Mideast Solidarity Project

2010-01-29T13:11:00.000-08:00

"Iraq inquiry hears defiant Tony Blair say: I'd do it again"

"Righteous, responsible but no regrets: Tony Blair's day in the dock"

-mm

2010-01-28T23:08:00.000-08:00

"A just cause, not a just war" An article by the late Howard Zinn

"How surrendering Palestinian rights became the language of "peace""

"Bilin grassroots leader Mohammed Khatib arrested in late-night raid"

"Iran executes two opposition supporters"

-mm

2009-12-04T13:33:00.000-08:00

"Pakistan and the Global War on Terror"

"President Obama's Afghanistan Election Speech"

-mm

2009-11-20T17:42:00.000-08:00

"Israel's two-tiered justice system"

"Biggest state party to Obama: Get out of Afghanistan"

"Karzai's last chance"

"Green movement spreading despite crackdown"

-mm

2009-11-13T18:56:00.000-08:00

"Huge rise in birth defects in Falluja"

"Israeli Jews and the one-state solution"

"The disastrous presidency of Mahmoud Abbas"

"Iranian irrationality? Maybe not"

-mm

2009-11-06T22:53:00.000-08:00

Afghanistan:

- "Women of Influence: Malalai Joya"

- "Stop US meddling; Support Afghan women at the table"

- "Cabinet of warlords"

Iran:

- "Iranian student dares to criticise Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to his face"

- Articles and videos from the 13th of Aban (Nov. 4)

Palestine:

- "Israeli soldiers, settlers violate Palestinian women's rights"

- "Gazans not allowed to rebuild their lives"

- "Israeli settlements could cause one-state solution"

- "Bipartisan attack on international humanitarian law"

Other:

- "Noam Chomsky: 'US foreign policy is straight out of the mafia'"

- "Why and to what end in Afghanistan"

On a side note, Malalai Joya will be in Seattle on November 11th and I highly encourage anyone and everyone to go if possible! For more information CLICK HERE

-mm

2009-10-30T12:32:00.000-07:00

My favorite story of this week is about Matthew Hoh and so this post will be dedicated to him. Matthew Hoh has become "the first U.S. official known to resign in protest against American policies" in Afghanistan.

- "U.S. official resigns over Afghan war"

- Watch him, or read the transcript, on NewsHour

- "Matthew Hoh speaks truth to power"

-mm

2009-10-23T17:24:00.000-07:00

Afghanistan:

-Three myths driving the Afghan war

-from Aljazeera, Inside Story: Afghan Election Runoff

Iran:

-Tehran says it favors deal on uranium but asks for more time

-Iran will emerge victorious

Iraq:

-from Aljazeera, Riz Khan: Iraqi Asylum Seekers, part 1 & 2

Pakistan:

-Taliban bombs in Pakistan strike air base, restaurant, and wedding party

-Obama's Pakistan problem

-Terrified whispers in Pakistan

Palestine:

-Israeli intelligence pose as Arabs to spy on citizens

-from Aljazeera, Locked in: Life in Gaza part 1 & 2

-mm

2009-10-16T16:52:00.000-07:00

"Israel rejects UN council backing for Gaza war crimes report" - is anybody surprised by this??? didn't think so.

"Iran court seeks to try Mehdi Karroubi over alleging detainees were raped"

"Palestinian faith in Obama 'evaporates'"

"Eight years later, we still don't get it in Afghanistan"

-mm

2009-10-09T13:30:00.000-07:00

Obama winning the Nobel Peace Prize is undoubtably the dominating headline of today and think some of these articles give some perspective about this current confusion.

- http://www.counterpunch.org/lindorff10092009.html

- http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts10092009.html

- http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/10/09-2

- http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/10/09-4

- http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/10/09-7

- http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-10-09/obamas-nobel-farce/?cid=hp:mainpromo1

- http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/oct/09/nobel-peace-prize-barack-obama

- http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/oct/09/obama-nobel-prize-reaction

Does Obama deserve the Nobel Peace Prize? What are your opinions?

IN OTHER NEWS:

"Israeli high schoolers choose jail over occupation army service"

"Why we must stay in Afghanistan"

"Iran activist sentenced to death for election protests"

"Iran's women are not afraid"

-mm

Interesting articles from today...

2009-10-02T12:52:00.000-07:00

"Abbas helps Israel bury its crimes in Gaza"

http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article10807.shtml

"Why Israel hates Obama"

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-10-01/a-white-house-of-self-hating-jews/?cid=hp:beastoriginalsL4

"Naive Obama gets Iran results"

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-10-02/naive-obama-gets-iran-results/

"Obama's Afghanistan problem - It's in our hands"

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/10/02-1

This last article reminded me about the rally and demonstration that will be happening on October 7th to protest against the occupation in Afghanistan. So if you're in the Olympia area, come join us! More info on the rally: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=131615607457&index=1

-mm

IDF uses undercover cops in recent Ni'lin protests, 2 arrested

2009-07-18T01:46:00.000-07:00

The IDF has begun using undercover agents at protests against the apartheid wall being constructed in Ni'lin, the same location where International Solidarity Activist Tristan Anderson was shot in the head by a high velocity tear gas round fired by IDF solders. In the video, you can see what happened during a protest on July 10th. ISM describes the scene in this way:

"The demonstration ended abruptly when approximately 10 members of Israeli special forces, disguised as participants with masked faces pulled out pistols and telescopic batons. Soldiers armed with guns and riot shields then entered through the fence and shot large amounts of tear gas, smoke grenades, percussion grenades and live ammunition from their handguns.

Two Palestinian young men were arrested and led away in handcuffs with their heads forced downwards and arms pulled upwards."

Iran: Inside the Protests

2009-07-15T17:36:00.000-07:00

A look inside the protests within Iran a few days after June 12, 2009 (election day). This was shown on Al Jazeera's "People & Power."

-mm

Who is Mousavi?

2009-07-15T17:32:00.000-07:00

Al Jazeera examines who Mir Hussein Mousavi is and his history with Iran past and present.

PART ONE

PART TWO

-mm

Prof. Juan Cole on Palestinian Statelessness:

2009-05-11T14:48:00.000-07:00

King Abdullah II of Jordan revealed to the Times of London that the Obama administration may attempt a comprehensive peace treaty between Israel and the entire Muslim world. The latter would recognize Israel and grant El Al overflight rights. Israel in return would have to freeze settlement activity and move smartly toward a two-state solution and the establishment of a Palestinian state, with Israeli settlers removed from the West Bank. The status of Jerusalem would be left for later negotiations.

Abdullah warned that if rapid progress is not made, another war will probably break out in the region within 18 months to two years.

In my view, the central problems in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are the statelessness of the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and in their diaspora, the continued military occupation or blockade by the Israelis, and the rapid expansion of Israeli colonies, which are usurping Palestinian land and rights.

Until the statelessness of the Palestinians is understood and seen as the central problem that it is, there can be no real progress on the issues. Statelessness was an attribute of slaves in premodern times. The Jews of Europe in the 1930s and 1940s were the primary victims of the crime of stripping people of their citizenship in a state. It is monstrous that Palestinians should be stateless all these decades after 1948. Make no mistake; it is Israel that deprived them of statehood, which the 1939 British White Paper pledged to them, and which other League of Nations Mandates, such as French Syria and Lebanon and British Iraq, achieved.

A stateless person ultimately has no rights, since it is states that guarantee rights. A stateless person may be robbed, raped, and sometimes even killed with impunity. Stateless children are often deprived of schooling. Since the property of the stateless is ambiguous with regard to its legal status, the stateless are at risk for extreme poverty. The contemporary world is a world of states, and falling between the cracks because you lack citizenship in any state is a guarantee of marginality and oppression.

Apologists try to shift the blame for Palestinian statelessness from Israel to someone else. But it won't work. The original tort of derailing Palestinian independence was Israel's, and Israel has been the main force preventing the declaration of a Palestinian state, so it is Israel that must step up here. Other countries cannot be expected to solve a problem created by the Israelis, nor do most of the countries in the region havethe economic efflorescence or governmental stability to do so.

It seems obvious what needs to be done to end Palestinian statelessness. If a Palestinian state isn't created in short order, the world is in for decades of Apartheid and political decay and consequent trouble, including terrorism and further wars. At the end of this process likely Israel will be forced to absorb the Palestinians as its own citizens, i.e. you end up with a one-state solution. The reason that there is more talk about the latter now is that it does at least resolve the central problem, of Palestinian statelessness, a problem that cannot be solved in any other way once a Palestinian state is forestalled by the massive Israeli colonization of the West Bank. (Actually I should say "Israeli and American," since a third of the Israeli squatters in the West Bank are Americans).

If Obama really is making this push for a comprehensive settlement, it is an enormous undertaking and its success is by no means assured (to say the least). He will have to be tough with Netanyahu and Lieberman, who will try to sabotage any such move. At least, the Obama administration is demonstrating some independence, and is no longer doing extensive advance briefings for Israeli officials on US diplomacy in the region.

For "cont'd" postings, click here.

posted by Juan Cole @ 5/11/2009 01:05:00 AM 13 comments |

They Don't Want Your Bombs or Your Bibles

2009-05-09T22:41:00.000-07:00

-mr

Baghdad Blues

2009-05-03T21:39:00.000-07:00

In Baghdad, Iraqis fear return of sectarian bloodshed

War Crime, Hate Crime, Sex Crime.

2009-05-01T22:38:00.000-07:00

Former US soldiers describe rape of Iraqi girl, killings:

Cortez said he attempted to rape Abeer al-Janabi but could not get an erection. He said he then held her down while Barker raped her.

When he heard gunshots in the room next door, Cortez said he ran to the door and found the rest of the family had been killed.

He said Green told them "he killed them all and that all of them were dead."

Cortez said that Green then raped the girl, put a pillow over her face and fired three shots into her head with an AK-47. Her body was then burned.

-mr

Little Shams found face down in burning asphalt

2009-05-01T21:34:00.000-07:00

Video: UK treatment for Iraqi toddler

Iraq's quiet healthcare crisis:

The boy looked like an old man. His lips moved slowly, trying to stretch against his inflexible, badly scarred skin, and bandages covered his eyes.

But the voice that came out of his disfigured face was loud and cheerful and it filled the hospital room.

"I want to go back to Iraq, I miss my dad," Hussein said. Read More

-mr

Israeli Lobby Wins Again

2009-05-01T21:16:00.000-07:00

The heft that dares not speak its name.

Lawyers credit Obama team for dismissing AIPAC case.

-mr

Empire's Shitty Ice Cream . . .

2009-05-01T21:11:00.000-07:00

Empire on the Run: Welcome to the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad:

But let’s make no excuses. I had come to the embassy for one purpose: Food.

-mr

Georgetown's 2009 Symposium on Palestine

2009-04-28T11:05:00.000-07:00

Georgetown University's Center for Contemporary Arab Studies has made its 2009 Symposium "Palestine & the Palestinians Today" available online.

This is an amazing resource. Pass it on!

-mr

What kind of statehood? "Netanyahu and the 'Palestinian state' card"

2009-04-28T10:53:00.000-07:00

Posted by Helena Cobban
April 28, 2009 7:58 AM EST | Link
Filed in Israel-2009

Israel's former failed prime minister and current defense minister, Ehud Barak, is now saying that PM Netanyahu
will present the U.S. administration a diplomatic plan in line with the principle of "two states for two nations" during his upcoming visit to Washington.
Until now, Netanyahu has refused to commit himself to agreeing with the Obama administration that statehood for the Palestinians is the way forward for peace. So now, Barak is indicating Netanyahu may be a bit "flexible" on the statehood issue. (Foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman, however, remains strongly opposed. Oops.)
But here's the thing. It is not the word "state" that's important, regarding the outcome. South Africa's Bantustans were also called "states", remember.

It is the content of the sovereignty and decision-making powers, the independence of the decision-making process, and the territorial and economic foundations that support this independence that are important.

So people should not get hung up on the word "state"-- and certainly, they shouldn't suddenly rush to crown Netanyahu with a peacemaker's laurels if he should deign to say the Palestinians might be able to have one.

Look at the content of any proposal made, not just its name.

A couple other things to bear in mind:

1. Past PM Olmert also said he believed in a Palestinian "state." His concept of it was very restrictive, including of course territorially. The fact that he accepted the notion of a Palestinian state did not mean his proposals regarding the final settlement were in any way acceptable.

2. Ten years ago, Barak won a strong victory in the polls against Netanyahu, and replaced him as PM. On that occasion, Barak won by promising Israelis that he was the man who could conclude a final peace with the Palestinians "within six to nine months." Eighteen months later his premiership collapsed into chaos with that pledge still unfulfilled.

Worse than that, the peremptory and bullying way he conducted his peace "diplomacy" with the Palestinians ensured that the Camp David II summit was a disaster. Barak then loudly blamed PA leader Yasser Arafat for the failure and said Israel "had no partner for peace." (Clinton, quite shamefully, completely backed him up on that.)

Leaders and activists in the real Israeli peace movement say that Barak's behavior at that time was a stab in the heart for their movement, from which it has still, nine years later, not recovered.

This time, Barak is "promising" that the Netanyahu government will have peace with the Palestinians "within three years." He has no credibility.

-mr

Protesting American Imperialism in Kut

2009-04-27T13:49:00.000-07:00

As submerged sectarian tensions re-surface in Iraq, US occupation forces defy the Status of Forces Agreement, killing several innocents in the process:

Al-Maliki Denounces US Raid as Violating SOFA;
Larijani dissatisfied with US

AP reports that Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki has denounced a US raid in Kut as a violation of the security agreement between Washington and Baghdad.

WaPo goes further and says that al-Maliki is actually calling for the troops involved to be prosecuted in Iraqi courts.

The US said its troops were targeting a major funder of militias, whom they accused of receiving monies and material from Iran. I.e. this was about the so-called 'special cells' or pro-Iranian groups inside the Shiite militias. Kut has a lot of Sadrists, who follow Muqtada al-Sadr and there are still Mahdi Army units active there. The raid left an innocent female bystander dead. Six captured alleged militiamen were released by the US military after al-Maliki's protest.

In Kut, hundreds gathered in an anti-US demonstration.

The US maintains that the raid was coordinated with the Iraqi government. But it appears that the officials the US dealt with were local and that they neglected to pass news of the plan up to their superiors.

Under the Status of Forces Agreement, the US must notify the Iraqi government before it takes military action.

Al-Maliki is touchy about such an operation in Kut and probably wants personal approval in such matters. Kut is in the Shiite south, where al-Maliki has been attempting to spread the influence of his Islamic Mission Party (Da'wa). It has a significant Sadrist constituency, and al-Maliki is trying to put together coalition provincial governments with the Sadrists. So the US raid made al-Maliki look weak and puppet-like and made him unpopular in a key area where he wants support.

Al-Zaman reports in Arabic that Iraqi government officials are expecting further bombings this week, as the country prepares for a conference on investing in Iraq later this week. The officials say that the guerrillas are attempting to dissuade foreign investors and to give them the impression that Iraq is unstable and a poor place to invest. The guerrillas hope to keep the government of Nuri al-Maliki weak so as to be able to overthrow it.

The speaker of the Iranian House has warned Iraqi insurgents that Tehran would track them down and punish them for the attacks this past week on Iranian pilgrims to holy shrines in Iraq. He also took up the theme that the US might be behind attacks on Iranian targets.

(source: Prof. Juan Cole's, Informed Comment)

-mr

Headlines:

2009-04-26T12:20:00.000-07:00

Maliki: US Raid ‘Crime’ That Violated Pact

Clinton Pledges to Keep Troops in Iraq if Violence Escalates

CIA ignored warnings from US soldiers that torture and extreme stress would not work

2008 'deadliest' year for Palestinians: rights group

Destroying Afghan opium crop: But does it help?

Iraqi forces dismantle two booby-trapped cars, 20 bombs in Baghdad

Injured soldier gets new face _ and anonymity

UK campaigners score victory towards arms embargo

Another muted scream: Basem Ibrahim Abu Rahme

Prof. Cole on Pakistani Taliban hype:

Pakistan Crisis and Social Statistics

Readers have written me asking what I think of the rash of almost apocalyptic pronouncements on the security situation in Pakistan issuing from the New York Times, The Telegraph, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in recent days.

And Stephen Walt also is asking why there are such varying assessments of Pakistan's security prospects. He suggests that one problem is the difficulty of predicting a revolutionary situation. But Pakistan just had a revolution against the military dictatorship! The polling, the behavior in the voting booth, the history of political geography, aren't these data relevant to the issue? Why does no one instance them?

As I have said before, although the rise of the Pakistani Taliban in the Pushtun areas and in some districts of Punjab is worrisome, the cosmic level of concern being expressed makes no sense to me. Some 55 percent of Pakistanis are Punjabi, and with the exception of some northern hardscrabble areas, I can't see any evidence that the vast majority of them has the slightest interest in Talibanism. Most are religious traditionalists, Sufis, Shiites, Sufi-Shiites, or urban modernists. At the federal level, they mainly voted in February 2008 for the Pakistan People's Party or the Muslim League, neither of them fundamentalist. The issue that excercised them most powerfully recently was the need to reinstate the civilian Supreme Court justices dismissed by a military dictatorship, who preside over a largely secular legal system.

Another major province is Sindh, with nearly 50 mn. of Pakistan's 165 mn. population. It is divided between Urdu-speakers and the largely rural Sindhis who are religious traditionalists, many of the anti-Taliban Barelvi school. They voted overwhelmingly for the centrist, mostly secular Pakistan People's Party in the recent parliamentary elections. Then there are the Urdu-speakers originally from India who mostly live in Karachi and a few other cities. In the past couple of decades the Urdu-speakers have tended to vote for the secular MQM party.

Residents of Sindh and Punjab constitute some 85% of Pakistan's population, and while these provinces have some Muslim extremists, they are a small fringe there.

Pakistan has a professional bureaucracy. It has doubled its literacy rate in the past three decades. Rural electrification has increased enormously. The urban middle class has doubled since 2000. The country has many, many problems, but it is hardly the Somalia some observers seem to imagine.

Opinion polling shows that even before the rounds of violence of the past two years, most Pakistanis rejected Muslim radicalism and violence. The stock of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda plummeted after the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.

The Pakistani Taliban are largely a phenomenon of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas west of the North-West Frontier Province, and of a few districts within the NWFP itself. These are largely Pushtun ethnically. The NYT's breathless observation that there are Taliban a hundred miles from Islamabad doesn't actually tell us very much, since Islamabad is geographically close to the Pushtun regions without that implying that Pushtuns dominate or could dominate it. It is like saying that Lynchburg, Va., is close to Washington DC and thereby implying that Jerry Falwell's movement is about to take over the latter.

The Pakistani Taliban amount to a few thousand fighters who lack tanks, armored vehicles, and an air force.

The Pakistani military is the world's sixth largest, with 550,000 active duty troops and is well equipped and well-trained. It in the past has acquitted itself well against India, a country ten times Pakistan's size population-wise. It is the backbone of the country, and has excellent command and control, never having suffered an internal mutiny of any significance.

So what is being alleged? That some rural Pushtun tribesmen turned Taliban are about to sweep into Islamabad and overthrow the government of Pakistan? Frankly ridiculous. Wouldn't the government bring some tank formations up from the Indian border and stop them?

Or is it being alleged that the Pakistani army won't fight the Taliban? But then explain the long and destructive Bajaur campaign.

Or is the fear that some junior officers in the army are more or less Taliban and that they might make a coup? But the Pakistani military has typically sought a US alliance after every coup it has made. Who would support Talibanized officers? Not China, not the US, the major patrons of Islamabad.

If that is the fear, in any case, then the US should strengthen the civilian, elected government, which was installed against US wishes by a popular movement during the past two years. The officers should be strictly instructed that they are to stay in their barracks.

What I see is a Washington that is uncomfortable with anything like democracy and civilian rule in Pakistan; which seems not to realize that the Pakistani Taliban are a small, poorly armed fringe of Pushtuns, who are a minority; and I suspect US policy-makers of secretly desiring to find some pretext for removing Pakistan's nuclear capacity.

All the talk about the Pakistani government falling within 6 months, or of a Taliban takeover, flies in the face of everything we know about the character of Pakistani politics and institutions during the past two years.

My guess is that the alarmism is also being promoted from within Pakistan by Pervez Musharraf, who wants to make another military coup; and by civilian politicians in Islamabad, who want to extract more money from the US to fight the Taliban that they are secretly also bribing to attack Afghanistan.

Advice to Obama: Pakistan is being configured for you in ways that benefit some narrow sectional interests. Caveat emptor.

-mr

Massive blasts roil illusions of peace in Iraq:

2009-04-23T11:22:00.000-07:00

REUTERS
Reuters North American News Service

Apr 23, 2009 10:22 EST

* At least 75 killed in two suicide bomb attacks

* Many Iranian pilgrims among the dead

* Local insurgent leader reported captured

By Aseel Kami

BAGHDAD, April 23 (Reuters) - Two suicide bombers wearing vests stuffed with explosives blew themselves up in separate attacks in Iraq on Thursday, killing 75 people, including many Iranian pilgrims, in the bloodiest day for more than a year.

The blasts occurred as apprehension grows in Iraq ahead of a pullout by U.S. troops from city centres in June, and after warnings from officials that insurgent groups may try to take advantage of that to launch attacks.

A national election due at the end of the year also threatens to stir a resurgence in violence just as the bloodshed of the past six years appeared to be receding.

Shortly after the two attacks, the authorities in Baghdad said they had arrested the purported leader of an al Qaeda-affiliated insurgent group, Abu Omar al-Baghdadi. His arrest, which has been reported before, could not be confirmed. One of the attacks occurred near Muqdadiya, 80 km (50 miles) northeast of Baghdad, in the volatile province of Diyala. The suicide bomber appeared to have targeted a group of Iranian pilgrims in a crowded roadside restaurant at lunchtime.

All but two of the 47 dead were Iranians visiting Shi'ite Muslim religious sites in Iraq, police said. Sixty-seven people were wounded.

It was the single deadliest attack since 50 people were killed by a suicide bomber in a restaurant near the northern city of Kirkuk on December 11 last year.

The blast in central Baghdad took place as a group of Iraqi national police were distributing relief supplies to families driven from their homes during the sectarian slaughter and insurgency unleashed by the 2003 U.S.-led invasion.

Twenty-eight people died, and 50 were wounded, police said. At least five children were among the dead, they added.

Red Crescent food parcels and shattered packets of chocolate biscuits were strewn in the blood pooled on the pavement after the attack, while a woman dressed in a black abaya robe wailed and beat her thighs in anguish.

"It is a suicide bomber. Obviously that has the fingerprints of al Qaeda," said Baghdad security spokesman Major-General Qassim Moussawi.

BAGHDADI ARREST

Violence across Iraq has fallen sharply over the past year, but insurgents such as Sunni Islamist al Qaeda still carry out attacks. Suicide bombings are often associated with al Qaeda.

A suicide bomber on Wednesday killed at least five people and wounded 15 inside a mosque in central Iraq, and on Monday, a suicide bomber in a police uniform killed four policemen in Diyala. Eight U.S. soldiers were wounded.

While the bombings remain routine, it has been a while since so many people were killed on a single day in Iraq.

On June 17 last year, a truck bomb in Baghdad killed 63, two bombs on March 6, 2008, killed 68 people, also in Baghdad, and female suicide bombers targeting a pet market killed 99 in the capital on Feb. 1, 2008.

Shortly after Thursday's bombings, Moussawi's office in Baghdad reported on its website that Baghdadi, had been arrested in the east of the city.

Baghdadi is said to be the head of the Islamic State of Iraq, one of several groups thought to be behind suicide bombings in the northern city of Mosul and elsewhere in Iraq.

Security experts have speculated that Baghdadi was a character invented by some extremists rather than a real person.

Some Iraqis expect violence to increase in Iraq as rival political and armed groups position themselves ahead of a national election due to take place at the end of the year.

Iraqi officials say al Qaeda and others are also likely to try to test Iraqi security forces as U.S. troops prepare to pull out of cities ahead of a full withdrawal by the end of 2011. (Writing by Michael Christie; Editing by Louise Ireland)

Source: Reuters North American News Service

-mr

'Just World News' with Helena Cobban:

2009-04-21T11:30:00.000-07:00

Veteran reporter and writer Helena Cobban on Israel's self-disclosed military doctrine of slow-motion ethnic cleansing, imperiled East Jerusalem Palestinians, and Israeli spooks . . .

The IDF's 'Dahiyah Doctrine', applied in Gaza

Posted by Helena Cobban
April 19, 2009 3:22 PM EST | Link
Filed in Gaza08-09 , Israel-2009

Kudos to Inter-Press Service's Daan Bouwens for this piece of reporting in which he reminded readers that Israel's strategic decisionmakers had integrated a policy of major, intentional destruction of civilian targets into their war-planning for certain contingencies considerably before they launched the assault on Gaza, December 27.

Bouwens quotes Valentina Azarov, a legal expert with the Israeli human-rights group HaMoked as arguing that the IDF's operations in Gaza, "were part of the military strategy called the 'Dahiyah policy', being that of indiscriminate killing and the use of excessive, disproportionate force."

Azarov and Bouwens were at pains to point out that this was Azarov's own personal assessment. However, she had adduced considerable evidence to back it up.

'Dahiyah' is, in this context, a reference to the the heavily populated southern suburb (dahiyeh) of Beirut, in which Hizbullah maintained its headquarters for many years prior to the Israeli assault of summer 2006-- and which it has substantially rebuilt since 2006.

But during Israel's 33-day war against Lebanon that year, it just about leveled the entire Dahiyeh, which was a neighborhood of densely packed eight- to ten-story buildings, most of them residential, but including numerous schools, mosques, shops, and so on, along with more than a few offices for Hizbullah's extensive social-service bodies, political bodies, and yes, also their military bodies.

