Beleaguered still: Al Ahram Weekly
Dina Ezzat finds little evidence that Arab countries are poised to break the siege imposed on Gaza
While the severity of the siege of Gaza may be lessened in the coming weeks, a total lift of the Israeli imposed blockade is not on the cards. That, at least, is the assessment of Egyptian, Arab and Western diplomats in Cairo.
But any easing of the blockade, according to an Egyptian official, would not be through the exclusive use of the Rafah crossing. Crossings into Gaza under Israeli control would also help ease the siege.
Egypt, which closed its borders with Gaza in the wake of the Hamas takeover of the Strip, is still determined that crossings will only resume routine operations after Fatah, Hamas’s political rival, is “fully re-instated in Gaza”.
“There will be no operation of the borders before the Palestinian Authority [PA] is back in Gaza. We cannot afford otherwise,” insisted a high level Egyptian official.
In the past few months Egypt has strengthened security measures along its 14km border with Gaza, including installing underground steel plates to prevent smuggling via tunnels. “Of course we will continue with these measures,” the same official noted.
Egypt, say officials, has promised both the US and Israel that it will not tolerate the smuggling of any arms, or materials that could be used to develop primitive arms, into Gaza. It is a commitment that persists despite the increasing number of voices calling on Cairo to ease restrictive controls on its border with Gaza.
Egypt does, however, seem willing to display more flexibility in mediating the so-far elusive national reconciliation agreement between Hamas and Fatah. Cairo, according to Egyptian officials and Hamas sources, is showing new signs of acceptance of Hamas.
Hamas sources, who spoke to Al-Ahram Weekly in Gaza on Sunday, say the one-day visit Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa made to Gaza earlier this week is a clear sign of a new Egyptian — and maybe Arab — position on Hamas. Moussa, according to both Hamas and Egyptian sources, had been lobbying for months to gain Egyptian, and wider Arab, approval for the visit.
“This siege has to be broken. No country should accommodate, or show any respect to, this siege. This is not just about Arab countries but all the countries of the world. We shall break the siege,” Moussa said in Gaza on Sunday.
During his talks with Palestinian political factions, including a tête-a-tête with the Gaza-based Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh, and in meetings with families who suffered from Israeli brutality during the three-week war on Gaza in late 2008 and early 2009, Moussa repeatedly promised he would work towards ending the siege. Moussa, the first Arab official to visit the Strip since July 2007, was shown endless examples of the destruction caused by the war and subsequent siege.
He spoke with families who had lost children during the war and who risk losing more members due to poor healthcare facilities, and received complaints from Palestinian medical staff and UN officials trying to provide humanitarian assistance to Gaza’s 1.5 million beleaguered residents. Moussa said that he was committed to ending the blockade. But while he mocked Israel’s announcement, on Sunday, that four items — mayonnaise, tomato sauce, sewing needles and shoe-laces — would henceforth be allowed entry to Gaza, he warned that any lifting of the siege would be gradual.
During talks with representatives of the squabbling Palestinian factions, Moussa stressed that reconciliation would speed up the chances of the siege being lifted. “He told us it would help Egypt to operate the Rafah crossing if the PA returned to Gaza,” said one Hamas source.
In Sharm El-Sheikh on Monday, a day after his meetings with Hamas leaders in Gaza, Moussa discussed with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas “some ideas” to find an exit out of the impasse that Egyptian mediation on national Palestinian reconciliation has hit. While sources suggested a breakthrough was not yet round the corner, they did not exclude some movement in the next few weeks.
“There will be meetings and talks and messages, and there might even be some goodwill gestures,” said one informed source. This, he added, could help in easing the siege since it would encourage Egypt to be more forthcoming in its own operation of the borders and allow Abbas and Cairo to pressure Israel to show more flexibility on the borders it controls.
“Israel should open all seven crossings [linking Gaza with the outside world],” Abbas said following talks in Sharm El-Sheikh on Tuesday with President Hosni Mubarak. European sources in Cairo say proposals that are currently being examined with both Egypt and Israel could allow for the easier transport of commodities, and maybe even individuals, in and out of Gaza. “We are still in the discussion phase. Nothing is concluded yet,” said one European source.
The current commotion, many Palestinians in Gaza believe, is a result of Israel’s bloody assault on the peace flotilla that was attempting to break the siege on 21 May.
