Saturday 11 July 2009

Fanaticos sionistas praticam vandalismo em Paris

fonte:Counterpunch




The Raids on the Resistances Bookstore

Zionist Fanatics Practice Serial Vandalism in Paris

By DIANA JOHNSTONE

Paris.

Thousands of books drenched in cooking oil – that is the latest exploit of the Zionist fanatics who regularly attack property and people in Paris and get away with it.

In the early afternoon of Friday, July 3, five men, mostly masked, stormed into the “Resistances” bookstore located in a quiet residential neighborhood of the 17th arrondissement in northwest Paris. To the startled women working in the shop, as well as two customers, they announcing that they were from the Jewish Defense League and began ripping books off shelves and tables, dousing them heavily with cooking oil, and then smashing four computers before leaving rapidly in a waiting vehicle.

The bookstore is owned and operated by Olivia Zemor and Nicolas Shashahani, who are also the leaders of the very active militant group CAPJPO-EuroPalestine (CAPJPO stands for Coordination des Appels pour une Paix Juste au Proche Orient). In addition to a wide collection of books on the Middle East and other subjects, including fiction, the bookstore has a reading room and a lending library, gives courses in English and Arabic, and possesses a modest but well-attended auditorium where authors are invited to speak.

Two and a half years ago, on December 7, 2006, a similar attack squad threw teargas grenades into the bookstore as a crowd was gathering to listen to the late Israeli author Tanya Reinhart and her companion, the Israeli poet Aharon Shabtai. On that occasion, Shashahani had to be treated for effects from the teargas but material damage was slight. This time, the entire shop is a shambles, with countless ruined books, and damage runs to tens of thousands of euros, according to Shashahani.

But, he stresses, this is only one in “hundreds of violent actions” carried out by the French version of the banned US Jewish Defense League in recent years. There is no reason to expect them to stop so long as they can count on indulgence on the part of French authorities and the silence of the mainstream media. The vandalism on the Resistances bookstore was reported by the French news agency AFP, but the dispatch was apparently carried only by the small tabloid Le Parisien and not by the major newspapers, much less by television. Usually, almost the only people who are informed about such events are in the politically active circles targeted for intimidation.

The general public remains ignorant of these aggressions, while it is regularly informed by television of even relatively minor acts of anti-Semitism – some of them imaginary (as the famous case a few years ago of the young woman who totally invented a story of being the victim of an “anti-Semitic assault” by blacks in the suburban commuter train in order to get attention from her family, and got the attention of everyone in France all the way up to the President of the Republic). Real “anti-Semitic acts” occur, but most are no more organized than school-yard insults. However, the publicity they receive serves to keep alive the notion that the very existence of Jews is under perpetual threat – the basic alibi used by the Jewish Defense League. The false claim that “the French government does nothing to protect Jews” is used as a pretext for aggressive “self-defense”.

As disciples of Meir Kahane, the JDL not only favors purifying an enlarged Eretz Israel of Arabs, but wants to bring the fight against Arabs and “Islamofascism” to France itself. Debate is not their style. After training in Israeli martial arts, they carry on their fight by physical means, attacking Arabs, Muslims and defenders of the Palestinian cause. The JDL is an informal group of a few hundred members, rather than a registered organization with a headquarters. The French police, adept at infiltrating every sort of political group, certainly must know who and where they are, but they seem never to be disturbed after one of their raids. Moreover, unless the aggressors identify themselves, victims cannot be sure whether they are being attacked by the LDJ or by Betar, an older Zionist youth organization founded back in 1929 by Vladimir Jabotinsky and close to Likud. Both use similar methods, and probably overlap, although the LDJ, as the more radical of the two, is said to be draining members from Betar.

In the rare cases when Zionist fanatics are actually arrested and put on trial, they are usually treated with uncommon indulgence. In December 2003, a group of pro-Palestinian students were violently attacked by the usual suspects. A Palestinian student suffered grave eye injuries. Faced with lackadaisical police, the students carried out their own investigation, leading to the conviction on September 16, 2004 of one Anthony Attal. He was given a suspended sentence of ten months.

