Starving a Nation: From the World's Largest Concentration Camp
« on: 2008-11-19 09:46:53 »
MIDEAST: On Top of Humanitarian Disaster, A News Blackout
Source: IPS Authors: Cherrie Heywood Dated: 2008-11-18 Datelined: Ramallah, West Bank
Israel has imposed a virtual news blackout on the Gaza Strip. For the last ten days no foreign journalists have been able to enter the besieged territory to report on the escalating humanitarian crisis caused by Israel's complete closure of Gaza's borders for the last two weeks.
Steve Gutkin, the AP bureau chief in Jerusalem and head of Israel's Foreign Press Association, said that he personally "knows of no foreign journalist that has been allowed into Gaza in the last week."
Gutkin said that "while Israel has barred foreign press from entering Gaza in the past, the length of the current ban makes it unprecedented." He added that he has received no "plausible or acceptable" explanation for the ban from the Israeli government.
AP has relied on reports from two of its journalists who were able to enter Gaza days before the closure began and are currently stuck there.
A delegation of European Union parliamentarians was also prevented from entering Gaza to assess the situation on the ground and to hold talks with Hamas leaders. They subsequently broke the naval siege of Gaza by entering the coast's territorial waters from Cyprus by boat, defying the Israeli navy.
During talks held with Hamas, the EU parliamentarians were able to get a historic commitment from the Islamic organisation to recognise Israel's right to exist within the internationally recognised 1967 borders. Hamas further offered a long-term ceasefire in return for Israel legitimising Palestinian rights.
Israel also prevented 20 European Union consul-generals from entering Gaza on Thursday. On Sunday Israeli border police prevented 15 trucks loaded with medication from entering the Gaza Strip.
EU commissioner for external relations and European neighbourhood policy, Bentita Ferrero-Waldner, has expressed strong reservations. "I am profoundly concerned about the consequences for the Gazan population of the complete closure of all Gaza crossings for deliveries of fuel and basic humanitarian assistance," Ferrero-Waldner said in a statement Friday.
Karen AbuZayd, head of the UN Relief and Welfare Agency (UNRWA) which cares for Palestinian refugees, added that it was unusual for Israel not to let basic food and medicines in. "This has alarmed us more than usual because it's never been quite so long and so bad, and there has never been so much negative response on what we need," she said.
Israel closed the borders following a barrage of rockets fired by Palestinian resistance fighters at Israeli towns bordering the Gaza Strip.
The tit-for-tat violence began on Nov. 4 when the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) launched a cross-border raid into Gaza, breaking a shaky five-month ceasefire with Hamas. The purpose was ostensibly to destroy a tunnel built by Palestinians allegedly to smuggle captured Israeli soldiers.
More than 20 Palestinians were killed in Israeli raids. Two Israelis were lightly injured in the subsequent rocket attacks.
The timing of Israel's breach of the ceasefire is curious in that hundreds of these smuggling tunnels have existed ever since Hamas took over the strip in June last year. They have been used to smuggle everyday necessities as well as arms because the territory is hermetically sealed by Israel.
John Ging, director of UNRWA in Gaza, who has lived there for the past three years, questioned the alleged security reasoning behind the closure. Since the ceasefire went into place this summer, Ging said, fewer supplies have passed through the crossing than in the beginning of 2006, when the western Negev in Israel suffered incessant rocket fire from Gaza.
At that time the Palestinian Authority (PA), which is supported by Israel and the international community, was ruling Gaza in a unity government with Hamas.
"Last week we were unable to feed 60,000 of Gaza's neediest refugees due to our warehouses running out of food. UNRWA supplies half of Gaza's population of 1.5 million people with emergency rations, and 20,000 people are fed per day when there are adequate supplies," Ging told IPS.
Seventy percent of Gaza experienced electricity blackouts after Israel prevented deliveries of diesel fuel, forcing Gaza's main power plant to close down.
"The Israelis were only allowing 2.2 to 2.5 million litres of fuel in per week prior to the closure, which was the minimum required to operate the power plant. The plant has a capacity for 20 million litres and this would last two months under normal circumstances and tide over emergency periods. But this has all run out," Ging said.
Kan'an Ubeid, deputy chief of the Palestinian Energy Authority, said at a press conference in Gaza that in addition to the shutdown of the diesel-fuelled power plant, the electric network bringing in power from Israel collapsed due to increased pressure on the system.
Gazans also ran out of cooking gas while Gaza's Coastal Municipalities Water Utility (CMWU) was forced to pump tonnes of untreated sewage into the ocean due to fuel shortages and the lack of spare parts for equipment in need of repairs and new parts.
Much of this will flow back into Gaza's underground water table, and the threat of contaminated drinking water spreading diseases has increased.
Meanwhile, the emergency and ambulance services director-general, Mu'awiyya Hassanein, says Gaza's health ministry is short of more than 300 types of necessary medication.
Sammy Hassan, a spokesman from Gaza city's main Shifa hospital said only urgent surgery was being carried out. "We have delayed all non-urgent surgery as our small generator has stopped working, as we can't import a vital spare part.
"We are down to 30,000 litres of fuel left to run the larger generator which is used when electricity is cut. Under the current circumstances with no electricity we require 10,000 litres per day," Hassan told IPS.
Philip Luther, deputy director of Amnesty International's Middle East programme, said that Israel's latest tightening of the blockade had "made an already dire humanitarian situation markedly worse. This is nothing short of collective punishment on Gaza's civilian population, and it must stop immediately."
Following international pressure and protests from the EU, Israel allowed 30 trucks of humanitarian aid to enter the strip Monday. "It will last a matter of days," said UNRWA spokesman Christopher Gunness. "But then what?"
Oxfam's spokesman in Jerusalem Michael Bailey, who coordinates a number of humanitarian projects in Gaza, said this response was entirely inadequate.
