Tag: Boycott

EDITOR: The ‘Peace Process’ is taken out of the deep freeze, but is there any life left in this corpse?

Hopeful Overtures, or Distant Thunder?

Now, some 14 months after Obama has taken over the Oval Office with much trumpeting about ‘change’, he finally remembered to start worrying about the Middle East and Palestine. This reminds us of the similar timetable of all US presidents before him, and also of the less than auspicious results of such sham up to now. On the one hand, Obama and Clinton have to be seen to be doing something, as the noises from Palestine and the Arab world, not to mention sectors of the Israeli society, are all speaking about the ‘last chance for peace’. On the other hand, he cannot do anything; he is a prisoner of his own ‘convictions’ seeing Israel as the most important ally in the coming war on Iran, and the following chaos which will no doubt overtake the Middle East. Israel, for Obama and Clinton, who are facing a stalemate if not defeat in Afghanistan, and unknown dangers in Pakistan, Yemen, Iran and parts of the Gulf, with certain unrest in Egypt, seems like the only ‘stable domino piece, and on their side, for better or worse.

So, what will they do? What can they do? How new can this initiative be?

Unfortunately, Both Obama and Clinton are fully committed to the decades-old game of the so-called Two State solution, woefully ignoring all that was done since 1967, not to mention 1948. Their solution is a Pax Isriaeliana – a forced agreement denying the minimum basic rights and needs of Palestine, and fully colluding with the Israeli agenda of only one meaningful entity, political, military and financial, between the river Jordan and the sea, to be a vassal state of the US and serve its regional interests. Nothing else is on the table, and nothing ever was. This is the reason that despite the rush of talks, talks about talks, Nobel prizes and photo-opportunities, and a much reduced Palestinian leadership, especially after the split with Hamas, there was no meaningful movement towards a just solution in Palestine. As the US/Israel position concentrates and is predicated on Israel’s ‘security needs’, which as we know, engulf the globe rather than just the region, and Israel’s notion of what it needs in terms of territories, control and sheer military power, there was nothing for any Palestinian leader, however desperate (and most of them were, and still are) to sign on behalf of their people, if they do not wish to sign away any future prospects altogether. Every Palestinian leader knows that continuing with the charade of the ‘peace talks’, in the way it was established over the last few decades, is playing with fire near an open oil drum; the Palestinian population has suffered more than possibly any other since 1945, and there is no end in sight. Palestinians know clearly enough that all the Oslo agreements, promises and procedures were used by Israel for one aim – to advance, deepen and secure its stranglehold on Palestine through a system combining settlements, brutal military occupation, the ‘separation’ (apartheid in Afrikaans) wall, daily repression and mass starvation in Gaza. Even the most pliant Palestinian leader, and there was no one more pliant than the current one, must understand that they cannot puta signature to something which will not only stifle hope, but cannot be delivered. The Oslo cloud of misguided optimism has long been blown away.

So, what is the agenda of the current revival of the ‘peace’ rain-dance by Obama, Clinton and Mitchell? Surely, they also know what has been described here, and know it without any possible doubt?

As much as one would like to believe in the benign aims of US foreign policy, (not a position one could easily recommend) it seems that like in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and many other fronts of the current conflict between Western Huntingtonian ‘civilizational’ crusade and the Moslem/Arabic cultures, with Palestine becoming the iconic conflict of this ‘clash of civilizations’. Pundits have told the various US administrations for decades that as long as the Palestine conflicts festers and occasionally boils over, the chance of stemming the anger in the Muslim and Arab world against the West is minimal; the US has overlooked, not to say ignored, such advice with surprising tenacity which seems foolhardy, to say the least. All the various efforts to quell unrest in the Muslim East have been on the US/Israel terms: “we will tell you how to behave, if you wish us to speak to you, and you better follow the instructions”. Such a policy could only produce the results which we know today.

So, is Obama able to ascend beyond the platitudes and destructive patterns which have dogged not only the Palestine conflict, but the whole US foreign policy? Is he able to reverse the trends of decades? Is he indeed willing to do so?

The answer to date must be a resounding NO. In all his foreign policy initiatives, Obama, and Clinton and Mitchell as his semi-autonomous apparatchiks, have proven their deep conservatism, their dependence on doctrines which have failed time and again to achieve the stated aims, and their beholden commitment to what they call ‘a strong Israel’, meaning the corollary of a weak Palestine, and a weak Arab Middle East. As long as this remains the order of the day, no amount of photo-opportunities will change the realities in Palestine, in the region, in the world. The US elite, its administration, its powerful economy, its military-industrial complex, have all combined to react in the well known rituals of the declining empire – a denial of unpalatable realities, a failure to think beyond their power grip, a selfishness bred by ultimate control for far too long, an inability to transcend patterns of behaviour ingrained by being so strong, that no other force need be consulted or taken into account.

