A UN panel report on the recent atrocities in Gaza by Israel, the self proclaimed most moral army in the present world. It wasn't surprising that Israel denied the allegations in the 500+ paged Un report. The panel was headed by Richard Goldstone, a South African jurist.

In a damning report on Israel's conduct during its invasion of the Gaza Strip, a United Nations panel on Tuesday accused its forces of war crimes and of deliberately spreading terror among civilians.

Richard Goldstone, a South African jurist, who chaired the four-member panel on behalf of the UN Human Rights Council, said the alleged crimes resulted from military policies adop­ted in the invasion at the turn of the year. He said the findings in the 574-page document "do not amount to second-guessing commanders and soldiers in the heat of battle".

His panel urged action by the UN Security Council that could lead to alleged crimes being referred to the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

The panel's investigation, with which Israel refused to co-operate, said the military operations in Gaza, aimed at ending Palestinian rocket fire from the territory, were "directed at the people of Gaza as a whole".

The report, handed to Israeli and Palestinian diplomats just half an hour before its release, comes a week before Barack Obama, US president, is expected to chair a meeting between Israeli and Palestinian leaders in New York to try to restart the peace process.

Mr Goldstone, who was chief prosecutor in war crime trials involving former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, said: "As a Jew, with a long affiliation with Israel, it's obviously a disappointment to me – putting it mildly – that Israel has behaved as described in the report."

He said there was no justification in international law for incidents such as an attack on a crowded Gaza mosque, even if Israel had been able to establish its erroneous claim that arms and militants were inside.

The Israeli government refused to allow the UN panel to visit Israel or the occupied West Bank after previous negative UN assessments of its conduct in Gaza. The panel visited Gaza and interviewed Israeli witnesses elsewhere.

Israel regards the Geneva-based Human Rights Council, which the US attended for the first time on Monday since joining it, as fundamentally anti-Israeli.

In a report that also condemns Hamas in Gaza for failing to halt rocket fire and take action against the perpetrators, the Goldstone panel accuses Israel of failing to investigate war crimes against international law in an operation in which 1,400 Palestinians were killed.

He urged the UN Security Council "as soon as possible" to establish a committee to determine whether, after a period of six months, Israel had pursued adequate investigations into alleged war crimes. He said Israeli probes so far had relied on the testimony of soldiers rather than victims and had been held in secret.

Separately, George Mitchell, US envoy to the Middle East, will continue talks on Wednesday with Benjamin Netanyahu, Israeli premier, to try to wrap up a deal to freeze Jewish settlement activity as a step to renewing the Middle East peace process.

FT.com

The attached photo is from the slideshow entitled "Fervent Believers" which accompanies this New York Times article:







The photo captions reads:

A settler tosses wine at a Palestinian woman on Shuhada Street in Hebron. The approach of some settlers towards neighboring Palestinians, especially around Nablus in the north and Hebron in the south, has often been one of contempt and violence. Photo: Rina Castelnuovo for The New York Times

these are the pics i clicked on my recent trip to kerala, a place they call god's own country.

these are the pics i clicked on my recent trip to kerala, a place they call god's own country.

these are the pics i clicked on my recent trip to kerala, a place they call god's own country.

by Lina Al Sharif.

This is something I’ve been feeling so significantly the past week. It’s the feeling of dehumanized or the feeling that life is not meant for us, the Palestinians. Even though I fight this feeling with all of my power, yet sometimes it prevails, because I don’t find an escape. In other words, my strength can’t protect my vulnerability; I find myself in need to feel weak, so I can feel my strength again.

Well, smallthings are always more significant than say wars or assaults.
Getting to explanations, the electricity in Gaza has been nothing but horrible since the start of this summer. It’s cut for almost 8 hours and mostly when it’s required. I think when you wake up at 8 am hopping to have a productive day then the very next moment it’s cut till 4 in the evening, you find yourself like…ok, now what? Go back to sleep! I use my computer for educational purposes. I’ll still live if I don’t use it for 8 hours. But now almost every single institution & society uses computers and depends on them for work. No electricity, no work!
Moreover, it’s July, the summer has not been hotter here in Gaza.
You may want to argue that these are tolerable troubles and after all you still get 16 hours of electricity!! Why all this drama?
Well here’s something, have you ever thought about not having electricity for 8 hours? Something the world takes for granted, like the electricity. To us ,Gazans, it is somethig when we have it for 24 hours.
So isn’t enough to feel dehumanized?

Another thing, summer time to many people is a time when you travel & chill out to put behind you all the year’s stress so you can have energy to start over. Well in Gaza, it’s yet another season. In this regard, I don’t feel bad for myself, as much as I feel bad for my parents; they work hard all the year. They deserve a break. My mum has not seen her mum for 5 years. Grandma lives in Jordan.
As a matter of fact, it’s impossible for us ,Gazans, to visit Jordan, because we’re not given visas.
Moreover, Rafah crossing opens 3 days each 3 months and conditionally; that is only for those who are severely sick, students ,and not Gaza residents. Plus, if you go out of Gaza, you won’t have a specific date or even an estimated period for how long you’ll be out. Not forgetting, the way people get humiliated by the Egyptian police on the terminal. So why the drama, the humiliation why to travel unless you were dying?! Again is that something you’ve ever thought of? It’s another thing the world takes for granted while to us, Gazans, is a means of last resort.

Last, the food we eat and the things we buy. I think that more than 80% of the goods you find in the supermarkets are smuggled. When you go to Al-Qishawai, one of Gaza’s biggest supermarkets, you find most of the goods there are smuggled from Egypt. One may ask what gives it away? Well you have to wash the Coca Cola can before you drink it, because it is so much like it was buried in the sand, and then hit by rocks then exposed to the sea that it got rusted. Another thing caught my attention how the box of tea bags is full of sand, because it’s smuggled.
The siege which has been imposed on Gaza for more than two years now does not mean to hunger the Gazans; it wants us to feel dehumanized! Something like, see even the food you eat is not clean, because you don’t deserve one. You don’t get to travel, because you don’t deserve it. You don’t get electricity for 24 hours, because you don’t deserve that either. These things are for human not Gazas humans.

Life is difficult in Gaza. All the people are suffering this dehumanization.
For how long? I don’t know.
Things don’t seem to get better. It’s only getting worse and worse! There’s no room for hope or anything that prompts it.
However, the only thing that makes me feel good in the end of the day despite the annoyance and frustration prompted by feeling dehumanized,is that I am not distracted to what is important, to what the Palestinian issue is all about; struggle for freedom ,dignity ,and justice.
In fact,I am in pain for the siege but not only for that. I am in pain for the constant confiscation for the lands in the West bank by the Israeli settlers. Moreover, I am in pain for the house demolitions in Al-Quds. I am in pain for not being able to visit Al-Aqsa even it’s only 2 hours or less far away from where I am. Maybe this pain is the only thing left for me to have hope. In fact, it is the only thing left. Till this hopeful pain turns to freedom we aspire, I am letting my strength protect my vulnerability.

Lina is a student at the Islamic University of Gaza and an active blogger. She could be reached www.livefromgaza.wordpress.com

by Hannah Mermelstein

"The war is with the Arabs."

I saw this sign as I was entering Nablus last week, again on my way to Ramallah, and again near Bethlehem. The phrase is printed in Hebrew, presumably by Israeli settlers, on huge signs throughout the West Bank. Israeli racism rarely shocks me anymore, but its blatant display still makes me stop and catch my breath as I translate it into other contexts. Imagine driving through the middle of a predominantly black neighborhood in a US city or town and seeing a humongous sign that says, "The war is with the Blacks."

I think about security. Israel's abuse of the word has rendered the concept almost meaningless in the region, but the importance of security on individual and communal levels cannot be underestimated. However, most discussions I see in the media about security ignore the Palestinian people's right to security. "The war is with the Arabs" is a new sign, as far as I know, but for years in the West Bank I have seen stars of David scrawled on Palestinian shops and homes, and signs like "Death to Arabs" and "Kahane was right" (Kahane was an extremist political leader who promoted ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people; this sign is essentially equivalent to "Hitler was right" in the middle of a Jewish neighborhood).

But signs are not only created; they are also destroyed. Since 1948, Palestinian people inside Israel have experienced erasure and denial of their identities that is perhaps stronger than that of any other group of Palestinian people. I visited a friend in Lyd last week who lives on Giborai Yisrael ("Heroes of Israel") Street. Driving around the Palestinian neighborhoods in Lyd, we passed roads bearing the names of Herzl, Jabotinsky, and other Zionist leaders. None of the old Arabic street names remain. Even the large cities with considerable Palestinian populations are now seeing the Arabic names officially erased from the signs. In Arabic script, "Yaffa" will become "Yafo," "Nasra" will become "Natzeret," and "Al Quds" will become "Yerushalayim."

Lack of security goes beyond denial of identity and history as visually expressed through signs. A Palestinian friend with Israeli citizenship told me he has heard a rumor that a huge piece of land in Jordan is being cleared and built up for the eventual arrival of the Palestinian population of Israel after they are transferred from their homes. "It may be conspiracy theory," he said, "but I don't know."

"I'd like to think that Israel couldn't get away with that," I responded.

"Of course they can," another friend from Lyd said, "and if the conditions are right, they will."

Imagine living day to day thinking you might be expelled from your country in the near future. Or in Gaza, wondering if you will be killed tomorrow, or if you will ever be able to come in and out of your country at will. Or in the West Bank, if your son will be arrested, or if you will be able to get through the checkpoint in the morning to get to work. Or in Jerusalem, if your residency will be stripped or your house destroyed.

Imagine little correlation between choice and consequence, an arbitrary relationship between cause and effect. If you are just as likely to get shot and killed sipping tea in your doorway, or sitting in your fourth grade classroom, or participating in a demonstration, or joining the armed resistance, is it any surprise that some choose each?

A friend of mine from the West Bank once told me that she never feels safe, so safety is not a consideration for her in making decisions. As much as I may try, I cannot truly imagine this lack of control.

I met a woman in Jerusalem who was displaced from her home by settlers, physically removed from her house by dozens of Israeli soldiers in the middle of the night. Twice a refugee (1948 and 2008), Um Kamel currently lives in a tent near her house that has been destroyed and re-pitched six times in the past six months. This is perhaps the height of insecurity, and yet Um Kamel stays strong and determined. Many in Palestine would call it sumoud, or steadfastness.

This kind of strength is seen remarkably often in Palestine, and indicates a deeper security that comes in part from faith. Faith in God, sometimes, but also faith in each other, in the justice of one's cause, in the tide of history that has shown that no single occupation in Palestine lasts forever. This, of course, is also Israel's deepest fear. That no matter how many walls they build, how many people they imprison, how many homes they destroy, how many signs they erase, and how many people they expel, true security will remain elusive, and eventually, Zionism will fail. As many older Palestinian people have said to me, with security, "We have lived through many occupations. This too shall pass."

Hannah Mermelstein is a co-founder of Birthright Unplugged and lives in Boston, Philadelphia and Ramallah.

This appeared in www.sabbah.biz

Israel's attempt to legislate loyalty to the Jewish state is proof of the failure of the Zionist/colonial project of Israelification.

by Azmi Bishara

What is behind the latest wave of legislative proposals flooding the Knesset agenda? I refer specifically to those intended to curb manifestations of Palestinian patriotism and to restrict the political activity of Arab Israelis.

The aim of these laws is to impose the Israeli nationalist creed by coercion. It's really that simple. Over the last decade, the Knesset has experienced several bursts of legislative activity seeking to restrict freedom of opinion and expression on the questions of the Jewishness of the state and the right to resist occupation. The advocates of these laws are indefatigable. If the proposals fail to pass through any of the necessary stages, they are resubmitted over and over again in the hope of wearing out their opponents.

Is Israel really heading towards fascism? Is its vaunted democracy on the wane? Or, I suppose, we could rephrase these questions as follows: Was Israel more democratic at some point of time than it is today and are liberal civic rights in that country being beaten back after having thrived at that particular point of time? What exactly is going on?

I would say that two developments are unfolding in tandem. On the one hand, Israel is experiencing a deepening of and expansion in the concept and exercise of liberal political and economic civil rights (for Jewish citizens). At the same time, there is an upsurge in ultranationalist and right-wing religious extremism accompanied by flagrant manifestations of anti-Arab racism. As a consequence, the Jewish citizen endowed with fuller civil rights (than those that had existed in earlier phases when Zionist society was organised along the lines of a militarised quasi- socialist settler drive) is simultaneously an individual who is more exposed to and influenced by right-wing anti-Arab invective.

The contention that Israel had at one point been more democratic and is now sliding into fascism is fallacious. It brings to mind our protest demonstrations in the 1970s and the earnest zeal with which we chanted, "Fascism will not survive!" Our slogans were inspired by the Spanish left before the civil war in Spain and by the Italian left in the 1930s. But, in fact, the context was entirely different. Israel was the product of a colonialist settler drive that came, settled and survived. Fascism is a very specific form of rule, one that does not necessarily have to exist in a militarised settler society that founded itself on top of the ruins of an indigenous people. Indeed, that society organised itself along pluralistic democratic lines and it was unified on a set of fundamental principles and values as a basis for societal consensus. As militarist values figured prime among them, there was no need for a fascist coup to impose them. Even Sharon, who, from the perspective of the Israeli left, seemed poised to lead a fascist coup was one of the most ardent advocates of women's rights during his rule. He also proved one of the more determined proponents of implementing the rulings of the Israeli Supreme Court, which is a relatively liberal body in the context of the Zionist political spectrum and within the constraints of Zionist conceptual premises. Israel has grown neither more nor less democratic. The scope of civil rights has expanded, as has the tide of right-wing racism against the Arabs.

Among the Arabs in Israel there have also been two tandem developments. The first is an increasing awareness of the rights of citizenship and civil liberties after a long period of living in fear of military rule and the Israeli security agencies, and in isolation from the Arab world. That period was also characterised by attempts to prove their loyalty to the state by dedicating themselves to the service of the daily struggle for material survival and progress in routine civic affairs. At the same time, however, the forces of increasing levels of education, the growth of a middle class, the progress of the Palestinian national movement abroad, the advances in communications technologies, the broadening organisational bonds among the Palestinians in Israel, and the cultural and commercial exchanges between them and the West Bank and Gaza combined to give impetus to a growing national awareness.

The Arab Israelis' growing awareness of rights has paved the way for an assimilation drive to demand equality in Israel as a Jewish state. Such a demand is inherently unrealisable, as it would inevitably entail forsaking Palestinian national identity without obtaining true equality. Instead of assimilation there would only be further marginalisation. However, this danger still looms; there are Arab political circles in Israel that are convinced that this is the way forward. At the same time, there is the danger that truly nationalist forces could lose their connection with the realities of Palestinians' civil life, by stressing their national identity exclusively with no reference to their citizenship or civil rights, or the conditions of their lives. This tendency threatens to isolate the nationalist movement from its grassroots, and this danger, too, persists although to a lesser extent.

The flurry of loyalty bills and the like reflects another phenomenon that has taken root among Arabs in Israel and that the Israeli establishment regards as a looming peril. This peril, from the Israeli perspective, is twofold. Not only can Palestinians exercise their civil rights in order to fight for equality, they can also take advantage of their civil rights in order to express and raise awareness of their national identity by, for example, commemorating the Nakba and establishing closer contact with the Arab world. Commemorating the Nakba — the anniversary of the creation of the state of Israel and the consequent displacement and dispossession of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians — is a relatively new practice for Arabs inside Israel, dating only to the mid-1990s. Before this — until at least the end of the 1970s, before the spread of national awareness gained impetus among Arabs inside Israel — many of them participated in the celebrations of Israel's independence day and offered their congratulations to Israelis on the occasion. There were no laws against commemorating Nakba Day, not because Israel was more democratic but merely because there was no need for such laws in the eyes of the Israeli establishment, since the Arabs were not commemorating it anyway. In fact, open demonstrations of disloyalty to the state as a Zionist entity were very rare.

But since that time, change did not affect Israel alone. The political culture of broad swathes of Arabs inside that country shifted towards more open expressions of their national identity. To them, there is no contradiction between this and the exercise of their civil rights. Indeed, they felt it their natural right to use the civil liberties with which they are endowed by virtue of their citizenship to engage in forms of political expression that the Israeli establishment regards as contradictory to its concept of citizenship. Naturally, the clash became more pronounced with the growing stridency of right-wing Zionist racism.

The citizenship of Arabs inside Israel has a distinct quality that I have been attempting to underscore for years. Theirs does not stem from ideological conviction or the exercise of the Zionist law of return. Nor is their situation similar to migrant labour or minorities who have chosen to immigrate to the country and who accommodate to the status quo, as is the case with immigrant communities in the US or France, for example. Their citizenship stems from the reality of their having remained in the country after it was occupied. They are the indigenous people. It is not their duty to assimilate to the Zionist character of the state and the attempt to transform them into patriotic Israelis is an attempt to falsify history, to distort their cultural persona and fragment their moral cohesion. A Palestinian Arab who regards himself as an Israeli patriot is nought. He is someone who has accepted to be something less than a citizen and less than a Palestinian and who simultaneously identifies with those who have occupied Palestinian lands and repressed and expelled his people.

It is impossible, here, to examine all facets of the phenomenon, but we should also touch upon a third trend, which is the growing degree of showmanship, sensationalism and catering to the forces of popular demand on the part of Knesset members. This trend is to be found in all parliamentary systems since television cameras made their way into parliamentary chambers. Parliament has become a theatre and a large proportion of MPs have become comedians or soap opera stars, depending on their particular gifts and/or circumstances. However, when the favourite drama or comedy theme is incitement against the Arabs, this can only signify that anti-Arab prejudices, fear mongering, abuse and intimidation are spreading like wildfire. This is the very dangerous and not at all funny part about the parliamentary circus. And it's going to get grimmer yet for Arabs in Israel.

In the Obama era, following the failure of Bush's policies, the Israeli government will be directing the venom of its right-wing racist coalition against East Jerusalem and Israeli Arabs. After all, it will be easier to focus on domestic matters, such as emphasis on the Jewishness of the state, than on settlements in the occupied territories. Some of the proposed loyalty laws, such as that which would sentence to prison anyone who does not agree to the Jewishness of the state, will have a tough time making it through the legislative process. However, merely by submitting the proposal, the racist MK will have killed two birds with one stone: he will have made a dramatic appearance before the cameras so that his constituents will remember his name come next elections, and he will have stoked the fires of anti-Arab hatred. Other laws may stand a better chance. The proposal to ban the commemoration of Nakba Day could pass like the law prohibiting the raising of the Palestinian flag, or it could fail because even on the right there are those who object to such a ban. It is also doubtful that this country could promulgate a law compelling people to swear an oath of allegiance, because the intended targets are not immigrants but citizens by birth. It would require quite a feat of constitutional re-engineering in order to render citizenship acquired by birth subject to a loyalty oath at some later phase in a person's life.

Naturally, no state, however totalitarian it may be, can impose love and loyalty for it by force, let alone a colonialist state that would like to force this on the indigenous inhabitants it had reduced to a minority on their own land. Certainly it would be much easier for Israel to prohibit manifestations of disloyalty than to legislate for forced manifestations of loyalty.

For many years I've been advocating a Palestinian interpretation of citizenship in Israel that Israel continues to reject, with consequences to myself that readers may well be aware of. According to this interpretation, the Palestinian Israeli effectively tells the ruling authorities, "My loyalty does not go beyond the bounds of being a law abiding citizen who pays his taxes and the like. As for my keeping in touch with Palestinian history and with the Arab world in matters that should be inter-Arab, such things should not have to pass via you or require your approval." Such talk was previously unheard of in Israel and it came as quite a shock to the ears of interlocutors used to liberal-sounding references to "our Arab citizens" who serve as "a bridge of peace" and proof of "the power of Israeli democracy". Rejecting such condescension, the new type of Palestinian says, "My Palestinianness existed before your state was created on top of the ruins of my people. Citizenship is a compromise I have accepted in order to be able to go on living here in my land. It is not a favour that you bestow on me with strings attached."

