     - the term cast did not mean "wantonly dispersed in densely populated areas."
     As it turned out, Cast Lead was in fact adapted from a Hanukkah poem by Haim Nachman Bialik, national poet of Israel, who poetically lived and died before the nation of Israel was cast across 78% of Palestine. In one of his works, Bialik speaks of a "dreidel cast from solid lead"—a toy that is now being cast across Hamas-controlled portions of remaining Palestinian percentages. more.. e-mail

The world’s message to Gaza: No one cares
Jenka Soderberg Editorial Group, International Middle East Media Center News 12/28/2008
     I sit in front of the computer, editing the article, trying, as always, to maintain objectivity, "Israeli airstrikes kill 205 Palestinians in Gaza".....my eyes begin to blur .....images of bodies, of wailing mamas screaming for their sons, of children missing limbs, hospital crews running, rushing....bodies everywhere......I can no longer see the computer screen through the tears. I think of our friends in Gaza - "Are they ok?"
     .....I try to think of an appropriate response: a protest at the Israeli consulate? A petition? A boycott campaign? They all seem so trivial, so ineffective. Send ANOTHER letter to my congressman, only to be rebuffed again with a form letter stating that the Congressman is in full support of Israel and their War on Terror?
     I’m thinking about an article I read yesterday, about Muntadhar al-Zaidi, the Iraqi journalist who threw his shoes at George Bush just last week. The article was by Ramzy Baroud, who said that the reality of the world outside the Green Zone had finally broken into the carefully-scripted press conferences of Bush lies and al-Maliki smiles.... more.. e-mail

Gaza: Silence is not an option
Eva Bartlett, International Solidarity Movement 12/28/2008
     Dr Khaled from Shifa hospital ICU told me the majority of cases in the intensive car unit are critical.He estimates 80% will not survive.At the time that we spoke the ICU was handling its 4th shift of critically injured.The ICU normally has 12 beds, but the hospital expanded it to 24 using beds and rooms from other departments.
     There is a critical need for more ICU beds, as well as mechanical ventilators.The majority of injuries were "multi-explosive injuries" with a concentration of head injuries ("head trauma") resulting from the explosions and from shrapnel in the brain.Other injuries include abdominal injuries resulting in internal bleeding caused by shrapnel in the abdomen. The majority of head injuries are not expected to survive, and those who do are expected to have brain damage and some with full paralysis (quadriplegia). Because of the shortage of spaces and equipment, the ICU has turned patients away. Others have been waiting in the reception area until a patient dies and the space can be used. more.. e-mail

Video: Tunnel Trade
A Film by Laila El-Haddad and Saeed Taji Farouky, Al Jazeera 12/28/2008
     When Israel withdrew from the Sinai Peninsula in 1982, they built a wall alongside the Gaza border with Egypt, splitting the city of Rafah into two.Families found themselves divided by a high-security international border, though their houses often lay less than 100m apart. Frequent border closures by the Israeli’s further isolated the Gaza Strip and Palestinian trade soon went underground.
     Since then, dozens of secret tunnels burrowed below the Israeli border fence, connecting family houses on both sides of the border.
     Everything moves through Rafah’s tunnels: from cigarettes and medicine to cash and people. But the residents have also suffered enormously. Israeli operations to destroy the tunnels have demolished thousands of homes over the past seven years. more.. e-mail

'Shabbat Shalom' in Gaza
Rami Almeghari writing from the occupied Gaza Strip, Electronic Intifada 12/27/2008
     Shabbat Shalom! "Peaceful Saturday." I don’t believe that Israeli leaders appreciate the meaning of this Hebrew greeting given at the start of the weekly Jewish day of rest. No more "Shabbat Shalom," as on Saturday, 27 December 2008, just a few days before the start of a new year, Israeli warplanes dropped bombs on different parts of the Gaza Strip.
     A sunny Saturday in Gaza became very dark as pillars of smoke blacked out the sky of the coastal territory, while the smell of blood was everywhere.
     In Rafah city in the southern Gaza Strip, three family members, including a father, a son and a nephew, were all killed as Israeli warplanes dropped bombs on the Rafah police station. The victims were present at the Rafah police station for a routine matter, when the Israeli air strikes occurred. They did not know that their fate awaited them right there on this "Shabbat Shalom."
     That is one example of the killings at what Israel alleges were Hamas "terrorist" outposts. At dozens of locations, entire buildings were torn down, windows of homes were smashed and countless cars damaged. Under the rubble lay dozens of corpses. About 60 Israeli F-16 warplanes attacked up to 100 targets in Gaza today, mainly police stations and charities run by Hamas. One of the Israeli missiles landed in the sports field of the Islamic University of Gaza, home to more than 18,000 students. more.. e-mail

Gaza: The Real Terrorists
Stuart Littlewood – London, Palestine Chronicle 12/27/2008
     The patience of all decent men must surely be exhausted.
     Today’s slaughter of innocents in Gaza, with at least 230 reported killed in raids on “Hamas terror operatives” (as the Israeli military put it), amounted to “a mass execution”, said Hamas.
     Can there now be any doubt who the real terrorists are?
     The killing spree couldn’t have happened without the tacit approval of America, Britain and the EU. The political pea-brains that direct the pro-Israel western alliance were partying, gorging themselves on Christmas fare or binge-shopping while this massacre of hungry women and children and their despairing menfolk in Gaza was being planned and executed.
     According to the US’s own definition of terrorism Israel is squarely in the frame. Under Section 3 of Executive Order 13224 "Blocking Property and prohibiting Transactions with Persons who commit, threaten to commit, or support Terrorism", the term “terrorism” means an activity that:
     (i) involves a violent act or an act dangerous to human life, property, or infrastructure; and
     (ii) appears to be intended
     • to intimidate or coerce a civilian population;
     • to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or
     • to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, kidnapping, or hostage-taking. more.. e-mail

Palestine: Another Massacre
Nizar Sakhnini, Palestine Chronicle 12/27/2008
     Massacres were part and parcel of the Zionist project in Palestine. They aimed at intimidating the Arabs and make them leave the country.
     Dozens of massacres were committed against the Arabs starting with the Massacre at Baldat al-Shaikh in December 1947 and not ending with the massacres in Qana in South Lebanon in 1996 and 2006.
     Another brutal massacre is being committed in Gaza today.Hundreds of Palestinian Arabs have been killed and/or wounded.
     Given below, is a list of some of the massacres committed by the Zionists since 1947:
     Massacre in Baldat al-Shaikh (31 December 1947): Haganah gang members stormed the village of Baldat al-Shaikh in pursuit of unarmed citizens. The death toll was about 600 people, most of whose corpses were found inside the houses of the village.
     Massacre in Deir Yassin (10 April 1948): A brutal massacre was committed in Deir Yassin: over 250 men, women and children were killed.
     Massacre in Lid (11 July 1948): A commando unit led by Moshe Dayan carried out this massacre. The unit stormed the city in the evening and many of the Arab citizens of the city took refuge from the attack in the Dahmash Mosque. The Zionists reached the mosque and killed 176 civilians who took refuge to the mosque raising the victims of the massacre in Lid to 426 Palestinian Arabs. more.. e-mail

’An earthquake on top of your head’
Dr Eyad Al Serraj, The Guardian 12/27/2008
     A practising psychologist in Gaza City, describes his family’s terror as the Israeli attack began.
     The bombing went on for about 10 minutes. It was like an earthquake on top of your head. The windows were shaking and squeaking. My 10-year-old was terrified, he was jumping from one place to another trying to hide. I held him tight to my chest and tried to give him some security and reassure him. My 12-year-old was panicking and began laughing hysterically, it’s not normal. I held her hand and calmed her and told her she would be safe. My wife was panicking. She was running around the apartment looking for somewhere to hide.
     We live on the ground floor so we headed to the basement.
     Not very far from our home is the headquarters of the police and there was a massive bomb. The chief of police was killed. Two streets away there was another bomb and more people were killed. The office of the president is about one kilometre from our house and it was also bombed.
     We went downstairs to the basement and tried to hide ourselves from the shelling. The child of one of our relatives, who lives in our building, finally came home from school. We hadn’t been able to find her. All the phone connections were jammed. She came home and she was in a very serious state of shock. She was pale and trembling and she was describing dead bodies in the streets. On her way home she passed Hamas people in uniform and they were dead. more.. e-mail

'The amount of death and destruction is inconceivable'
Safa Joudeh writing from the occupied Gaza Strip, Electronic Intifada 12/27/2008
     It was just before noon when I heard the first explosion. I rushed to my window and barely did I get there and look out when I was pushed back by the force and air pressure of another explosion. For a few moments I didn’t understand but then I realized that Israeli promises of a wide-scale offensive against the Gaza Strip had materialized. Israeli Foreign Minister Tzpi Livni’s statements following a meeting with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak the day before yesterday had not been empty threats after all.
     What followed seems pretty much surreal at this point. Never had we imagined anything like this. It all happened so fast but the amount of death and destruction is inconceivable, even to me and I’m in the middle of it and a few hours have passed already passed.
     Six locations were hit during the air raid on Gaza City. The images are probably not broadcasted on US news channels. There were piles and piles of bodies in the locations that were hit. As you looked at them you could see that a few of the young men were still alive, someone lifts a hand, and another raises his head.They probably died within moments because their bodies were burned, most had lost limbs, some of their guts were hanging out and they were all lying in pools of blood. Outside my home which is close to the two largest universities in Gaza, a missile fell on a large group of young men, university students. They’d been warned not to stand in groups as it makes them an easy target, but they were waiting for buses to take them home. Seven were killed, four students and three of our neighbors’ kids, young men who were from the Rayes family and were best friends. As I’m writing this I can hear a funeral procession go by outside; I looked out the window a moment ago and it was the three Rayes boys. They spent all their time together when they were alive, they died together and now they are sharing the same funeral together. Nothing could stop my 14-year-old brother from rushing out to see the bodies of his friends laying in the street after they were killed. He hasn’t spoken a word since. more.. e-mail

To be in Gaza is to be trapped
Peter Beaumont, The Guardian 12/28/2008
     Gaza. Always the suffering of Gaza, most potent symbol of the tragedy of Palestine. In 1948, during the Nakba – or "The Catastrophe" as Palestinians describe the war that gave birth to the state of Israel – 200,000 refugees poured into Gaza, swelling its population by more than two-thirds. Then Gaza fell under Egyptian control.
     The six day war of 1967 saw more refugees, but with it came the occupation of Gaza by Israel – an occupation that, despite Israel’s declaration under Prime Minister Ariel Sharon that it would unilaterally withdraw its settlements and troops in 2005, has never really ended.
     It has not ended, for to be in Gaza is to be trapped. Without future or hope, limited to a few square miles. Its borders, land and sea, are defined largely by Israel (with Egypt’s compliance along the southern end of the Strip).
     It is not open to the ocean apart from a narrow outlet accessible only to the fishing fleet, a coastal blockade policed by Israel’s gunboats, the boundaries of which have only recently been tested by boats of protesters sailing from Cyprus to draw attention to conditions inside Gaza. more.. e-mail

Inside Gaza: ’The hospital morgues were already full. The dead were piled on top of each other outside’
Sami Abdel-Shafi in Gaza city, The Independent 12/28/2008
     I am safe, and yet I feel like a walking dead person. Everything around me shows it. It is hard to write something of any coherence while exposed to cold winter air and to the smell that lingers after the detonation of Israeli bombs. They must have been massive. During the bombing I opened all the windows around my apartment to avoid them imploding as a result of the vacuum shocks sweeping through Gaza City after each enormous bang. While the bombing continued, I jumped down two flights of stairs to my father’s house, to make sure he was OK. Should I open up all his windows too? That would expose the old man to the risk of illness. We have no medical care or medication. However, the risk from shattering glass was greater, so I opened them all.
     Mobile phones did not work, because of electricity outages and the flood of attempted calls. I flipped the electricity generator on so that we could watch the news. We wanted to understand what was going on in our own neighbourhood. However, this was impossible. Israeli surveillance drones flew overhead, scrambling the reception. All I could do was step outside, where I found crowds of frantic people, lines of rising smoke and the smell of charred buildings and bodies that lay around targeted sites nearby. Somebody said the bombs had been launched in parallel raids over the entire Gaza Strip. What was the target here? Perhaps a police station about 200 metres away. Other bombs annihilated blocks less than a kilometre away, where one of the main police training centres stood. When the strikes began, a graduation ceremony for more than 100 recruits in a civil law enforcement programme was under way. These were the young men trained to organise traffic, instil civil safety and maintain law and order. Many of them were killed, it is said, in addition to the Gaza Strip’s police chief. more.. e-mail

Gaza massacres must spur us to action
Ali Abunimah, Electronic Intifada 12/27/2008
     "I will play music and celebrate what the Israeli air force is doing." Those were the words, spoken on Al Jazeera today by Ofer Shmerling, an Israeli civil defense official in the Sderot area adjacent to Gaza, as images of Israel’s latest massacres were broadcast around the world.
     A short time earlier, US-supplied Israeli F-16 warplanes and Apache helicopters dropped over 100 bombs on dozens of locations in the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip killing at least 195 persons and injuring hundreds more. Many of these locations were police stations located, like police stations the world over, in the middle of civilian areas. The US government was one of the first to offer its support for Israel’s attacks, and others will follow.
     Reports said that many of the dead were Palestinian police officers. Among those Israel labels "terrorists" were more than a dozen traffic police officers undergoing training. An as yet unknown number of civilians were killed and injured; Al Jazeera showed images of several dead children, and the Israeli attacks came at the time thousands of Palestinian children were in the streets on their way home from school. more.. e-mail

Rights orgs: Israel’s willful killings a war crime
Press release, Various undersigned, Electronic Intifada 12/27/2008
     Palestinian human rights organizations strongly condemn the recent military attacks carried out by the Israeli occupying forces in the Gaza Strip on 27 December 2008. The attacks began at approximately 11:30am and lasted for approximately three hours. These attacks have destroyed most of the Gaza security offices including police stations, resulting in the deaths of more than 200 Palestinians. More than 350 have been injured with at least 120 critically.
     The number of deaths resulting from these attacks indicates a willful targeting of the civilian police forces in these locations and a clear violation of the prohibition against willful killings.Willful killings are a grave breach of the Fourth Geneva Convention under Article 147 and therefore, a war crime. Both the time and location of these attacks also indicate a malicious intent to inflict as many casualties as possible with many of the police stations located in civilian population centers and the time of the attacks coinciding with the end of the school day resulting in the deaths of numerous children. more.. e-mail

The rains of death in Gaza
Laila El-Haddad writing from North Carolina, US, Electronic Intifada 12/27/2008
     We woke up this morning to the news in Gaza. It seems we always wake up to news there -- so it has become a matter of perspective how bad the news is each time; how remote it seems each time; how real or not; how severe and whether the severity warrants an "international outcry" or whether the animals can continue to suffer in their cages for a while longer.
     We received a call from my in-laws in Lebanon at an early hour, checking in on my family in Gaza, since they cannot call them directly. We call my parents. My father does not answer. We call his mobile, we reach him. He has just returned from al-Shifa hospital -- we hold our breaths.
     "We are OK. We went to donate blood and to see if they needed any help" says my father, a retired surgeon.
     "We were in the market when the strikes began. I saw the missiles falling and prayed; the earth shook; the smoke rose; the ambulances screamed," he said, the sirens audible in the background. He was on Talatini street at the time of the attacks, just a few streets down from one of the attack sites. more.. e-mail

Stench of Death Hangs Over Gaza
Ola Attallah – Gaza City, Palestine Chronicle 12/27/2008
     ’At least 206 Palestinians were killed in the massive Israeli air strikes.’
     With thick clouds of smoke billowing into the sky and dead bodies littering into the streets, a stench of death rose from the ruins of the Gaza Strip on Saturday, December 27.
     "Where are my sons?" screamed Um Ibrahim as she ran hysterically looking for her little kids.
     She lives near a security compound Israeli planes pounded to the ground on Saturday.
     "I don’t know what happened to them," cried the bereaved mother.
     Her neighbor Um Abed fell unconscious when she saw her son among the dead in the attacks.
     At least 206 Palestinians were killed in massive Israeli air strikes in the Gaza Strip on Saturday.
     "The number of victims has reached 195 martyrs with more than 300 wounded, 120 of whom are critically hurt," said Moawiya Hassanein, the head of Gaza emergency services.
     "The toll has gone up because of new Israeli raids and the discovery of several martyrs under the rubble." more.. e-mail

Delusions of victory in Gaza
Zvi Barel, Ha’aretz 12/28/2008
     As of yesterday, politicians and the public at large have been enthralled by a new prospect: that of a wide-scale military operation in the Gaza Strip. Such a prospect answers all their heart’s secret wishes: Avenging the rocket fire by Gazan militants, reclaiming Israel’s prestige, delivering a fatal blow to Hamas, providing payback for Israel’s 2005 pullout from Gaza, sending a strong message to Iran, an implicit one to Hezbollah, and also showing the government’s concern for its citizens and scoring some points with the electorate ahead of the elections.
     The public’s imaginations are let loose as they chant a battle-cry. Fighter planes have already bombed dozens of targets in the heart of Gaza and tomorrow thousands of troops may storm its alleyways. On the third day the Israel Defense Forces might eliminate Hamas leaders Ismail Haniyeh, Mushir al-Masri and Mahmoud al-Zahar. It will seize the Hamas government’s buildings and an army spokesman will display captured arm caches containing sophisticated missiles and thousands of guns to the press.
     ...How many soldiers are expected to be killed in the first wave? How many months is the IDF expected to spend in Gaza, sweeping its houses and tunnels? How many Palestinian civilians will be killed? Will Gilad Shalit survive in such a scenario? Will Hezbollah remain passive during a Gaza offensive? How will the residents of the West Bank, Jordan and Egypt react? What about the new U.S. president? And Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas? Not that he really matters. more.. e-mail

The neighborhood bully strikes again
Gideon Levy, Ha’aretz 12/28/2008
     Israel embarked yesterday on yet another unnecessary, ill-fated war. On July 16, 2006, four days after the start of the Second Lebanon War, I wrote: "Every neighborhood has one, a loud-mouthed bully who shouldn’t be provoked into anger... Not that the bully’s not right - someone did harm him. But the reaction, what a reaction.
     Two and a half years later, these words repeat themselves, to our horror, with chilling precision. Within the span of a few hours on a Saturday afternoon, the IDF sowed death and destruction on a scale that the Qassam rockets never approached in all their years, and Operation "Cast Lead" is only in its infancy.
     Once again, Israel’s violent responses, even if there is justification for them, exceed all proportion and cross every red line of humaneness, morality, international law and wisdom.
     What began yesterday in Gaza is a war crime and the foolishness of a country. History’s bitter irony: A government that went to a futile war two months after its establishment - today nearly everyone acknowledges as much - embarks on another doomed war two months before the end of its term. more.. e-mail

Gazan Voices, American Silence
Kenneth Ring, Palestine Think Tank 12/27/2008
     [Author’s note: Just after this article was written, it became evident that Israel is likely to launch at least a limited attack on Gaza, which only heightens the sense of urgency for action that is advocated here.]
     The baby is crying again. You wake up. Cold. There is no electricity in the house; it went off during the night. For the last week – weeks, months – it has been on only sporadically. You throw on a coat and go to check on the baby. It seems listless. There is no milk in the house, and very little food. The UN shipments have stopped again, and you are not sure when they will resume.
     In the other room, you hear your husband coughing. He has been sick for weeks and lately he has been spitting up blood. He has tried to get permission to get to a hospital in Israel, but every time he has been denied permission to leave.
     You go outside to see if a neighbor can give you any milk. The first thing that hits you is the stench. The garbage has not been collected for weeks, and the sewage problem, because of the recent rains, has become even worse. No wonder so many people are sick. You are living in a cesspool. And you, and everyone else, is trapped inside this prison because the borders are sealed. This has been going on now for a year and half, and there is no telling when it will be over. And with the end of the truce, such as it was, there is a renewed threat of violence from the Israelis. Even now, you see an Israeli drone overhead and know that a missile could be launched from it at any time. more.. e-mail

Hunger Before the Storm
Sameh A. Habeeb, Middle East Online 12/27/2008
     Israeli politicians, in the run-up to elections, are promising to deal a severe blow to Gaza as this is how Israeli policy is made. However, every household in Gaza is already under siege. In Gaza you can only find pale, angry and frustrated faces. If you visit my house you won’t find power, while my neighbor is out of gas. Another neighbor seeks potable water as power outages have left him without for four days. A third neighbor desparately looks for milk for his child but does so in vain. Another friend who lives on the corner needs medicine that can’t currently be found in Gaza.
     There is no shortage of such stories in Gaza (though there is a shortage of nearly everything else). Perhaps broadcasting such stories would result in pressure on Israeli leaders to stop the siege. Because what is happening is that the entire Gaza population of 1.5 million -- densely packed into a small area -- is being punished for crude rockets being fired into Israel by a few.
     Shaher Mazen, 25, holds a degree in political science but works as a taxi driver to put bread on the table for his family. I spoke to him while I was on my way to some of the Gaza bakeries to cover some news that was happening there. Shaher was frustrated because of siege and furious towards the two rival Palestinian governments, considering them as weak in the face of Israel. more.. e-mail

David Halpin - Braced / Jose Saramago - Gaza
David Halpin, Jose Saramago, Palestine Think Tank 12/27/2008
     It is a beautiful afternoon here on Dartmoor. The sunlight has that quality one sees in Russian paintings of birch trees in the crisp snow. The three lovely grandchildren - girls, are here. We have been out for a walk on the moor in freedom - not stifled by a 60 year long occupation that started with a terror driven ethnic cleansing.
     I phoned my brother in Gaza at noon. The couple had their fourth child, a baby girl, 7 days ago. There are now 4 children, so what future?
     There has been no electricity for 48 hours. If the hospital generators fail (they are meant for stand by only), those on ventilators etc might die. Those on ventilation are having their bronchial trees sucked out using syringes. 1500 need special medical care outside Gaza. Since June 2007 and the pre-emptive strike by Hamas and the tightening of the noose, there have been 273 Palestinian murders. One can assume at least three times that number have been wounded. There have been uncounted hundreds dying from want of adequate medical services. I have seen many ’amputees’ and appeared with one - Bashir on Al Aqsa TV. 3,500 factories have shut and the unemployment rate is about 80%. more.. e-mail

An interview with Carlos Latuff, cartoonist/activist
Jackson Allers, Palestine Think Tank 12/25/2008
     He has been alternatively praised and vilified in the press for his depictions of suffering in places like the Palestinian Territories, Iraq, and the slums of Latin America. But Brazilian cartoonist Carlos Latuff says he is not out to please anyone. MENASSAT spoke with Latuff on the heals of a newly released series of cartoons about Iraqi journalist Muntazer Al-Zaidi.
     BEIRUT, December 23, 2008 (MENASSAT) — Carlos Latuff, 40, is nothing short of a one-man cartoon wrecking-ball when he hits the ink.Based in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Latuff has spent the last 15 plus years crafting a style that can best be described as “populist cartooning.” He has touched on issues like Apartheid in South Africa, the plight of Native Americans in the US and the oppression of Tibetans in China.
     But perhaps his most controversial series to date is “We are all Palestinians,” in which he compares the actions taken by the Israeli government towards Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip directly to the Nazi’s treatment of Jews.
     In a December interview with the Jewish cultural scholar Eddy Portnoy, Latuff said, “It happens to be Israeli Jews that are the oppressors of Palestinians. If they were Christians, Muslims or Buddhists, I would criticize them the same way.” -- See also: Cartoon of the day more.. e-mail

Q&A: Israel Bars Credible Observers from Gaza
Thalif Deen Interviews U.n. Human Rights Expert Richard Falk, Inter Press Service 12/27/2008
     UNITED NATIONS, Dec 26(IPS) - The U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay last week lambasted the Israeli government for detaining and expelling a human rights expert, Richard Falk, who was on a U.N.-mandated assignment to probe the human rights situation in the occupied territories.
     "It is difficult to assess Israel’s motives for barring my entry to the Occupied Palestinian Territories, but it certainly seems to fit with a pattern of minimising to the extent possible, reporting on the realities of the occupation, especially in Gaza," Falk told IPS.
     Falk, whose official title is U.N. Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, is a Professor of International Law who has served in several U.S. academic institutions, including Princeton, Ohio State and the University of California.
     The detention and expulsion were "unprecedented and regrettable," Pillay said, complaining that Falk was not only separated from two U.N. staffers accompanying him but was also held incommunicado for more than 20 hours at the Ben Gurion airport last week and denied the use of his U.N.-issued cell phone. more.. e-mail

Bush’s farewell gift
Nicola Nasser, Al-Ahram Weekly 12/25/2008
     UN Resolution 1850 pushes Palestinian unity further from reach than ever
     The body of UN Security Council Resolution 1850 avoids any meaningful mention of a two-state solution or the creation of a Palestinian state with the exception of a feeble reference late in the text -- added almost as an afterthought -- to "preparation for statehood". While the preamble does mention Resolution 1514, issued five years ago, and notes that "lasting peace can only be based on an enduring commitment to mutual recognition, freedom from violence, incitement, and terror, and the two-state solution, building upon previous agreements and obligations," and even notes "the importance of the Arab peace initiative of 2002" the seven articles of the resolution, adopted on 16 December, focus on committing all parties to continuing an endless peace process.
     The outgoing US president "personally" sponsored Resolution 1850, which on the surface was intended to placate Palestinian negotiators before Bush’s meeting with President Mahmoud Abbas on 19 December. Bush has failed to fulfil his twice-made promise to usher in a Palestinian state, once by the end of 2005 and the second time by the end of this year. The resolution was intended to ensure Palestinian negotiators remain committed to the "Annapolis process" in which Bush’s failure to produce positive results is no less dismal than his failure to fulfil his promises to the Palestinian president by means of securing a UN rubber stamp on the process. The UN’s backing of the Annapolis process is supposed to preempt any attempt to wriggle out of it on the part of a new Israeli government. According to recent opinion polls, the most likely victor will be Likud leader Benyamin Netanyahu, who has made no secret of his opposition to the Annapolis process and vision. But as its record amply demonstrates Israel has never respected UN resolutions, confident that regardless how grossly it abuses them it will enjoy the backing of Washington. more.. e-mail

Cartooning for peace
Georges Bahgory, Al-Ahram Weekly 12/25/2008
     In Paris, Georges Bahgory teams up with 14 cartoonists for a dose of politics and sharp wit.
     Like a frond from a palm tree in my village, Bahgora, I was bound to meet other fronds, fronds that came from other parts of the world. Together we recreated one palm tree, a palm tree of universal dimensions.
     There are fifteen of us: Plantu from France, No-Rio from Japan, Vladdo from Colombia, Kroll from Belgium, Xia Lichuan from China, Patrick from Switzerland, Zlatkovsky from Russia, Ali Dilem from Algeria, Ramize from Turkey, Georgio Forattini from Italy, Danziger from America, Khalil Abu Arafeh from Palestine, Baha Boukhari from Egypt and Michel Kichka from Israel.
     We are all reincarnations of that great artist, Honore Daurmier, the French cartoonist whose drawings took France by storm in the 19th century. We challenged Israel in the cartoon battle. We sneaked into enemy land undetected, and we had the protection of Kofi Annan to boot. We wanted our drawings to reach the children of Ramallah. We wanted the detainees in Israeli prisons to bear witness as well.
     Our pens and brushes are ready. Plantu is swift with the left hand, drawing as fast as he thinks. Norio makes it look easy, working at the speed of light. Forattini offers a political analysis of the aggressor and the victim. Ramize gives her critique a sensual touch. Abu Arafeh is unwavering in his defence of Palestinian right. I keep the pen down, twirling it on the page, forming one long curly line. more.. e-mail

Unscripted: Green Zone Theater and the Shoe Drama
Ramzy Baroud, Palestine Chronicle 12/25/2008
     ’Al-Zaidi was overpowered, then dragged away by Iraqi security.’
     The plot, so unexpectedly, thickened in Iraq on a Sunday like no other. The two main actors - US President George W. Bush, and Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki -- took to the stage to perform another well-rehearsed press conference. The scripts were ever so predictable: Bush to tout the ’progress’ achieved in Iraq, while al-Maliki to express gratitude for the freedom bestowed on his country. Both men were to caution from overstated optimism, and to forewarn of the great challenges that are yet to come. The two partners were to shake hands, smile and walk away. Things, however, didn’t go according to plan on Sunday, December 14.
     A surprise appearance by till then little-known Iraqi journalist Muntadhar al-Zaidi provided a most unpredictable conclusion to the public performance regularly held in Baghdad’s Green Zone theater. Every joint press conference of US and Iraqi officials has, for years, concluded, more or less according to plan. Since the toppling of President Saddam Hussein’s statue in 2003, in a well orchestrated - Shakespearean even - series of events, until that fateful Sunday, few have dared to violate the carefully prepared, monotonous media appearances, which often end with a handshake, unconvincing smiles, and the mutter of disgruntled journalists for failing to land a last minute question. more.. e-mail

Fatah postpones convention
Khaled Amayreh, Al-Ahram Weekly 12/25/2008
     With no achievements in the peace process, Fatah’s high leadership decides against gathering the movement.
     With the "peace process" going nowhere, and beset by chronic internal divisions, Fatah has once again postponed convening its long-overdue Sixth Congress. The last time Fatah held its general congress was in Algiers nearly 20 years ago.
     Fatah leaders, including Palestinian Authority President (PA) Mahmoud Abbas, had been vowing ad nauseam to hold the convention before the end of 2008. However, Fatah’s inability to put its house in order and the lingering showdown with Hamas, which is in control of the Gaza Strip, have made the holding of a successful congress virtually impossible.
     There are numerous reasons and factors contributing to the latest postponement of the Fatah convention. The top Fatah leadership in Ramallah, let alone the movement’s overall leadership, is itself far from united. The two top Fatah leaders, Abbas and Ahmed Qurei, have not been on speaking terms for sometime due to "differences" over the peace process with Israel. This week, there were reports that Abbas was trying to sack Qurei as chief Palestinian negotiator with Israel. more.. e-mail