This bodes ill for Palestine, of course; it does not herald some excellent times for Israel either, of course. Unless the Israeli leadership, its social, intellectual and financial elites, all colluding fully in the brutal occupation, are brought to book, are faced with the results of the decades of their crimes, there is no hope for Palestine, Israel, or the Middle East.

There is also no hope for the rest of us, as the current US administration is failing its first major test.

A slightly different version was sent to the Guardian today, by Haim Bresheeth

Joe Biden and George Mitchell arrive to kick-start Israeli-Palestinian talks: The Guardian

Indirect negotiations mark first return to peace process since Gaza war
George Mitchell meets Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem yesterday as he began a round of regional talks lasting four months. Photograph: Moshe Milner/EPA
The US vice-president, Joe Biden, is due in Israel tomorrow for an American diplomatic initiative to start indirect negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.
The new round of so-called “proximity talks” could be announced as early as tomorrow, but there is scepticism on both sides about the chance of any agreement. George Mitchell, the US special envoy to the Middle East, will shuttle between Israeli and Palestinian leaders for four months hoping to find common ground. Although the talks are low-key, they mark the first return to a peace process since Israel’s war in Gaza more than a year ago.
Mitchell flew into Israel on Saturday night and met with Ehud Barak, the Israeli defence minister, for 90 minutes. He saw Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, today and will meet Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas tomorrow.
Mitchell’s team will handle the talks, while Biden’s visit is reportedly focused on trying to win Israeli support for the US administration’s policy on Iran and on discouraging Israel from any military action against the Iranian regime over its nuclear ambitions.

Abbas won the support of the Arab League and today the executive committee of the Palestine Liberation Organisation to go ahead with the talks. Yet they represent a partial climbdown for the Palestinian leader, who for a year has insisted there will be no talks with Israel without a full halt to the construction of Jewish settlements on occupied Palestinian territory. However, construction continues, with Israel offering only a limited, temporary halt that expires in a few months.
In a speech on Saturday in Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank, Abbas warned the peace process had “almost reached a dead end. The Israeli government continues to procrastinate to gain time and strengthen its control of the occupied territories to prevent any realistic possibility of establishing an independent, viable … state of Palestine,” he said.
The Palestinian leadership wants an independent state in Gaza and the West Bank, with a capital in East Jerusalem. However, Netanyahu says he will not give up East Jerusalem, which Israel captured in the 1967 war, occupied and later annexed ‑ a move not recognised by the international community. He also insists on holding on to large Jewish settlement blocs in the West Bank and says Israel must maintain a key presence in the Jordan valley, along the border with Jordan.
Some Israeli commentators were doubtful about the new diplomacy and said the gap between Israeli and Palestinian leaders was too wide to bridge. “If the talks are held in the planned indirect format, they are not going to lead anywhere,” wrote Shimon Shiffer, a columnist in the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper. “They are going to lead neither to increased trust between the leaders nor to final status arrangement talks in the near future.”
The diplomacy comes at a time of heightened tension. There have been several days of clashes between Palestinians and Israeli police at the Haram al-Sharif, or the Temple Mount, in Jerusalem’s Old City. There has been criticism of an Israeli announcement about more houses planned inside East Jerusalem settlements and on Friday a 14-year-old Palestinian boy was critically injured when he was shot in the head with an Israeli rubber-coated bullet during a demonstration in Nabi Saleh, in the West Bank, against Israeli confiscation of village land.

In Jerusalem on Saturday night, more than 2,000 Israelis and Palestinians held a protest against the eviction of Palestinian refugees and the growing presence of rightwing Jewish settlers.

US to relaunch peace talks in Middle East: The Independent

US ready to apportion blame if new round of talks fails to make progress again
By Donald Macintyre in Jerusalem
Monday, 8 March 2010SHARE PRINTEMAILTEXT SIZE NORMALLARGEEXTRA LARGE
US Vice-President Joe Biden will arrive in Israel today following a formal decision by the West Bank Palestinian leadership to approve Washington’s proposal for indirect peace negotiations with Israel.
The Palestinian Liberation Organisation gave President Mahmoud Abbas a mandate to take part in the talks – the first with Israel for over a year – while warning that without real progress to a deal on borders they would pull out of the negotiations after four months.
With both US presidential envoy George Mitchell – who will shuttle between the two sides during the process – and Mr Biden in the region, a more detailed timetable for the talks is likely to emerge this week. The Palestinian negotiators have so far ruled out direct talks without the full freeze on settlement construction that had been sought by Washington.