"Thirty trucks of aid after a closure of 10 days is insufficient. What we need is a complete revision of the embargo on Gaza. Dialogue with the relevant political leaders is the only way forward," Bailey told IPS.
"Both Israel and Gaza's other neighbours need to put the human rights and essential needs of Gazans above all considerations if there is to be a way out of this quagmire."
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
Re:Starving a Nation: From the World's Largest Concentration Camp
« Reply #1 on: 2008-11-26 22:41:47 »
Quote:
Posted by: Hermit Posted on: 2008-11-19 09:46:53 MIDEAST: On Top of Humanitarian Disaster, A News Blackout
It sure generates despair to read stuff like this, so few hurting so many.
Sigh
Fritz
Abbas adviser moots elections in West Bank alone
Source: Reuters Africa Author: Wafa Amr Date: Mon 24 Nov 2008, 13:05 GMT
RAMALLAH, West Bank, Nov 24 (Reuters) - Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas could hold elections in the occupied West Bank alone if Hamas prevents the ballot from taking place in Gaza, an Abbas aide said on Monday.
Locked in a power struggle with Hamas Islamists who refuse to accept peacemaking with Israel, Abbas is trying to restore his authority as the representative of all Palestinians, a year and a half after Hamas drove his Fatah forces from Gaza and took control in the coastal territory. On Sunday, he pledged to hold presidential and parliamentary elections next year if an Egyptian-led bid to secure rapprochement between the rival Palestinian factions fails.
Hamas insists it will not recognise Abbas as president once his four-year term expires on Jan. 9. It has demanded a new presidential election, but has rejected Abbas's demand to hold simultaneous parliamentary elections which could cut short Hamas's formal dominance of the Palestinian legislature.
"All efforts are focused now, until early next year, on the success of the national dialogue," senior Abbas adviser Nimer Hammad told Reuters.
Should Abbas go ahead and call a ballot, he said, Palestinian election officials will be dispatched to Gaza.
"If Hamas forcibly prevents them preparing for elections in Gaza, this is not going to stop the elections from being held. We will hold the elections in the West Bank and Hamas would be responsible for preventing the elections in Gaza," Hammad said.
Middle East watchers seem increasingly sceptical about an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal any time soon.
"What Israeli prime minister could ever make concessions to a Palestinian leader who doesn't control all of the guns?" former U.S. Middle East adviser Aaron David Miller wrote in a commentary in the Jerusalem Post on Monday.
"Only by restoring unity to the Palestinian house will a conflict-ending agreement be possible."
"POLITICAL TRICK"
Hamas won the last Palestinian election in January 2006, confounding Western hopes that the vote would reinforce Abbas and his secular Fatah faction as they pursue talks with Israel.
Hundreds of Hamas supporters including some lawmakers have since been arrested in Israeli raids and by Abbas' security forces. Abbas fired the Hamas-led government after the Islamist group took over Gaza in fighting with Fatah loyalists who were driven out. Fatah still holds sway over the West Bank. Egypt has tried to broker Palestinian rapprochement, but with little gain.
Hamas rejected Abbas's call for early elections.
"Such a political trick will not save him," senior Hamas official Mahmoud al-Zahar told reporters in Gaza on Monday.
"The call for elections is a manifestation of the crisis in which he is living, and cannot take place unless decided upon by a parliamentary majority," he said.
"This cannot take place while our leaders are in prisons and as long as there is a strong possibility of fraud."
Washington had pressed Israel not to block the 2006 election over the participation of Hamas. Israeli and U.S. officials say neither Israel or the United States will want to take such a risk again, unless Hamas changes course and renounces violence.
Zahar doubted whether America would accept a Hamas victory.
Hammad voiced hope for reuniting the Palestinian polity under Fatah.
"This so-called Hamas entity in Gaza has to come to an end, and we hope this division will end through the ballot boxes," he said. "Hamas does not want a dialogue nor elections. We cannot accept the continuation of this division."
(Additional reporting by Nidal al-Mughrabi in Gaza; Writing by Dan Williams in Jerusalem; Editing by Douglas Hamilton and Mark Trevelyan)
Re:Starving a Nation: From the World's Largest Concentration Camp
« Reply #2 on: 2008-11-30 10:07:30 »
The slow death of Gaza The collective punishment of Gaza's civilian population is illegal. But international law was tossed aside long ago
[Hermit: Seems strange to me for people to be discussing the idea that meaningful elections can be held in an occupied area where its population is being starved, while most of its elected representatives are jailed by the occupying forces and its Vichy administration, where the only permitted candidates would be quislings, hand selected by their apartheid-style overlords - and where none of these rather relevant factors are even mentioned in the discussions. Are people really stupid enough to imagine that elections held under such conditions could be valid, or do they think that discussing this atrocity in the measured tones of political discourse and ignoring the bodies behind the arras will make the stink go away?]
Source: The Guardian Authors: Andrea Becker Dated: 2008-11-24
It has been two weeks since Israel imposed a complete closure of Gaza, after months when its crossings have been open only for the most minimal of humanitarian supplies. Now it is even worse: two weeks without United Nations food trucks for the 80% of the population entirely dependent on food aid, and no medical supplies or drugs for Gaza's ailing hospitals. No fuel (paid for by the EU) for Gaza's electricity plant, and no fuel for the generators during the long blackouts. Last Monday morning, 33 trucks of food for UN distribution were finally let in – a few days of few supplies for very few, but as the UN asks, then what?
Israel's official explanation for blocking even minimal humanitarian aid, according to IDF spokesperson Major Peter Lerner, was "continued rocket fire and security threats at the crossings". Israel's blockade, in force since Hamas seized control of Gaza in mid-2007, can be described as an intensification of policies designed to isolate the population of Gaza, cripple its economy, and incentivise the population against Hamas by harsh – and illegal – measures of collective punishment. However, these actions are not all new: the blockade is but the terminal end of Israel's closure policy, in place since 1991, which in turn builds on Israel's policies as occupier since 1967.
