THE LEBANESE GOVERNMENT
THE SAME IS TRUE OF THE PALESTINIAN "GOVERNMENT"
Saturday, November 18, 2006
Olmert's drums of war
By Aluf Benn
Haaretz
"In his address to the General Assembly of the Jewish Communities of North America in Los Angeles earlier this week, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert made it clear that Israel and Iran were headed down a road of confrontation. It is hard to interpret his message any differently: "We have reached the pivotal moment of truth regarding Iran... Our integrity will remain intact only if we prevent Iran's devious goals, not if we try our best but fail."
Members of the UN Security Council are still talking about imposing ridiculous sanctions that will have little effect on Iran, and an international military operation against the Iranian nuclear installations is highly unrealistic. The Democrat's victory in midterm elections in the United States also lessened the likelihood that Bush will bomb Iran. Israel, it seems, is facing Ahmadinejad alone.
"A weak prime minister who is dropping in the opinion polls suddenly found himself faced with Benjamin Netanyahu, Avigdor Lieberman and Effi Eitam, who are politicizing the issue, and with a public that does not have faith in the prime minister due to his lack of security experience," senior officials in Jerusalem explained.
"Olmert is under attack for not being able to deal with the Qassam rockets, so he is under pressure and is moving away from the low-profile approach," they added.
The public will justifiably want to know what has been done to prevent the threat to its existence posed by Iran, and to stop the possible mass exodus of Jews from Israel, as described by Deputy Defense Minister Ephraim Sneh. Domestic pressure calling for military action will intensify.
However, experts on strategy have voiced doubts regarding Israel's ability to carry out an effective aerial attack on Iran's nuclear installations, similar to the raid that destroyed Iraq's nuclear reactor in 1981. The experts say there are three prerequisites for such an operation:
* Accurate and updated intelligence on the locations of the targets, some of which are hidden underground and are well defended
* The right kinds of munitions capable of destroying their targets with a high chance of success
* Diplomatic coordination with the Americans. The U.S. forces in the region could become targets of Iranian retaliation, just like Israel, and therefore there is no way that an independent Israeli action can take place without authorization from Bush. Did Olmert get such a go-ahead and is this why he was pleased with his visit to the White House?
International pressure and sanctions were supposed to delay the Iranians, at least until the regime there fell, or some miracle happened. However, it is not working out.
The challenge Olmert has set for himself is not a simple one. But the more his warnings intensify, the more difficult he will find it to back down and convince the public that we can live with an Iranian bomb. Therefore, we can assume that the confrontation is moving closer."
Hollow Visions of Palestine's Future
Peace will need more than David Grossman – or Uri Avnery
AN EXCELLENT PIECE
by Jonathan Cook
(I encourage reading the entire article)
"Grossman, one of Israel's foremost writers and a figurehead for its main peace movement, Peace Now, personifies the caring, tortured face of Zionism that so many of the country's apologists – in Israel and abroad, trenchant and wavering alike – desperately want to believe survives, despite the evidence of the Qanas, Beit Hanouns and other massacres committed by the Israeli army against Arab civilians. Grossman makes it possible to believe, for a moment, that the Ariel Sharons and Ehud Olmerts are not the real upholders of Zionism's legacy, merely a temporary deviation from its true path.
In reality, of course, Grossman draws from the same ideological well-spring as Israel's founders and its greatest warriors. He embodies the same anguished values of Labor Zionism that won Israel international legitimacy just as it was carrying out one of history's great acts of ethnic cleansing: the expulsion of some 750,000 Palestinians, or 80 per cent the native population, from the borders of the newly established Jewish state.
Remove the halo with which he has been crowned by the world's liberal media and Grossman is little different from Zionism's most distinguished statesmen, those who also ostentatiously displayed their hand-wringing or peace credentials as, first, they dispossessed the Palestinian people of most of their homeland; then dispossessed them of the rest; then ensured the original act of ethnic cleansing would not unravel; and today are working on the slow genocide of the Palestinians, through a combined strategy of their physical destruction and their dispersion as a people.
Yitzhak Rabin, Grossman's most direct inspiration, may have initiated a "peace process" at Oslo (even if only the terminally optimistic today believe that peace was really its goal), but as a soldier and politician he also personally oversaw the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian cities like Lid in 1948; he ordered tanks into Arab villages inside Israel during the Land Day protests of 1976, leading to the deaths of half a dozen unarmed Palestinian citizens; and in 1988 he ordered his army to crush the first intifada by "breaking the bones" of Palestinians, including women and children, who threw stones at the occupying troops.
Every day that Grossman denies a Right of Return for the Palestinians, even as he supports a Law of Return for the Jews, he excuses and maintains the act of ethnic cleansing that dispossessed the Palestinian refugees more than half a century ago.
Rather than suggest what Israel should talk about to the Palestinians' elected leaders, Grossman argues that Israel should talk over their heads to the "moderates," Palestinians with whom Israel's leaders can do business. The goal is to find Palestinians, any Palestinians, who will agree to Israel's "peace." The Oslo process in new clothes.
This low level of support for a barely viable Palestinian state contrasts with the consistently high levels of support among Israeli Jews for a concrete, but very different, solution to the conflict: "transfer," or ethnic cleansing. In opinion polls, 60 per cent of Israeli Jews regularly favor the emigration of Arab citizens from the as-yet-undetermined borders of the Jewish state.
By this, one might be tempted to infer that Avnery styles his own peace bloc as non-Zionist or even anti-Zionist. Nothing could be further from the truth, however. Avnery and most, though not all, of his supporters in Israel are staunchly in the Zionist camp.
However, unlike Grossman, Avnery not only supports a Palestinian state in the abstract but a "just" Palestinian state in the concrete, meaning for him the evacuation of all the settlers and a full withdrawal by the Israeli army to the 1967 lines. Avnery's peace plan would give back east Jerusalem and the whole of the West Bank and Gaza to the Palestinians.
But there is a serious danger that, because Palestinian solidarity movements have misunderstood Avnery's motives, they may continue to be guided by him beyond the point where he is contributing to a peaceful solution or a just future for the Palestinians. In fact, that moment may be upon us.
All four of them regarded Arafat as the Palestinian strongman who could secure Israel's future: Rabin hoped Arafat would police the Palestinians on Israel's behalf in their ghettoes; while Avnery hoped Arafat would forge a nation, democratic or otherwise, that would contain the Palestinians' ambitions for territory and a just solution to the refugee problem.
But without Arafat as their strongman, Gush Shalom have no idea about how to address the impending issues of factionalism and potential civil war that Israel's meddling in the Palestinian political process are unleashing.
They will also have no response if the tide on the Palestinian street turns against the two-state mirage offered by Oslo. If Palestinians look for other ways out of the current impasse, as they are starting to do, Avnery will quickly become an obstacle to peace rather than its great defender.
There are not too many available:
* There is the "Carry on with the occupation regardless" of Binyamin Netanyahu and Likud;
* There is the "Seal the Palestinians into ghettoes and hope eventually they will leave of their own accord," in its Kadima (hard) and Labor (soft) incarnations;
* And there is the "Expel them all" of Avigdor Lieberman, Olmert's new Minister of Strategic Threats.
Other Zionist Jews, in Israel and abroad, have been grappling with the same kinds of issues as Avnery but begun to move in a different direction, away from the doomed two-state solution towards a binational state. A few prominent intellectuals like Tony Judt, Meron Benvenisti and Jeff Halper have publicly begun to question their commitment to Zionism and consider whether it is not part of the problem rather than the solution.
Avnery hopes that his peace camp may be the small wheel that can push the larger wheel of organizations like Peace Now in a new direction and thereby shift Israeli opinion towards a real two-state solution. Given the realities on the ground, that seems highly unlikely. But one day, wheels currently smaller than Gush Shalom may begin to push Israel in the direction needed for peace. "
AN EXCELLENT PIECE
by Jonathan Cook
(I encourage reading the entire article)
"Grossman, one of Israel's foremost writers and a figurehead for its main peace movement, Peace Now, personifies the caring, tortured face of Zionism that so many of the country's apologists – in Israel and abroad, trenchant and wavering alike – desperately want to believe survives, despite the evidence of the Qanas, Beit Hanouns and other massacres committed by the Israeli army against Arab civilians. Grossman makes it possible to believe, for a moment, that the Ariel Sharons and Ehud Olmerts are not the real upholders of Zionism's legacy, merely a temporary deviation from its true path.
In reality, of course, Grossman draws from the same ideological well-spring as Israel's founders and its greatest warriors. He embodies the same anguished values of Labor Zionism that won Israel international legitimacy just as it was carrying out one of history's great acts of ethnic cleansing: the expulsion of some 750,000 Palestinians, or 80 per cent the native population, from the borders of the newly established Jewish state.
Remove the halo with which he has been crowned by the world's liberal media and Grossman is little different from Zionism's most distinguished statesmen, those who also ostentatiously displayed their hand-wringing or peace credentials as, first, they dispossessed the Palestinian people of most of their homeland; then dispossessed them of the rest; then ensured the original act of ethnic cleansing would not unravel; and today are working on the slow genocide of the Palestinians, through a combined strategy of their physical destruction and their dispersion as a people.
