May 9, 2010

HEY ELTON

by John Greyson

Palestinian civil society has called on Elton John to respect its boycott call and cancel his June 17th concert in Tel Aviv. If he does so, he’ll be joining Santana and Gil-Scott Heron, who recently cancelled their spring concerts in Israel. This video suggests six reasons why Elton should join the BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) movement.

For more info, please visit:

bdsmovement.net

BNC (Palestinian BDS National Commitee)

pacbi.org

PACBI (Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel)

bricup.org.uk

BRICUP (British Committee for Universities for Palestine)

quaia.org

QUAIA (Queers Against Israeli Apartheid)

EDITOR: New Heights of Israeli Chuzpah

After refusing to meet with the Elected (and unelected) representatives of Palestine for over a decade, Israel now discovered that indirect talks, that US invention on which they counted to delay a resolution forever, may not be successful after all, and the pressure may be too much for them to bear. So now they demand what they vetoed all along – direct talks. You couldn’t make it up!
The next demand will be that the talks be held in Yiddish, no doubt.

When the direct talks will fail, then Netanyahu can demand a return to indirect talks, and the cycle can start again.

Netanyahu: Mideast peace deal impossible without direct talks: Haaretz

PM echoes U.S. call to see proximity negotiations lead to direct contacts as soon as possible.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday that Israel expected the upcoming indirect negotiations with the Palestinians to lead to direct talks.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, U.S. envoy George Mitchell and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas are preparing to enter indirect Middle East negotiations.
Senior U.S. officials have told their Palestinian counterparts that Washington also believes direct talks between Israel and the Palestinians must begin as soon as possible.

The Obama administration has informed Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas that it will not unveil mediation proposals or a Middle East peace plan before the start of direct, substantive talks between the two sides on final-status issues, a high-level Israeli official said.

On Saturday, the PLO Executive Committee announced that it had given the green light to Abbas to begin indirect negotiations with Israel. Abbas also met with U.S. special envoy George Mitchell to discuss the manner in which the so-called proximity talks would be conducted.
The United States welcomed the PLO’s decision as an important step in the peace process. “It is an important and welcome step,” State Department spokesman P.J. Crowley said. Mitchell will meet with Abbas again Sunday in Ramallah before returning to Washington.

Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat said Saturday after a meeting in Ramallah between Abbas and Mitchell that the discussions would be held over the four months allotted to address final-status issues such as borders and security arrangements. “The issues of Jerusalem and the settlements are part of the 1967 borders, so they will be discussed and negotiated,” Erekat said.

The talks appear to represent a U.S.-brokered compromise that meets both the Palestinian demand to address the issue of borders, and Israel’s condition to discuss security arrangements. Both Palestinian and Israeli negotiators recognize that the two issues are intimately linked, and that any proposal or statement on either matter is likely to significantly influence any resolution on the other.

A statement from Netanyahu spokesman Nir Hefetz said the prime minister “welcomes the resumption of peace talks.”
Quoting Netanyahu, Hefetz added that “Israel’s position was and remains that the talks ought to be conducted without preconditions and should quickly lead to direct negotiations.”

“That will be judged by deeds, not by how much we smile at the White House. A comprehensive peace plan is needed, one that Israel stands behind. I’m not sure that that is possible with the current government,” Barak said.

In talks last week with Netanyahu and Barak, Mitchell asked that Israel make confidence-building measures over the next few weeks, both to build up PA institutions and encourage the Palestinians to shift more quickly to direct talks.

Yasser Abed Rabbo, a member of the PLO Executive Committee and veteran peace negotiator, said the Palestinians had received assurances from the U.S. concerning “settlement activities and the necessity to halt them.” He said the Obama administration had also promised to be tough in the event of “any provocations,” and guaranteed that all core issues would be put on the table.

The PLO decision came despite warnings from the rival Palestinian group Hamas, which said Friday that the move would only legitimize Israel’s occupation, Palestinian media reported.

“Absurd proximity talks” would only “give the Israeli occupation an umbrella to commit more crimes against the Palestinians,” Hamas reportedly said. “Hamas calls on the PLO to stop selling illusions to the Palestinian people and announce the failure of their gambling on absurd talks.”

Mid-East indirect peace talks ‘under way’: BBC

Indirect peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians have begun, the Palestinian chief negotiator has said.
Saeb Erekat spoke after a meeting between US Middle East envoy George Mitchell and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
Mr Mitchell will mediate in the talks between the two sides.
The start of so-called “proximity talks” in March was halted after a row over the building of new Israeli homes in East Jerusalem.
Palestinians broke off direct peace talks after Israel launched a military offensive on Gaza in late 2008.
“The proximity talks have started,” Mr Erakat said in the West Bank city of Ramallah.
The talks went ahead a day after receiving the backing of leaders of the Palestine Liberation Organisation.
The PLO’s Executive Committee decided to back the talks after a three-hour meeting in the West Bank.

Has the IDF become an army of settlers?: Haaretz

When the time comes for disengagement, perhaps the state may decide to temporarily redeploy regular troops to the Border Police. It is doubtful whether it will be possible once again to rely on the IDF for that job.
By Amos Harel
Israel’s left may have already missed the opportunity to reach a permanent agreement with the Palestinians. A considerable part of the blame for the failure falls with the Palestinians, but during the missed years – the critical years since the Oslo Accords – something important happened on the Israeli side: The Israel Defense Forces underwent a change.