Apparently, more and more Arab citizens have come around to this attitude, to the extent that Israel has begun to realise that the material exigencies of life or gradual acclimatisation to Israeli ways and political realities will not be able to stop the trend. It has come to believe that only new laws will bring a halt to what it regards as dangerous manifestations of disloyalty. Such laws will be inherently oppressive but they will simultaneously pronounce the failure of Israelification.

Author's note: In his defence of the need for a law to punish with imprisonment those who refuse to recognise Israel as a Jewish state, MK Zevelun Orlev cited the "case of Azmi Bishara". According to this right-wing lawmaker, "this case" began when Bishara refused to recognise the state verbally, after which he proceeded to visit "the countries of the enemy" without permission and to "abet the enemy" in time of war. Naturally, the accusations are groundless. Azmi Bishara did indeed visit Arab countries, openly and without permission, because he refuses to subordinate the relationship between himself, as an Arab, and the Arab world to Israeli authority. However, as an opposition Arab Knesset member, Bishara had no information to hand to an "enemy" or anyone else for that matter. Meanwhile, his ideas on politics and other matters are in the public domain, having been published and discussed in Israel and elsewhere. The allegation of abetting the enemy in time of war was merely a cover-up for a political witch-hunt. Its leaders are now trying to create legislation so they do not have to concoct security excuses in the future in order to suppress the advocates of opinions such as those Bishara expresses.

A special political vocabulary prevents us from being able to recognize what's going on in the Middle East.

By Saree Makdisi

On Sunday night, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a speech that — by categorically ruling out the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state — ought to have been seen as a mortal blow to the quest for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

On Monday morning, however, newspaper headlines across the United States announced that Netanyahu had endorsed the creation of a Palestinian state, and the White House welcomed the speech as "an important step forward."

Reality can be so easily stood on its head when it comes to Israel because the misreading of Israeli declarations is a long-established practice among commentators and journalists in the United States.

In fact, a special vocabulary has been developed for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the United States. It filters and structures the way in which developing stories are misread here, making it difficult for readers to fully grasp the nature of those stories — and maybe even for journalists to think critically about what they write.

The ultimate effect of this special vocabulary is to make it possible for Americans to accept and even endorse in Israel what they would reject out of hand in any other country.

Let me give a classic example.

In the U.S., discussion of Palestinian politicians and political movements often relies on a spectrum running from "extreme" to "moderate." The latter sounds appealing; the former clearly applies to those who must be — must they not? — beyond the pale. But hardly anyone relying on such terms pauses to ask what they mean. According to whose standard are these manifestly subjective labels assigned?

Meanwhile, Israeli politicians are labeled according to an altogether different standard: They are "doves" or "hawks." Unlike the terms reserved for Palestinians, there's nothing inherently negative about either of those avian terms.

So why is no Palestinian leader referred to here as a "hawk"? Why are Israeli politicians rarely labeled "extremists"? Or, for that matter, "militants"?

There are countless other examples of these linguistic double standards. American media outlets routinely use the deracinating and deliberately obfuscating term "Israeli Arabs" to refer to the Palestinian citizens of Israel, despite the fact that they call themselves — and are — Palestinian.

Similarly, Israeli housing units built in the occupied territories in contravention of international law are always called "settlements" or even "neighborhoods" rather than what they are: "colonies." That word may be harsh on the ears, but it's far more accurate ("a body of people who settle in a new locality, forming a community subject to or connected with their parent state").

These subtle distinctions make a huge difference. Unconsciously absorbed, such terms frame the way people and events are viewed. When it comes to Israel, we seem to reach for a dictionary that applies to no one else, to give a pass to actions or statements that would be condemned in any other quarter.

That's what allowed Netanyahu to be congratulated for endorsing a Palestinian "state," even though the kind of entity he said Palestinians might — possibly — be allowed to have would be nothing of the kind.

Look up the word "state" in the dictionary. You'll probably see references to territorial integrity, power and sovereignty. The entity that Netanyahu was talking about on Sunday would lack all of those constitutive features. A "state" without a defined territory that is not allowed to control its own borders or airspace and cannot enter into treaties with other states is not a state, any more than an apple is an orange or a car an airplane. So how can leading American newspapers say "Israeli Premier Backs State for Palestinians," as the New York Times had it? Or "Netanyahu relents on goal of two states," as this paper put it?

Because a different vocabulary applies.

Which is also what kept Netanyahu's most extraordinary demand in Sunday night's speech from raising eyebrows here.

"The truth," he said, "is that in the area of our homeland, in the heart of our Jewish homeland, now lives a large population of Palestinians."

In other words, as Netanyahu repeatedly said, there is a Jewish people; it has a homeland and hence a state. As for the Palestinians, they are a collection — not even a group — of trespassers on Jewish land. Netanyahu, of course, dismisses the fact that they have a centuries-old competing narrative of home attached to the same land, a narrative worthy of recognition by Israel.

On the contrary: The Palestinians must, he said, accept that Israel is the state of the Jewish people (this is a relatively new Israeli demand, incidentally), and they must do so on the understanding that they are not entitled to the same rights. "We" are a people, Netanyahu was saying; "they" are merely a "population." "We" have a right to a state — a real state. "They" do not.

And the spokesman for our African American president calls this "an important step forward"?

In any other situation — including our own country — such a brutally naked contrast between those who are taken to have inherent rights and those who do not would immediately be labeled as racist. Netanyahu, though, is given a pass, not because most Americans would knowingly endorse racism but because, in this case, a special political vocabulary kicks in that prevents them from being able to recognize it for exactly what it is.

Saree Makdisi is a professor of English and comparative literature at UCLA. He is the author of, among other books, "Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation."

Tehran Times, April 15, 2009
Q: Professor Chomsky, you have stated several times that most of the countries of the world, including the members of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), support Iran's efforts to develop its civilian nuclear energy program, but some voices in the United States are still making hawkish comments. Why is that the case?

A: Not only the Non-Aligned Movement, but also the large majority of Americans believe that Iran has the right to develop nuclear energy. But almost no one in the U.S. is aware of this. That includes those who are polled, and probably think they are the only ones who hold these beliefs. Nothing is ever published about it. What appears in the media, constantly, is that the "international community" demands that Iran stop uranium enrichment. Almost nowhere is it brought out that the term "international community" is used conventionally to refer to Washington and whoever happens to go along with it, not just on this issue, but quite generally.

Q: The U.S. government is clearly practicing double standards in its foreign policy. While supporting Israel's right to possess a nuclear arsenal, the U.S. is relentlessly pressuring Iran to halt its civilian nuclear program. What are your views on this? And does the International Atomic Energy Agency have the authority to investigate Israel's nuclear weapons program?

A: The basic point was explained very candidly by Henry Kissinger. He was asked by the Washington Post why he now claims that Iran does not need nuclear energy so it must be working on building a bomb, while in the 1970s he insisted forcefully that Iran needs nuclear energy and the U.S. must provide the shah with the means to develop it. His answer was pure Kissinger: "They were an allied country" so they needed nuclear energy. Now they are not an ally, so they do not need nuclear energy. As for Israel, it is an ally, more accurately a client state. So they inherit from the master the right to do as they please.

The IAEA has the authority, but the U.S. would never permit them to exercise it. The new U.S. administration has given no indication that it is any different.

Q: Four sovereign states possess nuclear weapons outside the framework of the NPT. Three never joined the NPT and the fourth withdrew from the treaty. Could Iran eliminate the endless pressure being imposed on it by withdrawing from the NPT?

A: No, that would simply escalate the pressures. Apart from North Korea, all of these countries receive extensive U.S. support. The Reagan administration pretended it did not know that its ally Pakistan was developing nuclear weapons, so that the dictatorship could receive massive U.S. aid. The U.S. has agreed to assist India in developing its nuclear facilities, and Israel is a special case.

Q: What are the obstacles blocking the establishment of direct talks between Iran and the U.S.? Does the Israeli lobby really have such a great influence over the U.S. corporatocracy?

A: The Israeli lobby has some influence, but it is limited. That was demonstrated in the case of Iran, once again, last summer, during the presidential campaign, the time when the influence of lobbies is at its peak. The Israeli lobby wanted Congress to pass legislation that came close to calling for a blockade of Iran, an act of war. The measure gained considerable support, but then suddenly disappeared, probably because the White House made it clear, quietly, that it was opposed.

As for the actual factors, we do not yet have adequate internal records, so it is necessary to speculate. We do know that a large majority of Americans want to have normal relations with Iran, but public opinion rarely influences policy. Major U.S. corporations, including the powerful energy corporations, would like to be able to exploit Iran's petroleum resources. But the state insists otherwise. I presume that the main reason is that Iran is just too independent and disobedient. Great powers do not tolerate that in what they take to be their domains, and the world's major energy-producing regions have long been considered the domain of the Anglo-American alliance, now with Britain reduced to junior partner.

Q: Do you believe we will see a tactical or systematic revision in the approach of the U.S. mainstream media toward Iran during Barack Obama's term in office? Will these media outlets stop their anti-Iranian propaganda?

A: The media generally adhere fairly closely to the general framework of state policy, though policies are sometimes criticized on tactical grounds. A lot, therefore, depends on the stand that the Obama administration will take.

Q: And finally, do you believe that the U.S. president should apologize for the United States' crimes against Iran over the past century, as Iran has asked?

A: I think that the powerful should always concede their crimes and apologize to the victims, in fact go much farther and provide reparations. Unfortunately, the world is largely governed by the maxim of Thucydides: the strong do as they wish, and the weak suffer as they must. Slowly, over time, the world is becoming more civilized, in general. But there is a long way to go.

Noam Chomsky
chomsky.info, June 7, 2009
The Obama-Netanyahu-Abbas meetings in May, followed by Obama's speech in Cairo, have been widely interpreted as a turning point in US Middle East policy, leading to consternation in some quarters, exuberance in others. Fairly typical is Middle East analyst Dan Fromkin of the Washington Post, who sees "signs Obama will promote a new regional peace initiative for the Middle East, much like the one championed by Jordan's King Abdullah... [and also] the first distinct signs that Obama is willing to play hardball with Israel." (WP, May 29). A closer look, however, suggests considerable caution.

King Abdullah insists that "There is no change to the Arab Peace Initiative, and there is no need to amend it. Any talk about amending it, is baseless" (AFP, May 16). Abbas, regularly described as the president of the Palestinian Authority (his term expired in January), firmly agrees. The Arab Peace Initiative reiterates the long-standing international consensus that Israel must withdraw to the international border, perhaps with "minor and mutual adjustments," to adopt official US terminology before it departed sharply from world opinion in 1971, endorsing Israel's rejection of peace with Egypt in favor of settlement expansion (in the northeast Sinai). Furthermore, the consensus calls for a Palestinian state to be established in Gaza and the West Bank after Israel's withdrawal. The Arab Initiative adds that the Arab states should then normalize relations with Israel.

The Initiative was later adopted by the Organization of Islamic States, including Iran (Akiva Eldar, Ha'aretz, June 1).

Obama has praised the Initiative and called on the Arab states to proceed to normalize relations with Israel. But he has so far scrupulously evaded the core of the proposal, thus implicitly maintaining the US rejectionist stand that has blocked a diplomatic settlement since the 1970s along with its Israeli client, in virtual isolation. There are no signs that Obama is willing even to consider the Arab Initiative, let alone "promote" it. That was underscored in Obama's much heralded address to the Muslim world in Cairo on June 4, to which I will return.

The US-Israel confrontation -- with Abbas on the sidelines -- turns on two phrases: "Palestinian state" and "natural growth of settlements." Let's consider these in turn.

Obama has indeed pronounced the words "Palestinian state," echoing Bush. In contrast, the (unrevised) 1999 platform of Israel's governing party, Netanyahu's Likud, "flatly rejects the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state west of the Jordan river." Nevertheless, it was Netanyahu's 1996 government that was the first to use the phrase. It agreed that Palestinians can call whatever fragments of Palestine are left to them "a state" if they like -- or they can call them "fried chicken" (David Bar- Illan, director of Communications and Policy Planning in the office of the Prime Minister; Interview, Palestine-Israel Journal, Summer/Autumn 1996).

The 1996 Netanyahu government's contemptuous reference to Palestinian aspirations was a shift towards accommodation in US-Israeli policy. As he left office shortly before, Shimon Peres forcefully declared that there will never be a Palestinian state (Amnon Barzilai, Ha'aretz, Oct 24, 1995). Peres was reaffirming the official 1989 position of the US (Bush-Baker) and the Israeli coalition government (Shamir-Peres) that there can be no "additional Palestinian state" between Israel and Jordan -- the latter declared to be a Palestinian state by US-Israeli fiat. In the Peres-Shamir-Baker plan, barely reported (if at all) in the US, the fate of the occupied territories was to be settled in terms of the guidelines established by the government of Israel, and Palestinians were permitted to take part in negotiations only if they accepted these guidelines, which rule out Palestinian national rights.

Contrary to much misunderstanding, the Oslo agreements of September 1993 -- the "Day of Awe," as the press described it -- changed little in this regard. The Declaration of Principles accepted by all participants established that the end point of the process would be realization of the goals of UN 242, which accords no rights to Palestinians. And by then, the US had withdrawn its earlier interpretation of 242 as requiring Israeli withdrawal from the territories conquered in 1967, leaving the matter open.

The Peres-Shamir-Baker declarations of 1989 were in response to the official Palestinian acceptance of the international consensus on a two-state solution in 1988. That proposal was first formally enunciated in 1976 in a Security Council resolution introduced by the major Arab states with the tacit support of the PLO, vetoed by the US (again in 1980). Since then US-Israeli rejectionism has persisted unchanged, with one brief but significant exception, in President Clinton's final month in office.

Clinton recognized that the terms he had offered at the failed 2000 Camp David meetings were not acceptable to any Palestinians, and in December, proposed his "parameters," inexplicit but more forthcoming. He then announced that both sides had accepted the parameters, though both had reservations. Israeli and Palestinian negotiators met in Taba Egypt to iron out the differences, and made considerable progress. A full resolution could have been reached in a few more days, they announced in their final joint press conference. But Israel called off the negotiations prematurely, and they have not been formally resumed.

The single exception suggests that if an American president were willing to tolerate a meaningful diplomatic settlement, it might very well be reached.

The facts are well documented in Hebrew and English sources (for review, see Chomsky, Failed States). But like much of the relevant history, they are regularly reshaped to suit doctrinal needs; for example by Jeffrey Goldberg, who writes that "By December of 2000, Israel had accepted President Bill Clinton's `parameters,' offering the Palestinians all of the Gaza Strip, 94 percent to 96 percent of the West Bank and sovereignty over Arab areas of East Jerusalem. Arafat again rejected the deal" (NYT, May 24). That is a convenient tale, false or seriously misleading in all particulars, and another useful contribution to US-Israeli rejectionism.

Returning to the phrase "Palestinian state," the crucial question on the US side is whether Obama means the international consensus or "fried chicken." So far that remains unanswered, except by studious omission, and -- crucially -- by Washington's steady funding of Israel's programs of settlement and development in the West Bank. All of these programs violate international law, as Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan conceded in 1967 and as has been reaffirmed by the Security Council and the World Court. Probably Netanyahu would still accept his 1996 position.

The contours of "fried chicken" are being carved into the landscape daily by US-backed Israeli programs. The general goals were outlined by Prime Minister Olmert in May 2006 in his "Convergence program," later expanded to "Convergence plus." Under "Convergence," Israel was to take over the territory within the illegal "separation wall" along with the Jordan Valley, thus imprisoning what is left, which is broken into cantons by several salients extending to the East. Israel also takes over Greater Jerusalem, the site of most of its current construction projects, driving out many Arabs. These Jerusalem projects not only violate international law, as do all the others, but also Security Council resolutions (at the time, still backed by the US).

The plans being executed right now are designed to leave Israel in control of the most valuable land in the West Bank, with Palestinians confined to unviable fragments, all separated from Jerusalem, the traditional center of Palestinian life. The "separation wall" also establishes Israeli control of the West Bank aquifer. Hence Israel will be able to continue to ensure that Palestinians receive one-fourth as much water as Israelis, as the World Bank reported in April, in some cases below minimum recommended levels. In the other part of Palestine, Gaza, regular Israeli bombardment and the cruel siege reduce consumption far below.

Obama continues to support all of these programs, and has even called for substantially increasing military aid to Israel for an unprecedented ten years (Stephen Zunes, Foreign Policy in Focus, March 4). It appears, then, that Palestinians may be offered fried chicken, but nothing more. Israel's forced separation of Gaza from the West Bank since 1991, intensified with US support after a free election in January 2006 came out "the wrong way," has also been studiously ignored in Obama's "new initiative," thus further undermining prospects for any viable Palestinian state.

Gaza's forced separation from Palestine, and its miserable condition, have been almost entirely consigned to oblivion, an atrocity to which we should not contribute by tacit consent. Israeli journalist Amira Hass, one of the leading specialists on Gaza writes that "The restrictions on Palestinian movement that Israel introduced in January 1991 reversed a process that had been initiated in June 1967. Back then, and for the first time since 1948, a large portion of the Palestinian people again lived in the open territory of a single country--to be sure, one that was occupied, but was nevertheless whole... The total separation of the Gaza Strip from the West Bank is one of the greatest achievements of Israeli politics, whose overarching objective is to prevent a solution based on international decisions and understandings and instead dictate an arrangement based on Israel's military superiority... Since January 1991, Israel has bureaucratically and logistically merely perfected the split and the separation: not only between Palestinians in the occupied territories and their brothers in Israel, but also between the Palestinian residents of Jerusalem and those in the rest of the territories and between Gazans and West Bankers/Jerusalemites. Jews live in this same piece of land within a superior and separate system of privileges, laws, services, physical infrastructure and freedom of movement" (April 24, BitterLemons.org).

The leading academic specialist on Gaza, Sara Roy, adds that "Gaza is an example of a society that has been deliberately reduced to a state of abject destitution, its once productive population transformed into one of aid-dependent paupers...Gaza's subjection began long before Israel's recent war against it. The Israeli occupation--now largely forgotten or denied by the international community--has devastated Gaza's economy and people, especially since 2006... After Israel's December [2008] assault, Gaza's already compromised conditions have become virtually unlivable. Livelihoods, homes, and public infrastructure have been damaged or destroyed on a scale that even the Israel Defense Forces admitted was indefensible. In Gaza today, there is no private sector to speak of and no industry. 80 percent of Gaza's agricultural crops were destroyed and Israel continues to snipe at farmers attempting to plant and tend fields near the well-fenced and patrolled border. Most productive activity has been extinguished... Today, 96 percent of Gaza's population of 1.4 million is dependent on humanitarian aid for basic needs. According to the World Food Programme, the Gaza Strip requires a minimum of 400 trucks of food every day just to meet the basic nutritional needs of the population. Yet, despite a 22 March decision by the Israeli cabinet to lift all restrictions on foodstuffs entering Gaza, only 653 trucks of food and other supplies were allowed entry during the week of May 10, at best meeting 23 percent of required need.. Israel now allows only 30 to 40 commercial items to enter Gaza compared to 4,000 approved products prior to June 2006." (Harvard Crimson, June 2, 2009).