Yitzhak Rabin, Grossman's most direct inspiration, may have initiated a "peace process" at Oslo (even if only the terminally optimistic today believe that peace was really its goal), but as a soldier and politician he also personally oversaw the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian cities like Lid in 1948; he ordered tanks into Arab villages inside Israel during the Land Day protests of 1976, leading to the deaths of half a dozen unarmed Palestinian citizens; and in 1988 he ordered his army to crush the first intifada by "breaking the bones" of Palestinians, including women and children, who threw stones at the occupying troops.
Every day that Grossman denies a Right of Return for the Palestinians, even as he supports a Law of Return for the Jews, he excuses and maintains the act of ethnic cleansing that dispossessed the Palestinian refugees more than half a century ago.
Rather than suggest what Israel should talk about to the Palestinians' elected leaders, Grossman argues that Israel should talk over their heads to the "moderates," Palestinians with whom Israel's leaders can do business. The goal is to find Palestinians, any Palestinians, who will agree to Israel's "peace." The Oslo process in new clothes.
This low level of support for a barely viable Palestinian state contrasts with the consistently high levels of support among Israeli Jews for a concrete, but very different, solution to the conflict: "transfer," or ethnic cleansing. In opinion polls, 60 per cent of Israeli Jews regularly favor the emigration of Arab citizens from the as-yet-undetermined borders of the Jewish state.
By this, one might be tempted to infer that Avnery styles his own peace bloc as non-Zionist or even anti-Zionist. Nothing could be further from the truth, however. Avnery and most, though not all, of his supporters in Israel are staunchly in the Zionist camp.
However, unlike Grossman, Avnery not only supports a Palestinian state in the abstract but a "just" Palestinian state in the concrete, meaning for him the evacuation of all the settlers and a full withdrawal by the Israeli army to the 1967 lines. Avnery's peace plan would give back east Jerusalem and the whole of the West Bank and Gaza to the Palestinians.
But there is a serious danger that, because Palestinian solidarity movements have misunderstood Avnery's motives, they may continue to be guided by him beyond the point where he is contributing to a peaceful solution or a just future for the Palestinians. In fact, that moment may be upon us.
All four of them regarded Arafat as the Palestinian strongman who could secure Israel's future: Rabin hoped Arafat would police the Palestinians on Israel's behalf in their ghettoes; while Avnery hoped Arafat would forge a nation, democratic or otherwise, that would contain the Palestinians' ambitions for territory and a just solution to the refugee problem.
But without Arafat as their strongman, Gush Shalom have no idea about how to address the impending issues of factionalism and potential civil war that Israel's meddling in the Palestinian political process are unleashing.
They will also have no response if the tide on the Palestinian street turns against the two-state mirage offered by Oslo. If Palestinians look for other ways out of the current impasse, as they are starting to do, Avnery will quickly become an obstacle to peace rather than its great defender.
There are not too many available:
* There is the "Carry on with the occupation regardless" of Binyamin Netanyahu and Likud;
* There is the "Seal the Palestinians into ghettoes and hope eventually they will leave of their own accord," in its Kadima (hard) and Labor (soft) incarnations;
* And there is the "Expel them all" of Avigdor Lieberman, Olmert's new Minister of Strategic Threats.
Other Zionist Jews, in Israel and abroad, have been grappling with the same kinds of issues as Avnery but begun to move in a different direction, away from the doomed two-state solution towards a binational state. A few prominent intellectuals like Tony Judt, Meron Benvenisti and Jeff Halper have publicly begun to question their commitment to Zionism and consider whether it is not part of the problem rather than the solution.
Avnery hopes that his peace camp may be the small wheel that can push the larger wheel of organizations like Peace Now in a new direction and thereby shift Israeli opinion towards a real two-state solution. Given the realities on the ground, that seems highly unlikely. But one day, wheels currently smaller than Gush Shalom may begin to push Israel in the direction needed for peace. "
A terrible legacy of hatred and death
This is the hell we have bequeathed to the Arab peoples of Iraq
By Robert Fisk
The Independent
"So the Ministry of Fear now has a Dowager of Fear, the good Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller who has discovered in the sanctum of MI5 another 30 "terror plots" to terrify us - and an entire generation of plots before the show is over. And how Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara admires her. "I think she is absolutely right that it will last a generation," he announces. Absolutely, indeed. The favourite Blair adverb, always trotted out when he really, truly and of course absolutely believes he is right; which is not the same at all, of course, as actually being right, which needs a lot more than belief to support it.
What is this trash? Accepting - which Blair can't do, can he? - that the risk to us is caused by his pusillanimous, mendacious policies in the Middle East (and that of his lord and master in Washington) would cut this latest bulletin from the Ministry of Fear down to a mere couple of years' worth of terror instead of a generation.
And note the smarmy way that officials in the Ministry of Fear now try to squeeze in a little bit of truth to take the edge off all those lies. According to Lord Carlile of Berriew QC, the war in Iraq is not to blame for the "terror plots" we are facing. No, "it is now clearly the case that although the Iraq war did not create violent jihad, it has become a convenient excuse for violent jihad". Come again, my good Lord? Now, let me get this right. Iraq has nothing to do with the "terror plots" - this, he says, is "clearly" the case ("clearly" being a notch down the road of lies from "absolutely", which might be pushing Lord Carlile's luck on this occasion). So the threats have nothing to do with Iraq but, er, well, yes, he tells us that they have, because the inventors of the "terror plots" lie to us about the real reasons for their deeds.
I am thinking of some real terror in Baghdad, the terror that comes through the letter box or is stuck on to walls. Now here are real terror plots for the Dowager of Fear to get her teeth into, plots to massacre and "cleanse" whole communities from their homes and cities on the grounds of their religious sect. And so let's take a look at some really ferocious terror, collected on the streets of Baghdad and from the front doors of those who are indeed facing a generation of threats, many of them scrupulously collected by local UN officials and put together by my Italian colleague, Mario Portanova, of the Milan magazine Diario. They are printed, not handwritten, and they are poisonous.
......
It should be noted that many of these terrible notices of intent to murder are preceded by the first words of the Koran: "In the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful." Now here's another threat from the "Day of Atonement Brigades", a Shia group: "To the disloyal Palestinians, declared enemies and Saddamist Baathists, specifically those who reside in the al-Shououn district (of Baghdad). This is a warning that you will be liquidated if you do not move completely away from this district within a 10-day period. Let this be a warning to all, without exception."
This, of course, is the hell we have bequeathed to all the Arab peoples of Iraq, this nightmare of genocidal threat and murder. All for non-existent weapons of mass destruction. And yet there is the Dowager of Fear trying to frighten us. That there may be "plots" I don't doubt. But given the hell-disaster we have helped to unleash in Iraq, is it any surprise? "
By Robert Fisk
The Independent
"So the Ministry of Fear now has a Dowager of Fear, the good Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller who has discovered in the sanctum of MI5 another 30 "terror plots" to terrify us - and an entire generation of plots before the show is over. And how Lord Blair of Kut al-Amara admires her. "I think she is absolutely right that it will last a generation," he announces. Absolutely, indeed. The favourite Blair adverb, always trotted out when he really, truly and of course absolutely believes he is right; which is not the same at all, of course, as actually being right, which needs a lot more than belief to support it.
What is this trash? Accepting - which Blair can't do, can he? - that the risk to us is caused by his pusillanimous, mendacious policies in the Middle East (and that of his lord and master in Washington) would cut this latest bulletin from the Ministry of Fear down to a mere couple of years' worth of terror instead of a generation.
And note the smarmy way that officials in the Ministry of Fear now try to squeeze in a little bit of truth to take the edge off all those lies. According to Lord Carlile of Berriew QC, the war in Iraq is not to blame for the "terror plots" we are facing. No, "it is now clearly the case that although the Iraq war did not create violent jihad, it has become a convenient excuse for violent jihad". Come again, my good Lord? Now, let me get this right. Iraq has nothing to do with the "terror plots" - this, he says, is "clearly" the case ("clearly" being a notch down the road of lies from "absolutely", which might be pushing Lord Carlile's luck on this occasion). So the threats have nothing to do with Iraq but, er, well, yes, he tells us that they have, because the inventors of the "terror plots" lie to us about the real reasons for their deeds.
I am thinking of some real terror in Baghdad, the terror that comes through the letter box or is stuck on to walls. Now here are real terror plots for the Dowager of Fear to get her teeth into, plots to massacre and "cleanse" whole communities from their homes and cities on the grounds of their religious sect. And so let's take a look at some really ferocious terror, collected on the streets of Baghdad and from the front doors of those who are indeed facing a generation of threats, many of them scrupulously collected by local UN officials and put together by my Italian colleague, Mario Portanova, of the Milan magazine Diario. They are printed, not handwritten, and they are poisonous.
......
It should be noted that many of these terrible notices of intent to murder are preceded by the first words of the Koran: "In the name of God, the compassionate, the merciful." Now here's another threat from the "Day of Atonement Brigades", a Shia group: "To the disloyal Palestinians, declared enemies and Saddamist Baathists, specifically those who reside in the al-Shououn district (of Baghdad). This is a warning that you will be liquidated if you do not move completely away from this district within a 10-day period. Let this be a warning to all, without exception."