The army plays a critical role in carrying out an agreement (in withdrawing from territory and evacuating settlers ), but also in ensuring security stability after the agreement is reached. The trouble is that the IDF of 1993 is not the IDF of 2010. Here is what happened in the officers’ course for the infantry corps, the spearhead of the combat units, during that period: In 1990, 2 percent of the cadets enrolled in the course were religious; by 2007, that figure had shot up to 30 percent. And this is how the intermediate generation of combat officers looks today: six out of seven lieutenant colonels in the Golani Brigade are religious and, beginning in the summer, the brigade commander will be as well. In the Kfir Brigade, three out of seven lieutenant colonels wear skullcaps, and in the Givati Brigade and the paratroopers, two out of six. In some of the infantry brigades, the number of religious company commanders has passed the 50 percent mark – more than three times the percentage of the national religious community in the overall population.

This is a generation of commanders committed to its missions, the IDF and the state. It simply has roots in different areas than previous generations. If you glanced at the lists in the company commanders’ offices 20 years ago, you could have seen considerable numbers of fighters from the greater Tel Aviv area and coastal plain. This is of course a generalization that unfairly overlooks the exceptions, but the number of such soldiers today is negligible. A few years ago, a Golani battalion commander found that only one of his soldiers was a resident of Tel Aviv. Today, in a different capacity, a number of Tel Aviv residents serve with him – but all of them live “south of the Dolphinarium line,” referring to the city’s lower-income neighborhoods.

In terms of manpower, long-term processes have been set in motion. The decision by left-wingers and members of kibbutzim to abandon Training Base 1 (where officers’ courses take place ) in the wake of the first Lebanon war and the first intifada can be felt today among the brigadier generals, who are knocking at the doors of the General Staff in 2010. Many complain about how colorless the senior brass is today, something that can be partially explained by the fact that in the mid-1980s many recruits with potential waived their assignation to officers’ courses.

It is an open secret that in the IDF a certain sector of the population is divided mainly between Unit 8200 of Military Intelligence, the pilots’ course, the reconnaissance units and sometimes – with a world of difference – those who get a psychiatric exemption from service. These people will hardly ever go to Golani or Kfir. The abandonment of the combat infantry units will also be noticeable in the next 15 years in the General Staff.

The IDF has made mistakes in the territories and continues to do so, especially in the silent assistance it has given the illegal outposts over the years. But describing it as an army of occupation troops is foolish and overlooks the truth. The secular left-wing fell asleep on the job. The empty ranks it left in its wake have been filled by others. Even those who believe there is no choice other than a massive evacuation of the settlements should know that it will be extremely difficult to do this after the disengagement from Gush Katif.

In 2005, the evacuation was carried out because Ariel Sharon did not bat an eyelid and the military acted accordingly. The battalion commanders, for the most part, will obey orders next time as well, but it is hard to see how the company commanders who come from the settlements of Tapuah and Kedumim will answer the call to remove Jews from their homes. It is no surprise that the top IDF brass is so fearful of such a scenario.

EDITOR: The Come Home To Roost…

It never rains, but it pours… It seems that troubles come in threes. We have Syria demanding its territories back, US demanding move on solution to the Palestine problem, and the Iranians playing Israel at the nuclear game. And we have not mentioned Hizbullah, the BDS, the economy… The voices calling for the end to occupation everywhere are on the increase, and now they come from within the elites, rather than from the tiny radical left. Time to listen, it seems.

The missiles are coming : Haaretz

A rational country would have done the arithmetic long ago and understood that by continuing to hold on to the Golan Heights, the chances of a confrontation would simply grow.
By Zvi Bar’el

Here’s a bit of arithmetic. Take the number of Hezbollah’s Scud missiles and Katyusha rockets and add the number of Iranian-made Zelzal rockets and Shihab-3 missiles, and divide by 7.5 million. How many missiles are there for every Israeli?
And now for geometry. Draw three circles around Tel Aviv; the first will mark the Shihab’s range, the second the Scud’s and the third the Katyusha’s. Assuming that an attack on Israel would be coordinated between Iran, Hezbollah and Syria, would you advise Hezbollah to fire only Scuds and conserve its Katyushas? Or maybe you would advise Iran to fire Shahabs and let Hezbollah conserve its Katyushas? Justify your answers based on your place of residence and the missile range.

The fear rained down on us by Military Intelligence research chief Yossi Baidatz, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates (“Hezbollah has more missiles than most governments” ), Jordan’s King Abdullah (“A war could break out this summer” ) and many military analysts leaves Israel with the all-too-familiar feeling that it has no choice but to launch a preemptive attack. Suddenly it turns out that it’s not the Iranian nuclear program that poses an existential threat, but rather the various kinds of missiles. And the terrified country is already preparing public opinion and the army for the next confrontation.

Indeed, there is a balance of terror between Israel and its neighbors, whose purpose is deterrence. That’s what every rational country does when it feels threatened and can’t find a nonmilitary alternative. No doubt, Israel is threatened, but so are Syria, Lebanon, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. It’s enough to listen to Israel’s threats to “take Syria back to the Stone Age,” “destroy Lebanon’s civilian infrastructure” or smash Hamas to understand that the style of the Israeli threat approaches that of Iran. If anyone should be waking up in the morning in a cold sweat, it’s the Lebanese, Syrians and Gazans, not the Israelis.

Nevertheless, even though Syria has suffered military blows from Israel, it continues to act “impudently,” and Lebanon, which was pounded in war, has stepped up its threats. Operation Cast Lead in Gaza did not stop Hamas from arming itself. And in the West Bank, the occupation forces have not completely neutralized the threat.

