The Mideast Solidarity Project (MSP) at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA raises awareness about human rights, immigration, and US foreign policy in the Middle East, the surrounding regions and the Diaspora. By challenging stereotypes and misrepresentation of regional conflicts and training organizers, MSP works as an advocate and ally. MSP serves as an active educational resource, a tool for solidarity building, and a means for anti-racist organizing on campus and in our community.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
' 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.'
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.
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
' 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.