This, of course, is the hell we have bequeathed to all the Arab peoples of Iraq, this nightmare of genocidal threat and murder. All for non-existent weapons of mass destruction. And yet there is the Dowager of Fear trying to frighten us. That there may be "plots" I don't doubt. But given the hell-disaster we have helped to unleash in Iraq, is it any surprise? "
Lieberman: Israel must reclaim control of Gaza-Egypt border
FROM THE RACIST MIND OF A MOLDOVAN ZIONAZI:
"Cabinet Minister Avigdor Lieberman told Israel Radio Saturday morning that Israel should reclaim control over the Rafah crossing and the Philadelphi Route on the border between Egypt and the Gaza Strip.
In the interview, the Deputy Prime Minister said that Israel need not reoccupy the Gaza Strip, but must take control over the area from which "the fuel that drives terrorism arrives."
Lieberman told Israel Radio that the proposals by Minister Shimon Peres and the Defense Ministry are senseless.
"There is no point in new peace initiatives, and those who initiate them are irresponsible and unwise."
According to Lieberman, the Palestinians do not truly desire a country, but instead "work in the service of international Jihad."
"There is no point in striking refugee camps and Palestinians who have nothing to lose," Lieberman said. "Instead, we should strike the entire Hamas leadership roaming free in Gaza."
Liberman said in the interview that "Judea and Samaria should be handled in cooperation with Jordan, and Abu-Mazen [Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas] should be ignored as he is not relevant, hated and lacking any authority in he territories."
He added that some people are interested in improving their situation, and that these are the people Israel should talk to.
"We must improve their financial situation, but we mustn't repeat the mistaked of Oslo and the Road Map," Lieberman said.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert forged an alliance with Lieberman, one of Israel's most divisive politciains, last month to shore up his shaky coalition.
Olmert's spokeswoman, Miri Eisin, had no comment Saturday on Lieberman's latest remarks."
Friday, November 17, 2006
Diplomats fear US wants to arm Fatah for 'war on Hamas'
A Palestinian Pinochet In The Making?
Times Online
"AMERICAN proposals to strengthen Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian security forces with additional guns and fighters have alarmed other Western nations, who argue that it is tantamount to supporting one faction in a potential civil war.
Fearing the strength of Hamas in Gaza, some US officials have urged that the moderate President Abbas should be given “deterrent capability” so that his Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority forces can confront the Islamist group if talks on a national unity government fail.
The divisions have led to a stand-off over the past month, with US officials saying that the unity government proposal had “no legs”. Other members of the “quartet” of international mediators — made up of the United States, United Nations, European Union and Russia — say that it should be given a chance instead of arming one of the Palestinian factions.
Proposals raised at meetings in London and Cairo include doubling the size of Mr Abbas’s presidential guard and persuading Israel to allow thousands of rifles into Gaza to alleviate its chronic shortage of weapons relative to Hamas. Fatah officials have asked for more than 1,000 reinforcements from the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s Badr Brigades, in exile in Jordan.
One Western official said that non-American quartet members emerged from one meeting convinced that the US wanted President Abbas to dismiss the Hamas Government, and to use his security forces to “confront Hamas politically and militarily, having confronted it economically”.
“There was effectively a stand-off. As far as we are concerned, what the Americans are proposing to do is back one side in an emerging civil war,” said a western official familiar with the discussions.
Opponents argued that the international community had accepted the participation of Hamas in elections and should therefore look to support a national unity government. Hamas won elections last January but instantly became international pariahs. Sanctions and an aid freeze have left the Palestinian Government broke and unable to pay 160,000 civil servant salaries.
The Spanish Prime Minister, José Luis RodrÃguez Zapatero, announced a new Middle East peace initiative with France and Italy yesterday. Central to the plan were an immediate ceasefire, a prisoner exchange, talks between the Israeli Prime Minister and the Palestinian President, international ceasefire monitors and a national unity government. Israeli officials dismissed the overture.
Some in Washington are sceptical about a new Palestinian coalition, believing that it will be too close to Hamas and will refuse three international demands — to recognise Israel, renounce violence and abide by previous agreements.
“Everybody wants to support Abbas, but there is a difference of opinion on how best you do it — or how much you are supporting him against Hamas against how much you are supporting him as President, which are not necessarily the same things,” said one international observer.
“A lot of what the Americans were saying was, ‘If there is going to be a fight, we might as well make sure the right person wins’. We would have a difference of opinion there. You really don’t want to be encouraging a civil war.”
The US insists that it has a good relationship with its partners. “We are continuing discussions and working things out. I think it is a little premature to be talking about a civil war as talks about a national unity government are still ongoing,” said a spokeswoman at the US Consulate in Jerusalem yesterday.
Sean McCormack, a State Department spokesman, confirmed that senior US diplomats travelled this week to Jordan to meet neighbouring Arab leaders, some of whom are hostile to Hamas.
Mr McCormack said that Washington was doing what it could to try to make sure that if the Palestinians produced a government that met the standards of the quartet statement, He said that Hamas had had failed in its attempt to govern.
The quartet has survived previous differences, notably the European insistence on alleviating Palestinian suffering with a temporary international mechanism that channelled salaries directly to some health workers when it became apparent that the international embargo on Hamas left Palestinian institutions near to collapse.
Alvaro de Soto, the UN Special Co-ordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, said: “The need to get a grip on law and order is one of the key reasons for pushing ahead with an agreed new national unity government. Only this could bring about what has been desperately missing until now, which is the security bodies under the authority of the President and those controlled by the Government, instead of facing each other off on the streets and even shooting at each other, working cohesively not only to fight crime and ensure stability but also to act against those who fire rockets into Israel.”"
***
THIS IS THE CLEAREST INDICATION YET THAT THE U.S. INSISTS ON THE "PINOCHET OPTION" IN PALESTINE: A MILITARY COUP AND A SUBSEQUENT REIGN OF TERROR. THE CHARADE OF "NATIONAL UNITY" GOVERNMENT IS INTENDED TO BUY TIME FOR ABBAS THE PUPPET.
ARE YOU LISTENING HAMAS? OR ARE YOU STILL HAVING YOUR STUPID ILLUSIONS ABOUT "BROTHER" ABU MAZEN? READ A LITTLE BIT OF HISTORY YOU NAIVE PEOPLE!
Iraqi Locals Accuse U.S. of Massacre in Ramadi
by Dahr Jamail and Ali al-Fadhily
"RAMADI, Iraq - U.S. military tank fire killed scores of civilians in Ramadi, capital of Al-Anbar province, late Monday night, according to witnesses and doctors. Anger and frustration were evident at the hospitals and during the funerals in the following days.
Iraqi doctors and witnesses at the scene of the attack said U.S. tanks killed 35 civilians when they shelled several homes in the Al-Dhubat area of the city.
On Tuesday, hundreds of people carried the 35 coffins of the dead to a graveyard in a funeral procession which closely resembled an angry demonstration. "We heard the bombing and we thought it was the usual fighting between resistance fighters and the Americans, but we soon realised it was bombing by large cannons," 60-year-old Haji Jassim explained to IPS at the burial. "We weren't allowed by the Americans to reach the destroyed houses to try to rescue those who were buried, so certainly many of them bled to death."
Jassim claimed that everyone killed was innocent, that they were not fighters. He said that when he and others attempted to reach the rubble of the destroyed homes, located near mosques whose minaret's loudspeakers had broadcast pleas for help, "There was a big American force that stopped us and told us the usual ugly phrases we hear from them every day."
Jassim, speaking with IPS while several other witnesses listened while nodding their heads, said that ambulances did not appear on the scene for hours because "we realised that the Americans did not allow them to move," and that as a result, "there were people buried under the rubble who were bleeding to death while there was still a chance to rescue them." Jassim then burst into tears and walked away saying prayers to Allah to bless the souls of the dead.
A doctor at Ramadi's main hospital, Abdullah Salih, told reporters that 35 bodies had been brought in and he also believed that others had not been retrieved since access had been limited by ongoing U.S. military operations. Another doctor, Kamal al-Ani, said that in addition to the dead, another 17 wounded had been brought into the hospital.
The scene at the hospital was tragic as doctors confirmed the reason of death for many as severe bleeding that had gone on for several hours. Most of the doctors were unwilling to discuss too many details for fear of U.S. military reprisals. "You can notice the number of dead is at least twice as high as the number of wounded," one of the doctors, speaking on condition of anonymity, told IPS.
A local Iraqi policeman who identified himself as Khalif Obeidi told IPS that tanks had destroyed several houses in the area during the U.S. raid, killing more than 30 civilians. "We know that those killed were innocent," said Obeidi, "although there have been attacks on the Americans from near that area in the past."
Residents of the city and relatives of the dead who were at the funeral were furious.
"There is no other way for the Sunnis than to fight," Ali Khudher, a 25-year-old carpenter who lost a relative in the attack told IPS. "It is a religious war and no one can deny that now."
Others who attended the mass funeral chanted anti-American, anti-Israeli, anti-Iranian and even slogans against the Islamic Party which is now part of the Iraqi government.
Tempers run high in Ramadi also because the city has often been the scene of large-scale U.S. military operations and their inherent forms of collective punishment."
***
SURE SOUNDS JUST LIKE WHAT THE ISRAELIS DID IN BEIT HANOUN. A COINCIDENCE? I THINK NOT.