LDJ or Betar members also have the advantage of a “sanctuary” – Israel. On October 25, 2006, a 68-year-old pro-Palestinian radical militant, Ginette Hess Skandrani, was attacked in her own home by three unknown men who beat her savagely, explaining only “you know why”. Hospitalized, her head wounds required several stitches. Last February 4, her aggressors were finally convicted and sentenced, but:

-- one of them, Ruben Colleu, was sentenced to two years in prison, of which 18 months were suspended – but he had already fled to Israel.

-- the second, Stevel Elie, was sentenced to three years in prison – but the French court had already given him permission to go to Israel “to do his military service” in Tsahal.

-- Only the third, Mike Sfez, was still around. Like Colleu, 18 months of his two year sentence were suspended, and the remaining six months could be transformed into social work.

Only recently, large squads of presumed LDJ thugs have attacked theater-goers outside a benefit for children of Gaza and attacked persons of Arab appearance on their way to a meeting of diverse groups scheduled to discuss the “Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions” movement.

The LDJ has its apologists in the police. On June 5, 2006, the head of the small right-wing Christian union “Action Police CFTC”, Michel Thooris, praised the LDJ and Betar for “performing a public service mission by defending people and property”. He was not publicly reprimanded by his big boss, the minister of the Interior at that time, Nicolas Sarkozy.

The double standards of Sarkozy’s tough “law and order” policy are all too obvious. His ostentatious policy switch from a certain traditional French balance in the Middle East to strong support for Israel is only likely to encourage the LDJ in its feeling of impunity. This spring, a commercially successful author, Paul-Eric Blanrue, was unable to publish his book on “Sarkozy, Israel and the Jews” in France, and was obliged to find a publisher in Belgium. Still worse, the usual French distributor of his Belgian publisher refused to distribute the book in France. His press conference in Paris was unattended by any journalist and his book, which carefully documents Sarkozy’s policy of wooing Jewish support in France by aligning with Israel and attacking the “riffraff” in the suburbs, has been ignored by French reviewers.

Even though the market is saturated, there is always room in the media, however, for laments that France’s secular tradition is threatened by the “communitarianism” of… Muslims. The ideological and violent provocations of fanatic Zionists are rarely singled out as the main cause of this disturbing trend. Of course, France’s many militant intellectual Zionists do not resort to the methods of the LDJ and Betar. But the theme of Jewish victimhood, which is constantly present in schools, in cinema, in political discourse and in the media, provides a congenial atmosphere for the pathological violence of the Jewish militias in France, and for the indulgence with which they are treated.

The situation is scarcely improved by the extreme fragmentation of the Palestine solidarity movement in France – which can be seen as just one aspect of the endemic sectarianism of the French left. The various victims of LDJ or Betar violence – such as CAPJPO, Ginette Skandrani, the comedian Dieudonné, etc., etc. – are often not on speaking terms with each other, so that even if they all profess solidarity with Palestine, there is very little or no solidarity between them.

However, one may hope that the July 3 attack on the Resistances bookstore may arouse a broader protest than other recent attacks, quite simply because of the strong connotations of destroying books. A protest demonstration has been called for the evening of Wednesday, July 8, to demand that the government finally ban the JDL, just as it has already been banned in the United States and Israel. This will be an opportunity to show solidarity in resistance to the most active form of fascism in France today.

Diana Johnstone is author of Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions (Monthly Review Press). She can be reached at diana.josto@yahoo.fr

Judenrein!Israel usa um conceito nazista para defender os colonatos

fonte:Reuters




Judenrein! Israel adopts Nazi term to back settlers


By Dan Williams

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Hosting the German foreign minister this week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used an especially tainted term to condemn the Palestinian demand that Israel's settlements in the occupied West Bank be removed.

"Judea and Samaria cannot be Judenrein," a Netanyahu confidant quoted him as telling Frank-Walter Steinmeier.