Still at odds
Dina Ezzat, Al-Ahram Weekly 12/25/2008
     Possible scenarios for future Egypt-Syria relations
     Egyptian officials are not short on criticism of Syria’s regional behaviour. On the contrary, Syria, as far as Egypt’s foreign and national security policies are concerned, is not being helpful on a wide range of issues, including Iran, Iraq and Palestine.
     Particularly subject to criticism in Cairo is the Syrian (mis)handling of Egyptian- Syrian tensions. "They are not helping at all. They are causing more damage and are blocking any chances, no matter how remote, for an end to the long phase of tension," commented one Egyptian official on condition of anonymity.
     Cairo is especially disturbed by a demonstration of a few hundred Syrians that took place in front of the Egyptian Embassy in Damascus and where harsh anti- Egypt slogans were chanted portraying Egypt deliberately shrugging the humanitarian crisis in Gaza borne by the Israeli siege by refusing to unilaterally open the Rafah Crossing that links Gaza to Sinai. more.. e-mail

The waiting game
Bassel Oudat, Damascus, Al-Ahram Weekly 12/25/2008
     Syria is looking forward to Obama taking the reins of US power, hopeful he will end its isolation.
     Syrian-US relations plummeted over the past five years into depths unseen since 1967. Differences ensued over the US military invasion of Iraq in 2003, which Syria -- sitting on the UN Security Council at the time -- strongly opposed. Following the occupation of Iraq, Syria cooperated with the US in fighting terror. It prevented volunteers from Arab and foreign countries from using its territories to reach Iraq, arresting some and deporting others. It exchanged security information with the US and pledged to tighten its borders with Iraq even more. But this wasn’t enough. Washington continued to accuse Syria of sponsoring terror and facilitating the passage of "terrorists" into Iraq.
     In summer 2004, Syria helped obtain a three-year extension for Lebanese President Emile Lahoud. The move divided Lebanon and alienated the Americans. Relations hit rock bottom when Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Al-Hariri was assassinated in February 2005. Acting under pressure from France and the US, Syria pulled out of Lebanon within months, ending 29 years of military presence in that country. With Paris and Washington insisting that Damascus had a hand in Al-Hariri’s murder, the UN Security Council ordered an investigation into the case. Washington pulled its ambassador to Syria out and called for a change in Syria’s "conduct". more.. e-mail

The Wisdom of Edwin Montagu
Gilad Atzmon, Palestine Think Tank 12/26/2008
     The following is a Memorandum written by Edwin Montagu commenting on the Balfour declaration. It was submitted to the  British Cabinet on 23 August 1917. 
     Though Montagu speaks wisdom in each sentence, his suggestions were ignored. Montagu probably failed to realise that the Balfour declaration was a token the British had to pay in order to pull America into the war.  
     In his remarkable book The Pity Of It All, Amos Elon  (Penguin 2004) provides a very interesting historical insight into the subject. Seemingly, within the eve of the first war, some very powerful Jewish German lobbies were operating in America. Prominent German American Jews protested against America joining England and France. In a statement to the New York Times on 22 November 1914, Jacob H Schiff, head of Khun, Loeb - at the time the second largest private bank in the US - charged the British and French with attempting to destroy Germany for reasons of trade (Elon, 253). Needless to say. the East European Jews who emigrated to the USA evading Anti-Semitic Czarist Russia regarded the German army as a liberator. At large, American Jewry was pro-German.
     The British Government took these developments rather seriously. At the time the British Ambassador to the United States suspected a 'Jewish conspiracy in America'. The 1917 Balfour Declaration was largely an attempt to divert the anti-English feelings amongst World Jewry in general and widespread among American Jews in particular. According to Montagu, the declaration is itself largely anti-Semitic. more.. e-mail

In confidence: a half-hour with Syria’s Bashar Assad
David Ignatius, Daily Star 12/27/2008
     Syrian President Bashar Assad says he doesn’t want to send a message to Barack Obama, exactly, but to express a three-part hope for the incoming administration’s Middle East policy:
     First, he hopes Obama won’t start "another war anywhere in the world, especially not in the Middle East." And he trusts that the doctrine of "pre-emptive war" will end when George W. Bush leaves office.
     Second, Assad said, "We would like to see this new administration sincerely involved in the peace process." He hopes Obama will back Syria’s indirect negotiations with Israel, and he urges the new administration to pursue "the Lebanese track and the Palestinian track, as well."
     Asked if he would mind if the Syrian track went first (a sequence that has worried some Syrians who prefer the ideological purity of following the Palestinians), Assad answered: "Of course not..." more.. e-mail

Ahmadinajad’s Christmas Message
Stuart Littlewood, Middle East Online 12/26/2008
     Israel’s stooges in the UK wasted no time orchestrating a tidal wave of protest against Channel 4 TV’s showing of a Christmas message by Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinajad.
     The MP Philip Davies, a Friend of Israel, said that the address was "completely unacceptable on every level" but didn’t explain why. "His previous comments don’t strike me as being in tune with what most people feel at Christmas time. He is an offensive man and the last person you would want to use for a Christmas message." Speak for yourself, Mr Davies.
     Israel’s Ambassador Ron Prosor complained that Ahmadinjad’s government "leads Christ’s followers to the gallows." Channel 4’s decision to broadcast the message was a “sick and twisted irony” and a "scandal and a national embarrassment" because the Iranian President "denies the Holocaust, advocates the destruction of the sovereign State of Israel, funds and encourages terrorism, executes children and hangs gay people. more.. e-mail

Palestinian Counseling Center in Beit Hanina, images of violence and their effects
Susan Galleymore, Jerusalem, December 2005, Palestine Think Tank 12/1/2005
     The Palestinian Counseling Center is located in Beit Hanina, East Jerusalem. I didn’t have a map of the area but I had a cell phone and the goodwill of the female passengers on the bus.
     PCC Counselor Siham Rashid advised me to look for The Garden of Eden. Since I’d forgotten whether she’d said it was an actual garden, an archeological site, or something else, I carefully pronounced the Arabic words and looked questioningly at fellow bus passengers. At first they were puzzled, then dumbfounded. Finally someone connected my halting Arabic with the name of a local grocery store – The Garden of Eden - and I hopped off the bus and phoned Siham. She kindly met me on the street and guided me to the Center.
     PCC is funded by many international donor organizations…excluding USAID. Siham explained that PCC turns down funds from USAID as its mission is incompatible with PCC’s work and goals. USAID has a reputation for creating dependencies between funds and recipient organizations’ missions; a group that receives USAID funding can find itself financially dependent and pressured to align organizational strategies with those of USAID’s. Siham added that USAID’s donations too frequently include military equipment such as Apache helicopters. She asked how could a group such as PCC accept funds from an organization that also donates weaponry and military equipment that is used against Palestinians with deadly results?
     Siham’s full interview will be available in the book, Long Time Passing: Speaking about War and Terror. Meanwhile, a summary follows... more.. e-mail

Christmas in Gaza
Stuart Littlewood, Middle East Online 12/24/2008
     In World War II the Nazis practised collective punishment to suppress resistance. Entire villages, towns or districts were held responsible for any resistance activity that took place there. Oh, come all ye faithful… Let’s crush Gaza, starve their little ones
     Who is holding the governments of Britain, the EU and the US to account this Christmas for aiding and abetting the deliberate starving of 1.5 million in Gaza?
     Hardly anybody. Most of those in a position to do so are Friends of Israel.
     What of our foreign secretary, David Miliband, our very Christian prime minister Brown and our even more pious peace envoy Mr Blair…. have they done anything at all to insist that Israel’s blockade is ended?
     The ‘Zionist Tendency’ in Whitehall still goes unchallenged.
     Please tell us Messrs Brown, Miliband and Blair: isn’t the Fourth Geneva Convention supposed to protect civilians under military occupation…. no violence to life or person, no cruelty, no torture; no taking of hostages; no outrages upon personal dignity; no collective punishment, no sentencing or executions unless ordered by a regularly constituted court affording all the judicial guarantees demanded by civilised peoples…all that sort of thing? more.. e-mail

Amira Hass / The sewage is about to hit the fan in Gaza
Amira Hass, Ha’aretz 12/25/2008
     Each day of electricity cuts increases the prospect that Palestinian Water Authority engineer Saadi Ali’s nightmare will come true. Ali, in charge of the North Gaza Emergency Sewage Treatment Project, lives in constant fear of a recurrence of the calamity that took place in March 2007 when the dirt embankments surrounding a temporary infiltration pond of sewage water collapsed, and the effluent water that flooded the nearby Bedouin village of Umm al-Nasser led to the drowning deaths of five people. About 1,000 people were evacuated from their homes, animals died and considerable damage was caused to property and crops.
     The temporary infiltration basin was originally built to lower the level of water in the nearby giant sewage lake that has slowly developed. Last November, the PWA, which is directly accountable to the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, was slated to empty the lake and transfer the sewage water to new infiltration basins seven kilometers to the southeast away. more.. e-mail

Championing global human rights: interview with Richard Falk
Victor Kattan, Electronic Intifada 12/24/2008
     Earlier this month, Israeli authorities deported Professor Richard Falk, United Nations Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, who had arrived in the country to conduct his duties to investigate rights abuses in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. The Electronic Intifada contributor Victor Kattan interviewed Falk about the motivation behind his deportation, comparisons he has made between Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians and Nazi crimes committed during World War II, his dual role as an academic and a human rights advocate, and how defenders of Israel deflect attention from what is happening on the ground by attacking critics of the state’s policies.
     Richard Falk is the Albert G. Milbank Professor of International Law and Practice, Emeritus, Princeton University and a member of the New York Bar. He is currently Visiting Distinguished Professor of Global and International Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has, since March 2008, been the UN Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Falk is the author of over 20 books on international law and served on the MacBride Commission of Inquiry to investigate the atrocities in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut in 1982, as well as a UN Commission of Inquiry to investigate human rights violations at the onset of the second Palestinian intifada in September 2001. His latest book Achieving Human Rights was published by Routledge in October 2008. more.. e-mail

Israel, piracy and the Red Sea
Galal Nassar, Al-Ahram Weekly 12/24/2008
     Beneath the surface of daring maritime hijackings, a larger agenda appears to be in play.
     Piracy has topped the news recently from the Middle East, in spite of major developments in Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine. Every day, it seems, brings a new scene straight out of Hollywood: another maritime hijacking, intense negotiations to free a detained oil tanker and its crew, and police hunts for suspected hijackers. We have even had gun battles on the high seas, as occurred recently when an Indian naval force vessel overpowered and sunk a pirate ship. Warships from around the world have converged around the Horn of Africa and are stationed and on the ready from the Indian Ocean to the Gulf of Aden. One is reminded of a film about extraterrestrial invaders, in which the most powerful weapons on earth have been assembled but are powerless to fend off the alien peril, and hence only some brave and ingenious hero (an American most likely) will save the world from immanent destruction.
     We are surrounded on land... The sea is our only route of contact with the rest of the world. Developing Eilat will be a major goal towards which we will direct our steps’ -- Ben-Gurion, 1949
     What should the Arabs do to forestall these plans?... Revive an idea that had gained some support in the 1980s until it was shelved as the result of US pressure. This was to create an Arab Red Sea Organisation establishing a security system for the Red Sea basin. more.. e-mail

New stage coming
Saleh Al-Naami, Al-Ahram Weekly 12/24/2008
     The near end of the truce in Gaza is likely to see a sharp escalation in direct Palestinian-Israeli confrontation.
     Tens of thousands of Hamas supporters attend a rally in Gaza marking the 21st anniversary of the movement’s creation on 14 DecemberThe booms of explosions and the whistle of bullets can be heard in the military camp of the Ezzeddin Al-Qassam Brigades, the military arm of Hamas. It lies north of the Al-Maghazi Refugee Camp in the central Gaza Strip, and scores of new recruits are being trained there around the clock. Hamas has stepped up its training of members recently, and plans to end this military training with the current truce’s end, scheduled for Friday, 19 December.
     Hamas has communicated with all of the Palestinian factions about the fate of the truce, and it is clear that there is a Palestinian consensus on not extending it. Khalil Al-Hayya, a prominent Hamas leader, says that the intention is to reject extension of the truce and to blame Israel for having "torn it up". "Israel is trying through the truce to gain security and maintain the siege imposed on the Gaza Strip, and we won’t agree to this. We won’t ever accept for this situation to continue, and there will never be a truce as long as there is a siege," he told Al-Ahram Weekly. more.. e-mail

Ignoring the Plight in Gaza
Yousef Munayyer, MIFTAH 12/24/2008
     The lights are out in Gaza again and few are paying attention. The 1.5 million Palestinians living in the densely populated strip are being collectively punished once more, while Israel attempts to strangle the Hamas government. The UN agency that feeds hundreds of thousands of people is unable to get supplies in because the border is closed, and a plea from UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon has been ignored.
     Today, Gaza is a horrifying and miserable place. In many areas, the air smells like human waste because of failures in the sewage system that have led to raw sewage overflows. Mosquitoes swarm throughout the area.
     When Israel first withdrew its settlers from Gaza in the fall of 2005, it followed the withdrawal with a campaign of sonic booms. Terrifying noises banged through the night. Children began displaying zombie-like behavior and consistently complained of nightmares. Miscarriages rose dramatically during this period.
     After Hamas was democratically elected, sanctions followed and the grip began to tighten on the Gaza Strip. Fuel supplies ran short, malnutrition rose, and Gaza’s only power plant could not be relied on to provide electricity. Store shelves were often empty of food, and many who were already impoverished were now struggling even more. more.. e-mail

One State Solution Gains Supporters
Osama al-Sharif - Amman, Palestine Chronicle 12/24/2008
     Few weeks ago, the Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa sent a letter to U.S. President-elect Barack Obama affirming Arab states’ commitment to concluding a comprehensive peace agreement with Israel based on the Arab Peace Initiative that was adopted in Beirut in 2002 and later in Riyadh in 2005.
     That deal would have secured the birth of an independent Palestinian state to coexist next to Israel. That the Arabs would finally agree on a singular approach to solving the Arab-Israeli conflict — 60 years after the creation of the Jewish state — was a historic breakthrough of enormous magnitude. But the initiative was brushed aside by the Sharon government and the Bush administration. A rare opportunity to hammer out an acceptable settlement to this bloody and intractable conflict was lost.
     Today as Israel considers an all-out invasion and reoccupation of Gaza with the purpose of destroying Hamas and other resistance movements there, the prospects of a two-state solution being resurrected soon seems far-fetched.
     The ramifications of a major onslaught on Gaza will be enormous and its reverberations will be felt in Israel, the Palestinian territories and across the region for many years to come. more.. e-mail

Obama and the Muslim World
Rami G. Khouri, Middle East Online 12/24/2008
     BEIRUT-- Incoming American President Barack Obama faces major challenges and opportunities in the foreign policy realm, and he is getting plenty of free, unsolicited advice. Here’s my contribution on an issue that he -- in an interview with the Chicago Tribune earlier this month -- defined as a priority for his administration: improving the U.S. image in the Muslim world.
     He plans a major speech in an Islamic capital, to emphasize that the United States is not waging war against Islam or Muslims. This is a simplistic approach that he should drop quickly, because it reflects the failed strategy of George W. Bush that treated Muslims as simpletons who could be swayed by nice words, rather than adults who react to how people and countries behave, not merely what they say.
     Bush devised a two-pronged counter-productive foreign policy in the Middle East that was defined by.
     a) sending troops to Iraq, largely ignoring the Arab-Israeli issue, misreading Islamists’ real power and legitimacy, misdiagnosing the terror phenomenon, and supporting freedom and democracy in most of the Middle East, while also supporting police states and life-long autocrats; and... more.. e-mail

Settling scores
Nevine El-Aref, Al-Ahram Weekly 12/24/2008
     A campaign to prevent Farouk Hosni becoming the next UNESCO director-general is taking shape.
     It was not an easy week for Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni and the members of his 2009 UNESCO election campaign committee. Hosni was caught up in yet another drive against his nomination for the post of UNESCO director-general and its impact lingers on.
     Earlier this week a rumour began circulating suggesting that Israel had convinced the current US administration to oppose Hosni’s nomination. According to leaks the Bush administration has already started a counter campaign and is keen to convince Barack Obama’s incoming administration, as well as some European and Latin American countries, to follow its lead.
     The rumours raise two important questions: are they true, and if so, why now?
     An official source who requested anonymity confirmed the US position towards Hosni’s nomination and told Al-Ahram Weekly that Washington had asked Egypt to reconsider Hosni’s candidacy and nominate someone else. Should Hosni succeed in gaining the post, the US and several other countries have threatened to reconsider their relationship with UNESCO. more.. e-mail

Gaza or Tehran
Dina Ezzat, Al-Ahram Weekly 12/24/2008
     Is Egypt ceding influence in Gaza to Iran, and is the latter fighting for it?
     Cairo is shrugging off statements made this week by Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah who called on Egypt to unilaterally open the Rafah border crossing to facilitate humanitarian assistance to over 1.5 million Palestinians desperate under a harsh Israeli siege. Nasrallah, Egyptian officials said, is free to make whatever appeals he wishes, but that will not change the Egyptian stance, which is to insist that only by the reinstatement of Palestinian Authority security personnel on the Palestinian side of Rafah would Egypt open its side of the crossing.
     "The umma [Islamic and Arab world] and history will always appreciate such a historic and brave move on the side of the Egyptian leadership should it decide to make the move," Nasrallah said Monday evening as he called for demonstrations in South Lebanon in solidarity with Gaza. The leader of Hizbullah called on the Arab League and the Organisation of the Islamic Conference to support Egypt towards making this move. more.. e-mail

No strategy, no change
Yossi Alpher, Jerusalem Post 12/23/2008
     The official end of the six-month cease-fire with Hamas in Gaza is not going to change very much in Israel-Hamas relations. Of course, it could change a lot for those Israelis and Palestinians who may now again be exposed to more intense physical danger. But just as before the cease-fire and during the cease-fire, the country will continue not knowing what to do about Hamas.
     Not only this country, but Egypt, the PLO, the US and Europe as well will remain at a loss. None of these actors has a workable strategy for dealing with Hamas. While the more distant actors in Washington and Brussels can perhaps afford to continue muddling through this issue, for Jerusalem, Cairo and Ramallah this has become a critical and inexcusable lacuna. All three would like Hamas to disappear. But they don’t know how to make this happen, at least not at a reasonable price. And when they fail, they have no reasonable alternatives to fall back on. Obviously, it is Israel that concerns us here. Over the three years since Hamas began gradually taking over the Gaza Strip, first through elections and then by force, this country has invoked a variety of economic, military and political measures for dealing with it. All have proven ineffective. more.. e-mail

Forget the Iris; save Nawar
Gideon Levy, Ha’aretz 12/25/2008
     The signs showed the pied piper had arrived. Nitzan Horowitz was going to Jerusalem. The opinionated, involved and lovable foreign desk chief was selected for the third place of the "New Movement-Meretz" list. Israel’s left presents the supporter of the orange revolution in Ukraine, the red revolution in Venezuela and the green revolution in Israel.
     ...Green is the color and for the issue of the Gilboa Iris it will always be springtime at the Knesset: Every initiative to build on the endangered flower’s habitat will be met with a fusillade of criticism by the new and promising lawmaker. Horowitz will also be the proud voice of the gay community. Every parliament in Europe decorates itself with one such young lawmaker with an up-to-date political agenda.
     Lamentably, Israel is no Sweden and not even a Finland. The atrophied and reduced left cannot afford such shiny luxuries. The moribund peace camp cannot waste its precious resources on flamboyant and fashionable symbols. It may not be politically correct to say this but there is no choice: Before they debate the future of vultures’ nests in the Golan Heights - how very annoying - they should debate the future of the settlements in the region; before they debate protection of endangered species - how very unfortunate - they should debate arresting Palestinians; before they debate gay rights - how anachronistic - they should debate basic human rights for 3.5 million Palestinians who have had none for over 40 years. more.. e-mail

Shifting sands
Mustafa El-Labbad, Al-Ahram Weekly 12/24/2008
     Growing tensions between Cairo and Tehran are a result of Iran seeking to wear the mantle Cairo once claimed as its own.
     Egyptian-Iranian relations took a turn for the worse following last week’s demonstrations in front of the Egyptian Embassy in Tehran protesting against the Israeli blockade of Gaza. The protesters alleged that Egypt was complicit in the blockade and chanted slogans against the Egyptian leadership. Cairo responded forcefully, both through the media and diplomatic channels.
     The foreign minister announced that Egypt would "join international efforts to prevent Iran from possessing nuclear weapons", a statement that while it does not contradict Egypt’s long held stance that Iran has the right to possess nuclear technology for peaceful purposes was read in Tehran as a shift in Cairo’s official position.
     Demonstrations are, of course, a legitimate channel for the public to express its opinion. Yet, however democratic Iran may be compared to other countries in the region Tehran is far from being London, Paris or Geneva. Demonstrations mounted by the political opposition are immediately suppressed. The protests that passed before the premises of the Egyptian diplomatic mission in Tehran, therefore, clearly had the government’s blessing if they were not actually organised by the government. There was nothing innocent about the route or the timing, both calculated to turn up the heat on Cairo while projecting Tehran as the Palestinians’ champion in contrast to Arab capitals which have abandoned their cause. more.. e-mail

Gaza near to collapse as Israel tightens grip, says bank
Toni O'Loughlin in Jerusalem, The Guardian 12/22/2008
     Israel’s blockade of Gaza is pushing the territory to the brink of collapse and fuelling the growth of a black money market controlled by Hamas, the World Bank warned yesterday.
     As tit-for-tat attacks across the Gaza border began to intensify following the end of a six-month truce on Friday, the World Bank said that an acute cash shortage in Gaza was playing into Hamas’s hands. The militant Islamists, who took control of Gaza in June 2007 following violent street clashes with their more secular rival, Fatah, have large stashes of shekels which they have been selling on the black market at a premium because of the cash shortage.
     There is also a worry that Hamas, with its dominant militant and bureaucratic control of Gaza, will begin to replace the shekel with US dollars, which are more easily obtained, to smuggle through the tunnels from Egypt in the south.
     The World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Quartet - the US, the EU, Russia and the United Nations - warned Israel of the crisis in a letter to the prime minister, Ehud Olmert, more than a week ago, to no avail. Instead, Israel continued to tighten its 18-month blockade of the tiny coastal territory, forcing banks and businesses to shut their doors, water, sanitation and electricity services to cease, medical clinics to turn away patients, and bread queues to form in the streets. Since the end of the truce, daily clashes have resumed, with Israel launching air strikes on Palestinian rocket-launching teams and Palestinian fighters firing makeshift rockets and mortars at neighbouring Israeli towns. more.. e-mail

More missile strikes, more victims
Eva Bartlett, Electronic Intifada 12/22/2008
     Salah Oukal, 46 years old, had gone outside to collect herbs for dinner, harvesting in the dark as the power was out again.It was just before 9pm and he was watering the trees next to his home in Jabaliya, when the missile struck, killing him instantly .A second missile followed immediately but did not explode.Oukal’s family spent the next hour searching without success for the father of seven and the family’s sole provider.Only with the headlights of an ambulance was Oukal’s dismembered body finally retrieved.
     The ground-to-ground missile fired from the Israeli side of Gaza’s eastern border injured an additional three residents, including Oukal’s son Ahmed, seven years old, who suffered rocket shrapnel wounds to his hand and head.Israeli authorities claimed that the missile was a response to rockets being fired from the area. However, Oukal’s family and neighbors report all had been quiet.
     "He wasn’t one of the resistance fighters," his teenage daughter explained."And there weren’t any rockets being fired before he was hit.It was quiet, and the shelling was sudden," she said. more.. e-mail

Israel’s Candidates: Spot the Difference
Uri Avnery, Palestine Chronicle 12/22/2008
     ’Nothing good will come out of this election.’
     A man was asked about his sons. ’I have three,’ he said, ’but one of them is a complete idiot.’
     ’Which one?’ they asked.
     ’Take your pick,’ he replied.
     In 51 days, we shall vote for a new Knesset and a new government.
     Three big parties are competing for the prize: Kadima, Likud and Labor.
     From there on, see the joke.
     Is there a real choice? In other words, are there any real differences between the three parties?
     As in the game "Spot the Difference", they are so tiny that one needs really good eyes to discover them.
     There are, of course, political differences between the three. But what the three parties, and the three leaders, have in common is far more important than what divides them.
     Binyamin Netanyahu says that this is not the time for peace with the Palestinians. We have to wait until conditions are ripe. Not on our side, of course, but on the Palestinian side. And who is going to decide whether the conditions are ripe on the Palestinian side? Binyamin Netanyahu, of course. He or his successors, or the successors of his successors. more.. e-mail

Non-Jews Need Not Apply
Gideon Levy, MIFTAH 12/22/2008
     The Israeli national flag flies high, defiant and arrogant over the Palestinian home in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem. This flag has never looked as repulsive as it does in the heart of this Palestinian neighborhood, above the home of a Palestinian family that suddenly lost everything. The head of the house, Mohammed al-Kurd, died 11 days after the eviction. Now his widow lives in a tent. The house is reached via a narrow alley: Here Moshe and Avital Shoham and Emanuel and Yiska Dagan live happily. They are the settlers who managed to expel the Palestinian tenants and take over another outpost, in the heart of East Jerusalem. House after house, the transfer here is especially quiet: The media barely report on these houses of contention.
     Israeli greed knows no bounds: It sends its tentacles into the homes of refugees who already experienced, in 1948, the taste of expulsion and evacuation and being left with nothing. Now they are refugees for a second time. Another 27 families here can expect a similar fate, and all under the aegis of the Israeli court system, the lighthouse of justice and the beacon of law, which approves, whitewashes and purifies deceptive and distorted ways of evicting these children of refugees from their homes for the second time. The family keeps, as an eternal souvenir, the keys to the house in Talbieh that was stolen from them and the banana warehouse in Musrara that was taken from them. Now they have another key that opens nothing: the key to the home in Sheikh Jarrah, which they received decades ago from the Jordanian government and the United Nations as compensation for their lost home. more.. e-mail

Obama and Bush, Two Sides of Same Coin
Hasa Afif El-Hasan, Palestine Chronicle 12/22/2008
     A recent World Public Opinion survey of 21 Muslim countries taken after Obama won the Presidency race revealed a plurality of respondents in the Palestinian occupied lands say the US definitely intended to create an independent and economically viable Palestinian state. Thirty-six percent of the Palestinians sampled, according to the survey, were certain and twenty-three percent thought it probable that the US goal was to help the Palestinians have the state they aspire to have; only thirty-seven percent were skeptical. In the rest of the Middle East countries, only eleven percent of respondents were certain that the US intended to create the Palestinian state; seven percent considered it likely; and fifty percent thought the US had no intention of helping the Palestinians. For some reasons that I do not understand, there is hope among some Palestinians that American patience with Israel will reach the breaking point, provoking a dramatic reversal of the US policies. Perhaps this is an expression of despair and feeling of abandonment by the Arab nations who became irrelevant in dealing with the Palestinians struggle and subservient to the US and Israel interests. In short, the US is the only sheriff in town.
     The survey suggests trouble ahead, especially for Abbas government, if Obama does not live up to the high expectation of the Palestinians. Optimistic Palestinians expect the US under Obama to play an active role and pressure Israel to make concessions rather than adopting Bush low-key mediating role. The optimistic Palestinians seem do not grasp the nature of the US-Israel relationship. The use of the US potential leverage to pressure Israel has been rarely attempted even when the US presidents were upset with the Israeli actions. Last time the US used its power to settle a Middle East conflict was under President Eisenhower more than half a century ago when it forced Israel to withdraw from Sinai and Gaza strip after the 1956 war with Egypt. more.. e-mail

Intolerable tolerance
Shimon Shamir, Ha’aretz 12/23/2008
     As everyone knows, Jerusalem is a city of seers and visionaries. The archives are full of plans for palaces and grandiose towers that savers of the world have dreamed of building in Jerusalem to spread peace and brotherhood. However, in contrast to those plans, which remain buried in the archives, one plan arrived not long ago that is supposed to take on flesh and sinew. A splendid Museum of Tolerance, initiated by beneficent Jews from Los Angeles, is set to go up in the heart of the city.
     This is a hallucinatory plan about to be realized in a place that no one disputes is part of the historic cemetery in Mamilla - an 800-year-old site whose boundaries are clearly indicated on maps. The tabernacle of tolerance is supposed to be built in total defiance of pleas by families whose ancestors are buried in Mamilla, the anger of this country’s Muslim community and the mood of many of Jerusalem’s Jewish inhabitants who are infuriated by the absurdity. This is tolerance that cannot be tolerated. more.. e-mail

US-led siege on Gaza pushes Arab leaders to drown Rice in Jewelry
Saed Bannoura, International Middle East Media Center News 12/23/2008
     An article I read today pushed me to write this piece; maybe it’s anger or disappointment, or maybe it is just the uncomfortable feeling that we are right when we say that Arab leaders are also responsible for our misery as Palestinians living under Israeli occupation.
     Matthew Lee of the Associated Press had an exclusive interview with Rice and said that although it seems that the US President, George W. Bush may be unpopular in the Middle East, "Arab leaders showered his diplomat with jewelry worth far more than a quarter of a million dollars last year".
     Lee reported that Rice received gem-encrusted baubles worth $316,000 from King Abdullah II of Jordan, and King Abdulla of Saudi Arabia. King Abdullah of Jordan gave Rice a $47,000 emerald and diamond necklace, a ring, bracelet and earrings.
     His wife, the Palestinian-descended Queen, also gave Rice a gift, less expensive than other gifts, but still a $4,460 Jewelry box.
     Lee also said that that in July, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia gave Rice a diamond necklace with matching earrings, a bracelet and a ring. The gift from the Saudi king is worth $165,000. The same king gave Rice a flower petal necklace worth $170,000 in 2005. more.. e-mail

From US war resisters, a letter of solidarity to students who refuse to serve in the Israeli military
Daily Star 12/22/2008
     About 100 Israeli high school students have declared their refusal to serve in the Israeli army and participate in the occupation of Palestine. We are US military service members and veterans who have refused or are currently refusing to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan.
     We stand in solidarity with the Israeli Shministim (Hebrew for 12th graders) who are also resisting military service. About 100 Israeli high school students have signed an open letter declaring their refusal to serve in the Israeli army and their opposition to "Israeli occupation and oppression policy in the occupied territories and the territories of Israel." In Israel, military service is mandatory for all graduating high school seniors, and resisters face the possibility of years in prison.
     We have also refused to participate in unjust acts of military aggression, and many of us have gone to prison or currently live with that possibility as a result. We believe that resistance to unjust war is a bold assertion of humanity in the face of overwhelming violence. more.. e-mail