In practice, Israel's blockade means the denial of a broad range of items – food, industrial, educational, medical – deemed "non-essential" for a population largely unable to be self-sufficient at the end of decades of occupation. It means that industrial, cooking and diesel fuel, normally scarce, are virtually absent now. There are no queues at petrol stations; they are simply shut. The lack of fuel in turn means that sewage and treatment stations cannot function properly, resulting in decreased potable water and tens of millions of litres of untreated or partly treated sewage being dumped into the sea every day. Electricity cuts – previously around eight hours a day, now up to 16 hours a day in many areas – affect all homes and hospitals. Those lucky enough to have generators struggle to find the fuel to make them work, or spare parts to repair them when they break from overuse. Even candles are running out.
There can be no dispute that measures of collective punishment against the civilian population of Gaza are illegal under international humanitarian law. Fuel and food cannot be withheld or wielded as reward or punishment. But international law was tossed aside long ago. The blockade has been presented as punishment for the democratic election of Hamas, punishment for its subsequent takeover of Gaza, and punishment for militant attacks on Israeli civilians. The civilians of Gaza, from the maths teacher in a United Nations refugee camp to the premature baby in an incubator, properly punished for actions over which they have no control, will rise up and get rid of Hamas. Or so it goes.
And so what of these civilian agents of political change?
For all its complexities and tragedies, the over-arching effect of Israel's blockade has been to reduce the entire population to survival mode. Individuals are reduced to the daily detail of survival, and its exhaustions.
Consider Gaza's hospital staff. In hospitals, the blockade is as seemingly benign as doctors not having paper upon which to write diagnostic results or prescriptions, and as sinister as those seconds – between power cut and generator start – when a child on life support doesn't have the oxygen of a mechanical ventilator. A nurse on a neo-natal ward rushes between patients, battling the random schedule of power cuts. A hospital worker tries to keep a few kidney dialysis machines from breaking down, by farming spare parts from those that already have. The surgeon operates without a bulb in the surgery lamp, across from the anaesthetist who can no longer prevent patient pain. The hospital administrator updates lists of essential drugs and medical supplies that have run out, which vaccines from medical fridges are now unusable because they can't be kept cold, and which procedures must be cancelled altogether. The ambulance driver decides whether to respond to an emergency call, based on dwindling petrol in the tank.
By reducing the population to survival mode, the blockade robs people of the time and essence to do anything but negotiate the minutiae of what is and isn't possible in their personal and professional lives. Whether any flour will be available to make bread, where it might be found, how much it now costs. Rich or poor, taxi drivers, human rights defenders, and teachers alike spend hours speculating about where a canister of cooking gas might be found. Exhaustion is gripping hold of all in Gaza. Survival leaves little if no room for political engagement – and beyond exhaustion, anger and frustration are all that is left.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
A week of Israeli settler outrages against Palestinians and against Israel's own security forces reached a crescendo over the last 24 hours with settlers opening fire on Palestinian civilians and unleashing violent disturbances across the West Bank. Israel's Justice Minister, Daniel Friedman, has just called the events a "shocking pogrom", journalists have described how their presence saved Palestinian residents of a home near Kiryat Arba from a lynching, and IDF sources described how the right wing activists "want to spark a religious war that would inflame the entire region." The belated IDF action in upholding a court order to evict settlers from a home that they illegally occupied in Hebron, led by Defense Minister Barak, was at least effective, although the same cannot be said of the limp-wristed measures taken in the face of settler rampages against Palestinians, and of the general approach to settler lawlessness.
While the Israeli press is full of graphic descriptions of the settler outrages, there has been remarkably little coverage in the American mainstream media, and as Jeff Goldberg points out on his Atlantic blog, there was no mention at all in the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organization's daily news digest (Daily Alert)--not surprising given that it is put together by the right-wing Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs led by Dore Gold. Settler extremism has become a strategic issue with implications for American policy, American private funding of settlements, and how to manage the security dynamic in the West Bank.
The litany of settler actions over this week makes for particularly bleak reading on a Friday night. On the walls of home and in mosques in the West Bank villages of Yatma, Sanjil, Turmus Ayya, and Isawiyya, graffiti has been scrawled reading "Mohammed the pig" and "Death to the Arabs", elsewhere cemeteries have been desecrated, Palestinian homes set on fire, olive trees uprooted, tires punctured, and yesterday two Palestinians were shot and seriously wounded by settler fire. Israeli security forces overseeing the evacuation of the Hebron house and sometimes trying to bring order were stoned and assaulted by settlers, along with the customary hurling of choice abuse, notably the word "Nazi". According to the Israeli Yedioth Ahronot newspaper, Ethiopian IDF soldiers "enjoyed" their own variation on the abuse theme, being told "niggers don't expel Jews".
All of this should not be described as madness. It was premeditated and there was a plan behind it that the Israeli establishment is calling a "price tag". In the immediate term, the settlers were hoping to prevent the evacuation of the Hebron house by setting off violence across the West Bank and by trying to provoke a Palestinian response that would in turn require the IDF to focus elsewhere and therefore be unable to carry out the Hebron mission. But the real goal was to send a signal that any future settler evacuation would carry a price far more bloody and devastating than the Gaza Disengagement of summer 2005--namely, to inflame the entire Occupied Territories, if not the region. The settlers (thus far at least) did not achieve that goal, but they have certainly caused great damage, and it would not be an exaggeration today to call settler extremism a potentially strategic destabilizing factor in the Middle East.
And yes I know, when I say settlers it is not all settlers, but let's not be naïve. Extremism is deeply entrenched in the settler movement. This does not apply to the economic settlers or what could be termed the "accidental settlers" close to the Green Line--their sin is one of indifference. But the settler movement has nurtured and produced this phenomenon of extremism, just read Akiva Eldar and Idith Zertal's "Lords of the Land", or Gershom Gorenberg's book "The Accidental Empire". The most noticeable aspect of the settler presence this week were the youths, often barely in their teens, and who might be described as Israel's child soldiers, high on the teachings of fanatical religious leaders. As Ben Caspit writes in today's Ma'ariv: Quote:
The hilltop youth...are not errant weeds, we are talking about a well-ordered organization with a hierarchy, with rabbis, with separate incitement, with a combat doctrine and with weaponry...they have messianic insanity in their eyes...This monster has to be stopped now. Afterwards, it will be too late.