It cannot be too often stressed that Israel had no credible pretext for its December attack on Gaza, with full US support and illegally using US weapons. Near-universal opinion asserts the contrary, claiming that that Israel was acting in self-defense. That is utterly unsustainable, in light of Israel's flat rejection of peaceful means that were readily available (see Chomsky, "Exterminate all the Brutes," updated footnoted version at www.chomsky.info). That aside, Israel's siege of Gaza is itself an act of war, as Israel of all countries certainly recognizes, having repeatedly justified launching major wars on grounds of partial restrictions on its access to the outside world.

One crucial element of Israel's siege, little reported, is the naval blockade. Peter Beaumont reports from Gaza that "On its coastal littoral, Gaza's limitations are marked by a different fence where the bars are Israeli gunboats with their huge wakes, scurrying beyond the Palestinian fishing boats and preventing them from going outside a zone imposed by the warships." (Guardian, 27 May). According to reports from the scene, the naval siege has been tightened steadily since 2000. Fishing boats have been driven steadily out of Gaza's territorial waters and towards the shore by Israeli gunboats, often violently without warning and with many casualties. As a result of these naval actions, Gaza's fishing industry has virtually collapsed; fishing is impossible near shore because of the contamination caused by Israel's regular attacks, including the destruction of power plants and sewage facilities.

These Israeli naval attacks began shortly after the discovery by the British Gas group of what appear to be quite sizeable natural gas fields in Gaza's territorial waters. Industry journals report that Israel is already appropriating these Gazan resources for its own use, part of its commitment to shift its economy to natural gas. The standard source, Platt's Commodity News, reports (Feb. 3, 16) that "Israel's finance ministry has given the Israel Electric Corp. approval to purchase larger quantities of natural gas from BG than originally agreed upon, according to Israeli government sources [which] said the state-owned utility would be able to negotiate for as much as 1.5 billion cubic meters of natural gas from the Marine field located off the Mediterranean coast of the Palestinian controlled Gaza Strip. Last year the Israeli government approved the purchase of 800 million cubic meters of gas from the field by the IEC.... Recently the Israeli government changed its policy and decided the state-owned utility could buy the entire quantity of gas from the Gaza Marine field. Previously the government had said the IEC could buy half the total amount and the remainder would be bought by private power producers."

The pillage of what could become a major source of income for Palestine is surely known to US authorities. It is only reasonable to suppose that the intention to steal Palestine's limited resources is the motive for preventing Gaza fishing boats to enter Gaza's territorial waters. It would also not be a great surprise if we were to discover some day that the same intention was in the background of the criminal US-Israeli attack on Gaza in December 2008.

The restrictions on movement used to destroy Gaza have long been in force in the West Bank as well, with grim effects on life and the economy. The World Bank has just reported that Israel has established "a complex closure regime that restricts Palestinian access to large areas of the West Bank... The Palestinian economy has remained stagnant, largely because of the sharp downturn in Gaza and Israel's continued restrictions on Palestinian trade and movement in the West Bank." The Bank "cited Israeli roadblocks and checkpoints hindering trade and travel, as well as restrictions on Palestinian building in the West Bank, where the Western-backed government of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas holds sway" (AP; Avi Issacharoff, Ha'aretz; May 6).

All of this constitutes what Israeli activist Jeff Halper calls a "matrix of control" to subdue the colonized population, in pursuit of Defense Minister Moshe Dayan's recommendation to his colleagues shortly after the 1967 conquests that we must tell the Palestinians in the territories that "we have no solution, you shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wishes may leave, and we will see where this process leads" (Yossi Beilin, Mehiro shel Ihud, 42).

Turning to the second bone of contention, settlements, there is indeed a confrontation, but it may again be less dramatic than portrayed. Washington's position was presented most strongly in Hilary Clinton's much-quoted statement rejecting "natural growth exceptions" to the policy opposing new settlements. Netanyahu, along with President Peres and in fact virtually the whole Israeli political spectrum, insists on permitting "natural growth" within the areas that Israel intends to annex, complaining that the US is backing down on Bush's authorization of such expansion within his "vision" of a Palestinian state.

Senior Netanyahu cabinet members have gone further. Minister Yisrael Katz announced that "the current Israeli government will not accept in any way the freezing of legal settlement activity in Judea and Samaria." (Ha'aretz, May 31). The term "legal" in US-Israeli parlance means "illegal, but authorized by the government of Israel." In this usage, unauthorized outposts are termed "illegal," though apart from the dictates of the powerful, they are no more illegal than the settlements granted to Israel under Bush's "vision."

The harsh Obama-Clinton formulation is not new. It repeats the wording of the 2003 Road Map, which stipulates that in Phase I, "Israel freezes all settlement activity (including natural growth of settlements)." All sides formally accept the Road Map -- consistently overlooking the fact that Israel, with US support, at once added 14 "reservations" that render it inoperable.

If Obama were serious about opposing settlement expansion, he could easily proceed with concrete measures, for example, by reducing US aid by the amount devoted to this purpose. That would hardly be a radical or courageous move. The Bush I administration did so (reducing loan guarantees), but after the Oslo accord in 1993, President Clinton left calculations to the government of Israel. Unsurprisingly,, there was "no change in the expenditures flowing to the settlements," the Israeli press reported: "[Prime Minister] Rabin will continue not to dry out the settlements," the report concludes. "And the Americans? They will understand" (Hadashot, Oct. 8; Yair Fidel, Hadashot Supplement, Oct. 29, 1993).

Obama administration officials informed the press that the Bush I measures are "not under discussion," and that pressures will be "largely symbolic" (Helene Cooper, NYT, June 1). In short, Obama "understands."

The US press reports that "A partial freeze has been in place for several years, but settlers have found ways around the strictures... construction in the settlements has slowed but never stopped, continuing at an annual rate of about 1,500 to 2,000 units over the past three years. If building continues at the 2008 rate, the 46,500 units already approved will be completed in about 20 years... If Israel built all the housing units already approved in the nation's overall master plan for settlements, it would almost double the number of settler homes in the West Bank" (Isabel Kirshner, NYT, June 2). The probable source, Peace Now, which monitors settlement activities, estimates further that the two largest settlements would double in size: Ariel and Ma'aleh Adumim, built mainly during the Oslo years in the salients that subdivide the West Bank into cantons.

"Natural population growth" is largely a myth, Israel's leading diplomatic correspondent, Akiva Eldar, points out, citing demographic studies by Col (res.) Shaul Arieli, deputy military secretary to former prime minister and incumbent defense minister Ehud Barak. Settlement growth consists largely of Israeli immigrants in violation of the Geneva Conventions, assisted with generous subsidies. Much of it is in direct violation of formal Government decisions, but carried out with the authorization of the Government, specifically Barak, considered a dove in the Israeli spectrum (Eldar, Ha'aretz, June 2).

Some deride the "long-dormant Palestinian fantasy," revived by Abbas, "that the United States will simply force Israel to make critical concessions, whether or not its democratic government agrees" (Jackson Diehl, WP, May 29). He does not explain whether refusal to participate in Israel's illegal expansion -- which, if serious, would "force Israel to make critical concessions" -- would be improper interference in Israel's democracy.

Diehl also refers to a recent Olmert peace plan of unprecedented generosity offered to Abbas, which he turned down, though it yielded just about everything to which Palestinians might reasonably aspire. Others have also confidently referred to this mysterious plan and its rejection by Abbas. Efforts to unearth the plan have so far been unavailing. The only sources detected in an assiduous search by David Peterson are comments by Palestinians in the Arab media that appear to be part of internal conflict about power sharing, not the usual source for Western commentators. Eliot Abrams dates the plan to January 2009 (WP, April 8, citing unspecified press reports, while also falsifying earlier plans for which records exist; June 3 response to query about his sources).

If there were any truth to this tale, one can be confident that it would be trumpeted by Israeli propaganda and its enthusiasts here, as a welcome demonstration that Palestinians simply will not accept peace, even the most moderate of them. It is highly dubious on other grounds. For one thing, Olmert was in no position to offer any credible proposal, having announced his resignation as he was facing indictment for serious corruption charges. The alleged plan is also hard to reconcile with the steady ongoing expansion of settlement under Olmert, vitiating even far less forthcoming offers.

Returning to reality, all of these discussions about settlement expansion evade the most crucial issue about settlements: what Israel has already established in the West Bank. The evasion tacitly concedes that the illegal settlement programs already in place are somehow acceptable (putting aside the Golan heights, annexed in violation of Security Council orders) -- though the Bush "vision," apparently accepted by Obama, moves from tacit to explicit. What is in place already suffices to ensure that there can be no viable Palestinian self-determination. Hence there is every indication that even on the unlikely assumption that "natural growth" will be ended, US-Israeli rejectionism will persist, blocking the international consensus as before.

It might be different if a legitimate "land swap" were under consideration, a solution approached at Taba and spelled out more fully in the Geneva Accord reached in informal high-level Israel-Palestine negotiations. The Accord was presented in Geneva in October 2003, welcomed by much of the world, rejected by Israel, and ignored by the US.

There is a "land swap" under consideration, but a radically different one. The ultra-right Israeli leader Avigdor Lieberman, now Foreign Minister, proposed to reduce the non-Jewish population of Israel by transferring concentrations of Israeli Arabs (specifically, Wadi Ara in the Galilee) to a derisory "Palestinian state" -- over the overwhelming opposition of the victims, to be sure. When first advanced, these ideas were denounced as virtually neo-Nazi -- which is a little odd; they were first proposed by Democratic Socialist political philosopher Michael Walzer, who wrote 30 years before Lieberman that those who are "marginal to the nation" (Palestinians) should be "helped to leave" in the interests of peace and justice. These ideas have now shifted to the political center in Israel, and are praised by New York Times Israel correspondent Ethan Bronner, who writes that the left likes Lieberman's "willingness to create two states, one Jewish, one Palestinian, which would involve yielding areas that are now part of Israel" in a land swap (NYT, Feb. 12) -- a polite way of saying that Israeli citizens of the wrong ethnicity will be transferred by force from a rich first world country to "fried chicken."

Obama's June 4 Cairo address to the Muslim world kept pretty much to his well-honed "blank slate" style -- saying very little of substance, but in a personable manner that allows listeners to write on the slate what they want to hear. CNN captured its spirit in headlining a report "Obama looks to reach the soul of the Muslim world." Obama had announced the goals of his address in an interview with NYT columnistThomas Friedman (June 3): "`We have a joke around the White House,' the president said. ÔWe're just going to keep on telling the truth until it stops working -- and nowhere is truth-telling more important than the Middle East'." The White House commitment is most welcome, but it is useful to see how it translates into practice.

Obama admonished his audience that it is easy to "point fingers... But if we see this conflict only from one side or the other, then we will be blind to the truth: the only resolution is for the aspirations of both sides to be met through two states, where Israelis and Palestinians each live in peace and security."

Turning to truth, there is a third side, with a decisive role throughout: the US. But that participant in the conflict is unmentioned. The omission is understood to be normal and appropriate, hence unmentioned: Friedman's column is headlined "Obama speech aimed at both Arabs and Israelis"; the front-page Wall St. Journal report on Obama's speech appears under the heading "Obama Chides Israel, Arabs In His Overture to Muslims." Other reports are the same. The convention is understandable on the doctrinal principle that though the US government sometimes makes "mistakes," its intentions are by definition benign. Washington has always sought desperately to be an honest broker, only yearning to advance peace and justice. The doctrine trumps truth, of which there is no hint in the speech or the mainstream coverage.

Obama once again echoed Bush's advocacy of two states, without saying what he means by the phrase "Palestinian state." His intentions are clarified not only by crucial omission, but also by his one explicit criticism of Israel: "The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. This construction violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace. It is time for these settlements to stop" (my emphasis). That is, Israel should live up to Phase I of the 2003 Road Map, though the truth is that Obama has ruled out even steps of the Bush I variety to withdraw from participation in these crimes.

The operative words are "legitimacy" and "continued." By omission, Obama indicates that he accepts Bush's "vision": the vast existing settlement project and infrastructure is "legitimate," thus ensuring that the phrase "Palestinian state" means "fried chicken."

Even-handed, Obama also had an admonition for the Arab States: they "must recognize that the Arab Peace Initiative was an important beginning, but not the end of their responsibilities." Plainly, it cannot be a meaningful "beginning" if Obama continues to reject its core principles: implementation of the international consensus. But to do so is evidently not Washington's "responsibility" in Obama's vision, presumably because the US has no responsibilities other than to persist in its traditional vocation of doing good.

On democracy, Obama said that "we would not presume to pick the outcome of a peaceful election" -- as in January 2006, when Washington turned at once to severe punishment of the Palestinians because it did not like the outcome of the peaceful election. Obama politely refrained from comment about his host, President Mubarak, one of the most brutal dictators in the region, though elsewhere he has had some illuminating words about him. As he was about to board the plane to Saudi Arabia and Egypt, the two "moderate" Arab states, "Mr. Obama signaled that while he would mention American concerns about human rights in Egypt, he would not challenge Mr. Mubarak too sharply, calling him a `force for stability and good' in the Middle East... Mr. Obama said he did not regard Mr. Mubarak as an authoritarian leader. `No, I tend not to use labels for folks,' Mr. Obama said. The president noted that there had been criticism `of the manner in which politics operates in Egypt,' but he also said that Mr. Mubarak had been `a stalwart ally, in many respects, to the United States'" (Jeff Zeleyna and Michael Slackman, NYT, June 4).

Obama also had observations on nuclear weapons, a matter of no slight significance in the light of his focus on Iran. Obama repeated his hope for their general abolition and called on all signers of the Non-Proliferation Treaty to abide by the responsibilities it imposes. His comments pointedly excluded Israel, which is not a signer of the NPT, along with India and Pakistan, all of them supported by the US in their development of nuclear weapons -- Pakistan particularly under Reagan, India under Bush II. India and Pakistan are now escalating their nuclear weapons programs to a level that is highly threatening (see, e.g., Jeffrey Smith and Joby Warrick, "Nuclear Aims By Pakistan, India Prompt U.S. Concern," WP, May 28, 2009). But our significant role in this confrontation confers no "responsibility."

Some who are placing their hopes in Obama have cited remarks of Assistant Secretary of State Rose Gottemoeller: "Universal adherence to the NPT itself - including by India, Israel, Pakistan and North Korea - also remains a fundamental objective of the United States." But the threat that her comment might mean something was quickly allayed by the report of a senior Israeli diplomat that Israel had received assurances that Obama "will not force Israel to state publicly whether it has nuclear weapons,... [but will] stick to a decades-old U.S. policy of `don't ask, don't tell'." And as the Institute for Public Accuracy was quick to remind us, the Bush administration had also adopted Gottemoeller's stand, calling for "universal adherence to the Non-Proliferation Treaty.(Julian Borger, Guardian, May 6. Reuters, May 21, http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSLL942309. http://www.accuracy.org/newsrelease.php?articleId=222.).

It appears, then, that "universality" applies to Iran's alleged programs, but not to the actual ones of US allies and clients -- not to speak of Washington's own obligations under the NPT.

With regard to Iran's nuclear programs, Obama chose his words carefully. He said that "any nation -- including Iran -- should have the right to access peaceful nuclear power if it complies with its responsibilities under the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty." His words again reiterate the Bush administration's position: it too held that Iran could "access peaceful nuclear power." But the contentious issue has been whether Iran has the rights guaranteed to signers of the NPT under Article IV: "Nothing in this Treaty shall be interpreted as affecting the inalienable right of all the Parties to the Treaty to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes without discrimination and in conformity with Articles I and II of this Treaty," which refer to nuclear weapons. There is a considerable difference between research and production, as Article IV permits, and "access," which Bush and Obama are willing to permit, meaning access from the outside. That has been the heart of the dispute, and remains so. The Non-aligned Movement, most of the world's states, has forcefully affirmed Iran's position (which is also supported by the majority of Americans). The "international community" -- a technical term referring to Washington and whoever happens to agree with it -- opposes allowing Iran the rights guaranteed to NPT signers, and Obama, by careful choice of misleading words, indicates his continued adherence to this stand.

There is a sensible approach to the threat of nuclear weapons in the region: to join in the overwhelming international support (including a large majority of Americans) for a nuclear-weapons-free zone including Iran, Israel, and US forces deployed there. Adequate verification is by no means impossible. That should mitigate, if not terminate, the regional nuclear weapons threat. But it is not on the agenda.

It is too easily forgotten that the US is officially committed to establishing a NWFZ in the region, in accord with Security Council Resolution 687 in 1991. This Resolution assumes special significance for the US and UK, because they appealed to it in their half-hearted attempt to provide at least some thin legal basis for their invasion of Iraq. The resolution calls for elimination of Iraqi WMD and delivery systems, as a step towards "the goal of establishing in the Middle East a zone free from weapons of mass destruction and all missiles for their delivery and the objective of a global ban on chemical weapons" (Article 14). Since that includes Israel, it was never intended seriously by the US and UK, and it was quickly dispatched to the memory hole along with other inconvenient truths that escape the commitment to "keep on telling the truth until it stops working."

It should perhaps be added that despite much fevered rhetoric, rational souls understand that the Iranian threat is not the threat of attack -- which would be suicidal. Wayne White, former deputy director of the Near East and South Asia office of State Department intelligence (INR), quite plausibly estimates the likelihood that the Iranian leaders would carry out "some quixotic attack against Israel with a nuclear weapon," thus instantly destroying Iran and themselves, as "down there with that 1 percent possibility." Also timely is his confirmation, from direct knowledge as the INR Iraq intelligence analyst at the time, that Israel's 1981 attack on Iraq's nuclear reactor did not end Saddam's nuclear weapons program, but initiated it.

No one wants Iran -- or anyone -- to develop nuclear weapons, but it should be recognized that the perceived threat is not that they will be used in a suicide mission, but rather the threat of deterrence of US-Israeli actions to extend their domination of the region. And to repeat, if the concern were Iranian nuclear weapons, there would be sensible ways to proceed -- to which, furthermore, the US is officially committed.

Obama's "new initiative" is spelled out more fully by John Kerry, the 2004 Democratic presidential candidate, now chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in an important speech at the Brookings Institute on March 9. (http://kerry.senate.gov/cfm/record.cfm?id=309250). In interpreting Kerry's words, we have to suspend normal rationality, and agree that the actual facts of history are completely irrelevant. What is important is not the contrived picture of past and present, but the plans outlined.

Kerry urges that we acknowledge that our honorable efforts to bring about a political settlement have failed, primarily because of the unwillingness of the Arab states to make peace. Furthermore, all of our efforts to "to give the Israelis a legitimate partner for peace" have foundered on Palestinian intransigence. Now, however, there is a welcome change. With the Arab Initiative of 2006, the Arab states have finally signaled their willingness to accept Israel's presence in the region. Even more promising is the "unprecedented willingness among moderate Arab nations to work with Israel" against our common enemy Iran. "Moderate" here is used in its technical meaning: "willing to conform to US demands," irrespective of the nature of the regime. "This re-alignment can help to lay the groundwork for progress towards peace," Kerry said, as we "re-conceptualize" the problem, focusing on the Iranian threat.

Kerry goes on to explain that there is also at last some hope that a "legitimate partner" can be found for our peace-loving Israeli ally: Abbas and the Palestinian Authority. How then do we proceed to support Israel's new legitimate Palestinian partner? "Most importantly, this means strengthening General [Keith] Dayton's efforts to train Palestinian security forces that can keep order and fight terror... Recent developments have been extremely encouraging: During the invasion of Gaza, Palestinian Security Forces largely succeeded in maintaining calm in the West Bank amidst widespread expectations of civil unrest. Obviously, more remains to be done, but we can help do it."

Routinely, Kerry describes the attack on Gaza as entirely right and just: by definition, since the US crucially participated in it. It doesn't matter, then, that the pretext lacks any credibility, under principles that we all accept -- with regard to others.