US Support for Bush's Iraq Policy Hits New Low
AP
"WASHINGTON — Americans' approval of President Bush's handling of Iraq has dropped to the lowest level ever, increasing the pressure on the commander in chief to find a way out after nearly four years of war.
The latest Associated Press-Ipsos poll found just 31 percent approval on his handling of Iraq, days after voters registered their displeasure at the polls by defeating Republicans across the board and handing control of Congress to the Democrats. The previous low in AP-Ipsos polling was 33 percent in both June and August.
Erosion of support for Bush's Iraq policy was most pronounced among conservatives and Republican men — critical supporters who propelled Bush to the White House and a second term in 2004. A month ago, approval of the president on the issue certain to define his presidency was 36 percent."
"WASHINGTON — Americans' approval of President Bush's handling of Iraq has dropped to the lowest level ever, increasing the pressure on the commander in chief to find a way out after nearly four years of war.
The latest Associated Press-Ipsos poll found just 31 percent approval on his handling of Iraq, days after voters registered their displeasure at the polls by defeating Republicans across the board and handing control of Congress to the Democrats. The previous low in AP-Ipsos polling was 33 percent in both June and August.
Erosion of support for Bush's Iraq policy was most pronounced among conservatives and Republican men — critical supporters who propelled Bush to the White House and a second term in 2004. A month ago, approval of the president on the issue certain to define his presidency was 36 percent."
Neocon Krauthammer Blames Iraqi Victims
A GREAT PIECE
By Kurt Nimmo
"Charles Krauthammer, neocon columnist who is in fact a warmonger propagandist, and thus deserves a seat in the docket at the Hague, or preferably in a courtroom here in America, tells us that the Iraqi people only have themselves to blame for the violence in their country. Krauthammer refuses to handwring or place blame where it is deserved. “Americans flatter themselves that they are the root of all planetary evil. Nukes in North Korea? Poverty in Bolivia? Sectarian violence in Iraq? Breasts are beaten and fingers pointed as we try to somehow locate the root cause in America,” writes the neocon scribe. “Our discourse on Iraq has followed the same pattern. Where did we go wrong? Too few troops? Too arrogant an occupation? Or too soft? Take your pick.”
How about America had no right to invade a country that did not pose a threat. But then, as Bush insider Philip Zelikow declared, the invasion was not about America or weapons of mass destruction or even Osama colluding with Saddam, but the “security” of Israel, that is to say Israeli hegemony in the Middle East.
As for why “democracy” withered on the wine in Iraq, Krauthammer has his own theories. “In retrospect, I think we made several serious mistakes—not shooting looters, not installing an Iraqi exile government right away, and not taking out Moqtada al-Sadr and his Mahdi Army in its infancy in 2004—that greatly compromised the occupation. Nonetheless, the root problem lies with Iraqis and their political culture,” he writes.
In other words, the United States fumbled the ball, thanks to Bush and crew. Of course, this is nonsense, as the neocons accomplished and continue to accomplish their objective of reducing Iraq, a first world nation prior to Bush Senior’s invasion, to a sub-Saharan condition, a decimated nation replete with poverty and almost unimaginable human misery. Over the last year or so, the final goal of the neocon plan—the violent balkanization of Iraq along ethnic and religious lines—has clipped along swimmingly.
Krauthammer would have us believe the neocons, brimming with democratic idealism and love for the Iraqi people, simply goofed up, although we should credit them for trying. Rather, the “Arabs [are] intrinsically incapable of democracy” and “there are political, historical, even religious reasons why Arabs are less prepared for democracy than, say, East Asians and Latin Americans who successfully democratized over the past several decades,” essentially a racist conclusion, but then this is quite normal for Israel First neocons. As Krauthammer would have it, the “problem here is Iraq’s particular political culture, raped and ruined by 30 years of Hussein’s totalitarianism,” never mind the United States installed Saddam Hussein and fed him weapons when it served foreign policy objectives, for instance the continuation of a brutal war between Iraq and Iran. Krauthammer assumes we are idiots when it comes to history. But then, naturally, most of his readers are idiots, or at least struck with amnesia when it comes to the historical record.
Iraq is a “social desert,” according to Krauthammer, never mind the Ba’athists created a health care and educational system envied by the Arab world prior to Bush Senior’s invasion, a fact admitted by none other than the Los Angeles Times. In Krauthammer’s hermetically sealed world, where historical facts are not allowed entrance, Iraqis attach themselves to “the mosque or clan or militia,” a quite natural phenomenon, considering the utter decimation of the social framework, thanks to depleted uranium enhanced bunkerbusters and cruise missiles. For the racist Krauthammer, who again and again utilizes the racist neocon yardstick when measuring Iraqis, “Iraqi national consciousness is as yet too weak and the culture of compromise too undeveloped to produce an effective government enjoying broad allegiance,” never mind most Iraqis know a spade when they see it—the installed government is beholden to the United States and its neocon political objectives, not the Iraqi people.
Krauthammer tells us the “Maliki government is a failure” and “beholden to a coalition dominated by two Shiite religious parties, each armed and ambitious, at odds with each other and with the ultimate aim of a stable, modern, democratic regime.” However, Krauthammer and the neocons are not interested in a “modern, democratic regime,” as spelled out in the Clean Break document, subtitled “A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” or maybe that should be eviscerating the realm. “Since Iraq’s future could affect the strategic balance in the Middle East profoundly, it would be understandable that Israel has an interest in supporting the Hashemites in their efforts to redefine Iraq,” the document states. According to the neocons, King Hussein of Jordan was a “direct descendant” of the Prophet Muhammad and thus should lead the Iraqis, an ideal situation for the Israelis as Hussein conducted peace negotiations directly with them and developed strong ties of friendship with Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, who joined Haganah, specifically Palmach, responsible in part for the Deir Yassin massacre. In short, the Israelis and their neocon allies expect the Arabs of Iraq to bow down to corrupt and decadent royalty complicit in the slaughter of fellow Arabs, including more than 5,000 during Black September at the behest of Henry Kissinger, the heads of the Defense Department, CIA, Joint Chiefs of Staff, Israeli and Jordanian ambassadors.
Naturally, since Iraq is wholly artificial, a bastard son of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, or rather a secret agreement between Britain and France to carve up a large swath of the Arab world, it stands to reason the Shi’ites do not “have enough sense of nation,” or a nation now supposedly envisioned by the United States. In fact, for the neocons and Israelis, this “sense of nation” is anathema, as they desire a disserved and splintered Iraq along religious and ethnic lines, managed by the “moral and intellectual leadership” of the Israelis, as the Clean Break document arrogantly stipulates.
For Krauthammer, the murderous sectarian warfare currently underway in Iraq is a good thing. “There is a glimmer of hope in this breakdown of the Shiite front,” he writes. “The unitary Shiite government having been proved such a failure, we should be encouraging the full breakup of the Shiite front,” a breakup that will eventually result in the sort of balkanization envisioned by the Israelis and their neocon cognates. Of course, Krauthammer does not say as much, but rather sticks to the absurdly transparent Bushian line that the United States hold out a hope, however futile, for a democratic Iraq.
“One can tinker with American tactics or troop levels from today until doomsday,” writes Krauthammer. “But unless the Iraqis can put together a government of unitary purpose and resolute action, the simple objective of this war—to leave behind a self-sustaining democratic government—is not attainable.” Of course, such a “self-sustaining democratic government” will never come about, especially with P2OG and British SAS undertakings underway, making certain Krauthammer’s “social desert” remains a permanent feature of a disintegrated Iraq.
Charles Krauthammer is a transparent shill for the neocon plan to balkanize, and thus murder a countless number of innocents, the entire Arab and Islamic world, although he masquerades as a champion of a maudlin “democracy,” in essence a social and cultural desertification. In normal, non-Bushzarro times, Mr. Krauthammer would be arrested as a criminal endangering the peace, as an exponent of mass murder and misery beyond measure. Instead, he is allowed to write columns for newspapers, infecting the intellectual weaklings among us, as Joseph Goebbels seduced the German people before him, resulting in over 56 million dead people."
A Palestinian woman walks past Israeli soldiers, in the Old City in the West Bank town of Hebron, November 17, 2006. (REUTERS)
Palestinians inspect a damaged house destroyed by an overnight Israeli airstrike on the northern Gaza Strip town of Beit Lahia. (AFP)
Palestinians walk past a damaged house in the northern Gaza Strip refugee camp of Jabalia. (AFP)
Palestinians inspect the rubble of a house targeted overnight by an Israeli missile strike in the northern Gaza Strip town of Beit Lahiya, Friday Nov. 17, 2006.(AP Photo)
A Palestinian girl walks inside a room in a house targeted overnight by an Israeli missile strike in the northern Gaza Strip town of Beit Lahiya, Friday Nov. 17, 2006. (AP Photo)
A Palestinian looks at the damage left by the recent Israeli military offensive in the northern Gaza Strip town of Beit Hanoun Friday Nov. 17, 2006.(AP Photo)
After the Rain of Death
Journey to Beit Hanun
By GIDEON LEVY
CounterPunch
"This is Islam al-Atamna. A girl of 14. She is sitting in her black mourning clothes. Eight close relatives - including her mother, grandparents, uncles and aunts - were all killed before her eyes, one after the other. They were killed in the street after they awoke at home in horror at the sound of the first shell that exploded and then fled outdoors, where the next shells caught them. About 11 fell on a residential neighborhood, one shell a minute, a rain of death, pursuing them in their flight. Fatherless for some time already, the girl is left alone in the world with her two little sisters and her 3-year-old brother Abdullah, whose legs were severed and who is hospitalized in the Al-Hilal Hospital in Gaza.