In fact, this was the tone in much of the Israeli press (and not just in Ha'aretz) and from much of the Israeli establishment. Senior sources in the Israeli Prime Minister's office were quoted as saying "these Jewish terrorists are as bad and dangerous as Arab terrorists." The American mainstream media, which tends to get very excited at Arab violence, had precious little to say either in the print or electronic media.
Beyond the shock and condemnation, the lurch by hard-line settlers toward a more extreme and confrontational approach has implications for Israeli and American policies. On the Israeli side, the state long ago ceased to uphold its own laws when it comes to the coddled settler community. That community now poses a direct threat to Israel's survival as a democracy with a Jewish character, in which the rule of law is upheld. And as this week proved, the hard-line settlers have become a clear and present danger to Israel--only drastic measures will suffice.
But I want to focus for a moment on the consequences for American policy, and in particular for a new Administration. The U.S. is on paper opposed to settlement expansion. The U.S. narrative, though, has shifted. Initially settlements were characterized by the U.S. as "illegal"--that description was dropped by the Reagan Administration and never returned to. Settlements became no more than "unhelpful" and later on an "obstacle to peace"--a language which the Bush Administration has occasionally used. What the U.S. has not done is to take a firm, consistent, and unrelenting position that Israel uphold its commitment to a settlement freeze--and without such U.S. action, the Israeli cost-benefit calculation on settlement expansion vs. freeze is always skewed in favor of the former.
This week, the Council on Foreign Relations and the Saban Center at Brookings released a report in the form of a book, entitled "Restoring the Balance: A Middle East Strategy for the Next President", including a chapter addressing the Arab-Israeli conflict. One of its five key recommendations was for the U.S. to "press Israel to freeze settlement construction" (they also recommended bringing Hamas into the fold, but that's another story). The Report went on to suggest how this might be done: "Both public criticism of Israeli settlement policy as well as conditioning portions of aid to a settlement freeze can be effective in eliciting Israeli compliance." So that's Brookings and CFR--and it doesn't get much more establishment than them--linking U.S. aid to Israel to a settlement freeze. Interesting, methinks.
Many groups in the U.S. (including right-wing Christian Zionists) provide financial support to settlements and settler causes (see here and here), often to 501(c) 3s as tax-deductible, charitable contributions, and that is something into which an investigation is long overdue. Jewish groups in particular should be vocal in their opposition to settlements (see Bernard Avishai on J Street here at TPM). After the Shin Bet Chief spoke of certain settlers groups posing a security threat, my colleague Steve Clemons suggested on his blog that the U.S. investigate and place those in question on the Terror Watch List. U.S. efforts to support the Palestinian economy and ease the closure and checkpoints (for details see the U.N.'s OCHA website) are undermined most of all by the existence of settlements scattered throughout the West Bank, which are protected by the IDF, have their own access roads, whose residents demand freedom of movement, and whose existence largely dictates Israeli-imposed restrictions on Palestinian mobility.
American efforts at building up Palestinian security capacity are also compromised by the settler scourge. The Palestinian Security Forces (PSF) will be unable to stand by and watch for long as settler militants unleash their wrath on the Palestinian population--indeed their intention is to provoke a PSF response.
And finally of course, the greatest threat to the entire two-state solution is the settlements enterprise. In short, there is no credible peace policy unless one is willing to get hard-assed about settlements--and that is true for both Israel and the U.S.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
Basic human rights, such as health, a life of dignity, education, housing, equality, freedom from racism, freedom of expression, privacy and democracy are increasingly being violated in Israel, a human rights watchdog group warned Sunday.
In its annual report, the Association of Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) pointed to "extremely worrisome trends at the center of which are violations of the most elementary human rights."
The report also noted that the situation in the occupied West Bank, between Israeli settlers and the local Palestinian population, was "reminiscent, in many and increasing ways, of the apartheid regime in South Africa." [ Hermit : Except as noted by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, ex Minister of Intelligence Services Ronnie Kasrils (who is Jewish) and Nelson Mandela, all of whom ought to be in a position to know, the Apartheid Government in South Africa treated its Blacks a lot less brutally than the Israeli Government treats Palestinians, didn't ever fire rockets at cars or marketplaces full of civilians, never established a concentration camp for blacks, and didn't ever try to starve the Blacks into submission. They also, despite an abysmal record of censorship, never approached Israel's level of news micromanagement. Which might be one reason why the Blacks of South Africa were never demonized, or their white oppressors perceived as victims. Which might be why Ronnie Kasril's, visiting Israel, did not compare the Israeli government to that of Apartheid South Africa. Instead he said, "...we must call baby killers 'baby killers' and declare that those using methods reminiscent of the Nazis be told that they are behaving like Nazis." I tend to agree.]
The ACRI noted that since the foundation of Israel, the country's Arab citizens have been discriminated against though legislation and allocation of resources.
In addition, women were widely discriminated against in the workplace, earning less money than men in nearly every profession, with a higher rate of unemployment, and with representation in the Israeli academia 10 per cent lower than the average in any of the European Union nations.
While the discrimination between Jews of European origins and those of Oriental or Middle Eastern origin has now been virtually eradicated, the report said, the socioeconomic gap between the two groups has grown, which bolsters a feeling of discrimination.
As regards the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian areas, the ACRI said that Israeli settlements in the West Bank have resulted in institutionalized discrimination in which two separate populations live under two separate judicial systems.
Allocation of funds and services in the occupied area is also unequal and settler violence against local Palestinians has grown.