General Dayton's forces, armed and trained in Jordan with Israeli participation and supervision, are the soft side of population control. The tougher and more brutal forces are those trained by the CIA: General Intelligence and Preventive Security.

Kerry is right that we can do more to ensure that West Bank Palestinians are so effectively controlled that they cannot even protest the slaughter in Gaza -- let alone move towards meaningful self-determination. For this task, the US can draw on a long history of colonial practice, developed in exquisite detail during the US occupation of the Philippines after the murderous conquest a century ago, then widely applied elsewhere. This sophisticated refinement of traditional imperial practice has been highly successful in US dependencies, while also providing means of population control at home. These matters are spelled out in groundbreaking work by historian Alfred McCoy (Policing America's Empire, forthcoming). Kerry should be familiar with these techniques from his service in South Vietnam. Applying these measures to Palestine, collaborationist paramilitary forces can be employed to subdue the domestic population with the cooperation of privileged elites, granting the US and Israel free rein to carry forward Bush's "vision" and Olmert's Convergence-plus. Gaza can meanwhile be kept under a strangling siege as a prison and occasional shooting gallery.

Washington's new initiative for Middle East peace, so it is hoped, will integrate Israel among the "moderate" Arab states as a bulwark for US domination of the vital energy-producing regions. It fits well into Obama's broader programs for Afghanistan and Pakistan, where military operations are escalating and huge "embassies" are being constructed on the model of the city-within-a-city in Baghdad, clearly signaling Obama's intentions (Saeed Shah and Warren Strobel, McClatchy Newspapers, May 27).

The "re-conceptualization" is evidently satisfactory to US high tech industry, which continues to enhance its intimate relations with Israel. One striking illustration as a gigantic installation that Intel is constructing in Israel to implement a revolutionary reduction in size of chips, expecting to set a new industry standard and to supply much of the world with parts from its Kiryat Gat facility. Relations between US and Israeli military industry remain particularly close. Israel continues to provide the US with a strategically located overseas military base for prepositioning weapons and other functions. Intelligence cooperation goes back half a century.

These are among the unparalleled services that Israel provides for US militarism and global dominance. They afford Israel a certain leeway to defy Washington's orders -- though it is skating on thin ice if it tries to push its luck too far, as history has repeatedly shown. So far the jingoist extremism of the current government has been constrained by more sober elements: for example, the shelving of the proposals to require a loyalty oath and to prevent citizens from commemorating the Nakba -- the disaster for Palestinians in 1948. But if Israel goes too far, there might indeed erupt a confrontation of the kind that many commentators perceive today, so far, with little basis.

This article originaly appeared in www.sabbah.biz


For simplicity, read COGAT = OCCUPATION ADMINISTRATORS. For your info, these are administrators in military uniform.

By Yotam Feldman and Uri Blau


Every week, about 10 officers from the Israel Defense Force's Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) unit convene in the white Templer building in the Kirya, the Defense Ministry compound in Tel Aviv, to decide which food products will appear on the tables of the 1.5 million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip. Among those taking part in the discussion are Colonel Moshe Levi, head of the Gaza District Coordination Office (DCO), Colonel Alex Rosenzweig, head of the civil division of COGAT and Colonel Doron Segal, head of the economics division. These officers decided, for example, that persimmons, bananas and apples were vital items for basic sustenance and thus permitted into the Gaza Strip, while apricots, plums, grapes and avocados were impermissible luxuries. Over the past year, these officers were responsible for prohibiting the entry into the Gaza Strip of tinned meat, tomato paste, clothing, shoes and notebooks. All these items are sitting in the giant storerooms rented by Israeli suppliers near the Kerem Shalom crossing, awaiting a change in policy.

The policy is not fixed, but continually subject to change, explains a COGAT official. Thus, about two months ago, the COGAT officials allowed pumpkins and carrots into Gaza, reversing a ban that had been in place for many months. The entry of "delicacies" such as cherries, kiwi, green almonds, pomegranates and chocolate is expressly prohibited. As is halvah, too, most of the time. Sources involved in COGAT's work say that those at the highest levels, including acting coordinator Amos Gilad, monitor the food brought into Gaza on a daily basis and personally approve the entry of any kind of fruit, vegetable or processed food product requested by the Palestinians. At one of the unit's meetings, Colonel Oded Iterman, a COGAT officer, explained the policy as follows: "We don't want Gilad Shalit's captors to be munching Bamba [a popular Israeli snack food] right over his head."

The "Red Lines" document explains: "In order to make basic living in Gaza possible, the deputy defense minister approved the entry into the Gaza Strip of 106 trucks with humanitarian products, 77 of which are basic food products. The entry of wheat and animal feed was also permitted via the aggregates conveyor belt outside the Karni terminal."

After four pages filled with detailed charts of the number of grams and calories of every type of food to be permitted for consumption by Gaza residents (broken down by gender and age), comes this recommendation: "It is necessary to deal with the international community and the Palestinian Health Ministry to provide nutritional supplements (only some of the flour in Gaza is enriched) and to provide education about proper nutrition." Printed in large letters at the end of the document is this admonition: "The stability of the humanitarian effort is critical for the prevention of the development of malnutrition."

In fact, the number of trucks entering the Gaza Strip is very close to the absolute minimum required for basic sustenance, as determined by the IDF itself. Data compiled by UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, shows that while the minimum number of trucks per day set by the IDF is 106, in May, 117 trucks passed through the Kerem Shalom terminal; in April the number was 113 and, before the start of Operation Cast Lead in December 2008, just 37.

These quantities allow a very slim margin for error or mishaps. Moreover, COGAT's analysis is statistically accurate only on condition that there is an equal division of the minimum supplies that are allowed in. "This analysis does not take distribution in the field into consideration," says the "Red Lines" document. A COGAT official says that he assumes that food distribution within Gaza is not equal. If some are receiving more, others are necessarily receiving less than the required minimum. So it is hard to reconcile this information with the claims of the defense minister and COGAT officers that there is no real food shortage in Gaza.

COGAT officers are in regular contact with international organizations, listen to their complaints and examine their requests to bring in various goods, in both official and unofficial meetings. For example, Amos Gilad has dinner from time to time with an official from the UNRWA delegation in Israel. The Israeli officers repeat the following phrase in their meetings with organization officials: "No prosperity, no development, no humanitarian crisis." A senior COGAT officer explains to Haaretz that it's not a siege policy, but rather the restriction of entry of luxury products. The decision as to which products qualify as "luxury" changes from week to week, and sometimes from day to day.

Some of these changes are the result of international pressure exerted upon Israel. For example, when he visited Gaza last February, U.S. Senator John Kerry was stunned to discover that Israel was not allowing Palestinians to bring in trucks loaded with pasta. Following American pressure, on March 20 the cabinet decided to permit the unrestricted transfer of food products into Gaza. Incredibly, the COGAT personnel do not see any contradiction between this decision and the serious restrictions that are nevertheless imposed on the entry of various food items.

"Let it be clear that the decision was not intended to lift the restrictions that were imposed in the past in relation to the entry of equipment and food into the Gaza Strip, as determined by the cabinet decision of September 19," said COGAT in response to Gisha: Legal Center for Freedom of Movement, which has demanded that "prohibited" foods be allowed to enter Gaza.

Despite the many resources invested by the IDF in coordinating with the Palestinians, since the start of the blockade no list of permitted and prohibited items has been relayed to the Palestinian side. The DCO spokesperson says there is no such list and that the Palestinians "know what they're allowed to bring in." But the Palestinians are less satisfied with this situation: Riad Fatouh says that at a meeting three months ago at the Agriculture Ministry in Tel Aviv, attended by al-Sheikh and Mhana from the Palestinian side, he asked DCO chief Moshe Levi for an official document detailing which products the army currently allows to be brought into Gaza. "Even if there are just 10 types of goods, I want to see it in writing," says Fatouh.

According to Fatouh, Levi was visibly angered upon hearing the request, and told him never to make such a request again, to be satisfied with the transfer of information by telephone. When Fatouh asked Levi why, the DCO chief told him: "Any goods that we allow in, or prohibit - you'll know about it by phone. That's the way we work." No one else in the room mentioned it again.

"If you go back two years, you see that it was utter foolishness," says a senior officer who was serving in COGAT when the blockade was imposed. "There was a vague, unclear policy, influenced by the interests of certain groups, by this or that lobby, without any policy that derived from the needs of the population. For example, the fruit growers have a powerful lobby, and this lobby saw to it that on certain days, from 20-25 trucks full of fruit were brought into Gaza. It's not that it arrived there and was thrown out, but if you were to ask a Gazan who lives there, it's not exactly what he needs. What happened was that the Israeli interest took precedence over the needs of the populace."

This move was greeted with dismay by many farmers in Israel, who were very pleased with Madar's performance. At an April 20 meeting in the office of Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai, it was decided that Madar is the one "who will set the agricultural agenda." Vilnai decided at that same meeting that Madar would be returned to the Erez checkpoint, but a military source explained that security considerations prevent his permanent return there. The spokesperson for the coordinator of activity in the territories would not permit Madar to be interviewed.

Avshalom Herzog, a member of Moshav Almagor, is a fruit grower and the proprietor of a large packing house. He says he has connections with 80 percent of the packing houses in Israel that transport goods to Gaza, in part because of his partnership with Khaled Uthman, the largest fruit trader in Gaza. Herzog is an energetic farmer, and frequently writes to the decision-makers - Deputy Defense Minister Vilnai, Agriculture Minister Shalom Simhon and COGAT officers - about bringing goods into Gaza.

"Until three or four years ago, in a normal year I transported 30-40 percent of the fruit that went into Gaza," says Herzog. "Today it's no more than 10-15 percent, because the market in Gaza is not a real market, but rather a market determined by the Defense Ministry. If the Defense Ministry says only 10 trucks will enter, then it doesn't matter who works in Gaza - he'll make money. And then there are wars between people who were never traders and there is bribery and people start to pay huge sums for the transport of fruit - irrational things, and then my share is diminished. I know that's how it is and there's not much I can do about it."

Herzog and other farmers have found an attentive audience in Simhon and Vilnai, but they are still not satisfied. "Simhon helps us sometimes," says Herzog, "but if he wanted to, he could have solved the problems a long time ago. You know what really makes me mad? There was a decision made in a meeting back in April. They came out with a protocol that required the entry of 20 trucks a day, and required that at least three trucks be filled with melons and that an officer from the agriculture staff who was exiled to Julis, in north Israel, be immediately returned to the Erez crossing, where he needed to be for the farmers' sake. This decision makes it plain as day that the one determining the mix of fruit [to be trucked in] is the director of the fruit growers' organization together with an officer of the agriculture staff in the Gaza DCO. But it's ignored. Today it's permissible to bring in peaches, bananas, apples, dates. Kumquats were permissible until yesterday. There are no plums, no pumpkin, no watermelon and no onion. It's just impossible to believe."

Summaries of the discussions about entry of food into Gaza show just how deeply the captains of the defense establishment seem to care about the income of Israeli farmers. Hence, in a discussion that took place in the office of Deputy Minister Vilnai, it was decided that every day, 15 trucks filled with agricultural produce would be brought in. "The problem right now is the emphasis on melons and fruit in general," Agriculture Ministry Director General Yossi Yishai said at the meeting. At the conclusion of the discussion, Vilnai instructed that three trucks with melons be brought into Gaza each week, "So as not to cause a market failure in Israel." Another document, from the end of April, signed by Vilnai's public information officer, says: "Israel's policy at the crossings is set at various times in accordance with a number of considerations … Economic considerations, including the agricultural establishment, are at the basis of the policy considerations."

Meir Yifrah, secretary of the Vegetable Growers Organization, also tries to exert influence on the decisions of COGAT and the Defense Ministry, with occasional success. "Once a month or so, I send a text message to [Agriculture Minister Simhon] Shalom saying the situation in the market is very tough, the growers need to send produce to Gaza, see what you can do with the Defense Ministry, so they'll bring in what's needed. It seems odd to me that pumpkin can be defined as a luxury item. It's sometimes used to feed animals, more than for people. If there are two or three or four growers who want to send stuff in and it's something they're short on there (in Gaza), I say they should be able to do that. I tried to pressure the Agriculture Ministry, and in the end we were successful. Last year I had a bad situation with onions. A lot of growers were stuck with their stock. We pressed the Agriculture Ministry and then they increased the onion quota from five to eight trucks at the end of last year."

Are sales to Gaza significant for Israeli farmers?

"The farmers' interest is to find other markets, so we can increase profitability for the grower, by creating demand in Israel and avoiding surpluses."

The Agriculture Ministry claims it also takes care of Palestinian interests: "When it comes to a decision on the kind of produce to be allowed into Gaza, the ministry takes into consideration Palestinian needs, the Israeli growers' ability to fulfill these needs as well as their own interests, and especially the Israeli consumer, to maintain reasonable prices in the local market. Minister Simhon, as a matter of policy, sees agriculture as a bridge to peace, and in every government in which he served, he has demanded the continuation of trade in farm products with the Palestinians, as well as cooperation in disease control in animals and plants - even in the worst security situations."

COGAT's "Red Lines" document, which defines the minimum necessary for the sustenance of Gaza residents, also finds that 300 calves a week are needed to feed Gazans - That's at least 200 fewer than the number brought in when the crossing was open for trade. Nevertheless, in the six months since Cast Lead, Israel has not permitted the entry of any live calves into Gaza, allowing only frozen meat and fish. In the period prior to the war, when Gaza residents were able to obtain permits to import calves, this was limited to calves from Israel, not from other countries as in the past.

In recent months, Israeli cattle breeders have been exerting pressure on the Agriculture Minister to get him to allow calves into Gaza. Most impacted by the restrictions on bringing meat into Gaza is Eyal Erlich, a former journalist who 15 years ago made a drastic career switch to become an importer of beef. Each year, until the blockade of Gaza was announced, Erlich sold 50,000 calves that he imported from Australia to Palestinians in Gaza (Gazans apparently prefer beef to lamb).

Erlich, 50, heavyset and white-haired, complains about the severe dent in his income and that of his Gazan partner, Hosni Afana. He believes that Agriculture Minister Simhon, who was involved in shaping the policy regarding import of beef to Gaza, exploited the situation to compel the Gazan market to buy Israeli, and thereby assist local breeders.

One way the Palestinians make up for the shortage of beef is by bringing in a large number of sheep via the Rafah tunnels. Unlike other animals, lambs will walk on their own to the other end of the tunnel, so they are easier to smuggle. Veterinary services in Israel estimate that since the start of the blockade, the Palestinians have smuggled in about 40,000 lambs through the tunnels, without any veterinary oversight. The Agriculture Ministry is concerned that these animals could spread epidemics that would eventually reach Israel.

Two days before the High Court's hearing on Erlich's petition, there was a meeting with attorney Hila Gorny of the State Prosecutor's Office. At this meeting, Uri Madar, of the agriculture department of the DCO, voiced his concern that the prohibition on importing beef to Gaza was adversely affecting the residents' nutrition. Colonel Alex Rosenzweig, head of the civilian division of COGAT, argued the opposite, saying there was no shortage of meat in Gaza and the ban on importation of cattle was not endangering the Palestinians' nutrition.

Madar declined to sign the state's response to the petition, asserting that there was "a black flag waving over it," and his view was not presented at the High Court hearing. Furthermore, at the hearing, the IDF did not present the COGAT document which states that at least 300 calves are to be imported into Gaza per week.

A Justice Ministry spokesperson, responding on behalf of the High Court Petition department, confirms this, adding, "Not only that, the state's position was never that the weekly quota of 300 calves, which applied for a certain period of time, was defined as a minimal humanitarian need. The position of the COGAT officials charged with assessing the humanitarian situation in Gaza was presented to the court, stipulating that the entire 'food basket' that is brought into Gaza, which includes frozen meat products, meets the humanitarian needs there. This position was supported by data presented to the State Prosecutor. These officials also stated that they were informed that this was the case by Palestinian officials with whom they are in contact. Beyond this, the State Prosecutor does not intend to relate to the content of the internal discussions held in anticipation of the filing of responses to the petition."

The spokesperson continues, "Although Erlich is seeking to paint his motives for filing the petition as stemming from concerns about the humanitarian situation in Gaza, he is essentially seeking to promote his business, which is being harmed by government policy on Gaza. The Supreme Court also reached this conclusion."

Erlich's experience in the ongoing fight to get cattle allowed into Gaza prompted him to establish Adam Solutions, a company devoted to assisting Palestinians in coping with the restrictions imposed on Gaza by the Israeli government. Erlich and his partner Basel Darawshe, son of former MK Abdulwahab Darawshe, hire out their services to wage a public and legal battle for "traders who need to bring in products" or "people who want to go out to get to hospitals."

How would you have helped?

"It's a legitimate and legal activity. What I would have done is go to a journalist, for example, and show how we're wrecking Israel's public relations."

Why did they turn to you?

"I'm a private businessperson. People come to me because they know I've solved more than a few problems because I was determined and clever."

Adiri also spoke about the matter with Bikel, a familiar figure in the flower, fruit and vegetable, and spice export field, who in the early 1990s also headed the Agricultural Strategy Committee, which dealt with agricultural relations with Palestinian farmers, among other things. Bikel remembers the problem with the bulbs: "The authorities wouldn't allow them to be imported. Hillel asked me if there was anything I could do. I told him that I thought I could do something, but it meant having to appeal to defense officials, to persuade the government and the agriculture minister, the defense minister and the prime minister. It's a tiring process. It's work. I told him that remuneration would only be due in the event of success, even though it meant a lot of work either way."

If it was really a security decision, how could it be subject to change?

"Decisions can be changed," Bikel insists.

In the end, Adiri did not avail himself of Erlich's or Bikel's services. "I asked the Dutch and they said absolutely not," says Adiri. "But the inquiry showed them that it was possible and motivated them to keep trying. They went to Ehud Barak and he eventually approved it."

Three months ago, an acquaintance walked into the shop run by H., an electronics merchant from Gaza City, and started talking about the situation in Gaza and the difficulty of bringing in goods. Then the acquaintance "casually mentioned" a friend of his who could help in obtaining merchandise. "After he started dropping hints, he told me that for NIS 60,000- 70,000 he might be able to bring in my merchandise," says H. He says he didn't go for the offer because of the high price. Other merchants say they've received offers to get their goods into Gaza for the exorbitant price of anywhere from NIS 40,000-100,000 per truck (the regular cost is about NIS 3,000). At least one admits that because of the ongoing blockade he did accept one such offer from an Israeli shipper.

One Israeli shipper explains how merchandise can be smuggled into Gaza. He says shippers often use permits obtained from aid organizations to bring in products Israel does not allow merchants to receive, such as clothing and shoes.

"We have no information whatsoever about this," says a spokesperson for the UN World Food Program. "This question does not apply to us since we use only our own trucks and drivers," says the International Red Cross. "All of our aid for Gaza is coordinated with the Israeli authorities," says a UNRWA spokesperson. "We have not encountered the kind of irregularities described. And if we did, we would report them."

How is it possible to do that?

"Let's say a merchant receives a turn to bring in sugar. He relays the name of the driver and the truck number to the Israeli side. The shipper who received the turn contacts another merchant, who didn't receive a turn and is ready to pay a lot of money to bring in his merchandise, which is stuck in Israel. The shipper arranges with the Palestinian shipper and transfers the sugar to the merchant who paid him. He makes up some story to tell the merchant who was supposed to receive the merchandise - that the truck got stuck or that it wasn't allowed through for some reason."