Asked how Germany's top diplomat responded to hearing the Nazi Holocaust term for areas "cleansed of Jews," the confidant said, "What could he do? He basically just nodded."

Protocol might have indicated that a representative of the country that carried out the World War Two genocide, and which has since made much effort to atone, be spared such invocations.

But these are not normal times for the right-wing Netanyahu coalition. It faces unprecedented U.S. pressure to make way for a Palestinian state on West Bank land that many Jews call Judea and Samaria and consider their eternal, biblical birthright.

Hence the jaw-dropper defiance of "Judenrein," which the confidant said Netanyahu had encouraged cabinet colleagues to deploy in their defense of the settlements and of Israel's insistence that Palestinians recognize it as a Jewish state.

Briefing foreign reporters last week, Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor, a stalwart of Netanyahu's Likud party, urged them to ask whether "Palestinians would accept that Jews will live among them, or whether it is going to be totally not allowed."

"'Judenrein' is the term that was once used in other countries," Meridor said darkly, in remarks echoed the next day by another Likud minister who briefed journalists and diplomats.

Some diplomats have quietly questioned the propriety of applying such comparisons to a Middle East conflict which is a unique mix of race and religion, conquest and coexistence.

German officials made no comment on the terminology.

RUSE?

The Palestinians, for their part, see a rhetorical ruse by an Israeli leadership which has shown little appetite for entering negotiations on a two-state peace accord.

"We believe that this is simply a new strategy by Israel to delay any real outcome," said Xavier Abu Eid, a Palestinian diplomat. "In past negotiations, I can assure you, Israel never tried to have Jews remain in the state of Palestine."

Challenged over the West Bank settlers' prospective status, Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad was quoted this week telling the Ideas Festival in Aspen that "Jews, to the extent they choose to stay and live in the state of Palestine, will enjoy those rights and certainly will not enjoy any less rights than Israeli Arabs enjoy now in the state of Israel."

Abu Eid said Palestinian jurists had yet to examine how settlers could become citizens. Nor is it clear how Fayyad's Palestinian Authority can claim to set long-term policy given its feud with the hardline Hamas Islamists who control Gaza.

Zalman Shoval, a former Israeli ambassador to Washington and veteran Likud member, voiced misgivings about the use of "Judenrein" in the Palestine context: "I don't like to transfer the trappings of Nazis to others, even if they are our enemies."

What was being branded as the Palestinians' bigotry, he said, could also be prudence about steps that might pre-judge disputes such as those over Palestinian refugees from Israel.

An Israeli diplomat suggested that Netanyahu, in adopting harsh language such as "Judenrein," aimed to mollify hawks in his coalition government over his agreement in principle to see the eventual establishment of a demilitarized Palestinian state.

"Netanyahu has done what was long considered unthinkable for a Likud leader," the diplomat said.

"So now he has to talk tough."

(Editing by Louise Ireland and Alastair Macdonald)

Os soldados israelitas atacaram a manifestao semanal de Nil'in

fonte:IMEMC


Soldiers attack the Ni'lin weekly Protest


Israeli soldiers attacked Palestinian villagers along with their international and Israeli peace supporters during the weekly non-violent protest against the wall in Ni'lin village, west of the central West Bank city of Ramallah, on Friday.

File Photo by Haytham Al Khateb
File Photo by Haytham Al Khateb

As the villagers marched towards the location of the Israeli wall, undercover Israeli soldiers attacked people and kidnapped three local youth. Witnesses say the saw soldiers beating up the three, before kidnapping them.

People continued to march until they reached the wall; troops then attacked them with tear gas. Scores were treated for the effects of tear gas inhalation. Later on local youth hurled stones on Israeli troops.

PCHR Weekly report: uma crianca palestiniana morta, 5 feridos.....

fonte:IMEMC


PCHR Weekly Report: Palestinian child killed, 5 civilians wounded by Israeli forces



According to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, during the week of 02 - 08 July 2009, a Palestinian child was killed and her father and uncle were wounded by Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip. Three Palestinian civilians, including two children, were injured when Israeli forces used force against peaceful protest against the Annexation Wall. Israeli forces conducted 25 incursions into Palestinian communities in the West Bank. Israeli forces abducted 18 Palestinian civilians, including seven children, and an American human rights defender in the West Bank.