Many of the 430 people killed and 1,150 wounded in the West Bank by Israeli security forces in 2008 were innocent bystanders, the report said, without giving exact figures.
The report went on to note that despite progressive labour legislation in Israel, the rights of employees are still violated, or at least not enforced, and many services remain physically inaccessible to the handicapped, who also suffer from a high rate of unemployment compared to the rest of the population.
However, the ACRI did find that the rights of gays in Israel were relatively advanced compared to other Western countries, and gay couples enjoyed the same rights as common-law couples.
The report was published to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
Re:Starving a Nation: From the World's Largest Concentration Camp
« Reply #5 on: 2008-12-12 04:35:50 »
Livni: Future of Israel's Arabs is in Palestinian state (Extra)
[ Hermit : After this, I don't understand how anybody can possibly object to characterizing Zionism as "Apartheid with added brutality". Here we have Dr Verwoed's policy of "Separate Development" (better known as Apartheid) being articulated by a supposedly centrist party leader. Why this hate-speech promoting ethnic cleansing is not widely reported in the world press is a question every publisher should be required to answer.]
Source: Middle East News Authors: Not credited Dated: 2008-12-11
Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said Thursday that the future of Israel's Arab citizens was in a future Palestinian state to be established in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
'My solution (for preserving Israel as a Jewish and a democratic state) is to establish two nation states wih certain concessions and with clear red lines,' Livni, who heads Israel's ruling, centrist Kadima party, told high-school pupils in Tel Aviv.
'So I could also come to Israel's Palestinian citizens, those whom we call Arab Israelis and tell them: 'Your national solution is somewhere else.''
The idea of moving Israel's Arab citizens or the areas in which they live to the future Palestinian state is regarded as highly controversial in Israel and her remark was thought to be the first time Livni has spoken publicly in favour of it.
Her spokespeople were not immediately available for comment. Livni is in a neck-and-neck race with Benjamin Netanyahu of the hardline Likud party, who has in recent weeks obtained a lead in opinion over her Kadima party to win the upcoming February 10 elections.
Over the past weeks, she has expressed markedly hardline positions, among others by speaking out against the Gaza truce.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
Re:Starving a Nation: From the World's Largest Concentration Camp
« Reply #7 on: 2008-12-12 18:08:20 »
Quote:
[Mermaid]i have been trying to get to the youtube videos linked from the comments section. what is a 'malformed video ID' and how to rectify it?
[Fritz]Cut and pasting the URL to the browser line seems to work, so I'm guessing the hyperlink on the page called "Here", is not syntactically correct.
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
Re:Starving a Nation: From the World's Largest Concentration Camp
« Reply #10 on: 2008-12-13 11:11:32 »
Joy is in short supply for Eid
Gaza's blockade means that this is the hardest holiday its people can remember.
Sources: The Independent Authors: Donald Macintyre Dated: 2008-12-13
Ironic text messages of goodwill for the great festival of Eid Al Adha – easily as central to the Muslim calendar as Christmas is in the West – became the vogue in Gaza this week.
"Despite there being no salaries, the money we don't have to give to our children, the high price of Egyptian lamb, and the switching off of power, we will celebrate by the light of an Egyptian candle," read one. It summed up the daily power cuts, the utter impossibility for most families this year of affording the traditional Eid sheep and the fact that smuggling tunnels under the border with Egypt have turned into a lifeline for the 1.5 million inhabitants of blockaded, Hamas-controlled Gaza.
The sardonic text message marking the most miserable Eid in Gaza anyone can remember came up on the mobile belonging to Adel Razeq. He runs Gaza's National Agency for Family Care and has been struggling with meagre resources to set up a "food bank" intended to distribute meals – in some cases repackaged leftovers from restaurants, wedding parties and even funerals – to the growing legion of undernourished in Gaza, where more than 50 per cent of families have for the first time been classified as living below the "deep poverty" line of £315 per month for two adults and six children.
Mr Razeq's team has identified severe need in 10 times the 400 to 500 families he is already helping and he believes that a much higher underlying demand is hidden by the pride of unemployed fathers. "We even get kids coming in here when the parents won't," he explains. "They will say 'I love my dad but he can't give us what we need'."
Certainly, the jobless man of the house remains discreetly indoors as his daughter, Besma El Ghoulah, 19, prepares this year's apology for an Eid feast for a family of 15: half a sheep's stomach cooking over an outdoor fire from wood foraged in the street. It was a neighbour's present to Besma's brother-in-law, who lost his job in a factory brought to a halt by Israel's blockade on commercial goods imposed after Hamas took full control of Gaza by force in June 2007. Unable to afford fruit or red meat, the family usually only eats a fresh chicken once a month. Besma says that her two- year-old brother Bilal has been diagnosed with slow growth and anaemia, reinforcing the recently leaked findings of the Red Cross that chronic malnutrition in Gaza is on the rise.
Meanwhile, two other Eid traditions – the menfolk visiting their female relatives and giving new clothes to the children – have this year been nullified. "My father didn't go out of the house," explains Besma. "He has no money to travel. Sometimes my father cries when he has no money to give my little brother sweets."
Not far away in the city's eastern Shajaia suburb, Eid has been even bleaker under the leaky asbestos roof of the ramshackle three-room house where Rabbia Farahad, 59, lives with his wife, Najah, and 10 children. Mrs Farahad says the family have fruit once a month and vegetables once a week. "If we have apples I give out half of one to each," she says. The family epitomise another conclusion of the Red Cross report, that mutual support mechanisms are beginning to break down. "This is the worst Eid we have ever been through," says Mr Farahad, who used to be a farmworker in Israel. "Before, people used to help us but now no one has any money."
The family has no compunction in citing the de facto Hamas government – and its split with Fatah – among the culprits. "First I blame the Israeli occupation [for the blockade]," says Mr Farahad's 16-year-old daughter Tahani, before adding sarcastically: "Then I blame our two beloved governments. They are the reason for this." For Tahani, as for so many other Gazans, the only answer is, "unity of Fatah, Hamas and the rest of the factions".