Since the blockade was placed on Gaza, the Karni terminal, through which more than 600 trucks used to pass daily has been closed. Now most goods are transferred through the Kerem Shalom crossing, and the only thing in operation at the Karni terminal is a conveyor belt that brings wheat, seeds and animal feed to the Palestinian side. The person who has profited most from this change is Nissim Jan, a former Shin Bet agent who served, among other things, as "head of the crossings department." In the seven years since he left the Shin Bet security service, he has managed to build himself a little empire that includes a company for logistical services, shipping services and real estate deals; he is currently constructing a building in the Barnea area of Ashkelon, together with contractor Didi Yamin.

Jan lives in a villa on the Ashkelon coast, drives a fancy Audi and wears neatly pressed button-down shirts. "Anyone who's anyone in the PA, and in Israel too apparently, knows me," he tells Haaretz. Palestinian and Israeli sources say that Jan is particularly close to Nasser Saraj, who oversees the operation of the crossings between Israel and Gaza.

Israel and Palestinian sources say that Jan gets a significant cut of this sum, ostensibly as payment for supplying food to the drivers and fuel for the trucks, a cost that cannot exceed more than a few thousand shekels a month. Man'am Shehaiber agreed to describe to Haaretz the way in which merchandise is transported from either side of the terminal. He said he employs 50 people at the crossing, but declined to reply to questions about his income from providing this service or the nature of his business connections with Jan. In addition, says an Israeli familiar with his business, Jan receives payment from the Palestinians for various jobs he does on the western (Gazan) side of the crossing.

Jan's profits seem dazzling to the Palestinians and the other Israelis involved in operating the crossings. One Israeli familiar with their operation says: "The services Jan supplies on both sides of the crossing have made him one of the most significant figures at Kerem Shalom." Some of the Palestinian traders mistakenly thought that he was the actual director of the crossing. Jan himself attests to his deep involvement there: "Nothing that happens at the crossings escapes my notice," he told Haaretz in a phone conversation. Sources in the Defense Ministry said that lately they've been checking into various complaints about his activity at the crossings.

Jan says that he handled, on behalf of the Palestinian Authority, the passage back into Gaza of Palestinians who found themselves stuck in Egypt after Hamas took control in Gaza and the Rafah crossing was closed. "They came to me because you go to people you can rely on," he says. "I think I'm someone who has a different approach than anyone else at the crossings."

We've been told you get a share of the NIS 500 that the Shehaiber family collects on each truck that goes through the crossing.

"That's a total lie."

But you know the Shehaiber brothers?

"Of course I do. They work with me every day."

And it's not a business partnership?

"It has nothing at all to do with what you're talking about. It's purely business, all legal, and has nothing to do with any 500 shekels."

What is your connection with Nazmi Mhana (the Palestinian director of the crossings)?

"Nazmi is a personal friend of mine. For some reason, it's hard for people to accept a proper, legitimate relationship between two adults."

We've been told that you also do jobs for the Palestinians.

"All the time, all the time. Including now."

How does one get these kinds of jobs?

"Be a person like me - serious, quiet, honest - and apply for any tender in proper legal fashion, and then work. Anyone who wants to can apply."

Doesn't the Israeli crossings administration have a problem with the fact that you also work in the Palestinian Authority?

"I don't speak with the crossings administration about anything. What I do with the Palestinian population, with the Palestinian Authority, with the Europeans - has nothing to do with that."

A lot of people we've talked with seemed genuinely nervous to even speak about you. Why are people afraid of you?

"Because I have integrity. Maybe because I don't deal in dirt."

Maybe because you were in the Shin Bet?

"What does the Shin Bet have to do with anything? It's been 10 years since I was in the Shin Bet."

Jan's business wasn't hurt by his entanglement in the affair of the transfer of gas canisters to the Palestinian Authority area. Less than a year ago, in late August, inspectors from the enforcement unit of the Infrastructure Ministry raided warehouses belonging to Jan in the southern industrial zone in Ashkelon. There the inspectors found about 100 tons of cooking gas and reported at the time that this was the largest amount of stolen gas ever discovered in Israel in recent years. The Israel Police's economic crimes unit began an investigation into the matter.

But you paid a fine.

"We paid, but not at the crossings. My shippers, who operate legally, stored the gas canisters in a place where they shouldn't have been stored, and so we paid the fine and I said that it was my merchandise, so I would bear the expenses and the consequences."

Isn't paying the fine akin to an admission that you committed an offense?

"Paying the fine is just a way of saying 'Leave me alone.' People just find it hard to accept that I'm not the person they think I am. When I was given the fine, I told [the person from the Infrastructure Ministry] right to his face: I'm paying, even though I think I'm more moral than anyone." W

From DarthDubious's blog

Why are the Mainstream Media Networks So Worthless? For These Four Reasons:


1. Self-Censorship by Journalists

Initially, there is tremendous self-censorship by journalists.

For example, several months after 9/11, famed news anchor Dan Rather told the BBC that American reporters were practicing “a form of self-censorship”:

“there was a time in South Africa that people would put flaming tires around peoples’ necks if they dissented. And in some ways the fear is that you will be necklaced here, you will have a flaming tire of lack of patriotism put around your neck. Now it is that fear that keeps journalists from asking the toughest of the tough questions…. And again, I am humbled to say, I do not except myself from this criticism.”What we are talking about here - whether one wants to recognise it or not, or call it by its proper name or not - is a form of self-censorship.”

Keith Olbermann agreed that there is self-censorship in the American media, and that:

“You can rock the boat, but you can never say that the entire ocean is in trouble …. You cannot say: By the way, there’s something wrong with our …. system”.

As former Washington Post columnist Dan Froomkin wrote in 2006:

Mainstream-media political journalism is in danger of becoming increasingly irrelevant, but not because of the Internet, or even Comedy Central. The threat comes from inside. It comes from journalists being afraid to do what journalists were put on this green earth to do. . . .

There’s the intense pressure to maintain access to insider sources, even as those sources become ridiculously unrevealing and oversensitive. There’s the fear of being labeled partisan if one’s bullshit-calling isn’t meted out in precisely equal increments along the political spectrum.

If mainstream-media political journalists don’t start calling bullshit more often, then we do risk losing our primacy — if not to the comedians then to the bloggers.

I still believe that no one is fundamentally more capable of first-rate bullshit-calling than a well-informed beat reporter - whatever their beat. We just need to get the editors, or the corporate culture, or the self-censorship – or whatever it is – out of the way.

And Air Force Colonel and key Pentagon official Karen Kwiatkowski wrote:

I have been told by reporters that they will not report their own insights or contrary evaluations of the official 9/11 story, because to question the government story about 9/11 is to question the very foundations of our entire modern belief system regarding our government, our country, and our way of life. To be charged with questioning these foundations is far more serious than being labeled a disgruntled conspiracy nut or anti-government traitor, or even being sidelined or marginalized within an academic, government service, or literary career. To question the official 9/11 story is simply and fundamentally revolutionary. In this way, of course, questioning the official story is also simply and fundamentally American.

2. Censorship by Higher-Ups

If journalists do want to speak out about an issue, they also are subject to tremendous pressure by their editors or producers to kill the story.

The Pulitzer prize-winning reporter who uncovered the Iraq prison torture scandal and the Mai Lai massacre in Vietnam, Seymour Hersh, said:

“All of the institutions we thought would protect us — particularly the press, but also the military, the bureaucracy, the Congress — they have failed. The courts . . . the jury’s not in yet on the courts. So all the things that we expect would normally carry us through didn’t. The biggest failure, I would argue, is the press, because that’s the most glaring….

Q: What can be done to fix the (media) situation?

[Long pause] You’d have to fire or execute ninety percent of the editors and executives. You’d actually have to start promoting people from the newsrooms to be editors who you didn’t think you could control. And they’re not going to do that.”

In fact many journalists are warning that the true story is not being reported. See this announcement and this talk.

And a series of interviews with award-winning journalists also documents censorship of certain stories by media editors and owners (and see these samples).

There are many reasons for censorship by media higher-ups:

One is MONEY.

The media has a strong monetary interest to avoid controversial topics in general. It has always been true that advertisers discourage stories which challenge corporate power. Indeed, a 2003 survey reveals that 35% of reporters and news executives themselves admitted that journalists avoid newsworthy stories if “the story would be embarrassing or damaging to the financial interests of a news organization’s owners or parent company.”
In addition, the government has allowed tremendous consolidation in ownership of the airwaves during the past decade. The large media players stand to gain billions of dollars in profits if the Obama administration continues to allow monopoly ownership of the airwaves by a handful of players. The media giants know who butters their bread. So there is a spoken or tacit agreement: if the media cover the administration in a favorable light, the MSM will continue to be the receiver of the government’s goodies.

3. Drumming Up Support for Wars

In addition, the owners of American media companies have long actively played a part in drumming up support for war.

It is painfully obvious that the large news outlets studiously avoided any real criticism of the government’s claims in the run up to the Iraq war. It is painfully obvious that the large American media companies acted as lapdogs and stenographers for the government’s war agenda.

Veteran reporter Bill Moyers criticized the corporate media for parroting the obviously false link between 9/11 and Iraq (and the false claims that Iraq possessed WMDs) which the administration made in the run up to the Iraq war, and concluded that the false information was not challenged because:

“the [mainstream] media had been cheerleaders for the White House from the beginning and were simply continuing to rally the public behind the President — no questions asked.”

And as NBC News’ David Gregory (later promoted to host Meet the Press) said:

“I think there are a lot of critics who think that . . . . if we did not stand up [in the run-up to the war] and say ‘this is bogus, and you’re a liar, and why are you doing this,’ that we didn’t do our job. I respectfully disagree. It’s not our role”

But this is nothing new. In fact, the large media companies have drummed up support for all previous wars.

For example, Hearst helped drum up support for the Spanish-American War.

And an official summary of America’s overthrow of the democratically-elected president of Iran in the 1950’s states, “In cooperation with the Department of State, CIA had several articles planted in major American newspapers and magazines which, when reproduced in Iran, had the desired psychological effect in Iran and contributed to the war of nerves against Mossadeq.”

The mainstream media also may have played footsie with the U.S. government right before Pearl Harbor. Specifically, a highly-praised historian (Bob Stineet) argues that the Army’s Chief of Staff informed the Washington bureau chiefs of the major newspapers and magazines of the impending Pearl Harbor attack BEFORE IT OCCURRED, and swore them to an oath of secrecy, which the media honored.

And the military-media alliance has continued without a break (as a highly-respected journalist says, “viewers may be taken aback to see the grotesque extent to which US presidents and American news media have jointly shouldered key propaganda chores for war launches during the last five decades.”)

As the mainstream British paper, the Independent, writes:

There is a concerted strategy to manipulate global perception. And the mass media are operating as its compliant assistants, failing both to resist it and to expose it. The sheer ease with which this machinery has been able to do its work reflects a creeping structural weakness which now afflicts the production of our news.

The article in the Independent discusses the use of “black propaganda” by the U.S. government, which is then parroted by the media without analysis; for example, the government forged a letter from al Zarqawi to the “inner circle” of al-Qa’ida’s leadership, urging them to accept that the best way to beat US forces in Iraq was effectively to start a civil war, which was then publicized without question by the media..

So why has the American press has consistenly served the elites in disseminating their false justifications for war?
One of of the reasons is because the large media companies are owned by those who support the militarist agenda or even directly profit from war and terror (for example, NBC is owned by General Electric, one of the largest defense contractors in the world — which directly profits from war, terrorism and chaos).

Another seems to be an unspoken rule that the media will not criticize the government’s imperial war agenda.

And the media support isn’t just for war: it is also for various other shenanigans by the powerful. For example, a BBC documentary reveals:

There was “a planned coup in the USA in 1933 by a group of right-wing American businessmen . . . . The coup was aimed at toppling President Franklin D Roosevelt with the help of half-a-million war veterans. The plotters, who were alleged to involve some of the most famous families in America, (owners of Heinz, Birds Eye, Goodtea, Maxwell Hse & George Bush’s Grandfather, Prescott) believed that their country should adopt the policies of Hitler and Mussolini to beat the great depression.”

Moreover, “the tycoons told the general who they asked to carry out the coup that the American people would accept the new government because they controlled all the newspapers.“ See also this book.

Have you ever heard of this scheme before? It was certainly a very large one. And if the conspirators controlled the newspapers then, how much worse is it today with media consolidation?

4. Censorship by the Government

Finally, as if the media’s own interest in promoting war is not strong enough, the government has exerted tremendous pressure on the media to report things a certain way. Indeed, at times the government has thrown media owners and reporters in jail if they’ve been too critical. The media companies have felt great pressure from the government to kill any real questioning of the endless wars.

For example, Dan Rather said, regarding American media, “What you have is a miniature version of what you have in totalitarian states”.

Tom Brokaw said “all wars are based on propaganda.

And the head of CNN said:

“there was ‘almost a patriotism police’ after 9/11 and when the network showed [things critical of the administration's policies] it would get phone calls from advertisers and the administration and “big people in corporations were calling up and saying, ‘You’re being anti-American here.’”

Indeed, former military analyst and famed Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg said that the government has ordered the media not to cover 9/11:

Ellsberg seemed hardly surprised that today’s American mainstream broadcast media has so far failed to take [former FBI translator and 9/11 whistleblower Sibel] Edmonds up on her offer, despite the blockbuster nature of her allegations [which Ellsberg calls "far more explosive than the Pentagon Papers"].As Edmonds has also alluded, Ellsberg pointed to the New York Times, who “sat on the NSA spying story for over a year” when they “could have put it out before the 2004 election, which might have changed the outcome.”

“There will be phone calls going out to the media saying ‘don’t even think of touching it, you will be prosecuted for violating national security,’” he told us.

* * *

“I am confident that there is conversation inside the Government as to ‘How do we deal with Sibel?’” contends Ellsberg. “The first line of defense is to ensure that she doesn’t get into the media. I think any outlet that thought of using her materials would go to to the government and they would be told ‘don’t touch this . . . .‘”

Of course, if the stick approach doesn’t work, the government can always just pay off reporters to spread disinformation. Indeed, an expert on propaganda testified under oath during trial that the CIA employs THOUSANDS of reporters and OWNS its own media organizations (the expert has an impressive background.)And famed Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein says the CIA has already bought and paid for many successful journalists. See also this New York Times piece, this essay by the Independent, this by one of the premier writers on journalism, this, and this roundup.

Indeed, in the final analysis, the main reason today that the media giants will not cover the real stories or question the government’s actions or policies in any meaningful way is that we live in a country that is not all that free (see point number 6). Mussolini said that fascism is the blending of the government and corporate interests, and the American government and mainstream media have in fact been blended together to an unprecedented degree.

See this book and the following 5-part interview for further information on 9/11 and the media: Barry Zwicker Interview Part 1

Can We Win the Battle Against Censorship?

We cannot just leave governance to our “leaders”, as “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance,”
-Thomas Jefferson.

Similarly, we cannot leave news to the corporate media. We need to “be the media” ourselves.

“To stand in silence when they should be protesting makes cowards out of men.”
- Abraham Lincoln

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”
- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

“Powerlessness and silence go together. We…should use our privileged positions not as a shelter from the world’s reality, but as a platform from which to speak. A voice is a gift. It should be cherished and used.”
– Margaret Atwood

“There is no act too small, no act too bold. The history of social change is the history of millions of actions, small and large, coming together at points in history and creating a power that [nothing] cannot suppress.”
- Howard Zinn (historian)

“All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent”
- Thomas Jefferson

by Carole Swords
June 16, 2009
WHO: The International Campaign to Open the Rafah Border
WHAT: Hunger Strike at Rafah Border WHERE: The Rafah Gate WHEN: JUNE 16, 2009
Contact: Don Bryant 0020 177543411 English
Christian Chantegrel 0020 0197490757 French
The International Movement to Open the Rafah Border (IMORB) is into the fourth day of a sit-in at the Rafah Gate. The group consists of Christian Chantegrel, Portugal; Micheline Garreau, Jacque Denko, Laila Mami France; Paki Wieland, Ellen Graves, and Don Bryant, USA and an Egyptian journalist, Iman Badawi. A German woman, Alona, and her six Palestinian children, aged 2-12, have joined the sit-in camp because they were denied entrance to Gaza and a reunion with Alona's husband and three older children.
The IMORB activists are demanding an end to the siege of Gaza that has been in place over two years, and maintained by Israel, Palestinian Authority and Egypt with the support of superpowers like Europe and the US.
Today, three of the group have begun a hunger strike. "I was inspired by a Palestinian Belgian, Mohammad, who joined our camp but was driven away by border security late last night," said Don Bryant of Cleveland, Ohio, USA, who began to fast today. "Mohammad told me of a 17-day hunger strike he did with other prisoners in an Israeli prison. They struck to gain simple accommodations in the prison. I am doing the same to ask the US, Israel, Palestinian Authority and Egypt to open the border to Gaza, so that 1.5 million Gazans can get food and medicine, and can rebuild after Israeli military strikes that have left the Gaza Strip decimated."
Ellen Graves of West Springfield, MA and Paki Wieland of Northhampton, MA are taking part in the hunger strike.
The IMORB plans to continue the sit-in and hunger strike until Alona's family and the hundreds of other Palestinians waiting in nearby El Arish and Rafah, are allowed to enter Gaza. Many Gazans are anxious to exit to Egypt as well. "We need the opening of the border for them to freely pass in both directions," reiterated Micheline Garreau of Nantes, France.
The Egyptian population has offered support to theIMORB by giving transportation, food and supplies. Palestinians in Gaza have been sending text messages of support to the international activists.The Egyptian police and border security are tolerating the IMORB sit-in for now. People have reported that they have been restricted from entering the area, today. Border officials have said the border will be open for the sick and injured Palestinians on Wednesday.
For interviews or to speak with hunger strikers contact:
Don Bryant 0020 (0) 177543411 English
Christian Chantegrel 0020 (0)197490757 French
Paki Wieland 0020 (0) 187358621 - English
Iman Baddawi 00 20 (0) 19 791 07 53 (Arabic – English
==================================Media Release….. Media Release…. Media Release.
Julie Must GO NOW!
Mark Must Stay!
Mark Anthony France, the 46 year old Spokesperson of the Julie Must GO NOW! Campaign, is facing the prospect of loosing his job, because he spoke out against the corruption of parliamentary democracy in the UK.
Mark who works at Bromsgrove Job Centre [as an Grade B Admin Officer earning £14,700 a year] organised the petition that called on Julie Kirkbride MP to resign immediately [ Julie is reported to have had an income of £266,000 last year]. On 28th May Julie Kirkbride ‘stood down’ as Bromsgrove’s MP.

Mark launched the petition during a live Sky News broadcast from Bromsgrove High Street on Saturday 16th http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRO42XVPSNo
A transcript of this interview is being used by his employer the DWP [Department of Work and Pensions] to sack him from his post.

The charge against him is that “employees should not comment on matters of controversy which fall within Ministers responsibility”

Today, speaking from his family home at 22 Perryfields Crescent, Bromsgrove, B61 8SS, Mark said:

“The attempt to silence me will fail. I have a democratic right to speak. Alongside thousands of other Job Centre Staff up and down the country I work hard to ensure that the victims of the recession are treated with dignity. We face a bullying management culture that stamps on the human rights of Job Centre Staff and our Unemployed customers”

“The DWP can punish me and my family for daring to speak the truth…but they will not stop the ‘Peasants Revolt’ that started in Bromsgrove from growing”.
“On Saturday 20th June I will be in Bromsgrove High St"

By ROSIE DIMANNO

Have you hugged a Jew today?

Couldn't hurt, on any day, given some worrisome trends in Canada - though less here than in Europe - to demonize both Jews and Israel, particularly via the rubric of anti-Zionism, which anybody with half a brain recognizes for what it is: The same old anti-Semitism tarted up in sleazy pedantic finery.
But yesterday, at the Beth Emeth Bais Yehuda synagogue in North York, the most astonishing thing happened. Leaders of Canada's political parties got all gushy and goopy, practically falling over one another to show they love Jews - and Israel - best.