The best online resource about the Dahiyah Doctrine is this contribution that Ben White made to the Guardian's 'Comment is free' section last October. This Wikipedia page on the 'Dahiya Strategy' is also helpful.

The White piece has good hyperlinks, including to the then-recent interview in which the GOC of the IDF's 'Northern Command', Gadi Eisenkot, talked openly about the Dayiha Doctrine in these terms:
"What happened in the Dahiya quarter of Beirut in 2006 will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on," said Gadi Eisenkot, head of the army's northern division.

"We will apply disproportionate force on it (village) and cause great damage and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages, they are military bases," Eisenkot told the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper.

"This is not a recommendation. This is a plan. And it has been approved," Eisenkot added.
In terms of "deterrence theory", this is a pretty standard threat of "massive retaliation." (Added to, I guess, a specifically Israeli version of Henry Kissinger's "Madman theory of deterrence", as indirectly alluded to here.)
But the results-- whether in the Dahiyah or in Gaza-- have been devastating.

Back in October-November of last year, when Eisenkot was making his pronouncements about the doctrine and Israelis were commenting on it-- sometimes with great approval-- just about all the discussion seemed still to be solely about Lebanon and Hizbullah, and future prospects in that theater.

But as we know, Israel's military planners were meanwhile already working hard to plan an upcoming operation against Gaza-- one of the key goals of which was to "restore the credibility of Israel's deterrence" and to wipe away the stale traces of defeat, flat-out operational ineptitude, and flawed leadership decisionmaking that had marked Israel's previous war of choice, in 2006.

Only a few of the commentaries in Israel-- e.g., this one from Gabriel Siboni-- noted the applicability of the Dahiyah Doctrine to Gaza.

Siboni wrote:
With an outbreak of hostilities, the IDF will need to act immediately, decisively, and with force that is disproportionate to the enemy's actions and the threat it poses. Such a response aims at inflicting damage and meting out punishment to an extent that will demand long and expensive reconstruction processes. The strike must be carried out as quickly as possible, and must prioritize damaging assets over seeking out each and every launcher. Punishment must be aimed at decision makers and the power elite.
... This approach is applicable to the Gaza Strip as well. There, the IDF will be required to strike hard at Hamas and to refrain from the cat and mouse games of searching for Qassam rocket launchers. The IDF should not be expected to stop the rocket and missile fire against the Israeli home front through attacks on the launchers themselves, but by means of imposing a ceasefire on the enemy...
It was left to one of Siboni's colleagues at Tel Aviv University's Institute for National security Studies, Zaki Shalom, to raise some significant questions about the new doctrine.
The last of his questions had particular significance to the situation in Gaza:
Finally, how will the plan be applied if it becomes evident that village inhabitants are shunning a mass exodus? Would the IDF activate massive fire that results in hundreds or possibly thousands of civilians killed?
Okay, forget about "village". (Israelis tend to just assume that all Palestinians live in "villages". The Dahiyah is not a village, and most of the residents of Gaza don't live in villages, either.)
But what, more germanely, happens to the plan if there is no place for the civilian residents of the area targeted to safely flee to-- as was certainly the case in Gaza?

... Anyway, it seems clear that my longtime acquaintances Richard Falk and Richard Goldstone, both of whom are charged by the UN with investigating Israel's conduct during the war on Gaza, have an ample paper trail to look to-- and hopefully, also to follow up further on-- regarding the specific intent of Israel's political and military leaders to engage from the get-go in avowedly disproportionate operations inside Gaza, including against specifically civilian targets.

Goldstone had a generally good track record in the waning days of his country's apartheid system, in investigating some of the grosser excesses of the "securocrats", including the high level securocrats, who ruled the country in those days. Let's hope he brings that same sensibility, that same doggedness, and that same refusal to be rolled by all the securocrats' many excuses, special pleadings, and specious arguments, to his current task regarding Israel.

Threats to East Jerusalem Palestinians, Youtubed

Posted by Helena Cobban
April 19, 2009 8:44 PM EST | Link
Filed in Palestine 2009

Clayton Swisher has two super short pieces on Al-Jazeera English about the threats to the Palestinian communities in the East Jerusalem neighborhoods of Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan. In the first of those, he finds a US diplomat who's been sent to "fact-find" with one of the threatened Sheikh Jarrah families.

Yes, "fact-finding" is fine. But really, how much more of it needs to be done? The numerous expropriations, home demolitions, and other gross rights abuses the Palestinians of occupied East Jerusalem have faced throughout 42 years of occupation have all been excellently documented.

The US government position still in fact tracks with the international law position that holds that East Jerusalem is indeed occupied territory. (Though for the past 16-plus years, US government officials have always tried to squirm their way out of admitting as much in public.

The fact that this portion of the city is occupied territory means that the implantation of Israeli settlers into colonies/settlements in and around it has been quite illegal under international law, as have all other steps taken to change the status of the this portion of the occupied West Bank. (Yes, of course including its annexation/Anschluss to Israel.)

The 270,000 Palestinians of East Jerusalem and the built environment they hold so dear (and sacred) are under acute threat these days. EJ Palestinians pay high Israeli-style taxes but receive nothing like he kinds of municipal or other kinds of government services that the city's Jewish-Israeli population receives. They are prohibited from holding any kinds of public political gatherings. Though they live in a city Israelis claim has been "unified", they are subject to all the sanctions available to the military occupation authorities in the rest of the West Bank, including endlessly renewable terms of detention without trial. (As applied, also, to the legislators they elected back in January 2006.)

In addition, thousands of EJ Palestinians have hanging over their heads either the threat of confiscation of the special blue ID cards ("pass books") that allow them to continue living in the city of their birth, or the threat of demolition of their family home. Hundreds of demolition orders-- maybe more than a thousand?-- are outstanding. The East Jerusalemites never know where the municipal demolition crews will be sent to next month, or next week, in their endless forays around the city.

Many East Jerusalemites feel quite abandoned by the Lords of Ramallah, judging that the situation of their city took a marked turn for the worse after Oslo.

So let's hope Sen. Mitchell and the rest of the "international community" finally do something this time to buttress and restore the protections that international law accords to the East Jerusalemites, as to the Gazans and all other populations under military occupation.
We need only recall that the special protections that the Fourth Geneva Convention accords to residents of territories under military occupation were adopted by the world's nations in 1949 in the specific light of the gross violations that the vulnerable populations (including of course Jewish and Roma populations) of Eastern Europe had been subjected to during the foreign military occupation they had then so recently suffered.

More on Jane Harman, high-ranking pro-Israel mole?

Posted by Helena Cobban
April 20, 2009 9:07 AM EST | Link
Filed in US foreign policy

Just how deeply have the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC and its longtime backers and contacts in the Israeli securocracy wormed their way into the heart of US national decisionmaking? Considerable new evidence on this is provided in this important piece of reporting by Congressional Quarterly's Jeff Stein yesterday. (HT: The Arabist.)

Stein's important scoop is about a series of moves that the high-ranking and strongly pro-Israeli California Congresswoman Jane Harman made in response to a telephonic appeal from an un-named "suspected Israeli agent" that she intervene politically to get the Justice department to reduce the charges against the two accused AIPAC spies, Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman.

Stein writes,
Harman was recorded saying she would “waddle into” the AIPAC case “if you think it’ll make a difference,” according to two former senior national security officials familiar with the NSA transcript.
In exchange for Harman’s help, the sources said, the suspected Israeli agent pledged to help lobby Nancy Pelosi , D-Calif., then-House minority leader, to appoint Harman chair of the Intelligence Committee after the 2006 elections, which the Democrats were heavily favored to win.
Seemingly wary of what she had just agreed to... Harman hung up after saying, “This conversation doesn’t exist.”
Ah, but what she didn't know was that the call was being wiretapped and recorded under the NSA's wiretap program... And now, someone has leaked the transcript of that call to Stein.
Jane Harman is no ordinary member of congress. She was at the time, as the Stein piece notes, poised to become the leading Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, and thus privy to many kinds of intelligence that are not shared with ordinary members of congress-- far less the citizenry.

It also meant she had powerful working relationships with members of the US securocracy and growing input into their decisions.

After the NSA overheard her saying she would intervene to try to save Rosen and Weissman's skins, they and CIA head Porter Goss opened an investigation into her actions (the previous wiretap having been only into the conversations engaged in by her interlocutor.)

Stein writes:
And they were prepared to open a case on her, which would include electronic surveillance approved by the so-called FISA Court, the secret panel established by the 1979 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to hear government wiretap requests.
First, however, they needed the certification of top intelligence officials that Harman’s wiretapped conversations justified a national security investigation.
Then-CIA Director Porter J. Goss reviewed the Harman transcript and signed off on the Justice Department’s FISA application. He also decided that, under a protocol involving the separation of powers, it was time to notify then-House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., and Minority Leader Pelosi, of the FBI’s impending national security investigation of a member of Congress — to wit, Harman.
Goss, a former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, deemed the matter particularly urgent because of Harman’s rank as the panel’s top Democrat.
But that’s when, according to knowledgeable officials, Attorney General Gonzales intervened.
According to two officials privy to the events, Gonzales said he “needed Jane” to help support the administration’s warrantless wiretapping program, which was about to be exposed by the New York Times.
Harman, he told Goss, had helped persuade the newspaper to hold the wiretap story before, on the eve of the 2004 elections. And although it was too late to stop the Times from publishing now, she could be counted on again to help defend the program.
He was right.
On Dec. 21, 2005, in the midst of a firestorm of criticism about the wiretaps, Harman issued a statement defending the operation and slamming the Times, saying, “I believe it essential to U.S. national security, and that its disclosure has damaged critical intelligence capabilities.”
Pelosi and Hastert never did get the briefing.
(The irony there was that Harman intervened strongly to defend the very wiretapping program that-- whether she knew it at the time or not-- had started to establish a pretty strong record of her own misdeeds.)
A year later, in November 2006, the Dems won control of the House-- and Jane Harman, by then the Minority (Democratic) Leader on the Intelligence Committee was on the point of becoming its Chair. However, something evidently happened at that point that persuaded the powerful Pelosi that this would be a bad idea. Stein does not say what that something was. Rep. Sylvestre Reyes (Texas) became Chair instead.

Today, indeed, Harman is no longer even on the House Intelligence Committee.

This indicates to me that the extreme permeability to Israeli influence of many of the US's leading national-security decisionmaking bodies that we saw during the early years of the Bush administration (and before that, during much of the Clinton administration) has slowly started to be rolled back in the past 2-3 years.

That early-Bush-era permeability-- as manifested in the extremely strong influence of hawkish pro-Israelis in the Rumsfeld Defense Department, in Cheney's office, and also, certainly in Congress-- helped to feed completely skewed disinformation into the pre-2003 decisionmaking process over Iraq, and thus played a huge role in jerking our government into launching that mega-lethal and extremely ill-considered military aggression.

Now, today's big "question" is whether the US will either launch a military attack against Iran or give Israel the permission it certainly needs if it is to use US assets and support to do launch one in its own name.

Might US decisionmaking once again be so permeable to Israeli disinformation and manipulation that Washington could get jerked into launching or allowing another ill-considered war-- one that, this time, would draw our already overstretched military directly into a shooting war with a non-trivial and extremely sensitively located regional power?

This clearly is something that all US citizens have a strong interest in preventing. So the more we know about previous attempts by the Israeli securocrats to distort our country's security-affairs decisionmaking, the better.

Huge kudos to CQ for publishing this story. I hope we see a lot more reportorial resources devoted to follow-up stories about all aspects of it.

But one last big question: Why, once again, do we see the WaPo and the NYT completely ignoring this important story, which CQ broke yesterday and should therefore have been in today's editions of both papers?

-mr

Israeli Soldier Slaughters Another Peaceful Protester

2009-04-19T19:06:00.000-07:00

From Informed Comment:

Sunday, April 19, 2009

Do You want more Gas?

First the Israeli government built a separation wall right through a Palestinian village, Bilin, on the West Bank inside the Palestine Authority (i.e. beyond the Israeli border).

Then young people assembled regularly to protest that their village was cut in two, with villagers on each side now unable easily to visit, and with the villagers having had land stolen from them without compensation.

On Friday, Israeli troops replied to the unarmed protesters by firing tear gas at them. But the tear gas canisters are intended to be shot from a fair distance. An Israeli soldier appears to have aimed a canister at close distance right at Basim Abu Rahmah, killing him on the spot. In mid-March Tristan Anderson of Oakland, California, was shot in the head with a canister and badly wounded while protesting the Apartheid Wall Israel has built; he is still in a coma.

Philip Weiss provides video demonstrating that that protesters were not violent. Basim was trying to reason with the Israeli soldiers just before he was killed. Weiss says that with the young man lying dead on the ground, one Israeli soldier asks a protester, "Do you want more gas?" (I have to say, I found the question chilling).

Aljazeera English also did a report:

Aljazeera English reports on the aftermath of the Gaza War, finding that "At least 83 children lost both parents and 2,200 lost at least one during Israel's recent war on Gaza."

Video:

-mr

Headlines:

2009-03-28T23:41:00.000-07:00

-mr

2009-03-28T01:51:00.000-07:00

Update on Iraq from Informed Comment:

26 Killed, 37 Wounded in Baghdad Bombing;Women's Condition Deteriorating

A car bombing in a market district of Shaab, Baghdad, killed 26 and wounded 37 on Thursday, the fifth large bombing in March. The LAT underlines that blast walls separating Shiite Shaab from nearby Sunni Arab areas have recently been removed. But it should be remembered that Shaab used to be mixed and is now almost wholly Shiite, so there could be some disgruntled Sunnis and who struck back.

AP has video:

Al-Zaman reports in Arabic that Iranian speaker of the House Ali Larijani is on a secret mission in Iraq to mediate between the Islamic Mission (Da'wa) Party of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and his sometime coalition partner, the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq (ISCI). The two parties are seeking to form coalitions in several southern Shiite provincial councils, and Iran is said impatient for the deal to be concluded.

Compare this item to the complaints of the incoming US ambassador to Iraq, slamming Iranian influence.

Iraqi women are in the grip of a silent emergency, according to Oxfam:
' "Women are the forgotten victims of Iraq. Despite the billions of dollars poured into rebuilding Iraq and recent security gains, a quarter of the women interviewed still do not have daily access to water, a third cannot send their children to school and since the war started, over half have been the victim of violence.'

McClatchy reports political violence in Iraq on Thursday:
' Baghdad

A car bomb targeted civilians near al Zahraa Hospital in Shaab neighbourhood, northern Baghdad at 1 p.m. Thursday killing 16 civilians including four women, injuring 40 others including four women.

Nineveh

Gunmen attacked and killed a store owner in his store in Faisaliyah neighbourhood, central Mosul at 11.30 a.m. Thursday.

A joint Iraqi police and Iraqi army patrol opened fire upon a suspect speeding car that wouldn't stop at the checkpoint in al Jamiaa neighbourhood in which Mosul University is located injuring the driver and accidentally killing a female student who was passing by. The car turned out to be booby trapped and was detonated under control without casualties.

- A gunman threw a grenade at a shop in Dawasa neighborhood in downtown Mosul in the afternoon. The shop owner was wounded and the gunman was arrested by police.

Kirkuk

Gunmen attempted to kidnap one of the body guards of the President of the Criminal Court in Kirkuk, Thursday morning. And during the ensuing hand fight, people started to gather and the gunmen fled leaving the body guard, Murad Fikret with superficial injuries.

Three workers in the Electricity Department in Kirkuk were injured when a roadside bomb targeted them while working in Rashad neighbourhood, western Kirkuk, early Thursday afternoon.'

My interview with Scott Horton of Antiwar.com is now available on the web. It concerns my book:

Engaging the Muslim World

Sunni Arab Refugees from Iraq Not Returning; $3-5 Bn. US Reconstruction Aid Wasted

Hamza Hendawi of AP says his interviews and on-the-ground researches in Baghdad support my contention that the Iraqi capital is now only 10 percent to 15 percent Sunni (in 2003 it was roughly 50/50 Sunni and Shiite):
' Among the statistics obtained by the AP:

— Only an estimated 50,000 of 300,000 displaced families — or 16 percent — have returned to their Baghdad homes, according to the U.S. military. Most are believed to be Sunnis.

— In Hurriyah, an estimated 3,000 to 4,000 families, most of them Sunnis, fled in 2006 and 2007. Of those, only 648 families — or 16 to 22 percent — have come back since September.

In addition, 350 to 400 of the displaced families have sold or rented their Hurriyah homes, suggesting they intend to stay away forever, said Maj. Hussein al-Qaissy, Hurriyah's Iraqi army commander.

Note that 300,000 displaced Iraqi families would likely be 1.5 million individuals.

I did research in August, 2008, in Jordan on Iraqi refugees, and it became very clear to me that they are not returning to Iraq. Many are traumatized, having seen horrific violence against neighbors, friends or family members. One fourth of the families applying for refugee aid reported having had a child kidnapped. Many have been personally threatened by militias who still control their old neighborhood. Sometimes the militias track them down in East Amman and threaten them again. Iraqi Sunnis do not feel safe returning to districts that are now largely Shiite. Mixed families feel that they no longer have a place to live safely. Most refugees have had their property confiscated. Many former Sunni neighborhoods in Baghdad are now ghost towns.

-mr

In Iraq, a boy named 'War' turns 6:

2009-03-20T16:00:00.000-07:00

That same year, War sat in the car as his dad drove down the dark streets of his neighborhood one night. A car stopped in front of them, and members of the Shiite militia, the Mahdi army, pulled a man from the trunk of the car and shot him.
They left him on the street and drove away. It was one of thousands of killings by street militias at the height of sectarian violence. The body was one of many that littered the streets like garbage in 2006 and 2007. Often, 50 bodies were found a day.
Badr got out of the car to see if it was someone from the neighborhood. Some boys distracted him briefly and warned him not to approach the body. When he turned, his son was gone.
War looked into the face of the dead Sunni man.
"What are you doing?" his father asked, running up to the little boy.
"Look baba," he said. "Poor man."
He's seen things a child should never see.
His parents try to protect him, but he asks questions.
"If he sees a man with a gun, he asks if he's going to kill someone," Iman, his mother, said as she baked bread in her home. "I don't know yet how it is going to affect him."
She looked at her son and held her daughter, not yet 2, in her arms.
"Our life is destruction, on top of destruction," she said.
War has never been to a playground and never been on a picnic. He's never been on a ride at an amusement park.
"He always asks to go out," his mother said. "He tells me, 'We haven't seen anything in our lives. Why are we like prisoners in our house?'"
Today, War turns 6. He's never had a birthday party. READ MORE

-mr

Dressed to Kill

2009-03-20T15:24:00.000-07:00

From The Angry Arab News Service:

"A sharpshooter's T-shirt from the Givati Brigade's Shaked battalion shows a pregnant Palestinian woman with a bull's-eye superimposed on her belly, with the slogan, in English, "1 shot, 2 kills." A "graduation" shirt for those who have completed another snipers course depicts a Palestinian baby, who grows into a combative boy and then an armed adult, with the inscription, "No matter how it begins, we'll put an end to it." Remind me to design T-shirts when Palestine is finally liberated. I have a few ideas. (thanks Asa)

From Informed Comment:

Israeli Excesses in Gaza Revealed

A discussion among Israeli veterans of the past winter's military campaign against Gaza has become public, embarrassing the Israeli military and the politicians who launched that attack, which killed many more innocent civilians than it did Hamas militants, and which wrought enormous damage on Gaza's already dilapidated civilian infrastructure. The Israeli soldiers complained of their inability to stop war crimes such as the arbitrary killing of unarmed civilians. They spoke of deliberate vandalism and destruction of property, including just tossing household effects of Gazan homes out the window.

The BBC adds,
'The soldiers' testimonies also reportedly told of an unusually high intervention by military and non-military rabbis, who circulated pamphlets describing the war in religious terminology.'
There was a general feeling, the soldiers reported, that Palestinian lives counted for little.

Aljazeera English has video:

Aljazeera English also interviews Gazan families who corroborate what the Israeli soldiers divulged.

M. J. Rosenberg has more, including a round-up of news about the ongoing hostilities between Hamas and Israel.

See also Richard Silverstein.

-mr

The Inside View

2009-03-16T12:30:00.000-07:00

Another rich, nuanced and illuminating post on the state of affairs in three occupied West Bank cities by veteran journalist and writer Helena Cobban.

What you won't find in The Press: Fateh/Hamas accord, Jewish-Israeli de-development and subsequent gentrification of historic Palestinian city centers, the insignificance of the Arab Peace Initiative, and Zayyad's best-known poetry:

Bethlehem, Nazareth, Jerusalem: Not a Christmas Story

Posted by Helena Cobban
March 15, 2009 10:32 PM EST | Link
Filed in Palestine 2009

1. Bethlehem

One morning at the end of February I spent 90 minutes hanging out in the office of Bethlehem mayor Victor Batarseh. Bethlehem in the West Bank, Palestine, that is. And yes, the mayor's office overlooks Manger Square, looking south toward the Church of the Nativity; so there is a certain sense of history to the place.

During our conversation, Batarseh wanted to make sure he got on the record with his scalding criticisms of Israel's recent war against Gaza. "This war was not against Hamas. It was against the Gaza Strips' women and children and its whole infrastructure," he said.

How can the western governments, time and time again, ask their people to pay for all these damages caused by Israel's military actions?

Bethlehem's city council has 15 members: eight are Christians and seven are Muslims, and of the Muslims, five are members of Hamas. Batarseh is a Christian, affiliated with one of the venerable leftist factions of the PLO: the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, PFLP.

I'd been taken to Batarseh's office by council member Zoughbi Zoughbi, a veteran peace activist and also, fwiw, a Christian. Visiting the office that morning were two of the Hamas council members and one of the Fateh members. Batarseh sat behind his desk, the council members and I sat in the easy chairs in front of the desk. Mainly we talked politics-- in English and Arabic. There was a lot of camaraderie and good-natured teasing amongst the council members in the gathering, which assumed the feel, very familiar to me, of an Arabic style "majlis" get-together. Every so often a city official would come in to do some business, and there were some discussions of serious differences among the council members on the question of whether the number of peddlers' cart licenses should be increased or not. (That one sounded like an issue of expanding the economic opportunities available to low-income people versus not scaring off valuable, revenue-bearing foreign tourists by having too many peddlers in the streets.)

Of course, given that the weather was very chilly that day the whole gathering was also lubricated by numerous rounds of hot drinks: yensoon (aniseed tea), mint tea, Arabic coffee, back to yensoon...

Armchair analysts in the west who believe that there are deep and possibly irreconcileable rifts between Fateh and Hamas would have done well to spend a morning with me in Batarseh's office. "In Bethlehem, there are no problems between Fateh and Hamas because we know each other well," Hamas councillor Saleh Shawkeh said. And the way the council members from the different Palestinian movements all interacted together seemed to bear out his words.

"Hamas has to join the PLO!" Zoughbi exclaimed at one point. Batarseh clarified that he thought that Hamas and Islamic Jihad should come in "under the PLO umbrella... and the PLO needs to be renewed and reformed so it can assure the representation of all Palestinians both inside the homeland and in the diaspora."

Shawkeh said, "Yes, the PLO is a legitimate body but it's not the only one in the field. So our idea is that the PLO needs to be fixed before we can come into it." (That echoed exactly what I'd heard from two Hamas parliamentarians I'd interviewed a few days earlier, in Ramallah/Bireh.)

Batarseh jumped in with: "Hamas needs to change too... It shouldn't reach for power by force, as it did in Gaza in 2007."

Shawkeh: "Look, we did win power firstly by votes, but no-one let us even start to exercise our constitutional power after the election!"

Half an hour later a Fateh councillor (whose name I didn't write down) also joined us. "There is no alternative but for both Hamas and Fateh to end the conflict between us," he said, "for the sake of the Palestinian people." Later on, though, he also chided the Hamas councillors, saying many Arab satellite news channels had been strongly biased toward Hamas-- "and they never mentioned the suffering Hamas inflicted on the people in Gaza."

When the conversation turned to broader political principles Batarseh betrayed his PFLP origins when he said,

Is there any space left for a Palestinian state any more, with all these Israeli settlements all around us and all these settler-only roads? If we're going to have a Palestinian state we need it to be viable!

Later in the conversation he laid stress on the fact that, "All of us agree that the Oslo Agreement was a big mistake in which Arafat and the PLO gave away far too much."

... All in all, it was a good-- and very good-natured-- political discussion.

Outside Batarseh's office, the streets that snake around and up and down the steep hills on which Bethlehem sits were much quieter than usual. A commercial strike had been called by the PA that day, to protest against Israel's newly announced plans to demolish 88 homes in the Silwan area of Jerusalem.

That strike was significant: It was the first nationwide public action called for jointly by both Fateh and Hamas. It was also an evocative reminder of the heady days of the First Intifada, 1987-93, during which the vast majority of the Palestinians' protest actions had been nonviolent mass actions like commercial strikes, sit-ins, and marches. And yes, the commercial strike announced that day (Feb. 28) was remarkably widely observed-- in Ramallah, in Bethlehem, in East Jerusalem, and in many other areas of the occupied West Bank.

The discussions inside the mayor's chamber may have been friendly and warm, and the streets outside subdued and calm. But around the Bethlehem and its sister cities of Beit Sahour and Beit Jala stood The Wall, its forbidding 30-foot-high presence a constant and very "concrete" reminder of the encirclement of the Palestinian communities of the West Bank.

I cannot overstate how brutal and ugly the Wall is. It becomes a fence in many of the more rural parts of the West Bank. But here, as all around east Jerusalem, and in nearby Ramallah, it is definitely and inescapeably a Wall-- one that's about twice the height of the Berlin Wall, which was already shocking enough.