European diplomats in Brussels now believe Israel’s stranglehold of Gaza has been discredited.
“That logic must now be abandoned,” said a joint statement signed by the foreign ministers of Italy, France and Spain. If not, more tragedies will occur, warned the three European ministers.
Supermarkets join Turkey boycott: YNet
Israel’s leading food chains plan to stop importing Turkish-made pasta, flour
Published: 06.18.10
Israel’s leading supermarkets have joined the boycott against Turkey following the flotilla affair and will soon stop importing products made in the country.
The main victim of the boycott is expected to be pasta imported from Turkey, which was marketed by the food chains due to its cheap price.
Youths hang signs informing shoppers that most clothes sold by fashion chain are made in Turkey and that ‘by buying them you are funding anti-Israel terror’
Full story
“Although I am against boycotts and believe the problem between Israel and Turkey must be solved on the diplomatic level, I am considering stopping the imports of pasta from Turkey,” said Willi Food CEO Zvi Williger, one of the main importers of pasta from Turkey.
He added that “all the suppliers from Turkey are pro-Israel and against the anti-Israeli policy.”
The Mega chain, which markets Turkish-made pasta under its private label, said Sunday that it would also stop importing pasta and flour from Turkey. The chain noted, however, that the Turkish products could still be found in the stores until the stock run out.
Rami Levy, the owner of Shivuk Shikma, has also joined the move. “We will stop importing pasta from Turkey and start importing past from Italy instead, although it is more expensive than the Turkish pasta,” he said.
“I believe the consumers will support our move and I hope that all retailers importing from Turkey will join the initiative and found an alternative in other countries,” he added.
The Shufersal chain said Sunday that it was still looking into the matter.
PR for internal consumption: Haaretz
Netanyahu’s PR, which plays on the paranoia and deepest fears of the ghetto , is working – but only internally.
By Doron Rosenblum
If the Israeli public employed the classification system famously used by Napoleon Bonaparte – who made light of the courage and cleverness of officers who were recommended to him, focusing instead on the question “But are they lucky?” – there is no question that not only would Defense Minister Ehud Barak drop to the bottom of the popularity scale, but so, and to the same degree, would Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
It is hard to be certain which of them is the schlemiel and which the schlimazel, or whose luck is worse. But one thing is clear: Every time those two grab the steering wheel – whether together or separately – they find themselves battered and bruised, limping from mishap to fiasco, from screw-up to snafu, and from there to all kinds of bad luck that have not yet even made it into the slang dictionaries.
It wouldn’t matter if it were only them. The problem is that those two get all of us into trouble: Shortly after the journey begins, the entire Israeli bus finds itself overturned on the side of the road with its wheels spinning uselessly on top.
In order to understand why public opinion surveys nevertheless tend to fault the ticket taker more than the driver, you have to get to the bottom of the difference, which does exist, between Barak’s schlimazel personality and Netanyahu’s schlemiel personality. The former, despite his great expectations, sees every initiative blow up in his face. But the latter has no intention of succeeding, and never did have.
In his ambition to perform spectacular pirouettes that will take the region’s breath away, Barak repeatedly finds himself on the boards. Netanyahu gets even more battered, but somehow looks less ridiculous, since he repeatedly tries – and repeatedly succeeds – to prove his standard opening argument: The floor is crooked. It was, still is and always will be. Or as he summed up his own failure of statesmanship this week, “Once again, Israel faces hypocrisy.”
For Barak bad luck is random, an accident (even if it is a multivehicle pileup ). For Netanyahu, bad luck is a worldview, a psychological situation assessment, almost an ideology – the decree of “Jewish” fate. That is precisely the difference between Barak’s premature assertion in the city square – “This is the dawning of a new day” – and what Netanyahu told the Likud Knesset faction this week: “Benighted medieval forces are rising up against us … A wave of hatred is flooding us … They are trying to grip us in an iron vise of missiles and terror.” Perhaps these words were a boastful “I told you so,” or perhaps they were a type of vision: a pessimistic vision that, whether consciously or not, fulfills itself every day as long as the prophet of destruction – this Job, who scratches himself with a potsherd – continues to serve as prime minister.