How gratifying this must have been for those assembled, and a wider constituency that has found itself besieged anew, bewildered and alarmed by the increasing brazenness of Jew-bashing in this country, a toxic debate that finds fertile soil in the political sludge of the Middle East.

There was Prime Minister Stephen Harper using the occasion to announce a new bill that would allow victims to sue perpetrators and sponsors of terrorism - whether individuals, organizations or foreign states - through Canadian courts, civilly.

And there was Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff, sounding rather ticked that the Tories had thus pre-empted a private member's bill on that very issue, which justice critic Irwin Cotler had planned to introduce in the Commons.

Jack Layton had no such bill in his back pocket - perhaps left it in his other pants - but was adamant that New Democrats stood four-square with the Canadian Jewish Congress as human-rights advocates, whilst denying that new-wave anti-Semitism is a phenomenon of the modern left.

The Green party's Elizabeth May extolled Israel as "an exemplar of democracy" in the Middle East, while claiming violence in the region is fuelled by "petro-dollars to petro-dictators." The Bloc called in sick and was excused.

Of course, this was the 29th plenary assembly of the CJC and none of the invited speakers would dare wrangle with their hosts on the details. But beyond the core consensus of a two-state solution in the Middle East, it's always the details that kibosh any proposals for ending the Palestinian conflict, securing Israel's security, or civilizing the discussion.

Harper was there to accept the prestigious Saul Hayes Human Rights award, named for a former CJC executive director, the first time it's been given to a sitting PM. The standing ovation lasted for several minutes. While traditionally tilting Liberal, many Canadian Jews now embrace Harper as Israel's staunchest defender.

"I am troubled, very troubled, by the degree in which opposition to the government of Israel has become, in some circles, an intellectual cover for anti-Semitic discourse," Harper said, to rousing cheers.

"It is all too common nowadays for people to claim to support Israel and the Jewish people. Yet when Israel is attacked for the umpteenth time, because its enemies refuse to accept the right of the Jewish state to exist, these same people are quick to condemn Israel and accuse it of war crimes and to demand that it unilaterally suspend its right to self-defence.

"You will not hear that kind of double-talk from our government - ever."

While certainly not all Jewish Canadians support Israel's conduct, the Harper government has been widely praised for being among the first to cut aid to the Palestians following the election of terrorist-designated Hamas, withdraw from Durban II and refuse to sign a francophone nation summit anti-Israel resolution.

Ignatieff yesterday conceded no ground to Harper's Tories on steadfastness with Israel.

First he teed off on Iran, "a dreadful regime that uses a great religion and then poisons the wellspring of generosity in that great religion with statements inspired by hatred. This is a state seeking weapons of mass destruction. This is a member of the UN denying another member of the UN the right to exist. Canada cannot be silent when one state denies another state their right to exist. Canada cannot be silent when a president of a state denies the Holocaust. And we cannot be in the room when the president of a state engages in vicious lies. Denial of the Holocaust is an unacceptable moral disgrace."

Ignatieff reminded that his father was a Canadian diplomat who served on the UN committee that recommended partitioning Palestine - "a plan accepted by Jews, but rejected by the Arab world. Too much violence has followed."

Five months ago, Ignatieff drew intense criticism for refusing to assail Israel's protracted military assault on Gaza, in response to incessant rocketing of Israeli towns. "I was proud to stand with Israel, my party was proud to stand with Israel, during that hour of trial."

As an elected politician, Ignatieff added, he is required to represent and listen to all factions. "But it does not mean agreeing with everyone and there are some lines I cannot cross. I cannot be neutral between a member of the UN and a terrorist organization. I cannot be neutral between democracy and terror. I cannot be neutral with historical facts. I cannot meet groups or appear on platforms with groups that have links or connections to terror.

"I cannot say one thing in a synagogue and another in a mosque."

But Ignatieff, sensing electoral drifts ahead, warned against exploitation of solidarity with Israel as a partisan political wedge.

"It is reckless, reckless, for leaders to try to score points by branding one another as anti-Israel, to try to claim votes by claiming a monopoly on support for Israel. The true interests of Israel will not be served if Israel becomes a domestic political football in this country."

Sounded a lot like third-and-long yesterday, though.

Hundreds of Palestinians, including scores of children, were detained by Israeli forces in the OPT and many were held incommunicado for prolonged periods. Most were later released without charge, but hundreds were charged with security-related offences and tried before military courts, whose procedures often failed to meet international standards for fair trial. Some 8,000 Palestinians arrested in 2008 or in previous years were still imprisoned at the end of the year. They included some 300 children and 550 people who were held without charge or trial under military administrative detention orders, including some who had been held for up to six years.

* Salwa Salah and Sara Siureh, two 16-year-old girls, were arrested at night from their homes in June and were still held in administrative detention at the end of 2008.
* Mohammed Khawajah, aged 12, was arrested by Israeli soldiers at his home in Ni’lin village at 3am on 11 September. He was beaten and detained with adults in an army detention camp until 15 September, when he was released on bail. He was charged with throwing stones at soldiers and sent for trial before a military court.
* Dozens of Hamas members of the Palestinian parliament and ministers in the former Hamas-led PA government remained detained without trial, up to two years after their arrest. The Israeli authorities held them apparently to exert pressure on Hamas to release an Israeli soldier held in the Gaza Strip by Hamas’ armed wing since 2006.

Almost all Palestinian detainees were held in prisons in Israel in violation of international humanitarian law, which prohibits the removal of detainees to the territory of the occupying power. This made it difficult or impossible in practice for detainees to receive family visits.

Read full report here: http://bit.ly/13b6o4

By Dr. Elias Akleh*

In his foreign policy speech, Sunday 6/14 at the religiously extremist Bar Ilan University, the Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu did not only put the cart of peace in front of the horse, but he also loaded that cart with tons of heavy rocks. The Palestinian senior negotiator, Saeb Erekat, explained "The peace process has been moving at a turtle speed; tonight Netanyahu had flipped this turtle on its back".

Netanyahu started his speech paying lip service to peace, and claiming that all the Israelis want is peace because they are peaceful people starting with their ancient prophets who had a vision of peace. Apparently Netanyahu has not studied his religion very well, otherwise he would have discovered that all the ancient Jewish prophets, including Moses himself, were warmongers and soldiers for a militaristic god, who ordered them to slaughter every living non-Jewish soul. When Israelis talk about peace they are actually talking about war. Their ancient, as well as modern, history is a clear evidence of this fact.

Netanyahu mentioned "three tremendous challenges: The Iranian threat, the financial crisis, and the promotion of peace". Diverting attention from terrorist nuclear Israel he claimed that "the greatest danger to the Middle East and to all of humanity is the encounter between extremist Islam and nuclear weapons" represented in Muslim Iran not in Talmudic Israel. He vowed to work with American and European leaders to form "an international front against Iran". He would do that by inciting the clash between civilizations; Christianity vs Islam while Talmudists are maliciously watching.

As for economy Netanyahu called upon the leaders of the Arab countries, especially oil rich states, ".. the initiatives that I see in the Persian Gulf, which amaze the entire world", to join with the Israelis "to promote economic peace". He shamelessly called upon "the talented entrepreneurs of the Arab world to come and invest here (in Israel) … to give the (Israeli) economy a jump-start". He tried to lure these Arab entrepreneurs by enumerating the industrial talents of Israelis. He put a condition, though, on such cooperation; "If you only agree to work together"; in other words, according to the Israeli rules and under their leadership.

As for promoting peace Netanyahu asked the rhetorical question: "…why is peace still so far from us… why has the conflict been going on for over 60 years?" and he answered himself with his distorted simple truth: "The simple truth is that the root of the conflict has been - and remains - the refusal (of Arabs) to recognize the right of the Jewish People to its own state in its historical homeland". The real simple truth Netanyahu is trying to distort is that Palestinians refuse to be enslaved and subjugated by the Zionist occupation of their land, and resist the Zionist colonizing ambition of building greater Israel from Nile to Euphrates in order to rule the world from Jewish Jerusalem as the capital. Israel's occupation of Palestine and the denial of Palestinian legitimate rights are the real cause of the conflict.

Turning the historical facts upside down, distorting the real historical "cause and effect" of the conflict and ignoring the Zionist terror attacks against Palestinian civilians in their market places since the 1920's Netanyahu repeated the Israeli propaganda that the Arabs had instigated the conflict by attacking the Jews since then until the present. He ignored the fact that Israel's seven wars against the Arabs had always been initiated by successive Israeli governments.

Netanyahu claimed that Israelis had listened to "great many people", who advised them that withdrawal is the key to peace with Palestinians. So Israel tried withdrawal by agreement, withdrawal without agreement, partial withdrawal and full withdrawal, yet peace was not achieved. These so-called withdrawals, he talked about, were in fact defeats suffered by Israelis, who recognized that withdrawal from these occupied areas was cheaper and less painful than their continued occupation.

Ignoring all the peace negotiations, peace agreements, peace plans, and the Arab peace initiative, Netanyahu had the audacity to "appeal to the leaders of the Arab countries and say: Let us meet. Let us talk about peace. Let us make peace", and asked them to receive him in their capitals or to come to Jerusalem. He claimed that "the more we (Israelis) get to a peace agreement with them (Palestinians), the more they are distancing themselves from peace. They raise new demands". Netanyahu has flipped the coin, here. It is an undeniable fact that the Israelis, themselves, are distancing themselves from peace and are constantly raising new demands. Netanyahu's speech is a clear example of sabotaging peace agreements and raising new demands.

Arabs had been talking peace since 1948 but the Israelis had never listened. There are no real peace partners in Israel. They have rejected all peace initiatives even the one that would have guaranteed them full recognition, protection, and economical relationships.

Netanyahu wanted to annul all previous negotiations and agreements and start fresh from point zero. "Let us begin peace negotiations immediately without prior conditions" he called upon the Arabs. Yet prior and impossible to accept conditions was his speech all about.

"The fundamental condition for ending the conflict is the public, binding and sincere Palestinian recognition of Israel as the national homeland of the Jewish People" He warned. He claimed that there is 3,500 years connection between the Jewish People and the Land of Judea and Samaria (West Bank of Palestine); the land of Jewish forefathers. This lie is refuted by remembering the fact that Abraham, the father of the three religions, had come from Ur on the Iraqi/Iranian borders, and that the original inhabitants of Palestine were the Cana'anites, who are the forefathers of the present-day Palestinians. Read ancient history and the Old Testament Mr. Netanyahu! He is alleging here that Palestinians are foreigners in, and possibly occupiers of, Palestine.

This precondition aims to annul Palestinians' rights to the land, to sabotage any peace negotiations, and to eventually legitimize illegitimate Zionist Jewish Israel. Initially the condition was to recognize Israel's right to exist. Now they want Israel to be recognized as a Jewish state. Next step will be to recognize legitimacy of terrorist Zionist Jewish Israel. This recognition is the first step of ethnically cleansing all the non-Jews from occupied Palestine. The Zionist term of "Jewish Israel" has the hidden Israeli future intention and agenda of deporting the 1.5 million Palestinians living as Israeli citizens in the Zionist state.

The second precondition, or principle as Netanyahu named it, is demilitarization, which "..is crucial to the existence of Israel". He stated that "Any area in Palestinian hands has to be demilitarized, with solid security measures. Without this condition, there is a real fear that there will be an armed Palestinian state which will become a terrorist base against Israel". We have to notice here that he did not mention a Palestinian state but "area in Palestinian hands", thus not recognizing the two-state solution. Such areas, according to Netanyahu, must not have control over its air or its borders, but should have a strong Palestinian government, whose job is to protect Israeli security by suppressing Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation, and brainwashing the mind of the new generations through programmed education to accept Zionist occupation and enslavement. What Netanyahu proposes here is isolated Palestinian ghettos with suppressive self-rule within heavily militarized Jewish Israel.

The third precondition was solving "the Palestinian refugee problem outside of the borders of the State of Israel". Netanyahu considered the internationally recognized Palestinian right of return to their homeland as contradictory to the continued existence of Israel as a Jewish state. He considered the Palestinian refugee problem a humanitarian problem and called for international investment to solve it. "I believe that with good will and international investment we can solve this humanitarian problem once and for all". Netanyahu denied the responsibility of the Israeli occupation in creating the Palestinian refugee problem. This is an occupation not a humanitarian problem. Netanyahu wants the international community to take care of this problem. It seems Israel is accustomed to, and feels has the right to, get the international community to pay for its own crimes.

Netanyahu resembled the Palestinian refugees' problem to what he called "Jewish refugees from Arab countries, who were uprooted from their homes". These so-called uprooted Jewish refugees from Arab countries had immigrated to Israel on their own accord despite the pleas of Arab governments not to leave. Many of these so-called Jewish refugees were lured and misguided by Zionist money and ideology, and others were coerced to leave Arab countries by Zionist terror attacks attributed to Arabs. Many Jews are still living in Arab and Islamic countries not willing to leave such as in Lebanon, in Iraq, in Syria, in Iran and practically in all the North African Arab countries.

The fourth precondition was the territorial issues that "… will be discussed in a permanent agreement". Netanyahu tried here to appease Obama's settlement freeze demand when he stated that "we have no intention to build new settlements". Yet, at the same time, he needed to assure his pro-settlement governmental coalitional parties, such as the extremist Israel Beituna, that he would not freeze settlements. So he stated that "settlers are not enemies of peace. They are our brothers and sisters". He supported "normal growth" to meet the people's (Jewish) need to live normal lives; a growth on the expense of Palestinian land. Palestinians are denied such normal growth by denying them building permits.

The most controversial pre-condition was the issue of Jerusalem. Netanyahu stated that as part of the permanent arrangement "Israel needs defensible borders with Jerusalem remaining the united capital of Israel". Jerusalem is one of the most holy places for Christian and Muslim Arabs, so holy that they ceded 78% of Palestine to Israel on the condition to keep east Jerusalem, at least, as a Palestinian capital. Jerusalem is the mother of all conflict.

Like the rest of all Zionist leaders before him, Netanyahu could not but exhibit the racist, extremist, condescending Zionist attitude of Jews as the light unto all nations when he declared that "the right to establish our sovereign state here, in the Land of Israel, arises from one simple fact: Eretz Israel is the birthplace of the Jewish People …where the People of Israel created the Book of Books, and gave it to the world".

Palestine is not the birthplace (god's promised land) of the Jews. Most of the Israeli Jews were not born in Palestine and those who did were the result of illegal occupation. The majority of the present-day Jews are the descendents of the Khazars and Westerners, who adopted Judaism. Judaism is a religion and not a nationality.

What "Book of Books" is Netanyahu talking about? Is he talking about the racist, hate-inciting, warmongering Talmud with teaching such as Jews as god's chosen people while the rest of nations are merely animal souls incarnated in human bodies only to serve Jews? Such a book fades away next to the other religious books that teach human brotherhood, love and peace.

* Dr. Elias Akleh is an Arab writer from a Palestinian descent born in the town of Beit Jala. His family was first evicted from Haifa after the "Nakba" of 1948, then from Beit Jala after the "Nakseh" of 1967. He lives now in the US, and publishes his articles on the web in both English and Arabic.

(this article was taken from http://sabbah.biz/mt/)

Watch the video which expose the truth of the extend of atrocities maiming a huge population.

By Dr. Elias Akleh

Young athletic Obama reflects active energy whether running up the ladder stairs into his Air Force One plane, or giving speeches, such as the song-and-dance so-called historic speech to the Islamic World in Cairo University last Thursday June 4th.

obama_bubbleThis was a very well written speech meant to touch the hearts of Muslims by playing some of their religious tunes citing Qur'anic verses in order to re-gain their trust and their cooperation the US lost during the Bush administration.

To obtain this goal Obama's speech followed a well-defined line that started with his own understanding of the causes of the conflict between the West and the Islamic World, his intent of breaking the cycle of conflict, his seeking a new beginning between the US and the Muslim world, his assertion that he is a different president with understanding of Islamic religion, his request for equal partnerships with the Islamic governments to deal with seven major issues in order to achieve better life for all, and finally his call for the younger generations to eliminate doubt of intentionality and fear of partnership based on previous experiences in order to remake this world. In other words he is saying: there is a problem, I can fix it, trust me because I am different, here is what I want you to do to help me fix the problem, and here is your reward for doing so.

To the average person the speech looks genuine, truthful, honest, and ushers the change Obama had always talked about. Looking deeper into the speech, its hidden messages, and its meta-messages one can recognize its condescending, its manipulations, and its contradictions with the actions and decisions of Obama's administration.

It is a political naiveté to believe that any US president, even black and looks different can change the American policies, either internal or foreign. Such policies are formulated by power elites in secluded meetings outside the federal compounds. All the president can do is to function as their façade and to follow their dictates because he was hired (others may think elected) to do so.

It has been recognized that the policies of direct hard and violent military approach of fighting "Islamofascism", crusading "global war on terror", building the "New Middle East", and spreading "freedom and the American democracy", the Bush administration had adopted for the last eight years, had failed on many fronts, and succeeded only in alienating the friendly Arab regimes, building fierce military resistance, strengthening anti-American sentiments in the Islamic World in general, and causing economical crises. A new approach is needed, and Obama's change (soft manipulative approach) is introduced.

Obama acknowledged civilization's debt to Islam and that it had been a part of America's story with 7 million American Muslims and over 1,200 mosques. Obama declared that "part of my responsibility as President of the US to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam". Yet he did not put an end to federal eavesdropping on Muslims' phone conversations, the spying on mosques, the closure of Muslim charity institutions such as the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development in Dallas and the long imprisonment judgments against five of its founders, end of May, for delivering food stuff to American recognized charities in Gaza Strip, and many similar anti-Muslim crimes in the US.

Obama confessed, implicitly, that hostility was caused by colonialism (neocons) and violent Muslim extremists (terrorists), "tension has been fed by colonialism that denied rights and opportunities to many Muslims, and a Cold War in which Muslim countries were … treated as proxies without regard to their own aspirations" and "violent extremists have exploited these tensions in a small but potent minority of Muslims". Yet he wants "this cycle of suspicion and discord must end".

Obama asked the Muslim World to discard the "crude stereotype" of America as "a self-interested empire", and requested that they partner with him in solving problems. He stated: "Our problems must be dealt with through partnership; our progress must be shared". This is the real goal of this speech; some type of partnership that serves the interests of the US as we can detect in the rest of his speech.

We see here clearly the hypocritical condescending attitude of the speech, where he claimed that only he, or only the US, knows what the problems of the Islamic World are, how to deal with them, and that he has the right and/or the authority to tell the Islamic World how to deal with these problems.

He asked them first to join him in confronting what he called violent extremists (Bush's global war on terror). He repeated the myth of the globally spread and strong al-Qaeda terrorists, who perpetrated the attacks of 911, and stressed that al-Qaeda's attack is a fact and not opinions to be debated. Obama wanted us to ignore all the scientific facts that contradict the official story of 911 attacks, and indicate that 911 was an inside job.

Obama denies American plans of building military bases in Afghanistan and Iraq along the oil pipe lines and to revive the opium industry in Afghanistan to regain the money laundering through Wall Street. Although Obama knows very well that Iraqi invasion was a "war of choice" that has devastated the country and led to strong anti-American sentiments he claimed that "Iraqi people are ultimately better off without the tyranny of Saddam Hussein". The fact is Iraqis, even those who hated Saddam Hussein, are longing for at least the peace and safety they enjoyed under his rule compared to the Americans.