The Israeli Wall where it comes anywhere close to populated areas-- and oftentimes, it will cut right through them-- is punctuated by cylindrical concrete watch-towers that are even taller than the Wall. At the top of the towers are large, slanted-forward bullet-proof glass windows from which heavily armed Israelis look down on the Palestinians living below. There are also numerous free-standing watch-towers, also of 35-40 feet high. Sometimes their thick slanted glass windows looks directly into apartments on the upper stories of buildings.

The sheer size and extent of these Walls and towers-- and the massive investment that has gone, and continues to go, into their ever-expanding construction-- make a mockery of the idea that the Israeli government might be seeking peace with its neighbors any time soon.

Concentration camps were first invented by the British, during their wars against the Boers in South Africa in the early years of the 20th century. The experience of being "concentrated" into these closely guarded camps did not make the Boer civilian population that was herded into them into a warm, pliant, peace-loving people, to say the least. No reason to think that Israel's ongoing attempts to quadrillage, "concentrate", and control the Palestinians of the West Bank would be much different.

But at least the Anglo-Boer wars came to an end and after just a few years of concentration the Boers were allowed back to their farms.

In Bethlehem or Beit Jala, by contrast, if you look out across the Wall to the areas outside it, most of what you see are the gigantic new Jews-only settlements of Gilo and Har Homa eating up more and more land with every month that passes. Those settlers don't look as though they are going anywhere anytime soon. So the Walls and fences that keep the indigenous Palestinians away from those expropriated portions of their native lands likely won't be coming down anytime soon, either.

As Zoughbi and I looked out westward across a valley toward what is now the settlement of Gilo he said, "Those used to be the fields and grazing lands for the landowners of Beit Jala. Beit Jala's people had such wonderful lands-- they used to stretch from here right down to the coastal plain. They took all that land... "

At the end of my visit to Bethlehem and Beit Jala, Zoughbi took me to a bus-stop in the center of Beit Jala where we were lucky (on a strike day) to find a mini-bus heading for Jerusalem. You can read a bit about that trip here.

I can't tell you how sad and guilty I felt that I-- a complete foreigner-- was able to travel fairly easily from Bethlehem to Jerusalem while Zoughbi, like the vast majority of other residents of Bethlehem, Beit Jala, and Beit Sahour have been forbidden since 2000 from traveling to Jerusalem, their close relatives and business associates there, and the many holy places there for both Christians and Muslims. And they, like all the other Palestinians of the West Bank have absolutely zero prospect, as of now, that these roads will be reopened to them any time soon.

Downtown Bethlehem is about seven miles as the crow flies from the center of Jerusalem.

2. Nazareth.

Back in the 1980s I made a couple of visits to Nazareth, which is the largest city in northern Israel and the largest Arab city anywhere in Israel. Back in those days if you started off from the-- in my view exceedingly ugly-- Church of the Basilica you could immediately climb upward into the dense network of tiny stone-paved streets that laced up the hills up behind it forming the dense and busy Arabic-style suq (market) that lies at the heart of all ancient Middle Eastern cities.

Back then, the guidebooks said that if you go to the second haberdasher on the right side of a certain street in the suq, you could get the key to a nearby, half-underground structure that was absolutely reputed to be the very synagogue in which Jesus of Nazareth, aged 12, had delivered his first sermon. In 1989 my father, a devout Anglican and something of a sermonizer in his own right, was staying with us in Israel/Palestine for ten days, and we couldn't resist the temptation to seek out the haberdasher in question, and get hold of the key... Before long, we were standing in that very synagogue room, imbibing many centuries' worth of pure ambience from the roughcut, cobwebby walls around us. Gosh, I must still have the photos of that somewhere...

And then, we exited the synagogue, coming out directly into the hustle-bustle of the suq that was all around us.

When I was planning the return trip I made to Nazareth ten days ago, I asked Jonathan Cook, a very smart British writer who I think has now earned the title of "The Sage of Nazareth", where would be a good place to stay. Jonathan suggested I try one of the two little guest houses that have recently opened up within the Old City. I was excited. I love the intricacies, history, and bustle of the Middle East's "Old Cities". When I was in Damascus back in January our delegation stayed in a place called the Talisman Hotel, which is one of a number of small boutique hotels that have opened up in recent years-- along with an even greater number of very fancy restaurants-- inside the traditional, courtyard-based homes and "palaces" of the Old City... Or, you could think of the often smaller "riyadh" guest-houses established in lovely old homes in Marrakesh... One of the principal attractions of such lodgings is the fact that they are located in, and help to sustain the economic fabric of, fully functioning ancient downtown areas.

Well, that is there. But Nazareth is in Israel, which apparently doesn't place much value on fully functioning Arab-style (and Arab-peopled) downtown areas.

Back in 2000, the Pope decided he wanted to visit Nazareth for the millennium. So a few years before that the Israeli government decided to gussy the whole city center up. That, according to Jonathan, involved closing down the entire downtown area for three years so the facades of the buildings could be entirely cleaned and standardized. The Pope came, and I imagine he may have looked at the facades for some minutes (or not.) But most of the shopowners and the residents who once lived above and all round them never returned. Downtown Nazareth became a nearly deserted urban wasteland, inhabited only by a small number of very poor squatters and drug addicts.

Jonathan has described the process as the "de-development" of the Nazareth downtown. You can see a few of his photos of Life in Nazareth here.

And guess what. Here as in Jaffa and Acre and the "de-developed" historic centers of other Palestinian cities inside Israel, Jewish-Israeli entrepreneurs have just now moving in to try to gentrify, boutiquize, and rebrand the Old City.

That is after, of course, the Israeli government has already, over the years, taken numerous steps to expropriate and re-purpose-- for Jews only-- many of the lands around the city that for generations were owned by Palestinian landowners. One of the biggest of these land-grabs was the one that resulted in the building of an whole new Jewish town, called Nazareth Illit ("Upper Nazareth") on the hills north of town.

Historian Geremy Forman has written that,

cited in Wikipedia

...Well, despite my disappointment about the sad fate of Nazareth's Old City, I did have a good time during my short stay there. Jonathan and his wife, Sally Azzam, were extremely kind in showing me around. They showed me how to find some of the small number of functioning businesses inside the Old City. But we also wondered around many streets looking at some of the fine architectural details of beautiful old homes now falling into disrepair.

Both of them are really interesting people. Jonathan is an amazingly prolific and smart writer. He's now published three books of his own, as well as contributing chapters to several edited volumes. (Details here.)

I managed to buy and read his latest book, Disappearing Palestine, before I got to Nazareth, and strongly recommend it. On his website he describes his perspective in these terms:

Many topics central to the dispute between Israelis and Palestinians, including the plight of the refugees and the continuing dispossession of Palestinians living as Israeli citizens, do not register on most reporters’ radars.

From Nazareth, the capital of the Palestinian minority in Israel, things look very different. There are striking, and disturbing, similarities between the experiences of Palestinians inside Israel and those inside the West Bank and Gaza. All have faced Zionism's appetite for territory and domination, as well as repeated attempts at ethnic cleansing. These unifying themes suggest that the conflict is less about the specific circumstances thrown up by the 1967 war and more about the central tenets of Zionism as expressed in the war of 1948 that founded Israel and the war of 1967 that breathed new life into its settler colonial agenda.

Sally was equally interesting to talk to. She is probably somewhere in her early thirties, and she's a native of Nazareth. She talked about how, growing up there and going to one of the city's many nun-run schools, she never heard very much talk at all-- either at home or from her teachers at school-- about the Nakba (catastrophe) that struck the whole Arab community of Palestine in 1948. She said her grandmother, who had lived through the whole Nakba, "never wanted to talk about it at all", and her mother never said much about it until recently, either.

It was only after Sally went to university, in Haifa, that she really started to hear the Nakba discussed openly. And it was then, too, that she started to explore and strengthen her identity as a Palestinian citizen of Israel. (Official Israeli policy has always been to try to downplay the "Palestinian-ness" of the country's Palestinian-Arab citizens, describing them only as "Israeli Arabs", or further sub-dividing them into even smaller categories like ""Christian Arabs", or "Israeli Druze", or "Israeli Beduins", or whatever... Anything but the dreaded P-word that might cause them-- gasp!-- to identify more closely with those of their cousins and brothers who had left as refugees in 1948 or who, living just a few miles south of Nazareth, were living under the yoke of Israeli military occupation in the confines of the West Bank.)

Sally also talked a little about how, young and eager to be "modern", she was eager when she went to university to have her first real opportunity to make friends with Jewish Israeli girls her age. But she said that most of her efforts to do so were rebuffed: "They really didn't want anything to do with us."

These days, one of the things Sally is doing is working with one of the many "co-existence and conflict resolution" projects that have been started by NGOs within the Palestinian-Israeli community. She's been working with a group of Palestinian-Israeli girls in Nazareth on life-skills, nonviolent communication, and things like that.

She recalled one recent event when "her" group of Palestinian-Israeli girls were scheduled to meet up and do a joint activity with a group of Jewish-Israeli girls who had been taking part in a parallel program someplace else. "Our girls were pretty excited at the opportunity to get together as equals, for once, with these Jewish girls. But when we got there, none of the Jewish girls turned up. They just couldn't be bothered. It was pretty hard to explain to the girls in my group that this event they had been looking forward to, and preparing for, for quite some time-- to the Jewish girls, it was just nothing."

for me, that story of Sally's was an echo of something Jewish Israeli strategic analyst Yossi Alpher had told me just a few days earlier.

We were having lunch in a nice cafe in northern Tel Aviv, and at one point Alpher said,

Now, you have numerous Israelis who commute on a weekly basis between Tel Aviv and London or Amsterdam. Then you have the descendants of all those earlier generations of Israelis who came here from Poland or Romania or wherever in the 1930s: Now that most of those countries have gone into the EU, Israelis are reclaiming their citizenship rights there, and those EU passports, at a fast rate. Why would they want to be bothered with the Arabs?

Anyway, back to Nazareth: Guess who's coming to the city again, (though in a new instantiation) this May?

The pope. H'mmm.

3. Tawfiq Zayyad

From 1973 until his untimely death in 1994, the Palestinian-Israeli Communist poet Tawfiq Zayyad was both Mayor of Nazareth and a member of Israel's Knesset (parliament.)

Here, thanks to Wikipedia, are English-language translations of two of Zayyad's best-known poems:

Here We Will Remain

In Lydda, in Ramla, in the Galilee,
we shall remain
like a wall upon your chest,
and in your throat
like a shard of glass,
a cactus thorn,
and in your eyes
a sandstorm.
We shall remain
a wall upon your chest,
clean dishes in your restaurants,
serve drinks in your bars,
sweep the floors of your kitchens
to snatch a bite for our children
from your blue fangs.
Here we shall stay,
sing our songs,
take to the angry streets,
fill prisons with dignity.
In Lydda, in Ramla, in the Galilee,
we shall remain,
guard the shade of the fig
and olive trees,
ferment rebellion in our children
as yeast in the dough.

* * *

All I Have

I never carried a rifle
On my shoulder
Or pulled a trigger.
All I have
Is a flute's melody
A brush to paint my dreams,
A bottle of ink.
All I have
Is unshakeable faith
And an infinite love
For my people in pain.

Zayyad was killed in a car accident in July 994, as he drove back to Nazareth after a visit he made to Jericho to welcome Yasser Arafat on the occasion of Arafat's post-Oslo return to the West Bank.

How tragic was that?

4. Jerusalem

I have written quite a lot about Jerusalem here already-- about the Jewish-Israeli western part of the city, from which some 60,000 Palestinians were ethnically cleansed during the fighting of 1948, and have never since been allowed to return, and about the now Israeli-occupied eastern part of the city from which some 2,000 Jewish people were ethnically cleansed during the 1948...

The eastern half of the city includes the city's historic and fascinating walled Old City, home of some of the holiest sites of the three monotheistic religions: The Kotel, or Wailing Wall, beloved as a place of intense lamentation by Jews; the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, which is, truth be told, much fought over among a myriad of Christian churches; and the Noble Sanctuary (Haram al-Sharif) of the Muslims, home to the highly venerated Al-Aqsa mosque and the gold-carapaced Dome of the Rock, a shrine on the spot from which the prophet is reputed to have sprung on his horse during his mystic Night Journey... The Haram al-Sharif is also reputedly on the site of the Jewish people's destroyed Third Temple. (The Kotel that we can see is the wall facing a portion of its foundation. The lamentations there are over the destruction of the temple.)

Ah, as soon as I write about this sacred geography, and its intimacy, you can start to see the complexity and incendiary nature of the issues involved.

No wonder my friend Moshe Ma'oz says "The negotiators should start with the issue of Jerusalem, not end with it. With goodwill and mutual respect all round these issues can be resolved. And once you've solved Jerusalem everything else falls easily into place."

However, the mutual respect part of this might require quite some effort to build. After Israel's military occupied East Jerusalem and the rest of the West Bank in 1967 it almost immediately set about trying to Judaize as much of the city as it could. First it seized back control over the historic Jewish Quarter of the Old City. Then it decided to make a big ceremonial plaza in front of the Kotel, for which purpose it demolished 135 Palestinian homes in the Mughariba Quarter near the Wall, along with two neighborhood mosques and the shrine of a Sufi saint. Then, almost immediately, it set about building thick swathes of Jewish settlements in such a way as to stifle the city's remaining Palestinian residents and to cut them off from their cousins and compatriots in the rest of the West Bank.

For this purpose, too, the Israeli government unilaterally expanded the municipal boundaries of Jerusalem considerably beyond where they had previously been and then declared the unilateral Anschluss of the whole expanded city to the State of Israel. The Palestinians trapped inside the annexed city now number 220,000. The number of Israeli settlers quite illegally planted into the occupied east of the city number around 195,000. The boundaries of the city are ringed by the brutal concrete Wall.

And still the demolitions of Palestinian homes inside the city continues, as does the creeping forward of Israeli settlement projects right through the heart of historic Palestinian neighborhoods both within the Old City and outside it..."

-mr

Headlines:

2009-03-14T09:10:00.000-07:00

Pakistan information minister quits:

Sherry Rehman resigns over differences with president regarding media control.

For more on the deepening crises in Pakistan check out Prof. Cole's resourceful and well-informed posts on the topic.

Gaps in Palestinian health care:

Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza have fragmented health services, according to a new study, due to the restrictions imposed upon people by Israeli security forces, poor management, and a growing population.

Ethnic cleansing in East Jerusalem:

Just this past week in the East Jerusalem area, 88 homes in al-Bustan, 55 homes in Shufat refugee camp, 35 Bedouin homes on the Jerusalem-Jericho Road, and 66 homes in al-Isawiyya were slated for destruction, affecting more than 2,000 Palestinians, most of whom have lived there for generations.

Israeli Settlers Terrorize Palestinian Villagers:

"We saw a group of masked Israeli settlers armed with sticks and chains heading towards us. The younger shepherds ran and managed to escape, leaving me with the flock of sheep," Rabaye told IPS.

"It was physically impossible for me to run, and I also didn't want the settlers to kill or steal my sheep. The security guard pushed me over, but I was not injured," recalled Rabaye, who was then seven months pregnant.

U.S. queries Israel's toilet-paper rules for Gaza:

The United States is protesting to Israel over seemingly random restrictions on deliveries to the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip of harmless goods such as soap and toilet paper, diplomats said Wednesday.

"It is totally surreal," one European diplomat said of Israeli decision-making. "One day we had 600 kg (1,300 pounds) of pasta at the Kerem Shalom crossing but they said, 'Today, pasta can't go in'."

Another Western diplomat said: "It's ever-changing. One week jam is okay and the next week it's not."

In addition to soap and toilet paper, the officials cited restrictions that come and go on imports of certain types of cheeses, toothbrushes and toothpaste.

Scott Horton Interviews Ray McGovern March 12th, 2009

Ray McGovern, former senior analyst at the CIA, discusses the ebb and flow of neoconservative influence in the White House, how the scuttled Charles Freeman appointment weakens U.S. leverage with Israel, the incredible influence still exerted by Steven J. Rosen despite his indictment under the Espionage Act, the shortcomings of the mainstream media and how the 2007 National Intelligence Estimate on Iran prevented a disastrous war.

-mr

Israeli Terror

2009-03-14T09:06:00.001-07:00

American citizen critically injured after being shot in the head by Israeli forces in Ni’lin:

Tristan was shot by the new tear-gas canisters that can be shot up to 500m. I ran over as I saw someone had been shot, while the Israeli forces continued to fire tear-gas at us. When an ambulance came, the Israeli soldiers refused to allow the ambulance through the checkpoint just outside the village. After 5 minutes of arguing with the soldiers, the ambulance passed.
– Teah Lunqvist (Sweden) - International Solidarity Movement

Four Palestinian villagers have already been killed for protesting against the separation wall in the West Bank Village of Ni’lin.

-am,mr

Just in from The Angry Arab News Service:

2009-03-13T20:34:00.000-07:00

960 Palestinian civilians: who are the terrorists?

"Israel's 22-day offensive in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip killed 1,434 people, including 960 civilians, 239 police officers and 235 fighters, a Palestinian human rights group said Thursday." (thanks Olivia)

The mother of all atrocious defense videos

"Unfortunately for us, Israeli arms-maker Rafael chose C. Which means we may have just found the most atrocious defense video of all time..." (thanks Laleh)

Didn't I tell you?

Yesterday, Chas Freeman withdrew his name. I wrote this the first day. (thanks Laurie)

Elliott Abrams: His Expertise

This is the expertise of Abrams: a man who never studied the Middle East and does not speak or read any of its languages (but he is fluent in Gun Zionism): "Expertise: U.S. policy in the Middle East, Israel-Palestinian affairs, democracy promotion, human rights policy, U.S. foreign policy." (thanks Mounzer)

They will not go

"Following the lead of Umm Kamel al-Kurd who put up a tent near her home in Sheikh Jarrah after she was forcibly removed from her home four months ago, other neighborhoods in Jerusalem facing a similar fate have set up such tents as spaces for organizing and encouraging others to stand in solidarity with each neighborhood. Such tents exist now on the Mount of Olives and in Ras Khamis. One of the organizers of the solidarity tent in al-Bustan, Ahmed Siam, told me "We will not let history repeat itself. We learned from history. We will not leave our land like we did in 1948. If they come and kill my son, I will not leave. This is our land. Even if they kill me and only my blood remains, it will remain on this land." The 7,000 residents of the area intend to fight for their right to stay on their land rather than see it turned into a new, illegal Israeli colony."

DON'T MISS Prof. As'ad AbuKhalil's scathing critique of the obnoxious provocateur, and self-interested scum of the earth, Christopher Hitchens - another privileged white man making the soulless trek from youthful radical to middle-aged reactionary.

-mr

Breaking news: Iraqi hero gets three years

2009-03-13T20:04:00.000-07:00

Prof. Cole reports on al-Zaidi: 3 Years Sentence on Shoe-Thrower

Iraqi shoe-thrower Muntadhar al-Zaidi was sentenced to 3 years in prison on Thursday, under a statute forbidding assaults on visiting heads of state. The maximum sentence is 15 years, but the judge said he took into account al-Zaidi's youth and that it was his first offense. Al-Zaydi's lawyers maintained that the law only forbade assault, and that it was wrong to punish al-Zaydi under the statute since he had merely mounted a symbolic protest.

Al-Zaydi's sister complained bitterly that the court had sided with the US against its own people, according to Aswat al-Iraq, an independent wire service. She also said that Muntadhar had asked her to distribute sweets when his verdict was read out, since he was proud of what he had done. Al-Hayat [Life] writes in Arabic that Al-Zaydi's family dismissed the verdict as faulty and purely "political," and his brother called the court "American." Iraqis will be having "Hero Parties" in his honor.

Al-Zaydi told the judge that he had been angered because of Bush's crimes, which had kicked off the violence in Iraq. He said his throwing shoes at Bush had been natural and understandable, and that any Iraqi who stood in his position would have done the same. . .

Aljazeera English has video and relevant interviews:

-mr

Iraq Instability

2009-03-10T16:49:00.000-07:00

Middle East expert, Prof. Juan Cole, examines the slated troop withdrawal from Iraq. There are several great articles to link to through his post. Note the level of reconciliation happening in places like Samarra, while violence escalates elsewhere in the country. In terms of political violence we are still talking magnetic car bombs, motorcycle riding suicide bombers, hand grenades tossed into crowded markets, and newly dug mass graves. This is the stuff we can only imagine on the big screen, and for all intents and purposes, its considered stability in Iraq.

Those pundits trumpeting peace in Iraq should authentic their message with a willingness to actually travel to Iraq themselves. They could hit up trendy Mansur, stop by historic Al-Mutanabi for a quick read, enjoy some Masgouf along the Dijla. Or, just try staying alive. Why is it that 'non-Westerners' are forced to accept a different kind of peace?

12000 US Troops Withdrawn from Iraq; 32 Killed in Police Academy Bombing

The Obama administration will not replace two US brigades (12,000 troops) that are departing Iraq. There are 140,000 US troops in that country, down from 160,000 in 2008 during the Bush troop escalation or "surge." The two brigades will likely be brought out of al-Anbar Province and Baghdad. Al-Anbar, once one of the most violent places in Iraq (and the world) has seen attacks and deaths decline dramatically since the tribal Awakening Councils started taking US salaries to fight Salafi extremists (what the US calls 'al-Qaeda'). Baghdad is also much less violent than in 2007, in large part because the Sunni Arab population has largely been ethnically cleansed from the capital, so that it seems to be 80% or 85% Shiite now. The 4,000 British troops stationed at the airport in Basra will also leave by the end of June, 2009.

The step will leave 128,000 US troops in Iraq through the December, 2009, parliamentary elections, when they will be needed to lock down the country and prevent car-bombings of polling stations. Those elections will be the last conducted under US auspices. By August, 2010, another 80,000 to 100,000 troops will be withdrawn, with all US soldiers and Marines scheduled to be out of Iraq by December 31, 2011.

AP has video on the news conference announcing the withdrawal:

Aljazeera English reports on the Iraqi politics around the US troop withdrawal.

The security challenges remaining in Iraq were demonstrated by the nine bombings over the weekend, including a major attack by a suicide bomber wearing an explosive vest at a police training facility in central Baghdad. That attack killed at least 32 and wounded 60. Among the dead were 8 police officials. It has all along been the goal of the Sunni Arab guerrillas to punish the new Iraqi police recruits as "collaborators" with the new Iraqi government and Washington. Despite large numbers of attacks on recruits and police, however, they have not prevented the establishment of a large, newly trained police force and army, which have begun performing better against the guerrillas in pitched battles.

The establishment of Sunni-majority elected provincial assemblies after the Jan. 31 provincial elections in Al-Anbar, Ninevah, Salahuddin and Diyala raises the question of whether Sunni Iraqis will begin channeling their energies into improving their provinces instead of supporting the guerrillas.

The potential for Sunni-Shiite reconciliation was attested to on Friday when nearly a million Shiites converged on the Askariya shrine or golden dome of Samarra to commemorate the death of Imam Hasan al-Askari, who is buried at the shrine. Samarra is a Sunni-majority city in the strongly Sunni province of Salahuddin, the site of many guerrilla attacks against US troops and those of the new Iraqi military. There was little violence associated with this pilgrimage. In February 2006, Sunni Arab guerrillas blew up the shrine of Samarra, setting off nearly two years of civil war.

Turkey will help train the Iraqi military, and will accept Iraqi cadets into its military academies. This step is ironic because the Iraqi officer corps after WW I was Ottoman-trained. After a century of Arab nationalism, Iraq's military is again establishing close ties to Turkey. From Ankara's point of view, having Iraqi officers educated in its military academies gives Turkey a chance to influence among the most important groups of future Iraqi leaders. In particular, Turkish military academies are stongly secular and hostile to religion.

Aljazeera English reports on the travails of poor Iraqi women laborers under the new regime:

Iraqi women are struggling to regain the rights they lost with the American occupation, which was marketed to the US public as a liberation of Iraqi women!

Mcclatchy reports political violence in Iraq on Sunday:

' Baghdad

- A roadside bomb detonated in Ghazaliyah neighborhood in western Baghdad targeting a Sahwa patrol around 7:30 a.m. Three Sahwa members were wounded.

- A magnetic bomb detonated under a parliament employee’s car in Damascus intersection in downtown Baghdad around 7:40 a.m. Two people were wounded including the employee.

- A suicide bomber riding a motor- bike filled with explosives targeted a crowd of recruiters for police in front of the police academy in Palestine street around 10:30 a.m. At least 28 people were killed (including five policemen and three traffic policemen) and 57 others were wounded.

Mosul

- Gunmen opened fire at two soldiers in Mithaq neighborhood in Mosul on Saturday night. The two soldiers who were killed, were going to buy some food stuff from the commercial shops near their military check point in the area.

- A gunman threw a grenade at a police patrol in Shareen market in downtown Mosul early morning. Two people were wounded including a policeman.

- Gunmen killed a young man in downtown Mosil around 8:30 p.m. The young man was a student at the technical institution in Mosul.

Diyala

- Police found eight mass graves in the orchards of the Al-Bu Tumaa village of Khalis (about 10 miles north of Baquba). There were 25 dead bodies in those graves who were killed by the Qaida which was controlling Diyala province.' (posted by Juan Cole @ 3/09/2009 - Informed Comment)

-mr

Headlines:

2009-03-05T23:06:00.000-08:00

Bomb kills 13 at livestock market south of Baghdad

Thursday: 21 Iraqis Killed, 73 Wounded

Lieberman in line for prominent Israeli post

Exclusive: Lawyer says Guantanamo abuse worse since Obama

The Ross-Iran Controversy

What do they have to hide? Fury as Straw blocks release of minutes of key Cabinet meeting held before Iraq war

Wis. reservist refuses to return to Iraq

Iraq’s War Widows Face Dire Need With Little Aid

The Vanishing Booksellers of Baghdad:

"Here they also sold bridles, saddles and shoes for religious men," says Afram Hussein al Fufuli, 69, concluding my history lesson. My translator-colleague and I had been directed to Fufuli by a younger bookseller up the street, who had called him "the dictionary." In his brown blazer and sweater, Fufuli did indeed have a professorial air. Framed by dusty stacks of books tall as himself (between Arabic volumes: John Le Carre, Macroeconomic Theory, Richard Nixon's Leaders), he conducted slow business out of a small brick storefront which, he said, his father opened in 1930.