Part of Mr Biden’s purpose in talks with Israeli leaders has been widely reported to be to urge Israel not to contemplate an Israeli military strike on Iran while President Obama continues to try for more stringent international sanctions to press Tehran to abandon its perceived military nuclear ambitions.
But the Vice President, the highest ranking US official to visit Israel since President Obama took office, will also meet Mr Abbas and other Palestinian leaders in Ramallah during his three-day visit. Yesterday’s PLO decision was expected after the heavily qualified approval given to the talks by the Arab League in Cairo last week.

There have been indications from the administration that it is ready to apportion blame for any failure to progress in the Israeli-Palestinian talks. At the same time, low expectations for the outcome were underlined by an internal Israeli Foreign Ministry paper assessing that the Middle East will be a relatively low priority for Washington in the run-up to November’s mid-term Congressional elections. The paper, leaked to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, says that in preparatory discussions for the so-called “proximity talks” US officials took positions closer to Palestinian requirements than to Israel’s. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been demanding that the Palestinians explicitly recognise Israel as a “Jewish state”, has continued to affirm his opposition to the sharing of Jerusalem as a capital – regarded as a sine qua non by Palestinian negotiators – and envisages a continued Israeli presence in the Jordan Valley.

But the document also suggests that the US administration will avoid taking any position that suggests disagreement with Israel because of the support that Israel enjoys in Congress. The unspoken implication is that that will be particularly true as President Obama seeks to prevent heavy Republican gains in the mid-term elections.
The talks co-incide with an increase in grass-roots protests by some Palestinians, partly exacerbated by the inclusion of religious shrines in two West Bank cities, Hebron and Bethlehem, in a list of Jewish heritage sites published by Mr Netanyahu.
A 14-year-old boy Ehab Fadel Barghouthi was still critically ill yesterday after being shot by border police with a rubber-coated bullet that penetrated his skull during an anti-settlement protest in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh on Friday. Eyewitnesses say he was shot at a range of around 20 metres during stone-throwing incidents.

And the Palestinian Authority has protested at the military detention of a 13-year-old boy Hasan El-Muhtaseb for six days for allegedly throwing stones during protests in Hebron. A military court yesterday released the boy on a £875 surety.

Continue reading March 8, 2010

Photographer Ryuichi Hirokawa’s best shot: The Guardian

Interview by Melissa Denes, The Guardian – 30 Apr 2009

I took this in 2002, at Al-Ram checkpoint on the West Bank. All the checkpoints had been closed by Israeli troops and these women were demonstrating to have them opened, so that food and medical supplies could come through. An hour before, a group of men had been demonstrating, but the soldiers pulled out their batons so the women – who were both Palestinian and Israeli – moved to the front.
On the left is a line of Israeli soldiers; that man at the front, with his hands in his pockets, is a policeman. I was drawn to the young woman standing second from the right, who is holding up her hand in a V-sign. She held that for a long time, at least 30 minutes – until the soldiers began to throw tear gas canisters.
You can see the press at the back. I don’t like to work from such a position of safety. I’ve been taking photographs in Israel and the West Bank since 1967. This one became symbolic for me, and last year I included it in my film Nakba (Catastrophe), which features hundreds of photographs and interviews with Palestinians displaced after 1948.
As a student in Japan, I was very idealistic. I read the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber and decided to work on an Israeli kibbutz. One day, I found some bullets in a field nearby and asked where they might have come from. No one knew – then a young Jewish man showed me an old map that had the Palestinian name for the place where we were working.
I began photographing the ruins of Palestinian villages and exhibited them in Jerusalem in 1969, in a show called Security. There was an angry response: people wanted to know whose security I was referring to. But one entry in the visitors’ book, written by a Jewish student, said: “In Israel we only ever hear one side; these pictures show us the other side.” I have been to Palestine 30 to 40 times now, most recently to Gaza in January. This is what I keep trying to show.

EDITOR: Gideon Levy has always been the most thoughtful, challenging and morally founded columnists in Haaretz, and in Israel. He has moved his political positioning much to the left over the last couple of years, and this article is the clearest he has written yet, a condemnation of the cozy self-image of the so-called Israeli left “peace camp”. Timely and accurate.