On "The Lemon Tree"
Dima Hamdan, Palestine Think Tank 12/21/2008
     While so much attention has been given to the Israeli animated film "Waltz with Bashir"�, which was hailed as a brave account of Israel’s complicity in the Sabra and Shatila massacres in 1982, another Israeli film, "The Lemon Tree"�, deals with the Israeli-Palestinian issue on a different, and perhaps, more profound level.
     Based on true events, the film tells the story of Salma, a Palestinian woman who wakes up one day to find that her new neighbour is no other than the newly-appointed Defence Minister of Israel. The Israeli Intelligence fear that her lemon groves might be used as hideouts for Palestinian militants, and so an order is issued to cut down her trees.
     Salma decides to fight this decision, and takes her battle all the way to the Israeli Supreme Court with the help of Ziad, a young ambitious lawyer. On the other side of the fence, the minister’s wife, Mira, is fighting with her own conscience as she feels the need to speak out against her husband’s decision and attempts, in her own words, to "become a better neighbour"� to Salm more.. e-mail

Arab Town Blamed for Jewish Pride March’s Cancellation
Jonathan Cook - Nazareth, Palestine Chronicle 12/19/2008
     ’The Jewish National Front is widely seen as a reinvention of the Kach movement.’
     Jewish peace groups have accused the Israeli police of fuelling racism by cancelling a "Jewish Pride" march by a far-right group that was to have taken place through one of the largest Arab towns in Israel.
     The police postponed the march, due last Monday, claiming they had evidence extremist residents of Umm al Fahm in northern Israel would open fire on the marchers and police.
     "There was a real danger that lives could be lost," said a police spokesman, adding that the decision to ban the march would be reassessed in two weeks.
     But local Arab leaders and Jewish peace activists claimed the police concocted the story to justify the cancellation of the march. Thousands of Jews had planned to form a human chain with the residents of Umm al Fahm at the entrance to the town to block the way of the Jewish National Front.
     Adam Keller, of the peace group Gush Shalom, said the planned show of solidarity would have been non-violent. He denounced the police for exploiting the stereotype of violent Arab citizens promoted by the marchers, many of whom are hardline settlers in the West Bank. -- See also: The war of dependence more.. e-mail

Stripping Israel of Its Blanket Immunity
Joharah Baker – The West Bank, Palestine Chronicle 12/19/2008
     Politics is a funny game, and as the popular saying goes, also makes strange bedfellows. That is why, when well-known adversaries become unlikely allies, most people are not necessarily fazed or even remotely surprised. Human rights, however, is a different story. Designed to be clear-cut, human rights are supposedly universally applied across the board, regardless of political considerations, race, religion or gender. That is why, when Israel’s closest friends are also the world’s most democratic ones, Palestinians and their supporters chalk up the inconsistencies to politics. However, when the issue comes to basic human rights, even the most unfazed of us is shocked at just how much Israel can get away with.
     On December 14, UN Human Rights Council Special Rapporteur to the Palestinian Territories, Richard Falk, was deported from Israel after arriving at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport from Geneva. Falk, an elderly Jewish American professor, was forced to spend the night in one of Ben Gurion’s infamous holding cells before being transported back to Switzerland.
     For all those who are well-versed in Israel’s relationship with international personalities sympathetic to the Palestinians, the writing was already on the wall way before Falk’s plane landed. According to the Israeli Foreign Ministry, Falk had been previously informed that he would be barred entry into the country. Still, one can only balk at the audacity of this so-called democratic state, which denied a high-level UN official entry to its country on the grounds of his perceived bias towards the Palestinians. more.. e-mail

Is the Peace Process Irreversible?
Daoud Kuttub, MIFTAH 12/20/2008
     Lame-duck Palestinian, Israeli and US leaders are making serious effort these days to ensure that the Israeli-Palestinian peace process enters an irreversible track before they leave office.
     This irreversible train left the station in September shortly after Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, resigned from his office due to police investigation. Olmert, who has continued as caretaker prime minister, surprised the Israeli public by stating publicly that the ultimate solution of this conflict will require a return to the 1967 borders and will have to include Israel giving up parts of Jerusalem.
     The US president, George W. Bush, who failed to accomplish his declared goal of reaching an agreement on an independent state before the end of his term, has decided instead to institutionalise his position in the UN. After five years of refusing to allow the UN Security Council in the conflict, the US has cosponsored with the Russians a resolution documenting the position of the international community. The resolution, supporting the Annapolis process, was approved with 14 votes, with Libya abstaining, even though it failed to speak about illegal Jewish settlements. more.. e-mail

A Comprehensive Approach to the Middle East Peace Process
David Miliband, UK Foreign Secretary, Dar Al-Hayat, MIFTAH 12/20/2008
     Next year needs to be an important year for the Arab-Israeli conflict. Unless we make real progress, the prospect of a two-state solution will slowly - or perhaps fast - slip away. The situation on the ground leaves too many people insecure, in poverty and despair, and is rapidly undermining the political process. While both sides are tiring of the conflict, they are also tiring, faster, of efforts to resolve it.
     The basics of an agreement to the Israel-Palestine conflict now command an unparalleled level of consensus. There is no viable alternative to a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders: a democratic and viable state of Palestine must live peacefully alongside an Israel secure from attack and recognised by its neighbours. Jerusalem must be the capital for both, with a just settlement for refugees.
     This is not just what the Palestinian President wants; it is also what the Israeli Prime Minister aspires to. It is the position of the both the outgoing and the incoming US administrations, of Europe and the Arab world. Yet our efforts to realise this vision are not succeeding. For many ordinary Palestinians and ordinary Israelis, the endless rounds of negotiations and talks are not delivering improvements on the ground. Israelis continue to feel threatened and under siege. They tried withdrawal from Gaza and Lebanon, but were rewarded only with rocket fire. more.. e-mail

Celebrities further disassociate with settlement financier
Press release, Adalah-NY, Electronic Intifada 12/21/2008
     Thirty human rights carolers braved the cold and ice on 20 December to serenade Manhattan’s holiday shoppers with a call, for the second year, to boycott the jewelry store and companies of Israeli settlement-builder and diamond mogul Lev Leviev. Leviev’s Madison Avenue store has been the site of 12 protests since it opened in mid-November 2007, and protests against his businesses have spread to London, Dubai and the West Bank villages where he is building settlements. Additionally, during the past year the UN children’s agency UNICEF and the Oxfam coalition have renounced Leviev, major Hollywood stars have distanced themselves from him, and the governments of United Kingdom and Dubai are under pressure to boycott Leviev’s businesses.
     The carolers, from the New York-based human rights coalition Adalah-NY and other groups, were accompanied in singing and chanting by a percussion section from the Rude Mechanical Orchestra. Hundreds of copies of the comic "Who is Lev Leviev?" were given to passersby, many of whom stopped to hear the parody holiday songs while carrying shopping bags from Madison Avenue’s most exclusive shops. more.. e-mail

'Our struggle will continue until the Wall is torn down!'
Palestinian Grassroots Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign, Stop The Wall 12/20/2008
     A massive demonstration against the Wall was held in Jayyous on December 19, with about 1000 people, mostly youth, protesting against the new path of the Wall that will permanently confiscate nearly 6,000 dunums of village land. The demonstration, which lasted for nearly five hours, resulted in several injuries to villagers, international solidarity activists, and four soldiers.
     At 1:00 in the afternoon, the protestors began to march from the centre of the village, to the south gate of the Wall, which is the area that is slated to be re-routed. As they marched, Occupation forces did not stop them from reaching the gate, but rather they entered the village from two different directions, and stationed themselves in a manner that surrounded the demonstrators. Undeterred by their vulnerable position in the middle of the forces, however, the demonstrators continued to march, and when they reached the gate, several different community activists gave speeches to the crowd, reaffirming Jayyous’ resistance to the Wall, and denouncing the Occupation in general.
     For approximately 45 minutes, the speeches continued without confrontation, and it was announced that the village would organize another demonstration next week. As this announcement was made, however, the Occupation forces began to close in on the protestors, and began taking pictures of the youth, in order to facilitate their targeting of the most active people in the future. In response to this, several youth began throwing stones at the forces. more.. e-mail

Israeli blockade ’forces Palestinians to search rubbish dumps for food’
Peter Beaumont, The Observer, The Guardian 12/21/2008
     Impoverished Palestinians on the Gaza Strip are being forced to scavenge for food on rubbish dumps to survive as Israel’s economic blockade risks causing irreversible damage, according to international observers.
     Figures released last week by the UN Relief and Works Agency reveal that the economic blockade imposed by Israel on Gaza in July last year has had a devastating impact on the local population. Large numbers of Palestinians are unable to afford the high prices of food being smuggled through the Hamas-controlled tunnels to the Strip from Egypt and last week were confronted with the suspension of UN food and cash distribution as a result of the siege.
     The figures collected by the UN agency show that 51.8% - an "unprecedentedly high" number of Gaza’s 1.5 million population - are now living below the poverty line. The agency announced last week that it had been forced to stop distributing food rations to the 750,000 people in need and had also suspended cash distributions to 94,000 of the most disadvantaged who were unable to afford the high prices being asked for smuggled food. more.. e-mail

’In Gaza, all dreams and hope have gone’
Ameera Ahmad, The Observer, The Guardian 12/21/2008
     Ameera Ahmad, 25, gave birth to daughter Layan six months ago. Here, she tells of life under siege and of her struggle to bring up a child after 18 months of Israeli blockade.
     During the months of the blockade, everything in my life has changed. Before, I would wake up and hope that tomorrow would be better than today. But it never happened. The reason is simple. It is because I live in Gaza, where all dreams and hope vanish because of the situation we live in.
     Even the most basic things are really hard to find. My daughter, Layan, is six months old. Things are so tough here that even when I needed to buy baby formula for her, I can’t find it. All the money that my husband Fady and I had saved up we have spent during the last three months. I never imagined that my children would grow up like this, in this awful predicament. Poor and always threatened.
     My husband is a television cameraman and sound man. But he has not received any salary during the last three months. The problem is that he works for a Palestinian company, but because this company is Palestinian there is very little work, and even then he has to wait until they decide they can afford to pay him. He can’t even get insurance for his life because his work here is dangerous, covering the internal fighting or Israeli incursions.
     Everything here that you need to survive is hard to find. There can be no electricity for hours and hours. Some days we only have power for six hours a day. Recently we had a period when we had no power at all for two whole days. more.. e-mail

Maisa’, a child growing imprisoned behind the Annexation Wall
Alsahl for Press and Media - Translation - Saed Bannoura, International Middle East Media Center News 12/20/2008
     Childhood in Palestine is not like childhood in the rest of the world, children in Palestine cannot enjoy their childhood, they are facing slow death, facing Israeli military and settler attacks, facing a ruthless occupation that does not have mercy on the children and does not allow anybody to have mercy on them.  Masia’, a child with an unprecedented story
     Masia’ Hani Omar, 11, from Masha village west of Salfit district and south of Nablus and Qalqilia. She resembles a unique story in the history of mankind. She lives alone with her family in a house totally surrounded by the Annexation Wall, barbed-wires, Iron gates and above all soldiers, armored vehicles and armed settlers.
     The Al Sahl for Press and Media met her at her home, behind the Wall;
     She said that since the occupation started constructing the Wall, she and her family became isolated from their own town, Masha. Soldiers also installed a barbed-wire separating the family from an illegal settlement near their home.
     Soldiers also installed military roads, huge concrete blocks and huge gates to the northern and south of their home which became a prison.
     Childhood amidst fear and horror
     “At night I wake up screaming and shouting, I keep having nightmares of settlers attacking us, throwing stones at our home, when I scream my brothers also wake up and start screaming and crying, we are all living in horror, we want to live a normal life”, she said. more.. e-mail

Truce in Gaza Ends, but May Be Revived by Necessity
Ethan Bronner, MIFTAH 12/20/2008
     Rockets are flying from Gaza into southern Israeli communities again. Israeli warplanes are firing missiles back, and Israel is closing the crossings through which food and fuel are supplied. The United Nations agency that feeds Palestinian refugees in Gaza says its stocks of flour are exhausted.
     In other words, the six-month truce that Israel and Hamas, the militant Palestinian leaders of Gaza, agreed to on June 19 is over. On Friday, Hamas officially declared in a statement that the ceasefire had expired, saying the truce would not be renewed because Israel was failing to fulfill its “fundamental conditions and obligations.” The end of the truce was greeted by relative calm, with only a scattering of rocket attacks and no major Israeli military activity. Officials and analysts on both sides say that things are likely to deteriorate further in the short term, but that both sides need the truce, so they will probably grope their way back to it. The question is how soon and after how much suffering.
     Israel and Hamas accuse each other of bad faith and of violations of the Egyptian-mediated accord, and each side has a point. Rockets from Gaza never stopped entirely during the truce, and Israel never allowed a major renewed flow of goods into Gaza, crippling its economy. This is at least partly because the agreement had no mutually agreed text or enforcement mechanism; neither side wanted to grant the legitimacy to the other that such a document would imply. more.. e-mail

Arabs’ Deadly Silence: All Quiet on the Gaza Shore
Rannie Amiri, Palestine Chronicle 12/19/2008
     ’The complicity of the Arab states in abetting the Israeli siege.’ (Photo: AP) "’a person who hears the voice of a man who calls the Muslims to his help but he does not respond to him, is not a Muslim." -- Prophet Muhammad
     Gaza is an island.
     Although located in the middle of the Arab world and bordering one of its principal and most populous countries, it could very well be in the middle of the ocean, isolated and unbeknownst to anyone. Its residents, if given the choice, may actually prefer this setting than bear witness to the malignant neglect afforded them by their fellow Arabs as Gaza inexorably withers under the barbaric Israeli siege.
     If there were any doubts of its dire situation, they were removed by Dr. Richard Falk, UN Special Rapporteur on the Situation of Human Rights in the Palestinians Territories.
     On Dec. 9, Falk clearly and forcefully stated that, "An urgent effort should be made at the United Nations to implement the agreed norm of a responsibility to protect a civilian population being collectively punished by policies that amount to a Crime Against Humanity." more.. e-mail

Talk with Hamas
Gideon Levy, Ha’aretz 12/21/2008
     The situation in the south is depressing. Qassam rockets are being fired out of a territory beset by boycott, siege and intolerable conditions at Israeli communities whose situation is no more tolerable, and the Israeli defense establishment admits it has no real response. With the exception of a few loud-mouthed politicians including Kadima head Tzipi Livni who have elections in mind, most level-headed politicians know the truth: There is no military solution. No wide-scale or small operation; no targeted killing or bombing will help, nor is there a military solution for the situation of abducted soldier Gilad Shalit.
     So what’s left to do but shrug? Gaza is banished and impoverished, Sderot is threatened and despaired and no one dares try to break the vicious cycle.
     Even outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who in the twilight of his political career has excelled by making some blunt and courageous remarks, has done nothing. If any debate is held over what course of action to pursue it is either for or against a "wide-scale operation." Meanwhile, analysts sit in news studios and dispatch advice, all of it belligerent and militaristic. Politicians, generals and the public all know that any substantial incursion into the Gaza Strip will be a catastrophe. Still, no one dares ask why, for heaven’s sake, not try to talk directly with Hamas. more.. e-mail

Lift the Siege of Gaza
The Economist - Editorial, MIFTAH 12/20/2008
     Contrary to the absurd claim of the rapporteur of the UN’s Human Rights Council, to whom Israel refused entry this week, the Gaza Strip is not facing a Nazi-like “Holocaust” at Israel’s hands. But the lot of the 1.5m Palestinians cooped up in this miserable scrap of desert is undeniably awful. Locked in on one side by Israel and on the other by Egypt, the Palestinians of Gaza have been subjected to an ever-tightening economic siege since the Palestinian Islamist movement, Hamas, booted the secular Fatah movement out of the strip in June 2007. The possible end this week of a truce between Hamas and Israel can only make things worse. As the truce has frayed, Israel has responded to the Palestinian rockets flying over the border by closing the crossings for long periods, depriving Gaza’s residents of many necessities of life (see article).
     If the lot of Gaza is awful, the condition of the Palestinians as a whole is not much better. Unlike Hamas, the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank stands by the decision the Palestine Liberation Organisation made a decade and a half ago to recognise Israel. Since the summit George Bush held last year in Annapolis, the PA’s president, Mahmoud Abbas, has been talking to Israel’s prime minister, Ehud Olmert, about how to form a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. But they have not closed the gap on crucial issues such as borders, Jerusalem or refugees. And even if they had, it is not clear what such an agreement would be worth. Mr Olmert is a lame duck who will leave office after Israel’s election in February. Hamas calls Mr Abbas a lame duck too: his four-year term expires in January. Though he will probably stay on anyway, a Palestinian president who speaks only for the West Bank and not for Gaza is in no position to deliver peace. more.. e-mail

Israel’s Cruel Siege of Gaza must End
Gulf News - Editorial, MIFTAH 12/20/2008
     There is much that is required when it comes to the situation in Gaza. The merciless Israeli siege of the territory has to come to an end once and for all. Hence, all efforts by both Palestinians and the international community should focus on this immediate and urgent matter.
     The recent renewal of rocket-firing from Gaza, targeting Israeli cities, is pointless as it simply aggravates matters further. The rockets, fired by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, did not cause any casualties or damage but brought into question the future of the six-month truce between Israel and the Palestinians, which will soon be coming to an end.
     But the ground reality cannot be based on extreme measures. Israel’s blockade of Gaza has created a humanitarian situation, and innocent civilians are paying the price.
     And it is for this very reason that the firing of rockets as a strategy should stop, as this has proved to be counterproductive in the long-term. The need of the hour is for Palestinians to discard their political and ideological differences and come together as a united force, as well as for the international community to put an end to Israeli aggression. more.. e-mail

Divide and Shock in Palestine
Ewa Jasiewicz, Palestine Chronicle 12/18/2008
     ’The West Bank is in the process of being strapped up for shock therapy.’
     The Palestine Trade and Investment Forum began in London this past weekend. Organised on the behalf of UK Trade and Industry and the Department for International Development, this British government lead initiative welcomed over 40 Palestinian delegates from the occupied West Bank, and just three from besieged Gaza.
     Whilst private sector business representatives talked of privatising Palestinian assets, services and natural resources, Israel continues to develop new settlements in the west bank and East Jerusalem, a light railway system on occupied territory and an apartheid wall declared illegal by the International Criminal Court; facts on the ground which fly in the face of any semblance of both sovereignty and territorial contiguity or independent development.
     In its decontextualisation of the Palestinian economy from both the conditions of military occupation and colonisation of both land and water resources by Israel in the West Bank, and the ongoing collective punishment of Gaza, this event and the Palestinian Reform and Development Plan it adheres to risks a normalisation of occupation and an abandonment of Gaza. more.. e-mail

Obama and the Israel-Palestine Conflict
Jeff Halper, MIFTAH 12/20/2008
     Writing recently in The Washington Post ("Middle East Priorities," Nov. 21), Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski, two former US National Security Advisors, a Republican and a Democrat, declared: "We believe that the Arab-Israeli peace process is one issue that requires priority attention [from the incoming Obama Administration]."
     Their assessment is correct, of course. Addressing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is an urgent priority. It is a conflict with global ramifications in a part of the world crucial to Western, and especially American, political and economic interests. The Israeli Occupation fuels anger and alienation among Muslims – as well as among peoples beyond the Muslim world, including in Europe – towards the US and its European allies. And the Palestinians are the gatekeepers that cannot be by-passed. No matter what peace plan is devised or how much pressure is exerted on the Palestinian leadership to accept it, until the Palestinian people everywhere, including the refugee camps, say that the conflict is in fact over, it’s not over. This is their ultimate clout. Only when a just solution is reached that genuinely addresses their grievances and needs will they signal to the rest of the Arab and Muslim worlds that the time has come to normalize relations with Israel and its American and Western patrons. This reality is obliquely acknowledged by Scowcroft and Brzezinski when they write: "Not everyone in the Middle East views the Palestinian issue as the greatest regional challenge, but the deep sense of injustice it stimulates is genuine and pervasive." more.. e-mail

Hassan Zbeidat: 'We will not leave our land. If we are born here, we will die here.'
Palestinian Grassroots Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign, Stop The Wall 12/15/2008
     The fertile Jordan Valley has long been a target of the Occupation’s colonial aims.Due to its abundance of water resources, rich soil, and natural minerals, the Valley has been the site of extensive land confiscation and expulsion of Palestinian residents, especially since the signing of the Oslo Agreement.Oslo severely restricted the Palestinians’ capacity for growth in the region, and effectively opened the door for increased military occupation and settlement expansion that is aimed at eventually eliminating the Palestinian presence in the Jordan Valley.Currently, only 5.62% of the Valley is under Palestinian control, while 94.37% lies under the Occupation’s control.
     Hassan Zbeidat, the mayor of Zubeidat, explains how the Occupation control infringes upon all aspects of the people’s lives. The small village of Zubeidat is one of the five villages in the Valley that have been designated as being Area B, meaning Palestinians are allowed to build on the land. However, Zubeidat is surrounded on all sides by settlements, closed military areas, and Area C lands, thus completely preventing any outward expansion. This means that as the village population grows, the inhabitants are forced to build vertically, constructing additional storeys on top of already-existing buildings. According to Hassan, Zubeidat presently has 1,700 people living on 42 dunums of land.
     The building restrictions also inhibit the construction of schools and hospitals, as there is no space upon which to build any large structures such as these. Children from the village must therefore walk several kilometres to go to school, and the nearest hospital or clinic is several villages away. more.. e-mail

Who is behind fraud, theft of Palestinian land?
Matti Friedman - BURQA, West Bank, Middle East Online 12/20/2008
     The transformation of a piece of West Bank land from a Palestinian field into a Jewish settlement has roots in an unlikely place — Orange County, Calif. — and in a document that a man supposedly signed more than four decades after the date of his death.
     Unfolding from the West Bank’s terraced olive groves to a strip mall in a Los Angeles suburb, the story of this posthumous deal offers a rare glimpse into the underworld of straw companies and middlemen through which chunks of land move from Palestinian to Israeli hands. Each transaction further complicates an Israeli withdrawal that would be key to any peace agreement.
     The land now houses a thriving Jewish settlement, another of the "facts on the ground" that strengthen Israel’s grip on the West Bank and outrage the Palestinians. Such property deals are driven by the settlers’ belief the land is their God-given right; the cooperation of Israel’s governments, even those that have talked peace; and cash from wealthy donors, many of them American Jews.
     In this case, a 2004 document shows a Palestinian farmer named Abdel Latif Sumarin sold a plot long tended by his family near the village of Burqa, east of the city of Ramallah, to a company with an Arabic name. The paper contains Sumarin’s signature in clear English script and that of a California notary. -- See also: Haaretz: Shady land deal unfolds from West Bank to California strip mall more.. e-mail

Bush’s Parting Gift to Israel
Jonathan Cook, Middle East Online 12/20/2008
     Almost unnoticed, Israel and the White House signed a deal over the summer to station an early-warning missile radar system, staffed with US military personnel, in Israel’s Negev desert. The media here described the Joint Tactical Ground Station, which brings Israel under the US protective umbrella against missile attack, as a “parting gift” from President Bush as he prepared to leave office.
     The siting of what is likely to become America’s first permanent base on Israeli soil was apparently not easily agreed by local defense officials. Aware of the country’s vulnerability to missile strikes, they have been trying to develop their own defenses – so far without success – against the varying threats posed by Palestinian Qassam rockets, Hizbullah’s Katyushas, and Iran and Syria’s more sophisticated arsenal.
     In finally accepting that it must rely on the US shield, Israel may have answered the Middle East’s biggest question of 2008: will it launch a go-it-alone strike against Iran’s presumed nuclear weapons program? more.. e-mail

Gaza: The Untold Story
Ramzy Baroud, Middle East Online 12/19/2008
     It’s incomprehensible that a region such as the Gaza Strip, so rich with history, so saturated with defiance, can be reduced to a few blurbs, sound bites and reductionist assumptions, convenient but deceptive, vacant of any relevant meaning, or even true analytical value.
     The fact is that there is more to the Gaza Strip than 1.5 million hungry Palestinians, who are supposedly paying the price for Hamas’s militancy, or Israel’s ‘collective punishment’, whichever way the media decide to brand the problem.
     More importantly, Gaza’s existence since time immemorial must not be juxtaposed by its proximity to Israel,failure or success in ‘providing’ a tiny Israeli town – itself built on conquered land that was seen only 60 years ago as part of the Gaza Province – with its need for security. It’s this very expectation that made the killing and wounding of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza a price worth paying, in the callous eyes of many.
     These unrealistic expectations and disregard of important history will continue to be costly, and will only serve the purpose of those interested in swift generalizations. Yes, Gaza might be economically dead, but its current struggles and tribulations are consistent with a legacy of conquerors, colonialism and foreign occupations, and more, its peoples collective triumph in rising above the tyranny of those invaders. more.. e-mail

My expulsion from Israel
Richard Falk, UN special rapporteur on the Palestinian territories, The Guardian 12/19/2008
     On December 14, I arrived at Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv, Israel to carry out my UN role as special rapporteur on the Palestinian territories.
     I was leading a mission that had intended to visit the West Bank and Gaza to prepare a report on Israel’s compliance with human rights standards and international humanitarian law. Meetings had been scheduled on an hourly basis during the six days, starting with Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, the following day.
     I knew that there might be problems at the airport. Israel had strongly opposed my appointment a few months earlier and its foreign ministry had issued a statement that it would bar my entry if I came to Israel in my capacity as a UN representative.
     At the same time, I would not have made the long journey from California, where I live, had I not been reasonably optimistic about my chances of getting in. Israel was informed that I would lead the mission and given a copy of my itinerary, and issued visas to the two people assisting me: a staff security person and an assistant, both of whom work at the office of the high commissioner of human rights in Geneva. more.. e-mail

Interview with Dr. Salah Haj Yahia of the PHR- Israel on the situation in Gaza
Saqer Abu Sa"™look, Naba News Agency - Translation - Saed Bannoura, International Middle East Media Center News 12/19/2008
     This is an interview with Dr. Salah Haj Yahia, of Physicians for Human Rights -- Israel, on the situation in Gaza and the hardships the residents, especially the patients are facing due to the ongoing and unjust Israeli siege. This interview was conducted by Saqer Abu Sa’look, Naba’ News Agency, and was translated by Saed Bannoura of the IMEMC.
     Dr. Yahia is the head of the PHR clinics and in charge of the field work of PHR in Tel Aviv. He managed to enter the Gaza Strip on Thursday along another PHR member, Mustafa Yassin, in order have a clear and close idea on the situation in Gaza and the needs of the medical sector. PHR delegates to Gaza have been denied entry to Gaza since August.
     Q: What do you think of the situation in Gaza?
     Dr. Salah: The current situation is filled with anticipation as the truce is ending, when night falls, the firing of missiles and retaliation starts. The biggest danger is if Israel decides to invade the Gaza Strip. If the army invades Gaza the number of fatalities will be huge, and medical needs will increase. The medical situation is already bad, and hospitals lack the basic supplies. more.. e-mail

The war of dependence
Yoav Stern, Ha’aretz 12/19/2008
     A salvo of shots cuts through the tranquil air. More shots, this time in a single burst. Another weapon replies with faint shots from a different neighborhood.
     "A pistol, perhaps?" asked one of the people present.
     More volleys and now fireworks, too, and everyone who had until a moment ago been serenely drinking a cup of Arabic coffee on the veranda in the winter sunshine amid the clear air of Umm al-Fahm jumps up from their seats. Light clouds of smoke, of the sort that fireworks leave behind, rise over the center of Umm al-Fahm.
     A little while earlier the police had announced the cancellation, or at least postponement, of the right-wing procession through the town, and a guest passing through concludes that the inhabitants are happy about the decision. They probably decided to waste some of the ammunition they had been saving for the right-wing procession, or for the police.
     A pubic activist who lives in the town smiles after hearing this theory. "Are you nuts? Today the pilgrims to Mecca came home. These are shots in their honor," he said. "Stop thinking everything revolves around you people." more.. e-mail

Christmas under Occupation
Dr. Mazin Qumsiyeh "“ Bethlehem, International Middle East Media Center News 12/19/2008
     When I look out the balcony of the faculty lounge at Bethlehem University I hear the constant hammering of the construction in the settlement that separates us from Jerusalem and I see Israeli settlements built on Palestinian lands surrounding Bethlehem on three sides. Every two weeks, Jewish settlers "visit" the hill on the fourth side (called Ush Ghrab) that they have set their eyes on. Yet, I hear the US media is focused on other things including the weighty matter of dodging shoes.
     After living 29 years in the US, it is not easy to be living in Bethlehem area especially this Christmas season. Life can be at times hard, exhilarating, depressing, fun, and hopeful. Israel occupied this area in 1967, but the landscape had begun to change well before that. In 1948, Bethlehem became home to thousands of Palestinian refugees after more than 750,000 people were driven from their homes in what became Israel. Palestinians were forbidden to return, and three cramped refugee camps (Dheisheh, Azza, and Aida) add to the local migrants from villages whose lands were taken over. more.. e-mail

Unity, and peace, hinge on US
Jim Lobe, Electronic Intifada 12/19/2008
     WASHINGTON (IPS) - Eighteen months after Hamas evicted Fatah forces from Gaza, the prospects for restoring Palestinian unity are more elusive than ever, with both factions believing that time is on their side, according to a new report by the Brussels-based International Crisis Group (ICG) released Wednesday.
     But changes in the regional and international landscape, particularly if United States President-elect Barack Obama follows through on his campaign pledges to engage with Iran and Syria, could spur a reconciliation, one which a growing number of experts here believe is essential for progress toward a Palestinian-Israeli peace accord.
     A more flexible attitude towards Hamas by Washington -- which organized a western diplomatic and aid boycott against it after the Islamist group won elections in 2006 and later formed a government of national unity with Fatah -- could also play a critical role in encouraging intra-Palestinian reconciliation that would in turn enhance chances for a peace settlement with Israel, according to the report. more.. e-mail

Fighting Within - Gilad Atzmon Interviews Sid Shniad (IJV Canada)
Gilad Atzmon, Palestine Think Tank 12/19/2008
     Recently I have been corresponding with Sid Shniad (1), a founding member of Canadian Independent Jewish Voice (Canadian IJV) (2). Those who are familiar with my writing are well aware of the fact that I am highly critical of any form of Jewish political activism, for I consider it to be a racially orientated discourse.
     Yet, as much as I am interested in elaboration on the issue, a true dialogue with Jewish political activists is pretty much impossible. Jewish political ethnic campaigners and political activists have much to lose. They are fully aware of the categorical contradiction between the aim for universal values and tribal activism. They have much incoherence and inconsistency to hide.
     Sid, however, was different, though we do not agree on many things, we have managed to keep an open and fruitful dialogue. He was very helpful and addressed each issue in a very positive manner.
     Gilad: Hello Sid, I will start with a very brief question. Assuming that you are a secular human being, what makes you into a Jew? And what does it mean to operate politically as a Jew?
     Sid: I come from a long line of irreligious Jews. My great-grandfather was a rabbi in Poland, but since that time there has been very little religion in my family. My father was not bar mitzvahed, but he strongly identified as a Jew. more.. e-mail