Is it by chance that during the term of “Mr. Public Relations” of all time, Israel has become one of the most ostracized and misunderstood countries in the world? Ironically, the person who built his entire political career on being a fluent spokesman for Israel’s righteousness to the outside world changed the direction of the loudspeaker the moment the responsibility became his. He has turned into the great rebroadcaster of every external threat for internal consumption – into a person who repeatedly plays on the paranoias and deepest fears of the ghetto mentality.
In that sense, Netanyahu’s PR has in fact succeeded, but only internally: The national PR man has once again succeeded in explaining to the domestic consumer, who is wallowing in his fears and hatreds, that there really is a reason for the sense of siege, isolation and persecution: The world is hypocritical, the wave is getting stronger, the vise is closing in.
Ostensibly, his reason for doing so is clear: to obviate the need for action and to avoid personal responsibility. For if this is a deterministic existential situation, there is nothing to be done: There is no point in further shaking up the ship that is being flooded in any case, or in trying to navigate it. All that remains is to sit and curse the entire world. But in that case, one question arises: Why did Netanyahu want to be prime minister, and for a second time yet?
After all, he can be a “concerned citizen” at home, too. So why is he behaving this way? Where is he actually trying to lead us? What does he want to promote, if anything – even according to his own lights? The answers to these questions have long since gone beyond the political realm. They apparently belong to the realm of the soul. And not only Netanyahu’s.
Israel urged to do more as Gaza blockade is eased: The Independent
By Donald Macintyre in Jerusalem
18 June 2010
Israel announced yesterday it would “liberalise” the flow of goods to Gaza in a statement which stopped short of a pledge to allow in raw materials needed to revive the besieged territory’s paralysed manufacturing sector.
The EU and aid agencies welcomed the Cabinet decision, taken after two days of deliberations, as “a step in the right direction” but warned that much more needed to be done to restart Gaza’s moribund economy and boost post-war reconstruction. Israel had been under mounting international pressure for a significant relaxation of its three-year-old embargo since its lethal commando raid on a pro-Palestinian flotilla earlier this month.
The inner Security Cabinet said it had agreed to expand the shipment of construction materials needed for internationally supervised infrastructure projects. And it said further decisions would be taken in the coming days on “additional steps to implement this policy”. Some such projects, requiring strict security guarantees from international organisations like the UN, will be exempted from a general prohibition on materials like cement which Israel says it fears will be used by Hamas to build up its “military machine”.
Raed Fattouh, the Palestinian co-ordinator for the shipment of goods from Israel into Gaza, said a newly expanded list of goods would now include food items, toys, stationery, kitchen utensils, mattresses and towels. There was no sign however of goods like industrial margarine or glucose which could be used for food processing being allowed in.
There was no mention in yesterday’s Cabinet statement of a switch from an “allowed” list of goods to a “banned list” – something which Tony Blair, representing the “Quartet” of the US, EU, UN and Russia, said on Monday in Luxembourg had been agreed “in principle” by the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. A senior Israeli official said yesterday that the idea of the switch from a “white list” to a “blacklist” was still “on the table.” The list would make it more difficult for the Israeli authorities to ban items like raw materials to revive private sector production but which did not pose a threat to Israel’s security.
Western diplomats have been pressing Israel to take more concerted action in what could be a relatively short window before a fresh flotilla poses a fresh maritime crisis by setting out from Gaza, on the grounds that it is much easier to condemn the flotillas if the blockade is being relaxed. At least two Lebanese organisations are threatening to send boats to the territory.
The EU’s foreign policy chief Baroness Ashton said the European Union had noted the development with “great interest” but hoped “the in-principle statement by the Israeli government can now be followed up very quickly with the detail which we shall look at with interest”.
A Foreign Ministry official in Turkey, nine of whose citizens were killed in the commando raid this month, said Ankara wanted to “evaluate” the Israeli move. “However, our attitude on the issue is obvious, we expect that the blockade be lifted altogether,” the official added.
While in Gaza one Hamas official condemned the move as “window dressing,” the chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said the Israeli decision was “not sufficient”. He added: “With this decision, Israel attempts to make it appear that it has eased its four-year blockade…. In reality, the siege of the Gaza Strip, illegally imposed on Palestinians, continues unabated.” Continue reading June 18, 2010