Child killed in Gaza while sleeping in her bedroom (PCHR photo)
Child killed in Gaza while sleeping in her bedroom (PCHR photo)

Israeli attacks in the West Bank:

During the reporting period, three Palestinian civilians, including two children, were injured when Israeli forces used force against peaceful demonstrations organized by Palestinian civilians in protest to the construction of the Annexation Wall in the West Bank.

During the reporting period, Israeli forces conducted at least 25 military incursions into Palestinian communities in the West Bank. Israeli forces abducted 18 Palestinian civilians, including seven children, and an American human rights defender.

During the reporting period, Israeli forces forced Fayez Ibrahim al-Toutanji, 54, to demolish a 42-square-meter structure to his 60-square-meter house in Beit Hanina village, northeast of Jerusalem. The family added two bedrooms and a kitchen to the house in 1996. In 2001, the Israeli municipality of Jerusalem issued an order to demolish the structure, claiming that it had been built without a license. The family appealed to the Israeli Municipal Court against the order, and following years of considering the case, the court approved the demolition and imposed a fine of 18,000 NIS (approximately US$ 4,500) on the family. On 01 June 2009, the court ordered the family to demolish the added structure in two months, and on 06 July 2009, the family started to demolish it.

At approximately 19:00 on Sunday, 05 July 2009, Israeli police and intelligence officers stormed the building of the Palestinian National Theater (al-Hakawati) in East Jerusalem, and handed to its administration a decision signed by the acting Israeli Minister of Internal Security, Yacob Ne'eman, banning the organization of shows of Palestinian folklore band, Ouf, and the German Storm band, claiming that the shows are organized under the auspices of the Palestinian National Authority. The police forced people out and closed the entrance of the building. The show was part of Palestine International Festival, which is organized annually under the auspices of local institutions and companies.

Israeli attacks in the Gaza Strip:

On Thursday, 02 July 2009, Israeli troops positioned at the border between the Gaza Strip and Israel to the east of Gaza Valley village, fired three artillery shells at the area. One shell landed a few meters away from the house of Kamal 'Abdul 'Aziz Abu 'Aayesh, 52, nearly one kilometer away from the border, wounding him in the left side. The second shell landed on a bedroom in a house belonging to Saleem 'Abdul 'Aziz Abu 'Aayesh, 57, killing his daughter, 17-year-old Heyam. The father was also lightly wounded by shrapnel to the neck and the right shoulder. The third shell landed near a dairy killing two cows.

Israeli forces have continued to close all border crossings to the Gaza Strip for more than two years. The Israeli closure of Gaza, which has steadily tightened since June 2007, has had a disastrous impact on the humanitarian and economic situation in the Gaza Strip.

1.5 million people are being denied their basic rights, including freedom of movement, and their rights to appropriate living conditions, work, health and education.

Israel has imposed additional access restrictions on international diplomats, journalists and humanitarian workers seeking to enter the Gaza Strip. They have prevented representatives of several international humanitarian organizations from entering the Gaza Strip.

Living conditions of the Palestinian civilian population have seriously deteriorated; levels of poverty and unemployment have sharply mounted.

Israeli settlement activities:

Israeli forces have continued settlement activities in violation of international humanitarian law and Israeli settlers illegally living in the West Bank have continued to attack Palestinian civilians and property.

During the reporting period, Israeli forces issued military orders to demolish 11 houses and 5 wells in al-Khader village, south of Bethlehem, claiming that they were built without licenses.

On Thursday morning, 02 July 2009, a number of Israeli settlers, escorted by Israeli forces, stormed the evacuated "Homesh" settlement, northwest of Nablus. They stayed in the area for approximately two hours.