Although Obama can understand that the trauma of 911 had led his country "… to act contrary to our traditions and our ideals", such as wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq, and human rights violations such as kidnapping, renditions and torture, yet he could not understand that all these traumas had led Muslims in general to resist such violent acts. So he claimed that "America will defend itself, respectful of the sovereignty of nations and the rule of law" through invading other countries and dropping bombs on civilians. The Americans "will do so in partnership with Muslim communities which are also threatened". It seems any threat to America is also a threat to Muslim communities since Obama claimed that these violent extremists had killed Muslims of different faith more than Americans, ignoring the fact that American military had adopted the policies of divide in order to conquer, and igniting hatred between different ethnic and religious groups.

Obama's real goal of the speech and his hypocritical condescending attitude is clearly expressed when he stated: "The sooner the extremists are isolated and unwelcome in Muslim communities, the sooner we (Americans) will all be safer". The hidden message here is that terrorists exist only in Muslim communities, and Obama wants the Muslim governments, as proxies, to eliminate those terrorists, who resist American colonialism. To motivate Muslim governments to destroy the terrorists among them Obama abused the Qur'anic teachings "whoever (terrorists) kills an innocent it is as if he has killed all mankind, and whoever (government) saves a person, it is as if he has saved all mankind".

The real violent extremists terrorist are the neocons, who worked in the Bush administration, who waged wars and terror around the world such as in Haiti, Sudan, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq and the Middle East. They have caused the devastations of several countries, and killed several millions of souls with each soul as killing all mankind. Yet Obama had refused to persecute these terrorists in the American communities.

As for the Israeli occupation of Palestine, Obama started with a warning to the Arabs by reasserting the unconditional immoral support for terrorist Israel. He talked about America's unbreakable bond to Israel "… based upon cultural and historical ties" as if the Jews, a small minority in America, are the only people having cultural and historical ties to America. Are there really any such bonds besides arming Israel? He acknowledged the Jewish suffering in Europe, and their "aspiration (Zionist colonial plan) for a Jewish homeland" that came on the expense of Palestinians. He stated that "threatening Israel with destruction is deeply wrong" ignoring the fact that Arabs and Muslims had never threatened Israel but extended many peace treaties to Israeli leaders, who rejected them. The opposite is true. Israel is threatening Arabs and Muslims. Suffering from a holocaust should have motivated them not to inflict similar holocaust on others.

On the other hand Obama recognized the "undeniable" Palestinian sufferings, pain and dislocations. Yet he did not confess that Israel, backed with American military support, is the cause of this suffering. It is a well known fact that Obama's administration is still providing Israel with weapons, $3 BILLION worth this year, to kill Palestinians and usurp more land, even after the Gaza holocaust. He justified this with "but if we see this conflict only from one side or the other, then we will be blind to the truth". Obama should look at the conflict from the side of justice. The Israelis had violently occupied Palestine, rejected the two states and the one state solutions and all other peace initiatives because their real "aspiration" is for Greater Israel from Nile to Euphrates. Ignoring this is another political naiveté.

Obama supported the two states solution, and promised to "…personally pursue this outcome with all the patience and dedication that the task requires". Promises … promises. But "Palestinians must abandon violence (terror)" seems to be the price of such dedication. Obama, here, ignored and legitimized the 61 years long Israeli terror against Palestinians, and denied the Palestinians the legal and moral right to resist occupation that is legitimized by the UN charter. He turned the table around describing Israelis as the victims of Palestinian aggression stating that it is not a sign of courage or power "to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus". He forgot to mention Israeli American made fighters dropping American made bombs on Palestinian civilian homes killing more children and women also while sleeping.

Obama's call to Palestinians to stop their resistance and to learn non-violent struggle methods from the American blacks, from people from South Africa to South Asia and from Eastern Europe to Indonesia, is hypocrisy and flatly wrong. All these people had won their freedom and their rights only when their oppressors realized that they cannot defeat the people's armed resistance. Obama needs only to study the black history in America to realize this fact. Yet Palestinians had always used peaceful methods more than violence. They had adopted peace initiatives, peace negotiations, demonstrations, Intifadas, lobbying and conferences, economic boycotts, divestment, and many other peaceful methods. It is only when the Israelis had met these peaceful methods with more brutal aggression that some Palestinians resorted to internationally approved armed resistance.

Obama denied the legitimacy of the democratically elected Hamas, who "..have support among some Palestinians" and demanded they " … must put an end to violence, recognize past agreements, recognize Israel's right to exist". He ignored the fact that Israel is the violent party, had sabotaged and annulled past unjust towards Palestinians agreements, and does not recognize Palestinians' right to exist on their own land. He then declared that Israel had violated past agreements "This construction (of Israeli settlements) violates previous agreements … it is time for these settlements to stop". These settlements are illegal under international law and must be dismantled not just stopped.

Obama summed up the Palestinian cause as a ".. continuing humanitarian crisis" and asked Israel to take concrete steps to enable Palestinian progress. Yet he demanded Arab governments to do more than the Peace Initiative which he considered only a beginning. He told them that since "privately, many Muslims recognize that Israel will not go away", you should act accordingly and help Palestinians "to recognize Israel's legitimacy, and to choose progress over a self-defeating focus on the past"

Lastly tickling the Islamic religious feeling with the story of Isra when Moses, Jesus, and Mohammed joined in prayer in Jerusalem, Obama called to turn originally Arab Jerusalem into an international city.

Along the last 61 years Israel has been the American mad dog in the heart of the Arab World. Successive American administrations promise Arab regimes to keep this Israeli dog on leash preventing it from expanding its territory providing the Arab regimes do the American biddings. Obama's administration is not different.

Talking about nuclear armaments Obama requested Iran to abide by the NPT, to overcome decades of mistrust caused by the US/Iran conflicts, and to prepare to move forward with the US to discuss the many issues between the two countries. Obama wanted to make it clear that "when it comes to nuclear weapons, we have reached a decisive point … it's about preventing a nuclear arms race in the Middle East that could lead this region and the world down a hugely dangerous path". Although he hinted that some countries (Israel) have nuclear weapons he did not mention Israel's nuclear weapons emboldening Israel's terror and threatening the region. He ignored America's own nuclear weapons, America's so-called defense shield in Europe, and all the nuclear bomb carriers; battleships, submarines, and fighter planes surrounding Iran from all sides.

Obama tried to alienate himself from Bush's doctrine of spreading American democracy and stated that no government should impose its system on other nations. He declared his commitment, though, to governments that reflect the will of the people. Yet his administrated had ignored and opposed the Palestinian choice of Hamas. He ignored American meddling in the elections of other countries such as Venezuela, Georgia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Lebanon recently, and even the coming elections of Iran.

As for religious freedom Obama accused Muslims if intolerance: "Among some Muslims, there's a disturbing tendency to measure one's own faith by the rejection of somebody else's faith". He cited the divisions between Sunni and Shia that led to tragic violence in Iraq as evidence of such intolerance. Yet he ignored the fact that Western countries, particularly the US, are greatly anti-Muslims. America had invented the terms extremist/fundamentalist Muslims, terrorist Muslims, Islamofascist, and Islamophobia. Muslims have been largely persecuted in America since 911. Obama ignored the fact that Islamic division in Iraq was the result of American policy of divide in order to conquer. Obama would not even dare to talk about Jewish religious intolerance and the rejection of others as represented by their concept of god's chosen people.

Obama paid lip service to women's rights giving women the right to choose her dress and to pursue education and careers equal to men.

Finally Obama talked about economic development; a dear subject to his heart. He invited the oil rich Gulf States to re-invest their money back into the US because "no development strategy can be based only upon what comes out of the ground, nor it can be sustained while young people are out of work". Many Gulf States withdrew their money from American banks after 911. Obama also wanted the Gulf States to increase its production of oil and to decrease the price. Hence, came his sudden unplanned quick visit to Saudi Arabia. In return Obama promised to "create a new corps of business volunteers to partner with counterparts in Muslim-majority countries".

Obama ended his speech with patronizing quotes from the three religions and calling to work together for peace.

Obama sang and danced very well. Now comes time for deeds.

By Alan Sabrosky *

The hopes Obama raised in Cairo didn't last a week before US Middle East envoy George Mitchell buried them five days later in Israel. It was understood that what Obama proposed would be difficult to translate into concrete deeds. I believe Obama was sincere, and it wouldn't have been the first time a US president used a major speech to end a debate within the government, and as a springboard for some dramatic policy initiatives. But Congressional supremacy inheres in the US constitutional order, and with the US Congress firmly in Israel's corner, the Wailing Wall trumps the dream.

The Dynamics

There are three futures for Israeli-Palestinian relations. These are: (1) the status quo, a mix of Israeli apartheid and repression coupled with Palestinian attempts at retaliation or at least survival; (2) a two-state solution, with a weak Palestinian state infested by Jewish settlements, periodically ravaged by the IDF; or (3) a one-state solution, either a secular, non-Jewish state or a Jewish state "ethnically cleansed" of Palestinians.

None of these is a joy. If all parties within and outside of the region agree on anything, it is that the status quo is too unstable to endure much longer. Jews inside and outside of Israel hate it, often for different reasons. Palestinians loathe it. Countries nearby wonder when conflict there will embroil them. Outside powers, especially the US and the European Union, desperately want something to emerge that lets them get off the political (and sometimes military) firing line.

It is this desperation more than good judgment that drives support for a two-state solution. Otherwise intelligent and, occasionally, well-meaning people advocate it, either as a political pablum to soothe anxieties or like someone drowning clutching a sinking lifeboat, knowing it isn't much but hoping that it will at least buy some time for something else to happen. Even with the best will in the world, a Palestinian state in two parts, separated by Israeli territory and with no common border or viable economy, would be a basket case, although possibly a supportable one with enough external aid. Add in Jewish settlers, Palestinian refugees, and East Jerusalem, and its prospects would be somewhere between dismal and abysmal. Whatever Palestinian state might emerge would make old-time Soviet satellites in Eastern Europe seem positively free.

Which leads to the one-state solution. A single, unified secular state might have worked once, but no longer. It is one thing to dismiss rhetorically the past and point to the future, but that requires someone outside of the region to make it happen, and then to enforce it. Neither the UN nor the EU can do it without a demonstrated US determination to bring Israel to heel. But Obama before Cairo and especially Mitchell afterwards have made it abundantly clear the US today simply will not do that. The US says it wants something to happen, Israel either ignores the US or openly flouts it, and the US then reaffirms its support for Israel. No sanctions, no reduction in aid, just words - ours, theirs, and occasionally those of others, within or outside of a negotiating context. But with or without US approval, Israel will do what Israel wants to do, the consequences be damned, and trust its puppets in the US Congress - both houses, both parties - to allow it.

Towards the Future

This is controlling. If the settlements stay in place in "Judea and Samaria" (i.e., the West Bank), any Palestinian state is simply a temporary "holding company" awaiting dissolution by Netanyahu, Lieberman and their merry band. Objectively, the US could force Israel to remove the settlements, and give Israel the pleasure of their relocation inside of Israel proper. Absent US financial support, military aid and diplomatic protection, Israel as a state withers on the vine or discards its "chosen people" visage and joins the global community. With US support, aid and protection, it has no need whatsoever to change the way it does its business, and therefore no need to give anything but lip service to the grandiose ideas being tossed around about a Palestinian state and a new beginning.

What is going to happen is an old story retold - "ethnic cleansing" that succeeds. And from the perspective of people like Netanyahu and Lieberman, it has its logic. The present is an untenable mess; a separate Palestinian state only postpones a solution and might see the US change its own policy as more and more Americans become aware of what is happening there; a secular state that ends the dream of a Jewish state is a more existential threat than anything posed by Iran; and all that remains is a single Jewish state without the Palestinians, and probably without the current Arab citizens of Israel as well. Of course it will be a crime against humanity, but with the US shielding them, they'll not end up in the dock or on the gallows where they belong.

It isn't even hard to anticipate how that will happen. At some point in the coming months, Israel will strike Iran, an illusionary "existential threat" contrived by Israel principally to incite fear and encourage support from the Jews of the Diaspora (especially in the US). However the strike goes, large numbers of people and many governments in the region will blame the US, either for helping or at least for not hindering Israel. There is a good chance much of the region will convulse, and during that convulsion with attention directed everywhere else, the IDF (actively aided by settlers in the West Bank) will expel the Palestinians there across the Jordan River and those in Gaza into the Sinai. It doesn't take a seer to anticipate their fate.

It also isn't hard to see how this might be averted. Much depends on what the US chooses to do, and so much of that depends on what the American people know and how they make that knowledge felt. There is much more criticism of Israel, and of US support for it, within the US today than existed even five years ago, and another five years could well produce a diplomatic revolution. It wouldn't be easy, but it could happen, and even sooner than that, depending on how much rage, pain or fear the US public experienced due to events in the region. Israel knows this, and I do not doubt for a moment what it will do - unless Obama forgets the Wailing Wall and remembers his dream.

* Alan Sabrosky (Ph.D, University of Michigan) is a ten-year US Marine Corps veteran and a graduate of the US Army War College. He can be contacted at docbrosk@comcast.net

*Haitham Sabbah

In a recently published report, Global Peace Index placed Israel only three steps from the less peaceful countries in the world.

In its third year study, an Australian nonprofit organization ranked 144 countries for how peaceful they are.

On top of the list, New Zealand followed by Denmark and Norway were ranked as the most peaceful countries in the world.

Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq only kept Israel from "occupying" the bottom of the list and positioned it as 141st out of 144 countries.

Although 2008 research study ranked Israel 136th, but then the list only had 140 countries, which means that they have slipped one position lower since then. In 2007 Israel was ranked 119 out of 121.

Out of the 23 indicators used in the report to determine the existence or absence of peace, Israel received the lowest possible "peace" scores for military capability, aggregate number of heavy weapons, number of armed services personnel and volume of imports of major conventional weapons. Similarly low was Israel score when it came to respect for human rights, potential for attacks and perceptions of criminality in society.

In short we can say: This is a quick shot of Zionistan-Israel reality.

by Susan Abulhawa*

Following Netanyahu's much anticipated policy speech, politicians and journalists, like mindless automatons, have set about repeating Israel's tired mantra that Palestinians should recognize Israel's right to exist. Never mind the fact that the PLO and Palestine Authority have obliged this ludicrous call, not once, but four times. And never mind that Israel has always denied Palestine's right to exist, not only as a nation, but as individuals seeking a dignified life in our own homeland.

Does anyone find it interesting that Israel is the only country on the planet going around with this incessant insistence that everyone recognize her right to exist? Given that we Palestinians are the ones who have been dispossessed, occupied, and oppressed, one might expect that we should be the ones making such a demand. But t hat isn't the case. Why? Because our right to exist as a nation is self-evident. We are the natives of that land! We know we have that right. The world knows it. That's why Palestine doesn't need Israel or any other country to recognize her right to exist. We are the rightful heirs to that land and this can be verified legally, historically, culturally, and even genetically. And as such, the only true legitimacy Israel will ever have must come from us abdicating our inheritance, our history, and our culture to Israel. That's why Israel insists we declare she had a right to take everything we ever had - from home and property, cemeteries, churches and mosques, to culture and history and hope.

Israel is a country that was founded by Europeans who came to Palestine, formed terrorist gangs who set about a systematic ethnic cleansing of the native Palestinians from their homes on 78% of Historic Palestine in 1948. Those Palestinians and their descendants still languish in refugee camps. Israel attempted a similar scenario in 1967 when they conquered the remainder of Palestine, but Palestinians then couldn't be dislodged from their homes as easily. This remains true, despite 40 years of Israel's violent and oppressive military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Despite home demolitions, land confiscations, rapacious building of Jewish-only colonies, endless checkpoints, targeted assassinations, bombings of schools, hospitals, municipal buildings and malls, closures and denials; despite the massive human rights abuses, the imprisonment and torture of men women and children alike, the separation of families, the daily humiliations; despite the massive killings - Palestinians remain. We still resist. We still live, love, and have babies. As much as we can, we rebuild what Israel destroys. Such are rights!
Rights are inherent and inherently just, like the right to live with dignity and to be masters of one's own fate. It is a human right not be persecuted and oppressed because you happen to belong to one religion and not another.

That Israelis simply take property belonging to Palestinians is not a right. That is theft. That Israel cut off the movement of food, medicine and other basic goods to the Gaza strip, causing massive malnutrition, economic collapse and misery because Palestinians elected particular leaders is not a right. That is an affront to humanity. That Israel rain death from the skies on an already battered and starved Gaza, murdering over 3000 human beings and maiming thousands more in a single month is not a right. It's a war crime. That Israel has employed every imperialistic tactic to subjugate, humiliate, break, and expel an entire nation of principally unarmed civilians because of their religion is not a right. It is a moral obscenity. That every Jew from Europe, Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Australia be entitled to dual citizenship, one in their native country and one in Israel, while the rightful heirs to the land linger as refugees without citizenship anywhere is not a right. It is an outrage.

I'm sure my words will be twisted in some way to imply that I'm advocating pushing Israelis "into the sea" or some other asinine claim. So let me be explicit: We all have the right to exist, to live, to be masters of our own destiny. We all have the right not to be oppressed by others. Such rights are inherent to every individual living in that land: Jew, Muslim, or Christian. But Israelis do not have the right to create particular religious demographics by causing the demise of the natives. To be a Jewish [or Muslim or Christian] state, where privilege is accorded to those belonging to a particular religion at the expense of those who do not is not a right.

A nation that discriminates against and oppresses those who do not belong to a particular religious, racial, or ethnic group is not a light onto nations. It is a blight. And to recognize such racism as a human or national right goes against every tenet of international law. It defies the basic sense that the worth of a human being should not be measured by their religion, any more than it should be measured by the color of their skin or the language they speak.

* Susan Abulhawa is the author of The Scar of David, a work of historic fiction. She is also the founder of Playgrounds for Palestine, http://www.PlaygroundsforPalestine.org and Board Member of Deir Yassin Remembered. She can be reached at: sjabulhawa@yahoo.com.

This fact sheet is a summary of the impacts of the Gaza crisis on children during the 22 days of conflict.
Key Child Protection Facts from 27 December – 17 January:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-3VQmkq82A&feature=player_embedded
Child Protection:

•314 children have were killed and at least 860 wounded as a result of the Gaza conflict since it began 27 December. (Al Mezan).
still today children and babies are dying in conditions that no human should have to endure let alone a child.

•Handicap International estimates that up to 55 percent of people injured (including about 450 children) have sustained injuries that are so severe , without proper rehabilitation, will result in permanent disability. and death. (OCHA)
Child Health and Well-Being:

•During the fighting, over 34 health facilities (eight hospitals and around 30 PHC clinics) were damaged or badly destroyed. Several facilities, including Dora Pediatrics Hospital, were hit more than once. (WHO)

•over 16 ambulances have been hit and damaged in the course of the conflict, with 13 medical personnel Killed and 22 injured in the line of duty all this while showing that they were on medical missions.