But unlike Israel, which sees the threat but forgets the catalyst, each of its neighbors has territory under Israeli occupation, each has a legitimate national claim to get its occupied land back. Anyone looking for a nonviolent alternative can find it well-packaged and waiting to be used, but it’s merely getting wet in the rain.

“[Syrian President Bashar] Assad wants peace but doesn’t believe [Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu,” Baidatz told the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee. But his words were lost in the alarming description of the number of missiles in Hezbollah’s hands. Because even though we understand weapons, and we consider Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah a household name, and we assemble and dismantle centrifuges every day, we lose our way when it comes to the peace process.

Baidatz didn’t explain how it’s possible to gain Assad’s confidence, and he wasn’t asked, just as he wasn’t asked whether returning the Golan Heights to Syria under agreed conditions could neutralize the Syrian-Lebanese-Hezbollah threat. These questions are too dangerous to ask to someone from the army – he just might propose a diplomatic solution.

But it’s possible to answer for him. Peace with Syria might neutralize the military threat from that country, stop Hezbollah from arming and put Iran in a confusing situation, even if it doesn’t break off its relations with Syria. Peace with Syria and the Palestinians would also change Turkey’s position and neutralize the hostility between Israel and the other Arab countries.

In short, the military threat would lose a great deal of its punch. A rational country, even one not seeking peace – and Israel, after all, is not one – would have done the arithmetic long ago and understood that by continuing to hold on to the Golan Heights, the chances of a confrontation would simply grow. It would have understood that the threat does not lie in the circles that mark the missile range but in those territories it continues to occupy.

Latest Israel-Palestinian Talks Hold Little Hope: Palestine Monitor

Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi MP
8 May 2010
After 18 months with no direct Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, so-called proximity talks between intermediaries, rather than face-to-face meetings between the direct parties, are scheduled to begin this week. An announcement is anticipated shortly. These shuttle deliberations are expected to continue for four months with Arab League backing. They hold little hope.
Israel’s governing coalition, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is unprepared to comply with international law and meet the minimum demands of Palestinian negotiators. Yes, last year, Netanyahu voiced support for a two-state solution, but he loaded it with so many caveats as to make it a meaningless commitment. He said no on a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem, no on the return of Palestinian refugees to homes and land in Israel, no on crucial control over borders, no on essential dismantlement of settlements illegal under international law. And, in fact, Israel’s Likud Central Committee, approximately 3,000 of the party’s most active members, voted in 2002 — at Netanyahu’s behest — never to permit a Palestinian state west of the Jordan River. The vote still stands today.

These negotiations will not bring peace. The best outcome that can be hoped for is if they expose Netanyahu to American intermediaries as devoid of positive contributions to peace and intent solely on scuttling progress. Last month, Middle East envoy George Mitchell’s deputy, David Hale, according to a Wall Street Journal story, informed Palestinian officials that the United States would consider allowing a United Nations Security Council resolution that censured a recalcitrant Israel intent on further settlement activity if Palestinians would return to talks.

If accurate, and the U.S. followed through, this would be a monumental moment as the U.S. has repeatedly vetoed Security Council resolutions directed at Israel, including efforts to stop the Har Homa settlement in occupied East Jerusalem undertaken in the 1990s under Netanyahu. An Obama administration willing to stand up to Israel could save the two-state solution. If not, however, the two-state solution could die on the Obama administration’s watch and be replaced by a South Africa and apartheid reality that Israeli leaders such as Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak have warned against.

Then-Prime Minister Olmert declared in 2007: “If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights (also for the Palestinians in the territories), then, as soon as that happens, the state of Israel is finished.”

And, just weeks ago, Israeli Defense Minister Barak stated, “As long as between the Jordan and the sea there is only one political entity, named Israel, it will end up being either non-Jewish or non-democratic. … If the Palestinians vote in elections, it is a binational state, and if they don’t, it is an apartheid state.”

These are damning words. And they are spoken at the highest levels of Israeli government. Palestinians have long expressed similar reservations, but only recently has the reality trickled into Israeli discourse, and it is still finding its way to the United States. High-level American officials are now grappling with the reality that if the two-state solution fails to take root during Obama’s tenure that we will be left with apartheid. The burgeoning non-violent Palestinian struggle against the wall and occupation my colleagues and I are organizing might yet transform into a civil rights struggle capable of rivaling movements last seen in the Jim Crow South and apartheid South Africa.

Israeli Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin, a member of the governing Likud Party, which has long pursued policies that subjugate Palestinians, is one of the few Israeli leaders to say a binational outcome is acceptable. “I would,” he recently said, “rather (have) Palestinians as citizens of this country over dividing the land up.” Regardless of his motivation, for Rivlin to reach this point highlights the inner crisis within Likud. Palestinian steadfastness and global solidarity are forcing Israel to choose: two states, apartheid, or democracy in one undivided state.

Although I continue to back two states, I believe the vast majority of Palestinians would accept equal rights and one person, one vote in one state with alacrity. I certainly would were we to reach such a day. But the political reality in Israel is otherwise. My equal rights are anathema to the vast majority of Israeli political leaders who deem any such offer “political suicide.”

Yet the extension of equal rights to me in two states — or one — is not a doomsday scenario for Israeli Jews. No solution, however, will be acceptable to Palestinians that does not provide us with full rights and freedom. We will not accept a two-state solution that more closely resembles a state of Israel and a series of South Africa-like Bantustans set aside for Palestinians. Black South Africans rejected such proposals — and were backed in their struggle by much of the international community — and so, too, will we.

The goal of negotiators must be a viable Palestinian state based on the 1949 armistice lines with its capital in East Jerusalem; Palestinian control over borders, airspace and seaports; a connector between Gaza and the West Bank; and a just resolution of the Palestinian refugee issue that resolves the plight of the more than 700,000 Palestinians expelled 62 years ago by Israel and never allowed to return.