On Saturday, 04 July 2009, Anas Nayef Qaffisha, 16, sustained bruises and cuts throughout the body, when he was attacked by 5 Israeli settlers, who attempted to run him down as he was passing through the main road in the Wadi al-Huassain and al-Ras neighborhood near "Kiryat Arba" settlement, southeast of Hebron. The settlers attacked the child and fled towards the aforementioned settlement. Over the past four years, Israeli settlers have continued to release wild boars into Palestinian agricultural areas in Skaka village, east of Salfit.

According to local sources, Israeli settlers release 40-60 wild boars each time, which damage crops. Palestinian farmers have sustained large losses due to such attacks. The village is located near "Ariel" settlement, the largest Israeli settlement in the northern West Bank.

On 06 July 2009, Israeli forces, accompanied by a number of armed Israeli settlers razed at least 5 donums of land in Kherbat al-Mafqara area to the east of Yatta village, south of Hebron, to expand the nearby "Avigal" settlement outpost. They then placed three mobile homes and an electricity generator on the land.

Israeli Annexation Wall:

Israeli forces have continued to construct the Annexation Wall inside West Bank territory. During the reporting period, Israeli forces used force against peaceful demonstrations organized by Palestinian civilians and international and Israeli human rights defenders in protest to the construction of the Wall.

Following the Friday Prayer on 03 July 2009, dozens of Palestinian civilians gathered in the center of Bil'in village, west of Ramallah. They moved towards the Wall and, following altercations with Israeli forces, threw stones at Israeli troops positioned in the area. Immediately, Israeli troops fired rubber-coated metal bullets, sound bombs and tear gas canisters at the demonstrators. Dozens of demonstrators suffered from tear gas inhalation.

Also following the Friday Prayer on 03 July 2009, dozens of Palestinian civilians and international human rights defenders organized a peaceful demonstration in protest to the construction of the Wall in al-Ma'sara village, south of Bethlehem. Israeli forces positioned at the main entrance of the village near "Efrat" settlement fired tear gas canisters at the demonstrators, and then chased and violently beat a number of demonstrators. As a result, 3 demonstrators, including two children, sustained bruises: 'Ali Mousa 'Alaa' al-Din, 22; Mohammed Mhamoud Zawahra, 12; and 'Obaida Eyad Braijiya, 10.

On Tuesday morning, 07 July 2009, Israeli forces positioned at Bethlehem – Hebron road prevented international solidarity delegations from traveling to Housan village, west of Bethlehem, and Beit Ummar village, north of Hebron. These delegations are visiting the West Bank in the context of the Peace Week for solidarity with the Palestinian people and to remind the international community with the Advisory Opinion and the Wall issued by the International Court of Justice.

Recommendations to the international community:

Due to the number and severity of Israeli human rights violations this week, the PCHR made a number of recommendations to the international community. Among these were a recommendation that the High Contracting Parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention to fulfill their legal and moral obligations under Article 1 of the Convention to ensure Israel's respect for the Convention in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. PCHR believes that the conspiracy of silence practiced by the international community has encouraged Israel to act as if it is above the law and encourages Israel continue to violate international human rights and humanitarian law.

The PCHR calls upon the High Contracting Parties to the Fourth Geneva Convention to convene a conference to take effective steps to ensure Israel's respect of the Convention in the Occupied Palestinian Territories and to provide immediate protection for Palestinian civilians.

For the full text of the report, click on the link below:

category palestine | human rights | news report author email saed at imemc dot org
Related Link(s): http://www.pchrgaza.org/files/W_report/English/2008/09-...9.htm

quando chove....... cospe

fonte:ABC News

Reporter feels mob's hate in the Holy City

By Middle East correspondent Anne Barker


The ABC's Middle East correspondent Anne Barker became caught in violent street protests involving ultra-Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem at the weekend. This is her graphic account of her ordeal.

As a journalist I've covered more than my share of protests. Political protests in Canberra. Unions protesting for better conditions. Angry, loud protests against governments, or against perceived abuses of human rights.