Human Rights: Nails in the Coffin of Israel
Kawther Salam, Palestine Think Tank 12/19/2008
     The Jewish State of Israel considers itself above the laws and has imposed a blockade on any criticism against its violations of the International laws, of its barbaric Apartheid regime and of its many crimes against humanity, by the UN human rights organizations and members of the International community.
     The representatives of this so-called "state" lose control each time any criticism against them, as small and innocuous as it may be, arises here or there. Each time they are criticized according to international laws and agreements to which Israel has acceded, and which in part were even redacted with help of representatives of Israel, these saints of the "unique and aloof" morality of their state give themselves the right to punish, to lambast the international organizations and their representatives, instead of accepting punishment or even mild criticism from these organizations which constitute the forum for the representatives of a great part of humanity.
     The representatives of the Israeli occupation regime reacted arrogantly after the Human Rights Council of the UN in Geneva unanimously released a list including 99 recommendations at the end of a two-day review of Israel’s record on human rights last Tuesday 9 December 2008. The council urged Israel to take 99 step to end its violations of human rights, including to lifting the blockade on the Gaza Strip, freeing Arab detainees, and to allowing international observers to enter Palestine. more.. e-mail

Underneath the Rubbles: Argentina Conspiracy
Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich, Middle East Online 12/19/2008
     Haaretz reports that an Argentine judge has ordered the property of a former Iranian diplomat to be seized as compensation awarded to a survivor of the 1994 bombing of a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires. Without verification, Israeli and American accusations trump lack of evidence in any jurisdiction- Argentina in particular – since it stands to benefit from the verdict.
     The US-Argentina relationship has always been in a struggle; but it was Ronald Reagan, the man who declared to the American people: “We raised a banner of bold colors--no pale pastels. We proclaimed a dream of an America that would be a Shining City on a Hill” who strengthened the ties. Reagan’s opposition to the Sardinistas prompted him to solicit the aid of the most ruthless military regime Argentina has ever known to train the Contras[i].
     ...Among the victims were some 2000 Jews. Hitler was not without long-term impact in Argentina. The country’s military regime kept secret camps decorated with swastikas.[iii] A Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs publication reveals that during this period, the foreign policy of Israel was to offer assistance to the Jews in Argentina, but at the same time “to cooperate with the military regime in realizing economic goals” of Israel. “Israel was accused by various quarters within the Israeli political system and the Jewish community in Argentina of deserting hundreds of Argentinean Jews, some of whom disappeared and some of whom were arrested and tortured under the military junta’s rule. more.. e-mail

Craigslist founder supports microfinance in Palestine
Ma’an News Agency 12/19/2008
     Bethlehem – Ma’an – The inspiration behind the largest online classified ad service, as well as its namesake, announced plans on Thursday to bring his web savvy to Palestine.
     Internet entrepreneur Craig Newmark, who founded the immensely popular www.craigslist.com, plans to support stability in the Middle East through a new partnership with an existing microfinance organization that provides small loans to residents in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, as well as other developing nations.
     In partnership with CHF International, a humanitarian aid and development assistance organization, Newmark helped develop Kiva, the world’s “first person-to-person micro-lending website.”
     On the site, individuals can choose and lend to entrepreneurs in the developing world, according to CHF. The aid organization has been working in the occupied Palestinian territories since 1994. It extends small loans to families for business development and home improvement, “in hopes of fostering economic stability in this politically fragile region. -- See also: Kiva more.. e-mail

The weapon of the occupied
Matthew Cassel, Electronic Intifada 12/16/2008
     It’s not surprising that since the George W. Bush shoe-dodging incident the US media has been recalling the infamous "shoeing" of the Saddam statue by a few Iraqis after American forces had brought it down. These images were aired over and over in the international media to show that Iraqis celebrated the toppling of their former ruler. Reports later emerged that this event had been mostly staged by the American military and the media had not accurately shown how few the numbers of people who had actually been around to hit the decapitated statue with their shoes. Most Iraqis did not celebrate the event because many were frightened in their homes, or packing their bags to leave their country and the extreme violence that their occupiers had brought with them to Iraq.
     But others, especially many in the Arab world, might recall another event where flying shoes made the front pages.
     It was 28 September 2000. Then opposition candidate to become Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, decided to take a "stroll" to the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, one of Islam’s holiest sites. He claimed the move was not meant to be provocative, and that he was just taking a walk "to see what happens here." However, the previous decade, there had been at least two incidents during which Jewish Israelis threatened the mosque compound and Israeli forces carried out several mass killings of worshippers, and Palestinians revolted leading to the death of nearly 100 Palestinians by Israeli forces. more.. e-mail

Veolia involved in Israel’s waste dumping in West Bank
Adri Nieuwhof, Electronic Intifada 12/16/2008
     At the entrance of the Tovlan landfill, located beside the Jordan River in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT), three flags fly proudly: those of Israel, France and the European company, Veolia. Through its Onyx subsidiary, Veolia, which is also constructing the Jerusalem light rail project on occupied Palestinian land, is managing the Tovlan landfill. In a 2004 year report on sustainable development, Veolia announced that its subsidiary Onyx brought "the new Tovlan landfill into service in Israel." Prior to that time, Tovlan was an old, unsanitary waste dump.
     Veolia has a history of juggling with names. In 2005 Onyx became Veolia Environmental Services, also operating in Israel under the name TMM Onyx. Research by the Coalition of Women for Peace confirms that the Tovlan landfill is owned and operated by TMM, a company that is 100 percent owned by Veolia Environmental Services Israel.
     Consistent with its activities in the light rail project, Veolia claims that the Tovlan landfill is located in Israel, rather than in the OPT. According to Israel’s Ministry of Environment Protection there are 18 authorized landfills, including the Tovlan and Abu Dis landfills located in the occupied West Bank. The Tovlan site is managed by the Israeli settlement regional council of Biqat Hayarden, which covers 21 settlements. It is mainly used as a dump for solid waste from Israeli municipalities and the illegal settlements of Ariel, Maale Efrayim, the Regional Councils of Megilot, Biqat Hayarden and Shomron as well as the Barkan Industrial Park. more.. e-mail

Majdal: Home Sweet Home
Najwa Sheikh Ahmed – Gaza, Palestine Chronicle 12/16/2008
     ’I was trying to imagine what I will see from the old Majdal if there still any.’
     Home for all of us is the place where we can find peace, comfort, and love, it is where we find passion, and warmth, no matter where we are or who we are it is the place where we want to hide and seek peace.
     Home is the place where every stone, every corner recalls a memory of a certain event during your childhood; it is where the signs of how tall you became are still carved on the door.
     For me as a third generation Palestinian refugee, I missed experiencing all these feelings, the camp where I have been raised is just a temporary residence, a place that I and my family before me were forced to live in after they lost their homeland, the camp was never to be my home..
     It was hard for me to forget the stories of my parents about their homeland, and to a accept the camp as my home, though all my memories and childhood are in the camp, my whole life in the camp, but there always a feeling of commitment towards the original homeland. more.. e-mail

Land and Population Transfer
Palestine Monitor, Palestine Monitor 12/16/2008
     The new Knesset hopeful for the Israeli right offers some interesting insights into his ‘creative’, ‘out of the box’ diplomatic efforts in Washington.
     The Jerusalem Post this morning published an interview with outgoing Israeli ambassador to the US, Danny Ayalon concerning the Annapolis Peace Process. Ayalon has recently returned to Israel to run for a Knesset seat in the extreme rightwing party Israel Beiteinu (Israel Our Home).
     The article focused on Ayalon’s diplomatic achievements in Washington concerning the prospects of a land and population transfer to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in which Israel would keep settlers in much of the West Bank, and in return would give the Palestinians land in the Galilee that are primarily populated by Arabs.
     The Jerusalem Post states that: ‘Ayalon revealed that when he explained the plan in his informal talks with the highest echelons of the outgoing administration of US President George W. Bush, "they didn’t fall off their chairs."’
     Considering the audience, Palestine Monitor is not surprised in the least. more.. e-mail

Fighting on a different front
Ben White, The Guardian 12/16/2008
     This Thursday, a group of Israeli young men and women, barely out of school, will bring home some important truths about the situation in Israel/Palestine for those who care to listen. The Shministim (Hebrew for twelfth-graders) are Israelis who, having been called up for compulsory military service, have refused to serve in an occupying army and are thus sent to prison for refusing the draft.
     December 18 has been called as a day of action for the Shministim (principally by the US-based Jewish Voice for Peace). It is a chance to raise the profile of Israel’s conscientious objectors, protest at their repeated imprisonment, and highlight exactly why these Israeli youth have decided it is better to go to jail or risk isolation and ridicule from family and friends, rather than enforce the occupation of the Palestinian territories.
     A Shministim refusenik faces the prospect of repeat sentences of up to four weeks at a time, as the cycle of draft-refusal-punishment can continue until they are 21 years old or discharged for some other reason (medical for example). Someone like Tamar Katz, because of her refusal to wear a military uniform in prison, is placed in solitary confinement. more.. e-mail

Time to End the Settlement Project
Ghassan Khatib – The West Bank, Palestine Chronicle 12/16/2008
     ’The settlement phenomenon is the biggest threat to any potential peace..’
     The recent settler violence in Hebron, which was described by Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, as a pogrom, brought to the attention of Israelis and Palestinians the grave danger that settlements and settlers represent.
     But the riots in Hebron were in fact different only in terms of the level of violence. Otherwise they were part of an orchestrated campaign of settler violence that has been in increasing evidence this past year. The Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronot reported 675 violent incidents by Jewish settlers in the West Bank, mainly against Palestinian citizens, but also against Israeli soldiers.
     The large-scale and organized nature of these activities indicates that they are not spontaneous, scattered and individual initiatives but rather the result of a political position that aims at achieving political objectives.
     This would not be the first time settlers and settlements are deliberate political pawns, whether for their own aims or those of Israel. Over the years, Israeli governments have used the settler presence in the occupied Palestinian territories at certain times in order to achieve specific political objectives. more.. e-mail

Round and round again
Simon Tisdall, The Guardian 12/16/2008
     Pressure is building on all sides for positive movement to resolve the Israel-Palestine conflict. The transition in Washington, February’s Israeli elections, and possible power shifts among the Palestinians are encouraging perceptions of a new "window of opportunity". But while the view through the glass may be clearer, the window frame remains firmly locked and bolted.
     Filling the temporary gap between George Bush and Barack Obama, Britain has presumed to lead and is busy twisting arms. Gordon Brown’s talks today with Israel’s caretaker leader, Ehud Olmert, followed a gee-up session with the Palestinian prime minister, Salam Fayyad, at a London conference on investment in the Palestinian economy. "Let’s seize the opportunity to make 2009 the Middle East year of peace," Brown said.
     Claiming to have Obama’s full backing, Brown’s clunking fist is also being directed at the Arab states. "Ultimately more is needed than a two-state solution - a broader peace between Israel and all its Arab neighbours," he said. That message was driven home by foreign secretary David Miliband during a visit to the region last month. more.. e-mail

Al-Zaidi Puts Iraq Back on the Map
Remi Kanazi, Palestine Chronicle 12/16/2008
     ’One has to wonder what will come after the shoe protest.’
     I can’t lie. I’ve watched Iraqi journalist Montather Al-Zaidi whip those two shoes past George Bush’s head more times than I can count. I loved it; I even got into the corny jokes about the Red Sox drafting Al-Zaidi in the spring (cementing my belief that Iraqis have the second strongest arms in the Middle East—behind Palestinians of course). I also read endless blog coverage and joined the Facebook group, "Release Montather Al-Zaidi and Give Him New Shoes."
     Overnight, Al-Zaidi became a hero to many Iraqis, Arabs, Bush haters, and anti-war activists. After the episode, Iraqis rallied in the streets with shoes in hand and demanded that their new hero be released (reports have now surfaced that Al-Zaidi’s wrist has been broken and he has been tortured in jail). That’s when I realized that Al-Zaidi did something much greater than throw two shoes at a war criminal, he (even if it will only last a week) single-handedly put Iraq back on the map. more.. e-mail

Let the Countdown Begin...
Palestine Monitor, Palestine Monitor 12/16/2008
     Monday morning - 227 Prisoners released by Israel
     Monday night - 29 Palestinians arrested and 1 killed by Israel
     Yesterday, the much hyped and celebrated Israeli release of "˜hundreds’ of Palestinian prisoners occurred. The international press, as it has done throughout the previous prisoner releases, described the event as some sort of grand concession by Israel.
     It seems that when the international press wants to focus on the prisoner issue, they wait until one of these high-profile, confidence-building releases takes place.
     The airways were full of images of happy Palestinians reuniting with their families - so many of them that they filled the entire screen. CNN described the event as historic, and the number of prisoners released in the "˜hundreds’. It looks and sounds good, but what do they fail to mention?
     They fail to mention that this historic concession comprises a mere 2% of the approximately 11,000 Palestinians held by Israel. more.. e-mail

While Livni promises Arab deportation, Obama offers "nuclear umbrella" to Tel Aviv - that's what friends are for!
Michele Giorgio, il manifesto, Palestine Think Tank 12/14/2008
     Jerusalem - Everyone is pointing their finger at Benyamin Netanyahu, guilty of being the leader of a Likud full of rightist extremists like Moshe Feiglin. And yet, yesterday Tzipi Livni, the candidate as the Premier of the "centrist"� Kadima in the coming elections held next 10 February who is currently serving as Foreign Minister, proved to hold opinions that are very close to those of the nationalist extremists. Leaving no room for possible misinterpretations, Livni told a group of high school students in Tel Aviv that the Israeli Arabs (Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, one fifth of the Israeli population) should go and live in the Palestinian state when it has been set up.
     “Once a Palestinian state is established”—Livni claimed—“among other things I will also be able to approach the Palestinian residents of Israel, those whom we call Arab Israelis, and tell them: ’your national aspirations lie elsewhere.’” Livni didn’t specify which steps she would take in order to have the Arab Israelis transferred into the future Palestinian state while the Arab Israelis will go on demanding the foundation of an Israeli state belonging to all its citizens and not to its Jewish majority alone. more.. e-mail

Gaza Haunts the EU
Dr. Saeb Shaath, Palestine Think Tank 12/14/2008
     While Gaza defies Zionist-imposed death, in simple direct words, the "˜civilised’ world praises the killers. The EU is rewarding the Zionist vultures by upgrading its relationship with the Zionist entity (through a proposal by the European Union Commission and Council for the draft recommendation to conclude a Protocol to the EU-Israel Association Agreement and on the general principles governing the State of Israel's participation in Community programs). This means that more European taxpayers’ money will be made available to pour into the only entity on earth that is refusing to comply with UN and Security Council resolutions. Violating most international laws and basic Human Rights, a very advanced and sophisticated Israeli Army is attacking civilians and aiding settlers to attack unarmed defenceless Palestinians.
     Last Wednesday, the European Parliament (EP) postponed a vote that could largely upgrade EU-Israeli relations. The vote, originally scheduled for Thursday, December 11, was postponed to another date yet to be determined, the majority of European Parliamentarians ruled on Wednesday. more.. e-mail

Rewarding Israel’s Criminal Behaviour
Stuart Littlewood, Middle East Online 12/14/2008
     Members of the European Parliament recently took a critical view of proposals to upgrade the EU-Israel Association Agreement and put down amendments designed to toughen up the conditions. "It’s time for the Israeli government to stop considering itself above the law and start respecting it,” warned Luisa Morgantini, the Parliament’s vice-president.
     As a result, the vote was postponed – “a political stunt”, said the frustrated Israel lobby. In the meantime, all 27 EU ministers voted unanimously to approve the upgrade. However, it is not a done deal just yet. The EU Parliament still has to vote on this.
     Most citizens, myself included, are baffled by the way the EU operates. One thing is certain: it has little to do with democracy. I seem to remember that when they voted in 2002 to suspend the EU-Israel Agreement on account of Israel’s continual violation of human rights, they were ignored by the Commission and Council of Ministers – that’s Western democracy for you. more.. e-mail

The Chickens Come Home to Roost
Paul J. Balles, Middle East Online 12/14/2008
     Thirty-nine women and children and eight teenagers at a wedding could hardly be mistaken for militants. Yet that’s what the US military said about the 47 civilians murdered in an air strike in Afghanistan (BBC 11/07/08). Do we imagine, for a minute, that anyone vaguely knowing these people would forgive their tormentors and murderers?
     When a superior officer ordered three of his US marines not to take time to process the prisoners according to the rules, the threesome took turns blowing their prisoners’ brains out in Fallujah in 2004 (Los Angeles Times 11/07/08).
     How many of us would seriously think that stories of these atrocious misdeeds weren’t broadcast by word of mouth through all of the Arab and Islamic worlds?
     "We did a study on 3,000 children in Gaza," says, Dr Eyad al Saraj, a child psychologist. "45 per cent of them said the worst thing they have witnessed was the beating of their fathers by the Israeli soldiers. That was the symbol of security and power for them and it was shattered." more.. e-mail

I am ashamed
Hadassa Ben-Itto, Ha’aretz 12/15/2008
     I always tried to integrate public activity into my personal life. I felt a special obligation to do so, as someone who had the good fortune to grow up here and to take part in the magnificent Zionist enterprise of establishing the Jewish state. I eschewed the political and media tracks: I do not denigrate their importance and centrality, but I decided they were not appropriate for me. Instead, I chose to join the justice system, as I believe it makes a vital contribution to shaping the face of a democratic country, and to be active on behalf of the Jewish people, whose future is intertwined with the future of the State of Israel.
     Recently, I was invited to give the keynote speech at a major event in Bern to mark the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht. The crowd included members of the clergy, ambassadors and other state representatives.
     .... I am ashamed of my silence. I saw the uprooting of olive trees, the overturning of market stalls, the attacks on property, and sometimes on innocent people, and I kept silent. I heard the words of incitement, I identified the messages and I was ashamed, but I kept silent. more.. e-mail

Tzipi’s Nation-State
Uri Avnery, Middle East Online 12/14/2008
     It sounds like an invented story. And indeed it is.
     In this tale, an American politician gets up and declares: The United States was founded by British Protestants who were persecuted in Europe for their Puritan beliefs. Therefore, the United States is an Anglo-Saxon Protestant state.
     And he goes on: the United States is also a democratic state. Therefore, people with another background – such as Native Americans, Africans, Latinos, Asians and Jews – enjoy full equality. But they must know that the United States is an Anglo-Saxon nation-state, while they belong to other nation-states.
     Sounds far-fetched? Indeed it is. No American politician would dream of uttering such a statement, even if he might feel it in his heart.
     Here in Israel one can say such a thing, and nobody gets excited.
     This week Tzipi Livni did just that. more.. e-mail

Radio Interview with Gilad Atzmon
Don Bustany, KPFK, Palestine Think Tank 12/14/2008
     For our first podcast transmission, Palestine Think Tank is happy to invite you to listen to this entertaining and informative radio interview Don Bustany made with Gilad Atzmon for the radio station KPFK. Topics covered in the show are those that many of Gilad’s readers will be familiar with, and they include Jewish Identity Politics, the contradiction in speaking tribal and thinking universal, the smearing and labelling that he has had to undergo for expressing his ideas, and naturally, bringing things back on focus, to the role that the West plays in covering up a humanitarian crisis and crime against humanity that Israel is conducting in Gaza. Enjoy! More podcasts to come! [end]

This Land is Ours Say Israeli-Arabs
Saleh Al-Naemi – Occupied Jerusalem, Palestine Chronicle 12/12/2008
     Israeli-Arabs are reacting with outrage with Foreign Minister and frontrunner for premiership Tzipi Livni’s call for Arab citizens to leave Israel and move into the new Palestinian state.
     "Israeli-Arabs will not leave their land," Arab member of Knesset Abbas Zakour told IslamOnline.net on Friday, December 12.
     "We are the owners of this land. We have been born here and will be buried in this land."
     Livni, the leader of the centrist Kadima party who hopes to become prime minister after the February 10 polls, said Thursday that Israeli-Arabs should move to the new Palestinian state when it is created.
     "My solution for maintaining a Jewish and democratic state of Israel is to have two distinct national entities," she told a group of secondary school students in Tel Aviv.
     "And among other things I will also be able to approach the Palestinian residents of Israel, those whom we call Arab Israelis, and tell them: ’your national aspirations lie elsewhere.’" more.. e-mail

A judicial and moral miscarriage
Editorial, Ha’aretz 12/14/2008
     The arrest of settler Ze’ev Braude, who was filmed shooting Palestinian civilians at close range, sheds more light on the law enforcement system applied to the Jewish population in the occupied territories. Judges in two courts rejected prosecutors’ requests to remand the suspect, accused of serious crimes, until a final decision is made on whether to keep him in custody for the duration of judicial proceedings against him.
     The rulings by Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court Judge Malka Aviv, who released Braude from jail, and District Court Judge Orit Efal-Gabai, who sent him to house arrest subject to restrictions, are not unusual.
     A few days prior, Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court Judge Moshe Drori refused to impose restrictions on Hebron settler Noam Federman, and even castigated the security forces who had evicted the Federman family from the site they had broken into numerous times.
     Two years ago, Attorney General Menachem Mazuz acknowledged that the state of law enforcement in the territories is "very inferior." His predecessor Elyakim Rubinstein branded this phenomenon as "sub-law enforcement on Israelis who reside in Yesha [the West Bank and Gaza. more.. e-mail

Bush’s lethal legacy to the Palestinians
Marc J. Sirois, Daily Star 12/13/2008
     Notwithstanding widespread hopes that US President-Barack Obama will save the Middle East from itself, it is increasingly evident that it might will be beyond anyone’s powers to soon repair the damage wrought by eight years of George W. Bush. Regardless of how committed Obama may (or may not) prove to be, the fact remains that many of the conditions necessary for a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are neither present nor close at hand. The Hamas-Fatah feud makes one side too divided to either negotiate a full and fair agreement or properly implement one, and Israel’s voters apparently feel so guilty at having been led by Ehud Olmert that they look set to engage in mass self-flagellation by electing Benjamin Netanyahu, an avowed foe of the entire peace process. All of this threatens to extend the Palestinians’ seemingly interminable season of dispossession.
     My own unease over this state of affairs is piqued by the evident satisfaction that some commentators - particularly American neoconservatives but also some of their fellow travelers in the Middle East - are taking at something that ought to unnerve any reasonable individual. These suggest (as they always have) that Arabs don’t (and shouldn’t) care all that much about the Palestinian cause, argue tacitly that peace is not even worth pursuing until Arab states have democratized, and peddle the familiar line that Hamas is irrevocably hostile to a negotiated solution. more.. e-mail

Livni competes with Netanyahu in Racism
Adib Kawar, Palestine Think Tank 12/13/2008
     It is parliamentary (Zionist Knesset) election time, and with an ever increasing trend towards extreme right and racism by the vast majority of the Zionist colonialist population in occupied Palestine; thus the trend of the different Zionist political parties and their masses to express the deep and widespread racism and hate towards the about 20% of indigenous Palestinian Arabs still not ethnically cleansed from their occupied homeland. Livni and Netanyahu as well as the Labor party leader, Ehud Barak, the supposed-to-be Zionist left (who is day and night threatening to fully destroy Lebanon if its resistance dared to object to and challenge an attempted invasion of Lebanon), as well as the rest of the Zionist leaders, are competing in who can express their racism the most.
     Livni speaking to a group of secondary school students in Tel Aviv in remarks broadcast by army radio talked about "democracy"� (!!!) "My solution for maintaining a Jewish and democratic state of Israel is to have two distinct national entities."  The woman with Polish roots claiming to be speaking about a "democratic state"� wants to complete the uprooting of Palestinian Arabs from their own homeland!!!! This is how school students are raised, fed and smeared with racism and fascism even before reaching their teens. more.. e-mail

An Israeli in Gaza
Frank Barat, Palestine Monitor 12/13/2008
     You recently took part in the Free Gaza movement and successfully reached Gaza by boat with others activists, journalists and human rights workers from around the globe. How did you get involved in such an initiative and why was it important for you to take part?
     As an Israeli and the head of an Israeli peace organization (ICAHD – The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions), I was asked by the Free Gaza Movement organizers to take part in their action to Break the Siege of Gaza by sailing two boats from Cyprus to Gaza City port. I agreed because this was a non-violent political action; breaking the siege and by implication highlighting Israel’s responsibility for it (which it tries to shrug) fit into ICAHD’s mission, to end the Israeli Occupation completely.
     Had this been defined as a humanitarian mission I would not have participated, since the so-called “humanitarian crisis” in Gaza is not the result of some natural calamity, but of a deliberate policy of Israel – plus the US, Europe and Japan, it must be said, and aided by Egypt – to break the will of the Palestinians to resist and to replace the democratically elected government of Hamas by a collaborationist regime more amenable to Israeli control. more.. e-mail

Telling It as It Is
Mustafa Barghouti, Palestine Chronicle 12/12/2008
     ’We need to provide an alternative view to an audience long monopolised by the lobby.’
     As many speculate about Obama’s future policies in the Middle East, the general Arab reaction is wait-and-see. The new president will likely face a barrage of problems, the economy and Iraq for starters, enough to keep him busy for a whole term. But there is no indication that the "change" Obama likes so much to talk about applies to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The appointments he made so far are not that encouraging either.
     The Israelis, and Tzipi Livni has said as much, want the Americans to stay out of it. They want to keep the Palestinians divided, hold out the carrot of possible negotiations, while expanding settlements and changing the status quo all the time. The Palestinians, meanwhile, seem hapless. Pursuing negotiations that have no chance of success, the Palestinians are holding on to Annapolis like a drowning man clutches at a straw. What are they doing about the Israeli settlements that grew exponentially during the Annapolis talks? Nothing. What are they doing about the Israeli roadblocks that increased from 521 to 630 during the same period? Nothing. What are they doing about the system of apartheid that subsequent Israeli governments appear to reinforce? Nothing. more.. e-mail

EU rewards Israel for starving Gazans, expanding colonies
Khalid Amayreh in occupied East Jerusalem, Palestinian Information Center 12/12/2008
     On Monday, 8 December, European Union (EU) foreign ministers decided to boost relations with the apartheid state of Israel.
     The decision opens the way towards a first-ever EU-Israel summit in the coming months, perhaps during the Czech Republic’s presidency of the bloc, in the first half of 2009.
     The EU will also consider inviting Israel to participate in the civilian missions linked to its security and defense policy.
     Czech officials have pointed out that upgrading EU-Israeli relations will be one the Czech Republic’s main priorities when it takes over the EU presidency from France in January.
     Immoral decision
     The plainly immoral decision came as a surprise, not because the EU is a paragon of virtue and morality, but rather because Israel has been behaving and acting very much as a Nazi state would. Hence, the decision can only be viewed as a cheap appeasement and expression of political promiscuity.
     Indeed, it is very hard to think of a single positive factor justifying this grave blunder on the part of the EU. more.. e-mail

Avanti populi
Gideon Levy, Ha’aretz 12/14/2008
     The Kadima primary this week is no more than the election of a condo committee. And this is the last chance: The condo is slated for demolition, an urban renewal project. Kadima will not survive. The ideological power of the new Dash has been exhausted, its leadership used up, its job over. The house that arose as an electoral exploit by Ariel Sharon will hardly manage to run one more time, and then it will be evacuated.
     Living together happily in this condo are the representatives of the imaginary Israeli political center, which does not exist; residents who came from the right, but want to feel good about themselves, giving themselves a moderate and enlightened appearance. They are also the most mediocre of political hacks, they and their neighbors across the hall. The most captivating resident, Tzipi Livni, has already been elected chairwoman of the committee in place of the corrupt chairman, who was appointed in place of the elderly chairman who collapsed. Now the residents will put together a list of their friends. more.. e-mail

The substance of semantics
Elie Podeh, Ha’aretz 12/14/2008
     The recent debate in the pages of Haaretz over the clause dealing with the question of Palestinian refugees in the Saudi peace initiative (Matti Steinberg on November 30, Daniel Schueftan on December 5 and Alexander Yakobson on December 7) reflects the traditional manner in which Israeli society deals with changes on the Arab side of the table.
     This is a textual, philological approach, which focuses on analysis of the given text - whether an agreement, initiative, letter or just a speech - according to a mistaken understanding that the "correct" interpretation would provide us an answer as to how to deal with the issue in question.
     Still, as a textual approach is by nature open to interpretation, it grants an advantage to those who raise doubts and misgivings. A quick glance at the Arab-Israeli conflict (and the Palestinian issue in particular) teaches us that Israeli society has grappled with these textual conflicts at several key junctures of change over the history of that conflict. more.. e-mail

Jenin Trade Fair: A step down - a step forward
Palestine Monitor, Palestine Monitor 12/13/2008
     From resistance stronghold during the al-Aqsa Intifada to role model for development and political stability. How security and trade go hand in hand in city of Jenin.
     On 27 November the Jenin Trade Fair began., which is a trade fair whose aim is to promote and re-establish links between traders, small producers and companies of all sizes and shapes in the Jenin Governorate with Arab Israeli counterparts in particular. In his speech, the Danish Representative to the PA, Rolf Holmboe, stated that the trade fair’s objective is "�to achieve an impact on the economy of Jenin Governorate in the shorter term, thereby increase stability and provide a positive outlook to the future."�
     The trade fair was opened with speeches from prominent figures such as PM Salam Fayyad, Quartet Representative Tony Blair, the Governor of Jenin, Qadoura Mousa who is organising the event and the Danish Representative to the PA, Rolf Holmboe, who promoted the idea and is funding the event. more.. e-mail

Cluster Bomb Treaty and the World’s Unfinished Business
Ramzy Baroud, Palestine Chronicle 12/12/2008
     Deminers scour farmland in the village of Zawtar West in south Lebanon.(IRIN) The United States, Russia and China are sending a terrible message to the rest of the world by refusing to take part in the historic signing of a treaty that bans the production and use of cluster bombs. In a world that is plagued by war, military occupation and terrorism, the involvement of the great military powers in signing and ratifying the agreement would have signaled -- if even symbolically - the willingness of these countries to spare civilians’ unjustifiable deaths and the lasting scars of war.
     Nonetheless, the incessant activism of many conscientious individuals and organizations came to fruition on December 3-4 when ninety-three countries signed a treaty in Oslo, Norway that bans the weapon, which has killed and maimed many thousands of civilians.
     The accord was negotiated in May, and should go into effect in six months, once it is ratified by 30 countries. There is little doubt that the treaty will be ratified; in fact, many are eager to be a member of the elite group of 30. Unfortunately, albeit unsurprisingly, the US, Russia, China, Israel, India and Pakistan -- a group that includes the biggest makers and users of the weapon - neither attended the Ireland negotiations, nor did they show any interest in signing the agreement. more.. e-mail