Israel has a fateful decision before it: Comply with international law and achieve a just two-state solution, or reject the logic of peace and face a determined non-violent movement against apartheid that will spread from the West Bank to Gaza to within Israel itself. When this reality becomes more widely known, Americans will, I believe, begin to question backing an Israeli ally subjecting a majority people to a discriminatory standard of law.

One set of laws for Jews and one set for Palestinians is intolerable in the 21st century. American funding for Israel to perpetrate this mockery of democracy is, I have found in my speaking engagements here, already unsettling U.S. taxpayers. While we pursue non-violent resistance to Israeli expansionism in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, American military aid to Israel destabilizes the region and endangers Palestinians daring to protest an occupation that attempts to reduce us to an inferior status. Much as in apartheid South Africa and the Jim Crow American South, such discrimination is increasingly rankling concerned people around the world. Problematically, these latest talks seem ill-equipped to address this central concern.

Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi is secretary general of the Palestinian National Initiative and a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council.

The friend: Haaretz

As this week’s meeting between Elie Wiesel and Obama shows, with friends like that, Israel doesn’t need enemies.
By Gideon Levy
The settlers of Pisgat Ze’ev, the intruders of Sheikh Jarrah, the people who covet Silwan, the infiltrators into the Muslim Quarter and you, the mayor of the nationalist city, Nir Barkat, can stop worrying: (All of ) Jerusalem is yours, forever. Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel met at the White House with his friend, Barack Obama, on a mission from his other friend, Benjamin Netanyahu, and when he came out he said he had the impression that Obama respected his advice to postpone discussions on Jerusalem.
With friends like that, Israel doesn’t need enemies. Sixty-two years after declaring its sovereignty, Israel still needs Jewish influence peddlers – one time it’s Wiesel and one time it’s Ron Lauder – to appeal to the nobleman. Forty-three years since the occupation started and these people are only working to perpetuate it.
There are not many Jews like Wiesel, to whom the White House door is open and the president lends an ear. And what does Wiesel do with this golden opportunity? He talks to Obama about postponing discussions on Jerusalem. Not about the need for an end to the occupation, not about the opportunity to establish a just peace (and a just Israel ), not about the outrageous injustice to the Palestinians. Only perpetuating the occupation.

Instead of a figure considered so moral taking advantage of a presidential meal to urge his host to end Israel’s endless foot-dragging, Wiesel haggled for wholesale postponement. He did this ostensibly for the good of a country whose prime minister, just one year ago, gave his two-state speech, but has not lifted a finger to implement it. A country with which Syria is almost begging to make peace and against which the Palestinians have long stopped using terror. But it continues in its refusal to make peace. In light of all this, what does the friend recommend? To postpone. Postpone and postpone, like Netanyahu, who sent him, asked him to do.

The man the Nobel Prize committee said is “a messenger to mankind; his message is one of peace, atonement and human dignity,” is doing just the opposite. Not peace, not atonement and not human dignity, certainly not for the Palestinians. After the ridiculous ad campaign in the American press, based on the fact that Jerusalem is mentioned in the Bible (“more than 600 times” ) and not once in the Koran, perhaps, heaven forbid, the American president of change will listen to the bad advice of his friend, the Holocaust survivor, and decimate any chance for peace.

Wiesel will make arrangements and Obama will postpone. Around a quarter of a million Palestinians will continue to live another generation under Israeli occupation. A quarter of a million? Three and a half million, because to Obama, Wiesel and in fact everyone, it’s clear that without dividing Jerusalem there will be no peace.

And what if Obama postpones discussions on Jerusalem as his friend requested? Postpone until when? For another 43 years? Maybe another 430 years? And what will happen in the meantime? Another 100,000 settlers? A Hamas government in the West Bank, too? And why? Because Jerusalem isn’t mentioned in the Koran, its Palestinian residents don’t have a right to self-determination?

And what about the sanctity of Jerusalem as the third holiest city in Islam after Mecca and Medina? What does sanctity have to do with sovereignty, anyhow? What will happen if once again the discussion is postponed and they talk about water, as Netanyahu wants? These are all questions the friend was not asked.

How depressing to think that these are currently the Jewish people’s greatest role models. It’s as if they think that automatic and blind support of Israel and its caprices means true friendship – that perpetuating the occupation serves Israel’s goals rather than endangers its future. It’s as if they let their conscience speak out about the world’s injustices, but when it comes to Israel’s injustices they have a veil over their eyes and their voice falls silent.

If I were Elie Wiesel, such a famous Holocaust survivor, a Nobel Prize laureate whose voice is heard in high places, I would ask my friend in the White House, for the sake of peace, Israel’s future and world peace: Please, Mr. President, be forceful. Israel depends on you as never before. Isolated as never before, it’s as good as dead without American support. Therefore, Mr. President, I would say to Obama over the kosher meal that was served, be a true friend of Israel and extricate it from its misfortune.

EDITOR: The Ethnic Cleansing Continues

By a variety of measures, all illegal, Israel plans not just to build over all of East Jerusalem, in defiance of the “promise’ given to Obama, but also to dislodge as many Palestinians as possible from their homes and houses. The obvious contradiction between the two following news items speaks for itself. As usual, the US politicians are only too happy yo be led by the nose.