Fufuli described how, when the car bomb exploded nearby, all his books were knocked down and his metal gate was twisted. "Thanks to God, I was away from the shop at the time." After that, for a while, the street was deserted. The explosion killed 38, and was a well-documented tragedy. READ MORE

Guantanamo Briton-resident Reunited With Sister:

In a statement read to the media in central|London. Mr Mohamed said: "I have been through an experience that I never thought to encounter in my darkest nightmares.

"Before this ordeal, torture was an abstract word to me. I could never have imagined that I would be its victim.

"It is still difficult for me to believe that I was abducted, hauled from one country to the next, and tortured in medieval ways - all orchestrated by the United States government."READ MORE

-mr

"CLOSED ZONE"

2009-03-05T23:00:00.000-08:00

`Closed Zone`: 90 animated seconds on the closure of Gaza
Gisha - I am pleased to send you a link to "Closed Zone", a 90-second animated film by Yoni Goodman, Director of Animation for the Academy Award-nominated film "Waltz with Bashir". Closed Zone shows the closure of the Gaza Strip and its effects on the ability of one and a half million human beings living there to pursue their aspirations and, more recently – even to run from harm`s way, during the devastating military operation in Gaza. Unfortunately, despite post-war calls to rehabilitate Gaza, the closure policy remains in effect.

-mr

Death of the two-state solution and Gaza reconstruction . . .

2009-03-05T20:42:00.000-08:00

Informed Comment on Hillary Clinton in the Holy Land, and Gaza aid:

Clinton Slams Israel on Jerusalem House Demolitions; 50-Years War Looms with Danger to US

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton slammed Israel on Wednesday for its plan to demolish 88 Palestinian homes in Occupied East Jerusalem, calling it a violation of the Roadmap for Israeli-Palestinian peace. She said after meeting Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, "Clearly this kind of activity is unhelpful and not in keeping with the obligations entered into under the 'road-map'... It is an issue that we intend to raise with the government of Israel and the government at the municipal level in Jerusalem."

Clinton will get lots of critical emails from a tightly organized network of far rightwing Revisionist-Zionists for her comment. Please consider sending her a supportive message for daring speak out on the issue. In fact, urge her to use a stronger word than "unhelpful" the next time. And, other bloggers: Please send your readers to make such comments, as well. The left blogosphere that cares about these things is bigger than the Jabotinskyites, but we don't bother to network or write or contribute specifically on this issue, and so we are always being out-organized and outflanked and marginalized.

The issue of the house demolitions in Jerusalem is important because of its emotional resonance for Palestinians and for the whole Muslim world, which views Jerusalem as Islam's third holiest city, a city Muslims ruled in history for longer than Jews did. Bin Laden repeatedly cited the Israeli occupation of Jerusalem, along with the presence of US troops in Saudi Arabia, as his motivation for attacking New York.

But in fact the demolition of 88 houses is a minor affair compared to Israel's plans to build 73,000 new houses in the Occupied West Bank, which would lead to a doubling of the Israeli squatter population to 600,000. About a third of the Jewish colonists in the West Bank are Americans. The plan will almost certainly be implemented by the far rightwing government being assembled by Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu. The two-state solution is already dead, but this massive expansion of the squatter population would be the final nail in the coffin. Palestinian statehood is important because currently over half the world's some 9 million Palestinians are stateless,including those in Gaza and the West Bank. Statelessness is a severe disability in the contemporary world, because the state guarantees basic political and civil rights. No stateless Palestinians enjoy the basic rights and freedoms granted Americans by the US Bill of Rights, because their occupiers or hosts will not grant them and the Palestinians have no state representation of their own. (The Palestine Authority is essentially an extension of the Israeli occupation authority and lacks the prerogatives and sovereignty of a state). There are not two sides to this issue, whereby someone could argue that Palestinians don't deserve citizenship in a state and it is good for them to be expropriated at will. It is a scandal and a crime that they remain stateless after all these decades. And, no, it is not the "Arabs" fault. The "Arabs" did not expel the Palestinians from their homes, and since Israel kept the Occupied Territories after 1967, they are its responsibility, not Morocco's.

Clinton has told CNN, "The two-state solution is the inevitable, inescapable outcome of any effort," Clinton told CNN. "It is hard to imagine what other positive outcome could be arrived at." But Clinton has been so cautious in her statements while in Israel, neglecting to press the Israelis publicly and forcefully on their extensive colonization plans, that Palestinians are despairing of genuine progress. They are calling her "Condi Clinton." That seems harsh, given that Condi would almost certainly not have chided the Israelis publicly over house demolitions in Jerusalem.

Hillary is right and wrong. A two-state solution is no longer feasible. It was the best hope for peace, but Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon killed it, with some help from Hamas, Islamic Jihad, etc. There will not be a positive outcome in the Mideast. We are in for a fifty-years war, which Israel is very likely to lose in the long run, and during the course of which there will be enormous violence and terrorism, including, probably, further attacks on the United States for its knee-jerk support of Israeli expansionism and aggressive total wars on Arab civilian populations.

Since,apparently, the US government is primed to let John Yoo rewrite the US constitution whenever a few bombs go off, so that freedom of speech and the press can be abolished and the right to be free of unreasonable search and seizure can be revoked, the Mideast 50-years-war very likely will lead to the destruction of American democracy. The blueprint for that demolition job has long existed and steps toward it were taken under Bush.

Aljazeera English reports on Israel's demolition of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem and its refusal to grant building permits to Arab families, while building new housing for Jewish families. These policies violate the 1907 Hague Convention and the 1949 Geneva Convention on occupied territories, which forbid the settlement of citizens of the Occupier in the conquered area, and forbid significant alterations in the lifeways of the occupied population. Israel has single-handedly reduced the Geneva Conventions to irrelevancy, since it flouts them and strong-arms the United States into acquiescing in and supporting the flouting.

Aljazeera English notes that while Bill and Hillary Clinton helped open the Gaza Airport in 1998, Hillary did not bother to visit Gaza now that she is secretary of state, and the Israelis have destroyed the airport, turning Gaza into "the world's largest prison," or as a Vatican spokesman put it, a concentration camp.

Cairo Donor Conference Nets $5 bn for Gaza Reconstruction;
Israelis Block Gaza Reconstruction

Shorter AFP: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will try to tell Binyamin Netanyahu, the far rightwing prospective prime minister of Israel, that he should allow the rebuilding of Gaza and start up a peace process that leads to a Palestinian State. Netanyahu ask her to let him bomb Iran and go on colonizing the West Bank and making sure there is a never a Palestinian state.

Netanyahu probably won't get his way on Iran, but he likely will keep the Palestinians stateless, i.e., in subhuman conditions.

Clinton arrives in Israel from a donors conference in Cairo that raised $5 bn. Unfortunately, Israel won't let most of it in, since it is trying to half-starve the Palestinians into submission. And the only realistic conduit for that amount of money is the Palestinian Authority bureaucracy in Gaza, which was taken over by Hamas when it won the January, 2006 elections. But the US and Israel refuse to deal with Hamas and won't let the money go through bureaucracies it controls (all the relevant ones). Washington and Tel Aviv will probably try to use the money to bolster Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah faction within the Palestinian authority. What they can't understand is that Palestinians have excellent bs meters, and don't support people they view as corrupt collaborators. The frantic search for the 'good Palestinian' only creates unpopular failures over time, in the nature of the case.

Anyway, rebuilding is pretty hard when Israel won't let in concrete for . . . rebuilding.

Aljazeera English reports on the challenges of rebuilding Gaza and the Israeli blockade that is keeping basic materials out. 90% of Gaza's water is unsafe to drink, and the damage the Israelis did the sewage treatment plant has sent raw sewage into the drinking water.

Veteran journalist and Palestine expert Helena Cobban is in the area and has been filing some eye-opening reports at her blog on the condition of the Palestinians.

-mr

Helena Cobban in the OPT's:

2009-03-01T00:47:00.000-08:00

Bantustan Days, Part 1

... Or, 25 interesting things about Ramallah and its environs.

1.

Whole areas of the Greater Ramallah area now loom like "Dubai on a hilltop", with clusters of large high-rises either recently built, or still being built. Many are glossy, glass-fronted "trade centers" or "office complexes." Who's been financing this massive wave of development? Some of it, clearly, has been financed by western donor governments eager to prop up the Ramallah-based "Palestinian Authority'. Many area residents say, however, that much of it has been financed by the very extensive, and relatively well-off, networks of Ramallah expatriates. Some people say that as much as 90% of the Palestinians whose family origins are here now live elsewhere-- primarily in the US. When they've sent money 'home', over the years, they have generally loved to plow it into real-estate development. Back in the days of full-bore Israeli occupation, the military authorities kept a tight lid on Palestinian building. Now, they are 'free' to indulge their wildest real-estate fantasies (and some truly are pretty wild and tasteless.) The results do not make it easy to persuade the many international NGOs who flock to Palestine that there is any real socioeconomic need here. Yes, there is need in Palestine, including a lot of it in other parts of the West Bank, as well as in Gaza. But for the most part you don't find it if you stay inside Ramallah.

2.

Many of the city's high-rises are now occupied by PA 'ministries.' By some counts there are 37 of them, each with its own grandiose marble-clad building. (Often, little goes on inside, but that's another question.) But the PA is not a sovereign government. In fact it has a jurisdiction and mandate that is far more circumscribed than that of my home-state, Virginia. In Virginia, the state-- or Commonwealth, as it is somewhat grandiosely known-- has a 'Department of Education', a 'Department of Transport', etc etc. Wouldn't it be more appropriate for the PA to call these bodies "Departments", and to keep them to a reasonable and effective scale? Calling them 'ministries', it seems to me, is just another instance of PA grandiosity and legerdemain.

3.

Ramallah has numerous lively and engaging cafes and eateries-- and apparently some bars and night-clubs, though I didn't check those out. But I don't think it has a single decent bookstore. H'mmm.... I moved from there to East Jerusalem recently; one of the first things I did was wander along Jerusalem's Salahuddin Street to the Educational Bookstore. Although it's tiny it always has the most stunning and well-organized selection of books on current political and cultural topics, in Arabic and English. Maybe they should open a branch in Ramallah? READ MORE

-mr

Headlines:

2009-03-01T00:16:00.000-08:00

Obama's Iraq plan draws fire from Left

US deaths spike in Afghanistan

Israel's death squads: A soldiers story

The target, Razeq, was in the passenger seat, closest to the APC. "I have no doubt I see him in the scope. I start shooting. Everyone starts shooting, and I lose control. I shoot for one or two seconds. I counted afterwards – shot 11 bullets in his head. I could have shot one shot and that's it. It was five seconds of firing.

"I look through the scope, see half of his head. I have no reason to shoot 11 bullets. I think maybe from the fear, maybe to cope with all the things that are happening, I just continue shooting."

As far as he can recall, the order to fire was not specific to the sharpshooters in the APC. He cannot know for certain if the troops in the truck thought wrongly that some of the fire was directed at them from the cars. But he says that after he stopped "the firing gets even worse. I think the people in the truck started to panic. They're firing and one of the cars starts driving and the commander says, 'Stop, stop, stop, stop!' It takes a few seconds to completely stop and what I see afterwards is that both cars are full of holes. The first car, too, which was there by coincidence."

Razeq and Dhuheir, the militants, were dead. So were Abu Laban and Al Leddawi. Miraculously, the driver of the taxi, Nahed Fuju, was unscathed. The sharpshooter can remember only one of the four bodies lying on the ground. "I was shocked by that body. It was like a sack. It was full of flies. And they asked who shot the first car [the Mercedes] and nobody answered. I think everybody was confused. It was clear that it had been a screw-up and nobody was admitting [it]." But the commander did not hold a formal debriefing until the unit returned to its main base.

"The commander came in and said, 'Congratulations. We got a phone call from the Prime Minister and from the Minister of Defence and the chief of staff. They all congratulated us. We succeeded perfectly in our mission. Thank you.' And from that point on, I understood that they were very happy." He says the only discussion was over the real risk there had been of soldiers' casualties from friendly fire in the shoot-out, in which at least one of the IDF's own vehicles was hit by ricocheting bullets, and at the end of which at least one soldier even got out of the 4x4 and fired at an inert body on the ground. READ MORE

-mr

2009-02-28T00:32:00.000-08:00

Helena Cobban on the racist, rightest, radicals dominating Israel's new government:

[Lieberman's] desire for a more starkly Jewish-dominated political system in Israel is linked to the calls he has issued for all citizens to be required to take an oath of loyalty to Israel "as a Jewish state." Back in 2006, he openly called for the execution of any Arab Knesset member who meets with Hamas; and at Yisrael Beiteinu rallies young supporters openly shout "Death to the Arabs" without any party elders intervening to quiet them.

Lieberman has described the "loyalty oath" he calls for as similar to the loyalty oaths that many western countries require of new immigrants when they become citizens. (He himself immigrated to Israel from Moldova at age 20, in 1978.)

Dr. Ahmed Tibi, a Palestinian-Israeli member of the Israeli Knesset who has been a frequent target of Lieberman's wrath, rejects that comparison. "In Europe or America, those oaths are required when new citizens come voluntarily into the state. We never ‘came into' Israel. We were here all along, and the state of Israel came forcibly into our lives... Lieberman himself is the immigrant who now comes in and directs his racism against the indigenous people here." READ MORE

Israel's cruel and arbitrary aid regulations dumbfound US Senator Kerry:

Red-faced and unusually tongue-tied Israeli officials were forced to try and explain to U.S. Senator John Kerry during his visit to Israel last week why truckloads of pasta waiting to enter the besieged Gaza strip were not considered humanitarian aid while rice was.
"Although the situation has improved in comparison to several months ago, the amount of aid allowed in is still too little compared to the pre-blockade scenario," said UNRWA spokesman Sammay Mshasha.

"Furthermore, when the delivery of aid is restricted to an argument of pasta vs rice, then the situation becomes a little ridiculous. No security reasons justify a blockade on pasta," Mshasha told IPS.

"Rebuilding Gaza's infrastructure is vital but the Israelis are not allowing glass in to fix shattered windows. No cement or steel is being permitted in either. We have had construction material waiting in warehouses from 22 months ago, long before the war," added Mshasha.

An estimated 15,000 buildings in Gaza were destroyed during Operation Cast Lead, causing 50,000 Palestinians to flee their homes and seek emergency shelter. Thousands have no home to return to, while thousands of others returned to homes extensively damaged. READ MORE

Imagine how immense a tunnel would have to be to accommodate Israel's vast fire-power, including a whole fleet of F16's -- or the number of tunnels required to transport all of the building supplies used in the construction modern day Israel, a wealthy nation with an average annual income of $17,000.

Ann Wright on the 'prison called Gaza':

How do you rebuild 5,000 homes, businesses and government buildings when the only way supplies come into the prison called Gaza is through tunnels? Will the steel I-beams for roofs bend 90 degrees to go through the tunnels from Egypt? Will the tons of cement, lumber, roofing materials, nails, dry wall and paint be hauled by hand, load after load, 70 feet underground, through a tunnel 500 to 900 feet long and then be pulled up a 70-foot hole and put into a waiting truck in Gaza?
The gates to Gaza slammed shut again on Thursday, February 5, the day our three-person group departed Gaza, having been allowed in for only 48 hours. The Egyptian government closed the border crossing into Gaza, continuing the sixteen-month international blockade and siege. The crossing had been briefly open to allow medical and humanitarian supplies into Gaza following the devastating 22-day attack by the Israeli military. The attacks killed 1,330 Palestinians and injured over 5,500. The Israeli government said the attacks were to punish Hamas and other groups for firing unguided rockets into Israeli, rockets that over the past two years have killed about 25 Israelis. Most international observers have called the Israeli response to the rocket attacks disproportionate and collective punishment, elements of war crimes.
Today, seventeen days after the gates swung closed on Gaza, they remain firmly locked. Cease-fire talks in Cairo between the Israeli government and Hamas are stalled. Opening the border with Egypt is a contentious point in the cease-fire negotiations. READ MORE
-mr

The Golden Rule: those with the gold, rule.

2009-02-26T13:21:00.001-08:00

What won't be entering our history books:

Straw Vetoes Iraq Minutes Release:

Justice Secretary Jack Straw has vetoed the publication of minutes of key cabinet meetings held in the run-up to the Iraq war in 2003.

The Information Tribunal ruled last month that they should be published.
They had rejected a government appeal against the Information Commissioner's ruling that the papers be published because decisions taken in the run-up to 2003 invasion of Iraq were "momentous" and controversial. READ MORE
-mr

2009-02-25T11:37:00.000-08:00

Helena Cobban lauds Amnesty International's call for an Israeli-Hamas arms embargo.

Huge kudos to Amnesty International for having pulled together a well-researched and intelligent report on the international arms suppliers who were complicit in the commission of war crimes and crimes against humanity during the recent Israel-Gaza war, and for concluding it with a forthright call to all there arms suppliers to cease their arms shipments to the belligerents forthwith.

The news release about the report is here, and the PDF of the report's full text is here.

(Astute readers of JWN will recall that one of the first things I called for when the recent Gaza war broke out was a complete embargo on all arms shipments to the warring parties.)

Of course, the lethal and destructive capabilities of the arsenals of the two sides are completely asymmetrical. And regarding the shipments of arms to each sides by outside arms suppliers, we can recall Kathy Kelly's poignant recent speculation regarding the sheer size of the "tunnels" that would be required if all Israel's arms imports had to be brought in in such a way.

The Amnesty report does three things particularly well:
1. It pulls together a lot of details about the size, nature, and provenance of the arms transfers made to each side-- and, too, of the effects some of these transferred arms had on the communities targeted. And while it is careful to do this for both sides, the report makes quite clear the stark disparity between the level and lethality of the arms level on each side. In particular, though the report is careful to list all the suppliers of significant amounts of arms to srael, the figures it provides show that the overwhelming majority of these outside-supplied arms-- $7.9 billion-worth in the four years 2004-2007-- came from the United States. The second place was occupied by France, which provided only $59 million-worth.
2. It provides a very clear explanation (p. 19 of the full report) of the duty all states have under international law to avoid aiding or assisting other states in the commission of unlawful acts. This duty is spelled out in Article 16 of the International Law Commission’s Articles on Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts (2001), which states: “A State which aids or assists another State in the commission of an internationally wrongful act by the latter is internationally responsible for doing so if: (a) that State does so with knowledge of the circumstances of the internationally wrongful act; and (b) the act would be internationally wrongful if committed by that State.” After the way the Israelis used their foreign-supplied weapons in and against Lebanon in 2006, surely no state officials elsewhere could thereafter argue that "they did not know" that Israel had a propensity to use such weapons in ways that were grossly disproportionate to the military task at hand and often grossly indiscriminate... Also, in addition to the duties states have under international law, most states-- including the US-- also have their own domestic legislation governing the end use of weapons it supplies to others. In the case of the US, such arms can be used only for defensive purposes.
3. Finally, the Amnesty report is quite clear on the policies it advocates. It calls for the immediate imposition of a "comprehensive UN Security Council arms embargo on Israel, Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups until effective mechanisms are in place to ensure that weapons or munitions and other military equipment will not be used to commit serious violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law, and the establishment of a " thorough, independent and impartial investigation of violations and abuses of international human rights law and international humanitarian law, including the Israeli attacks which have been directed at civilians or civilian buildings in the Gaza Strip, or which are disproportionate, and Palestinian armed groups’ indiscriminate rocket attacks against civilian centres in southern Israel."
So now, let's see what the AI organization in the US, and the US Campaign to End the Israeli occupation can do with this information and this campaign.

She later notes, and responds to, Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum's criticism of the report as "unbalanced and unfair because it equates the criminal with the victim." READ MORE

-mr

Canada's largest union of public employees boycotting Israel; US aid for Gaza reconstruction

2009-02-25T11:28:00.000-08:00

The daily digest from Prof. Juan Cole's Informed Comment:

US To Offer Nearly $1 bn. for Gaza Reconstruction

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will announce at the Gaza donor's conference next week that the US will give $900 million to help rebuild the Gaza Strip. That is about a billion dollars.

It is obvious why Clinton is making this gesture. The United States's name is mud in much of the Muslim world because Washington supported to the hilt Ehud Olmert's brutal assault on the people and civilian infrastructure of the Gaza Strip. Gaza was already a blockaded and abused slum before the war, where 15% of the children were undernourished. Bush urged Olmert on, and Obama has been silent.

So at least the US can spend some money to restore to the Gazans the basic prerequisites for a decent life.

Moreover, the US has increasing competition for influence in the area. The Gulf oil states are planning out the rebuilding of Gaza, and Saudi Arabia and Qatar have already pledged $1.25 billion. Qatar stole thunder in Lebanon last spring when it negotiated a peace deal between Hizbullah and the Lebanese government that brought Hizbullah into the government. The Saudis have been trying to bring Fatah and Hamas together. The US has been irrelevant, because under Bush Washington was just a ventriloquist dummy for the Israeli Rightwing. You can only have leverage as a good faith broker if you aren't completely identified with one side of a dispute.

So people are asking where the US government is going to get a billion dollars to give to the Gazans. That's easy. The US should take it out of the over $3 billion a year it gives to Israel. Israel aggressively launched that war, which it planned out for six months beforehand, even while Olmert was ostensibly indirectly negotiating a truce with Hamas. The war was fruitless and accomplished none of its goals. There is no reason for the US government to be giving the Israelis, who have a per capita income of $17,000 a year, money in the first place. But it certainly makes no sense to reward them for bad behavior, especially given that we are living through the great crash and incipient depression of 2009.

Amnesty International is going further and urging that the UN institute a weapons ban on both Israel and the militant Palestinian factions.

Aljazeera English reports on the psychological damage to Gaza children of the war:

The Gaza War was so clearly an unequal contest that involved total war on Palestinian civilians that Canada's biggest union of public employees has called for a boycott of Israel.

-mr

Students Occupy NYU

2009-02-19T12:52:00.000-08:00

NYU has been taken over in Solidarity with Palestine. Students are demanding that NYU become economically democratic and fiscally transparent. No joke. Here is the website www.takebacknyu.com with all the demands and a live camera feed.

Take Back NYU! is a coalition of nearly two dozen groups and hundreds of students at New York University demanding budget disclosure, endowment disclosure, and student representation on the Board of Trustees.

We, the students of Take Back NYU! declare our solidarity with the student [sleepovers] in Greece, Italy, and the United Kingdom, as well as those of the University of Rochester, the New School for Social Research, and with future [sleepovers] to come in the name of democracy and student power. We stand in solidarity with the University of Gaza, and with the people of Palestine.

Some of their demands are of specific interest to Evergreen’s TESC Divest group: 8, 9 & 10:

8. That the first two orders of business of the Socially Responsible Finance committee will be:
An in depth investigation of all investments in war and genocide profiteers, as well as companies profiting from the occupation of Palestinian territories.
A reassessment of the recently lifted of the ban on Coca Cola products.
9. That annual scholarships be provided for thirteen Palestinian students, starting with the 2009/2010 academic year. These scholarships will include funding for books, housing, meals and travel expenses.

10. That the university donate all excess supplies and materials in an effort to rebuild the University of Gaza.

Check out their website!

-mr, am

Reporting from Baghdad: Dahr Jamail on Iraq

2009-02-18T19:12:00.000-08:00

Scott Horton Interviews Dahr Jamail
February 13th, 2009

Dahr Jamail, author of Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq, discusses the improved security in Baghdad that comes by way of a semi-police state fortified with concrete blast walls, the millions of Iraqi refugees who claim they will never return, the rising discontent among members of Sunni “Awakening” groups, the incredibly high potential for violence in a politically unstable country with armed militias and 50% unemployment and how the numerous U.S. military bases create facts on the ground that make a speedy withdrawal seem unlikely.

MP3 here. (38:20)

Dahr Jamail is an unembedded journalist in Iraq and author of Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq and Military Resisters: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan. His personal website is dahrjamailiraq.com and archives of his articles can be found at antiwar.com/jamail. (posted by Antiwar.com)

Helena Cobban in Ramallah

Also, Helena Cobban is visiting a number of Middle Easter nations and is currently in the city of Ramallah. Her experiences and brilliantly stated insights convey the every-day challenges Palestinians face living under Israeli control, even in what she refers to as the "Club Fed" of the occupied territories where an imagined sense of normalcy is almost possible:

I've never stayed for very long in Ramallah before. I generally preferred to stay in East Jerusalem and then as necessary traverse the ghastly Qalandia crossing point between there and Ramallah, sometimes staying with friends here in Ramallah for a night or two. But this time I decided to make Ramallah my first stop, and to stay here for a week or so, so I can catch up with everything that's been going on here. It is, after all, three years now since I was last in town.

So yesterday morning, I took a car from Amman down to the Allenby/ King Hussein Bridge. There was almost no-one else seeking to cross-- almost as bad a sign as if it had been jam-packed, I think. The deal is you do your Jordan-exit business first, east of the bridge, then take a Jordanian-provided and mandatory shuttle bus across the trickle of water known as the River Jordan, to the Israeli side. But it took nearly an hour for them to gather enough people (ten or so) to justify sending the bus across. I got a bit impatient. But in the bus I found that a fellow-traveler who's a manager with the (Abu Mazen-controlled) Palestine Investment Fund was also hoping to head up to Ramallah, so we shared a taxi and split the cost of some $120.