•An estimated 3,300 babies were born during the conflict, during which there were reports of premature labor and delivery due to lack of access to healthcare. we do not have the numbers of misscarrages that occured but are believed to be in there hundreds (OCHA)

•Primary health care services were reported to have declined by well over 90%. and worsen daily , and many programs such as vaccination schemes and neonatal care, stopped completely for significant periods. thus will cause so much more long term damage (WHO)
Displacement:

•At the peak of displacement, UNRWA was accommodating almost 51,000 people, among them approximately 28,560 children, in 44 shelters across Gaza. Currently, there are still over 500 people in temporary shelters including many children. (OCHA)

•It has been estimated that 200,000 people were displaced, among them 112,000 children. they are living without all basic human needs (Al Mezan)

•At least 4,100 houses have been destroyed and another 17,000 homes severely damaged, forcing many of the residents, among them thousands of children, to seek shelter elsewhere. (PCBS)

•Israeli shells hit three UNRWA schools that were sheltering displaced families, killing 47 people, including 15 children. all while in school and many more injured many severe (OCHA)
Education

•At least 61 schools were damaged or destroyed from air strikes and related bombardment in Gaza. (Al Mezan)

•Around 440,000 students in Gaza lost five days of the new school term, and the first-term exams, which were being sat when the conflict began, were postponed. education is still a priority and all students have done all they can to study in daylight as power is in sgort supply (OCHA)

•At the height of the conflict, virtually all of Gaza’s 1.4 million people, including 793,520 children, were without electricity for days and weeks in areas still they are unger severe shortages. (OCHA)

•At any given time during the conflict, at least 500,000 people were without water and the water supplys were targeted and destroyed. still no aid to repair the water supplies are being allowed in (OCHA)

•At least 2,200,000 liters of sewage have leaked out of Gaza’s waste water system due to damage from shelling, affecting at least 91,727 people, including 51,367 children. daily the situation worsens (OCHA)
Food and Nutrition

•Approximately 91% of Gaza’s population — some 1,275,300 people including 714,168 children — are now dependent on food assistance. but less than 40% of the needs of basics are reaching those most in need(OCHA)

•Around 30,000 babies — or three quarters of Gaza’s infants under 6 months of age — are not exclusively breastfed, exposing them to a high risk of infection or malnutrition from using breast milk substitutes prepared with contaminated water.this is a situation that again worsend daily leaving many infants with having long term problems (UNICEF)

•A child in Gaza is five times more likely to be stunted than in a healthy population. it is now believed to be double that and as the months and weeks go past the situation worsens daily (UNICEF)

•more than half of children under 2 in Gaza are anaemic
studies have not been taken on children over two but it likly to be much higher

Barack Obama is recognized to be a person of acute intelligence, a legal scholar, careful with his choice of words. He deserves to be taken seriously -- both what he says, and what he omits. Particularly significant is his first substantive statement on foreign affairs, on January 22, at the State Department, when introducing George Mitchell to serve as his special envoy for Middle East peace.

Mitchell is to focus his attention on the Israel-Palestine problem, in the wake of the recent US-Israeli invasion of Gaza. During the murderous assault, Obama remained silent apart from a few platitudes, because, he said, there is only one president -- a fact that did not silence him on many other issues. His campaign did, however, repeat his statement that "if missiles were falling where my two daughters sleep, I would do everything in order to stop that." He was referring to Israeli children, not the hundreds of Palestinian children being butchered by US arms, about whom he could not speak, because there was only one president.

On January 22, however, the one president was Barack Obama, so he could speak freely about these matters -- avoiding, however, the attack on Gaza, which had, conveniently, been called off just before the inauguration.

Obama's talk emphasized his commitment to a peaceful settlement. He left its contours vague, apart from one specific proposal: "the Arab peace initiative," Obama said, "contains constructive elements that could help advance these efforts. Now is the time for Arab states to act on the initiative's promise by supporting the Palestinian government under President Abbas and Prime Minister Fayyad, taking steps towards normalizing relations with Israel, and by standing up to extremism that threatens us all."

Obama is not directly falsifying the Arab League proposal, but the carefully framed deceit is instructive.

The Arab League peace proposal does indeed call for normalization of relations with Israel -- in the context -- repeat, in the context of a two-state settlement in terms of the longstanding international consensus, which the US and Israel have blocked for over 30 years, in international isolation, and still do. The core of the Arab League proposal, as Obama and his Mideast advisers know very well, is its call for a peaceful political settlement in these terms, which are well-known, and recognized to be the only basis for the peaceful settlement to which Obama professes to be committed. The omission of that crucial fact can hardly be accidental, and signals clearly that Obama envisions no departure from US rejectionism. His call for the Arab states to act on a corollary to their proposal, while the US ignores even the existence of its central content, which is the precondition for the corollary, surpasses cynicism.

The most significant acts to undermine a peaceful settlement are the daily US-backed actions in the occupied territories, all recognized to be criminal: taking over valuable land and resources and constructing what the leading architect of the plan, Ariel Sharon, called "Bantustans" for Palestinians -- an unfair comparison because the Bantustans were far more viable than the fragments left to Palestinians under Sharon's conception, now being realized. But the US and Israel even continue to oppose a political settlement in words, most recently in December 2008, when the US and Israel (and a few Pacific islands) voted against a UN resolution supporting "the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination" (passed 173 to 5, US-Israel opposed, with evasive pretexts).

Obama had not one word to say about the settlement and infrastructure developments in the West Bank, and the complex measures to control Palestinian existence, designed to undermine the prospects for a peaceful two-state settlement. His silence is a grim refutation of his oratorical flourishes about how "I will sustain an active commitment to seek two states living side by side in peace and security."

Also unmentioned is Israel's use of US arms in Gaza, in violation not only of international but also US law. Or Washington's shipment of new arms to Israel right at the peak of the US-Israeli attack, surely not unknown to Obama's Middle East advisers.

Obama was firm, however, that smuggling of arms to Gaza must be stopped. He endorses the agreement of Condoleeza Rice and Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni that the Egyptian-Gaza border must be closed -- a remarkable exercise of imperial arrogance, as the Financial Times observed: "as they stood in Washington congratulating each other, both officials seemed oblivious to the fact that they were making a deal about an illegal trade on someone else's border -- Egypt in this case. The next day, an Egyptian official described the memorandum as `fictional'." Egypt's objections were ignored.

Returning to Obama's reference to the "constructive" Arab League proposal, as the wording indicates, Obama persists in restricting support to the defeated party in the January 2006 election, the only free election in the Arab world, to which the US and Israel reacted, instantly and overtly, by severely punishing Palestinians for opposing the will of the masters. A minor technicality is that Abbas's term ran out on January 9, and that Fayyad was appointed without confirmation by the Palestinian parliament (many of them kidnapped and in Israeli prisons). Ha'aretz describes Fayyad as "a strange bird in Palestinian politics. On the one hand, he is the Palestinian politician most esteemed by Israel and the West. However, on the other hand, he has no electoral power whatsoever in Gaza or the West Bank." The report also notes Fayyad's "close relationship with the Israeli establishment," notably his friendship with Sharon's extremist adviser Dov Weiglass. Though lacking popular support, he is regarded as competent and honest, not the norm in the US-backed political sectors.

Obama's insistence that only Abbas and Fayyad exist conforms to the consistent Western contempt for democracy unless it is under control.

Obama provided the usual reasons for ignoring the elected government led by Hamas. "To be a genuine party to peace," Obama declared, "the quartet [US, EU, Russia, UN] has made it clear that Hamas must meet clear conditions: recognize Israel's right to exist; renounce violence; and abide by past agreements." Unmentioned, also as usual, is the inconvenient fact that the US and Israel firmly reject all three conditions. In international isolation, they bar a two-state settlement including a Palestinian state; they of course do not renounce violence; and they reject the quartet's central proposal, the "road map." Israel formally accepted it, but with 14 reservations that effectively eliminate its contents (tacitly backed by the US). It is the great merit of Jimmy Carter's Palestine: Peace not Apartheid, to have brought these facts to public attention for the first time -- and in the mainstream, the only time.

It follows, by elementary reasoning, that neither the US nor Israel is a "genuine party to peace." But that cannot be. It is not even a phrase in the English language.

It is perhaps unfair to criticize Obama for this further exercise of cynicism, because it is close to universal, unlike his scrupulous evisceration of the core component of the Arab League proposal, which is his own novel contribution.

Also near universal are the standard references to Hamas: a terrorist organization, dedicated to the destruction of Israel (or maybe all Jews). Omitted are the inconvenient facts that the US-Israel are not only dedicated to the destruction of any viable Palestinian state, but are steadily implementing those policies. Or that unlike the two rejectionist states, Hamas has called for a two-state settlement in terms of the international consensus: publicly, repeatedly, explicitly.

Obama began his remarks by saying: "Let me be clear: America is committed to Israel's security. And we will always support Israel's right to defend itself against legitimate threats."

There was nothing about the right of Palestinians to defend themselves against far more extreme threats, such as those occurring daily, with US support, in the occupied territories. But that again is the norm.

Also normal is the enunciation of the principle that Israel has the right to defend itself. That is correct, but vacuous: so does everyone. But in the context the cliche is worse than vacuous: it is more cynical deceit.

The issue is not whether Israel has the right to defend itself, like everyone else, but whether it has the right to do so by force. No one, including Obama, believes that states enjoy a general right to defend themselves by force: it is first necessary to demonstrate that there are no peaceful alternatives that can be tried. In this case, there surely are.

A narrow alternative would be for Israel to abide by a cease-fire, for example, the cease-fire proposed by Hamas political leader Khaled Mishal a few days before Israel launched its attack on December 27. Mishal called for restoring the 2005 agreement. That agreement called for an end to violence and uninterrupted opening of the borders, along with an Israeli guarantee that goods and people could move freely between the two parts of occupied Palestine, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The agreement was rejected by the US and Israel a few months later, after the free election of January 2006 turned out "the wrong way." There are many other highly relevant cases.

The broader and more significant alternative would be for the US and Israel to abandon their extreme rejectionism, and join the rest of the world -- including the Arab states and Hamas -- in supporting a two-state settlement in accord with the international consensus. It should be noted that in the past 30 years there has been one departure from US-Israeli rejectionism: the negotiations at Taba in January 2001, which appeared to be close to a peaceful resolution when Israel prematurely called them off. It would not, then, be outlandish for Obama to agree to join the world, even within the framework of US policy, if he were interested in doing so.

In short, Obama's forceful reiteration of Israel's right to defend itself is another exercise of cynical deceit -- though, it must be admitted, not unique to him, but virtually universal.

The deceit is particularly striking in this case because the occasion was the appointment of Mitchell as special envoy. Mitchell's primary achievement was his leading role in the peaceful settlement in northern Ireland. It called for an end to IRA terror and British violence. Implicit is the recognition that while Britain had the right to defend itself from terror, it had no right to do so by force, because there was a peaceful alternative: recognition of the legitimate grievances of the Irish Catholic community that were the roots of IRA terror. When Britain adopted that sensible course, the terror ended. The implications for Mitchell's mission with regard to Israel-Palestine are so obvious that they need not be spelled out. And omission of them is, again, a striking indication of the commitment of the Obama administration to traditional US rejectionism and opposition to peace, except on its extremist terms.

Obama also praised Jordan for its "constructive role in training Palestinian security forces and nurturing its relations with Israel" -- which contrasts strikingly with US-Israeli refusal to deal with the freely elected government of Palestine, while savagely punishing Palestinians for electing it with pretexts which, as noted, do not withstand a moment's scrutiny. It is true that Jordan joined the US in arming and training Palestinian security forces, so that they could violently suppress any manifestation of support for the miserable victims of US-Israeli assault in Gaza, also arresting supporters of Hamas and the prominent journalist Khaled Amayreh, while organizing their own demonstrations in support of Abbas and Fatah, in which most participants "were civil servants and school children who were instructed by the PA to attend the rally," according to the Jerusalem Post. Our kind of democracy.

Obama made one further substantive comment: "As part of a lasting cease-fire, Gaza's border crossings should be open to allow the flow of aid and commerce, with an appropriate monitoring regimeÉ" He did not, of course, mention that the US-Israel had rejected much the same agreement after the January 2006 election, and that Israel had never observed similar subsequent agreements on borders.

Also missing is any reaction to Israel's announcement that it rejected the cease-fire agreement, so that the prospects for it to be "lasting" are not auspicious. As reported at once in the press, "Israeli Cabinet Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer, who takes part in security deliberations, told Army Radio on Thursday that Israel wouldn't let border crossings with Gaza reopen without a deal to free [Gilad] Schalit" (AP, Jan 22); ÔIsrael to keep Gaza crossings closed...An official said the government planned to use the issue to bargain for the release of Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier held by the Islamist group since 2006 (Financial Times, Jan. 23); "Earlier this week, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said that progress on Corporal Shalit's release would be a precondition to opening up the border crossings that have been mostly closed since Hamas wrested control of Gaza from the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority in 2007" (Christian Science Monitor, Jan. 23); "an Israeli official said there would be tough conditions for any lifting of the blockade, which he linked with the release of Gilad Shalit" (FT, Jan. 23); among many others.

Shalit's capture is a prominent issue in the West, another indication of Hamas's criminality. Whatever one thinks about it, it is uncontroversial that capture of a soldier of an attacking army is far less of a crime than kidnapping of civilians, exactly what Israeli forces did the day before the capture of Shalit, invading Gaza city and kidnapping two brothers, then spiriting them across the border where they disappeared into Israel's prison complex. Unlike the much lesser case of Shalit, that crime was virtually unreported and has been forgotten, along with Israel's regular practice for decades of kidnapping civilians in Lebanon and on the high seas and dispatching them to Israeli prisons, often held for many years as hostages. But the capture of Shalit bars a cease-fire.

Obama's State Department talk about the Middle East continued with "the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan and PakistanÉ the central front in our enduring struggle against terrorism and extremism." A few hours later, US planes attacked a remote village in Afghanistan, intending to kill a Taliban commander. "Village elders, though, told provincial officials there were no Taliban in the area, which they described as a hamlet populated mainly by shepherds. Women and children were among the 22 dead, they said, according to Hamididan Abdul Rahmzai, the head of the provincial council" (LA Times, Jan. 24).

Afghan president Karzai's first message to Obama after he was elected in November was a plea to end the bombing of Afghan civilians, reiterated a few hours before Obama was sworn in. This was considered as significant as Karzai's call for a timetable for departure of US and other foreign forces. The rich and powerful have their "responsibilities." Among them, the New York Times reported, is to "provide security" in southern Afghanistan, where "the insurgency is homegrown and self-sustaining." All familiar. From Pravda in the 1980s, for example.

Jealousy and hate fills our heart
when we speak we spit venom
polite and humbleness is a long lost virtue
Humility is a meaningless word

We care bout nothing but money and luxury
we care nothing for the people in distress
Oppression and killing is just another boring news item for us
We forgot and ignored to stand up against injustice

Dark have been our thoughts of lately my friends
we've sat in the shadows for too long,
All we do is against The Almighty's will
and yet call ourselves human
we chose to ignore and forget the very hand that made us,
we are nothing but beasts and monsters

It's time to an introspection my dear friends
it's pay back time,
time to stand up against injustice,
let's forget the past and build the future

The big question is Varun Gandhi a religious bigot, a glorified idiot or is he a part of political conspiracy? If he actually said it, is it a scary situation? Or just another gimmick,a vote bank politics? Or just another proof of growing ultra right wing fascism?

Now with the elections around the corner, the question is do you want someone like Varun Gandhi and the so called saffron brigade rule the country? The politics is altogether the case of fox and jackal. The jackal has an open enemy, but the fox deceives you by showing off love outside and carrying hate inside. A difficult choice though, with the presence of the third front, things makes difficult even more.

[col. writ. 2/26/09] (c) '09 Mumia Abu-Jamal

Few sciences are more complex than economics, for despite the plethora of formulas claiming to define its workings, economics remains a bedeviling mystery that confuses and confounds the best minds time and time again.

That's often because our economic ideas are formed not only by our experiences but by our beliefs, and as such, we defend our ideas based not on evidence, but on our theoretical constructs -- again, what we believe.

We are free marketeers, or Keynesians; we follow the theories of Adam Smith, Henry George, David Ricardo or Karl Marx the way we follow our favorite basketball team, win or lose.

Sometimes those theories blind us to the bigger game of life outside our doors.

Much of the current economic crisis is the direct result of the economic theory of deregulation, made, not under George Bush alone, but in the waning days of the Clinton administration. For it was in 1999 that Clinton's treasury secretaries, first Robert Rubin, and later Larry Summers, advocated the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, a 1933 law which prohibited commercial banks and investment banks from functioning in the same house.

The reason? None other than ole FDR. President Franklin D. Roosevelt explained as much in his famous "Fear Itself" inaugural speech of 1933, when the nation was reeling in the grips of the Great Depression. Roosevelt said,"...there must be a strict supervision of all banking and credits and investments; there must be an end to speculation with other people's money..."*

In November 1999 President Bill Clinton signed into law the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, essentially repealing Glass-Steagall, by tearing down the brick wall between commercial and investment banks. The securities industries went on a tear, making millions, billions and then tens of billions on speculation with other people's money -- until the house of cards came crumbling down in November 2008.

The speculation business didn't just become toxic. It was poison in the 1930's, and came back to life in the late '90's more poisonous than ever.

By then, both political parties were parties of deregulation, for both were instruments of corporate power, and both were the authors of today's Great Recession, if not the Depression to come.

[col. writ. 2/21/09] (c) '09 Mumia Abu-Jamal


Of all the myriad things to inherit, perhaps the worst is an empire, for such a transmission brings with it the duty of defense, which, in time, invariably becomes defending the indefensible.

For empires are constructed of crimes, and similarly so maintained.

They are birthed in invasion, nursed on occupation and raised on the cruel gruel of repression, torture and brutality.

That is their intrinsic nature as shown by the abundant examples of history. This was shown best by Rome, which ravaged the then-known world to enrich the 'eternal city'. Nations were invaded, their nobles either slain or enslaved, puppets were installed, and the natural resources extracted to feed the ever-hungry maw of Rome.

For millions of Blacks, the Obama election has sparked a new way of thinking and speaking of an America that has, heretofore, been a subject of considerable ambivalence. For perhaps the first time in U.S. history (certainly since Reconstruction), millions speak of the U.S. as "we", instead of "they."

This may well be a turning point in American history.

But is the American Empire "ours" simply because a Black man is the nation's chief executive?

Did we vote it into being, or did we merely inherit it?

Most who voted for Obama certainly didn't vote for the Iraq War, one of the most overt imperial projects in modern U.S. history. They supported a quick and decisive end of the war - not its continuation nor its expansion.

Indeed, of all Americans, Blacks opposed the war the most vehemently, according to national polls.

Perhaps it was the deep memory of national oppression that made it so unseemly to support such an oppressive occupation against the Iraqi people; perhaps it was the clumsiness of the government's lies used to 'sell' the invasion.

But empires begotten by violence and exploitation are poisonous things that damage both sides of this deadly duo.

The British Empire toiled for generations to conquer and exploit over 1/2 of Africa, most of Asia and two-thirds of the Americas. But all of that crumbled when the nation was almost broken under the weight of the Germans, and she was too weak to hold her colonies. Indeed America, as the strongest to emerge from the war, inherited much of Britain's loss, as well as other European powers.

It inherited the Vietnam War when the French could no longer sustain it, and paid a heavy price of death and defeat.

Empires shouldn't be inherited lightly, like knick-knacks from an elderly grandma.

This is especially so in democracies, where the people allegedly determine public policy, for what public policy could be more dire than imperial war?

I'm not very good with words, but let me try anyway. It's a big subject, but the truth is it's for real. It's been unfolding for a while now,once what was a mere 100s have grown and is still growing. It's just not the extreme right wing as it seems, the so called atheist aren't actually what they claim to be. conditions are worse that companies ask their employees to either fake their name or to avoid their full name, still worse what it seems to be is that companies have second thoughts on hiring educated lot based on their religion. And the media both electronic and paper aren't helping either. They make things much worse than what it actually is,they seems to have a microscopic view.
I don't think we should judge people based on their religion, or creed. I think we should respect someone just for being a human, humility is the greatest virtue one can have. If there's a ideological difference and you think you need to establish you're right,you've every right to leave a statement,but it's the way how you prove your point. You cannot just beat up or thrash someone and try to prove your point!

I'll have posts related to religions,philosophy, economy and politics mainly. All kinda comments are welcomed. But it would be greatly appreciated if you can do without personal attack and posting spams.