Peace Now: Construction for largest East Jerusalem settlement has begun: Haaretz

Anti-settlement group says renovations within former police station did not require municipal building permits – official approval that could torpedo the new peace negotiations.
The Israeli anti-settlement group Peace Now said Sunday that renovation work has recently begun for the construction of 14 housing units in an old Israel Police station in East Jerusalem, where plans are in the works for the largest Jewish neighborhood in that part of the city.
Some 50 Jewish families currently live in six buildings in Ras al-Amud, where an American Jewish millionaire has purchased land for Jewish settlement.
The plan calls for the construction of 104 housing units on the land where the former headquarters of the Judea and Samaria police was housed before it was moved to a new building in Area E-1.

The plan for the building of the new settlement, Ma’aleh David, was filed for approval last summer by the relevant municipal committee at the Jerusalem municipality.
But Peace Now said renovations within the former station did not require municipal building permits – official approval that could torpedo the new peace negotiations.
Once the police evacuated the area it returned to the control of the Committee of the Bokharan Community, which has held ownership over the property and the structures there since before 1948.
The municipality has treaded carefully in its approval of new construction plans since tensions rose between Israel and the U.S. after new construction in East Jerusalem was announced during U.S. Vice President Joe Biden’s visit in March.

The new settlement is planned to be connected to an existing Jewish neighborhood, Ma’aleh Zeitim, and together will be occupied by some 200 families, forming the largest Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem.
According to the plan, the former police structure will be razed and replaced by seven structures ranging between four and five stories in height.
The plan involves high-end housing and the complex will include a swimming pool, mini “country club,” community library and parking spaces. A synagogue, kindergartens and a mikveh (Jewish ritual purification bath) are also planned for construction there.
A foot bridge will connect the new settlement with existing ones on the other side of the road. The settlement of Ma’aleh Zeitim across the street currently houses 51 families and in its second phase of development, which is currently being completed, another 66 housing units are being built.

When the two neighborhoods are completed and linked, a Jewish settlement of more than 1,000 people will be situated in the heart of Ras al-Amud, a neighborhood comprising 14,000 Palestinians.

U.S.: Israel pledged not to build in Ramat Shlomo for two years: Haaretz

U.S. State Dept. says first round of proximity talks ends with positive steps from both sides.
The U.S. State Department announced on Sunday that the first round of indirect peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority has been completed, saying that both Israel and the Palestinians had taken steps to create an atmosphere conducive to successful talks.
State Department spokesman Philip Crowley said in a statement that U.S. special envoy George Mitchell has left the Middle East after concluding talks characterized as “serious and wide-ranging.”

Crowley said Israel had pledged not to build in the Ramat Shlomo neighborhood of East Jerusalem for two years and that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas vowed that he would work against incitement of any sort.
Mitchell told the parties that progress is important so they can move to direct negotiations resulting in a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The State Department statement also said that both Israel and the Palestinians would be held “accountable” for actions that “undermine trust” during the course of the proximity talks.

Mitchell will return to the region next week to continue the talks.
Sources close to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded to the American announcement later Sunday, confirming that the housing project intended for the Ramat Shlomo neighborhood would not be built in the coming two years. The sources added that even when the Ramat Shlomo crisis first erupted, when the housing project was announced just as U.S. Vice President Joe Biden was visiting Israel, Israel told the U.S. administration that the project was only in very initial stages and construction would not begin for at least two years.

“Prime Minister Netanyahu even announced this publicly after Biden’s visit,” the sources said. “Furthermore, the prime minister emphasized from the beginning that the planning and construction in Jerusalem will continue as always, just as it was during every one of Israel’s last 43 administrations, and there has never been any Israeli pledge on this matter.”
The sources also said that the Israel promised the U.S. administration to discuss all the core issues during the course of the proximity talks, and to take confidence building steps as gestures toward the Palestinians. On the other hand, sources said, the U.S. has promised Israel that the core issues, especially the most sensitive ones like the fate of Jerusalem, would be resolved only after proximity talks progress to direct talks.
Earlier on Sunday, the PA responded to U.S. and Israeli calls for eventual direct peace negotiations by reiterating that it would engage only in proximity talks until Israel halted all settlement construction.
Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat clarified the PA’s stance as he officially announced the start of indirect peace negotiations mediated by Mitchell. The Palestinian Liberation Organization’s executive committee approved the four-month process on Saturday.

“I can officially declare today that the proximity talks have begun,” Erekat said, after a meeting between Mitchell and Abbas.
Netanyahu, meanwhile, told his cabinet on Sunday that Israel expected the upcoming indirect negotiations to lead to direct talks, declaring: “It is impossible to make peace at a distance.”
But Erekat told Voice of Palestine radio in response: “If he [Netanyahu] announces a complete halt to settlement building, there will be direct talks.”
In his remarks to the cabinet on talks with the Palestinians, Netanyahu said no-one should expect that “we will arrive at decisions and agreements on matters that are critical … without sitting together in the same room.”

Senior U.S. officials have told their Palestinian counterparts that Washington also believes direct talks between Israel and the Palestinians must begin as soon as possible.
The Obama administration has informed Abbas that it will not unveil mediation proposals or a Middle East peace plan before the start of direct, substantive talks between the two sides on final-status issues, a high-level Israeli official said.
On Saturday, the PLO Executive Committee announced that it had given the green light to Abbas to begin indirect negotiations with Israel. Abbas also met with Mitchell to discuss the manner in which the so-called proximity talks would be conducted.

The United States welcomed the PLO’s decision as an important step in the peace process. “It is an important and welcome step,” Crowley said.
Palestinian chief negotiator Saeb Erekat said Saturday after a meeting in Ramallah between Abbas and Mitchell that the discussions would be held over the four months allotted to address final-status issues such as borders and security arrangements. “The issues of Jerusalem and the settlements are part of the 1967 borders, so they will be discussed and negotiated,” Erekat said.