Getting in to the West Bank through the Israeli-controlled side was the usual, extremely depressing experience. The Israelis have cadres of young women, presumably doing their national service, whom they use as the "front-line" in many border-control jobs. Many of them love to hang around with each other and with the beefy young guys who also work there, to chat on cell-phones, to stand around admiring each other's make-up and hair-dos, and to really relish the power they have over all these exhausted-looking Palestinian families whom they have to deal with. The main power they have is to harrass and delay, but it's backed up by other much more intrusive or fearsome powers, too.
When our bus with ten people rolled in, there were around 60-70 people in the passport-control waiting area, so some of them may well have been waiting since early morning. Just about all of them looked to be Palestinians, since of course just about every Palestinian family in the West Bank has half or more of its family members now living in Jordan. And guess what, people in these families like to get together!!! But to do so, they have to pass through these border-controls that are totally controlled by the cohorts of bored and faintly malevolent young Israelis. Well, that gives just a first glimpse of what then continues to happen to Palestinians inside the West Bank, any time they want to travel from one town or city there to another, I guess.

... If all the Palestinian communities in the occupied territories can nowadays be described as "open-air prisons"-- and I believe they can-- then Ramallah is probably the "Club Fed", i.e. the top banana, in this extensive system. Provided you don't actually need to go anywhere else, provided you have plenty of money (yes, this Club Fed ain't cheap to live in), and provided you're capable of completely disabling any sense of solidarity or connectedness you might have with family members, friends, or just plain compatriots who happen to live elsewhere, such as Gaza, you could possibly even live a pretty good life here.

Places that most Ramallah people can't ever get to include even Jerusalem, which used to be just 12 minutes away by car along the hilltop road. Ramallah's a historically Christian town, and just about everyone here has family members or close business ties with East Jerusalem. Tough luck. The Wall, with its horrendous-- and oh so evocatively looming-- watch-towers, stands between.

You are reminded nearly everywhere of the tight noose Israel retains around Ramallah. Like the rest of the West Bank, it is literally a captive market for Israeli produce. Many stores are filled with Israeli-produced goods or with other imports that, having come in through Israeli ports and middle-men give them a nice cut of the profits, too. You can get some great Palestinian fresh produce, and a few locally-manufactured products like Taybeh beer, or some Palestinian-processed foods. But even for those Palestinian industries, their scale is small and many or most of their inputs have to brought in from or through Israel.
READ MORE
-mr

A call for aid to Gaza, the stomach-churning reality and significance of the war, boycotts and more . . .

2009-02-16T18:30:00.000-08:00

The daily digest from Informed Comment:

The demonstrating crowds have gone home. The blog postings have tapered off. The pundits have moved on. Congress is back to its old tricks, ignoring public opinion in favor of the lobbyists and money men. The US public is worried about losing its job or getting back the one it lost. Gaza here is a dimming memory, a momentary nightmare now past.

But the Palestinian children wounded and charred by Israeli bombings are still screaming, their physicians unable to get hold of enough pain killers to still their yelps of pain. Some 5300 Palestinians, most of them children, women and noncombatants, were wounded in Israel's savage war on the Gaza population.

Please consider donating to UNICEF UK's Gaza children's fund (US UNICEF for Palestinian Children here). In fact, I challenge other bloggers to carry the same appeal for UNICEF, among the best aid groups for this purpose, so that we can see if we can create a cyberspace aid convoy for them.

I suggest that we use this icon:

and put something like "I donated to the Gaza Unicef Convoy and you can too" beneath it above our blogrolls.

Outgoing Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has ruled out allowing needed goods into Gaza, which Israel has virtually surrounded from land and sea, until Hamas releases captured Israeli soldier Sgt. Gilad Shalit. Olmert is thereby committing a war crime. You can't collectively punish the general Gaza population if you are the occupying authority. It is not allowed to torture that wailing child in the video above by keeping out painkillers, just because some adult somewhere from the same territory captured an Israeli soldier. But Olmert will get a pass on his war crimes. Apparently you only get punished for them if you are weak or lose; it isn't the crime but the power of the criminal that matters. I heard on LBC satellite news that Hamas replied that they think Shalit was killed by an Israeli bomb during the assault on Gaza. The Israelis and Palestinians are cruel to one another, in their taunts just as in their violence.

The United Nations Security Council again demanded that Israel let in food, medicine and fuel unimpeded. Since Israel is still technically the occupying authority in Gaza, insofar as it controls its borders and airspace, for it to engage in collective punishment on the Gazan population is a war crime forbidden by the 4th Geneva Convention of 1949, which was enacted to prevent Nazi tactics from being deployed against occupied populatoins. UN relief workers, have been impeded from getting into Gaza by Israeli authorities. Those who managed to get through found between 14,000 and 21,000 homes destroyed and 240 of 400 schools badly damaged. The value of the destruction is estimated at $2 billion, and the essential infrastructure of the Strip has been deeply degraded, with potentially severe human health consequences. Much rubble has yet to be cleared away, so there could yet be more dead bodies found, and bomb clearing has not been completed, so people may yet be killed by accidentally setting off unexploded ordnance.

It is often forgotten that about half of Gazans are children, because of the ongoing population explosion, caused by insecurity, which has brought the Strip's population to nearly a million and a half. When Israel made a total war on the Gaza population, it was inevitably targeting large numbers of innocent children.

Susan Taylor Martin of the St. Petersburg Times reports on the bewilderment of Fatah activist as to why the Israelis had blasted his house to smithereens. Fatah and Hamas have poor relations and Fatah has been negotiating peace with Israel.

Peace activists and Muslim groups in the UK are attempting to address the continued Israeli blockade of food and medicine by sending an NGO convoy of trucks to Gaza. They will go down through France and Spain, on ferries across the Straits of Gibraltar to Morocco, and then across North Africa to Egypt and the Sinai, hoping to cross at Rifah.

MP George Galloway is accompanying the convoy part of the way. He told the Independent,
' Anywhere else, there would be a Berlin-style airlift, he says. "Almost every window has been broken but Israel refuses to allow glass across the border. So, in the bitter winter, 61,000 families whose homes have been destroyed are living among the rubble and the rest are freezing because they've got no windows. You could solve that problem in a weekend, but because it is the Palestinians it doesn't happen."
'
The volunteers are taking their own aid. "What we asked people to bring was bedclothes, clothes, nappies, food and medical equipment." Does he really expect to be allowed in? "I do, actually. My prediction is that by the time we arrive in Gaza there will be a 12-month ceasefire." If not, they will wait there until let in.'

Galloway is pilloried by the British establishment as an exhibitionist, but he has a knack for speaking uncomfortable truths eloquently. He points out that given the magnitude of the humanitarian disaster in Gaza, the whole world would be doing an airlift if the victims were not Palestinians. As it is, aid for Gazans has arrived in Jordan from Chile and Pakistan. And the government of Scotland has voted to send substantial civilian aid.

Again, I say we create a cyberspace Gaza convoy via UNICEF.

Some American peace activists are beginning to organize for boycotts of and divestment from Israeli companies.

Boycotters maintain that some Israeli diamond enterprises selling in the US are morally compromised in two ways-- they import diamonds from West Africa (which can be blood diamonds, implicated in violence and human rights abuses), and use profits on selling the cut diamonds to support the illegal colonization by the Zionist far right of the West Bank. (All Israeli colonization of the West Bank is illegal, since it is occupied territory and falls under the 1949 Fourth Geneva Convention, which forbids the occupier to settle its own people in militarily occupied territory or to substantially alter the lifeways or conditions of the occupied population).

I think organizing an effective For America Peace PAC would be a thousand times more effective in putting pressure on Israel to cease its daily violation of basic Palestinian rights. But I also predict that Israeli Apartheid policies toward the Palestinians will deepen under the new, far-right government now being assembled, and that these policies will increasingly attract economic boycotts from the rest of the world. I think Israel is pretty vulnerable to such boycotts, though I think it will take 20 years for them to build up to the point where they have a practical effect. It is likely the next big thing.

On another cautionary note, the multinational audience in Qatar for the BBC Doha Debates (supported by the Qatar Foundation) voted that the Gaza war demonstrated that Arab unity is dead. The governments of Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia deeply dislike Hamas, especially since it decided to play footsie with Iran, and those governments weren't exactly effective in protesting what was done to Gaza.

I don't think the big significance of the Gaza War, however, was political. It changed nothing politically. Netanyahu and the far right were ahead in the Israeli elections. They won. Hamas was in control of Gaza. It still is, and is now more popular in the West Bank and the Arab street, too. What has changed? The rockets still get fired at Israeli towns. Israel still occasionally bombs Gaza.

The big significance was humanitarian. So as to avoid negotiating with Hamas, the Olmert government made total war on Gazans, which is to say, on Palestinian children. They need our cyberspace aid convoy to begin healing and recovering. As things now stand, the Israeli blockade remains in place. Children in hospitals are screaming. (posted by Juan Cole @ 2/16/2009)

-mr

Israel's Crappy Valentine's Day Present

2009-02-13T02:07:00.000-08:00

'Israel lets Gaza export Valentine's Day flowers:'

Israel is relaxing its blockade of the Gaza Strip to let through 25,000 carnations headed to Europe for Valentine's Day. But the head of the Gaza flower growers' association said that was "nothing" compared to the 40 million flowers a year that came out of the territory before the blockade.

Democracy Now video: Former Speaker of the Israeli Parliament Avraham Burg: "The Holocaust is Over: We Must Rise From Its Ashes:"

As Israeli leaders continue talks on assembling a coalition, we’re joined now by a former Israeli politician who’s emerged as one of his government’s biggest critics. Avraham Burg is a former Speaker of the Israeli Parliament and former Chairman of the Jewish Agency and the World Zionist Organization. His new book is called “The Holocaust Is Over: We Must Rise From its Ashes.”

Dr. Haidar Eid interrogates the role of the Palestinian intellectual class in resisting Israeli dominion:

The principled critical legacy of the likes of Ghassan Kanafani, Edward Said and Frantz Fanon is no longer the guiding torch of the NGOized left -- the secular democratic left which is supposed to be, as Said would argue, "someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments or corporations [or donors], and whose raison d'etre is to represent all those people and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug." A fascinating, and timely, remark by Hungarian philosopher George Lukacs points the way that the NGOized left should be talking right now: "When the intellectual's society reaches a historical crossroads in its fight for a clear definition of its identity, the intellectual should be involved in the whole sociopolitical process and leave his ivory tower."

Conn Hallinan explores Gaza as death's personal laboratory, and the gruesome weapons illegally deployed in the latest assault:

Erik Fosse, a Norwegian cardiologist, worked in Gaza hospitals during the recent war. "It was as if they had stepped on a mine," he says of certain Palestinian patients he treated. "But there was no shrapnel in the wound. Some had lost their legs. It looked as though they had been sliced off. I have been to war zones for 30 years, but I have never seen such injuries before."

The famous Iraqi Shabandar Cafe is reopened sans the owner's five sons and wife - testament to Mohammad al-Khashali's resilience and Iraq's longstanding intellectual traditions.

Shabandar Cafe, a landmark on a street famed for its bookshops, has reopened two years after a massive bomb gutted the cultural heartland of Iraq's capital and brought tragedy to the owner's family.

On Iraqi elections: 'Iraq's Teflon Don: The New Fallujah Up Close and Still in Ruins' by Dahr Jamail and Tom Engelhardt.

Driving through Fallujah, once the most rebellious Sunni city in this country, I saw little evidence of any kind of reconstruction underway. At least 70% of that city's structures were destroyed during massive U.S. military assaults in April, and again in November 2004, and more than four years later, in the "new Iraq," the city continues to languish.

Prof. Cole on Iraq:

After attacks on Shiite pilgrims killed 20 on Wednesday, Thursday saw another violent day in Iraq, with bombings in Mosul, a gas cylinder explosion in Karbala and other violence that left 12 dead.

McClatchy discerns a return of the Baath Party in new guises in Iraq, with Salih Mutlak's National Iraqi Project, which did well among Sunni Arab voters in the recent provincial elections, as exhibit A.

Dahr Jamail reports from Fallujah at Tomdispatch.com and finds that it is still in ruins and that the American-funded Awakening Councils were more about security for US troops in al-Anbar than about reconstruction of the war-torn province.

Iranian Foreign Minister Manochehr Mottaki was in Baghdad Thursday to initial a trade agreement that set a target of $5 billion annually between Iran and Iraq. Three Iranian consulates were also opened in the Iraqi cities of Arbil, Karbala and Sulaimaniya.

Mottaki said that there was no longer any reason for Iran and the US to hold bilateral talks on Iraq suecrity, given the stability and relative security in the Shiite South of Iraq where Iran has influence.

Maj. Gen. Michael Oates, who is in charge of US troops in the Shiite south of Iraq, said Thursday that in his view the security gains there were permanent. He cited the decline of Shiite radical groups (read: the Mahdi Army) and "al-Qaeda" (though Sunni fundamentalist guerrillas did not operate much in the Shiite South in recent times). USA Today says that the situation there is so calm now that some US troops wonder why they are still being deployed to the region. Still, there are two attacks on US GIs every day. (I suspect that a lot of the decline in such attacks derives from the Status of Forces Agreement concluded by the al-Maliki government with the US, which stipulates all US troops out of Iraq by the end fo 2011. Shiite militias that have as a main goal the end of what they see as the US occupation no longer have a reason to fight. If the US reneges and overstays its welcome, however, that violence could come back big time.

Basra in particular has the potential to emerge as an advanced Persian Gulf port, as the British troops leave.

The US kept blaming Iran for attacks and poor security in the Shiite south. Would not we have to conclude, if we accepted that premise, that the new and better security situation of today is owing to Iranian efforts, too?

In any case, the agreement between Mottaki and Oates is remarkable, and perhaps another subtext to Mottaki's comments is that the scheduled US military departure is another element making it unnecessary for the two sides to talk about Iraq. (The Iraqis in any case always found it humiliating to have the US and Iran conduct bilateral discussions of Iraq, as though the two could make decisions that interfered in Iraq's national sovereignty.

The minister of women's affairs in the al-Maliki government, Nawal Samarra'i, resigned last week because her ministry was receiving almost no money from the government and she did not feel she could run it properly on those paltry resources. This is a little reminder that the new Iraqi government is dominated by Shiite fundamentalist parties uninterested in liberating Iraqi women.

-mr

2009-02-12T22:00:00.000-08:00

Hampshire College becomes first college in U.S. to divest from Israeli Occupation!

Students for a Just Peace-"The six corporations, all of which provide the Israeli military with equipment and services in the Occupied West Bank and Gaza are: Caterpillar, United Technologies, General Electric, ITT Corporation, Motorola, and Terex .. Furthermore, our policy prevents the reinvestment in any company involved in the illegal occupation. " READ MORE

Democracy Now:

The Board of Trustees at Hampshire College has agreed to divest from six companies because of their involvement in the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Hampshire is believed to be the first US college or university to divest from companies tied to the Israeli military. The companies are Caterpillar, United Technologies, General Electric, ITT Corporation, Motorola and Terex. The board agreed to the divestment following a two-year campaign by the campus group Students for Justice in Palestine. Thirty-two years ago, Hampshire College became the first school to divest from apartheid South Africa. READ MORE
-mr

Israeli Election Results

2009-02-11T23:51:00.000-08:00

Latest from Informed Comment on the Israeli elections:

Right Wing Sweeps Israel;
Racialist Avigdor Lieberman Kingmaker
Two State Solution Dead, Challenge to Obama

The outcome of the Israeli election has sounded the death knell for the two-state solution. There are not 61 votes for it in the new Knesset of 120 seats. A good 64 of the just-elected and/or re-elected Members of Parliament favor accelerated Israeli colonization of the West Bank and oppose Palestinian statehood. Most militant of all is Avigdor Lieberman, a former bouncer from Moldova who has risen in Israeli politics on a platform of racial hatred for Israeli-Palestinians (20% of the population), whom he has urged be "executed" or made to take loyalty oaths, stripped of their citizenship and possibly transferred to the Palestine Authority.

With Lieberman emerging as kingmaker in the new government, logically speaking, there are only three other plausible future relationships of Israel and the Palestinians:

1. Apartheid, with Israeli citizens dominating stateless Palestinians and controlling their borders, land, water and air. Apartheid would be accelerated under Lieberman's baleful influence. Over time, this outcome would break down, since it will be unacceptable to the rest of the world over the coming decades).

2. Expulsion. The Israelis could try to violently expel the Palestinians (and possibly Israeli-Palestinians as well), creating a massive new wave of refugees in Jordan or Egypt's Sinai. (This option would almost certainly end the peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan and might well push the Arab states into the arms of Iran, creating a powerful anti-Israel military coalition and a huge set of threats to the United States.)

3. One State. The Israelis could be forced over time, by economic and technological boycotts, to grant citizenship to the Palestinians of the occupied territories.

Some Neoconservatives have proposed that Jordan could take back part of the West Bank and Egypt could take back the Gaza Strip. However, the Jordanian and Egyptian regimes will absolutely not do so, leading back to option (2) above. Jordan's government is based on the East Bank, Bedouin-origin population and has anxieties about the 60 percent of the population that is already of Palestinian origin. Egypt's relatively secular elites are afraid of Muslim radicalism and would not want to have Hamas become part of Egypt. Both Egypt and Jordan bought into the Arab League position that the PLO is the only legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, and they cannot go against this principle without enormous trouble, even from their own populations, who engaged in huge protests during the recent Gaza war against these governments continuing to have diplomatic relations with Israel.

Since President Obama sent out George Mitchell to attempt to kickstart the peace process and get back on track to a two-state solution, both have now had the rug pulled out from under tham by an Israeli public moving to the far right.

Despite the vote tallies being in, it still is not clear who will form the next government in Israel.

Estimates of the seats won by leading parties in the Israeli elections pointed to a huge shift rightward.

Kadima: 28
Likud: 27
Beitenu: 15
Labor: 13
Arabs 9

According to AFP N. America service, Kadima leader Tzipi Livni said, "Today the people have chosen Kadima . . ." She called on Binyamin Netanyahu of the Likud Party to join in a government of national unity (with herself as prime minister). It may be sort of like when Hillary Clinton offered Obama vice president.

Livni's problem is that if she tries for a right-of-center coalition with the left, she can only get 47 seats. The 9 Arab representatives would not formally join her coalition and now hate her because she was among the leaders of the great Gaza Massacre.

Last week, the Arab Members of the Knesset (parliament) let her have it:
' Livni will not be able to count on the support of the three Arab factions, whose MKs are still upset at her for her role in Operation Cast Lead and for saying in December that in the event of the formation of a Palestinian state, the national aspirations of Israeli Arabs "lie elsewhere."

"What Livni said about us is worse than Lieberman," United Arab List-Ta'al MK Ahmed Tibi said on Saturday night. "That's why we won't recommend to Peres that Livni form a government."

Hadash chairman Muhammad Barakeh said that "Tzipi Livni is not an option for us and neither is Barak or Netanyahu. I don't see us recommending someone who supported the war."

Kadima officials responded that such speculation did not matter, because the factions would reconsider their views if Livni won the election. '

But Kadima leaders may hope that the Arabs will vote with them because they have no place else togo. (Israel is 20% Arab, which should yield 24 seats in the Knesset, but only 9 were apparently elected, down from 12. Attempts were made to disqualify some Arab parties from running, but the Supreme Court struck them down)

Even if the Arabs changed their minds and tacitly supported Livni, that still only gets her, de facto, to 56. But she would need at least 61 to form a government and govern, meaning she'd have to attract at least one small rightwing party into her coalition. But that party would then have a veto because its defection would cause the government to fall. Livni said, at least, that she wanted to stop the Israeli settlement of the West Bank and even move some of the more exposed settlers back to Israel, by force if necessary. None of the small rightwing parties that might join her government and get her over 61 would accept this platform.

CBS explains Livni's difficulties going forward.

(Juan Cole @ 2/11/2009)

-mr

Gaza Justice Action Center

2009-02-09T08:54:00.000-08:00

You're just one click away from telling Congress to lift the Gaza siege and support UNRWA . . .

CLICK HERE TO TELL CONGRESS TO END THE SIEGE AND TO SUPPORT UNRWA

Farhana writes:

While the world's attention is on the Economic Stimulus debate, Israel continues to dominate and starve the people of Gaza.

The right-wing pro-Israel Lobby is applying all pressure on congress to tighten the Gaza blockade. AIPAC and their friends are working overtime to make sure the Gaza border continue to be closed.

They've gone as far as introducing a new house resolution that attacks the United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA) alleging it supports terrorists. Introduced last week and referred to the U.S. Congress House Foreign Affairs Committee, H. Con. Res. 29 states in part:

[Whereas schools administered by UNRWA have reported to have produced several graduates that have gone on to careers affiliated with terrorism, including Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, and Abd al-Azis Rantisi, the former Hamas chief;

Whereas United States taxpayer dollars should never be used for purposes of supporting terrorist cells or activities that support terror or promote a culture of hatred at any of its locations: ] READ THE FULL TEXT HERE

What twisted logic. How can UNRWA possibly know what their students will grow up to be? Instead of pumping more money into educating and feeding Palestinians, some in Congress would rather cut off all humanitarian aid starving young children so they don't grow-up to be terrorists. That's not a solution.

Thank you again, please spread the word to all your friends.

(thanks Janae)
-mr

LET'S HAVE A DEBATE!

2009-02-06T20:31:00.001-08:00

SESAME is proposing a formal debate on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and is searching for student or faculty debaters ready and willing to represent the Israeli point of view.

We believe that vigorous and interactive discussion deepens the quality of discourse on campus and is essential in fulfilling the ideals of a democratic republic. A formal debate is a healthy place to express honest disagreements and challenge individual and collective assumptions.

We have yet to finalize any format or the parameters of the topic - so we are soliciting any and all suggestions!

We have already volunteered the idea at a recent Zionist meeting and were declined.

If you have strong and clear opinions on what we view as the Israeli occupation of historic Palestine, please contact us ASAP. We need your help in elevating the public discourse!

If you’re interested please contact Michelle @ SESAME or respond on tesccrier:

Phone: (360)867-6724
Email: sesame@evergreen.edu

-mr

Understanding Iraq's Elections

2009-02-06T15:08:00.000-08:00

The latest polling results reveal a sharp drop in Baghdad's Sunni population indicating the triumph of years of ethnic cleansing in the capital's Sunni and mixed neighborhoods. This militia-led slaughter was decisive in lowering the catastrophic levels of violence plaguing Iraq in 2006, working in tandem with Bush's so-called surge. Prof. Cole described this devastating dialectic in summer '08:

"As best I can piece it together, what actually seems to have happened was that the escalation troops began by disarming the Sunni Arabs in Baghdad. Once these Sunnis were left helpless, the Shiite militias came in at night and ethnically cleansed them. Shaab district near Adhamiya had been a mixed neighborhood. It ended up with almost no Sunnis. Baghdad in the course of 2007 went from 65% Shiite to at least 75% Shiite and maybe more. My thesis would be that the US inadvertently allowed the chasing of hundreds of thousands of Sunni Arabs out of Baghdad (and many of them had to go all the way to Syria for refuge). Rates of violence declined once the ethnic cleansing was far advanced, just because there were fewer mixed neighborhoods. Newsrack was among the first to make this argument, though I was tracking the ethnic cleansing at my blog throughout 2007."

Few Sunnis still reside in Baghdad, a once vibrant metropolitan center hosting a commingling of faiths and ethnicities. Majority Sunni or mixed enclaves in the capital have since been refashioned into exclusively Shiite neighborhoods. Many of Iraq's four million internally and externally displaced peoples fled this sectarian bloodshed and even if they felt secure enough to return they would have little to return to. Their former homes have been re-occupied, and the current Baghdadi balance of power guarantees that the days of mixed neighborhoods are long gone for now.

Lasted on Iraq's provincial elections from Informed Comment:

Religious Parties Sweep Shiite South; Sunni Arabs fragmented, mainly Secular.

The Iraqi provincial election results are out. They confirm what I said last Monday, that the parties who want a strong, united Iraq have come to the fore in these elections. Although Nuri al-Maliki's Da'wa Party got over a third of the votes in Baghdad and Basra, they clearly did not achieve a commanding position, and its share in the more rural Shiite provinces was signifcantly less..

The big story here is that the Shiite religious parties (and yes, the Da'wa or Islamic Mission Party is among them) again swept the Shiite south. However, those Shiite parties that won out this time want a strong central government, not a Shiite mini-state.

There is nothing here to give comfort to those Americans who fear Iranian influence in Iraq. The Islamic Mission Party or Da'wa is just as committed to warm relations with Tehran as is the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq. The Da'wa leaders were in exile in Tehran for years just like ISCI. Da'wa is more "lay" and less clerical than ISCI, but being "lay" means non-clerical, not secular. Da'wa wants an Islamic State.

These election results raise severe questions about the viability of the Biden plan, which foresaw three decentralized super-provinces overseen by a weak central government. Most of the victors in this election are strong believers in a centralized civil bureaucracy.

On the whole, I think these results are encouraging for Obama. The Sunni Arab ex-Baathist secular elites have reentered polities in the Sunni Arab areas. These election results put paid to the fantasies of Dick Cheney and John McCain that Sunni Arab Iraqis are pro-"al-Qaeda." Most of them would not even vote for a religious party, much less for a radical fundamentalist terrorist group. Cheney said that if the US left, al-Qaeda would take over Sunni Arab Iraq. That is highly unlikely given these election results.

Iraq voted as several distinct demographic zones.