There has never been an Israeli peace camp: Haaretz

By Gideon Levy
The Israeli peace camp didn’t die. It was never born in the first place. While it’s true that since the summer of 1967, several radical and brave political groups have been working against the occupation – all worthy of recognition – a large, influential peace camp has never existed here.

It’s true that after the Yom Kippur War, after the first Lebanon War and during the giddy days of Oslo (oh, how giddy those days were), citizens took to the streets, generally when the weather was nice and when the best of Israeli music was being performed at rallies, but few people really said anything decisive or courageous, and fewer still were willing to pay a personal price for their activities. After the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, people lit candles in the square and sang Aviv Geffen songs, but this certainly isn’t what one would call a peace camp.

It is also true that the stance advocated by the so-called Matzpen movement immediately after the Six-Day War has now more or less become the Israeli consensus position – but it is mere words, devoid of content. Nothing meaningful has been done so far to put it into practice. One would have expected more, a lot more, from a democratic society in whose backyard such a prolonged and cruel occupation has existed and whose government has primarily invoked the language of fear, threats and violence.

There have been societies in the past in whose name frightful injustice has been committed, but at least within some of them, genuine, angry and determined left-wing protest took place – of the sort that requires personal risk and courage, and which is not limited to action within the cozy consensus. An occupying society whose town square has been empty for years, with the exception of hollow memorial rallies and poorly attended protests, cannot wash its hands of the situation. Neither democracy nor the peace camp can.

If people didn’t take to the streets in large numbers during Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, then there isn’t a genuine peace camp. If people don’t flood the streets now – when dangers lie in wait and opportunity is wasted time after time, and democracy sustains blow after blow on a daily basis and there are no longer sufficient resources to properly defend it, and when the right wing controls the political map and settlers amass more and more power – then there is no genuine left wing.

There is nothing like the debate over the future of the Meretz party to demonstrate the sorry state of the left. This comes in the wake of the strange and ridiculous report last week about the party’s poor showing in the last election, and which gives every possible recommendation. Meretz disappeared because the party fell silent; you don’t need a commission to find that out. But even during its relatively better days, Meretz was not a real peace camp. When Meretz applauded Oslo, it deliberately ignored the fact that the champions of the “historic” peace accords never intended to evacuate even a single settlement over the course of the great “breakthrough” that earned its promoters Nobel peace, yes, peace prizes. This camp also overlooked Israel’s violations of the agreements, its illusions of peace.

Above all, however, the problem was rooted in the left’s impossible adherence to Zionism in its historical sense. In precisely the way there cannot be a democratic and Jewish state in one breath, one has to first define what comes before what – there cannot be a left wing committed to the old-fashioned Zionism that built the state but has run its course. This illusory left wing never managed to ultimately understand the Palestinian problem – which was created in 1948, not 1967 – never understanding that it can’t be solved while ignoring the injustice caused from the beginning. A left wing unwilling to dare to deal with 1948 is not a genuine left wing.

The illusory left never understood the most important point: For the Palestinians, consenting to the 1967 borders along with a solution to the refugee problem, including at least the return of a symbolic number of refugees themselves, are painful concessions. They also represent the only just compromise, without which peace will not be established; but there’s no sense in accusing the Palestinians of wasting an opportunity. Such a proposal, even including the “far-reaching” proposals of Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert, has never been made to them.

Meretz will surely find some kind of organizational arrangement and will again get half a dozen members elected to the Knesset, on a good day maybe even a dozen. This doesn’t mean much, however. The other left-wing groups, both Jewish and Arab, remain excluded. No one has any use for them, no one thinks about including them, and they are too small to have any influence. So let’s call the child by its real name: The Israeli peace camp is still an unborn baby.

Continue reading March 7, 2010

EDITOR: The Al Ahram Nakba Archive is a useful research source for finding sources and quotes, but has not been recently updated. It will be available as a permanent link on this website, on the right, within the LINKS category.

The Nakba Archive

David Ben-Gurion, one of the father founders of Israel, described Zionist aims in 1948 thus: “A Christian state should be established [in Lebanon], with its southern border on the Litani river. We will make an alliance with it. When we smash the Arab Legion’s strength and bomb Amman, we will eliminate Transjordan too, and then Syria will fall. If Egypt still dares to fight on, we shall bomb Port Said, Alexandria and Cairo… And in this fashion, we will end the war and settle our forefathers’ account with Egypt, Assyria, and Aram” *.