What should we say to Islam? What can we say to Islam? That the chip in the radar system is to blame? That the electronic component is responsible? Perhaps that the Palestinians are to blame?
Since the accident the girl has not fallen asleep for even a moment, which one can see in her frozen face. Islam is now a girl in shock, whose entire world was destroyed last Wednesday morning, with a total of 22 relatives dead and dozens wounded.
Islam's town is upside down. The roads are full of open pits, crushed electricity poles, smashed cars, torn houses and a sewage system whose effluents flow quietly in the streets.
After the six-day war waged by the Israel Defense Forces against Beit Hanun during Operation Autumn Clouds - when soldiers also took over Islam's house, imprisoning on the first floor the 104 people who lived in the eight apartments in the building, all relatives - people here expected to wake up last week to a new dawn, a dawn without soldiers. The day before, IDF had left Beit Hanun after "completing its mission" - nobody knows exactly what that mission was - and the residents awoke to freedom. But just then the volley of shells landed. Between 6:30 and 7 A.M., on the row of houses in the street that ends in a recently planted orchard, a gift from the Japanese government.
Now the survivors are sitting in the street of death, all of whose fatalities are members of one family, the Al-Atamna family. There has never before been such killing, of 22 members of one family, not even under direct Israeli occupation.
In the hospitals in Gaza, Egypt and Israel the wounded, about 40 in number, are moaning, many of them with amputated limbs and head injuries, quite a number of them children. The dead also include children, and mainly women: The mass poster that was printed presents the portraits of the men and the children who were killed, whereas the pictures of the women are replaced by paintings of red roses, as is the custom.
The entrance to Beit Hanun is horrifying. It is a town that is half destroyed and half deserted. Some of the residents, those who had a place to go, fled while they were still able to do so and have yet to return. Those who remain are walking around the streets like victims of shell shock, trying to assess the damages. A few people with initiative have already begun reconstruction: One is building a new fence, another is clearing the ruins from his yard, and technicians are repairing electricity and telephone cables, until the next invasion. An old woman is drying loofa in her ruined yard, as though nothing has happened.
......
......
Taxi driver Raad Al-Atamna, a member of the family and an old acquaintance of ours from the Erez checkpoint: "Her uncle was also killed, and another uncle is in a hospital in Egypt. Now she has nobody. What can I tell you, only God will look after her and help her. Gideon, I'm begging God not to harm either a Muslim or a Jew - no person should be harmed like us. It's a tragedy, a Holocaust such as we have not had since 1956. I hope that what happened to us doesn't happen to anyone else in the world."
By GIDEON LEVY
CounterPunch
"This is Islam al-Atamna. A girl of 14. She is sitting in her black mourning clothes. Eight close relatives - including her mother, grandparents, uncles and aunts - were all killed before her eyes, one after the other. They were killed in the street after they awoke at home in horror at the sound of the first shell that exploded and then fled outdoors, where the next shells caught them. About 11 fell on a residential neighborhood, one shell a minute, a rain of death, pursuing them in their flight. Fatherless for some time already, the girl is left alone in the world with her two little sisters and her 3-year-old brother Abdullah, whose legs were severed and who is hospitalized in the Al-Hilal Hospital in Gaza.
What should we say to Islam? What can we say to Islam? That the chip in the radar system is to blame? That the electronic component is responsible? Perhaps that the Palestinians are to blame?
Since the accident the girl has not fallen asleep for even a moment, which one can see in her frozen face. Islam is now a girl in shock, whose entire world was destroyed last Wednesday morning, with a total of 22 relatives dead and dozens wounded.
Islam's town is upside down. The roads are full of open pits, crushed electricity poles, smashed cars, torn houses and a sewage system whose effluents flow quietly in the streets.
After the six-day war waged by the Israel Defense Forces against Beit Hanun during Operation Autumn Clouds - when soldiers also took over Islam's house, imprisoning on the first floor the 104 people who lived in the eight apartments in the building, all relatives - people here expected to wake up last week to a new dawn, a dawn without soldiers. The day before, IDF had left Beit Hanun after "completing its mission" - nobody knows exactly what that mission was - and the residents awoke to freedom. But just then the volley of shells landed. Between 6:30 and 7 A.M., on the row of houses in the street that ends in a recently planted orchard, a gift from the Japanese government.
Now the survivors are sitting in the street of death, all of whose fatalities are members of one family, the Al-Atamna family. There has never before been such killing, of 22 members of one family, not even under direct Israeli occupation.
In the hospitals in Gaza, Egypt and Israel the wounded, about 40 in number, are moaning, many of them with amputated limbs and head injuries, quite a number of them children. The dead also include children, and mainly women: The mass poster that was printed presents the portraits of the men and the children who were killed, whereas the pictures of the women are replaced by paintings of red roses, as is the custom.
The entrance to Beit Hanun is horrifying. It is a town that is half destroyed and half deserted. Some of the residents, those who had a place to go, fled while they were still able to do so and have yet to return. Those who remain are walking around the streets like victims of shell shock, trying to assess the damages. A few people with initiative have already begun reconstruction: One is building a new fence, another is clearing the ruins from his yard, and technicians are repairing electricity and telephone cables, until the next invasion. An old woman is drying loofa in her ruined yard, as though nothing has happened.
......
......
Taxi driver Raad Al-Atamna, a member of the family and an old acquaintance of ours from the Erez checkpoint: "Her uncle was also killed, and another uncle is in a hospital in Egypt. Now she has nobody. What can I tell you, only God will look after her and help her. Gideon, I'm begging God not to harm either a Muslim or a Jew - no person should be harmed like us. It's a tragedy, a Holocaust such as we have not had since 1956. I hope that what happened to us doesn't happen to anyone else in the world."
Zahhar: Iran contributed 120 million US Dollars and promised more
FROM THE WINDBAGS OF HAMAS:
"Tehran – Dr. Mahmoud al-Zahhar, the PA Foreign Minister, told reporters in Tehran on Thursday that the Iranian government have already contributed 120 million US Dollars to the Palestinian government and promised more aid.
Dr. Zahhar was speaking to reporters after meetings with Iranian officials he held in Tehran.
The Iranian government announced last April that it will provide 50 million US Dollars in aid to the Palestinian government to compensate for the loss of funds as a result of the siege imposed by the US and Western governments.
Dr. Zahhar also told reporters the intended national unity government will not recognize Israel.
He added that the letter of assignment to the new proposed prime minister will be the same as the one Ismail Haneyya received, but the National Harmony Document will form part of the letter of assignment and there is no requirement in the document to recognize Israel or relinquish rights.
He also stressed that one condition of forming this government is having guarantees that the siege will be lifted.
The quartet committee requires that Hamas recognizes Israel, gives up resistance and respects all signed agreements between the PA and Israel. "
***
Why do you have to disclose such information? To show off? To give Iran credit?
You will never hear Nasrallah speak like this; but then we are talking about REAL LEADERS.