In the two provinces with very large Shiite cities, the Islamic Mission Party (Da'wa) of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki took over a third of the vote. Another 15-20% of the vote went to Shiite fundamentalist parties such as the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq or the Sadrists. Contrary to what a lot of observers are saying, the Da'wa Party is not secular and it is not anti-Iran. It is Iraq's oldest Shiite fundamentalist party, founded in the late 1950s, and it explicitly works for an Islamic republic. Its leaders consult with and tend to defer to Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani. Since these parties will have to make post-election coalitions to rule, given that none gained a majority, the resulting provincial governments will resemble those formed by the United Iraqi Alliance, which grouped as allies these same Shiite religious parties. The major difference in this election in the big urban areas is that in Baghdad, the Shiite middle class gave the Iraqi List of Iyad Allawi nearly 10% of the vote, and the Sunni fundamentalists got a similar percentage. Of course, some Sunnis may have voted for Allawi's Iraqi List. But the election returns suggest that Sunnis are no no more than ten to fifteen percent of the Baghdad population, and that Iraq's capital is now a largely Shiite city. In Basra province, the Sunni proportion seems even smaller, tiny, even. This is odd because Zubayr near Baghdad is a largely Sunni city of 300,000. The Basra middle classes, once fairly secular, returned the big religious parties overwhelmingly.

The second zone is the medium and smaller Shiite cities of the south. There, Da'wa did not do nearly as well, receiving between ten and twenty-three percent of the vote. The other 90 to 77 percent of the seats went to other fundamentalist Shiite parties in the main. The Sadrists showed substantial strength in some provinces, garnering 14% and 15% of the vote. Although the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq suffered a massive reversal, insofar as it had dominated the provinces of the south from 2005, it still often ranged from 8% to 15% of the seats in these provincial councils. Other small Shiite parties, including former PM Ibrahim Jaafari's National Reform Trend and the Islamic Virtue Party, both small Shiite fundamentalist parties, often got between three and eight percent of the vote.

The final zone is the four Sunni Arab provinces, which did not vote similarly to one another.

The ethnically mixed Diyala Province in the east split its vote, with about a quarter going to secular parties with a Baathist background; about a fifth going to the Sunni fundamentalist bloc; a fourth going to the Kurdistan alliance, and about 15 percent going to Shiite fundamentalist parties.

In al-Anbar, the secular and tribal parties won big, with the religious parties marginalized (15% of the vote).

In Ninevah, a big, secular, centralizing party, al-Hadba', got nearly 50% of the seats, sweeping away the Kurdish representatives that were once prominent on this provincial council.

Salahuddin returned so many small parties that seeing a trend thare is beyond me. The over all picture of the Sunni Arabs is that contrary to the last administration in Washington, the Sunni Arabs of Iraq are mostly secular nationalists and are uninterested for the most part in fundamentalists or "al-Qaeda."

Al-Hayat reports in Arabic that the Iraqi High Electoral Commission announced 90 percent of the results in the provincial elections held Jan. 31. More results are given in Arabic in this al-Hayat article. The New York Times has a fairly complete list of results in English. (Juan Cole @ 2/05/2009 )

-mr

Obama's Hopelessly Lopsided Humanity

2009-02-06T14:52:00.000-08:00

"Obama: What if this happened to your girls?"

Posted by Helena Cobban
February 4, 2009 4:33 PM EST | Link
Filed in Gaza08-09 , Obama presidency

When he was on the campaign trail, Pres. Obama gave Israel nearly "carte blanche" to act as it wanted against Gaza by saying-- in southern Israel-- that if his daughters were threatened by rocket attack in the same way that kids in southern Israel were, then he couldn't imagine what he would do in response.

So I hope he reads this piece by Ethan Bronner and Sabrina Tavernise in the NYT today, about what happened to Sabah Abu Halima's family in Atatra, Gaza during the recent war:
The phosphorus smoke bomb punched through the roof in exactly the spot where much of the family had taken refuge — the upstairs hall away from the windows.
The bomb, which international weapons experts identified as phosphorus by its fragments, was intended to mask troop movements outside. Instead it breathed its storm of fire and smoke into Sabah Abu Halima’s hallway, releasing flaming chemicals that clung to her husband, baby girl and three other small children, burning them to death.
But that's not all. Later on,
Omar Abu Halima and his two teenage cousins tried to take the burned body of his baby sister and two other living but badly burned girls to the hospital on that Sunday.
The boys were taking the girls and six others on a tractor, when, according to several accounts from villagers, Israeli soldiers told them to stop. According to their accounts, they got down, put their hands up, and suddenly rounds were fired, killing two teenage boys: Matar Abu Halima, 18, and Muhamed Hekmet, 17.
An Israeli military spokeswoman said that soldiers had reported that the two were armed and firing. Villagers strongly deny that. The tractor that villagers say was carrying the group is riddled with 36 bullet holes.
The villagers were forced to abandon the bodies of the teenage boys and the baby, and when rescue workers arrived 11 days later, the baby’s body had been eaten by dogs, her legs two white bones, captured in a gruesome image on a relative’s cellphone. The badly burned girls and others on the tractor had fled to safety.
Matar’s mother, Nabila Abu Halima, said she had been shot through the arm when she tried to move toward her son. Her left arm bears a round scar. Her son came back to her in pieces, his body crushed under tank treads.
Bronner and Tavernise's piece is tragic. (Though the NYT gave it an inappropriate headline, I think.)
It's also notable because they make a point of noting how many Palestinians were killed by Israel's security forces in the 39 months between the IDF's supposed withdrawal from Gaza in September 2005, and the outbreak of the hostilities last December: about 1,275.

Israeli hasbaristas have argued throughout this time that the siege the Israeli government has maintained around Gaza has been the main (or sometimes, the only) Israeli "response" to the rockets launched against Hamas and other militants in Gaza over this time. I have always argued that this was never a simple situation of "rockets versus siege" but that during this period, in addition to the siege, the Israelis maintained very lethal military ops against Gaza, as well.

Also, few if any of Israel's actions against Gaza have been undertaken solely "in response to" Palestinian rocketings. There has always been a cycle of violence; and very frequently (including, most notably, last December 27) Israel has been the one to initiate a new round or significantly escalate an existing round. The number of Israelis killed by the Gazans' for the most part extremely primitive, home-made bottle rockets has been very low. Certainly, far fewer than 100 killed over that same time. (Though Bronner and Tavernise somehow omit to mention the number. I believe it's available at B'tselem's site.)
But anyway, main point of post: Pres. Obama, what would you do if your family members got treated the same way Sabah Abu Halima's family got treated? I am assuming, of course, that you and everyone else agrees that a Palestinian life is every bit as valuable as an Israeli life...
(Helena Cobban - JUST WORLD NEWS )

-mr

White-Lies Israeli Style

2009-02-05T19:39:00.000-08:00

Gazans Seek Answers on White Phosphorus:

Gaza City, Gaza - When Nafiz Abu Shabam received a 5-year-old patient at the Shifa Hospital early in the war between Israel and Hamas, he dressed her burns and sent her for tests. Three hours later, when he and other medical staff redressed the wound, they saw smoke coming from it.
"We found small pieces of foreign material in her body, and even when we picked it out, the wound was still smoking," he says. "We were later told [by foreign doctors and human rights workers who arrived after the war started] that it was white phosphorus."
As white phosphorus is highly incendiary, can reignite when exposed to oxygen, and causes painful chemical burns, it is not intended – or legal under international law – for use in civilian areas.

Israel initially denied that white phosphorus munitions were used in its 22-day war with Hamas. It now says, "there was no illegal use of phosphorus or any other material," according to the spokesman for Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Amid the allegations that white phosphorus shells were used in populated areas, Israel announced an investigation. READ MORE

-mr

Iraq's Elections

2009-02-05T10:18:00.000-08:00

I have scanned several major mainstream news sources and they all fail to mention that al-Maliki's Da'wa party, which won most of the provinces in last week's local election, is a religious Shiite party. The Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq and candidates backed by Muqtada as-Sadr are regularly branded as 'Shiite,' but never Da'wa. This is a deliberate omission to paint the most recent Iraqi elections as a victory for the 'secular West' and a defeat for the 'fundamentalist East.' It is as insincere in its intentions as the narrow worldview inspiring such fabrications in the first place. Prof. Juan Cole clarifies:

Iran did not Lose the Provincial Elections

It is being alleged by US pundits that the outcome of the provincial elections in Iraq, as far as it is known, indicates a defeat for the religious parties and for Iran.

This allegation is not true. In the Shiite provinces, the coalition of the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq and the Islamic Mission Party (Da'wa) will continue to rule. Both parties are close to Tehran, and leaders of both spent time in exile in Iran. Da'wa appears to have become more popular than ISCI. But Da'wa was founded in the late 1950s to work for an Islamic republic in Iraq, and current leader Nuri al-Maliki has excellent relations with the Iranian leadership.

Da'wa is more "lay" in the composition of its leadership, which is made up of lawyers, physicians and other white collar types. ISCI has more clerics at the top, though it also comprises technocrats such as VP Adil Abdul Mahdi. But Da'wa will need Iranian economic and development aid just as much as previous governments did.

In the Sunni provinces there appears to have been a turn to more secular parties, but neither the Sunni fundamentalists nor the Arab nationalists have much use for Iran to begin with.

The Kurdish leadership is also quite close to Iran. They will have elections in May.
Juan Cole @ 2/05/2009

-mr

2009-02-01T22:02:00.000-08:00

Robert Fisk asks us when we stopped caring about civilians deaths in wartime.

McClatchy reports on Iraq's meager voter turnout:

Voter turnout in Iraq's provincial elections Saturday was the lowest in the nation's short history as a new democracy despite a relative calm across the nation. Only about 7.5 million of more than 14 million registered voters went to the polls.
Interviews suggest that the low voter turnout also is an indication of Iraqi disenchantment with a democracy that, so far, has brought them very little.
Since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003 and the fall of a brutal dictator, Iraqis witnessed unprecedented violence in their nation and what they believe is humiliation under a foreign occupation. Even on Saturday, U.S. tanks could be spotted across Baghdad on largely empty roads. READ MORE

Prof. Cole offers some insight on the election:

There was a lockdown of the whole country, in which US troops assisted, with no private automobiles allowed to run. Given this datum, the breathless newspaper headlines that the elections came off without any major attacks are reporting a given. Guerrillas can't detonate a car bomb if they can't drive a car to their target.

Glitches prevented thousands of voters from casting their ballots McClatchy says, causing big demonstrations and protest rallies to be held. The Iraqi government electoral high commission said that the main problem was that some Iraqis had not registered and then just showed up expecting to be able to vote anyway. There were widespread reports of vote-buying.

American corporate media will report the Iraqi provincial elections as a vindication of the 2003 US invasion of that country, and as a sign that Iraqis are eager to be like Americans. In places like Sadr City, the teeming slums of East Baghdad, many Iraqis voted as a protest against continued US military presence. Likewise, Sunni fundamentalists saw the vote as an assertion of Iraqi sovereignty. The elections come in the wake of the Status of Forces Agreement that pledges all US troops will be out of the country by 2011, and in the wake of the election of Barack Obama in the US, who has committed to having most US troops out in 16 months. The sharp fall in deaths of civilians and security personnel in January, to 189, is not a sign that Bush won but rather that the Iraqis have. No point in blowing things up if the US is leaving anyway, and less reason to resist the new federal Iraqi government if Sunni Arab elites can rule their own provinces.

It is not the US presence in Iraq that Iraqis are celebrating in this election but Washington's imminent departure.

The USG Open Source center translated the sermon Fiday of Muzaffar al-Musawi, Friday prayer leader in Sadr City is observed to carry a report on a Friday sermon Shaykh Muzaffar al-Musawi delivered in the City of Al-Sadr:
' In his sermon, Al-Musawi urges citizens to participate in the elections "intensively so that others will not fill the voting forms." He denounces those whom he termed the "climbers of the ladder of Al Al-Sadr." He says: "We call on the sons of the City of Al-Sadr to vote lest others fill the forms or rig the elections. The one who does not participate in the elections will be betraying Martyr Al-Sadr and Muqtada al-Sadr."

He adds: "Some politicians and parties speak in the name of the two religious authorities, Sayyid Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr and Sayyid Muhammad Sadiq al-Sadr, may God sanctify their secret. We tell them that we, the sons of the two Al-Sadrs suffered from the torture and evil of Saddam. Beware, do not let anyone to climb the ladder of Al Al-Sadr."

Al-Musawi says: "Our bloc is the Independent Free Men Trend bloc, for which the Al-Sadr Trend announced its support a week ago."

Al-Musawi adds: "We have seen humiliation and deprivation from the authority and the occupier. What the occupier did was more heinous than what Saddam did."

Concluding, Al-Musawi says: "Elect the Independent Free Men Trend list so that your suffering will end. Make them hear your voice tomorrow. Say yes, yes to the Free Men List in order to prove to them that we are still present in the arena, the street, and Iraq."

-mr

Razing Gaza

2009-01-31T22:10:00.000-08:00

Israel grapples with abstract, impotent threats against its existence, while Palestinian villages are physically, and in actual fact, wiped off the map.

What if one, just one, Israeli town was ever razed? What if Palestinians had a single tank to do a little razing with!

This report from British Channel 4 displays the unimaginable level of destruction wrought by Israel's latest sanguinary binge. Veteran reporter Jonathan Miller has covered earthquakes, hurricanes and tsunamis and says that the "enormity of destruction" in Gaza "is as bad or worse" than anything that he has ever seen.

GAZA VILLAGES WIPED OFF THE MAP

'Calm Iraqi Election Marred as Thousands Denied Vote':

Saturday's balloting allows Iraqis to select provincial council members who in turn chose the governor of each Iraqi province. They are the equivalent of a state legislature.
Under Iraqi law, the power of provincial councils remains unclear. They have control over local security forces, public facilities and influence over the appointment of senior ministry officials in their province. But the Baghdad national parliament can remove governors and other provincial officials and the provincial budget will come from the federal government.
In Ameriyah Mohammed Allawi, 25, laughed when asked why he came to vote.
"We are an occupied country," he said. "I am voting only so that my vote will not be stolen by the corrupt people who are willing to do anything to remain firm on their seats."
His name was not on the roster's list and he left dejected.
READ MORE
-mr

Iraqi Elections and a Petarted Israel

2009-01-31T13:07:00.000-08:00

Prof. Cole comments on the provincial elections in Iraq. Iraqis are increasingly voting for secular lists this time after being sorely disappointed by the religious councils' failure to improve daily life throughout Iraq since the last election in Jan. '05. Iraq is still plagued by violence, and suffering from grinding poverty, urban decay, 50% unemployment and a dearth of basic human services. Many mixed provinces remain political tinderboxes, such as restive Diyala. A proper homecoming remains a distant dream for over four million Iraqis internally and externally displaced by the war, like Riverbend and her family who escaped to Syria in '07.

Iraqi Voters select provincial Councils in Saturday's Vote

Iraqis go to the polls Saturday to vote in the first provincial elections since January, 2005. This time, two big things are different. The Sunni Arabs are not boycotting the election, as they did 4 years ago; and the Shiite parties are competing against one another rather than running as a monolithic coalition. These two changes bestow a dynamism on the process and make the outcome hard to predict. The final results may well tell us about likely changes in the composition of the Federal parliament in the national elections scheduled for December, 2009.

The LAT reports that the elections can only be held in Iraq via security arrangements that shut down traffic and interfere with ordinary life in other ways.

Al-Zaman reports in Arabic that despite a law forbidding campaigning within 24 hours of an election, most Iraqi parties went on trying to convince Iraqis to give them their votes right up to the last minute.

The number of candidates assassinated recently has risen to 8.

The Baghdad daily said that opinion polling done in Iraq recently suggested that voters will no longer confine themselves to casting their ballots for the religious (i.e. fundamentalist) parties, and that nationalist and secular parties are making a credible showing.

At the same time, clerics used their Friday prayer sermons to campaign for the political parties to which they belong. Cleric Muzaffar al-Musawi, the Imam-Jum`ah or chief Friday prayer leader in the East Baghdad slums of Sadr City, denounced anyone who did not vote for the Sadr Movement as a traitor to Iraq.

Meanwhile, in the Sunni Abu Hanifa Mosque in Baghdad, Sheikh Abd al-Sattar al-Janabi read out a fatwa or considered legal opinion from the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Iraq, Abd al-Karim Zaydan, affirming the duty to vote and disallowing past excuses for staying home on election day (such as that the election is being held under conditions of foreign military occupation or that the results of the polls are illegally fixed and predetermined. These allegations, Zaydan says, do not remove the duty of the individual to vote.

Ayad Allawi, a secular ex-Baathist of Shiite extraction who served as appointed, interim prime minister in 2004, accused incumbent parties of putting the resources of the government to work for them in their campaigns.

McClatchy reports that voters in Basra may be trying to settle political and personal scores by voting. Those Basrawis who hate the rigid, puritanical Mahdi Army may well vote for the Da'wa Party of PM Nuri al-Maliki, since al-Maliki sent the army last spring to crack down on the Sadrists in Basra.

McClatchy reports on a female, Sunni Arab candidate running in Diyala Province, whose husband (a provincial council member) has been kidnapped by insurgents; she is trying to use a seat on the provincial council to bargain for his release.

Israel may be hoist with its own petard, or so it goes. Uri Blau of Hareetz discusses the Secret Israeli database disclosing the full extent of illegal settlement in the West Bank. This is incredibly explosive stuff:

The defense establishment, led by Defense Minister Ehud Barak, steadfastly refused to publicize the figures, arguing, for one thing, that publication could endanger state security or harm Israel's foreign relations. Someone who is liable to be particularly interested in the data collected by Spiegel is George Mitchell, President Barack Obama's special envoy to the Middle East, who came to Israel this week for his first visit since his appointment. It was Mitchell who authored the 2001 report that led to the formulation of the road map, which established a parallel between halting terror and halting construction in the settlements.

The official database, the most comprehensive one of its kind ever compiled in Israel about the territories, was recently obtained by Haaretz. Here, for the first time, information the state has been hiding for years is revealed. An analysis of the data reveals that, in the vast majority of the settlements - about 75 percent - construction, sometimes on a large scale, has been carried out without the appropriate permits or contrary to the permits that were issued. The database also shows that, in more than 30 settlements, extensive construction of buildings and infrastructure (roads, schools, synagogues, yeshivas and even police stations) has been carried out on private lands belonging to Palestinian West Bank residents. READ MORE

-mr

Headlines:

2009-01-29T19:56:00.000-08:00

The Iraqi government refuses to renew Blackwater Worldwide’s license to operate in the nation.

"Tentative Hope Rises Ahead of Iraq Elections"

Israel attacks Rafah, while asserting it hasn't violated the ceasefire.

Hamas would recognize Israel with pre-1967 borders.

Obama loophole allows 'terrorist' detentions to continue.

Israeli soldiers find artistic expression in racist "throw-ups":

A series of slogans in both Hebrew and English were left on a house in the Gaza City neighborhood of Zeytun, including "Arabs need 2 die," "Make war not peace", and "1 is down, 999,999 to go," The Guardian newspaper reported.

According to the media outlets, some of the graffiti was sprayed on the walls of a house belonging to the Samouni family, which lost 30 of its members during the IDF's three-week offensive in the Gaza Strip. (see below)

-mr

WaPo reports on the As-Samouni family:

2009-01-27T00:18:00.000-08:00

The Israeli military has an uncanny talent for near mechanistic slaughter. One family, the Samouni's, lost 29 members! If this small-town family of farmers weren't being herded into a crowded house and shelled by the IDF, they were being shot at while attempting to flee, detained while pleading for help, bearing witness to the slow death of trapped loved-ones (the children of whom were later found emaciated and clinging to corpses), or suffering the cruelty of being denied access to the emergency care of the Red Cross for over three days. The Israeli military is currently under investigation for committing war crimes in Zaytoun.

Two days before the shell struck Wael Samuni's house, the Red Cross had begun negotiating with the Israeli army to get ambulances into Zaytoun to evacuate civilians. "For the first two days, people were calling and literally begging us to come get them,' " said Antoine Grand, head of the Red Cross in Gaza, who declined to allow the ambulance teams working those days to be interviewed.
"We said: 'We're doing our best. Hang on,' " Grand said. "Then their mobile phone batteries died."
"We normally have good coordination about these things," he added. "But for days we asked for a green light to get in there, and it wasn't granted. I don't know why. It is extremely frustrating."
Leibovich, the Israeli army spokeswoman, declined to comment on why the army had not allowed the Red Cross into Zaytoun. Grand corroborated Leibovich's assertion that there were clashes in the neighborhood but said that should not have prevented emergency workers from being given access.
"Look, on the one hand, we don't want to go in while the fighting is going on. But they weren't fighting 24 hours a day for all those days," Grand said, adding that there was an Israeli army post 100 yards from where the Samuni house was struck. "Permission could have been granted earlier."
On Jan. 7, the Red Cross was finally permitted to enter Zaytoun, during a three-hour pause in combat operations to allow for humanitarian relief. The wounded had to be evacuated by donkey cart, because the Israeli army would not move earthen barricades it had placed in the road, according to the Red Cross's report. There was not enough time to retrieve the dead until Jan. 18, when at least 21 bodies were removed from the site, Grand said. The Red Cross's investigation of the events will be completed in the next few months, he added, and will be "shared privately" with the Israeli government. READ MORE

-mr

On not C-ing BS for once . . .

2009-01-26T22:19:00.000-08:00

CBS breaks out of the mainstream mold and does some honest reporting. They probe Israel's illegal settlements in the West Bank and interview actual Palestinians - including Dr.Bourgouti, who has been barred from re-entering his hometown of Jerusalem (where he'd been practicing as a doctor for 14 years) simply because he moved 10 miles out of town. This absurd banishment is four years in, and counting. CBS also visits a Palestinian family living in a house on the highest hill in Nablus. Their private life, rights and freedom of movement are constantly violated by Israeli soldiers who occupy their home at will due to its 'strategic value.'

Apartheid Checklist:
- humiliating and life crippling checkpoints
- massive separation barriers
- house demolitions
- institutionalized political inequality
- deliberate economic impoverishment
- internationally condemned settlements (insidiously choking all prospects for a two state solution)

A rapidly growing Arab population will outnumber Israeli Jews within a few short decades. This leaves Israel with three options: unbridled ethnic cleansing, a 'one man/one woman, one vote' democracy or apartheid - a process clearly already under way.

1- VIDEO: Please thank CBS because last night 60 Minutes Bob Simon Told the Truth About Jewish Settlers and the Israeli Army in West Bank to Prime Time Sunday Night American television. http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=4752349n (Video & Audio Needed)

• CONTACT “60 Minutes” - They are getting a lot of “heat” from the vocal minority who support Israel’s brutal and counterproductive actions. It is important that those who value peace with justice in the region make the effort to support balanced media coverage. Tel: 212-975-2006 Fax: 212-975-2019 E-Mail: 60m@cbsnews.com, kev@cbsnews.com Copy to: info@cair.com

• Mail: 60 Minutes 555 West 57th St. New York, NY 10019

2- VIDEO Please watch this Video by a Israelis Women's group who is fighting for Palestinian justice and a Homeland since 2001.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcGm-gxmxHw

3- BBC STORY Incitement against Palestinians by military chief rabbi

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7852025.stm
-mr

In Occupied Iraq

2009-01-26T00:14:00.000-08:00

BAGHDAD, Iraq — U.S. troops stormed the house of a former army officer Saturday in northern Iraq, killing the man and his wife, wounding their 8-year-old daughter and unleashing anger among residents at tactics they deemed excessive, police said. READ MORE

Anthony Shadid and Qais Mizher from the Washington Post report that U.S. forces killed an Iraqi couple, and wounded their eight year old daughter sleeping between them, in a night-time raid. Like the earlier murder of Hardan Al-Jubori - who was executed and had his finger amputated by U.S. troops on December 10th - the crime is being contested by Iraqi witnesses and authorities who allege US soldiers acted on their own, without the presence of Iraqi forces as required by the new Status of Forces Agreement.

Why did the US occupying army attempt to arrest Dhiya Hussein under the cover of darkness? Did they have a warrant for his arrest? If not, did they obtain the proper approval from an Iraqi judge for detaining him, as necessitated by the new security agreement? Were American forces accompanied by Iraqi security forces? These questions are currently being contested by local Iraqis and Gen. Jamal Tahir Bakir, head of the provincial police.

In the case of Hardan Al-Jubori, Ra’ed Jarrar writes on his blog:

The U.S. army declined to explain why Mr. Al-Jubori's finger was cut off, but CNN suggested that may have carried out this criminal act for "further identification" and "inclusion of his finger print and DNA in a US database,"as if giving such reasons would justify executing civilians in their homes then cutting their fingers off. What a great new system of justice: kill then identify.

I hope the U.S. army will not open a new Haditha-style fake investigation then find all U.S. troops innocent of any wrong doing. I urge you to contact the U.S. army and ask whether this execution and finger amputation is an official army policy:

CPICPRESSDESK@Iraq.centcom.mil

here is the email i sent:

Dear sir or madam at the Combined Press Information Center:

I am Raed Jarrar, and Iraqi blogger. I'm writing you to ask 3 questions regarding the execution and finger amputation of Mr. Hardan Al-Jubori on December 10th:

1- CNN reports that the reasons behind cutting Mr. Al-Jubori's finger after killing him might be "further identification" and "inclusion of his finger print and DNA in a US database". Are these speculations by CNN true?

2- CNN reports that Mr. Al-Jubori was an "Al-Qaeda suspect". Do you have a policy to execute al-qaeda suspects without a fair trial?