I've been at violent rallies in East Timor. I've had rocks and metal darts thrown my way. I've come up against riot police.

But I have to admit no protest - indeed no story in my career - has distressed me in the way I was distressed at a protest in Jerusalem on Saturday involving several hundred ultra-Orthodox Jews.

This particular protest has been going on for weeks.

Orthodox Jews are angry at the local council's decision to open a municipal carpark on Saturdays - or Shabbat, the day of rest for Jews.

It's a day when Jews are not supposed to do anything resembling work, which can include something as simple as flicking a switch, turning on a light or driving.

So even opening a simple carpark to accommodate the increasing number of tourists visiting Jerusalem's Old City is highly offensive to Orthodox Jews because it's seen as a desecration of the Shabbat, by encouraging people to drive.

I was aware that earlier protests had erupted into violence on previous weekends - Orthodox Jews throwing rocks at police, or setting rubbish bins alight, even throwing dirty nappies or rotting rubbish at anyone they perceive to be desecrating the Shabbat.

But I never expected their anger would be directed at me.

I was mindful I would need to dress conservatively and keep out of harm's way. But I made my mistake when I parked the car and started walking towards the protest, not fully sure which street was which.

By the time I realised I'd come up the wrong street it was too late.

I suddenly found myself in the thick of the protest - in the midst of hundreds of ultra-Orthodox Jews in their long coats and sable-fur hats.

They might be supremely religious, but their behaviour - to me - was far from charitable or benevolent.

As the protest became noisier and the crowd began yelling, I took my recorder and microphone out of my bag to record the sound.

Suddenly the crowd turned on me, screaming in my face. Dozens of angry men began spitting on me.

Spit like rain

I found myself herded against a brick wall as they kept on spitting - on my face, my hair, my clothes, my arms.

It was like rain, coming at me from all directions - hitting my recorder, my bag, my shoes, even my glasses.

Big gobs of spit landed on me like heavy raindrops. I could even smell it as it fell on my face.

Somewhere behind me - I didn't see him - a man on a stairway either kicked me in the head or knocked something heavy against me.

I wasn't even sure why the mob was angry with me. Was it because I was a journalist? Or a woman? Because I wasn't Jewish in an Orthodox area? Was I not dressed conservatively enough?

In fact, I was later told, it was because using a tape-recorder is itself a desecration of the Shabbat even though I'm not Jewish and don't observe the Sabbath.

It was lucky that I don't speak Yiddish. At least I was spared the knowledge of whatever filth they were screaming at me.

As I tried to get away I found myself up against the line of riot police blocking the crowd from going any further.

Reassurance

Israeli police in their flak jackets and helmets, with rifles and shields, were yelling just as loudly back at the protesting crowd.

I found them something of a reassurance against the angry, spitting mob.

I was allowed through, away from the main protest, although there were still Orthodox Jews on the other side, some of whom also yelled at me, in English, to take my recorder away.

Normally I should have stayed on the sidelines to watch the protest develop.

But when you've suffered the humiliation and degradation of being spat on so many times - and you're covered in other people's spit - it's not easy to put it to the back of your mind and get on with the job.

I left down a side street and walked the long way back to the car, struggling to hold back the tears.

A vitória da derrota

fonte:EI




The victory of defeat
Jonathan Cook, The Electronic Intifada, 10 July 2009

Israel has been moving ahead with creating two Palestinian territories in the West Bank and Gaza Strip who are sinking ever deeper into chronic dependency on Israeli goodwill. (Wissam Nassar/MaanImages)

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's prime minister, has been much criticized in Israel, as well as abroad, for failing to present his own diplomatic initiative on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process to forestall US intervention.

Netanyahu may have huffed and puffed before giving voice to the phrase "two states for two peoples" at Sunday's cabinet meeting, but the contours of just such a Palestinian state -- or states -- have been emerging undisturbed for some time.