50 years after the Arab defeat in the1948 war, which resulted in the establishment of Israel, many of Ben-Gurion’s stated aims can still be discerned in the language of Israeli and Zionist leaders. Some modifications have become apparent, in large part as a result of Arab resistance, but the biblical language in which Ben-Gurion chose to state his meaning starkly expresses the deeply-rooted nature of these violent fantasies of conquest and destruction.

Resistance, in this instance through a better comprehension of the history of the struggle, as well as the writing of our own version of it, becomes more necessary than ever. Israel cannot be allowed to write the history of the past fifty years unchallenged. It is in this conviction that Al-Ahram Weekly presents the first in a regular series of articles designed to document the history and nature of Arab-Israeli struggle, as well as that of Palestinian dispossession and exile.

Policy of provocation: Al Ahram Weekly

Israeli provocations, including annexing Islamic sites to an alleged heritage list, are creating a powder keg in the occupied territories, writes Khaled Amayreh in the West Bank

Palestinian officials have warned that recent Israeli provocations, including government-backed attempts by Jewish religious extremists to claim a foothold at the Al-Aqsa Mosque, are creating an incendiary situation in the occupied territories.

Visibly frustrated by Israel’s utter disregard for Palestinian objections to Israeli encroachment on Muslim holy places in Hebron, Bethlehem and East Jerusalem, Palestinian Authority (PA) officials have been appealing to the international community, especially Israel’s guardian-ally, the United States, to rein in the Israeli government.
“These provocations are killing the last hopes for peace. Israel is turning the occupied Palestinian territories into a powder keg. If these provocations continue, there can be no peace process, and the international community will have to bear the consequences,” said the erstwhile chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat.
Arguing that Israel is provoking the religious sensibilities of Palestinians, Erekat urged the Obama administration to stop Israel “before it is too late”.

Similarly, Ismail Haniyeh, the prime minister of the Gaza-based Hamas-run government in the Gaza Strip has called for a new Intifada, or uprising, against Israeli provocations.
Haniyeh said it was unacceptable that Israel could seize Islamic holy places in the West Bank while the Palestinians watched passively.
In recent days, Israel took a series of provocative measures Palestinians insist would alter the status quo in occupied Palestine, including adding two important Islamic sites to an alleged Jewish heritage list.
The two sites are the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron and the Bilal Ibn Rabah mosque in Bethlehem. Palestinian leaders, along with Arab and Muslim states, argue forcefully that the Israeli decisions nullify any serious talk of a peace process.

This view has been further enforced by the storming of the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound by Israeli occupation police forces on Sunday 28 February.
Palestinians said that the police attacked Muslim worshipers in order to provide protection for Talmudic Jewish fanatics seeking to gain “prayer rights” at one of Islam’s holiest shrines. Israeli spokespersons said the police had to intervene in order to protect “visitors” from stone-hurling Muslims.

As many as 200 crack policemen and para-military soldiers stormed the Al-Aqsa compound to evict dozens of Muslims who had barricaded themselves inside the Mosque, ostensibly to protect the site and repulse Jewish fanatics who were celebrating a Jewish holiday called “Purim”.
Showing no discretion and failing to take the sacredness of the place into consideration, Israeli forces shot tear-gas canisters throughout the Haram Al-Sharif esplanade (Noble Sanctuary), causing several injuries, mainly as a result of tear- gas inhalation.
Earlier, the Israeli occupation police sealed all gates leading to the Haram Al-Sharif, apparently in order to prevent Jerusalemites from converging on the holy place, as has happened on previous similar occasions.
The storming of the Al-Aqsa Mosque drew verbal reactions from Arab and Muslim capitals, that warned Israel that it was creating a tinder box.

Eventually, the Jordanian government seemed to have convinced the Israeli government to withdraw police forces from the Haram Al-Sharif and restore normality at the holy place.
Nonetheless, it is highly likely that tensions will continue to increase, especially in East Jerusalem, mainly due to further Israeli provocations, including plans to demolish dozens of Arab homes in the occupied city.
According to the Israeli media, the Jewish mayor of Jerusalem, Nir Barkat, has taken a final decision to demolish dozens of Arab homes, especially in the Silwan neighbourhood, in order to create flats for Jewish settlers.

The Silwan neighbourhood, labelled by Israeli sources “the second most incendiary place after the Al-Aqsa Mosque,” would witness the expulsion from their homes of hundreds of Palestinian families. Khalil Tufakji, an East Jerusalem geographer and cartographer, described the plan as “demographic ethnic cleansing”.
“They [the Israelis] want to obliterate the Arab identity of the city. They claim they want to develop the city, but in truth what they want is to destroy the Arab presence here. This is an ongoing demographic genocide.”