Israel totally rejects new European "peace initiative"
| Spanish FM: Nothing in peace plan 'Israel can reject' | ||
 | ||
| By Akiva Eldar and Avi Issacharoff, Haaretz Correspondents, and The Associated Press | ||
| ||
Spanish Minister of Foreign Affairs Miguel Angel Moratinos sought Friday to reassure Israel over a new Mideast peace initiative proposed the day before by Spain, France and Italy, saying that there was nothing in the plan "that Israel can reject." Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said Thursday that Israel rejected the new peace initiative out of hand. She told Moratinos that it was unacceptable for an initiative concerning Israel to be launched without coordination with Jerusalem. Livni also told Moratinos that if the sponsors of the initiative were so inclined, they should seek to hold dialogue with Israel on any new plan. But Moratinos told Haaretz on Friday he had spoken to his Israeli counterpart about the initiative, in what he described was a "good conversation," and had "tried to convince her that it's not an anti-Israeli plan." He said that, "at the end of the conversation it was fine," and promised to provide Livni with "all the details." Introducing the plan Thursday during a meeting with French President Jacques Chirac, Spanish Prime Minister Spanish Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero said it had five components, including an immediate cease-fire that would be monitored by an international presence in Gaza. Moratinos said that he had been anticipating a poor reception, but remained confident that the plan would be taken seriously. "We assume our responsibilities," he said. "I knew that in the beginning there will be a negative reaction but I have full confidence that the initiative will go through." The Spanish foreign minister acknowledged that there was still work to be done on the proposal, but said that the three countries had been driven by a desire to change the stalemate in the region. "It is not a final initiative, we will have to adapt. But we have a sense of urgency that something has to be done, and this stagnation and frustration which are affecting the lives of Israelis and Palestinians are [getting] worse." He also said that his own country has an interest in events in the Middle East, not least because they have a direct impact on Spain and its citizens. "We have police and civil guard [in Lebanon], two Spanish citizens were kidnapped in Gaza, because there is a big disaster," he said. "It's affecting my economy and security in terms of the whole situation. I have interests that are affecting my country, and so, what do I have to do, just wait and see?"According to Moratinos, European Union and American officials at the highest levels have been made aware of the initiative."We discussed with [EU foreign policy chief Javier] Solana and I discussed it this morning with the Americans, but the Americans have the Quartet," Moratinos said, referring to the foursome of the U.S., United Nations, Russia and the EU, who play a joint role in efforts to end the conflict." But we already discussed the general idea with [U.S. Secretary of State] Condoleezza Rice a long time ago. And so we want the Americans to lead the initiative, but we have to forward some ideas. If they have better ideas, I am ready to accept them." | ||
Lebanese daily publishes letter to MP Saad Hariri during July war, with plan to "terminate" Hezbollah
Toni Nissi (right)
THIS IS A BOMBSHELL
"Al-Manar special report – Fatima Mussaoui – Translated / The Lebanese daily "Addiyar" unveiled a letter that was sent by Toni Nissi, the Policy Chief of the International Lebanese Committee to implement UN resolution 1559, to the head of the so called majority, MP Saad Hariri, on the 17th of July – four days after the Israeli aggression against Lebanon began. According to Addiyar, the letter said: "Your Excellency the head of the Future Movement parliamentary bloc Sheikh Saad Hariri, as a result to the work and follow up with the American administration in Washington, the Security Council in New York and the European Parliament in Belgium, particularly NATO members, we are glad to inform you of the following: A- The intended scenario: First: After three day on the Israeli army military campaign, the operations have radically transformed from an attempt to pressure the Lebanese government to disarm Hezbollah and bind Lebanon to sign a peace accord through creating a new "security zone" after destroying Lebanon's infrastructure, to stop this operation and move to an alternative plan. The agreed upon plan is to totally destroy Hezbollah's military structure and leave the mission of "pressure" to the United States and the international community. Second: After Hezbollah's military structure is totally destroyed, and not before that, the United States and France will present a draft resolution to the UN Security Council, that we would also take part in preparing, to deploy international forces under Chapter Seven of the UN charter, on the Lebanese-Israeli and the Lebanese-Syrian borders, with full authority to implement UN resolutions 1559 and 1680. Third: Any ceasefire, should it take place, will not be permanent unless it leads to a mechanism by which illegal weapons in Lebanon are withdrawn. Fourth: In this battle, Hezbollah has proven itself as a terrorist organization with huge potentials, and therefore, the international community, especially the United States and Europe, have decided that this campaign does not stop unless Hezbollah is totally crushed. In section "B" of the letter sent to MP Hariri, Toni Nissi explains the reasons behind the aggression saying: First: Because the "Cedars Revolution" has been frozen and the rounds of national dialogue have become a heterodoxy. Second: Because destroying Hezbollah is a US priority, especially if it is to go for standoff with Iran. Third: Because Hezbollah, without deploying deterrent international forces under Chapter Seven and without controlling Lebanon's border with Syria, no matter how much Israel or the United States hit it, will emerge stronger than before when a ceasefire is put into effect. In section "C" of the letter the Policy chief touched on the measures taken by Hezbollah during the aggression. And in section "D" Nissi asks "what should we do?" He then answers: First: Launch a massive media campaign against Hezbollah, with a Christian characteristic and a bid to involve some Shiites in it. Second: Issue a resolution by the Lebanese government calling the United Nations to interfere to implement international resolutions and help the government to practice its authority on all Lebanese soil, even if this leads to the withdrawal or resignation of the Hezbollah and Amal ministers from the government. "
Nine Israeli human rights organizations speak out about Gaza
Statement, Israeli human rights organizations, 17 November 2006
Gaza humanitarian crisis - a joint statement by Israel's leading human rights organizations
"Nine Israeli human rights organizations issued an unprecedented joint call to the international community to ensure human rights in the Gaza Strip. The statement comes in light of the dire humanitarian situation there:
Some 80% of the population is extremely poor, living on less than $2 a day. A majority of the population is dependant on food aid from international donors.
In the past four months, the Israeli military has killed over 300 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Over half of those killed were unarmed civilians who did not participate in the fighting. Among the dead, 61 were children.
About 70% of Gaza's potential workforce is out of work or without pay.
On 28 June, Israel bombed Gaza's only independent power station, which produced 43% of the electricity needed by the residents in Gaza. Since then, most of the population has electricity between 6 and 8 hours each day, with disastrous consequences on water supply, sewage treatment, food storage, hospital functioning and public health.
The Gaza Strip is almost entirely sealed off from the outside world, with virtually no way for Palestinians to get in or out. Exports have been reduced to a trickle; imports are limited to essential humanitarian supplies.
Israel cannot shirk its responsibility for this growing crisis. Even after its Disengagement in 2005, Israel continues to hold decisive control over central elements of Palestinian life in the Gaza Strip:
Israel continues to maintain complete control over the air space and territorial waters.
Israel continues to control the joint Gaza Strip-West Bank population registry, preventing relocation between the West Bank and Gaza, and family unification.
Israel controls all movement in and out of Gaza, with exclusive control over all crossing points between Gaza and Israel, and the ability to shut down the Rafah crossing to Egypt.
Israeli ground troops conduct frequent military operations inside Gaza .
Israel continues to exercise almost complete control over imports and exports from the Gaza Strip.
Israel controls most elements of the taxation system of the Gaza Strip, and since February has withheld tax monies legally owed to the PA, and amounting to half of the to tal PA budget.
The broad scope of Israeli control in the Gaza Strip creates a strong case for the claim that Israel's occupation of the Gaza Strip continues, along with an obligation to ensure the welfare of the civilian population. Regardless of the legal definition of the Gaza Strip, Israel bears legal obligations regarding those spheres that it continues to control. Israel has the right to defend itself. However, all military measures taken by Israel must respect the provisions of international humanitarian law.
The following Israeli human rights organizations call on the international community to ensure that Israel respects the basic human rights of residents of the Gaza Strip, and that all parties respect international humanitarian law:
B'Tselem: the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories
Association for Civil Rights in the Israel
Amnesty International - Israel Section
Bimkom: Planners for Planning Rights
HaMoked: Center for the Defense of the Individual
Gisha: Center for the Legal Protection of Freedom of Movement
Physicians for Human Rights-Israel
Public Committee Against Torture in Israel
Rabbis for Human Rights "
Gaza humanitarian crisis - a joint statement by Israel's leading human rights organizations
"Nine Israeli human rights organizations issued an unprecedented joint call to the international community to ensure human rights in the Gaza Strip. The statement comes in light of the dire humanitarian situation there:
Some 80% of the population is extremely poor, living on less than $2 a day. A majority of the population is dependant on food aid from international donors.
In the past four months, the Israeli military has killed over 300 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Over half of those killed were unarmed civilians who did not participate in the fighting. Among the dead, 61 were children.
About 70% of Gaza's potential workforce is out of work or without pay.
On 28 June, Israel bombed Gaza's only independent power station, which produced 43% of the electricity needed by the residents in Gaza. Since then, most of the population has electricity between 6 and 8 hours each day, with disastrous consequences on water supply, sewage treatment, food storage, hospital functioning and public health.
The Gaza Strip is almost entirely sealed off from the outside world, with virtually no way for Palestinians to get in or out. Exports have been reduced to a trickle; imports are limited to essential humanitarian supplies.
Israel cannot shirk its responsibility for this growing crisis. Even after its Disengagement in 2005, Israel continues to hold decisive control over central elements of Palestinian life in the Gaza Strip:
Israel continues to maintain complete control over the air space and territorial waters.
Israel continues to control the joint Gaza Strip-West Bank population registry, preventing relocation between the West Bank and Gaza, and family unification.
Israel controls all movement in and out of Gaza, with exclusive control over all crossing points between Gaza and Israel, and the ability to shut down the Rafah crossing to Egypt.
Israeli ground troops conduct frequent military operations inside Gaza .
Israel continues to exercise almost complete control over imports and exports from the Gaza Strip.
Israel controls most elements of the taxation system of the Gaza Strip, and since February has withheld tax monies legally owed to the PA, and amounting to half of the to tal PA budget.
The broad scope of Israeli control in the Gaza Strip creates a strong case for the claim that Israel's occupation of the Gaza Strip continues, along with an obligation to ensure the welfare of the civilian population. Regardless of the legal definition of the Gaza Strip, Israel bears legal obligations regarding those spheres that it continues to control. Israel has the right to defend itself. However, all military measures taken by Israel must respect the provisions of international humanitarian law.
The following Israeli human rights organizations call on the international community to ensure that Israel respects the basic human rights of residents of the Gaza Strip, and that all parties respect international humanitarian law:
B'Tselem: the Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories
Association for Civil Rights in the Israel
Amnesty International - Israel Section
Bimkom: Planners for Planning Rights
HaMoked: Center for the Defense of the Individual
Gisha: Center for the Legal Protection of Freedom of Movement
Physicians for Human Rights-Israel
Public Committee Against Torture in Israel
Rabbis for Human Rights "
WHO concerned about lack of access to healthcare in occupied Palestine
Statement, World Health Organization, 17 November 2006
"WHO is concerned about the rapid deterioration of Palestinians' equitable access to adequate and effective medical services. This is mainly the result of the Palestinian Ministry of Health's financial crisis which has followed the Palestinian Legislative Council elections in January 2006. The Government of Israel has stopped handing over the tax and customs revenues it collects on behalf of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and international donors have suspended direct aid to the Ministry of Health.