YouTube Partners with MOSSAD - ADL
Haitham Sabbah, Palestine Think Tank 12/12/2008
     It seems that the days of using YouTube as #1 media to distribute documentaries, videos and presentations about the truth of Israel and Zionist and their horrific war-crimes history and terrorism profile, has come to an END.
     Yesterday, it was announced that YouTube officially connected to the infamous ADL as partner to "Fight Against Hate."
     NEW YORK, Dec. 11 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ - YouTube has reached out to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) for its expertise in dealing with hate on the Internet. In one outgrowth of that partnership, the League is now a contributor to YouTube's newly launched Abuse & Safety Center, where users are empowered to identify and confront hate, and to report abuses.
     The YouTube Abuse & Safety Center features information and links to resources developed by ADL to help Internet users respond to and report offensive material and extremist content that violates YouTube’s Community Guidelines on hate speech.… more.. e-mail

Eid proves hard in Gaza
Al Jazeera 12/12/2008
     In an occasional diary piece, a member of staff from the charity Oxfam writes on the situation in Gaza, where residents are celebrating Eid al-Adha with basic goods and power in short supply.
     A lot can happen in a month. A lot has happened in Gaza since I was last there five weeks ago.
     Since Israel tightened the blockade on the Gaza Strip in November, bakeries have run out of gas. People are now queuing for bread. Gaza’s only power plant has been shut down.
     Light, water and heating are in scarce supply. Banks ran out of money. It is bad enough to think about this, but what is it like to live with?
     I phoned my colleague, Nidal, who works with Oxfam in Gaza. He started by telling me that power to his home in the Bureij refugee camp has been off for the past two days. His son Tareq, a toddler, is frightened by the dark and has stopped eating properly. more.. e-mail

East Jerusalem’s planning trap
Efrat Cohen-Bar, Ha’aretz 12/12/2008
     This week a new mayor and city council took office in Jerusalem. Also this week, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel published its annual report. The report shows that the capital’s new municipal government has its work cut out for it, if it has any intention of correcting the city’s discriminatory policies in East Jerusalem.
     According to the ACRI report, 67 percent of Palestinian families living in East Jerusalem are impoverished. It also notes that there has been an official and declared Israeli policy to preserve a Jewish majority in Jerusalem, and that the bureaucracy has been enlisted to advance this goal. In what is supposedly a unified city, west and east are worlds apart, in terms of both human rights and development opportunities. One of the best examples is embodied in municipal planning procedures.
     One third of Jerusalem’s population lives in the Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem. These residents suffer from residential congestion, a lack of suitable infrastructure and mountains of obstacles on the path to obtaining building permits. Neither existing plans, nor the new ones currently being touted by City Hall, meet the minimal housing needs of the city’s Palestinian residents.... more.. e-mail

'I was afraid they would destroy our trees'
Eva Bartlett writing from the occupied Gaza Strip, Electronic Intifada 12/12/2008
     Leila pointed towards a lone tree and small house on a ridge above what appeared to be a vacant lot. "This was a great field," she said, "filled with lime, guava and orange trees. They destroyed them, killed the trees," she explained, referring to Israeli invasions over the years. "A few days after he learned his trees had been destroyed, the man who owned and tended to the trees passed away."
     She began to speak of Israel’s last large-scale invasion, at the end of February and into the first week of March, which Israel dubbed "Hot Winter." During the invasion Israeli forces killed at least 120 Palestinians, and wounded hundreds more. This was the invasion during which Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai threatened Palestinians in Gaza with a "holocaust" in response to the firing of homemade rockets from the Strip towards Israel.
     Leila’s family home in Jabaliya, in the northern Gaza Strip, lay in the thick of the slaughter. Israeli soldiers took over her home, using the top floor room overlooking a main street as a sniper position, from which to target people outside.The family was kept locked in one room, at gunpoint, for three days, as is often the army policy when invading Palestinian areas."We weren’t allowed to cook, to heat milk for my baby, to wash for our prayers. The soldiers said we could only go to the bathroom alone, but I refused this. I’m a woman, I don’t want to be alone with soldiers," she explained. As it was, Leila said that the women complained of soldiers not allowing them to close the door when using the toilet. more.. e-mail

60 years of refugeehood and human rights
Rami G. Khouri, Daily Star 12/13/2008
     Sixty years ago, on December 10, 1948, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a powerful, universal call to treat all human beings with dignity, respect, opportunity and equal rights. The 28 articles of the declaration are stunning in their simplicity, clarity and sheer human decency. The declaration remains a beacon of hope for those people around the world in situations of oppression, occupation or marginalization.
     I especially admire the preamble, which says that, "... the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world," and adds that, "... if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law.
     Also 60 years old this autumn is the Palestinian refugee situation. Curious about the linkage between these two anniversaries, I sat down for a chat in Beirut this week with Karen AbuZayd, the commissioner-general of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), the body charged with meeting the basic needs of Palestinian refugees. more.. e-mail

The Middle East needs media freedoms even more than other parts of the world
Editorial, The Daily Star, Daily Star 12/13/2008
     Saudi Arabia, Syria and Tunisia formed their own club on Friday, overcoming serious differences in government structure and orientation to find common ground. Tunisia and Syria are officially republics, while Saudi Arabia is an absolute monarchy. The Saudis and the Tunisians are aligned with the United States, while the Syrians are allied to Iran - and Damascus has particularly frosty relations with Riyadh. Nevertheless, the three leaderships agreed on one thing: the need to keep some of their citizens from attending a conference in Beirut on, of all subjects, a free press.
     The peoples of the Middle East and North Africa have suffered more than most from the repercussions of information being controlled and/or misconstrued by a select few. Ignorance about this part of the world has provided a freer hand for the launching and maintenance of colonial projects, impunity for the betrayals carried out in their dissolution, cover for the dispossession of the Palestinians, and impunity for the overthrow of sovereign governments (including some that were freely and fairly elected). Nowhere should citizens and their governments be more aware of the need for open media environments that enhance the likelihood of decent governance by fashioning some degree, however modest, of accountability for those who rule over others. more.. e-mail

The sheikh’s handshake
Jack Shenker, The Guardian 12/11/2008
     "I said shake, rattle and roll," sang rock legend Bill Haley in 1954, "well, you never do nothin’ to save your doggone soul." Muhammad Sayyid Tantawi was a young theology student in 1950s Cairo and so probably wasn’t well-versed in Haley’s back catalogue; still, had he paid closer attention to the song’s lyrics he might have found them alarmingly prophetic. Last month Sheikh Tantawi, now Egypt’s top cleric and arguably the highest authority in Sunni Islam, shook the wrong hand, rattled the Muslim world, and is now facing increasingly-belligerent calls for his head to roll.
     The ill-fated clasp took place at an interfaith conference in New York and the recipient was Israeli president Shimon Peres. Sheikh Tantawi, who as the Grand Imam of Cairo’s al-Azhar mosque and university occupies the highest seat of learning in the Sunni world, claims the embrace was purely accidental. "I shook his hand like I did the others: at random, without even knowing him," Tantawi told the incredulous Egyptian press. Israeli reporters tell a different story, suggesting that it was Tantawi who approached Peres and that the two men had a warm and serious conversation throughout dinner.
     Regardless of who is right, the handshake stirred up a storm of controversy that has dominated front pages for days in Egypt and beyond. The problem is that, intended or not, a friendly gesture between the Supreme Islamic Guide for the Muslim world on the one side and the president of a Zionist state on the other is seen by many in the Middle East as a painful propaganda gift to the Israelis, just as hundreds and thousands of Gazan Muslims remain trapped under brutal siege by the Israeli army. The pan-Arab newspaper al-Quds al-Arabi called Tantawi "absurd"; the Egyptian opposition daily, al-Dostour, is now running a high-profile campaign for his dismissal. more.. e-mail

Our mothers’ sons
Rod Solaimani and Hammad Hammad, Ha’aretz 12/12/2008
     The patio greeted us with a coolness and calm that seemed anything but natural in Deheisheh refugee camp, near Bethlehem in the West Bank, where the sheer density of people has eroded any notion of private space. Above us, grape vines curled around the rafters of an unfinished ceiling. It’s strange that since 1948, the visual reminder of a refugee’s transience seems to have evolved from temporary tents to constant construction.
     What exactly were two recent American college grads (Hammad, a Palestinian Muslim, and Rod, an Iranian Jew) doing when they chose to spend their summer living and working in a refugee camp? What started as an idea born over Red Bulls at 2 A.M. one night last spring at Georgetown University, evolved into summer camps in the Deheisheh, Jalazun and Al-Azzeh refugee camps last July. As idealistic college students, we aspired to inspire refugee youth to become agents of change in Palestinian society, so they could proactively take steps (using the arts, media and sports) to make peace and stability a day-to-day reality in their lives. more.. e-mail

A life in writing: Mourid Barghouti
Interview by Maya Jaggi, The Guardian 12/13/2008
     I learn from trees." The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti gestures around his mother’s terraced garden in the hilly Jordanian capital, Amman. "Just as many fruits drop before they’re ripe, when I write a poem I treat it with healthy cruelty, deleting images to take care of the right ones."
     Barghouti has published 12 poetry books in Arabic since the early 1970s, as well as a 700-page Collected Works (1997). He has read in overflowing amphitheatres and in refugee camps. Midnight and Other Poems, his first major collection in English translation, is out this month from Arc.
     It was his memoir, I Saw Ramallah, published by Bloomsbury in 2004 in a translation by Ahdaf Soueif, that first won him a readership in English. The late Edward Said saw it as "one of the finest existential accounts of Palestinian displacement". Reflecting on crossing the bridge from Jordan to his West Bank birthplace in 1996 after 30 years’ exile - a visit under Israeli control that he refused to call a return - he described a condition of permanent uprootedness. A student in Cairo when the 1967 Arab-Israeli war broke out, he was prevented, like many others, from returning to the Israeli-occupied West Bank. He was later exiled from Jordan for 20 years, Egypt for 18 years, and Lebanon for 15 years. Yet all writing, for him, is a displacement, a striving to escape from the "dominant used language" and the "chains of the tribe - its approval and taboos". more.. e-mail

I believe in Miracles
Nahida Izzat, Palestine Think Tank 12/11/2008
     You can break my bones
     My free spirit is invincible
     You can cause me the loss of sight
     The light of my insight
     You’ll never take away
     In the shadows of darkness
     Lies the corpse of your might
     You can destroy my house
     The windows of my hope,
     You cannot break
     The pillars of my faith
     You can never shake
     You can threaten me
     With weapons of death
     And mass destruction
     Implanting fear in my heart
     You cannot achieve
     Nor can you cut off
     My divine connection
     With a missile... more.. e-mail

Illusions in Gaza
Amira Hass, Ha’aretz 12/11/2008
     The first thing that captures your eyes, after two years away, is a visual quiet. Gone are the flags of every color (including green) that once flew everywhere; the billboards commemorating shaheeds with their weapons, new ones popping up nearly every day; the large banners emblazoned with slogans. Yes, here and there you still come across a tattered flag or faded sign, old graffiti on the walls, or a smiling Arafat beaming down from a giant poster that no one took the trouble to remove, the colors dulled by time. But the loud, aggressive, competitive profusion that was frequently replenished is all gone. Pictures of government officials in Gaza don’t impose upon you, they don’t hang on every corner. Instead, one notices bougainvillea, tree-lined avenues, wrought-iron gates, colorful head coverings. The Hamas government doesn’t need external symbols to prove its strength and announce its presence. The conclusion is obvious as it is.
     A somewhat hasty conclusion - or a partial one, to be more precise. When there is no political competition, someone said to me, there’s no need for its outward expressions. Are there really no rivals (Fatah, in other words), or have they been silenced? Around November 11, the anniversary of Yasser Arafat’s death, the Palestinian police in the Gaza Strip worked to conceal any symbols related to the date, the man and the movement - in addition to prohibiting the staging of any memorials. more.. e-mail

Testimony: Jewish settlers assault family in Hebron
Report, B'Tselem, Electronic Intifada 12/11/2008
     Raja Yusef Rashid al-Matariyeh, 40, married and a mother of five children, is a homemaker and a resident of Hebron. Her testimony was given to Issa Amro at the witness’ home on 7 December 2008:
     My husband and I live with our five children in Wadi al-Hussein. My brother-in-law Husni al-Matariyeh and his family live in the same building. He has 10 children.
     The building is located about 20 meters from the fence of the Kiryat Arba settlement and 200 meters from the house that the settlers invaded about a year and a half ago ["the House in Dispute"]. Settlers have been assaulting us almost every day for a long time. Since they invaded the house, they’ve been attacking us even more.
     Twenty days ago, when the high court decided that they had to leave the house, settlers cut the wire fence surrounding Kiryat Arba close to our building. The army hasn’t fixed the fence since then.
     On Saturday, 29 November, settlers threw stones at our house. To defend ourselves, we threw stones at them, and they ran away. That same day, an officer from the Civil Administration came to our house and told us: "You are our responsibility, and we’ll protect you." He asked us to file a complaint with the police. We told him, "We’ve already complained a lot of times, and it never helps." But he insisted, so the next day, my husband went to the Israeli police station and filed a complaint against the settlers who attacked our house. more.. e-mail

What was wrong in apartheid S. Africa is wrong in Palestine
Ida Audeh writing from Boulder, Colorado, US, Electronic Intifada 12/11/2008
     Try talking in Boulder, Colorado about Israel’s policies in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and you might think you had stepped into a time warp: a time when "foreigners" and their religion could be trashed with impunity, colonialism was something to be proudly embraced, and apartheid in South Africa still had supporters.
     In September, I participated in what was supposed to be a panel discussion following a performance of "My Name is Rachel Corrie." The play is based on the diaries and emails of 23-year-old Rachel Corrie, who was killed by an Israeli bulldozer in the Gaza Strip in March 2003 as she stood to defend a Palestinian home from demolition.
     The play describes the conditions facing Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, whose ability to resist their own destruction was steadily and systematically being undermined by Israel. Today, of course, the situation is much worse. Who would have thought that Israel would be able to hermetically seal the Gaza Strip and prevent food, medicine, fuel and electricity from reaching 1.5 million Palestinian residents -- impose collective punishment on a civilian population, which is a war crime -- for months on end and not face international sanctions. more.. e-mail

The house on Hayarkon Street
Gideon Levy, Ha’aretz 12/11/2008
     Human excrement, probably belonging to a homeless person, lies on the floor of my office. There is no flooring, only sand; there are no walls, only the skeleton of a building. This was my office, and across from it was the office of the chairman and the secretary general. On the floor above us was the conference room, below us the foreign liaison department. Only the last vestiges remain, I find among the ruins a yellowish coupon for lunch in the restaurant. With a coupon like that I used to eat, every noontime, every day. Boiled chicken and rice with Shimon Peres, schnitzel with Israel Galili, vegetable soup with Yigal Alon - for four years of my life.
     From 1978 to 1982, this legendary building at 110 Hayarkon Street, Tel Aviv - Labor Party headquarters - was my second home. The no-parking sign at the entrance was removed just at that time; until then parking had been reserved only for the cars of the ministers, with special three-digit license plates, but those were the party’s first days in the opposition and the sign was suddenly removed. Gad Yaacobi and Israel Yeshayahu had to look for parking on the adjacent streets. more.. e-mail

Solidarity, not charity, for the people of Gaza
Ewa Jasiewicz, Electronic Intifada 12/11/2008
     International Human Rights Day is observed on 10 December, and it’s time we turned the rhetoric of human rights into reality. Together with the Free Gaza Movement, I am commemorating Human Rights Day this year in Gaza, a tiny strip of land wedged between Israel and Egypt, home to 1.5 million human beings, and subject to an increasingly brutal war being waged against its civilian population by the state of Israel.
     We mounted this mission to give our solidarity to the people of Palestine and to highlight the strangulating conditions Israel causes in besieged Gaza. The inhumane effects of this siege threaten to stunt an entire generation -- both in terms of physical and mental growth due to malnutrition, terrorization by bomb attacks, incursions and the use of sonic booms -- but also in terms of the generation of students who have won places at academic institutions around the world but cannot fulfill them, and those undermined on the ground in Gaza by a lack of food, medicine, electricity, materials and the peace and space to make good use of them in. more.. e-mail

Analysis: Cruelty and silence in Gaza
Jonathan Spyer, Jerusalem Post 12/11/2008
     Unremarked upon by the Western media, a systematic campaign of persecution is taking place in the Gaza Strip, and to a lesser extent in the West Bank. The general silence surrounding this campaign aids its perpetrators. The victims are Palestinian Christians, in particular the small Christian community of Gaza.
     The perpetrators are a variety of Islamist groups, all of which are manifestations of a process of growing Islamic militancy and piety taking place across the region.
     The Christian population of the Gaza Strip is small - 2,000-3,000 people. Gazan politics has long been characterized by a conservative, Islamic bent. Gaza’s Christians as a result have tended toward political invisibility.
     Since the Hamas coup of July 2007, this position has become increasingly untenable. Islamist organizations, empowered by the indifference of the authorities, have begun to target Christian institutions and individuals in Gaza with increasing impunity. Intimidation, assault and the threat of kidnapping are now part of daily reality for Christians. more.. e-mail

On life support
Editorial, The Guardian 12/12/2008
     Anyone who thinks that the status quo in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is acceptable should talk to a doctor from Gaza. There is an acute shortage of all drugs, and a complete lack of all cancer and cystic fibrosis medication. The hospitals have generators, but often no fuel, and switching from mains to an emergency supply wrecks the equipment. One of the strip’s three CT scanners is bust because of fluctuations in current. This also makes the temperature control of incubators for newborn babies unreliable. There have been some transfers of the sick to Israeli hospitals, but none to Egypt. According to one source, more than 230 patients died last year waiting for a permit to leave.
     The list goes on: the majority of Gaza’s children present the symptoms of mild or severe post traumatic stress disorder. About 45% of children under five have iron deficiency from lack of fruit and 18% of children have stunted growth. There is one other statistic: 71% of children interviewed at a school recently said they wanted to be a "martyr". more.. e-mail

A talker, not a doer
Akiva Eldar, Ha’aretz 12/11/2008
     "Not only is the law-enforcement situation in the territories not satisfactory, it is at a very low level." This sharp statement is not the conclusion of an investigation by the Yesh Din human rights organization, which revealed that a mere eight percent of the files concerned with offenses by Israelis against Palestinians ended in indictments. Rather these are the words of the attorney general, Menachem Mazuz, speaking two years ago at a legal conference in Caesarea.
     No Israeli attorney general has succeeded in gaining control of the legal jungle that exists in the settlers’ state. But the shortcomings of his predecessors do not free Mazuz of responsibility: Both as the supreme governmental-legal authority and as the person responsible for the general prosecution, he has contributed a substantial chapter of his own to the story.
     It is therefore not surprising that the settlers of Hebron were amazed last week by the determination of the law-enforcement arm to evacuate the so-called House of Contention. In March 2006, the High Court of Justice ruled that the settlers who had taken over the house belonging to Zakariya al-Bakri in the Tel Rumeida quarter of Hebron must be evacuated. The trespassers left the house, but they were speedily replaced by a new batch of invaders. In response to an appeal from Peace Now, who turned to him for help, Shai Nitzan, the deputy to the state prosecutor, responded in January that the owner "can of course use the civil process to get rid of the squatters." more.. e-mail

Middle East Peace Needs Political Bailout
Osama Al-Sharif – Amman, Palestine Chronicle 12/11/2008
     At the crux of things is the Palestinian problem.
     It’s bailout time! As the world economic crisis worsens, banks, mortgage companies, auto giants and other troubled businesses are desperate for government intervention. Multi-billion dollar stimulus packages have already been adopted by European and American governments. China, Japan and other Asian countries have already stepped in to rescue ailing industries and support financial institutions. A number of Arab governments are working to limit the effect of the global financial meltdown on their economies through hefty cash injections, ad-hoc incentives and deposits guarantees.
     President-elect Barack Obama wants to bailout America’s auto industry, which is on the verge of bankruptcy. The Bush administration has pumped $20 billion to save beleaguered Citi Group, the largest bank in the world. A few weeks ago, US Congress approved a $700 billion rescue package to buy risky debts from banks.
     The full extent of the damage to world economy is yet to be measured. This is one storm that refuses to blow away, and it is now clear that the financial crisis will continue for most of 2009. more.. e-mail

Music and Peace
Daniel Barenboim – New York, Palestine Chronicle 12/11/2008
     Daniel Barenboim’s West-Eastern Divan.
     The sovereign independent republic of the West-Eastern Divan, as I like to call the orchestra I founded with Edward Said to promote dialogue between Israelis and Palestinians, began as an unpredictable experiment in 1999.
     Over the years, it has grown into an example of how Middle Eastern society could function under the best of circumstances. Our musicians have gone through the painful process of learning to express themselves, while simultaneously listening to the narrative of their counterparts. I cannot imagine a better way of implementing the first and most fundamental article of the United Nations’ declaration of human rights: that all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights, that they are endowed with reason and conscience and should act toward one another in a spirit of brotherhood.
     Unfortunately, today in the Middle East, not all human beings are granted the same freedom and equality in dignity and rights. The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra is a musical organisation, not a political one, but for the approximately six-week duration of its annual existence it is able to provide its members with one basic need: equality. more.. e-mail

Behind Israeli Bars: Palestinian Child Prisoners
Joharah Baker – The West Bank, Palestine Chronicle 12/10/2008
     During Israel’s first Universal Periodic Review (UPR) session on December 4 in Geneva’s UN Palais de Nations, a number of issues were brought to the fore by representatives of the UN member states sitting in the room. The UPR, a new Human Rights Council mechanism whereby a country’s own national report on human rights is subjected to scrutiny by its fellow countries, is supposedly aimed at creating a means of addressing human rights violations occurring throughout the world. Among the concerns voiced by state parties towards Israel’s national report was concern over its treatment of Palestinian minors in Israeli prisons. While Israel’s panel of experts attempted to put to rest this issue by claiming that a total of six Palestinian minors from the occupied Palestinian territories were in Israeli prisons or detention centers and that all of these minors were 17 years of age, there are a number of Palestinian and international organizations that beg to differ.
     The Palestinian prisoner issue has long been at the forefront of Palestinian-Israeli negotiations, and has often been used as one of the more flexible bargaining chips that Israel is willing to utilize under the umbrella of “good will gestures”. There are over 10,000 Palestinian prisoners currently in Israeli prisons and detention centers both in the Palestinian territories and inside Israel. While this issue continues to remain a grave concern for Palestinians, the incarceration of children is no doubt an even graver concern and a clear breach of several international laws and charters protecting the rights of the child. more.. e-mail

Wisdom and laughter in a child’s view of Palestine
Naomi Shihab Nye, Electronic Intifada 12/10/2008
     Might Randa Abdel-Fattah’s new book ’Where the Streets Had a Name’ be required reading, please, for the new American government? Such an eloquent, high-velocity novel with a spunky 13-year-old heroine, Hayaat, could easily help adults grasp the ridiculous realities of insult constantly faced by residents of occupied Palestine.
     Abdel-Fattah’s third book -- she’s an "Australian-born-Palestinian-Egyptian-choc-a-holic," a lawyer, and a mom of two, all somewhat miraculously before the age of 30 -- absorbs a reader immediately. This engaging family story deftly weaves together every iconic element of Palestinian disenfranchisement -- land titles, checkpoints, curfews, the general frustrations of daily life -- along with jokes, arguments and repeated stories which keep people going. Lost olive trees and the profound and irrevocable sense of time and haunted belonging, are in place by page 20.And they all ring very very true.
     Young Hayaat of Bethlehem has a scarred face and an ebullient spirit. Written in first person, the narrative feels genuine without stretching our belief. Her older sister Jihan diets and exercises obsessively (including lifting cans of chickpeas, as weights) to prepare for her wedding. The girls have two little brothers, minor characters. Their father, Baba, carries the profound weight of the endlessly frustrated, depressed Palestinian man: "We have no way of seeing Baba’s demolition -- the rubble and ruins are inside him."Their mother grits her teeth and channels her own frustration into cleaning and cooking and bossing her children around. more.. e-mail

An Israeli in Gaza: An Interview with Jeff Halper
Frank Barat - London, Palestine Chronicle 12/10/2008
     Jeff Halper heads an Israeli peace organization.
     Frank Barat: You recently took part in the Free Gaza movement (1) and successfully reached Gaza by boat with others activists, journalists and human rights workers from around the globe. How did you get involved in such an initiative and why was it important for you to take part?
     Jeff Halper: As an Israeli and the head of an Israeli peace organization (ICAHD -- The Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions), I was asked by the Free Gaza Movement organizers to take part in their action to Break the Siege of Gaza by sailing two boats from Cyprus to Gaza City port. I agreed because this was a non-violent political action; breaking the siege and by implication highlighting Israel’s responsibility for it (which it tries to shrug) fit into ICAHD’s mission, to end the Israeli Occupation completely. Had this been defined as a humanitarian mission I would not have participated, since the so-called "humanitarian crisis" in Gaza is not the result of some natural calamity, but of a deliberate policy of Israel -- plus the US, Europe and Japan, it must be said, and aided by Egypt -- to break the will of the Palestinians to resist and to replace the democratically elected government of Hamas by a collaborationist regime more amenable to Israeli control. more.. e-mail

The UN Resolution That Time Forgot
Ghada Karmi - London, Palestine Chronicle 12/10/2008
     Rectifying this injustice is a moral and practical imperative.
     Sixty years ago, on 11 December 1948, the United Nations General Assembly passed an important resolution about Israel and the Palestinians. It called on the newly formed Israeli state to repatriate the displaced Palestinians "wishing to live in peace with their neighbours’at the earliest practicable date", and to compensate them for their losses. A Conciliation Commission was set up to oversee the repatriation of the returnees. Though never implemented and frequently ignored since then, Resolution 194 has haunted the Israeli-Palestinian peace process ever since, and has proved the most insurmountable obstacle in all peace negotiations. It is the legal basis for the ’right of return’, to which Palestinians have clung for sixty years.
     Far from this fundamental plank of the Palestinian cause being protected and preserved, it has been used like a political football between the parties, sometimes to attack, sometimes to defend, and now as something to bargain over. Through this process the discourse about the right of return has become deliberately ambiguous or vague, responding to Israel’s anxieties. To assert, against this background of appeasement, that the right of return is the sine qua non of any solution to the Israeli-Palestinian problem is viewed today as ’unrealistic’ and old-fashioned, even an obstacle to peace, as if the passage of sixty years had disqualified the Palestinians from entitlement to their homeland. Israel, conversely, shows no such ambiguity in its perennial and unambiguous rejection of the right of return. more.. e-mail

The EU’s blind eye to Israel
David Morrison, Electronic Intifada 12/10/2008
     On 1 September 2008, the European Union decided that meetings with Russia about a new partnership agreement would be postponed until the latter ended its military occupation of Georgia. In contrast, on 16 June 2008 the 27-member EU decided to "upgrade" its relations with Israel. This has now been put into effect by a decision of the EU Foreign Ministers meeting in Brussels on 8 December.
     Was this in recognition of Israeli adherence to previous agreements with the EU, or progress in the peace process with the Palestinians? On the contrary, by the EU’s very own standards it appears to have been a reward for Israel’s military occupation of the territory of several countries, and gross violations of human rights and international law, as well as specific commitments made to the EU. If the conditions applied to Russia today were applied to Israel, the EU would immediately terminate its partnership agreements with Israel.
     In 2004, Israel became an EU partner within the framework of the EU’s European Neighborhood Policy (ENP), which encompasses both the EU’s Mediterranean and eastern European neighbors. Under the ENP, according to the policy stated on its Web site, the EU’s relations with other states are "a privileged relationship, building upon a mutual commitment to common values (democracy and human rights, rule of law, good governance, market economy principles and sustainable development)." Moreover, the ENP offers "a deeper political relationship and economic integration."However, this is not unconditional, as "the level of ambition of the relationship will depend on the extent to which these values are shared." more.. e-mail

Legal lenience
Akiva Eldar, Ha’aretz 12/11/2008
     The decision yesterday by Jerusalem Magistrate’s Court Judge, Malka Aviv, to order the release of Ze’ev Braude, the settler suspected of shooting a Palestinian following the evacuation of the House of Contention in Hebron, did not come as a surprise to either the State Prosecutor’s Office or human rights groups.
     A brief search on the judiciary’s Web site reveals that Aviv, according to her CV, is herself is a long-term settler. She was one of the first settlers of Gigit, a moshav which was established in the Jordan Valley in 1975.
     During 41 years of occupation, many settlers and supporters of Jewish settlements in the West Bank have risen to senior posts in the Israel Defense Forces and hold key offices in the Civil Administration as well.
     The friendly handling of settler Noam Federman’s case a week ago, by Judge Moshe Drori, was not unusual. Although the settler breached an area declared a "special security zone," violating a military order and promises made by the local council head to restrain renegade settlers, Drori reprimanded the state for removing Federman. more.. e-mail

lsrael’s Hitler to Join the Knesset
Khalid Amayreh in Occupied Jerusalem, Palestinian Information Center 12/11/2008
     His name is Moshe Feiglin, but he may very well be called Israel’s Adolph Hitler. On Monday, 8 December,  the day the Likud held its primaries,  Feiglin won  a respectable position on the Likud’s  Knesset list  for the upcoming Israeli elections,  slated to take place on 10 February. This means, almost certainly,  that Feiglin will become a Knesset member as all opinion polls indicate that the jingoistic party will win the elections and form Israel’s next government.
     Calling Feiglin a "Hitler"� is not an exaggeration at all. The man stands for and advocates all the fascist ideas and  ideals that made Hitler the Nazism evil. In fact,  whatever  differences there may be between people like Feiglin and the hated Nazi hierarchy   have  more to do with form rather than substance, e.g. Hitler and ilk  believed in the superiority of the  Master Aryan  Race while Feiglin and tens of thousands of supporters  believe in the superiority of the Chosen People over goyem.. And while Hitler would call German territorial expansionism "lebensraum,"� Feiglin uses a lesser sophisticated term in reference to  Israel’s territorial aggrandizement: Eretz Yisrael ha’Shlema (the Greater Land of Israel) which includes, in addition to mandatory Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, and large parts of Syria, Iraq and Egypt. more.. e-mail