“The declared goal is not development. The real goal is depopulation of Arabs,” Tufakji said.
Israel has been planning to destroy hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Arab homes in Jerusalem that the occupation authority claims were built without a valid construction licence.
However, Palestinians and human-rights activists operating in the occupied territories argue that the licence issue is only an excuse since successive Israeli governments have routinely and systematically refused to grant non-Jews building licences, forcing frustrated Palestinians, languishing under a severe housing crises, to build unlicensed homes.
Arab sources in occupied Jerusalem have warned that the implementation of the Barkat plan would trigger a real Intifada in Jerusalem and the rest of the occupied territories.

“Of course, there will be violent reactions. What would you do if someone destroyed your home in order to build a flat for someone else? That would be an act of rape, and rape must be resisted,” said Jamal Moussa, a resident of the Silwan neighbourhood, the main focus of the Israeli plan.
Political and religious leaders of the estimated 350,000 Jerusalemite Palestinian citizens have reacted similarly, warning Israel that carrying out “this spate of ethnic cleansing would make the powder keg go off”.
Last week, Palestinian youths hurled stones at Israeli occupation soldiers in the southern West Bank town of Al-Khalil (Hebron). The soldiers fired rubber- coated bullets, stun grenades and shot tear-gas canisters.

Some eyewitnesses described the violence, which lasted for five days, as “a possible preview of things to come,” especially if the “present trend continues”.
Facing a difficult situation, stemming mainly from the refusal of the Obama administration to put pressure on Israel, PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad decided to hold his weekly cabinet session in Hebron this week.

The meeting was meant to highlight Palestinian rejection of the latest Israeli decisions to take over Islamic holy places in Hebron and Bethlehem.
Fayyad and other PA officials have pointed out that they don’t want to see violence return to the streets of the West Bank.
However, it is abundantly clear that the possible return of violence to the streets of the West Bank depends more on what Israel does than on what the PA says.

Report: Hamas admits losing control in Gaza: Haaretz

Gaza in anarchy as extremist groups challenge Hamas regime, military chief tells Damascus leader.
In a letter to Hamas political chief Khaled Meshal, the group’s senior military commander has admitted losing control in Gaza, the Arabic-language newspaper As-Sharq Al-Awsat reported on Saturday.
According to the London-based newspaper, quoted by Army Radio, Ahmed Jabri sent an urgent dispatch to the Damascus-based Meshal, warning him that the security situation in Gaza is “deteriorating”.

“Recently a series of explosions has raised fears in Gaza,” Jabri wrote. Gaza had descended into “anarchy”, he said.
In the letter, Jabri reportedly admitted to a string of errors in governing the strip, where Islamist Hamas seized control in a bloody confrontation with its rival secular movement, Fatah, in the summer of 2007.
Hamas is convinced that extremist ‘jihadi’ Islamist movements are behind the bombings, which could mark the start of a push to oust the de facto government, the newspaper said.

Other Palestinian sources told As-Sharq Al-Awsat the attacks were the result of internal strife within Hamas, however.
On Thursday, Haaretz correspondents Amos Harel and Avi Issacharroff wrote in their MESS Report blog that extremist groups pose a growing threat to Hamas rule in Gaza.
They wrote: “Israel, which until now has viewed Hamas as its biggest enemy in Gaza, needs to take into account that within a couple of years Hamas will be the moderate force in Gaza protecting the calm while a monstrous and more dangerous threat is growing in the form of the ultra-radical groups.”

Continue reading March 6, 2010

EDITOR: Israeli Apartheid Week

This week, the BDS campaign is at last spreading far and wide across the globe, through the Apartheid Week campaign. It certainly seems to mark the gradual transformation of pubic opinion on this issue, and predicates a likely political change in the future. This is why the tag on anti-semitism has been automatically attached to this activity by Zionist propaganda makers.

Universities across the globe mark Israeli Apartheid Week: Haaretz

LONDON – A filmmaker, anthropologist and economic researcher are among those headlining events marking what pro-Palestinian organizers have declared as “Israeli Apartheid Week” – and all three speakers are Israeli.

University campuses in more than 40 cities around the world are marking the week with lectures, films, multimedia events, cultural performances and demonstrations.
Since they were first launched in 2005, the events have become some of “the most important global events in the Palestine solidarity calendar,” according to its organizers.