In fact, Netanyahu appears every bit as committed as his predecessors to creating the facts of an Israeli-imposed two-state solution, one he and others in Israel's leadership doubtless hope will eventually be adopted by the White House as the "pragmatic" -- if far from ideal -- option.

While Israel has been buying yet more time with Washington in bickering over a paltry settlement freeze, it has been forging ahead with the process of creating two Palestinian territories, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, that, despite supposedly emerging from occupation, are in reality sinking ever deeper into chronic dependency on Israeli goodwill.

This is creating a culture of absolute Israeli control and absolute Palestinian dependency, enforced by proxy Palestinian rulers acting as mini-dictatorships.

For a growing number of Palestinians, the conditions of bare subsistence and even survival are Israeli gifts that few can afford to spurn through political activity, let alone civil disobedience or armed resistance. The Palestinian will to organize and resist as their land is seized for settlements is being inexorably sapped.

It is little mentioned but Israel all but abandoned completing its massive separation wall in the West Bank some time ago. There are significant gaps waiting to be filled, but, with things having grown so quiet and the cost of each kilometer of wall so high, the sense of political and military urgency has evaporated.

Suicide bombers, had they the determination, could still slip into Israel. But increasingly Palestinians view such attacks as futile, if not counterproductive: Israel simply wins greater international sympathy and has the pretext to turn the screw yet tighter on Palestinian life.

None of this has been lost on Israel's leaders of either the so-called Left or Right.

Rather than being an aberration in response to rocket attacks, the blockade of Gaza has become Israel's template for Palestinian statehood. The West Bank is rapidly undergoing its own version of disengagement and besiegement, with similar predictable results.

Gaza's blockade -- and the savage battering it took in December and January -- has suggested even to Netanyahu that the Israeli version of the carrot-and-stick approach works.

The stick -- a devastated Gaza unable to rise from the rubble because aid and basic goods are kept out -- has transformed most of the population into a nation dependent on handouts, borrowing where possible to buy necessities smuggled through the tunnels, and concentrating on the lonely art of survival.

As the normally restrained International Committee of the Red Cross reported last month: "Most of the very poor have exhausted their coping mechanisms. Many have no savings left. They have sold private belongings such as jewelry and furniture and started to sell productive assets including farm animals, land, fishing boats or cars used as taxis."

The carrot -- if it can be called that -- is directed towards Gaza's leaders, Hamas, rather than its ordinary inhabitants. The message is simple: keep the rocket fire in check and we won't attack again. We will allow you to rule over the remnants of Gaza.

In the West Bank, the carrot for the leadership is even more tantalizingly visible. The Palestinian Authority under Mahmoud Abbas is colluding in the creation of a series of mini-fiefdoms based on the main cities.

Trained by the US military, Palestinian security forces with light weapons are taking back control of Jenin, Nablus, Jericho, Qalqilya, Ramallah and so on, while the PA is encouraged by promises of economic charity to prop up its legitimacy.

The leader of a Palestinian non-governmental organization in Ramallah confided at the weekend that what is being created are "City Leagues" -- a mocking reference to the Palestinian regional militias known as the Village Leagues armed by Israel in the early 1980s to stamp out Palestinian nationalism by threatening and attacking local political activists. Those were a dismal failure; this time Palestinians are less sure Israel will not succeed.

Palestinian prisons are starting to fill not only with those suspected of belonging to Hamas but those who dissent from Fatah rule. The ground is being carefully tended by Israel to create a brutal client state.

The stick, as in Gaza, is directed at the ordinary population. The news headlines are of the easing of movement restrictions at the checkpoints. That may be true at a few places deep in the West Bank. But at the big checkpoints that separate Israel from what is left of the West Bank, such as the one at Qalandiya between Ramallah and Jerusalem, the monitoring of Palestinian movement is becoming fearsomely sophisticated.

These checkpoints are now more like small airport terminals, with limited numbers of "trusted" Palestinians entitled to pass through. To escape the poverty of the West Bank each day to reach manual work inside Israel, they must have a magnetic ID card storing biometric data and a special permit. Cards are denied by Israel not only to those with a record of political activity but also to those who have distant relatives deemed to be politically engaged.