Instead of Auschwitz
Amira Hass, Ha’aretz 12/11/2008
     The committee coordinating the struggle to free Gilad Shalit went all the way to Auschwitz where, it is reported, its members distributed 888 yellow flowers. That was in October, and we can only hope that this media gimmick will not be repeated, either because an agreement will be reached in the near future or because the organizers will understand how lacking in taste that move was.
     The committee is continuing to put non-stop pressure on the government despite warnings that this is hampering the negotiations. In this way, the organizers and participants are showing a healthy lack of faith in the politicians’ promises. But the lack of faith stops when we talk about the policy of repression employed by Israel against the Palestinian population in the Gaza Strip. Here the organizers (including the kibbutz movement’s missions branch) accept the government’s approach and merely demand "more!" - more blockading of food, medicine, fuel and cash; more destruction of industry and agriculture; more homes without water. That is the logic behind the demonstrative obstruction of the border crossings initiated by the organizing committee in October. Now the committee is aiming its arrows at the families of the Palestinian prisoners. It tried to stop family visits at the Ashkelon prison and pledges to do so at other jails. more.. e-mail

Poem: To Exist is to Resist
Remi Kanazi, Palestine Think Tank 12/10/2008
     Palestinian New Yorker, Remi performs 2 of his poems.
     In my mind
     I’ve freed Palestine
     Envisioned a dream
     That just needs to be seen
     Olive trees and fields of figs
     Orange groves
     That lead to our roads
     No blocks filled with cops
     No ten-year-olds shot
     Freedom
     Is what I got
     I understand my grandmother’s plan
     To live on her bought and paid for land
     And though it isn’t in her hands
     It remains in her heart
     Every time another is killed
     We go back to the start.... more.. e-mail

No Eid celebration in Gaza
Eva Bartlett writing from the occupied Gaza Strip, Electronic Intifada 12/9/2008
     On Saturday, banks in Gaza were thronged by lines of disappointed Palestinians who were expecting to receive part of their salaries before the Eid al-Adha holiday, which begins on Monday. Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian Authority’s appointed Prime Minister based in Ramallah, foresaw the cash crisis earlier in the week and urged Israel to allow the transfer of shekels to Gaza, citing a needed 250 million shekels ($63 million) to pay the salaries.
     Palestinian sources put the last transfer of shekels to Gaza as at the end of September, when a comparatively inadequate amount of 50 million shekels ($12.5 million) was allowed in, just a fraction of what Fayyad says Gaza needs to pays its 77,000 government workers.The World Bank is warning of severe ramifications from Israel’s blockade on banknotes, citing a potential "collapse of the commercial banking system in Gaza" and "serious humanitarian implications" as some of the consequences.
     Standing outside of Gaza City’s closed Palestine Bank on Saturday morning, expectant employees voiced their frustration."I was expecting my salary today," said 34-year-old Mahmoud Saleh, a father of two. "I was putting all my hopes on this money as Eid is coming and I’d wanted to buy clothes for my daughter. I still hope that somehow I’ll get the money before Eid. What else can I do? It’s all I can do to hope." more.. e-mail

Activists, Physicians, University Teachers Onboard Ship Heading to Gaza
Saed Bannoura, International Middle East Media Center News 12/9/2008
     Independent Palestinian Legislator and head of the Popular Committee Against the Siege, Jamal El Khodary, stated on Tuesday morning that another ship carrying activists, physicians, university teachers and aid supplies is on its way to the Gaza Strip.
     "Two Jewish academics from the UK, Emeritus Professor Jonathan Rosenhead and Research Fellow Mike Cushman, both from the Department of Management at the London School of Economics, have joined the latest ’Free Gaza’ boat in an attempt to enable Palestinian university students to pursue their studies abroad", the British Committe for the Universities of Palestine reported.
     El Khodary said that "the Intifada of ships" is ongoing in spite of the Israeli aggression and obstructions.
     The new ship will sail for Larnaka port in Cyprus at eleven on Tuesday morning and is determined to reach the Gaza Strip in order to deliver humanitarian supplies. more.. e-mail

Encountering Peace: Who owns the water?
Gershon Baskin, Jerusalem Post 12/8/2008
     The current water crisis is extremely serious. Years of mismanagement and irresponsible water policies are now being investigated by the state comptroller. This is not the first time that the water sector is under the scrutiny of a public investigatory committee. In June 2001 the Knesset conducted a similar investigation and reported on serious dysfunctionality, but it seems that very little has changed since then.
     ....THE WATER crisis on the other side of the separation barrier is even more severe than in Israel proper. The Israeli-Palestinian water agreement that was signed in 1995 provided the Palestinians with increased quantities of water. The agreement was supposed to be "interim" to be followed by a permanent status agreement several years later. In the meantime, 13 years have passed, the population has grown, yet no additional allocations have been permitted.
     The annex on water in the interim agreement also created a joint water committee (JWC), one of 26 joint committees that were created in the Oslo agreements. When those committees were created, there was a great deal of hope and perhaps naïveté on both sides. It was hoped that the joint committees would provide the mechanism for building and strengthening cooperation and interdependence. When the violence erupted in the end of September 2000, all of the joint committees ceased to function, with the exception of the JWC. more.. e-mail

Kouchner Reverses Morgantini’s Decision in the European Parliament
Justin Theriault, International Middle East Media Center News 12/9/2008
     BRUSSELS, December 9, 2008 -- Despite the scathing remarks by European Parliament (EP) Vice-President last week, in regards to Israel’s human rights abuses and incessant disregard for International law and Geneva Conventions, today, the EP’s 27 foreign ministers voted unanimously to upgrade EU foreign relations with Israel.
     Last week, after being denied a vote altogether by EP Vice-President, Luisa Morgantini, Israel’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, Tzipi Livni, decided to do some more lobbying with the EP’s foreign ministers, but in particular Bernard Kouchner of France, who currently sits as the EU’s rotating president.
     "At one point, she asked everyone else in the room to leave so that she could speak with Kouchner privately. During that conversation, the two agreed that there would be no linkage, but the EU would issue a separate statement stressing the need to continue the final-status talks." It seems obvious, although difficult to actually find a formal report on the powers of EU President, that Kouchner overrode Morgantini’s earlier decision to hold Israel accountable to international law before a vote would take place in order to “upgrade” EU-Israeli relations. more.. e-mail

Border Control / Having Feiglin to kick around
Akiva Eldar, Ha’aretz 12/9/2008
     If Moshe Feiglin did not exist, Benjamin Netanyahu would have to invent him. Every headline that talks of the all-out war against the man who represents the right fringe of the party brings the Likud leader closer to the point marking the center. And that point is the ultimate goal of the Likud chairman’s election campaign. In order to remove Kadima, headed by Tzipi Livni, and what remains of the Labor Party, headed by Ehud Barak, from the government, Netanyahu needs more than simply Dan Meridor who zig-zagged to the center and back. For that purpose, he had to find someone of Feigin’s ilk, who is perceived even among right-wingers as an extremist, if not downright delusional, and on whom an attack does not automatically cast suspicion back on the attacker as having left-wing tendencies.
     A modest achievement by Feiglin in the Likud primary, which will not have too great an influence on the internal balance of power in the party leadership, will make it possible for Netanyahu to continue to treating him like a punching bag all the way to the polling booth on February 10. more.. e-mail

Feiglin, his cronies are fascists by any definition
Yossi Sarid, Ha’aretz 12/10/2008
     Each list of candidates is tinted with its own characteristic hue. Sometimes, one drop is enough to paint a whole list. Likud’s list offers quite a few rotten drops, and with each drop the cup overflows.
     The list’s color is as brown now as that brown house in Hebron. Likud’s official spokespeople did try to console and be consoled yesterday, when they said that the devil isn’t all that bad now that it’s been pushed down to number 20 on the list. But full revulsion is better than partial consolation in this case.
     Moshe Feiglin has been described as a radical rightist but that’s not his main problem - which has now become the Likud’s problem and our problem. In certain respects, he’s less legitimate than Meir Kahane and far less so than Rehavam Ze’evi, the man who Benny Begin once defined as "a moral infection." Those were the days in old Jerusalem. more.. e-mail

Young israelis who refuse to serve the occupation need our support
Omer Goldman, Palestine Think Tank 12/8/2008
     A note from Shministit Omer Goldman.
     Dear Mary,
     My name is Omer Goldman. I am 19 years old. I am one of the Shministim. Thank you for signing the Shministim letter to support me and my friends.  
     I first went to prison on September 23 and served 35 days. I am lucky, after 2 times in jail, I got a medical discharge, but I’m the only one. By the time you read this, many of my friends will be in prison too: in for three weeks, out for one, and then back in, over and over, until they are 21. The reason? We refuse to do military service for the Israeli army because of the occupation.
     I grew up with the army. My father was deputy head of Mossad and I saw my sister, who is eight years older than me, do her military service. As a young girl, I wanted to be a soldier. The military was such a part of my life that I never even questioned it.
     Earlier this year, I went to a peace demonstration in Palestine. I had always been told that the Israeli army was there to defend me, but during that demonstration Israeli soldiers opened fire on me and my friends with rubber bullets and tear-gas grenades. I was shocked and scared. I saw the truth. I saw the reality. I saw for the first time that the most dangerous thing in Palestine is the Israeli soldiers, the very people who are supposed to be on my side. more.. e-mail

Musical resistance against the siege
Sameh A. Habeeb, Electronic Intifada 12/8/2008
     On 27 October, a group of young Palestinians, none of them over the age of 25, organized the first music concert of its kind in the Gaza Strip, called Gaza Concert ’08. Regardless of the awful conditions in the Gaza Strip brought on by the 19-month Israeli siege, the youth sang for freedom, peace and ending the unjust siege. Thousands of people came from all over Gaza while several international and local media outlets covered the event that was sponsored by Action for Peace Italia. A mixture of traditional Palestinian debka dance, rap, and nationalist anthems were performed calling for lifting the siege and ending Israeli occupation.
     Ahmed, one of the dabka dance performers, lost his hand in an Israeli military operation in 2006 in the Jabaliya refugee camp when he and his friends were hit by Israeli shelling. "I came here to express my readiness and willingness for peace. I lost my hand but I want a just peace with Israelis if they give me my full rights."
     Hatem Shurab, a 24-year-old singer based in Gaza and one of the concert organizers, is a another victim of Israeli siege. He is involved in a journalism training program in the US. However, due to the closure, Shurab was trapped in Gaza and missed his chance along with some friends who were also supposed to participate. He explained, "I came here to sing for peace and freedom. I came here to make the suffering of people heard through songs and music. I sang for Sarah who was sick and unable to get treatment due to the siege. The words of my song say: ’A girl called Sarah, innocence in her eyes, because of no medications she is about to die. Don’t let Sarah feel the pain, let her fly like a bird in the sky, take the siege away.’ more.. e-mail

The Gaza truce faces a potentially lethal situation
Yossi Alpher, Daily Star 12/8/2008
     In and around the Gaza Strip we confront a potentially lethal situation. The current cease-fire is due to end in barely 10 days unless new terms can be negotiated between Israel and Hamas. Ten days of fighting last month demonstrated just how easily the two sides can slide back into conflict. In parallel, both Israeli and Palestinian politics are becoming increasingly volatile, with Gaza almost beckoning as an arena where ambitious and even ruthless politicians can seemingly prove their mettle to the voters.
     Israel is moving into an election campaign in which Minister of Defense Ehud Barak is running at the head of one party while the former head of another, the soon-to-be-indicted Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, remains in power with nothing to lose and no one to account to for his decision-making. Judging by his advocacy of caution, the beleaguered Barak, whose standing has plummeted in the polls, does not want to fight an election while fighting in Gaza. In parallel, Olmert appears increasingly capable of negotiating a prisoner exchange deal with Hamas, mediated by Egypt, that releases hundreds of hardened militants in exchange for a single Israeli soldier and boosts Hamas’ popularity in the Arab world in general and among Palestinians in particular. more.. e-mail

Breaking Through Israeli Blockade for Fourth Time
Free Gaza Movement - Cyprus, Palestine Chronicle 12/8/2008
     ’The ship will also be carrying in one ton of medical supplies ..’
     The Free Gaza Movement announced today that it would send a delegation from Cyprus to Gaza aboard their blockade-busting ship, the Dignity, at 11pm, Monday, 8 December. The Free Gaza Movement has successfully challenged the siege on three previous occasions this year, landing missions in Gaza in August, October, and November. Free Gaza ships are the first to dock in Gaza Port in over 41 years.
     Israel maintains absolute control over Gaza’s borders and airspace, and has imposed an increasingly brutal blockade on its 1.5 million civilians for over two years, drastically increasing poverty and malnutrition rates. Over 700 students are currently trapped in Gaza, while Israel denies their right to attend universities abroad.
     In a statement released by Drs. Jonathan Rosenhead and Mike Cushman, of the London School of Economics, the academics stated that they were pleased to be traveling to Gaza aboard the Dignity, and that, "This siege is an affront to any idea of academic freedom or human rights. We, working for a British university, have the freedom to teach and study, this must be a universal right, not at the discretion of an occupying power. " more.. e-mail

Israel besieges Gaza’s fishing industry
Mel Frykberg, Electronic Intifada 12/8/2008
     RAMALLAH, West Bank (IPS) - Israeli naval commandos recently hauled off three international peace activists off Palestinian fishing boats seven nautical miles off Gaza’s coast. They were accompanying 15 Palestinian fishermen attempting to complete a day’s fishing without being shot at or arrested by the Israeli navy.
     Darlene Wallach (57) from the US, Andrew Muncie (34) from Britain and Italian Vittorio Arrigoni (33), members of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a pro-Palestinian rights organization, were attempting to protect the fishermen when their three boats were surrounded by two Israeli gun boats and five smaller naval boats.
     Twenty naval commandos boarded the vessels. Using tasers and guns, they forced the ISM members and Palestinian fishermen into their naval vessels. Despite being in Palestinian territorial waters, and nowhere near Israeli territorial waters, the solidarity activists were taken to a detention center at Ben Gurion International Airport in Tel Aviv from where they were subsequently deported. The Gazans were interrogated before being sent back to Gaza. more.. e-mail

Israel’s 'Auschwitz borders' revisited
Ali Abunimah, Electronic Intifada 12/8/2008
     In 1969, Israel’s legendary diplomat Abba Eban warned that withdrawal from the territories his country occupied in June 1967 would be a return to "Auschwitz borders." Since then some Israeli politicians have used these provocative words to attack almost anyone who defies them.
     In 1992, for instance, the George H. W. Bush administration briefly suspended US loan guarantees to Israel to protest settlement construction in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. A symbolic sanction that cost Israel little, it was nevertheless unprecedented for the US to condition aid on Israeli behavior. Israel’s then Deputy Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu denounced the move as an American effort to force Israel back within the "Auschwitz borders." He later attacked then Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin for signing the 1993 Oslo Accords which, he alleged, would also take Israel "back to Auschwitz." Rabin was assassinated in 1995 by an Israeli Jew brought up on such rhetoric. Netanyahu served as prime minister from 1996-1999 and may do so again following elections next February. more.. e-mail

Despite all odds, Palestinians carry on with living in the Heart of Hebron
Reham Alhelsi, Palestine Think Tank 12/7/2008
     Hebron, or Al-Khalil, lies 30 km south of Jerusalem and is the second largest Palestinian city with a population of 163,000 Palestinians. Hebron is one of the commercial centres of the Occupied Palestinian Territories and several industries emerged in Hebron and continue to find their home there. Like the rest of Palestine, the cancer of illegal settlements has set its lethal teeth in Hebron. This city is not only surrounded by settlements like other Palestinian cities and towns, but has settlement points in its heart. In 1968 a group of Israelis rented a hotel room in Hebron for 48 hours, after which they refused to leave, and 6 months later the establishment of a Jewish neighbourhood in Hebron was approved by the Zionist state, to be followed in 19070 by another approval to establish the illegal settlement Kiryat Arba. In 1980 the Israeli government decided to add a floor to the Beit Hadassah point, to be used as a school, the corner stone for a settlement in the heart of the old city of Hebron. 4 years later, a Jewish settlement point was established in Tel Rumeida. In 1994 a fanatic Jewish settler entered the Ibrahimi mosque and opened fire on the worshippers there killing 29 Palestinians. According to the Protocol concerning the Redeployment in Hebron, signed 1997 between the PLO and Israel, Hebron was divided into 2 sections: H1 and H2. H1, forming 80% of the city (18 square km), is home to some 120,000 Palestinians, and is under Palestinian control. H2 covering the old city with the commercial centre and the Jewish settlements (4.3 square km), where around 40,000 Palestinians are forced to live with some 600 fanatic Jewish settlers, fell under Isreali control.... -- See also: Reham Alhelsi's Photos more.. e-mail

Hebron settlers take their fight into Israel
Jonathan Cook, Electronic Intifada 12/7/2008
     Extremist settler groups currently involved in violent confrontations with Palestinians in the center of Hebron have chosen their next battleground, this time outside the West Bank.
     A far-right group know as the Jewish National Front, closely associated with the Hebron settlers, is preparing to march through one of the main Arab towns in northern Israel. The march, approved by the Israeli high court back in October, is scheduled to take place on 15 December, the group announced this week.
     The police are expecting to deploy thousands of officers to prevent trouble, and have limited the number of Front members participating to 100. The march will not enter the heart of the city, say police, though it is not yet clear whether Front members will be allowed to carry the guns most have been issued as settlers.
     The Front says it will wave Israeli flags in what the group has dubbed a demonstration of "Jewish Pride" through Umm al-Fahm, home to nearly 45,000 Palestinian citizens of Israel. more.. e-mail

UN recieves low score on Palestine
Ulrich Knapp, Electronic Intifada 12/7/2008
     UNITED NATIONS (IPS) - People in seven majority Muslim countries favor a more active United Nations with broader powers, while simultaneously viewing the world body as dominated by the US and failing to deal with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, according to a new poll by WorldPublicOpinion.org, a global network of research centers.
     The survey was conducted in Egypt, Turkey, Jordan, Iran, Indonesia, the Occupied Palestinian Territories and Azerbaijan. Nigeria, which has a 50 percent Muslim population, was also polled.
     The survey found conflicted attitudes towards the UN. There was, however, clear support for a UN with much broader powers than it has today. Asked about a number of options for giving the UN greater powers, nearly all received strong support.
     Steven Kull, director of WorldPublicOpinion.org, told IPS: "If we compare the results in Muslim-dominated countries to those in other regions, there is virtually consensus around the world on giving the UN more powers. This consensus is rather striking." more.. e-mail

Obama’s Middle East Challenge
Yinon Cohen and Neve Gordon – Israel, Palestine Chronicle 12/8/2008
     ’Obama has a crucial advantage over his predecessors.’
     As Barack Obama enters the oval office he will face a series of daunting challenges. One of these is confronting the age old Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which has been seriously, yet unsuccessfully, tackled by every American president since Jimmy Carter. The inability to reach a peaceful solution has not only had fatal repercussions for the people residing in Israel and the Occupied Territories, but has also been detrimental to Middle East stability and to vital US interests in the region.
     In recent years, some of the hurdles facing those political leaders who want to reach a peace agreement based on the two-state solution have only grown. The Palestinians are in the midst of an internal fray between the old-guard of Fatah and the fundamentalist Hamas ideologues, and currently there is no agreed upon leadership with which one can negotiate. The Israeli political arena has also become much more polarized, and, it will be practically impossible for whichever party wins the upcoming elections to sign a comprehensive peace agreement with the Palestinians, not least because the settler movement and its supporters will control a critical block in the Knesset. more.. e-mail

End the Gaza Blockade
Congressman Dennis Kucinich, Palestine Chronicle 12/8/2008
     Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) sent a letter urging Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to ensure that Israel ends the blockade of Gaza. The letter was sent (Dec 2) in support of the U.N. High Commissioner of Human Rights, Ms. Navi Pillay’s call for the immediate end of the blockade.
     Dr. Condoleezza RiceSecretaryU.S. Department of State2201 C Street NWWashington, D.C. 20520-0099
     Dear Dr. Rice:
     I am writing to urge you to ensure that Israel complies with international humanitarian law and end its blockade of Gaza. Last week, the U.N. High Commissioner of Human Rights, Navi Pillay, called for its immediate end. In response, Israel renewed the blockade and dismissed Ms. Pillay’s assessment for being “one-sided.” While there are many political considerations to be made in this volatile region, we can not tolerate the collective punishment of 1.5 million people. Moreover, the humanitarian crisis in Gaza undermines Israel’s political and security goals.
     Israel has a right to defend itself and its citizens. This includes taking action against Hamas for its abominable mortar attacks into southern Israel. However that action should not and cannot amount to collective punishment against the Palestinian people, prohibited by Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, as it does today. more.. e-mail

One Eid Al-Adha in Palestine
Ma'an, Ma’an News Agency 12/8/2008
     Bethlehem – Ma’an – It is the custom of Palestinians to wake up at dawn on Eid Al-Adha, dress in their best often new clothes, and head to the mosque to perform the Eid prayer.
     In Duma, south of Nablus, the Mosque’s Imam was awoken at 4:30am by settlers from the nearby Migdalim colony who shot at the building and physically attacked the religious leader.
     In Hebron, Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad and member of the Palestinian Legislative Council Dr Mustafa Barghouthi performed the Eid prayer at the Ibrahimi Mosque in an act of solidarity with the city’s civilians, targeted by settlers in a week of attacks.
     Following the Eid prayer it is the duty of all Muslims who are able to slaughter their best farm animal, cook the meat and offer portions to neighbors and the poor.
     Buying a lamb costs between 2,000-3,000 shekels, (500-750 US dollars); lean times all over the West Bank meant many families did without this year. more.. e-mail

Memo for Obama
Uri Avnery – Israel, Palestine Chronicle 12/5/2008
     ’Your personal intervention, at the critical moment, could do wonders.’
     For the President-Elect, Mr. Barack Obama.
     The following humble suggestions are based on my 70 years of experience as an underground fighter, special forces soldier in the 1948 war, editor-in-chief of a newsmagazine, member of the Knesset and founding member of a peace movement:
     (1) As far as Israeli-Arab peace is concerned, you should act from Day One.
     (2) Israeli elections are due to take place in February 2009. You can have an indirect but important and constructive impact on the outcome, by announcing your unequivocal determination to achieve Israeli-Palestinian, Israeli-Syrian and Israeli-all-Arab peace in 2009.
     (3) Unfortunately, all your predecessors since 1967 have played a double game. While paying lip service to peace, and sometimes going through the motions of making some effort for peace, they have in practice supported our governments in moving in the very opposite direction. In particular, they have given tacit approval to the building and enlargement of Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian and Syrian territories, each of which is a land mine on the road to peace. more.. e-mail

More violent than ever: Review of a Palestinian week, filled by settlers’ attacks
Palestine Monitor, Palestine Monitor 12/6/2008
     Ongoing violent attacks perpetrated by extremist Jewish settlers against Palestinians civilians and property has reached an unprecedented level in the West Bank. The escalation of hatred and racist aggression targeting Palestinian civilians all across the West Bank, including women and children has led to this retrospective review of the events of last week.
     Hebron: The violence reached its climax this week after the evacuation of the Rajbi’s family house (AKA the "˜House of Contention’) in Khalil in the southern West Bank. Khalil, or Hebron, is a Palestinian city where approximately 600-800 Jewish settlers live downtown - with several thousand more in surrounding settlements.
     Five Palestinian houses were occupied by hundreds of Jewish settlers who then set the homes on fire. Settlers burnt and destroyed seven cars, along with trucks belonging to the Hebronite fire brigade. Nine of them have been entirely destroyed. more.. e-mail

The Daily Pogroms Committed by Jewish Terrorists in Hebron
Sami Jamil Jadallah, Palestine Think Tank 12/7/2008
     Hitler campaign against the Jews started on 1st of April, 1933 when Hitler’s Strum Abteilung (SA) picketed Jewish shops. Hitler wanted to make life hell for the Jews so they are forced to immigrate and leave their country of Germany. The forced exiles of German Jews from Germany went on for years culminating in the mass murder of over 6 million Jews in concentration camps all over Germany and Poland.
     This campaign of terror against the Jews was relentless and on the night of 9-10 of November ,1938 over 7,500 Jewish owned shops were destroyed and over 400 synagogues were burned. This night became known as Crystal Night signaling the official start of the Holocaust.
     What is happening now in Hebron/Al-Khalil by Jewish settler terrorists is no different from the Crystal Night carried out by Hitler’s Strum Abteilung. In fact and since the Hebron Agreement or Protocol Concerning the Redeployment in Hebron/Al-Khalil negotiated during the period of January 15-17, 1997 and signed by non others than Benjamin Netanyahu and Yasser Arafat under the supervision of Warren Christopher and Dennis Ross, for the Palestinians in Hebron/Al-Khalil every night is a Crystal Night.... more.. e-mail

Rights watchdog: After U.S., Israel is least egalitarian country in West
Tomer Zarchin, Ha’aretz 12/8/2008
     The past year has seen a dramatic rise in the number of violent attacks perpetrated by Jewish settlers against Palestinians in the territories. Yet, only 8 percent of the police investigations of settler violence result in indictments. This finding is contained in a new report, published yesterday by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI), to mark the 60th anniversary of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The report states that in most instances of innocent civilian bystanders being killed in the territories, no investigation is opened. Also, only a small number of the cases that are investigated result in an indictment.
     ACRI reports that in most of Israel’s mixed towns, including Ramle, Lod, Acre, Haifa and Jaffa, Arab citizens suffer from discrimination. The infrastructure in the Arab neighborhoods is neglected, public buildings and parks are lacking, there is a poor education system and health and welfare services are insufficient. The past decade has seen an increase in the gaps in life expectancy between Jews and Arabs and also between the center and the periphery. As such, the infant mortality rate in the periphery is double that in the country’s center. Moreover, there are fewer hospital beds and doctors as well as less medical equipment per capita in the periphery, as compared to the center. more.. e-mail

The Adventures of Andy in Disappeared Palestine
Hatim Kanaaneh - Galilee, Palestine Chronicle 12/5/2008
     This sounds like a lovely title for a children’s book or even a fairytale. Indeed the tale told here is fantastic and hard for the sane mature to believe, fit only for the imagination of a child. It is about the surreal happenings in few days in the life of Andy, a real person who showed up at the Acre train station one evening with an assortment of video-recording equipment.
     Andy hails from America. He belongs to the rare breed of self-assigned truth and justice seekers who dedicate themselves to the task of saving the human race at this late hour of its incessant march, lemmings like, to its demise. He has no plausible connection to Palestine or the Palestinians except that he, like Jimmy Carter, finds them awfully wronged and their suffering worthy of recognition. He wants to set the record straight. Together with another fighter for Palestine, Dr. Ahlam (Arabic for ’dreams’) Muhtaseb, he sets out to document the wrongs done the Palestinians in 1948 through visits to their destroyed former homes and the recording of interviews with members of separated families in Galilee and the refugee camps in Lebanon. more.. e-mail

Open Letter to the British Foreign Secretary
Stuart Littlewood - London, Palestine Chronicle 12/5/2008
     Miliband, once head of Tony Blair’s policy unit is now foreign secretary.
     To Mr David Miliband, You seem like a clever man -- Kennedy scholar, something big in Social Justice, then head of Tony Blair’s policy unit, now foreign secretary. Tell us, why do so many western politicians have so much trouble coming to terms with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which their countries are obliged to observe?
     Is it because they haven’t bothered to read it? Or do they simply not care? Either way, they neglect their duty.
     Understanding the Declaration is really no sweat. A glance at the Preamble is enough to grasp the fundamentals:
     • Recognition of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.
     • Violence against tyranny and oppression is what happens if these rights are not protected by the rule of law.
     • Member States (and that includes Britain) have pledged themselves to promote universal respect for and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms. more.. e-mail

Jerusalem’s Status: To Be Determined
Nadia W. Awad – The West Bank, Palestine Chronicle 12/5/2008
     Last week, approximately 100 American Orthodox Jews gathered in Jerusalem’s Talpiot district in conjunction with a national convention for the Orthodox Union, an American Jewish group. The choice of location was significant to them, as it was the site designated by the US for the building of a future embassy in Jerusalem. The main objective of the rally was to call for the US government to move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, the ’undivided capital of Israel’. The title of the convention was also telling: Keep It One, Keep It Ours.
     Despite the significant fact that there are no embassies, only consulates, in Jerusalem, most people around the world are ignorant of one detail: Jerusalem has never been officially recognized as the capital of Israel. On the contrary, most countries consider its status as yet to be determined, with Israel’s control of east Jerusalem considered a very illegal military occupation. As such, recognizing the de facto control of Israel over Jerusalem does not equate to recognizing its sovereignty over the city. more.. e-mail

Freedom Fighters
David Keyes, MIFTAH 12/6/2008
     The word "Freedom" is scribbled on the light-blue door of Jameel Aldweek’s classroom in the New Kufar Aqab Girls School on the outskirts of Ramallah. It is a welcome reprieve from the swastika and "All Jews are pussies" emblazoned on the security barrier as I entered the West Bank. Aldweek, director of the Al-Razee Association and co-teacher of a new pilot project in two Palestinian schools, begins by asking the dozen sixth-grade girls in attendance, "What does democracy mean to you?" "Liberty and responsibility," one student immediately shoots back. "What is the link, then, between liberty and responsibility?" he retorts. The girls enthusiastically give examples of conflicting interests in their homes. One girl answers that often she wants to watch one television channel but her brother wants to watch another. Cooperation and dialogue are the keys to solving problems, Aldweek says. "It is forbidden to impose on the freedoms of others."
     Aldweek stands relaxed and confident at the front of the classroom, gently encouraging the girls to participate. A soft smile graces his lips, and his eyes light up when they share an observation or experience in support of democratic ideals. His graying hair is matched by an equally peppered kempt mustache. Aldweek speaks to me in hushed tones about his goal of infusing Palestinian youth with tolerance and respect for differing races, religions, and genders. With ten schools in Jerusalem, he calculates, he could affect 400 families--and within a decade, he hopes for nothing less than a transformation of Palestinian culture. more.. e-mail

