JEWISH VOICE FOR PEACE: Don’t let AIPAC speak for you - March 20, 2010
Jewish Voice for Peace - 18 March 2010
AIPAC’s annual Washington DC policy conference takes place next week, and thousands of AIPAC members will tell Congress that the Obama administration is being too hard on Israel. Why? Because Obama, Biden and Clinton dared to insist that Israel abide by international law and freeze settlement construction.
We need to let Obama and Congress know that AIPAC doesn’t speak for us, and that the time is over for unconditional aid to support settlement expansion and human rights violations. It’s the only way we’ll ever achieve a lasting peace. Read More…
McDONALD: True friends must tell the truth - March 20, 2010
by Hamish McDonald - The Sydney Morning Herald - 20 March 2010
The coolness didn’t last long. Along with standing firm on ”border security” and opposing higher taxes, our politicians find it hard to maintain any indignation, let alone anger or rage, against Israel. Read More…
SIEGMAN: Telling Israel – and ourselves – difficult truths - March 20, 2010
EDITOR’S NOTE: One has to wonder what it will take for the US to call Israel to heel. After all, Israel’s non-compliance with international law could not be clearer. The Fourth Geneva Convention outlaws settlers in occupied territory which means Israel’s settlement building is illegal and so are ALL the settlers. Israel’s apartheid policies and practices are crimes in international law and so is the slow-genocide that it is carrying out in Gaza with a crippling siege. The refugees’ right of return is firmly entrenched in international law, yet Israel refuses to allow the Palestinians to return to their homes while opening its doors to Jews the world over who have no connection whatsoever with the land except through the stories of religion. Without acknowledging these truths and finally adhering to international law, any peace process will be what it has always been – farcical nonsense.
PHOTO: Uriel Sinai/Getty Images
by Henry Siegman - Foreign Policy - 18 March 2010
For all the anger and indignation of the White House and Department of State over the humiliation of Vice President Joseph Biden by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government during Biden’s visit to Israel, it is difficult to deny that we virtually invited that treatment. Read More…
ABARBANEL: Please help little Amal from Gaza - March 18, 2010
by Avigail Abarbanel - 18 March 2010
A couple of nights ago I watched the documentary ‘Children of Gaza’ on Channel 4’s ‘Dispatches’. The film was made by the award winning documentary maker Jezza Neumann. Since then I can’t get the face of Amal, one of the four children featured in the film, out of my head. Amal was wounded during Israel’s attack on Gaza just over a year ago. She was found under rubble and I understand that for a while she lay near the dead and mutilated bodies of her uncles, one of whom had his head split in two.
Since Israel’s attack over a year ago, Amal has been living with several pieces of shrapnel lodged in her head. She is suffering from frequent awful headaches and nosebleeds. This is in addition to the obvious psychological trauma that she has to live with. As a psychotherapist I have no idea how long it will take and if it will ever be possible for Amal to recover from the trauma she has been through, and what life will be like for her if the shrapnel can’t be taken out of her brain. Read More…
LENDMAN: Peace process hypocrisy: stillborn from inception - March 18, 2010
by Stephen J Lendman - The Baltimore Chronicle - 15 March 2010
Journalist Henry Siegman titled his August 2007 London Review of Books article, “The Great Middle East Peace Process Scam,” calling it likely “the most spectacular deception in modern diplomatic history.”
This writer omits most likely calling it the no-peace peace process, stillborn from inception, while Haaretz writer Gideon Levy, on March 7, 2010, wrote “There has never been an Israeli peace camp,” saying “let’s call the child by its real name: The Israeli peace camp is still an unborn baby,” the mother yet to become pregnant given decades of Israeli-Washington rejectionism.