As a consequence of these measures, the PA has been unable to pay regular salaries since March 2006. Health workers employed by the PA have since received provisional allowances through the Temporary International Mechanism established by the European Union . However they joined a general open-ended strike on 23 August demanding full payment of long-overdue salaries and guarantees that salaries in the upcoming months will be paid.
According to media reports, unions representing health professionals in the West Bank have announced that as of 15 November public medical services will be further restricted. This will affect people requiring emergency care, chronic patients and deliveries of newborns as Primary Health Centers will be closed down and emergency rooms at public hospitals will stop operating.
"WHO is very concerned about the announced reduction of services and the deterioration of vital medical services. This will further exacerbate the already difficult humanitarian situation affecting Palestinian lives and their right to enjoy the highest possible level of physical and mental health, " said WHO's Head of Office, Ambrogio Manenti.
WHO calls on the parties concerned to work to reach an agreement that will guarantee Palestinians' access to essential medical services during the strike.
WHO also urges the international community to support the Palestinian public health sector in this critical phase. In its statement of 20 September 2006, the Quartet noted that the resumption of transfers of tax and customs revenues collected by Israel on behalf of the PA would have a significant impact on the Palestinian economy. "
Killing Hope in Beit Hanoun
“I lost my whole family; is there anyone who is still alive? Anyone?” screamed a Palestinian mother from Beit Hanoun as she fell in the arms of her neighbor
By Ramzy Baroud
"“God is greater than Israel and America,” was the echoing cry of tens of thousands of Palestinians, who descended into the graveyard in grief stricken Beit Hanoun, in the northern Gaza Strip. They congregated in yet another familiar scene to bury their loved ones, killed by Israel’s brutal war against the Palestinians.
This time, the loss was too great to bear, even by the standards of the people of Gaza: eighteen ambulances lined up, carrying the mutilated bodies of eighteen members of the same extended family, the majority of whom were women and children; all civilians.
“I will avenge; I will avenge,” screamed a relative of one of those who died in the Israeli artillery attack on Beit Hanoun, on November 8.
A man initiated the burial ceremony by stepping forward carrying the lifeless body of his one-year-old baby. The tough posture Gaza’s men often wish to exhibit was overshadowed by incomprehensive grief; relatives and friends were collapsing in droves; others reached to the sky, in despair.
Only God could hear them now. Two more tiny bodies swaddled in white made their way through the crowd; more followed.
The total number of those killed in the Israeli bombing of the civilian neighborhood rose to 20, adding to over 50 others killed earlier in the same Israeli military assault dubbed “Clouds of Autumn”, which converged mainly on Beit Hanoun. The latest two figures are to be included in the overall count of 350 Palestinians killed since last June, in the wider military operation carried out in Gaza and dubbed “Summer Rains”.
The numbers are devastating, but the devastation takes on a new dimension when the limbless, maimed, injured, homeless and the forever scarred are factored in. Not that those spared such classifications are better off; since Israel laid its military siege on Gaza — preceded and further cemented by an international economic and diplomatic boycott against the Palestinians and their elected government — Gaza’s misery grows perpetually.
First came the darkness — after the Israeli army bombed the strip’s primary power generator — then, poverty augmented, following the intricate plot to impoverish, thus topple the government (Israel refused to hand over tax revenues it collected on behalf of the Palestinian government, denying civil servants their salaries, thus crippling the economy of the occupied territories).
Then the water got polluted, because of the electric shortage. Hospitals and all other public institutions were left in a state of near collapse; naturally, internal chaos prevailed, thanks in part to rogue Palestinian elements. Then there was Beit Hanoun, another black spot on the collective memory of this nation already overwhelmed by most tragic occasions.
This latest episode, like the others before it, came courtesy of Defense Minister Amir Peretz — although the weapons technology is courtesy of our ever-generous US government — the rising star of Israel’s militancy. He pledged months ago to show his critics what sort of a tough man he was. The “leftist” media in Israel tried to sell him to the public as a populist leader with “socialist” tendencies — can Israel’s ideological classification be any more bizarre? Now even right-wing media and politicians are cheering Peretz’s terror.
Israel’s deputy defense minister, Ephraim Sneh, told The Jerusalem Post that the “moral responsibility” for the deaths rested with Palestinian militants who were “cynically using their civilian population as human shields for terrorist activity”, reported Reuters; it also quoted the Israeli ambassador to the United Nations, Dan Gillerman, as saying that the attack hardly represented a “watershed moment (for) war is a dirty business and during war ugly things happen”.
Strange that the leaders of a state that lives beyond the fringes of morality and law still speak as if they indeed possessed moral superiority. Even stranger how such wicked disregard for human life is skimmed over in Western media, without the mocking language that often accompanies ridiculous statements often made by war criminals who defend their crimes as moral and human imperatives.
While some Israeli commentators had the courage to recognize the horror put forth by their malicious army, Ben Caspit was hardly one of them. He equated Gaza’s homemade rockets — which produced few injuries in many months — with his country’s barbaric “response”.
“Every other method has been tried, and failed. With scoundrels you behave like a scoundrel, and with murderous, bloodthirsty terrorism that wants to wipe you off the map, you have to respond accordingly: wipe it out.”
And with it, wipe out entire families, devastate whole communities, send a whole nation into a perpetual state of grief, loss and despair.
What does the state of Israel hope to achieve from all this? After sixty years of Palestinian revolt against dispossession and occupation, does Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his henchmen expect the Palestinians to raise the white flag of surrender? Haven’t they seen the ever-flowing footage of Palestinians burying their dead? Haven’t they read the defiance, the tenacity in the faces of the living?
“I lost my whole family; is there anyone who is still alive? Anyone?” screamed a Palestinian mother from Beit Hanoun as she fell in the arms of her neighbor.
“My husband, my sister, my children, my mother ...,” she counted what seemed like an endless list, but “I swear in the name of God, we will not surrender; this is our land and here we shall live and die.”
But history offers no lesson to Israel; it shall remain isolated in its antiquated, ideologically racist, and inherently theological ideals, operating outside law and morality. But then there should be no surprises when more crude rockets burn their way towards Israel, when many more hideous suicide bombings detonate in crowded Israeli streets, creating further suffering. For, Israel’s insistence on living by the sword will continue to create the perfect environment for violence to prevail, for innocent people to die, and for people to lose everything, even their will to live."
A project of dispossession can never be a noble cause
Israel's liberal intellectuals lament the malaise that grips their country - but refuse to face up to the ethnicide at the heart of it
A GOOD COMMENT
Ahdaf Soueif
Friday November 17, 2006
The Guardian
"Before Donald Rumsfeld departed from the Pentagon, the "Transformation Group" he headed worked with an Israeli army team to develop ideas for controlling the Palestinians after Israel withdraws from the occupied territories. Eyal Weizman, an Israeli academic who has written about this cooperation, tells us that they decided to do this through an invisible occupation: Israel would "seal the hard envelopes" around Palestinian towns and generate "effects" directed against the "human elements of resistance". We saw this concept being implemented in Beit Hanoun last week when the Israeli army killed 19 sleeping people with a missile attack.
The world can look forward to more of the same. According to Weizman, the chief of staff of the Israeli armed forces, Dan Halutz, confirms that the Israeli army sees the conflict as "unresolvable". It has "geared itself to operate within an environment saturated with conflict and within a future of permanent violence ... it sees itself acting just under the threshold of international sanctions ... keeping the conflict on a flame low enough for Israeli society to be able to live and prosper within it." So here's another function for the separation wall Israel is building: to shield Israeli society from too close a knowledge of the brutal acts their army carries out in their name. And yet Israeli intellectuals wonder at the malaise that grips their country. Two Nobel prize laureates, Yisrael Aumann and Aaron Ciechanover, were recently quoted bemoaning the "fatal disease: the depletion of spirit ... [the] cancer that has spread through Israeli society". They attribute it to a kind of generalised "selfishness" which, oddly, they think may be OK in Switzerland but not in Israel. It's nothing to do with "the enemy" they say, because they can handle the enemy with their "wisdom and technology". Again, as we saw in Beit Hanoun.
Einstein, their distinguished predecessor, expressed grave doubts about political Zionism. A letter he signed, published in the New York Times in December 1948, warned against the emergence in Israel of (the future prime minister) Menachem Begin's "Freedom party". It cited Deir Yassin, where Begin and friends, eight months earlier, had killed 240 men, women and children and "were proud of this massacre". "This," the letter goes on, "is the unmistakable stamp of a fascist party for whom terrorism ... and misrepresentation are means, and a 'leader state' is the goal." Professors Aumann and Ciechanover might consider what Einstein would have made of the scenes in Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahiye over the last several weeks.