Adeeb Yusef Zarouk, 46, a father of seven, can remember the prosperous Eids his family enjoyed when he worked as a welder in Israel. His only living repairing satellite dishes has dried up because his customers have no money. He says he too would "love to see" a unity government. But blaming malign influence by Iran and Syria, he doesn't think it will happen after Hamas's no-show at talks brokered by Cairo. An opponent of Hamas, he is cynical about the possible renewal next week of the ceasefire, noting that it did not open the crossings or restart the economy when it was enforced for four months. "The truce will be extended because Israel and Hamas will benefit," he says. "But it won't help the public."
He believes, like many other Gazans, that Israel's blockade is having exactly the opposite effect to that it intends. Jobless young people are being given little option but to join Hamas or another armed faction. Charging that Hamas had distributed $100 payments to its supporters this Eid, he says: "This siege is having a very strong effect on the people but though they say it is against Hamas it is not affecting Hamas at all. The Israelis don't know what they are doing. Hamas is the only one who is benefiting."
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
But Israel defended the action, with Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni declaring that Falk, a Princeton professor who condemned the Israeli blockade on the Gaza Strip, was "unwelcome in Israel." A later statement from the Israeli Foreign Ministry accused Professor Falk of "legitimizing Hamas terrorism." Israeli human rights group B’Tselem condemned the move, saying that barring the entry of the professor was "an act unbefitting of democracy."
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
Re:Starving a Nation: From the World's Largest Concentration Camp
« Reply #12 on: 2008-12-16 20:58:40 »
[Fritz]Thought this added to the reality and threaded it in time as well.
Slouching toward a Palestinian Holocaust
Source: transnational Author: Richard Falk Date: June 29, 2007
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born? William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming
There is little doubt that the Nazi Holocaust was as close to unconditional evil as has been revealed throughout the entire bloody history of the human species. Its massiveness, unconcealed genocidal intent, and reliance on the mentality and instruments of modernity give its enactment in the death camps of Europe a special status in our moral imagination. This special status is exhibited in the continuing presentation of its gruesome realities through film, books, and a variety of cultural artifacts more than six decades after the events in question ceased. The permanent memory of the Holocaust is also kept alive by the existence of several notable museums devoted exclusively to the depiction of the horrors that took place during the period of Nazi rule in Germany.
Against this background, it is especially painful for me, as an American Jew, to feel compelled to portray the ongoing and intensifying abuse of the Palestinian people by Israel through a reliance on such an inflammatory metaphor as ‘holocaust.’ The word is derived from the Greek holos (meaning ‘completely’) and kaustos (meaning ‘burnt’), and was used in ancient Greece to refer to the complete burning of a sacrificial offering to a divinity. Because such a background implies a religious undertaking, there is some inclination in Jewish literature to prefer the Hebrew word ‘Shoah’ that can be translated roughly as ‘calamity,’ and was the name given to the 1985 epic nine-hour narration of the Nazi experience by the French filmmaker, Claude Lanzmann. The Germans themselves were more antiseptic in their designation, officially naming their undertaking as the ‘Final Solution of the Jewish Qestion.’ The label is, of course, inaccurate as a variety of non-Jewish identities were also targets of this genocidal assault, including the Roma and Sinti(‘gypsies), Jehovah Witnesses, gays, disabled persons, political opponents.
Is it an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not. The recent developments in Gaza are especially disturbing because they express so vividly a deliberate intention on the part of Israel and its allies to subject an entire human community to life-endangering conditions of utmost cruelty. The suggestion that this pattern of conduct is a holocaust-in-the-making represents a rather desperate appeal to the governments of the world and to international public opinion to act urgently to prevent these current genocidal tendencies from culminating in a collective tragedy. If ever the ethos of ‘a responsibility to protect,’ recently adopted by the UN Security Council as the basis of ‘humanitarian intervention’ is applicable, it would be to act now to start protecting the people of Gaza from further pain and suffering. But it would be unrealistic to expect the UN to do anything in the face of this crisis, given the pattern of US support for Israel and taking into account the extent to which European governments have lent their weight to recent illicit efforts to crush Hamas as a Palestinian political force.
Even if the pressures exerted on Gaza were to be acknowledged as having genocidal potential and even if Israel’s impunity under America’s geopolitical umbrella is put aside, there is little assurance that any sort of protective action in Gaza would be taken. There were strong advance signals in 1994 of a genocide to come in Rwanda, and yet nothing was done to stop it; the UN and the world watched while the 1995 Srebrenica massacre of Bosnians took place, an incident that the World Court described as ‘genocide’ a few months ago; similarly, there have been repeated allegations of genocidal conduct in Darfur over the course of the last several years, and hardly an international finger has been raised, either to protect those threatened or to resolve the conflict in some manner that shares power and resources among the contending ethnic groups.
But Gaza is morally far worse, although mass death has not yet resulted. It is far worse because the international community is watching the ugly spectacle unfold while some of its most influential members actively encourage and assist Israel in its approach to Gaza. Not only the United States, but also the European Union, are complicit, as are such neighbors as Egypt and Jordan apparently motivated by their worries that Hamas is somehow connected with their own problems associated with the rising strength of the Muslim Brotherhood within their own borders. It is helpful to recall that the liberal democracies of Europe paid homage to Hitler at the 1936 Olympic Games, and then turned away tens of thousands of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany. I am not suggesting that the comparison should be viewed as literal, but to insist that a pattern of criminality associated with Israeli policies in Gaza has actually been supported by the leading democracies of the 21st century.