3- can you give a rough estimate of how many people in Iraq fall under this category of "Al-Qaeda suspects"?

thank you

Raed Jarrar
Washington, DC

Here are some stills from the video provided to CNN by al-Jubori family:

Al-Jubori's Family in front of their home

Hardan Al-Jubori's Mother

pool of blood in the bedroom

Mr. Al-Jubori's hand

Mr. Al-Jubori's dead body
-mr

Orientalist Redux

2009-01-25T23:53:00.000-08:00

Guest writer on Informed Comment:

Jonathan Lyons writes in a guest op-ed for IC:

With the change of administration in Washington, the time has come to acknowledge the so-called war on terrorism for what it truly is: the latest reminder of the West’s enduring failure to engage in any meaningful way with the world of Islam. For almost 1,000 years, attempts at understanding have been held hostage to a grand Western narrative that shapes what can – and, more importantly, what cannot – be said about Islam and Muslims. This same narrative, an anti-Islam discourse of enduring power, dominates every aspect of the way we think, and write, and speak about Islam. It shapes how we listen to what they say and interpret what it is they do. As such, it exercises a corrosive effect on everything from politics, the history of ideas, and theology to international relations, human rights, and national security policies. This has left the West both intellectually and politically unable to respond to some of the most significant challenges of the early 21st century – the global rise of Islamist political power, the more narrow emergence of terrorism in the name of Islam, tensions between established social values and multi-cultural rights on the part of growing Muslim immigrant populations, and so on. READ MORE

-mr

US Patronage Equals Moral Culpability

2009-01-25T22:47:00.000-08:00

Helena Cobban, Bill Hartung and Frida Berrigan record why we, as US taxpayers, are party to Israeli war crimes . . . and why we are on the wrong side of this anti-colonial struggle for political independence.

The right to self-determination is a right accorded to all citizens of the world, and accompanying this legal right is the entitlement to wage wars of national liberation. The American War of Independence (1775–1783) was such a war, in which the American colonists and their allies overthrew British rule.

However, it could be argued that America's war of independence was more akin to a civil war fought on foreign soil, for the combatants were comprised of both nations' residents and viewed as ethnically similar. In this respect the level of Israeli brutality, by now routine in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, in incomparable to British aggression in colonial America, because it's steeped in the special wrath reserved for peoples racialized as 'other' and inferior.

Helena Cobban of 'Just World News:'

The United States is very far from a "neutral party" in the continuing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. As I've noted before, the US government not only gives Israel essential political support (e.g. by blocking resolutions at the security Council); it also provides most of the high-tech arms the Israelis use against their opponents including during the assault on Gaza.

This recent short report by Bill Hartung and Frida Berrigan shows that,
Israel’s intervention in the Gaza Strip has been fueled largely by U.S.-supplied weapons paid for with U.S. tax dollars:
· During the Bush administration (from FY2002 through FY2009) Israel has received over $21 billion in U.S. security assistance, including $19 billion in direct military aid under the Pentagon’s Foreign Military Financing (FMF) program.
· The bulk of Israel’s current arsenal is composed of equipment supplied under U.S. assistance programs. For example, Israel has 226 U.S.-supplied F-16 fighter and attack jets, over 700 M-60 tanks, 6,000 armored personnel carriers, and scores of transport planes, attack helicopters, utility and training aircraft, bombs, and tactical missiles of all kinds.
· During 2008 alone, the United States made over $22 billion in arms sales offers to Israel, including a proposed deal for as many as 75 F-35 Joint Strike Fighters worth up to $15.2 billion; nine C-130J-30 aircraft worth up to $1.9 billion; 4 Littoral combat ships and related equipment worth as much as $1.9 billion; and up to $1.3 billion worth of gasoline and jet aviation fuel.
Hartung and Berrigan have tracked US arms transfers to Israel for some years now. Go to that link above-- and to the onward links from there-- to learn more details, including about which US military-industrial corporations won those contracts from the Pentagon, which helped yet further to boost their shareholders' profits.
I was interested to be reminded how many F-16s Israel has in its air force. 226! What on earth are they all for? Where on earth do they even park that many large hulks of metal?

The F-16s and Israel's Apache helicopters performed many deadly deeds in the recent war, including destroying a university, several schools, and the seat of the Palestinians' elected legislature. I also learned Thursday that the headquarters of the truly excellent Gaza Community Mental Health Program was badly damaged in the shelling. (More details here.)

Someone-- I forget where-- quoted a Hamas supporter as saying if the Israelis really are as terrified of the Palestinians' arsenal of extremely primitive rockets as they claim to be, then he would be happy to trade that entire arsenal for just one of Israel's F-16s. Well, the IOF would still have 225 other F-16s left, of course. But you get the general drift of the argument...

Meantime, we US citizens need to start holding our own government-- administration and congress-- accountable for the absolutely vital, multi-pronged support it has given to Israel's war on Gaza.

We should call for a total ban on all arms supplies to the Middle East pending the conclusion of final-status peace agreements between Israel and its three neighboring nations of Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon. Those peace agreements will certainly include provisions for longer-term follow-on arms control and security regimes. But we need to start implementing this arms embargo now. Perhaps it will help persuade Israelis that they need to solve their problems at the negotiating table, not by sowing death and destruction among their neighbors.

But if the US goes on arming one side to the conflict while pretending to be a "neutral mediator" in the peacemaking?? That idea is simply laughable.

-mr

2009-01-25T22:21:00.000-08:00

Helena Cobban responds to the thought-obstructing banality: "Israel had no choice"

There are numerous other things it could have done to defuse tensions along its border with the Strip, other than launch the "shock and awe" war of December 27- January 18.

The Israeli government could have:
1. Placed considerably more value on the tahdi'eh (ceasefire) it concluded-- through the Egyptian intermediary-- back last June, and sought to fulfill the terms of that ceasefire and then use it as a basis for building an even more robust agreement with Hamas and the rest of the Palestinians. It didn't do that. It did nothing to lift the siege, as the Hamas negotiators would happen as the ceasefire progressed. That ceasefire had a six-month initial term, and for the first four and half months it was pretty well observed by both sides. But then, on Nov 4-- election day in the US-- the Israeli government authorized a large-scale IDF operation against Gaza that directly contravened the terms of the ceasefire and set in motion a new cycle of violence that, though it went through ups and downs, set the stage for the failure of the ceasefire-extension negotiation.
2. Even though the ceasefire-extension negotiations at the end of November and the beginning of December were held in a situation of cross-border tensions, still, the Israeli government could have pushed for a successful extension and strengthening of the ceasefire. True, the Hamas negotiators made clear they would only do so if the Israelis agreed to lift the siege of Gaza. So why didn't the Israeli government make strenuous efforts to explore ways for that to happen-- even including ways to verify that the re-opened borders would not allow a significant rearming by Hamas? Those ways exist. They are being actively explored by the diplomats right now. So why-- as both Chaitin and Chazan write-- did Israel have to go through this ghastly and damaging war in order to arrive at a diplomatic place it could have reached in mid-December without launching that war at all?
3. In general, if someone is doing something that really bothers or harms you, there are always scores of ways that intelligent people can use to try to prevent them from taking those harmful acts. So maybe Israel didn't want to talk to Hamas directly? It could talk through the Egyptians or the Turks, or numerous other potential intermediaries. So Hamas had its own conditions, too? Why not? They are people, after all, and could not be expected simply to lie down under the harsh siege forever without demanding that it be lifted. (Also, a blockade/siege is, strictly speaking itself an act of war.) Besides, having a Gaza population that is busily engaged in economic development and through that development acquires an increasing socio-economic stake that it would be reluctant to put at risk in a renewal of hostilities with Israel surely makes a lot more sense, for Israelis, than having 1.5 million neighbors in Gaza who feel a deep sense of grievance and also feel they have little or nothing to lose in any new round of hostilities?
-mr

Sderot Obama vs. Jabaliya Obama

2009-01-25T21:12:00.000-08:00

Courtesy TomDispatch:

Change Obama Can Believe In:
Lest President Barack Obama's opportunistic silence when Israel began the Gaza offensive that killed more than 1,400 Palestinians (more than 400 of them children) be misinterpreted, his aides pointed reporters to comments made six months earlier in the Israeli town of Sderot. "If somebody was sending rockets into my house, where my two daughters sleep at night, I'm going to do everything in my power to stop that," Obama had said in reference to the missiles Hamas was firing from Gaza. "I would expect Israelis to do the same thing."
Residents of Gaza might have wondered what Obama would have done had he been unfortunate enough to be a resident of, say, Jabaliya refugee camp. What if, like the vast majority of Gazans, his grandfather had been driven from his home in what is now Israel, and barred by virtue of his ethnicity from ever returning? What if, like the majority of the residents of this refugee ghetto-by-the-sea, he had voted for Hamas, which had vowed to fight for his rights and was not corrupt like the Fatah strongmen with whom the Israelis and Americans liked to deal?
And what if, as a result of that vote, he had found himself under an economic siege, whose explicit purpose was to inflict deprivation in order to force him to reverse his democratic choice? What might a Gazan Obama have made of the statement, soon after that election, by Dov Weissglass, a top aide to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, that Israel's blockade would put him and his family "on [a] diet"?
"The Palestinians will get a lot thinner," Weissglass had chortled, "but [they] won't die."
Starting last June, the Sderot Obama would have noticed that, as a result of a truce brokered by Egypt, the rocket fire from Gaza had largely ceased. For the Jabaliya Obama, however, the "Weissglass Diet" remained in place. Even before Israel's recent offensive, the Red Cross had reported that almost half the children under two in Gaza were anemic due to their parents' inability to feed them properly.
Who knows what the Jabaliya Obama would have made of the Hamas rockets that, in November, once again began flying overhead toward Israel, as Hamas sought to break the siege by creating a crisis that would lead to a new cease-fire under better terms. He might well have had misgivings, but he would also have had plenty of reason to hope for the success of the Hamas strategy.
Ever committed to regime change in Gaza, Israel, however, showed no interest in a new cease-fire As Defense Minister Ehud Barak told Fox News, "Expecting us to have a cease-fire with Hamas is like expecting you to have a cease-fire with al-Qaeda." (Barak apparently assumed Americans would overlook the fact that he had, indeed, been party to just such a cease-fire since June 2008, and looks set to be party to another now that the Gaza operation is over.)
A canny Sderot Obama would have been all too aware that Israel's leaders need his vote in next month's elections and hope to win it by showing how tough they can be on the Gazans. Then again, a Sderot Obama might not have been thinking much beyond his immediate anger and fear – and would certainly have been unlikely to try to see the regional picture through the eyes of the Jabaliya Obama. READ MORE

-mr

Israel finally confesses . . .

2009-01-24T22:43:00.001-08:00

. . . to at least one war-crime: the deployment of white phosphorus in its attack on Gaza. White phosphorus can serve as a smokescreen in battle, but is severely restricted by international law and is prohibited from being deployed in civilian areas. Gaza is one of the most crowded places on earth. Ample photographic and video evidence attests to its illicit use in heavily populated areas, for example the firing of white phosphorous shells at a UN school in Beit Lahiya on January 17. The Israel government may reverse these claims - i.e. bona fide lies - but hubris and corruption prevent it from doing little else than ironically denying its original denials.

'CHANGING TUNE'
January 5 The Times reports that telltale smoke has appeared from areas of shelling. Israel denies using phosphorus
January 8 The Times reports photographic evidence showing stockpiles of white phosphorus (WP) shells. Israel Defence Forces spokesman says: “This is what we call a quiet shell – it has no explosives and no white phosphorus”
January 12 The Times reports that more than 50 phosphorus burns victims are taken into Nasser Hospital. An Israeli military spokesman “categorically” denies the use of white phosphorus
January 15 Remnants of white phosphorus shells are found in western Gaza. The IDF refuses to comment on specific weaponry but insists ammunition is “within the scope of international law”
January 16 The United Nations Relief and Works Agency headquarters are hit with phosphorus munitions. The Israeli military continues to deny its use
January 21 Avital Leibovich, Israel’s military spokeswoman, admits white phosphorus munitions were employed in a manner “according to international law”
January 23 Israel says it is launching an investigation into white phosphorus munitions, which hit a UN school on January 17. “Some practices could be illegal but we are going into that. The IDF is holding an investigation concerning one specific unit and one incident” Source: Times database READ MORE

"A Shameful War: Israel in the Dock Over Assault on Gaza"

Up to 10 times as many Palestinians were killed as Israelis. The Palestinian Ministry of Health says 1,314 Palestinians were killed, of whom 412 were children or teenagers under 18, and 110 were women. On the Israeli side, there were 13 deaths between 27 December and 17 January, of whom three were civilians killed by rockets fired from Gaza. Of the 10 soldiers killed, four were lost to "friendly fire".

-mr

Sadder and Wiser

2009-01-24T21:25:00.000-08:00

Obama shatters 18 innocent lives in Pakistan as he continues to dash voters' hopes for sustained 'change.' It appears that the commencement of hope and other heartwarming abstractions have begun and ended in the same hard-boiled breath as the US actively engages a sovereign nation within the usual format: illegal unilateral military strikes.

Obama's strategies have the appearance of LBJ in 1965 - it is worth recalling that LBJ was also the 'peace' candidate ushered in with a massive inauguration crowd. As of now, Obama is on the road to escalation in Afghanistan (increased troop levels, bombing campaigns, cross-border operations etc) and not the stepped-up support for post-war state building that many were hoping for. Hope may keep the desire for change alive, but it does little to generate it. Only through the exhaustive efforts of diplomacy and direct action can 'change,' the abstraction or glossy campaign slogan, enter the immediacy of lived life.

"President Orders Air Strikes on Villages in Tribal Area"

"Thousands Attend Funeral of Drone Victims in Pakistan"

Iraqi Ra'ed Jarrar who attended the inauguration comments on Obama's first executive orders and statements:

While Obama's order to close the secret CIA prisons around the globe is positive, it is still just a gesture that must be followed by real orders to stop all the CIA's illegal overt operations around the world.

While Obama's call on Israel to open Gaza's borders for commerce and humanitarian aid was a nice gesture, it must be followed by real steps to reevaluate the U.S. blind and unconditional support to the Israeli occupation(s).

While I deeply appreciated all these nice gestures, they all were dwarfed by yesterday's attack on Afghanistsn that killed 25 people, and today's attack on Pakistan that killed 20 people. These new criminal attacks on Pakistan and Afghanistan not only killed dozens of civilians in their homes, but also exposed and shattered Obama's hollow promises. Obama's choice to continue the same old U.S. policy in disregarding other nation-states' sovereignty cannot be excused, and the bombs that assassinated Pakistanis and Afghans during the last couple of days cannot be sugarcoated by some nice gestures.

If Obama really wants to "seek a new way forward" with the Muslim world based on "mutual interest and mutual respect", I think a good start would have been to stop assassinating Muslims in their homes.
-mr

Told you so . . .

2009-01-23T14:44:00.000-08:00

Prof. As'ad AbuKhalil from The Angry Arab News Service, who recently spoke at Evergreen, comments on Obama's latest speech on the Middle East. As'ad is suffering an acute case of vindication as President Obama remains faithful to the Zionist path of US foreign policy, and contributes to the welter of misrepresentation plaguing the conflict and distorting the realities on the ground.

But Obama's speech was quite something. It was like sprinkling sulfuric acid on the wounds of the children in Gaza--those who survived the Israeli terrorist festival of butchery and massacres. His remarks leave you with the impression that there are two sets of problems in the holy land: that there was terrorism against civilians in "southern Israel" and then there is some undefined civilian suffering in Gaza from some undefined natural disaster--an earthquake or hurricane. He specifically mentioned the violence against "southern Israel" left it unclear as to what happened in Gaza. He then did the typical dance: of saluting Mubarak for not only oppressing his own population but for oppressing the Palestinians and imposing the siege on them. READ MORE

-mr

Unprecedented Criminality in the Holy Land

2009-01-23T14:29:00.000-08:00

Several human rights and relief agencies have finally been permitted to enter Gaza, many for the first time since last November due to the Israeli imposed blockade. They report their unspeakable findings. This is exactly why the Israeli government is expected to pass a bill this Sunday to grant aid and succor to IDF officers accused of Gaza war crimes, but as Dr. Juan Cole comments dryly: "It is ironic that an Israeli defense minister seems unaware that the Nuremberg trials established the principle that following orders is no defense for a soldier charged with atrocities."

Weekly Report: On Israeli Human Rights Violations in the Occupied Palestinian Territory

Amnesty International: Houses in Shocking State

United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA): Phosphorus Shells Hit UN School

BBC: UN 'Shocked' by Gaza Destruction

-mr

2009-01-23T14:09:00.000-08:00

Latest round-up on Gaza from Prof. Juan Cole at Informed Comment:

Gaza Aftermath Raises Question of War Crimes: Obama Must Overcome Initial Muslim Distrust

The Israeli assault on Gaza has drawn to an end, now that its Great Enabler (W.) is no longer in the cockpit of the Calamity Machine, and its architect, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, is the lamest of lame ducks.

Those hawks who proclaimed so loudly that Israel had no choice but to just fall upon the Gazans, and that the Palestinians of Gaza were unalterably dedicated to war-making on Israel, have fogotten a mid-December poll that showed 74% of Palestinians wanted to see the truce extended, and 51% of Israelis did. Let me just repeat that. In calling Hamas's bluff to break off negotiations, and massively punishing Gaza civilians, the Olmert government was ignoring the majority view among Israelis and the vast majority of Palestinians who wanted a truce. Of course, once hostilities began, people rallied around their flag. But if Olmert had been forced to hold a referendum among Israelis on whether to do this horrible thing, he would have lost.

The last Israeli troops left Gaza on Wednesday. The three week long shooting-fish-in-a-barrel exercise killed, on the Palestinian side, 280 children and minors, 111 women, and 503 male noncombatants. Gaza police accounted for 167 of the dead; can you just read off Gaza police as "Hamas militants"? Or were they traffic cops & etc.? The Palestinian Center for Human rights estimated that the Israelis killed 223 Hamas guerrillas. In other words, if this count is correct, the Israelis managed to kill more children than real militants.

So what is the outcome of this dirty little war?

The fundamentalist group Hamas is reasserting itself in Gaza as Israeli troops withdraw, and now has a new pretext to target members of the Fatah group, secular nationalists loyal to Palestine Authority president Mahmoud Abbas. So the Israelis may have actually politically strengthened Hamas and further weakened Fatah, which is already notorious for corruption, political repression, inefficiency, and, increasingly collaboration with Israel.

Although Israel claimed to have destroyed 60 percent of the tunnels whereby Gazans bring food, medicine, and sometimes explosives into the Strip via the Sinai Peninsula, reports Wednesday indicated that the tunnels were already active again. Even if only 40 percent of them are operational, it is hard to see what was achieved. The others can be redug, and anyway a lot of materiel can be brought in with the 40 percent surviving tunnels.

Israeli politicians and military commanders are being urged to consult counsel before they travel in Europe, where some courts assert universal jurisdiction and where war crimes cases are being filed against Israeli leaders. In 1998, a London court ordered the arrest of Chilean dictator Gen. Augustino Pinochet, who had butchered thousands of community activists, asserting universal jurisdiction. Governments have attempted to reduce the prerogative of courts in this regard, but apparently there are loopholes in the current British legislation that would allow an Israeli leader or officer to be arrested if they journey to the UK. Ynet observes, "The Israeli. . . claim that Hamas has been using women and children as human shields never really took, said a source. Whenever it was used the response was the same: If you know that . . . women and children [were] there – hold your fire."

Defense Minister Ehud Barak is setting up a legal defense of Israeli troops from potential war crimes prosecutions. Barak pledged that Israeli soldiers would not have to worry about prosecution: "The soldiers did not embark on a private operation . . .We will give them out full support." It is ironic that an Israeli defense minister seems unaware that the Nuremberg trials established the principle that following orders is no defense for a soldier charged with atrocities.

Even as Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni visited Brussels, human rights organizations in Belgium were (wholly unrealistically) petitioning a court to have her arrested. However impractical the legal move, it was a humiliation for Tzipi.

The right-Zionists are always asking why Israel is held to a different standard. It isn't. it appears to be being held to the same standard as Augusto Pinochet and Slobodan Milosevic. It isn't very nice company to be in, and many Israelis are deeply ashamed of what was done and demanding Israeli investigations of war crimes.

UN Secretary-General Ban ki-Moon visited Gaza and was reported absolutely appalled at the scenes of human destruction he witnessed there. He demanded that nothing like the Gaza campaign ever be undertaken again (i.e. by Israel) and he said he would do what he could to establish accountability.

Amnesty International is accusing Israel of using white phosphorous in such a way that it constituted a war crime. The New York times clearly takes the charges seriously, underlining my thesis that what the government of Ehud Olmert disturbed many American Jews.

Aljazeera English reports on the aftermath of the Israeli assault on Gaza, including questions about the use of white phosphorous on densely populated civilian areas, producing burns and destroying food warehouses in the midst of a famine. Many Gaza civilians are camped on the rubble of their former homes, searching frantically for loved ones who may no longer be among the living.

Aljazeera English reports that the Muslim world has been disappointed in Obama's silence on Gaza, and that he needs to do some fence mending.

"They even killed the cats!"

Some 50,000 Palestinians have been left homeless by the Israeli war on the people of Gaza, with 400,000 now lacking access to running water. Rebuilding what the Israeli military destroyed will cost billions of dollars.
Cont'd (click below or on "comments")

Ashraf Khalil of the LAT reports that the Israelis destroyed 21,000 buildings. Khalil writes from the scene:
' In the village of Fukhari, outside Khan Yunis, it seemed as if a powerful earthquake had struck, flattening a collection of 15 homes belonging to a single extended family, a swath of destruction the size of a city block. Israeli tanks and bulldozers rolled through this agricultural patch last week, destroying every building in sight. . . "They even killed the chickens and the turkeys!" shouted Faour Atteya, a 50-year-old high school teacher. "They killed the cats!"'

Aljazeera English reports on innocent civilian families buried in the rubble of farmhouses and other buildings demolished by Israeli air strikes.

Saudi Arabia pledged $1 bn. toward rebuilding Gaza at the Arab summit in Kuwait. This aid will likely be the main source of reconstruction, since Europe and the US refuse to deal with the Hamas government of Gaza, which the Israelis failed to dislodge. It should be pointed out that Saudi money will likely come with some strings attached, and may be disbursed in such a way as to try to spread the rigid Wahhabi branch of Islam. The Palestinians are the most secular people in the Arab world, but Israeli actions are pushing them into the arms of the conservative Gulf states. I don't think the Israelis will like the outcome down the road very much. But they seem to be unable to foresee the likely consequences of their actions. They invaded and occupied southern Lebanon in 1982, and seemed surprised when that occupation turned the Shiites against them and produced Hizbullah. They encouraged Hamas as an alternative to the secular Fatah in the late 1980s, and now seem surprised that Hamas overshadows Fatah.

The Israelis' brutal murder of hundreds of innocent Gazans, and wounding of thousands of women and children, in the war they just concluded will rebound on them in some horrible way. The campaign likely has already probably ensured the reelection in Iran of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who had faced a tough campaign this June. Likewise, the war much weakened the Palestinian Authority and the Fatah party of PA president Mahmoud Abbas, because the Palestinian public perceived it to be implicated in the attack on Gaza. The US and Israel won't talk to Hamas, and if Fatah has been discredited with the Palestinians, then the Iraelis really have no one to talk too. That may suit them now, but timeis not on Israel's side.

I recommend to both sides Leo Tolstoy's short story, "A Lost Opportunity."

Anyway, it seems obvious that Hamas's control of Gaza has not been destroyed, if that was the goal of the Israeli leadership, since Hamas's security men reemerged on Monday to combat looting and gouging among the survivors.

Stephen Walt points out at his new blog that the Israelis think they got deterrence with regard to Hamas because the operation restored their own confidence. But you only get deterrence if you break the will of the enemy, which manifestly did not happen.

If the point was to stop the rockets being fired by Hamas, the ceasefire of last June did that, despite Olmert's propaganda to the contrary, and a further ceasefire could have been arranged. If the point was to destroy Hamas, well, they didn't accomplish that.

Mark Levine asks, "Who will save the Palestinians?"

Tomdispatch.com has been doing good work intracing military influence on civilian society in the US.
-mr

Counting the Dead

2009-01-19T09:17:00.000-08:00

Olmert declares an Israeli victory, yet there is little proof that Hamas's leadership has been destroyed or surrendered, that Hamas's rocketing capabilities (crude as they may be) or its capacity to build more rockets have been destroyed or that Gazans and other Palestinians have started to oppose Hamas. In the meantime, Gaza Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh insists “The enemy has failed to achieve its goals.”

There is plenty of proof that Israel has criminally evacuated, shattered, and leveled more of the build world in its latest round of asymmetrical bloodshed. As the fighting comes to a halt and the details are debated, the dead will continue to be plucked from the rubble and the Gaza death toll will rise.

And the aggrieved will demand accountability .

Abu Al-Aish recounted the shelling of his home: "I freaked out for the first few minutes after the incident. I didn’t know what was going on. It felt as though I was being slaughtered. I ran around in the apartment, looking at body parts – who is dead and who stayed alive. I saw that Mayer (his daughter) was gone. Bisan, the eldest, took her last breath. I began counting the bodies and then ran downstairs to scream."

The funerals of Abu Al-Aish's daughters Bisam (20), a business administration student, Mayer (15), Aya (13) and the niece Nour (14) were held in Gaza Saturday, but the doctor, who is tending to his injured daughter Shada (18), could not attend.

"Gazans pick up the pieces as the guns fall silent:"

Mr Atar did not know what to do next.

“What kind of plans can I make? I am at the mercy of God. The Israelis left nothing for us to survive on. We will have to stay in the UNRWA school until we can find somewhere to live.”