Erekat said that during their meeting, Abbas gave Mitchell a letter outlining the Palestinian Authority’s position on proximity talks and the issues it wants to discuss. Abbas would head the Palestinian negotiating team himself, Erekat said, adding that the Palestinians view the talks as aimed at “The end of the occupation and creation of a Palestinian state alongside the State of Israel along the 1967 borders.”
The talks appear to represent a U.S.-brokered compromise that meets both the Palestinian demand to address the issue of borders, and Israel’s condition to discuss security arrangements. Both Palestinian and Israeli negotiators recognize that the two issues are intimately linked, and that any proposal or statement on either matter is likely to significantly influence any resolution on the other.

Israel welcomes PLO decision
Prime Minister Netanyahu welcomed the decision to resume peace talks, urging that they be held unconditionally and lead swiftly to direct negotiations between the two sides.
A statement from Netanyahu spokesman Nir Hefetz said the prime minister “welcomes the resumption of peace talks.”
Quoting Netanyahu, Hefetz added that “Israel’s position was and remains that the talks ought to be conducted without preconditions and should quickly lead to direct negotiations.”

Defense Minister Ehud Barak said that the U.S. administration expects Israel to do its part in facilitating U.S. efforts to advance the stalled peace process. “An essential condition for improving relations with the U.S. is taking steps that prove Israel is seriously committed to making decisions on the Palestinian issue once they reach the negotiating table,” Barak said at a conference at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot.
“That will be judged by deeds, not by how much we smile at the White House. A comprehensive peace plan is needed, one that Israel stands behind. I’m not sure that that is possible with the current government,” Barak said.

“Without an agreement, we will be subject to international isolation, and we will suffer a fate similar to that of Belfast or Bosnia, or a gradual transition from a paradigm of two states for two peoples to one of one state for two peoples, and some people will try to label us as similar to South Africa. That’s why we must act,” Barak said. If both sides are willing to make brave decisions, he said, “it will be possible to get to direct negotiations and a breakthrough toward an agreement.”
In talks last week with Netanyahu and Barak, Mitchell asked that Israel make confidence-building measures over the next few weeks, both to build up PA institutions and encourage the Palestinians to shift more quickly to direct talks.

A senior official in Jerusalem said Israel would take such steps in the coming weeks, probably including the release of hundreds of Palestinian prisoners, the removal of additional checkpoints and the transfer of certain West Bank areas to PA security control.
Yasser Abed Rabbo, a member of the PLO Executive Committee and veteran peace negotiator, said the Palestinians had received assurances from the U.S. concerning “settlement activities and the necessity to halt them.” He said the Obama administration had also promised to be tough in the event of “any provocations,” and guaranteed that all core issues would be put on the table.

The PLO decision came despite warnings from the rival Palestinian group Hamas, which said Friday that the move would only legitimize Israel’s occupation, Palestinian media reported.
“Absurd proximity talks” would only “give the Israeli occupation an umbrella to commit more crimes against the Palestinians,” Hamas reportedly said. “Hamas calls on the PLO to stop selling illusions to the Palestinian people and announce the failure of their gambling on absurd talks.”

Sleepless in Jerusalem and Gaza

Here is the current crop of this amazing video documentary project:

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68 Sleepless Gaza Jerusalem.divx

67 Sleepless Gaza Jerusalem.divx

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65 Sleepless Gaza Jerusalem .divx

64 Sleepless Gaza Jerusalem .divx

63 Sleepless Gaza Jerusalem.divx

New Israeli order allows for mass expulsion from West Bank: The Electronic Intifada

Mel Frykberg, 7 May 2010
RAMALLAH, occupied West Bank (IPS) – Several Palestinians have set up a protest tent in no-man’s land in the northern Gaza Strip, near the Erez border crossing into Israel, as they protest their deportation from the Israeli occupied West Bank into Gaza where Hamas authorities have refused them entry.

Ahmed Saban — After finishing his prison sentence, Ahmed Sabah was deported to the Gaza Strip, away from his family in the West Bank. (Wissam Nassar/MaanImages)

Tens of thousands of other Palestinians face a possibly similar predicament in the near future. This follows a sweeping new Israeli military order which allows for the expulsion of Palestinians or foreigners whom Israel considers to be in the West Bank illegally as “infiltrators.”

Fadi Azameh, 19, from Hebron in the southern West Bank, was arrested at his place of employment by the Israeli military last week, held briefly at a military base before he was expelled to Gaza.

Azameh was born in Gaza but his family left the coastal territory and settled in the West Bank 12 years ago. He had not been back since.

Ahmed Sabah, a 40-year-old prisoner from the northern West Bank town of Tulkarem was also deported to Gaza after serving a lengthy prison sentence in an Israeli jail.

His wife and son, whom he had not seen since the boy was a baby, were informed that Sabah would not be attending a joyful reunion they had planned after he had already been released in Gaza.

The two Palestinians are refusing to leave the tent and have pleaded for international intervention in their case.

The Hamas authorities for their part have stated that they would not allow them into Gaza as this will encourage Israel to proceed with its policy.

The “infiltrator” order could affect thousands of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank who were born in Gaza — or those who had their ID documents issued in Gaza — but moved years ago to live in the West Bank where they now have families and where their employment and educational facilities are based.

Palestinian identification papers in both the West Bank and the Gaza Strip are formally issued by the Palestinian Authority (PA), but Israel controls the population registry and must approve most changes, including relocation from Gaza to the West Bank.