To ground these allegations, it is necessary to consider the background of the current situation. For over four decades, ever since 1967, Gaza has been occupied by Israel in a manner that turned this crowded area into a cauldron of pain and suffering for the entire population on a daily basis, with more than half of Gazans living in miserable refugees camps and even more dependent on humanitarian relief to satisfy basic human needs. With great fanfare, under Sharon’s leadership, Israel supposedly ended its military occupation and dismantled its settlements in 2005. The process was largely a sham as Israel maintained full control over borders, air space, offshore seas, as well as asserted its military control of Gaza, engaging in violent incursions, sending missiles to Gaza at will on assassination missions that themselves violate international humanitarian law, and managing to kill more than 300 Gazan civilians since its supposed physical departure.
As unacceptable as is this earlier part of the story, a dramatic turn for the worse occurred when Hamas prevailed in the January 2006 national legislative elections. It is a bitter irony that Hamas was encouraged, especially by Washington, to participate in the elections to show its commitment to a political process (as an alternative to violence) and then was badly punished for having the temerity to succeed. These elections were internationally monitored under the leadership of the former American president, Jimmy Carter, and pronounced as completely fair.
Carter has recently termed this Israeli/American refusal to accept the outcome of such a democratic verdict as itself ‘criminal.’ It is also deeply discrediting of the campaign of the Bush presidency to promote democracy in the region, an effort already under a dark shadow in view of the policy failure in Iraq.
After winning the Palestinian elections, Hamas was castigated as a terrorist organization that had not renounced violence against Israel and had refused to recognize the Jewish state as a legitimate political entity. In fact, the behavior and outlook of Hamas is quite different. From the outset of its political Hamas was ready to work with other Palestinian groups, especially Fatah and Mahmoud Abbas, to establish a ‘unity’ government. More than this, their leadership revealed a willingness to move toward an acceptance of Israel’s existence if Israel would in turn agree to move back to its 1967 borders, implementing finally unanimous Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338.
Even more dramatically, Hamas proposed a ten-year truce with Israel, and went so far as to put in place a unilateral ceasefire that lasted for eighteen months, and was broken only to engage in rather pathetic strikes mainly taking place in response to Israeli violent provocations in Gaza. As Efraim Halevi, former head of Israel’s Mossad was reported to have said, ‘What Isreal needs from Hamas is an end to violence, not diplomatic recognition.’ And this is precisely what Hamas offered and what Israel rejected.
The main weapon available to Hamas, and other Palestinian extremist elements, were Qassam missiles that resulted in producing no more than 12 Israeli deaths in six years. While each civilian death is an unacceptable tragedy, the ratio of death and injury for the two sides in so unequal as to call into question the security logic of continuously inflicting excessive force and collective punishment on the entire beleaguered Gazan population, which is accurately regarded as the world’s largest ‘prison.’
Instead of trying diplomacy and respecting democratic results, Israel and the United States used their leverage to reverse the outcome of the 2006 elections by organizing a variety of international efforts designed to make Hamas fail in its attempts to govern in Gaza. Such efforts were reinforced by the related unwillingness of the defeated Fatah elements to cooperate with Hamas in establishing a government that would be representative of Palestinians as a whole. The main anti-Hamas tactic relied upon was to support Abbas as the sole legitimate leader of the Palestinian people, to impose an economic boycott on the Palestinians generally, to send in weapons for Fatah militias and to enlist neighbors in these efforts, particularly Egypt and Jordan. The United States Government appointed a special envoy, Lt. Gen. Keith Dayton, to work with Abbas forces, and helped channel $40 million to buildup the Presidential Guard, which were the Fatah forces associated with Abbas.
This was a particularly disgraceful policy. Fatah militias, especially in Gaza, had long been wildly corrupt and often used their weapons to terrorize their adversaries and intimidate the population in a variety of thuggish ways. It was this pattern of abuse by Fatah that was significantly responsible for the Hamas victory in the 2006 elections, along with the popular feelings that Fatah, as a political actor, had neither the will nor capacity to achieve results helpful to the Palestinian people, while Hamas had managed resistance and community service efforts that were widely admired by Gazans.
The latest phase of this external/internal dynamic was to induce civil strife in Gaza that led a complete takeover by Hamas forces. With standard irony, a set of policies adopted by Israel in partnership with the United States once more produced exactly the opposite of their intended effects. The impact of the refusal to honor the election results has after 18 months made Hamas much stronger throughout the Palestinian territories, and put it in control of Gaza. Such an outcome is reminiscent of a similar effect of the 2006 Lebanon War that was undertaken by the Israel/United States strategic partnership to destroy Hezbollah, but had the actual consequence of making Hezbollah a much stronger, more respected force in Lebanon and throughout the region.
The Israel and the United States seemed trapped in a faulty logic that is incapable of learning from mistakes, and takes every setback as a sign that instead of shifting course, the faulty undertaking should be expanded and intensified, that failure resulted from doing too little of the right thing, rather than is the case, doing the wrong thing. So instead of taking advantage of Hamas’ renewed call for a unity government, its clarification that it is not against Fatah, but only that “[w]e have fought against a small clique within Fatah,” (Abu Ubaya, Hamas military commander), Israel seems more determined than ever to foment civil war in Palestine, to make the Gazans pay with their wellbeing and lives to the extent necessary to crush their will, and to separate once and for all the destinies of Gaza and the West Bank.
The insidious new turn of Israeli occupation policy is as follows: push Abbas to rely on hard-line no compromise approach toward Hamas, highlighted by the creation of an unelected ‘emergency’ government to replace the elected leadership. The emergency designated prime minister, Salam Fayyad, appointed to replace the Hamas leader, Ismail Haniya, as head of the Palestinian Authority. It is revealing to recall that when Fayyad’s party was on the 2006 election list its candidates won only 2% of the vote. Israel is also reportedly ready to ease some West Bank restrictions on movement in such a way as to convince Palestinians that they can have a better future if they repudiate Hamas and place their bets on Abbas, by now a most discredited political figure who has substantially sold out the Palestinian cause to gain favor and support from Israel/United States, as well as to prevail in the internal Palestinian power struggle.