Its aim, they state on their Web site, is to “contribute to this chorus of international opposition to Israeli apartheid and to bolster support for the boycotts, divestments and sanctions (BDS) campaign.”
Though many of the details about those events were not being promoted on the Apartheid Week Web site, it did list several events being offered by Israelis.

Among them is Shir Hever, an economic researcher at the Alternative Information Center in Jerusalem, who is scheduled to give a series of lectures at the University of Amsterdam entitled “Could the Economic Policies of Israel be Considered a Form of Apartheid?”
In addition, Israeli activist and filmmaker Shai Carmeli-Pollak is screening his 2006 documentary “Bil’in Habibti,” about Israel Defense Forces violence, at Boston-area universities.
Jeff Halper, the Israel-based professor of anthropology who is co-founder and coordinator of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, was scheduled to speak on “Israeli Apartheid: The Case For BDS” at Glasgow University.

The participation of several Israelis in the anti-Zionist events is “atrocious,” said David Katz, a member of Britain’s Jewish Board of Deputies who grew up in South Africa and has long fought the comparison between that country’s racial segregation and Israel’s ethnic divisions.
“They are free to do as they please, but it’s atrocious,” he said of the participating Israelis. “I think they don’t understand the analogy they are making… which is insulting to those who suffered under apartheid.”
“It’s like calling things ‘holocaust’ which are not the Holocaust or terming something ‘genocide’ which is not genocide,” said Katz.

As part of efforts to counter the Apartheid Week events, one Jewish charity brought over Benjamin Pogrund, a South African immigrant to Israel who is the former deputy editor of the Johannesburg-based Rand Daily Mail, to speak to British university students about why Israel is not an apartheid state.
“The game plan of those who seek the destruction of Israel is to equate us with South Africa, a pariah state which had to be subjected to international sanctions,” Pogrund has said. “Israelis coming to take part in this week should know better.”

In Canada, the legislature in the province of Ontario unanimously condemned Israeli Apartheid Week, voting for a resolution that denounced the campus events.
“If you’re going to label Israel as Apartheid, then you are also… attacking Canadian values,” Conservative legislator Peter Shurman told Shalom Life, a Toronto-based Jewish Web site.
“The use of the phrase ‘Israeli Apartheid Week’ is about as close to hate speech as one can get without being arrested, and I’m not certain it doesn’t actually cross over that line,” he said.

No country would accept Netanyahu’s conditions for peace: Haaretz

By Akiva Eldar
The decision to add the Tomb of the Patriarchs and Rachel’s Tomb to the list of historical heritage sites up for renovation was not made with the intention of inflaming tempers and sabotaging efforts to revive final-status talks with the Palestinians. It was merely a routine move by a rightist government, further proof that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s “two states” speech at Bar-Ilan University was a milestone on the road to nowhere. The only difference between “the rock of our existence” that launched the Western Wall tunnel violence in 1996 and the 2010 model is that this time Netanyahu is wearing a mask, trying to pass himself off as peace activist Uri Avnery, with the generous help of Defense Minister Ehud Barak.

The prime minister, as we all know, simply can’t wait for renewed final-status talks to get underway, but Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas refuses to back down and is setting “conditions that predetermine the outcome of the negotiations,” as Netanyahu told Haaretz a week ago. Indeed, the Palestinians have made their participation in indirect talks conditional on, in part, a construction freeze during the talks in West Bank settlements and East Jerusalem. They have the audacity to claim that it is Netanyahu’s demand to expand settlements during negotiations along with the assertion of Jewish ownership over sensitive sites which are the conditions that predetermine the outcome of the talks.

The Palestinian demand for a total freeze on settlement construction, including that required for natural population growth, is not, in Netanyahu’s words “a condition that no country would accept.” Israel accepted that condition in the road map seven years ago. In an article in the journal of the Israel Council on Foreign Relations in December 2009, Prof. Ruth Lapidoth, recipient of the 2006 Israel Prize for Legal Studies, and Dr. Ofra Friesel write that the Netanyahu government is obligated by the road map, which was ratified by the Sharon government. A former legal adviser to the Foreign Ministry, Lapidoth stresses that the 14 remarks (not reservations, as they are usually termed) that Israel appended have no legal validity. And since the U.S. government promised no more than to relate “fully and seriously” to these remarks, they don’t have any diplomatic validity, either.