Thousands of other Palestinians from Jordan and abroad who have reunited with family members in the Israeli controlled territory could also be effected.

Many of those originating in Jordan married West Bank spouses and moved to the Palestinian territory where they subsequently started families.

Other Palestinians with foreign passports who have opened up businesses, creating work opportunities in an area where unemployment remains high, also risk deportation.

Foreign nationals not of Palestinian descent and without Israeli visas could also be targeted.

Israel has been trying to crack down on pro-Palestinian foreign activists and those working with nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). Several were deported earlier in the year when heavily armed Israeli troops raided their apartments at night.

Foreign NGO workers based in the Occupied Palestinian Territories have complained of difficulties in getting their work permits and residence visas renewed by the Israeli authorities.

Israel’s new military order applies even to “Area C” of the West Bank which under the 1993 Oslo Accords falls under the full civil and military control of the PA.

Critics have argued that Israel is trying to solidify the geographical and political divide between the PA controlled West Bank and the Hamas controlled Gaza Strip. Others say this could be a precedent for ethnic cleansing of the West Bank.

Israeli extremists and right-wingers have long supported the expulsion of Palestinians from the occupied West Bank to Jordan which they argue is the “real Palestinian State.”

A number of Israeli and Palestinian human rights organizations have written to the Israeli defense minister, Ehud Barak, demanding the postponement of the order’s implementation pending “a serious and comprehensive discussion on the matter.”

The Israeli rights group HaMoked states that the new order is intended to serve as a “High Court bypass” mechanism, facilitating deportation in similar cases in the future.

“The army must bring candidates for deportation before the committee within eight days, while they can be deported without judicial review within 72 hours. At the same time, the candidates for deportation are not allowed to appeal to the committee, or to any court, during these eight days,” says the organization.

The Fourth Geneva Convention imposes an absolute prohibition on the forced removal of civilians from their homes, the violation of which is deemed an especially grave breach of the Convention.

Meanwhile, in a continuing development Gazans challenging Israel’s “no-go security zones” along Gaza’s borders with Israel continue to be wounded and killed as they try to access their agricultural land, much of it situated in the fertile areas along the border.

Last week Ahmed Deeb, 21, from Gaza bled to death after Israeli soldiers shot him in the leg, rupturing his femoral artery, with a “dum dum” bullet which fragments inside the targeted area upon impact.

The week before, Maltese national Bianca Zammit, 28, was also shot in the leg as she filmed one of the growingly frequent non-violent protests against Israel’s self-declared buffer zones.

In another incident of Gazans dying to live, four tunnel workers were killed, and several hospitalized in a serious condition, in southern Gaza after Egyptian security forces threw explosives into several smuggling tunnels linking Gaza with the Sinai Peninsula.

Due to Israel’s crippling economic blockade of the coastal territory — in conjunction with the Egyptians — the tunnels represent a vital supply line for desperately needed daily goods for the impoverished territory.

Working in the tunnels also provides Gaza’s poor with a means of income in an area where unemployment is rife.

Defying appeal from Gaza students, Atwood set to accept Israeli prize: The Electronic Intifada

Kristin Srzemski, 8 May 2010
Author Margaret Atwood On Sunday, Booker Prize-winning author Margaret Atwood will accept the Dan David Prize at Tel Aviv University and her portion of the $1 million payout that goes with it. Meanwhile, a mere 40 miles away, students in the occupied and besieged Gaza Strip will stilll be struggling to find the ways and means to continue their educations.
Atwood will be accepting her prize despite a worldwide call — initiated by the Palestinian Students Campaign for a Cultural and Academic Boycott of Israel (PSACBI) — for her to turn down the award. The Canadian author, whose work often reflects issues of colonization, feminism, structures of political power and oppression, will be sharing the literary prize with Indian writer Amitav Ghosh, whose novels question the brutalities of colonial rule and post-colonial dispossession. Ghosh was also asked to turn down the prize, which he has declined to do.

Being an artist of conscience has been one of Atwood’s hallmark characteristics throughout her career. She supported the South African anti-Apartheid movement and, according to filmmaker John Greyson, was the first public figure to speak out in support of gay rights after police arrested 300 men in Toronto in 1981. The late Palestinian scholar Edward Said named her as an “oppositional intellectual.” That’s why her acceptance of the Dan David Prize is fraught with ironies, not least of which is the requirement that she donate 10 percent of the prize money back to support graduate students at Tel Aviv University, while Gaza’s students — just a short drive away — are enclosed in an open-air prison, unable to complete their studies.
“We have no fuel supply in Gaza for student transportation,” Ayah Abubasheer of PSCABI wrote in an email on 21 April. “There are no basic supplies or stationery for students in Gaza. Basic materials such as pens, pencils, sharpeners, erasers and so on are not available. And, books? There are no books, research resources or any of the like in Gaza. Israel bombed the Islamic University’s labs and student residences during the [winter 2008-09 attacks on Gaza].”

PSCABI is the student arm of the Palestinian Campaign for the Cultural and Academic Boycott of Israel. Both groups belong to the global boycott, divestment and sanctions movement, started in Palestine in 2005. The group is comprised of students representing all Palestinian universities in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip and has alliances with Palestinian student groups at Israeli universities, Abubasheer said. This coalition of activists wrote an open letter to Atwood on 4 April, asking her to turn down the prize. The letter went “viral” and was soon posted on websites and blogs across the Internet. It also spawned other letters and action alerts, all with the aim of persuading Atwood to stand in solidarity with Gaza’s students.
Atwood admitted via email she was aware of the open letter, but said she did not receive it personally. She did not respond to the students in Gaza, but she did reply to Antoine Raffoul, a Palestinian architect living in London who is the founder of the organization 1948: Lest We Forget.