The Historical Meaning of the Palestinian Flag
Matthew Taylor, The Daily Californian, Palestine Think Tank 12/7/2008
     Political Zionism-the quest to establish and hold a Jewish-majority state within historic Palestine-has largely been predicated on the belief that Palestinians should not have the right to live on their ancestral lands. In 1948, Israel's founders carried this philosophy to its logical conclusion and used military force to drive more than 700,000 Palestinians out of their homes in a carefully planned campaign of ethnic cleansing. In 1967, Israel conquered and occupied the West Bank and Gaza Strip, and then proceeded to build hundreds of colonies in violation of international law while abusing the human rights of the indigenous Palestinian population.
     In December 1987, Palestinians organized a grassroots uprising in an effort to liberate themselves from Israel’s occupation. Palestinians refused to pay taxes, they boycotted all Israeli goods and they planted backyard gardens. And they displayed the Palestinian national flag, which was illegal under the terms of the occupation.
     Then-Israeli defense minister Yitzhak Rabin ordered his soldiers to break the bones of Palestinians who participated in this uprising or who displayed their flag. Israeli soldiers injured, jailed and killed thousands of Palestinians for their crimes of struggling for human rights and self-determination. more.. e-mail

The Settlers: The Newest Ally to Palestinian Nationalism?
Palestine Monitor, Palestine Monitor 12/6/2008
     Ironically today, there are no greater allies to the Palestinian cause of independence than that of the seemingly rabid settler movement and their heightened willingness to use violence and intimidation.
     For years the international press has cast the conflict in an unfair light by overemphasizing the violence of Palestinians while under-reporting that of either the Israeli military or settler movement. Throughout the world it has been Palestinians who have been perceived as the irrational and violent actors in the unfolding tragedy. Israel has been characterized as the righteous victim who must live in fear of their "˜crazy ideological neighbors’.
     Creating such an impression in spite of the overwhelming asymmetry of the conflict is no small feat, and one which Palestinians have long fought to overcome. Now it seems the settlement movement, and it renewed sense of urgency, are working along side Palestinian peace activists to change this perspective to a more accurate picture. more.. e-mail

Will You Continue to Ignore Gaza’s Suffering, Mr Obama?
Kathleen and Bill Christison, CounterPunch, Palestine Think Tank 12/5/2008
     Palestine and Palestinian suffering have always taken a back seat in the world’s attention while the United States starts this war, finishes off that war, or expands it; while the world deals with wars and economic crises; while the attention of the compassionate is taken up by starvation and pestilence and war in Sudan or in Congo or Rwanda or Somalia. Throughout these crises - quite legitimate crises all - Palestine is always left to molder, sometimes at a more rapid pace in more inhumane circumstances than at other times.
     Right now, the circumstances could not be more inhumane. Right now, the paramount Palestinian crisis is in Gaza, where Israel - with active political and ongoing financial backing from the United States - is blockading a tiny, horribly overcrowded piece of land and consciously depriving its 1.5 million people of all of the essentials of life: of food, of medicines, of equipment to keep hospitals running, of fuel for cooking, of fuel for producing electricity, of fuel for running generators, of fuel for automobiles, of spare parts for sewage treatment plants (so that plants break down and sewage pours into the streets and, in quantities in the millions of liters, into the Mediterranean), of clean fresh water. more.. e-mail

Telling it as it is
Mustafa Barghouti, Al-Ahram Weekly 12/3/2008
     Unless the Palestinians can speak effectively with one voice, the world won’t listen, though Palestine is the core problem.
     As many speculate about Obama’s future policies in the Middle East, the general Arab reaction is wait-and-see. The new president will likely face a barrage of problems, the economy and Iraq for starters, enough to keep him busy for a whole term. But there is no indication that the "change" Obama likes so much to talk about applies to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The appointments he made so far are not that encouraging either.
     The Israelis, and Tzipi Livni has said as much, want the Americans to stay out of it. They want to keep the Palestinians divided, hold out the carrot of possible negotiations, while expanding settlements and changing the status quo all the time. The Palestinians, meanwhile, seem hapless. Pursuing negotiations that have no chance of success, the Palestinians are holding on to Annapolis like a drowning man clutches at a straw. What are they doing about the Israeli settlements that grew exponentially during the Annapolis talks? Nothing. What are they doing about the Israeli roadblocks that increased from 521 to 630 during the same period? Nothing. What are they doing about the system of apartheid that subsequent Israeli governments appear to reinforce? Nothing. more.. e-mail

The pilgrims’ progress
Reem Leila, Al-Ahram Weekly 12/3/2008
     Egyptians demonstrate demanding passage for Palestinian pilgrims seeking to travel to Mecca. The situation at the Rafah crossing, though, remains confused, with Hamas preventing pilgrims from entering Egypt, reports More than 1,000 students from Cairo, Ain Shams, Al-Azhar and Helwan universities protested last week against the siege imposed on the Gaza Strip and called on the government and the international community to intervene. The demonstrations on 26 November, which continued into Monday, culminated in a statement demanding the full opening of Rafah crossing for Palestinian pilgrims who have been prevented from going to Mecca for hajj because Hamas has refused to allow them to cross the border since Egypt opened the crossing on Saturday.
     Egypt occasionally opens the crossing to allow Palestinians, usually seeking medical treatment, students or pilgrims, to enter and leave the impoverished coastal strip.
     "There is a consensus among the different national parties that it is our responsibility to lift this siege on Gaza. The government has barred several attempts by the Muslim Brotherhood [MB] and opposition activists to send medical supplies through Rafah," said MB MP Hamdi Hussein. more.. e-mail

Will sensible minds prevail in Washington?
Rami G. Khouri, Daily Star 12/3/2008
     The appointment of Hillary Clinton as the next United States secretary of state has generated much discussion and debate, most of it focused on personality and based on speculation and entertainment. The Obama team’s policies will speak for themselves in due course, which is how this administration will be judged.
     Election campaigns and running an administration are two different things. Politicians are not normal human beings, and do not respond to standard ethical values that define the rest of society. Like Shakespearean actors, they enjoy a mandate from the rest of us to perform on a large stage, to entertain, to exaggerate, dance, perhaps even occasionally to enlighten and move us. They make promises they do not expect to keep, and adopt some positions they know they will reverse in office.
     We should enjoy this for the good things it offers - like leadership anchored in the legitimacy of the consent of the governed - while noting the intemperance and expediency of politicians who can also embody the clarity and decency of ordinary Americans. In 1998, before she officially became a politician, Hillary Clinton came out strongly in favor of the rights of the Palestinians when she said that they should have a state of their own - years before this became an accepted position in the US. Once she became a US senator from New York, though, she donned the politician’s hat and espoused fiercely pro-Israeli positions. In the presidential election campaign, she embraced Israeli positions on issues like Iran and Hamas. Speaking before the pro-Israel AIPAC in June, she said, "The United States stands with Israel, now and forever." more.. e-mail

Correction to the Speech in Favor of Israel by Ban Ki-moon
Kawther Salam, Palestine Think Tank 12/3/2008
     During the event commemorating the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinians, which I attended at the UN in Vienna, a message of UNSG Ban Ki-moon was read by Mr. Antonio Maria Costa, DG of the UN in Vienna.
     I listened to the message read by Mr. de Costa, and I found that the language used in the speech of SG Ban Ki-moon was not fit for the occasion to the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinians. The speech was based on contradicting standards which ignore the UN resolutions related to the historical facts surrounding Palestine and Palestinians, and replaced them with improper phrases which honoring the criminal Israeli occupation and their alliance, and harms the feeling of Palestinian participants who live in the exile since 60 years ago.
     SG Ban Ki-moon was wrong in almost all aspects in his speech. [see link below] SG Ban Ki-moon ignored that the cause of the current situation is the disrespect by Israel for uncounted resolutions and pleas of the international community regarding Palestine and, the continued blocking of all good faith solutions to our problem in by the representations of the USA and UK in the security council. The statement of Ban Ki-moon read at the Day of Solidarity with the Palestinians was a complete abdication of the idea of an international community guided by the precepts of respect for each other, for laws and treaties, in favor of the real terror and cajoling of by the representatives of the main sponsors and promoters of genocide and terrorism around the world, namely Israel, followed by the USA and the UK. -- See also: SG Ban Ki-moon's speech more.. e-mail

Bottom of the bottom
Khaled Amayreh, Al-Ahram Weekly 12/3/2008
     While Arab activists and intellectuals rally to the cause of Palestinian refugees, officialdom in Ramallah denounces their efforts.
     The Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority (PA) has strongly denounced a recent conference on the plight of Palestinian refugees held in the Syrian capital, Damascus, organised by a coalition of factions and figures dedicated to the right of return, which according to organisers -- amongst them Hamas -- is the heart and soul of the Palestinian problem.
     The conference asserted the centrality of the right of return and warned Palestinian, regional and international players that any resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict not including the repatriation of millions of uprooted refugees to their original homes and villages in what is now called Israel would be strongly rejected by the Palestinian people.
     The PA didn’t specifically object to what was said in Damascus, although critics argue that President Mahmoud Abbas and his aides are not sincere about their declared commitment to the right of return. Indeed, Abbas reportedly told Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on many occasions that the Palestinians would accept any "just and agreed upon resolution" of the refugee issue. This is a clear departure from the erstwhile Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) position that resolution of the refugee plight would have to be pursuant UN Resolution 194, which calls for both repatriation and indemnification. more.. e-mail

Iraq’s US Security Charade
Ramzy Baroud, Palestine Chronicle 12/4/2008
     ’There is nothing worth celebrating about all of this.’
     World media rashly celebrated the "historic" security pact that allows for US troops to stay in Iraq for three more years after the Iraqi parliament ratified the agreement on Thursday, 27 November. The approval came one week after the Iraqi cabinet did the same.
     Thousands of headlines exuded from media outlets, largely giving the false impression that the Iraqi government and parliament have a real say over the future of US troops in their country, once again playing into the ruse fashioned by Washington that Iraq is a democratic country, operating independently from the dictates of US Ambassador to Baghdad Ryan Crocker and the top commander of US troops in Iraq, General Ray Odierno. The men issued a joint, congratulatory statement shortly after the parliamentary vote, describing it as one that would "formalise a strong and equal partnership" between the US and Iraq.
     Jonathan Steel of the British Guardian also joined the chorus. "Look at the agreement’s text. It is remarkable for the number and scope of the concessions that the Iraqi government has managed to get from the Bush administration. They amount to a series of U-turns that spell the complete defeat of the neo-conservative plan to turn Iraq into a pro-Western ally and a platform from which to project US power across the Middle East." more.. e-mail

Lie to us, but do not ignore us: Settler taped shooting Palestinians point blank
Faud Al-Lahham, Ma’an News Agency 12/5/2008
     Bethlehem – Ma’an - A video of an Israeli settler shooting two Palestinians at close range was made public by the Israeli human rights group B’tselem on Thursday.
     The sounds and images of a machine-gun waving settler were transmitted to international, local and Israeli TV stations.
     The footage showed a middle-aged Israeli from one of the illegal settlements inside the Palestinian city of Hebron firing at 40-year-old Husni Matariyah at point blank range. The bullet hit the left side of Matariah’s chest. The settler then shot Matariah’s 65-year-old father Abed Al-Hai in the hand.
     The injured men were moved to Hebron’s A’lia Hospital in poor and critical condition. The man who shot them, despite being caught on video, is free and preparing himself for a new crime.
     Although his crime was cruel and brutal, it is not out of the ordinary in Palestine for settler mobs to decide that they will exact some sort of punishment against Palestinians. Indeed, such acts have been going on for decades. Ever since settlers took over the first Palestinian home in the center of the city, ever since the first trailer home was dropped in the center of Palestinian gardens, these acts of the settlers have continued under the sponsorship of the Israeli army. -- See also: Jewish settlers in Hebron shoot Palestinian men more.. e-mail

Obama’s Palestinian friend
Akiva Eldar, Ha’aretz 12/5/2008
     No one stopped Rashid Khalidi, the Columbia University professor of Modern Arab Studies, at Ben-Gurion airport. Having just landed after the long flight from New York, the professor was anticipating the traditional reception from airport security personnel reserved for visitors with "suspicious" names. To his surprise, he entered the airport like anyone else, with no problems or delays. Perhaps word had gotten around at Ben-Gurion that he was the Palestinian friend of United States President-elect Barack Obama.
     Khalidi, 60, who spent three weeks in Israel and the territories before continuing on to Beirut this week, doesn’t like all the fuss surrounding his relationship with the president-elect. Up to now, he had avoided speaking about it publicly, for better or worse. The reason may be, as reflected in my interview with him at his hotel in Jerusalem, overlooking Damascus Gate, his disappointment in his Chicago friend’s treatment of the Arab and Islamic community in the United States. Or maybe it’s also discomfort with the Democratic candidate’s response during the campaign to reports about the ties between them. "He is a respected scholar, although he vehemently disagrees with a lot of Israel’s policy," said Obama in a widely publicized comment from a May campaign event, in response to a question about their relationship. His spokesman made certain to add that the president-elect has been "clear and consistent on his support for Israel. more.. e-mail

Spy tactics
Saleh Al-Naami, Al-Ahram Weekly 12/3/2008
     Israel’s attempts to take advantage of the destitution it creates include bribing Palestinians to spy on Palestinians. Those who refuse starve or die.
     Khaled Abu Shamala, 38, was in a taxi heading to the crossing point of Erez that links Gaza to Israel. He was trying to phone his daughter, Fedaa, who was asleep when he left home, to tell her that he wouldn’t forget to bring her a doll. He was on his way to have heart surgery in Jerusalem. When he reached the crossing point, an Israeli soldier escorted him to a room in the administrative building and told him to wait. An hour passed, then two, then three. Another soldier came to escort him to another room. Waiting for him was an officer of the Israeli domestic intelligence service, Shin Bet. The soldier told Abu Shamala that he could not proceed to Jerusalem unless he cooperated with Israeli intelligence and provided information on Palestinian factions.
     Abu Shamala refused directly, condemning the immorality of the request. The officer laughed and started calling him names. Abu Shamala returned home depressed and exhausted. Two weeks later, on 28 October 2008, he died.
     Khawla Arshid, 49, was a liver cancer patient. She underwent several chemotherapy sessions in an Israeli hospital. Three weeks ago, she was due for another chemotherapy session. She was stopped at the Erez Crossing and asked to collaborate with Shin Bet. She refused and was turned back. A week later, she died. more.. e-mail

Action, not words
Karen AbuZayd, The Guardian 12/5/2008
     The noble spirit of the universal declaration of human rights is betrayed by a lack of help for Gaza
     As we approach the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the steadily rising death toll in Gaza highlights the painful gap between its peaceful rhetoric and the desperate reality for Palestinian people.
     The declaration was a pivotal statement in which the world community recognised the "inherent dignity and the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family as the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world". True to its nobility of spirit, it declares "the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom from fear and want as the highest aspiration of the common people".
     Sixty years on, the fate of the Palestinian people should be a cause for universal soul-searching. The need to give substantive meaning to the protection of Palestinians has never been greater. The former high commissioner for human rights, Mary Robinson has said that in Gaza, nothing short of a "civilisation" is being destroyed. Desmond Tutu has called it "an abomination". The humanitarian coordinator for the occupied Palestinian territory, Maxwell Gaylard, said that in Gaza there was a "massive assault" on human rights. Most recently, the European commissioner, Louis Michel, described the blockade of Gaza as a "form of collective punishment against Palestinian civilians, which is a violation of international humanitarian law". more.. e-mail

Twilight Zone / Out of prison
Gideon Levy, Ha’aretz 12/4/2008
     Osama wakes up early every morning these days and goes to work in his well-kept garden. Afterward he goes for a walk. It’s hard for him to sit at home. "It’s hard for me to stare at walls," he says. He is 45 years old, and 19 of those years were spent behind walls, bolts and locks. Ten years ago, when we were first introduced through the letters he wrote me from prison, using green ink and in excellent Hebrew, he wrote that he dreamed of taking his other pen pal, a young man named Hagai Matar, horseback riding around his village.
     Since then, Matar has grown up - he was a conscientious objector and is now a journalist at the weekly paper Ha’Ir - and Osama Barham has left jail and returned to jail. He was released this past summer, and we met again this week. "You look good," I told him as we embraced. "I dye my hair," he told me.
     The house in the village is better kept than it used to be, and Osama is more muscular. In the time that has passed, so has another intifada, along with the disengagement from the Gaza Strip. When he was released from prison the first time, I was invited to join him at a large celebration his family held. The entire village came. I found it strange that the person to whom Israel attributes militant involvement with Islamic Jihad should make a point of seating an Israeli alongside him. "For five years, you’ve been telling me that I’m part of Jihad; for five years, I’ve been telling you that I’m not," he once wrote me from prison. I later was invited with my children to his home for lunch. more.. e-mail

It’s Grim in Gaza
Anne Penketh, MIFTAH 12/4/2008
     I met Karen AbuZayd, the head of UNRWA, when she was sitting in the basement dining room of a trendy London hotel beside a mirror on which an artist has written in gold letters: "this is shit."It is understandable that Mrs AbuZayd, whose UN agency looks after the welfare of Palestinian refugees, did not wish to be photographed in front of the art work. But the message on the mirror aptly sums up the dramatic humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip, as she was the first to point out.
     The Israeli blockade has caused an ever worsening crisis for the 1.5m Palestinians in Gaza since it was imposed after the election of Hamas in January 2006. Israel has refused to lift the blockade for as long as the Palestinian militants’ rockets come over the fence.
     With the press barred from crossing into Gaza for the past month, Mrs AbuZayd brought me up to date with the current misery and hardship for the Palestinian population trapped inside.
     Ninety five percent of the private sector has collapsed since June. Of the 1.1m registered Palestinian refugees in Gaza, 800,000 need food distribution. Electricity supplies are on for eight hours a day. 120,000 people have not had water for a week. They are cooking with wood in high rise apartments, which is an obvious fire risk. more.. e-mail

Apartheid Must Not Be Tolerated or Promoted
Michael Severson, Palestine Chronicle 12/4/2008
     This is the picture I see but the picture that won’t be in The Smithsonian.
     Advertising finances a magazine’s publication. The higher the readership, the higher the cost to place an ad on its pages; evidently, the higher the readership, the higher the exposure for the advertiser. So, imagine the potential of The Smithsonian at over seven million readers, according to its web site. Now imagine a full page color advertisement in the December issue, proclaiming, "You’ll love Israel from the first "Shalom," its history, unpolluted beaches, and so on.
     The readers of the magazine were exposed to half truths, if not an entirely fabricated reality. What the ad failed to tell them is that the serenity of Israeli beaches and the thrill of its history hide behind them an untold story of tears and blood, and a version of history to which they will not be exposed. What the magazine doesn’t show is the 27 foot high apartheid wall, the military checkpoints, the confiscated land, the ruined orchards, the waterless wells, the demolished houses, and to its neighbors to the north, the destroyed, cluster-bombed wasteland. more.. e-mail

Share Space, Defy the Wall
Mohammed Abu-Nimer – Washington, Palestine Chronicle 12/4/2008
     Arabs and Jews were separated for decades before the separation wall was built in the West Bank and around Gaza. When former Egyptian president Anwar Sadat travelled to Israel in 1977, he declared before the Knesset (parliament) that such separation can only bring devastation and alienation to Arabs and Jews alike. He came to meet the Israelis in their homes to challenge their fears.
     The physical wall between the West Bank and Israel reflects how current political leaders and ideologies have deepened the Israeli-Palestinian moral, mental, physical, economic, and psychological divides. However, history shows that such divides between enemies in neighbouring and interdependent geographical areas fail to bring about genuine peace or stability (e.g. Northern Ireland, South Africa, or Germany).
     There are many strategies for reducing the adverse effects of the wall. In my view, the most important approaches will address separation by creating more shared Israeli and Palestinian space. more.. e-mail

The Other, Older Palestinian Coup D’etat
Nicola Nasser, Middle East Online 12/4/2008
     Failing to substantiate for the President of the autonomous Palestinian Authority (PA), Mahmoud Abbas, a credible “legal” basis to extend his term from the Basic Law, which is the constitutional terms of reference that govern the rotation of power and the renewal of the executive, legislative and judicial branches of the PA, Abbas in his capacity as the chairman of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) convened the rubber stamping Fatah –dominated Central Council (CC) of the PLO in the West Bank city of Ramallah to elect him also President of the State of Palestine on November 23.
     The move could have been the last “constitutional” resort to extend his term as PA president before it expires on January 9 next year in order to secure himself as the supreme “legitimate” authority on Palestinian decision –making in the context of the “make - or – break” bloody wrangling with the rival Hamas on the leadership of the Palestinian national movement. more.. e-mail

Tales from within: An eye on Nablus Balata Refugee Camp
Palestine Monitor, Palestine Monitor 12/3/2008
     Pictures
     As you walk through the old city of Nablus the vibrancy of the bustling markets is an inescapable feature. As you walk through the cobble stoned streets, you encounter a collage of sights and smells. The pungent aroma from the spice shops followed by the sweet smell of Knaffe is a riot for the olfactory senses. Frenetic activity on the streets is contrasted by the nonchalance of shopkeepers. People, young and old are welcoming and one is filled with a sense of warmth walking through the narrow winding streets that are a photographers delight. Everything seems effortless and the pulse of the town is set at a comfortable pace. Life appears normal. However, further scrutiny would reveal that normality in this town has been an ephemeral feature. The old city of Nablus has experienced more incursions during the second intifada than most other West Bank cities or residential areas. The city being one of the former strongholds of the second intifada experienced heavy battles on its streets and parts of the old city has been re-built numerous times after being bulldozed and bombarded.
     Strolling through the narrow streets of the old city a parallel universe somehow emerges when trying to imagine the numerous violent clashes and battles between Israeli forces and local Palestinian resistance groups. As you walk across Martyr’s square walls are adorned with posters of young men in soldiers uniform, brimming with pride as they stand in unison holding their rifles. Inscriptions in bold letters inform the readers which brigade or military wing to which the “shahid” (martyr) belonged. On closer inspection one realizes that these seemingly proud soldiers are mere teenage boys in oversized uniforms. The numerous deaths of such fighters during the second intifada have left clear scars on this city that is perpetually recovering. more.. e-mail

Ship Intifada and pilgrim lottery
Saleh Al-Naami, Al-Ahram Weekly 12/3/2008
     Her suitcase is still on the sofa by the front door to her home in the eastern quarter of Deir Al-Balah in central Gaza Strip. Attaf Al-Sumuh, 47, still hasn’t lost hope that she can perform the pilgrimage this year, even though this year’s pilgrims from the world over are already in Mecca. Al-Sumuh can’t accept the fact that political quibbling between the Ramallah and Gaza governments might mean that she won’t be able to perform this religious duty she’s anxiously been anticipating. She was supposed to perform the pilgrimage with her brother Akram, and says that she had sworn to perform it when she was cured from the illness she had suffered for three years, and registered with the Ministry of Religious Endowments under the Ismail Haniyeh government. "I can’t believe this is happening, that I might not be able to perform the pilgrimage rituals due to differences between the political organisations," she told Al-Ahram Weekly. "This is madness."
     Khaled Bareim, 53, lives in the village of Al-Qarara in southern Gaza Strip, and he registered for the pilgrimage with the Ministry of Religious Endowments under the Ramallah government. He was supposed to leave last Saturday with 200 other pilgrims via the Rafah crossing for Saudi Arabia, but the Haniyeh government’s security forces prevented that from happening, as they don’t have entry visas for Saudi Arabia. more.. e-mail

UN assembly head hailed for slamming Israel
Thalif Deen, Electronic Intifada 12/3/2008
     UNITED NATIONS (IPS) - The president of the United Nations General Assembly, Father Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, dropped a political bombshell last week when he lashed out at Israel for its repressive actions in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, including the recent blockade of humanitarian aid to Gaza.
     "What is being done to the Palestinian people seems to me to be a version of the hideous policy of apartheid," he told delegates, during a meeting commemorating the "International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People."
     A senior UN official told IPS: "I cannot remember any Assembly president so publicly vocal in denouncing Israel."  D’Escoto damned both the Israelis and the UN for the plight of the Palestinians. "And he was on target," the official added.  "I believe," d’Escoto said, "that the failure to create a Palestinian state as promised is the single greatest failure in the history of the United Nations."  Nadia Hijab, senior fellow at the Washington-based Institute for Palestine Studies, told IPS that d’Escoto’s comments are a welcome reminder of the reality on the ground, and "a valiant attempt to hold the international community responsible for its posturing on the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and siege of Gaza." more.. e-mail

The Lady Between the Queen and the Tribe
Gilad Atzmon, Palestine Think Tank 12/3/2008
     In spite of the fact that I monitor Israeli press and Jewish activism on a daily basis, I must admit that almost once a day I come across something new and refreshing about my ex-brethren.
     As it happened, yesterday I learned about an organisation named the "International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists"� (IAJLJ). An association with such a name didn’t take me by complete surprise.  
     By now I am used to the concept of  "˜primarily-Jewish’ organisations and associations. 
      At the end of the day, it shouldn’t take any of us by surprise, Israel, as we know, is the  "˜Jews-only’ state. Furthermore, Israel’s very few sporadic vocal opponents within the Jewish world tend for some reason to operate also in similar racially orientated primarily Jewish political settings such as "˜Jews For Peace’,  "˜Jews for Justice in Palestine’, "˜Jewish Independent Voice’, etc. more.. e-mail

Renegotiating the Ceasefire
Ghassan Khatib, Palestine Media Center 12/2/2008
     CContrary to the expectations of many analysts, the ceasefire that was agreed in June between Hamas in Gaza and Israel and lasted longer than any other ceasefire since the establishment of the Palestinian Authority, has been facing serious difficulties in recent weeks.
     The past month witnessed a return to violence that included rocket fire from Gaza at Israeli areas and Israeli air raids and shelling that left many casualties on the Palestinian side, in addition to the tight blockade Israel has imposed that has seen only four shipments of humanitarian goods reach Gaza since November 4.
     Why does a ceasefire that lasted successfully for five months face these problems only a month before it was due to end or be extended? The answer would seem rooted mainly in domestic Israeli politics and to a lesser extent in Gaza. This is primarily because Israel is the determining factor in deciding the state of relations with Gaza, whether peaceful or violent. Hamas, furthermore, has benefitted from the ceasefire and is clearly interested in renewing it, particularly because the calm enabled the Islamist movement to consolidate its power in Gaza. more.. e-mail

'We are slowly dying'
Sameh A. Habeeb writing from the occupied Gaza Strip, Electronic Intifada 12/3/2008
     Israel has further tightened the screw on Gaza, where some areas have been completely plunged into darkness as fuel shortages shut down Gaza’s sole power plant 25 days ago.
     The power cuts affect all activities dependent on electrical power as the remaining power sources provided by Israel and Egypt cannot serve the needs of the whole of the Gaza Strip.Access to drinking and irrigation water is affected, as well as sewage treatment, risking disease.Already, this means that millions of liters of sewage water pollute the Mediterranean Sea on a daily basis.
     Israel is also denying food to the 1.5 million Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.According to the Popular Committee Against the Siege, basic food items like milk, flour, cooking oil, meat, rice and legumes are not sufficiently available.Some figures indicate that only 15 percent of Gaza’s food needs are getting in through the Israeli-controlled borders.
     Palestinians in Gaza are also being denied the right to access medical treatment.Basic medicines have vanished from the Strip, including those for the treatment of diabetes, heart conditions, asthma and other chronic diseases.There are also shortages of medicine to treat cancer and renal and liver diseases.Sterilization and disinfectant supplies, as well as other needs for the safe treatment medical patients, are in short supply.Machines that mean life or death for Gaza patients are breaking down because Israel is not allowing the import of spare parts.Doctors will have a hard time even diagnosing patients because the power cuts have damaged CT and x-ray equipment at Gaza’s hospitals. more.. e-mail

A psychological siege
Safa Joudeh writing from the occupied Gaza Strip, Electronic Intifada 12/3/2008
     Israel’s siege on Gaza, now in its 19th month, has wreaked havoc on all aspects of life and significant attention has been paid in particular to the economic consequences of border closures and blockade. However, an overlooked epidemic threatens the social and familial ties that bond the 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza. Living under a constant state of crisis in which their livelihoods have been denied, the people of Gaza’s once exemplary resilience and determination are giving way to an unfathomable sea of depression and psychological illnesses.
     According to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, as a direct result of Israel’s siege, 65 percent of households in Gaza struggle to obtain basic needs such as food, clothing and medicine. Among those struggling is Fouzan Salah, a 35-year-old father of four. Fouzan, who owned a tailoring factory with his brother, began selling his sewing machines in January of this year in order to feed his family. Since Israel began restricting the entry of goods and raw material into Gaza, an estimated 55 percent of private sector establishments have shut down and 97 percent of industrial establishments ceased their operations. Such was the fate of Fouzan’s factory, which received all of its fabric from Israel. The family now has no income and is in danger of losing its home. They Salahs currently rely on charity and the assistance of others, surviving on one, sometimes two small meals a day. more.. e-mail

Charity is Not a Crime: Fallacy of Justice
Dr. Elias Akleh, Palestine Chronicle 12/3/2008
     ’Feeding hungry children is a divine act, not a crime.’
     When twelve good American jurors acquit a group of defendants from all charges, and twelve other good American jurors convict them of all the charges in a second trial, one cannot help but wonder what kind of judicial system we have. And when the defendants are a group of compassionate Americans, who raise funds to feed hungry families, to open schools to educate young minds, and build clinics and hospitals to care for the sick, the disabled and the elderly, one wonders what had happened to compassionate America, who offers aid to poor nations. The trial case of the Holy Land Foundation, a charity that provided aid to impoverished families in other countries as well as some American families, raises such wonders.
     After the attacks of 911 and the enactment of the American Patriot Act, the US government was granted unchecked total power to designate any organization as a terrorist entity, shut it down, freeze its assets and prosecute its members as "enemy combatants". Since then the government had shut down thousands of Middle Eastern and Islamic organizations, but failed to produce any tangible evidence to prosecute any one individual. more.. e-mail

Perverse justice
Wajahat Ali, The Guardian 12/3/2008
     The Bush administration’s "war on terror" paraded a feather in its tattered cap with the Holy Land Foundation convictions delivered last week. Most observers accurately characterised this legal charade as a witch hunt, using Muslims and Arabs, specifically Palestinians, as its targets. In doing so the administration shamelessly abuses to advance its failed security measures and pro-Israel policy initiatives that systematically punishes Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank.
     Five leaders from the once highly-respected charity group Holy Land Foundation, which gave nearly $12m to non-violent, Palestinian institutions to build hospitals and feed the poor, were convicted on 108 charges of supporting terrorism by funneling money to Hamas. A US official proudly declared: "Today’s verdicts are important milestones in America’s efforts against financiers of terrorism." However, Linda Moreno, a defence lawyer for one of the HLF leaders, said she disagreed, and told me: "This was a political, ’win at all costs’ prosecution." more.. e-mail