To promote these goals it is conceivable, although unlikely, that Israel might release Marwan Barghouti, the only credible Fatah leader, from prison provided Barghouti would be willing to accept the Israeli approach of Sharon/Olmert to the establishment of a Palestinian state. This latter step is doubtful, as Barghouti is a far cry from Abbas, and would be highly unlikely to agree to anything less than a full withdrawal of Israel to the 1967 borders, including the elimination of West Bank and East Jerusalem settlements.
This latest turn in policy needs to be understood in the wider context of the Israeli refusal to reach a reasonable compromise with the Palestinian people since 1967. There is widespread recognition that such an outcome would depend on Israeli withdrawal, establishment of a Palestinian state with full sovereignty on the West Bank and Gaza, with East Jerusalem as capital, and sufficient external financial assistance to give the Palestinians the prospect of economic viability. The truth is that there is no Israeli leadership with the vision or backing to negotiate such a solution, and so the struggle will continue with violence on both sides.
The Israeli approach to the Palestinian challenge is based on isolating Gaza and cantonizing the West Bank, leaving the settlement blocs intact, and appropriating the whole of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. For years this sidestepping of diplomacy has dominated Israeli behavior, including during the Oslo peace process that was initiated on the White House lawn in 1993 by the famous handshake between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasir Arafat.
While talking about peace, the number of Israeli settlers doubled, huge sums were invested in settlement roads linked directly to Israel, and the process of Israeli settlement and Palestinian displacement from East Jerusalem was moving ahead at a steady pace. Significantly, also, the ‘moderate’ Arafat was totally discredited as a Palestinian leader capable of negotiating with Israel, being treated as dangerous precisely because he was willing to accept a reasonable compromise. Interestingly, until recently when he became useful in the effort to reverse the Hamas electoral victory, Abbas was treated by Isreal as too weak, too lacking in authority, to act on behalf of the Palestinian people in a negotiating process, one more excuse for persisting with its preferred unilateralist course.
These considerations also make it highly unlikely that Barghouti will be released from prison unless there is some dramatic change of heart on the Israeli side. Instead of working toward some kind of political resolution, Israel has built an elaborate and illegal security wall on Palestinian territory, expanded the settlements, made life intolerable for the 1.4 million people crammed into Gaza, and pretends that such unlawful ‘facts on the ground’ are a path leading toward security and peace.
On June 25, 2007 leaders from Israel, Egypt, Jordan, and the Palestinian Authority met in Sharm El Sheik on the Red Sea to move ahead with their anti-Hamas diplomacy. Israel proposes to release 250 Fatah prisoners (of 9,000 Palestinians currently held) and to hand over Palestinian revenues to Abbas on an installment basis, provided none of the funds is used in Gaza, where a humanitarian catastrophe unfolds day by day. These leaders agreed to cooperate in this effort to break Hamas and to impose a Fatah-led Palestinian Authority on an unwilling Palestine population. Remember that Hamas prevailed in the 2006 elections, not only in Gaza, but in the West Bank as well. To deny Palestinian their right of self-determination is almost certain to backfire in a manner similar to similar efforts, producing a radicalized version of what is being opposed. As some commentators have expressed, getting rid of Hamas means establishing al Qaeda!
Israel is currently stiffening the boycott on economic relations that has brought the people of Gaza to the brink of collective starvation. This set of policies, carried on for more than four decades, has imposed a sub-human existence on a people that have been repeatedly and systematically made the target of a variety of severe forms of collective punishment. The entire population of Gaza is treated as the ‘enemy’ of Israel, and little pretext is made in Tel Aviv of acknowledging the innocence of this long victimized civilian society.
To persist with such an approach under present circumstances is indeed genocidal, and risks destroying an entire Palestinian community that is an integral part of an ethnic whole. It is this prospect that makes appropriate the warning of a Palestinian holocaust in the making, and should remind the world of the famous post-Nazi pledge of ‘never again.’
E2ca3bc6713642d99f3d33082d3d7072lar On the U.S.-Mexico border, the American government has been trying, with limited success, to set up a string of sensor-laden sentry towers, which would watch out for illicit incursions. In Israel, they've got their own set of border towers. But the Sabras' model comes with automatic guns, operated from afar.
The Sentry Tech towers are basically remote weapons stations, stuck on stop of silos. "As suspected hostile targets are detected and within range of Sentry-Tech positions, the weapons are slewing toward the designated target," David Eshel describes over at Ares. "As multiple stations can be operated by a single operator, one or more units can be used to engage the target, following identification and verification by the commander."
We flagged the towers last year, as the Israeli Defense Forces were setting up the systems, designed to create 1500-meter deep "automated kill zones" along the Gaza border.
"Each unit mounts a 7.62 or 0.5" machine gun, shielded from enemy fire and the elements by an environmentally protective bulletproof canopy," Eshel explains. "In addition to the use of direct fire machine guns, observers can also employ precision guided missiles, such as Spike LR optically guided missiles and Lahat laser guided weapons."
Re:Starving a Nation: From the World's Largest Concentration Camp
« Reply #14 on: 2008-12-26 19:05:24 »
Arrests, Diplomacy by Israel Keep Aid Out of Gaza
Source: Antiwar.com Authors: Jason Ditz (Compiler) Dated: 2008-12-07
The Israeli government has a long list of goods which it doesn’t allow into the Gaza Strip for security reasons. Things like shoes and clothing. Food and medicine are not on the list, but that has not helped humanitarian groups from delivering these items to the strip, which is under virtually unprecedented isolation in recent weeks.
The Israeli government had previously allowed several aid ships into the strip, but seems to be taking its policy of cutting off the 1.5 million residents of Gaza from basic humanitarian supplies far more seriously recently. Last week the Israeli navy forced a Libyan cargo vessel full of food and medicine from landing in the strip as well, insisting that anyone who wants to transfer aid to Gaza should do so “in coordination with Israel.”
With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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