"Rafah, a Landscape scarred by Israel's war:"

Mr Harb, who works for the humanitarian organisation, Care, said he had felt helpless during the airstrikes as he snuggled against his children, trying to comfort them with the idea that the bombing they could hear would be "very temporary".
He recalled that when he had said this, his 15-year-old daughter, Banyas, had replied: "This is temporary for ever", meaning that she "is forever moving from war to war since she was born. Then my six-year-old son, Ziad, asked me 'are we going to die?' That really broke my heart."

"Gazans confront shattered lives:"

By the time she was found - she is not sure if it was three or four days later - she hardly knew her own name. But she remembers details.
"I got a glass of water, I wanted to fill it with water from the tap, but it fell down on the floor, and then there was blood all over the glass so I couldn't use it. I waited a bit and then I drank directly from the tap.
She says she wanted to leave, but her father was lying across the door.
"I didn't want to step on him in case I hurt him."

-mr

Zionism and its Victims

2009-01-18T14:07:00.000-08:00

A binational state is the only long term, truly equitable, solution to the conflict in Palestine and Israel. Physically, geographically, economically, the place is much too small for each side to completely avoid one another, especially under the weight of perpetual hostility. And Israel's assiduous colonization of the West Bank has made a two-state solution nearly impossible. Edward Said, prominent Palestinian-American intellectual and spokesperson for the Palestinian cause, writes:

"The involvement of each in the other, largely due to the aggressiveness with which the Israelis have entered Palestinian territory, and from the very beginning have invaded Palestinian space, suggests that some mode of arrangement has to be established that allows then to live together in some peaceable form. It is not going to be through separation. The South Africans in a country twenty times bigger couldn't for long maintain apartheid."

And neither could the United States. Legal structures of power and coercion that create, maintain and exploit sociopolitical differences in the interests of a dominant group are not just morally offensive and indefensible, but impractical.

For over 60 years Palestinians have been shackled by Israeli power, and the target of its genocidal intentions. In this material relationship of inequality, Israel occupies the position of superiority - militarily, economically and politically. Israel's military is among the world's leading five, and the Israeli state is the second largest recipient of US aid. The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs writes that: "Total U.S. aid to Israel is approximately one-third of the American foreign-aid budget, even though Israel comprises just .001 percent of the world's population and already has one of the world's higher per capita incomes."

Israel speaks the language of power, while Palestinians and their fractured authority (which hardly amounts to anything resembling a sovereign, effectual entity) remain stateless, and as Middle East expert Juan Cole argues, virtual slaves interned in open-air camps. This state of constant deprivation and debasement amounts to nothing less than slow-motion ethnic cleansing.

Israel is a Vulgarian State that has distorted and mocked the very existence of the Palestinian people in order to deliberately cleanse a people from their ancestral homeland. It is unwilling to confront the monstrosity of what it means to exist at the expense of another people, whom they have either killed, driven away or legally deprived of every civil, political and human right. The only solution to this apartheid, as with all others, is a solution predicated on equality, on the co-citizenship afforded only through the decolonization and reintegration of a violently partitioned land.

Palestinians and Israelis are invested in each other; their enemy is their only partner. However for any genuine partnership or negotiation to take root, both must occupy positions of equal strength. It cannot be the same tired equation of Israel the aggressor and Palestine the aggrieved. Nir Rosen describes this colonial dialect of domination and oppression, and the few options it permits:

A Zionist Israel is not a viable long-term project and Israeli settlements, land expropriation and separation barriers have long since made a two state solution impossible. There can be only one state in historic Palestine. In coming decades, Israelis will be confronted with two options. Will they peacefully transition towards an equal society, where Palestinians are given the same rights, à la post-apartheid South Africa? Or will they continue to view democracy as a threat? If so, one of the peoples will be forced to leave. Colonialism has only worked when most of the natives have been exterminated. But often, as in occupied Algeria, it is the settlers who flee. Eventually, the Palestinians will not be willing to compromise and seek one state for both people.

Zionism, the exclusive and totalizing ideology legitimating Israel's imperial aggressions in the region is a dangerous brand of ethnic nationalism that diminishes all hopes for a peaceful resolution.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's brand of Zionism is a form of ethnic nationalism. Ethnic nationalism differs in important ways from civic nationalism. Civic nationalism is based not on ethnicity but on national ideals. The mainstream of French nationalism since 1789, for instance, has been civic, not ethnic. That is why a Senegalese African like Blaise Diagne could be elected to the French parliament in 1914. Senegal was a colony but a few districts were seen as French soil and so could send representatives to Paris. This would be as though in the same period Tanzanians could serve in the German parliament or Uzbeks in the Tsarist Russian Duma. Obviously, French society is made up of fallible human beings and there is practical discrimination against French of black African heritage, but it isn't legal discrimination.

If Israel is to flourish, it must recognize itself as a multi-ethnic, civic state. It already has 1.4 million Palestinian-Israelis, and at least 300,000 non-Jewish Russians, according to the 2008 census. It also has a growing population of Thai, Sudanese and other guest workers, who are not citizens but who may never go back home. (Germany's experience with the Turkish guest workers was that many became citizens in the end). Excluding guest workers condemns a capitalist society to demographic and economic stagnation. Where guest workers are already present, disallowing them citizenship creates enormous social problems. Israel will be a Jewish-majority state for some decades. But it can't remain that way in the long run without doing some very unpleasant things that will make its leaders really look like Milosevic. READ MORE

The latest and most gruesome super-blitz into Gaza has really been about dominating all of historical Palestine. The annexation wall and settlements continue to enfeeble the West Bank by carving up Palestinian communities into isolated, non-viable Bantustans, while the blockade of tiny Gaza continues to asphyxiate those who managed to survive Israel's latest turkey shoot - which wasn't about Hamas or makeshift rockets, but about permanently subjugating the Palestinian people and further entrenching Israeli control of Palestinian land, air and water.

Latest from Informed Comment:
Prof. Juan Cole describes the expanding boycotts of Israeli goods, an increasingly global trend as Israel continues to offend world-wide audiences with its wanton killing of Palestinian civilians:

Wholesale food distributors in Jordan, the UK and the Scandinavian countries are quietly imposing an informal boycott on Israeli fruit, according to Ynetnews, in response to the war on Gaza. My guess is that if the Apartheid situation in the Occupied Territories becomes formalized, such boycotts will spread.

Cole also comments in more detail on Dr. Izz el-Deen Aboul Aish, who's anguished, soul-churning laments were aired on the Israeli news station he regularly appeared on (the video is posted under "Aftermath," below this one):

Israel pursued its attacks on Friday and on Saturday morning, killing 55 Palestinians, including a houseful of girls, daughters and a niece of a physician working in Israel who was being interviewed on Israeli television when the news reached him. AFP writes:
' At least 55 Palestinians were killed on Friday, including at least 10 people who died when a tank shell slammed into their house in Gaza City during a funeral wake, according to Palestinian medics . . . In the Jabaliya refugee camp in the north of the territory, three daughters and a niece of a Palestinian doctor working in Israel were killed in an Israeli air strike. "They were girls, only girls. I want to know why they have they killed them. Who gave the order to fire?" the children's sobbing father Ezzedine Abu Eish said on Israeli television. Palestinian militants meanwhile fired over 20 rockets and mortar rounds into southern Israel on Friday, wounding five people, the Israeli military said. Over 700 such projectiles have been fired since the start of the war.'

The father of the dead little girls, Dr. Izz el-Deen Aboul Aish, appears to have been a sort of an Arab "Dr. Sanjay Gupta" who came on Israeli television frequently. He was about to do an interview on Israeli television when the word reached him of the atrocity against his family. His wife had earlier died of cancer, so his children were all he had left. He commuted to Tel Aviv from Gaza and told the girls to sleep near the stone walls to stay safe in his absence.

The Israeli anchors put his anguished lamentations on the air for over 3 minutes, which I take to be their own little protest against Olmert's Butcher Shop. The physician is heard repeatedly crying out, "Ya Rabb, ya Allah" (O Lord, O God!) as the image of the mangles small bodies invades his mind.

In the News:
Noam Chomsky lucidly paraphrases Israel's long-term intentions, and Hamas's willingness to accept a political solution:

. . . . There`s a theme that goes way back to the origins of Zionism. And it`s a very rational theme: `Let`s delay negotiations and diplomacy as long as possible, and meanwhile we`ll `build facts on the ground.`` So Israel will create the basis for what some eventual agreement will ratify, but the more they create, the more they construct, the better the agreement will be for their purposes. Those purposes are essentially to take over everything of value in the former Palestine and to undermine what`s left of the indigenous population.

I think one of the reasons for popular support for this in the United States is that it resonates very well with American history. How did the United States get established? The themes are similar.

(on Hamas accepting a two-state solution). . . . .That`s their official position taken by Haniya, the elected leader, and Khalid Mesh`al, their political leader who`s in exile in Syria, he`s written the same thing. And it`s over and over again. There`s no question about it but the West doesn`t want to hear it. So therefore it`s Hamas which is committed to the destruction of Israel.

In a sense they are, but if you went to a Native American reservation in the United States, I`m sure many would like to see the destruction of the United States. If you went to Mexico and took a poll, I`m sure they don`t recognize the right of the United States to exist sitting on half of Mexico, land conquered in war. And that`s true all over the world. But they`re willing to accept a political settlement. Israel isn`t willing to accept it and the United States isn`t willing to accept it. And they`re the lone hold-outs. Since it`s the United States that pretty much runs the world, it`s blocked. READ MORE

Israel bombs the University Teachers Association in Gaza. Oxford University academic Karma Nabulsi has termed Israel's vicious targeting of Gaza's academic institutions: `scholasticide,' Israel`s systematic and intentional destruction of Palestinian education centers:

In its current war on Gaza alone, Israel has bombed the ministry of education, the Islamic University of Gaza, and tens of schools, including at least 4 UNRWA schools, after having largely destroyed the infrastructure of teaching throughout the year and a half of its illegal and criminal siege of the densely populated Gaza Strip. READ MORE

-mr

Aftermath

2009-01-18T12:10:00.000-08:00

With Israel and Hamas both declaring temporary ceasefires, the worst may seem over. However, Hamas has stated its intention to resume fighting if Israeli troops do not leave Gaza within a week.

Reports are already coming in of Israel violating the ceasefire. Given Israel's past disrespect for ceasefires this is likely to continue for some time.

But Gaza, already littered with ruins and bullet-riddled buildings before the Israeli assualt, now lays devasted. Some are already estimating the damage is nearly $1 Billion Dollars. Given how poverty-stricken Gaza is this means the ruins will be the new face of Gaza for some time.

Many bodies remain trapped underneath collapsed buildings and the Palestinian death toll could continue to rise significantly.

As Gaza Doctor and Peace Activist Dr. Ezzeldeen Abu al-Aish delivered a press conference on how three of his daughters and a neice were murdered by Israeli tank fire, hecklers condemned the Grief-stricken father for "Talking Against Israel". While the hecklers stated with absolute certainty that the girls deserved to die because "they had weapons inside the home". The Israeli military differed, simply saying that they had come under sniper fire.

Dr. Ezzeldeen Abu al-Aish is unique in that he was trained in Israel and speaks Hebrew and was one of the only Palestinian voices on Israeli TV during the invasion. During an interview with him Israeli viewers got a brief glimpse of the suffering in Gaza.

While polls show that 94% of the (Non-Arab) Israeli population supported the war there is growing dissent in Israel that the operation did not go far enough.

Are Gazans Slaves? The Dispossession of Liberty:

2009-01-15T11:05:00.000-08:00

Latest from Informed Comment
Israel in Gaza increasingly seen as Rogue State by EU, Red Cross, Lancet; Are Gazans Slaves?

As of Thursday morning, the Israelis have now killed 1038 and wounded 4850 Palestinians.

The BBC reports that "More than 300 of the dead are said to be children, 76 are women and more than 4,500 people have been injured, of whom 1,600 are children and 678 are women." In addition, many of the dead or wounded are just Gaza police and municipal authorities that the Israelis are counting as "Hamas" when they may be no such thing. Tens of thousands of civilians have been rendered homeless, which is to say that there are thousands of families and children without shelter in the middle of winter (the low tonight in Gaza is 6 C./ 42 F.)

Aljazeera English reports on babies who died because of the interruption in transportation and hospital care.

Cont'd

The head of the Red Cross remarked on Wednesday that the situation is "shocking."

' "I saw this dramatic humanitarian situation. There's an increasing number of women and children being wounded and going to hospitals," Jakob Kellenberger told reporters in Jerusalem. "It is shocking. It hurts when you see these wounded people and the types of wounds they have. And I think that in addition the number of people coming to these hospitals is increasing," he said. The Red Cross president called for improved access for ambulances inside Gaza seeking to recover the wounded and to rescue civilians sheltering from the fighting, saying Israel's daily three-hour pause in operations is "not sufficient." "It is a positive step that you have a three-hour stop in the fighting, for doing humanitarian work, but it is not sufficient," he said. "Civilians who are being wounded, who are being trapped with problems of hunger, without water, you must be able to say that you can reach them." '

It is now estimated that Israel has inflicted $1.4 bn. in damages on Gaza, which was already desperately poor. It is being accused of deliberately and wantonly targeting civilian targets, on the grounds that they are 'symbols of government' and Hamas had gotten into control of the government.

The respected medical journal Lancet let the Israeli leadership have it in an editorial this week:

' "We find it hard to believe that an otherwise internationally respected, democratic nation can sanction such large and indiscriminate human atrocities in a territory already under land and sea blockade," The Lancet said. "The collective punishment of Gazans is placing horrific and immediate burdens of injury and trauma on innocent civilians. These actions contravene the fourth Geneva convention." The editorial also blasted "national medical associations and professional bodies worldwide," accusing them of keeping silent as the destruction unfolded. "Their leaders, through their inaction, are complicit in a preventable tragedy that may have long-lasting public-health consequences not only for Gaza for also for the entire region," it said.'

The Lancet editorial board used the same word as I have, "atrocities," for what is being done to the civilian population, and agrees with my charge of indiscriminate fire on civilians (a war crime) and contravention of the international law governing treatment of subject populations in occupied territories (Israel controls Gaza's borders, air and sea access and denies it statehood, and so is the occupying authority. Having merely removed its colonists does not mean it is no longer an occupier; colonizing an occupied territory is itself illegal). The Israeli military's apparent targeting of clinics and other medical facilities at a time when they are most needed for care of civilians seems to have especially angered the Lancet editors.

Palestinian human rights organizations are calling on the High Contracting Parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention to convene to investigate Israeli abuses of the law.

Unlike the obsequious US press, Britain's Channel 4 is capable of challenging the propaganda that Hamas was intensively bombarding Israel with rockets during the 2008 ceasefire. The anchor was given a report by the Israeli government that showed that Hamas did not in fact send rockets on Israel in that period. Only 20 rockets were fired from Gaza between June and December of 2008, and they were fired by organizations other than Hamas. No Israelis were killed in that period by these little home made projectiles.

Trita Parsi takes on the glib charges about Iran and Gaza, and warns that the Gaza War is a trap for Obama in his proposed opening to Iran.

The European Union has put off plans to declare Israel a privileged partner in trade, diplomacy and political ties on Wednesday. The falling through of this program is a blow to Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni, who had hoped to campaign on the achievement in her bid for the prime ministership (the election is Feb. 10).

The plan was derailed by commissioner for external relations Benita Ferrero-Waldner, who has been involved in trying to broker peace in Sri Lanka and in freeing imprisoned Bulgarian nurses in Libya. She has been an activist in helping children AIDS victimes. She is a former Austrian foreign minister.

There is no talk of sanctions against Israel; what has happened is only that extra privileges are not being proffered. The EU officials are clearly very disturbed by the bloodbath in Gaza. Ramiro Cibrian-Uzal, the EU ambassador to Israel, put the matter as delicately as he could: "In a war situation, in a situation in which Israel is at war, using its war means in a very dramatic way, in a powerful way in Gaza, everybody realises that it is not the appropriate time to upgrade bilateral relations."

"Using its war means in a very dramatic way" seems pretty clearly an implicit condemnation of the disproportionate use of force and the complete disregard for civilian life that has characterized Israel's massive bombardment of densely populated Gaza.

The thing I cannot understand is why it is only the war that should give Europe pause? What about the blockade on Gaza, which left 15 percent of Gazan children (and half of them are children) malnourished?

In fact, I would argue that until the 1.5 million people of Gaza are freed from Israeli control and abuse, there is no reason for the EU to reward Israel with special perquisites not given other non-European countries.

I would argue that Israel is keeping the Gazans in a state akin to slavery. Here are some similarities between the condition of the people of Gaza and classical slavery:

They were deprived of their basic rights as a result of a military conquest. (Peoples and individuals have often been enslaved as a result of being vanquished.)

They are stateless. In fact, US slaves at the time the constitution was written in the eighteenth century were at least counted as 3/5s of a citizen. Gazans are not counted as citizens at all by any existing state.

They have suffered what Orlando Patterson called "social death." Most Gazans are refugees from the 1948 and 1967 wars and used to live in what is now Israel, but had their property stolen by the European Jewish settlers. They are now trapped in Gaza, and are cut off from many other members of their clan. Social death occurs when the enslaved is removed from his or her original social and geographical context. The Gazans are certainly for the most part cut off in this way.

Gazans lack mobility, being trapped in the Gaza Strip. Israel controls their borders and their air and coastline. There is also a checkpoint on the short border with Egpt, but it is strictly policed. It is typical of the condition of slaves that they are deprived fo the liberty of movement.

They do not control their own property. Thus, Gazans cannot own a medical clinic, e.g.,and be sure of it not being bombed by the Israelis. They can never know from day to day what the Israelis will do to their property. They cannot export their goods via their harbor on the Mediterranean because Israel does not allow it. They cannot have a functioning airport. Likewise slaves do not actually own property, since the slavemaster actually owns it and can dispose of it as he likes.

Innocent Gazans may be killed or maimed with impunity by Israeli bombs and shells. Likewise, slavemasters in most societies can kill or beat their slaves with few repercussions.

Gazans can be deprived of enough nutrition to be healthy at will. A free person lacking nutrition can make arrangements to get more. A slave, because of lack of freedom of movement, is forced to simply go hungry.

It may be objected that Israelis do not make Gazans work for them for free. But forced labor is only one element of slavery. The essential characteristics of any slave system have more to do with the denial of liberty than with the precise economic form of exploitation practiced on the slave. That there has been Israeli economic exploitation of Gazans and their resources is in any case undeniable.

Unless and until the Gazans are freed by the Israeli Pharoah from their debilitating bondage, the violence will go on. And the Gazans, having been deprived of their liberty as Samson was deprived of his sight, are perfectly capable of bringing down the whole structure of Levantine security if this unhealthy and outrageous denial to them of the elements of basic human dignity does not cease once and for all.

(Juan Cole @ 1/15/2009 12:27:00 AM)
-mr

2009-01-14T22:03:00.000-08:00

Israel prevents Palestinian ZOMBIE ATTACK!:

GAZA (Reuters) - Stench, debris and human remains greeted Palestinians in the city of Gaza on Wednesday after an Israeli missile strike at dawn -- but in this case no one died.

A big explosion tore through the increasingly packed Sheikh Redwan cemetery, shattering tombstones and ripping bones and recently buried flesh from the earth.

"The planes have struck even the dead. There is nothing the planes have not hit in the Gaza Strip," lamented Abu Fayez al-Shurafa, leaning on a cane. READ MORE

Gaza war rages as toll tops 1,000:

The Palestinian death toll stands at about 1,033 people and nearly 5,000 have been injured, with 40 per cent of the dead civilians and a third children, aid agencies and Palestinian medics say.

Raed, an Iraqi architect who lived through years of the US occupation of his country, reports on Israeli war crimes:

The UN human right council held a special session this week to discuss the Israeli crimes in Gaza, and they came up with the following:

1- The council "DECIDES TO DISPATCH FACT-FINDING MISSION TO INVESTIGATE VIOLATIONS AGAINST PALESTINIANS IN OCCUPIED TERRITORY"

The Council [...] decided to dispatch an urgent independent international fact-finding mission to investigate all violations of international human rights law and international humanitarian law by the occupying power against the Palestinian people throughout the Occupied Palestinian Territory. The Council also requested the United Nations Secretary-General to investigate the latest targeting of UNRWA facilities in Gaza, including schools, that resulted in the killing of tens of Palestinian civilians, including women and children.

2- The council "adopts resolution on grave human rights violations in Gaza Strip"

In the resolution, which was adopted by a vote of 33 to 1 with 13 abstentions, the Council called for the immediate cessation of Israeli military attacks throughout the Palestinian Occupied Territory; demanded the occupying power, Israel, to immediately withdraw its military forces from the occupied Gaza Strip; called upon the occupying power to end its occupation to all Palestinian lands occupied since 1967, and to respect its commitment within the peace process towards the establishment of the independent sovereign Palestinian state with east Jerusalem as its capital; demanded that the occupying power stop the targeting of civilians and medical facilities and staff as well as the systematic destruction of cultural heritage; demanded further that the occupying power lift the siege, open all borders.

Prof. Juan Cole on Turkish boycott of Israeli goods, an increasing trend in the region:

The Turkish Consumers Association is spearheading a Turkish consumer boycott of Israeli-made goods.Turkey is Israel's eighth largest trading partner, with trade between the two countries worth over $2.6 bn a year in 2007

Israel's economy depends heavily on foreign trade, which accounts for 80 percent of its GDP.

There is a dispute about whether this downturn in relations between Turkey and Israel is a hiccup or whether it is a negative secular trend, with Turkey looking increasingly like the rest of the Middle East, which does very little business with Israel.

Even in Egypt, which has a peace treaty with Israel and had in the 1990s supplied up to a third of Israeli petroleum, the Gaza War is hardening attitudes and has produced massive demonstrations little covered in the US media. In 2005, Egypt had made a deal to sell natural gas to Israel, but the supreme court struck it down last fall on the grounds that such an arrangement requires the approval of parliament. It is hard to imagine even Egypt's docile parliament, dominated by the ruling party, voting for such a thing any time soon. Israel has replaced Egyptian petroleum for the most part with oil from Russia and Kazakhstan.

I think over time there is a real danger of Israel risking boycotts and economic strangulation if it continues with Apartheid policies in the Occupied territories.

Field Up Date on Gaza from the Humanitarian Coordinator
United Nations-Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs

And how about a field update on human rights in Iraq: Human Rights in Iraq "extremely poor -HRW

Israel Shuts out World Press

Gaza's Blackening Beaches

At the Bedside of a Badly Wounded Girl in Gaza

Israeli banned Arab parties: We'll establish an alternative Arab parliament

-mr

Casualties and Conscience

2009-01-12T20:42:00.000-08:00

Latest from Informed Comment:

The al-Mezan Center for Human Rights rounds up the statistics it can verify for deaths, injuries, and displaced persons among the Palestinians of Gaza as of late Sunday. They estimate nearly 3,000 wounded, of whom 600 are children and 385 women. While human rights organizations are saying 20,000 Gazans have been made homeless and sought refuge in shelters, al-Mezan thinks the number is actually as high as 200,000 displaced. (Gaza's population is 1.5 million).

UN sees Gaza aid, recovery impossible under blockade: Reuters

"The whole question of the recovery of Gaza will depend on lifting the blockade," said Peter Ford, an official of UNRWA, the main U.N. relief agency for Palestinians.

"There is an immediate need for Israel to allow in cash but Israelis are preventing the entry of bank notes and cash and people in Gaza cannot buy anything. It is economic strangulation," he told reporters after a donors meeting initiated by Abu Dhabi, capital of the United Arab Emirates.

Ten Israeli soldiers choose jail over Gaza

-mr

2009-01-12T20:08:00.000-08:00

Israel's use of white phosphorus against unarmed civilians:

Human Rights Watch said Sunday that Israel's military has fired artillery shells with the incendiary agent white phosphorus into Gaza and a doctor there said the chemical was suspected in the case of 10 burn victims who had skin peeling off their faces and bodies.

"Suddenly, I saw bombs coming with white smoke," said the man, whose burned face was covered with medical cream. "It looked very red and it had white smoke. That's the first time I've seen such a thing."

His cousin, in another hospital bed, was more severely burned, with patches of skin peeling off his face and body, and had to be wrapped with thick white bandages.
The hospital's chief doctor, Youssef Abu Rish, said the burns were not from contact with fire, but he couldn't say what sort of substance caused them. He said information he collected on the Internet indicated it could have been white phosphorus.
White phosphorus is not considered a chemical weapon, and militaries are permitted under laws of warfare to use it in artillery shells, bombs and rockets to create smoke screens to hide troop movements as well as bright bursts in the air to illuminate battlefields at night.
Israel is not party to a convention regulating its use. Under customary laws of war, however, Israel would be expected to take all feasible precautions to minimize the impact of white phosphorus on civilians, Human Rights Watch said.
"What we're saying is the use of white phosphorus in densely populated areas like a refugee camp is showing that the Israelis are not taking all feasible precautions," said Marc Garlasco, a senior military analyst for the rights group. "It's just an unnecessary risk to the civilian population, not only in the potential for wounds but also for burning homes and infrastructure." (AP) READ MORE HERE and HERE
-mr

Israel Drops Pretense of Democracy

2009-01-12T11:35:00.000-08:00

Arab Parties Banned from the Upcoming Elections

By a margin of 26-3, the Israeli Central Elections Committee decided to ban the Balad Party from running in next month’s election. By a margin of 21-8, they also banned the United Arab List-Ta’al (UAL-T). The two bans will prevent more than half of the current Arab members of Israel’s Parliament, the Knesset, from running for reelection.

The Arab parties earned the ire of the most hawkish elements in the Israeli government by publicly opposing the ongoing war in the Gaza Strip. Balad likewise made enemies by explicitly calling for equal rights for all citizens of Israel, regardless of national or ethnic identity, which the ruling Kadima Party said would “undermine Israel’s identity as a Jewish state.” READ MORE

Mideast Solidarity Project

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