Try Tough Love, Hillary
Roger Cohen, MIFTAH 12/3/2008
     Imagine Ehud Olmert, the outgoing Israeli prime minister, saying this to Barack Obama:
     “The United States has been wrong to write Israel a blank check every year; wrong to turn a blind eye to the settlements in the West Bank; wrong not to be more explicit about the need to divide Jerusalem; wrong to equip us with weaponry so sophisticated we now believe military might is the answer to all our problems; and wrong in not helping us reach out to Syria. Your chosen secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, said during the campaign that ‘the United States stands with Israel, now and forever.’ Well, that’s not good enough. You need to stand against us sometimes so we can avoid the curse of eternal militarism.”
     Perhaps that seems unimaginable. But Olmert has already said something close to this. In a frank September interview with the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth, reprinted this month by The New York Review of Books, the Israeli leader chose to exit with a mea culpa for his country’s policies. more.. e-mail

Revoking Israel’s UN Membership
Snorre Lindquist and Lasse Wilhelmson – Stockholm, Palestine Chronicle 12/3/2008
     Israel membership at the UN is conditional on its respect for international law.
     The Gaza Strip is now the largest concentration camp in the world. The situation grows steadily more insufferable for the 1.5 million Palestinians who live there. Deliveries of food, medicine and fuel are made difficult or stopped altogether. Child malnutrition is increasing. Water supplies and drainage have ceased to function. Children die for lack of healthcare. Tunnels to Egypt, dug by hand, are the only breathing space. Journalists and diplomats are denied entry. Israel is planning more military efforts. The Palestinians in Gaza are now to be starved into surrender and become an Egyptian problem.
     The UN should use the word apartheid in connection with Israel and consider sanctions with the former South Africa serving as a model. Miguel dÉscoto Brockman, president of the UN General Assembly, conveyed this message at a meeting on November 24th 2008 with the UN General Secretary Ban Ki-moon present. more.. e-mail

How Zionists Occupy Two Nations: America and Palestine
Mohamed Khodr, Palestine Think Tank 12/3/2008
     Thankfully, several prominent Jews have formed a new lobby, J Street, to oppose the influence of the Israel Lobby and its stranglehold on US foreign policy that emphasizes force over diplomacy. J Street supports a peaceful negotiated settlement of the Israeli Palestinian conflict and the formation of two independent states although it avoids delineating the borders of such states; for example, by supporting the 1967 borders.
     From America’s “Jewish Triangle” to Iraqi’s “Sunni Triangle - Government Job Notice: No Gentiles Need Apply - “The Modern Age is the Jewish Age, and the twentieth century, in particular, is the Jewish Century.” –Yuri Slezkine, Professor of History at University of California, Berkeley, “The Jewish Century”; Princeton University Press (Russian Jewish immigrant to the U.S.)
     No, America, there is no Zionist Conspiracy running our nation; just well funded organized Zionist Coincidences - From Truman, to Clinton, to Obama, to…..
     In a Nov. 10, 1945 meeting with American diplomats brought in from their posts in the Middle East to urge Truman not to heed Zionist urgings to recognize Israel, Truman bluntly explained his motivation:
     “I’m sorry, gentlemen, but I have to answer to hundreds of thousands who are anxious for the success of Zionism: I do not have hundreds of thousands of Arabs among my constituents” - Harry Truman, 33rd President more.. e-mail

Jerusalem’s Status: To Be Determined
Nadia W. Awad, MIFTAH 12/3/2008
     Last week, approximately 100 American Orthodox Jews gathered in Jerusalem’s Talpiot district in conjunction with a national convention for the Orthodox Union, an American Jewish group. The choice of location was significant to them, as it was the site designated by the US for the building of a future embassy in Jerusalem. The main objective of the rally was to call for the US government to move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, the ‘undivided capital of Israel’. The title of the convention was also telling: Keep It One, Keep It Ours.
     Despite the significant fact that there are no embassies, only consulates, in Jerusalem, most people around the world are ignorant of one detail: Jerusalem has never been officially recognized as the capital of Israel. On the contrary, most countries consider its status as yet to be determined, with Israel’s control of east Jerusalem considered a very illegal military occupation. As such, recognizing the de facto control of Israel over Jerusalem does not equate to recognizing its sovereignty over the city.
     Following the 1948 War, Jerusalem was divided into two parts. East Jerusalem was under the control of Jordanian rule while west Jerusalem was captured by the Israelis. This status did not continue, when, after the Six Day War in 1967, Israeli forces entered east Jerusalem, occupying it by force and immediately demolishing hundreds of Palestinian homes in the Old City’s Maghrebi Quarter in order to facilitate the expansion of the Jewish Quarter. UN Resolution 242, possibly one of the most oft-quoted resolutions when discussing Middle East politics, deals with the aftermath of the 1967 War, and specifically calls for: “The withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict.” Unfortunately, Israel has yet to comply. more.. e-mail

ISRAEL-OPT: How Gaza gets power - analysis
IRIN - UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs 12/4/2008
     GAZA, 3 December 2008 (IRIN) - Gaza’s sole power station supplies about 30 percent of Gaza’s electricity; 10 lines from Israel supply about 62 percent; and two lines from Egypt about 8 percent.
     The station supplies about 65MW of electricity, and is functioning at half capacity after its transformers were bombed by Israel in June 2006, according to UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) field officer Hamada al-Bayari in Gaza.
     The plant supplies roughly 40MW to Gaza City, 10MW to northern Gaza and 15 MW to middle Gaza.
     The sole source of industrial fuel for the power station is funded by the European Commission via a European aid programme called PEGASE, covering development projects in partnership with the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank, bypassing Hamas.
     Theoretically, Israel allows the transfer of 2.5 million litres of industrial fuel to over 200 distribution points in Gaza each week via PEGASE, monitored on the ground by financial firm Price Waterhouse Coopers. more.. e-mail

More transnational companies divest from illegal industrial settlements
Adri Nieuwhof, Electronic Intifada 12/2/2008
     The movement in Europe to put pressure on companies that benefit from the occupation is growing. Over the last few months, European, Palestinian and Israeli activists have won significant victories toward the 2005 call by Palestinian civil society for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel. In early October, Barkan Wineries, a subsidiary of Tempo Beer Industry Ltd., decided to divest from an illegal settlement in the Barkan Industrial Park. Dutch Heineken has a 40 percent share in Tempo Beer Industry and as a member of the United Nations Global Compact, it has promised to support and respect the protection of internationally proclaimed human rights and to make sure they are not complicit in human rights abuses. According to the Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq, Heineken played a positive role in this decision by adhering to its corporate social responsibility policies.
     Diakonia Sweden released in October a critical report on Swedish Assa Abloy, owner of Mul-T-Lock which has a production unit in the Barkan Industrial Park. In response to the report, Assa Abloy announced its removal of the production unit, and it expressed its "regret that the inappropriateness has not been noted internally, during the eight years of ownership, of having a production unit on the West Bank." more.. e-mail

The believers and the kingdom of evil
Shlomo Avineri, Ha’aretz 12/4/2008
     The fact that two opposite interpretations to religious tradition could lead to a radical delegitimization of Israel’s existence should raise a number of thoughts. First, it appears that at least as far as the Jewish public is concerned, the deepest undermining of Zionism and Israel’s legitimacy does not come from the extreme left wingers dubbed "post Zionists," but from religious groups with deep faith. It is possible to be both a believing Jew and a meticulous enemy of Israel.
     When Herzl wrote in his diary, the day after the First Zionist Congress, "...in Basel I founded the Jewish state," it was clear to him that the state hadn’t really been founded in those summer days of 1897. Rather, the infrastructure that provided a basis for a political framework for the Jewish people for the first time in 2000 years had been formed.
     Or as Herzl said, he gave people "the feeling that they were the national assembly." Until they met, the Jews lacked not only territory, but an institutional authority that could speak in the nation’s name and demand a state.
     That was the significance of convening the congress, holding elections, electing an executive committee, charging a voluntary tax (the shekel), creating financial instruments - which in later days would be called "the state in formation." more.. e-mail

No Bethlehem Wine for Christmas
Stuart Littlewood – London, Palestine Chronicle 12/2/2008
     Christian hotels in the Holy Land as well as Catholic and Anglican churches in the UK face Christmas without Bethlehem wine as Israeli soldiers at the checkpoint at Hebron are refusing to allow lorries carrying the wine to enter Israel.
     The wine is made by a Roman Catholic religious order, the Salesians of Don Bosco, at the Cremisan winery in Beit Jala, a suburb of Bethlehem. The Salesians have been producing the wine for the past 125 years as a direct means of support for their pastoral and educational work among the poor of Bethlehem and to provide a livelihood for many local Palestinian families. Although small by modern standards, the winery’s organic production using classical Italian methods has made its table wines and brandy famous far beyond the region.
     Now, for the first time in more than 100 years, the churches and religious establishments in Jerusalem, Nazareth and other parts of Israel are being deprived of Cremisan wine. Christian hotels and pilgrim houses in Israel are now being forced to buy Israeli wine. Because wines for export are shipped through the Israeli port of Haifa, no export to the UK and Europe has been possible for several months. more.. e-mail

Power cuts, fuel shortages affect health and water supplies
Report, IRIN, Electronic Intifada 12/2/2008
     WEST BANK/GAZA (IRIN) - Adel Abu Sido, 31, a taxi driver from Gaza City, stands over his two-week old premature baby, Hadil, dreading her air supply may abruptly stop.
     Hadil’s incubator is not reliably providing enough oxygen due to the inconsistent power supply at al-Shifa Hospital, the main healthcare center in the Gaza Strip.
     The fuel for hospital generators has nearly run out and a shortage of basic medical supplies has left al-Shifa with only 20 percent of the oxygen supply it needs, forcing medical professionals in Gaza to make hard choices, said Gaza health ministry spokesperson Hamam Nasman.
     "Fifty percent of hospital equipment at al-Shifa has stopped functioning due to the lack of electricity and spare parts since this more than 20-day blockade started," said Gaza health minister Basem Naim, adding that 95 basic medications are out of stock.
     Asthma patients waiting for inhalers are being turned away, as hospital pharmacists scavenge local pharmacies.
     "Al-Shifa Hospital is using its secondary generator nearly 20 hours a day to power the hospital, since there is not enough fuel in stock to operate the primary generator," said spokesperson Nasman. Under normal circumstances the secondary generator has the capacity to power the hospital only three hours a day. more.. e-mail

A Peace Process That Makes Peace Impossible
Nicola Nasser – The West Bank, Palestine Chronicle 12/2/2008
     In Annapolis, Abbas was lured by a promise of a Palestinian state.
     Palestinian-Israeli peace-making can only deliver if Palestinians are united, but the current Annapolis "peace process" was launched first of all as a blueprint for perpetuating the inter-Palestinian divide.
     Commitment or non-commitment to what the Quartet of the US, EU, UN and Russian mediators in Middle East peace -- making described as the "Annapolis Process" in a statement they released after their meeting in the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh on November 8 has become the terms of reference to make or break the Palestinian unity of ranks, which has so far failed the Egyptian mediation efforts, the latest in a series of national, Arab and non-Arab similar reconciliation endeavors.
     The Annapolis conference, which was hosted by the United States in Meryland on November 27, 2007 and attended by all members of the League of Arab States, convened with much fanfare and re-launched the Palestinian-Israeli negotiations after a seven-year interruption since the collapse of the trilateral Camp David summit with the U.S. in 2000. more.. e-mail

A must-read interview
Michael Tomasky, The Guardian 12/2/2008
     You really have to take five or six minutes and read this amazing interview Ehud Olmert gave to Yedioth Ahranoth, republished in the current issue of the New York Review. Olmert, the lame-duck pm, speaks with a frankness I’ve never seen from a head of state from Israel or anywhere. To wit:
     Were a regional war to break out in the next year or two and were we to enter into a military confrontation with Syria, I have no doubt that we’d defeat them soundly. We are stronger than they. Israel is the strongest country in the Middle East. We could contend with any of our enemies or against all of our enemies combined and win. The question that I ask myself is, what happens when we win? First of all, we’d have to pay a painful price.
     And after we paid the price, what would we say to them? "Let’s talk." And what would the Syrians say to us? "Let’s talk about the Golan Heights."
     So, I ask: Why enter a war with the Syrians, full of losses and destruction, in order to achieve what might be achieved without paying such a heavy price?... more.. e-mail

Jewish ’Refugee’ Lobby Seeks to Eclipse Palestinian Losses
Jonathan Cook -- Nazareth, Palestine Chronicle 12/2/2008
     A broad coalition of Jewish lobby groups has made a series of breakthroughs this year in its campaign to link the question of justice for millions of Palestinian refugees with justice for Jews who left Arab states in the wake of Israel’s establishment 60 years ago.
     Referring to these Jews as the "forgotten refugees" and claiming that their plight is worse than that of exiled Palestinians, the campaign has scored political successes in recent months in Washington, London and Brussels.
     Last week, the campaign received a major fillip when one of Israel’s largest political parties announced that restitution of property for Arab Jews was a central plank of its platform for the general election scheduled for February.
     Shas, a religious fundamentalist party and the third biggest in the current parliament, said it will refuse to support any government that reaches a deal with the Palestinians unless it first forces the Arab states to compensate these Jewish emigrants. more.. e-mail

Need for Action against Israel
Editorial, Gulf News, Palestine Media Center 12/2/2008
     As we get closer to celebrating Eid Al Adha, Muslims and Arabs across the region are preparing for this blessed occasion.
     Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip, where a humanitarian crisis exists because of a brutal, month-long Israeli blockade. The people are being stripped of their basic rights and are struggling to get hold of food and medicine.
     The sick are not getting the medical attention they need and most recently, Gaza’s sole power plant had to be closed because of Israel’s refusal to allow regular shipments of industrial fuel to enter. Essentially, Palestinians are being stripped of their dignity.
     The current deterioration in humanitarian, economic and social situation in the Strip is both shocking and revolting. And the blockade is becoming more and more restrictive with no end in sight. Sadly, what is apparent is the lack of coverage of and attention to Gaza. more.. e-mail

Gaza’s Grim Reaper
Paul J. Balles, Middle East Online 12/2/2008
     While Americans concentrate on the cost of rescuing the US financial system, and Europeans worry about how the worldwide financial crisis will affect them, Israel blithely, with US government and European community approval, deprives Gaza’s entire civilian population of food, medicine and clean drinking water.
     When pushed to explain their behaviour, they claim self-defence. Defence against whom? More than 50 per cent of the population in Gaza is comprised of children under the age of 15. Few people outside of Gaza even notice this slow genocide.
     Israel always manages to commit its worst deeds when no one else is looking. If they happen to be caught, they blame it on the Palestinians – on a few resistance fighters lobbing rockets into Israel in retaliation for a broken cease-fire. To the Israeli, the actions of a few violent Palestinians are justifiable cause for genocide of the entire Palestinian population in Gaza. more.. e-mail

Interview: Hanan Ashrawi
Al Jazeera 12/3/2008
     Ashrawi says Obama’s policies indicate he wants to engage the Palestinians  Hanan Ashrawi, the prominent Palestinian politician, is cautiously optimistic about the impact Barack Obama, the US president-elect, and his administration will have on the Palestinian-Israeli peace process.
     Al Jazeera attended a breakfast round-table with Ashrawi while she was visiting Doha, the capital of Qatar.
     Below are her responses to the questions that were put to her.
     Question: With the new US administration coming in and Hillary Clinton being appointed as US secretary of state, in your view are we likely to see a similar stance from her towards the Middle East peace process as there was under Bill Clinton’s administration?
     Hanan Ashrawi: First of all, we must not personalise issues. I don’t think it is a matter of individuals. more.. e-mail

Obama’s Victory and What It Means to Us
Miko Peled, Palestine Chronicle 12/2/2008
     ’Instead of fighting to end the occupation, we must bring an end to apartheid.’
     Besides restoring my faith in humanity, Barak Obama’s victory made me think of one thing: The first Palestinian Prime Minister in a post Zionist, secular, democratic state in Palestine/Israel. This may sound strange coming from an Israeli living in America, but just as Obama is good for black and white Americans, a Palestinian prime minister in a secular democracy will be good for Israelis as well as Palestinians. If it can happen in the US it can happen in the holy land. On January 20, an African American by the name of Barak Hussein Obama will be sworn in as President of the United States. This is a milestone if ever there was one, and there are many lessons to be learned from it. At the same time, this does not mean that we should expect that an Obama administration will offer anything new as far as US policy towards Israel and the Palestinians.
     One lesson we need to take from Barak Obama’s victory is this: With razor sharp focus on a single issue, driven home here in America and in our shared homeland, we can achieve equal rights between Israelis and Palestinians in all of Palestine/Israel. The message has to be: End the apartheid. The term occupation has become irrelevant because it has come to imply a temporary situation and the Zionist rule of Palestine is clearly not temporary. The message and the effort need no longer focus on a tiny, helpless Palestinian state living peacefully alongside an all-powerful Israel that is armed to its teeth; that possibility has been obliterated for good anyway. The message and the effort should be focused on ending apartheid and a call for equal rights. more.. e-mail

Corruption, Genocide and Ethnic Cleansing In the Occupied Territories
Justin Theriault, International Middle East Media Center News 12/2/2008
     Issues such as international law, Abbas’ leadership of the PLO, Hamas, terrorism and the failed peace process are analysed and discussed
     It has been under 16 months since I have been back to Ramallah, yet I see so many changes that have happened in and around the city. As I did the last time I had a chance to visit the West Bank, I entered from Jordan, from the west, across the Allenby Bridge, through Jericho into the community that lies just to the west of Ramallah, which is called Al Bireh. Al Bireh is historically a Muslim community and Ramallah a Christian community, but today it’s difficult to distinguish them from one another as they both seem to be and are both commonly referred to as simply, Ramallah.
     The first thing that could be observed very clearly was a further expansion of settlements in and around Ramallah and the surrounding agricultural communities. There aren’t any new settlements per se; rather, the existing ones have expanded their boundaries and their populations. These settlements are, of course, in direct violation of international law, as outlined in UN Resolution 446, which “...‘determines’ that Israeli settlements are a ‘serious obstruction’ to peace and calls on Israel to abide by the Fourth Geneva Convention”(1) , Resolution 452, which “...‘calls’ on Israel to cease building settlements in occupied territories”(2) , Resolution 465, which "...‘deplores’ Israel’s settlements and asks all member states not to assist Israel’s settlements program"(3) , Resolution 471, which "...‘expresses deep concern’ at Israel’s failure to abide by the Fourth Geneva Convention."(4) more.. e-mail

Hajj in exchange for power
Amira Hass, Ha’aretz 12/3/2008
     GAZA - The Hamas government is preventing thousands of Muslims from leaving the Gaza Strip to go on the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca - a religious duty - on the Id al-Adha (feast of the sacrifice) holiday.
     What a sensational headline, what a fascinating paradox. What Israel has never dared to do - certainly not to this extent - is being done by a Palestinian government for which Islam is the basis of its platform and provides personal guidance for each of its ministers.
     Why does the Ismail Haniyeh government need the headache of the images of security roadblocks on the main road in Gaza preventing would-be pilgrims from reaching the Rafah crossing, which Egypt has announced will be temporarily opened, and the reports, including exaggerated ones, about people beaten by Hamas security forces because they insisted on getting close to the crossing? Why did the government decide not to allow out some 3,000 Gazans registered for the pilgrimage with the Palestinian religious affairs ministry in Ramallah as long as Egypt and Saudi Arabia don’t allow an additional 3,000 Gazans who registered with the religious affairs ministry in Gaza to go on hajj? more.. e-mail

The Holy Land Foundation and the War on Charity
Stephen Lendman – Chicago, Palestine Chronicle 12/1/2008
     ’Until shut down, HLF was the largest Muslim charity in America.’
     The Texas-based Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF) was the largest American Muslim charity until the Bush administration falsely declared it an enemy of the state and shut it down.
     On December 4, 2001, the Treasury Department declared HLF a terrorist group, froze its assets, and falsely claimed they were being used to funnel millions of dollars to Hamas. HLF appealed at the time but in court was denied.
     On January 25, 1995, Bill Clinton issued Executive Order 12947 - Prohibiting Transactions With Terrorists Who Threaten To Disrupt the Middle East Peace Process. The same year Hamas was declared a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO). It’s still one today, so any individual or group charged with providing it material support (true or false) becomes a convenient target for prosecution.
     Post-9/11, many have been, and HLF is one. For the Department of Justice (DOJ), a big one because of their prominent charitable activities. Shut it down and chill out all others while at the same time providing open-ended billions for Israeli state terrorism as a partner in its commission. more.. e-mail

Cutting off aid to Gaza
Abdurahman Jafar, The Guardian 12/1/2008
     With an injection of up to £5.5bn of taxpayer funds you’d think Lloyds TSB would be far more transparent and accountable, but that’s not the case.
     The bank’s increasingly anti-democratic activities took an alarming turn last week when, without warning or prior consultation, it delivered an abrupt notification to the Islamic Bank of Britain (IBB) to cease all dealings with British charity Interpal by December 8 2008 (the date was subsequently revised to 30 January 2009) or "all transactions into or out of Interpal accounts will be blocked and IBB will be at further risk of all its customer payments being suspended". Interpal is one of the few remaining sources of humanitarian assistance in an increasingly beleaguered occupied Gaza.
     Interpal wrote to Eric Daniels, Chief Executive Lloyds TSB, on November 13 requesting an explanation, but to date no response has been sent. I contacted the PR department for an explanation and was informed "Lloyds TSB never comment on individual client relationships and so are unable to comment on our relationship with IBB." more.. e-mail

Einab junction: inside Israel’s new terminals
Anna Baltzer writing from Einab junction, occupied West Bank, Electronic Intifada 12/1/2008
     When I first visited the West Bank in 2003, checkpoints were controlled by young Israeli soldiers, nervously clutching their weapons and yelling at Palestinians to stay in line. When I returned in 2005, I found many checkpoints replaced by metal turnstiles into which Palestinians were herded to wait for soldiers to push a button, letting them through one by one or sometimes not at all. Each year I return, the method of control over Palestinian movement is further institutionalized, most recently Israeli terminal-style buildings, entirely separating soldiers from the Palestinians whose movement they are controlling.
     I first encountered one of these terminals after visiting a women’s cooperative in Tulkarm to purchase embroidery to send home. Because there are no reliable postal services in the West Bank, and because I did not want to risk the products being damaged or confiscated by Israeli airport security if I transported them in my luggage, I knew I would have to send them to the United States from a post office in Israel. I had traveled from Tulkarm to Tel Aviv once in the past by taking a shared taxi to the nearby Einab junction, where I had walked from the Palestinian road to the Israeli one and caught transport into Israel. more.. e-mail

A Kuffiyeh of a Different Color
Joharah Baker - The West Bank, Palestine Chronicle 12/1/2008
     On a recent trip to Milan, Italy, I spotted three teenage girls strolling through the famed Duomo area of the city. For the most part, the girls looked like any typical group of teens, decked out in skinny jeans and ponytails, all carrying their cups of iced coffee, coke or whatever drink was popular that day. There was one thing, however, that caught my eye. Around their necks, each had a colorful checkered scarf - one blue, one green and one pink, all of which strikingly resembled an accessory I know all too well -- the kuffiyeh.
     At first, I was pleasantly surprised. These young Italians were wearing my national scarf, albeit with a fashionable twist, since the kuffiyeh (or hatta as we so fondly like to call it), is traditionally black and white. All the same, for me, it still symbolized a level of awareness among non-Arabs that I believed was a step in the right direction.
     After a moment of contemplation, I realized I had gotten way ahead of myself. I knew the colored kuffiyehs had become somewhat of a fashion trend over the past few years, with colored scarves ranging from yellow to purple to hot pink adorning the necks of men and women alike. Still, I had not realized how much controversy it had actually elicited until I heard of a campaign against colored kuffiyehs being launched in Palestine. The campaign is calling on Palestinians to halt the sale and purchase of these kuffiyehs, which they say is an insult to our national heritage. Palestinians say Israel has also jumped on the bandwagon, creating blue and white kuffiyehs (the colors of the Israeli flag), some even with the Star of David embossed on them. This, of course, is where Palestinians will have to draw the line. There is enough controversy over the Israeli takeover of hummus and falafel without having to battle over our checkered scarf. more.. e-mail

African Americans, Peace and the Plight of Palestinians
Cynthia McKinney, Black Agenda Report special feature, Palestine Think Tank 12/1/2008
     The former congresswoman and Green Party presidential candidate charges that "Israel’s lockdown of Gaza is keeping food, fuel, and medicine from civilians." But that’s just the most recent atrocity in a human rights catastrophe that began 60 years ago, in Palestine, the same year that birthed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Declaration is prime evidence that a civilized world is possible, but "Palestine is the place that the Universal Declaration forgot."
     Former Georgia congresswoman and recent Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney was scheduled to give the following address in Damascus, Syria at a Conference to commemorate the 60th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. She notes that this year also marks “the 60th year that the Palestinian people have been denied their Right of Return, enshrined in that Universal Declaration.” However, Delta Airlines personnel prevented Ms. McKinney from boarding her flight. She describes the incident as “a dispute over my paperwork.” - The editors
     A funny thing happened to me while at the Atlanta airport on my way to the Conference: I was not allowed to exit the country.
     I do believe that it was just a misunderstanding. But the insecurity experienced on a daily basis by innocent Palestinians is not. Innocent Palestinians are trapped in a violent, stateless twilight zone imposed on them by an international order that favors a country reported to have completed its nuclear triad as many as eight years ago, although Israel has remained ambiguous on the subject. President Jimmy Carter informed us that Israel had as many as 150 nuclear weapons, and Israel’s allies are among the most militarily sophisticated on the planet. Military engagement, then, is untenable. Therefore the exigency of diplomacy and international law. more.. e-mail

What Israel hasn’t tried
Mohammed Naim Farhat, Ha’aretz 12/2/2008
     After the breakdown of the cease-fire between Israel and the Palestinians, people are talking about the possibility of Israel retaking the Gaza Strip. This possibility is not desirable for Israel, but it continues to be the main alternative to the temporary calm. It shows the fixed idea both sides have that in the end violence and shows of force are the only way to solve the conflict.
     The statements here are made from the viewpoint of a fair adversary - someone who lives on the other side and is aware of what is happening there; someone aware of the risks and opportunities. What we, the Palestinians, see is an attempt by the Israeli occupation to reshape its control over the West Bank and Gaza, with the goal of leaving them under military attack. The result is a lost opportunity to create a more comfortable climate on the way to an agreement. The damage in political, economic, human, moral and security terms of this choice is obvious; it harms the chances for an agreement, which in any case is complex and difficult. From the Palestinians’ point of view, retaking Gaza will mean an increase in the violence they experience every day. The victims are not only people losing their lives, but those increasingly losing hope. more.. e-mail

Urgent Action Needed – No New EU-Israel Action Plan!!
Palestinian Grassroots Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign, Stop The Wall 12/4/2008
     The European Parliament (EP) has recently announced that a vote will be held on December 4 to enter into force the EU-Israel Association Agreement, which will enable far greater Israeli participation in European Community programs.Originally, the EU had stated that the vote on this issue would not take place until 2009, but it seems clear that the EU and Israel are attempting to minimize the voice of international civil society by suddenly announcing that it has been moved up to December 4.
     The proposed agreement offers to Israel full access to the EU scientific, academic, research and technical programmes, and will significantly deepen EU-Israeli cooperation and integration in many important sectors. It ignores the fact that these sorts of cooperation agreements that increase Israel’s relationships with the international community are one of Israel’s primary means of its ongoing occupation, the displacement of and systematic racial discrimination against the Palestinian people. By engaging in this agreement, the EU sends the message that it effectively condones the Israeli apartheid regime, and that it will not challenge Israel on its massive violations of Palestinian rights. more.. e-mail

Rebuilding a General Union of Palestinian Students
Raja Abdulhaq, Electronic Intifada 12/1/2008
     From the very beginning, students have played an active role in the Palestinian national movement. Their enthusiasm, motivation, and hard work help them to overcome even the most daunting tasks. Organizing rallies, academic events, political debates, fundraising, cultural programs, students demonstrate the great influence they are able to assert on societies divided by war, engrossed by political strife, and weakened by economic turmoil.
     The General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS) has been driven by the goal of organizing and uniting student activists devoted to helping achieve justice and freedom for the Palestinian people. GUPS is a student founded organization dedicated to presenting agenda that informs and educates people about Palestine, Arabs, and the nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
     Historically, GUPS has always played a significant role in the Palestinian cause. Officially launched in 1959 in Cairo, Egypt, there were more than 100 GUPS branches worldwide, and more than 100,000 students were involved. GUPS was active in coordinating with other student groups and raising awareness about the Palestinian. However, it collapsed after the Oslo Accords in the mid-1990s. more.. e-mail

Law Over Gun
Rami G. Khouri, Middle East Online 12/1/2008
     BEIRUT - One of the great weaknesses in the modern Middle East that explains much of the chronic violence and political thuggery of the past half century is the thin state of the rule of law in comparison with the rule of the gun.
     Three separate developments now taking place in different parts of the Arab world might have real consequences for this region’s future: the International Criminal Court (ICC) indictment against the Sudanese president Omar Hassan Bashir, the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) approved by the Iraqi parliament to see the United States withdraw fully by the end of 2011, and the mixed Lebanese-international special tribunal that will try those to be accused of killing former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri and a dozen other public figures.
     These three very different dynamics have one thing in common that is unusual and crucial for the Arab World: They bring into play law and accountability as antidotes to runaway homegrown political killings and brutality, and foreign military interference. They may well reveal whether we are destined long to remain plagued by political violence and dictatorship, or can anticipate a better future where citizens and entire societies are protected by the rule of law. more.. e-mail

Israel Becoming Greater and Greater Cause for Concern
Editorial, Jordan Times, Palestine Media Center 11/30/2008
     Israel, the “only democracy in the Middle East” (trademark), is becoming a greater and greater cause for concern.
     There is its inability and unwillingness to abide by international law and international norms. For 41 years, the country has illegally occupied land it seized in war and refused to contemplate giving this back to its rightful owners.
     There is the country’s appalling human rights record. Nearly half the people under its control, i.e., the 5 million Palestinians of the occupied territories and the one million Palestinians with Israeli citizenship, suffer varying degrees of outright discrimination.
     In Israel, a poverty-stricken community is denied fair allocations of land and resources, while being underrepresented in a polity that defines itself while excluding them. more.. e-mail

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