David Grossman seemed to many commentators to be evoking Hamlet in his Rabin memorial address on November 4, published in the Guardian. But when Grossman in effect argued that something was rotten in the state of Denmark he was merely referring to the lack of a "king" in Israel - a leader "to appeal to the Palestinians over the heads of Hamas" to start another peace process. But the peace processes the Palestinians have been subjected to have only led to their further dispossession. The Palestinians elected Hamas last January because two decades of interacting with a variety of Israeli governments has bankrupted the secular Palestinian leadership politically and morally. So the wish to engage in yet more talks, to get the "peace process" back on track, is either catastrophically blind or expresses ill faith. It always comes with lamentations over a "noble" project that has somehow gone wrong.
The secret rotting at the core of the state of Israel is its refusal to admit that the Zionist project in Palestine - to create a state based on the dispossession of the non-Jewish inhabitants of the land - was never noble: the land it coveted was the home of another people, and the fathers of the Israeli nation killed, terrorised and displaced them to turn the project into actuality. But the Palestinian nation lives on - visibly and noisily and everywhere. To make its own denial stick, Israel has to deny and suppress Palestinian history. To impose its design on Palestine, it has to somehow make the Palestinians disappear. "Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill"; and so the ethnicide continues. The new deputy prime minister, Avigdor Lieberman, plots against the Palestinians within Israel. The Israeli army kills and terrorises the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Zionists and their friends are desperate to silence the voices of and for Palestine. Meanwhile, Israel insists it is civilised, decent, peaceable - a light unto nations. How can a society caught in such delusion thrive? And how can people living within the Zionist project as privileged Jewish citizens bewail their embattled lot or be puzzled by it? Liberal Israelis of the left should heed another couple of lines from the bard: "Glamis hath murder'd sleep, and therefore Cawdor shall sleep no more; Macbeth shall sleep no more."
Israel will not be well until it acknowledges its past and makes amends for it. The process has a name: truth and reconciliation. Israelis cannot remain within the Zionist framework and profit from it and think of themselves as good citizens of the world. Many thoughtful and brave Israelis have made a choice. Some have left Israel, others remain. Practically all have made it their life's mission to expose how Zionism really works - and what it costs.
Since 1988, initiatives, peace talks and road maps have aimed to establish a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza with its capital in Jerusalem, and to do justly by the Palestinian refugees. For 12 years none of this happened, and first-hand accounts of the Camp David talks in 2000 show that Israel did not have the political will then to make the necessary minimum offer. Presumably it still doesn't; hence the "sealed envelopes". But, perhaps because the stakes are now so high, people are once again speaking of the visionary solution: the secular democratic state, a homeland for both Israelis and Palestinians."
A GOOD COMMENT
Ahdaf Soueif
Friday November 17, 2006
The Guardian
"Before Donald Rumsfeld departed from the Pentagon, the "Transformation Group" he headed worked with an Israeli army team to develop ideas for controlling the Palestinians after Israel withdraws from the occupied territories. Eyal Weizman, an Israeli academic who has written about this cooperation, tells us that they decided to do this through an invisible occupation: Israel would "seal the hard envelopes" around Palestinian towns and generate "effects" directed against the "human elements of resistance". We saw this concept being implemented in Beit Hanoun last week when the Israeli army killed 19 sleeping people with a missile attack.
The world can look forward to more of the same. According to Weizman, the chief of staff of the Israeli armed forces, Dan Halutz, confirms that the Israeli army sees the conflict as "unresolvable". It has "geared itself to operate within an environment saturated with conflict and within a future of permanent violence ... it sees itself acting just under the threshold of international sanctions ... keeping the conflict on a flame low enough for Israeli society to be able to live and prosper within it." So here's another function for the separation wall Israel is building: to shield Israeli society from too close a knowledge of the brutal acts their army carries out in their name. And yet Israeli intellectuals wonder at the malaise that grips their country. Two Nobel prize laureates, Yisrael Aumann and Aaron Ciechanover, were recently quoted bemoaning the "fatal disease: the depletion of spirit ... [the] cancer that has spread through Israeli society". They attribute it to a kind of generalised "selfishness" which, oddly, they think may be OK in Switzerland but not in Israel. It's nothing to do with "the enemy" they say, because they can handle the enemy with their "wisdom and technology". Again, as we saw in Beit Hanoun.
Einstein, their distinguished predecessor, expressed grave doubts about political Zionism. A letter he signed, published in the New York Times in December 1948, warned against the emergence in Israel of (the future prime minister) Menachem Begin's "Freedom party". It cited Deir Yassin, where Begin and friends, eight months earlier, had killed 240 men, women and children and "were proud of this massacre". "This," the letter goes on, "is the unmistakable stamp of a fascist party for whom terrorism ... and misrepresentation are means, and a 'leader state' is the goal." Professors Aumann and Ciechanover might consider what Einstein would have made of the scenes in Beit Hanoun and Beit Lahiye over the last several weeks.
David Grossman seemed to many commentators to be evoking Hamlet in his Rabin memorial address on November 4, published in the Guardian. But when Grossman in effect argued that something was rotten in the state of Denmark he was merely referring to the lack of a "king" in Israel - a leader "to appeal to the Palestinians over the heads of Hamas" to start another peace process. But the peace processes the Palestinians have been subjected to have only led to their further dispossession. The Palestinians elected Hamas last January because two decades of interacting with a variety of Israeli governments has bankrupted the secular Palestinian leadership politically and morally. So the wish to engage in yet more talks, to get the "peace process" back on track, is either catastrophically blind or expresses ill faith. It always comes with lamentations over a "noble" project that has somehow gone wrong.
The secret rotting at the core of the state of Israel is its refusal to admit that the Zionist project in Palestine - to create a state based on the dispossession of the non-Jewish inhabitants of the land - was never noble: the land it coveted was the home of another people, and the fathers of the Israeli nation killed, terrorised and displaced them to turn the project into actuality. But the Palestinian nation lives on - visibly and noisily and everywhere. To make its own denial stick, Israel has to deny and suppress Palestinian history. To impose its design on Palestine, it has to somehow make the Palestinians disappear. "Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill"; and so the ethnicide continues. The new deputy prime minister, Avigdor Lieberman, plots against the Palestinians within Israel. The Israeli army kills and terrorises the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Zionists and their friends are desperate to silence the voices of and for Palestine. Meanwhile, Israel insists it is civilised, decent, peaceable - a light unto nations. How can a society caught in such delusion thrive? And how can people living within the Zionist project as privileged Jewish citizens bewail their embattled lot or be puzzled by it? Liberal Israelis of the left should heed another couple of lines from the bard: "Glamis hath murder'd sleep, and therefore Cawdor shall sleep no more; Macbeth shall sleep no more."
Israel will not be well until it acknowledges its past and makes amends for it. The process has a name: truth and reconciliation. Israelis cannot remain within the Zionist framework and profit from it and think of themselves as good citizens of the world. Many thoughtful and brave Israelis have made a choice. Some have left Israel, others remain. Practically all have made it their life's mission to expose how Zionism really works - and what it costs.
Since 1988, initiatives, peace talks and road maps have aimed to establish a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza with its capital in Jerusalem, and to do justly by the Palestinian refugees. For 12 years none of this happened, and first-hand accounts of the Camp David talks in 2000 show that Israel did not have the political will then to make the necessary minimum offer. Presumably it still doesn't; hence the "sealed envelopes". But, perhaps because the stakes are now so high, people are once again speaking of the visionary solution: the secular democratic state, a homeland for both Israelis and Palestinians."
Bush to face the ghosts of America's last failed war
Thirty-one years after the US army left Saigon, President Bush flies in for a visit dogged by the unlearned lessons of history
Suzanne Goldenberg
Friday November 17, 2006
The Guardian
"On the morning of April 30 1975 a young corporal in the army of North Vietnam drove a tank through the streets of an unfamiliar city wreathed in smoke and resounding with gunfire, and stopped at a set of wrought-iron gates. Corpses lay on the pavement, and in the distance a lone helicopter rose above the US embassy and turned towards the river.T he soldier, Nguyen Van Tap, paused: could the gate be electrified? Then he gunned the engine and crashed into Saigon's Independence Palace. Moments later, Mr Nguyen's lieutenant, Vu Dang Toan, took the surrender of the South Vietnamese regime barricaded inside.
The Vietnam war was over, and the two villagers from north of Hanoi had witnessed what would have once been unthinkable: the humbling of a superpower by a peasant army. In the paint factory on the outskirts of Hanoi where the two men work now, Mr Vu says the significance of the victory was apparent even then. "When a small country like Vietnam is invaded by a big country like America and wins, then all the other countries can learn a lesson - that they can win a war against America," he says.
"They ran like cowards," says Mr Nguyen.
"They simply didn't have the power to fight us," adds Mr Vu. He smiles.
America has never really got over that morning in Saigon. Today, 31 years later, George Bush arrives in Hanoi for a visit steeped in the legacy of an old defeat - and haunted by the prospect of another.
In reality, the most compelling parallel has little to do with either Iraq or Vietnam. It is about the nature of power: America's view of itself in the world, and its execution of foreign policy.
In Vietnam, it was the August 1964 attack on US destroyer in the Gulf of Tonkin, which we now know never happened. In Iraq, it was the imminent danger that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. And that is why this war has proven so painful - because the lessons of Vietnam were not absorbed."
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