Cultural boycotts equal censorship, Atwood said. In addition, the Dan David Prize is a cultural event, funded by an individual, she said. “To boycott a discussion of literature such as the one proposed would be to take the view that literature is always and only some kind of tool of the nation that produces it — a view I strongly reject.”
Atwood also said via email that she is the international vice president of the literary organization PEN, which advocates for writers who are persecuted or imprisoned because of their work. As such, she is not allowed to participate in cultural boycotts, she said.

Dan David and Tel Aviv University
Dan David, 80, was born and raised in communist Romania. He joined the Zionist youth movement and helped organize aliyah or Zionist emigration to Israel, according to a 13 November 2007 article published by the Israeli daily Haaretz. David, who made his fortune in instant photo booths, used $100 million of his own money to found the Dan David Foundation, which administers the Dan David Prize. He also sits on the Board of Governors of Tel Aviv University (TAU), which is at the center of Israel’s military-industrial complex.

Today, some 64 research projects in defense or national security are being funded by Israeli and US defense agencies on the TAU campus. “TAU is playing a major role in enhancing Israel’s security capabilities and military edge,” reads the introduction to an article entitled “Lifting the Veil of Secrecy” in the Tel Aviv University Review, Winter 2008/09 issue.
“‘People are just not aware of how important university research is in general, and how much TAU contributes to Israel’s security in particular,’ says TAU President Zvi Galil in the article.

One project currently underway explores how to turn birds into weapons because they are relatively “unobtrusive,” especially when compared to the much larger unmanned drones, according to the article.
Antoine Raffoul said that the Dan David Prize cannot be divorced from Israel. “Its institutions, whether cultural, educational, industrial, scientific, judicial, agricultural or military, are part and parcel of the political institution of the state … working hand in hand to enforce the policies of an illegal occupation of Palestinian land,” he said.

TAU was built upon the remains of a Palestinian village depopulated and destroyed by Zionist forces in 1948. “By accepting the prize at Tel Aviv University, you will be indirectly giving a slight and inadvertent nod to Israel’s policy of ethnic cleansing and genocide. This university has refused to commemorate the destroyed Palestinian village on which it was built. That village is called Sheikh Muwanis, and it no longer exists as a result of Israel’s confiscation. Its people have been expelled,” the Gaza students wrote in their open letter.

Upholding the rights and voices of the persecuted
During an acceptance speech for the American PEN Literary Service Award in New York City in April, Atwood said oppressors share a commonality. “They wish to silence the human voice, or all human voices that do not sing their songs. They wish to indulge their sense of power, which is best done by grinding underfoot those who cannot retaliate.”
Gaza’s students are disappointed with Atwood’s decision to accept the Dan David Prize, Abubasheer said. “We are deeply wounded by her decision. Students here have been asking about the sincerity of her novels and wonder whether she will reconsider her decision to stand on the wrong side of history”

In the end, for Atwood, at least, it comes down to whether or not a cultural boycott is equivalent to censorship. But as filmmaker Cathy Gulkin said in an article posted on the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel’s website on 6 May, the two issues are distinct. Gulkin said that censorship is wielded by a force with the power to prevent a work from being presented, while a boycott asks artists to withdraw their work voluntarily. She participated in a boycott of the Tel Aviv International Film Festival last winter.
“Palestinian civil society has no power or will to silence or censor. They can only appeal to people of conscience … to support them in their struggle to achieve their human rights,” Gulkin wrote in her call to boycott last winter.

The Palestinian students and Raffoul point to a number of artists and authors, including Naomi Klein, Carlos Santana, Bono, Snoop Dog and Sting, who have heeded Palestinian civil society’s call for the boycott of Israel.
Raffoul even pointed to actor Marlon Brando, who rejected his Academy Award in 1973 to protest the US government’s treatment of Native Americans or the Beatles rejecting knighthoods in England.
“I sympathize with the very bad conditions the people of Gaza are living through due to the blockade, the military actions, and the Egyptian and Israeli walls,” Atwood wrote in her email to Raffoul.
“We are not asking for sympathy!” Abubasheer said. “We want solidarity. … You are either with justice or with injustice. There is no neutral zone.”

Abubasheer added: “Thus, we all have an individual moral responsibility to boycott. Boycott is inclusive and it brings people together, fighting for peace through justice and accountability, from the youngest to the oldest, from the four quarters of the world, anyone can boycott. After the wiping out of entire families in broad daylight, what else do some public intellectuals need to see in order to make a bold move?”
Raffoul contends that today no one — especially important cultural figures such as Atwood — can exist in a vacuum. “You can’t hide behind the cloak of literature,” he said. “We don’t live in a shell anymore. You cannot claim to be a humanitarian in any state and then … fly into a zone called Israel [that is] killing people and dehumanizing innocent people.”

Atwood said she plans to “observe” what she sees in Palestine and then write about it. She suggested this reporter hold off on writing this article until then.
But Abubasheer would not be comforted by this promise. Quoting Archbishop Desmond Tutu, she said: “If you choose to be neutral in situations of injustice, then you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”
She added: “The position taken by Ms. Atwood … is clear in the light of this statement.”

Kristin Szremski is an award-winning journalist with more than 20 years in newspapers. She began her career in Warsaw, Poland, working on an English-language newspaper with members of the Solidarnosc (Solidarity) union. Her work has appeared nationally and internationally. Szremski is currently a freelance journalist living outside Chicago.