In September 2009, former IDF chief of staff and current Vice Prime Minister and Minister of Strategic Affairs, Moshe Ya’alon, said Jews have an “unassailable right (to) settle anywhere, particularly here, (in) the land of the Bible,” and earlier called the peace process a useful fiction “to sear deep into the consciousness of Palestinians that they are a defeated people.” Read More…
SALT: Murdoch’s Kind of Arabs: Sleeping with the Enemy - March 18, 2010
by Jeremy Salt - The Palestine Chronicle - 16 March 2010
Rupert Murdoch, perhaps the greatest defender of free speech and the free flow of communications in recorded human history, or so you would think to read his speeches, and the praise heaped on him by his flatterers, pleaded at the inaugural Abu Dhabi Media Summit last week for an end to media censorship in the Middle East so that the entire region could benefit from the ‘powerful wind’ of creative energy that was blowing through it. He warned his Arab media hosts not to bury inconvenient stories because ‘in the long run this is very counterproductive’. For someone who has spent his life burying inconvenient truths this is certainly amusing. Read More…
GORDON: Rachel Corrie’s memory, Israel’s image - March 18, 2010
by Neve Gordon - The Nation - 16 March 2010
Seven years ago today, Rachel Corrie was crushed to death by a Caterpillar D9R Israeli bulldozer while nonviolently protesting the demolition of Palestinian homes in Rafah, Gaza Strip, along with other members of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM). Now her parents, sister and brother are suing the State of Israel and the defense minister, claiming wrongful death.
The suit’s objective, according to Rachel’s mother, Cindy, “is to illustrate the need for accountability for thousands of lives lost, or indelibly injured, by [Israel's] occupation…. We hope the trial will bring attention to the assault on nonviolent human rights activists (Palestinian, Israeli and international) and we hope it will underscore the fact that so many Palestinian families, harmed as deeply as ours or more, cannot access Israeli courts.” Read More…
McCARTHY: Jail ordeal of hundreds of Palestinian children arrested for throwing stones - March 18, 2010
Palestinian youths throw stones at Israeli soldiers during clashes in Hebron last month. Photograph: Bernat Armangue/AP
by Rory McCarthy - The Guardian - 14 March 2010
With more than 300 Palestinian children being held in Israeli prisons, human rights groups and Palestinian officials are increasingly concerned about the actions of the Israeli military.
The Israeli group B’Tselem said that security forces had “severely violated” the rights of a number of children, aged between 12 and 15, who had been taken into custody in recent months.
The family of one 13-year-old boy from Hebron who was arrested on 27 February by a military patrol and detained for eight days have brought a legal case against the authorities. The teenager, Al-Hasan Muhtaseb, described how he had been interrogated without a lawyer late into the night, forced to confess to throwing stones, made to sign a confession in Hebrew that he couldn’t read, jailed with adults and brought before a military court. He was only released on bail eight days later, after considerable legal effort by several human rights groups. As he had signed a confession, he still faces a possible indictment for throwing stones – a charge that usually brings several months in jail but carries a maximum penalty of 20 years’ jail. Read More…
COLE: The Map: The story of Palestinian nationhood thwarted after the League of Nations recognized it - March 17, 2010
by Juan Cole - Informed Comment - 16 March 2010
On March 10, I posted on the humiliation heaped on Vice President Joe Biden by the Israeli government of far-right Likud leader Binyamin Netanyahu. Biden went to Israel intending to help kick off indirect negotiations between Netanyahu and Palestine Authority president Mahmoud Abbas. Biden had no sooner arrived than the Israelis announced that they would build 1600 new households on Palestinian territory that they had unilaterally annexed to Jerusalem. Since expanding Israeli colonization of Palestinian land had been the sticking point causing Abbas to refuse to engage in negotiations, and, indeed, to threaten to resign, this step was sure to scuttle the very talks Biden had come to inaugurate. And it did.
The tiff between the US and Israel is less important that the worrisome growth of tension between Palestinians and Israelis as the Israelis have claimed more and more sites sacred to the Palestinians as well. There is talk of a third Intifada or Palestinian uprising.
As part of my original posting, I mirrored a map of modern Palestinian history that has the virtue of showing graphically what has happened to the Palestinians politically and territorially in the past century. Read More…
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