Netanyahu argues that Sharon reached an oral agreement with George W. Bush that the construction freeze would not apply to the “settlement blocs” and that the United States would take into account natural-growth requirements. The prime minister therefore expects the Palestinians to honor not only formal agreements to which they were a party, but also informal understandings reached behind their backs between Israel and America. Yet when the Palestinians demand an acknowledgment of understandings they reached with the Olmert government on a number of final-status principles, Netanyahu says this is a “precondition that predetermines the outcome of negotiations.”

The prime minister also contemptuously rejects the Palestinian demand that the talks be resumed where they were halted in December 2008. He is not prepared to even listen to the parameters for a final-status agreement proposed by Bill Clinton in December 2000. Netanyahu insists he has the right to start negotiations from square one, ignoring every agreement already reached with the Palestinians. He has even forgotten the Wye River Memorandum of 1998, under which he undertook, in Clinton’s presence, to transfer 13 percent of Area C to the Palestinians.

Netanyahu sticks only to those clauses in the interim agreement (Oslo 2) that removed responsibility for the Palestinians’ welfare from Israel’s hands and left Israel in control of Area C (60 percent of the West Bank). And of course, Netanyahu is totally committed to those clauses that require the Palestinians to combat terrorist infrastructure and incitement and refrain from asking the United Nations to condemn the injustices of the occupation.

Netanyahu is setting conditions for negotiations that no country would accept. His opposition to a settlement freeze and his refusal to resume talks where they left off expose his Bar-Ilan declarations as a cunning diversionary tactic. As his chief spokesman, President Shimon Peres, is wont to declare, “You have to tell the people the truth.” The dismal truth is that, behind the mask, Netanyahu is still the same old Bibi.

EDITOR: The Dubai murder story that will not die down

The murder of one Palestinian in Dubai refuses to disappear from the front pages. Is it possible that Israel has gone too far for the general public sensibilities this time? We should not be celebrating too soon. After all, it certainly did go too far during the 22 days of the carnage in Gaza? While the public revulsion aroused by each wave of brutalities seems to subside after some time has passed, there is also a public memory which keeps building up, a memory of the systemic nature of Israeli Zionist methods and means, and to this end the Apartheid Week is crucial. Thus, this growth of the rejection of Israel’s impunity is also important, even, as now, it is only played on a formalistic level.

Australia police expected in Israel to probe Dubai hit passports: Haaretz

Australian investigators are expected in Israel in the coming days to question several dual nationals whose names have been connected to the assassination of Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai last month.

Israel agreed to allow two to three Australian police officers to question the dual citizens, after Australia’s Foreign Ministry on Sunday requested approval from the Israeli envoy in Canberra to dispatch the investigators.
Mabhouh was found dead in his Dubai hotel room on January 20 in what police say they are almost certain was a hit by Israel’s Mossad spy agency.
Australia last week said it was not satisfied with the Israeli envoy’s explanation about the use of fraudulent Australian passports in the killing, after three people holding Australian passports were listed among 15 new suspects.

Dubai authorities have named 26 alleged members of the team that tracked and killed the Palestinian and said they operated in disguise and used fraudulent British, Irish, French, German and Australian passports.
Media reports last week said that Australian authorities had approached Israel in the 1990s to seek assurances that its passports would not be used in Mossad activities after it was feared Israel had doctored New Zealand passports.
During that meeting, the reports claimed, the Israelis said they condoned such identity theft, with Australian participants describing their response as “enraged self-righteousness.”

On Saturday, investigators from Britain’s Serious Organized Crimes Agency arrived in Israel to interview dual nationals whose names were used on British forged passports tied to the killing.
‘Two suspected Dubai assassins traveled to the U.S. after the hit’
At least two of the 26 suspected members of the team that tracked and killed Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai last month traveled to the U.S. shortly after his death, the Wall Street Journal reported on Monday.

Records show one of the suspects entered the U.S. on January 21 using an Irish passport and another arrived in the U.S. February 14 using a British passport, reported the Wall Street Journal, quoting “a person familiar with the situation.”
Investigators are uncertain whether the two are still in the U.S. Police suspect the alleged hit squad members used fraudulently issued passports, and that the two may have left the U.S. using different travel documents.
Spokesmen for the U.S. State Department and Interpol both declined to comment on the Wall Street Journal report.
People with the same names as many of the suspects live in Israel and say their identities were stolen. The passport abuse has drawn criticism from the European Union, and some of the governments involved have summoned the Israeli ambassadors to their countries to protest.

Israel has not denied or confirmed it played any role but Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has said there was nothing to link Israel to the killing.
Dubai police have also identified two U.S. financial companies they believe issued several of the credit cards used by at least 14 suspects in the alleged killing.

Continue reading March 1, 2010