The same non-governmental leader concluded, again with bitter irony: "Our leaders are declaring victory: the victory of defeat."

Should Abbas and his PA functionaries sign up to this Israeli vision of statehood, the defeat for the Palestinians will be greater still.

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.

A version of this article originally appeared in
The National, published in Abu Dhabi.

Friday 10 July 2009

Evitar ainda o conflito com Israel

Fonte:Palestine Chronicle


Still Avoiding Clash with Israel


It appears that discredited Lieberman has been replaced by Barak. (AP/file)

By George S. Hishmeh

Why are Barak Obama and his senior colleagues in the US administration weak kneed in confronting Israeli shenanigans, whether over Israeli colonialist policies in the occupied Palestinian territories or its regional stance, particularly over Iran?

All Obama has to do is look at what his European partners are doing or saying. Here is French President Nicolas Sarkozy calling for the dismissal of Israel foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman, known for his ethnic-cleansing policies and extremist views against Palestinian Arabs, who number more than one-fifth of the Israeli population. Sarkozy, according to the Israeli media, has compared Lieberman to the French far-rightist Jean Marie Le Pen.

Lieberman had introduced legislation in the Knesset that would have curbed the rights of Arabs in Israel, and had suggested ceding their towns, mostly in the Galilee region where they form a majority, to the projected Palestinian state in exchange for the Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank.

Additionally, the European Commission also criticised Israel for its colonial policies which helped strangle the Palestinian economy and made the Palestinian government more dependent on foreign aid.

“It is the European taxpayers who pay most of the price of this dependence,” the EU underlined, explaining that the expropriation of fertile Palestinian land for Israeli settlements, roads that serve settlers only and West Bank checkpoints help constrain Palestinian economic growth and make the Palestinian government more dependent on aid. The European Union is one of the largest donors to the Palestinian Authority, having contributed $280 million this year.

Israeli opposition leader Tzipi Livni, the former foreign minister, has also joined the chorus in questioning Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s commitment to a two-state solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. In remarks to the Knesset, Haaretz reported, she accused the prime minister of paying “lip service” to the concept of Palestinian state.

“I, like everyone, heard the speech at Bar-Ilan University [in which Netanyahu said Israel would agree to a demilitarized Palestinian state] and I didn’t know whether to be happy or not,” Livni said.

“The prime minister still does not really believe that this is the right path for Israel but he understands that this is the right thing to say,” she continued.

“The world is demanding it, so I have to say it. This is how Netanyahu explained it to his faction members.”

Consequently, she added, Netanyahu had “placed Israel, to my great sorrow, in the position of the party that is rejecting peace...”.

This is Netanyahu’s Israel that the Obama administration is still reluctant to take on. And despite its expressed interest in pursing an Arab-Israeli settlement, the Obama administration is still wasting time continuously accommodating the bankrupt Israeli position. And it now appears that the seemingly discredited Lieberman has been replaced by Ehud Barak, the defence minister who unsuccessfully negotiated with the Palestinians when he was prime minister a decade ago, in shepherding the lethargic negotiations.

After meeting twice with US Special Envoy George Mitchell earlier this month, Barak admitted that he expected no imminent announcement on the issue of continued expansion of Israeli colonies despite the insistence of the Obama administration that Israel should curtail all construction in the occupied territories before any peace negotiations can start.

Meantime, a new Israeli tactic seems to be emerging in a bid to stall any ultimate evacuation of the settlements which are illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention. It is now demanding that in return for an Israeli freeze on settlement expansion, the Arab states should begin the process of normalization with Israel, a view that has intrigued the positive attention of some Obama aides. But the Arab states remain cool to this approach since they have already offered, under the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002, to recognize Israel once it pulls back to the 1967 lines.

The new Israeli diversionary approach aims at pushing ahead a so-called “wider peace agreement” that would involve the Palestinian Authority, Syria and Lebanon, a position that has apparently intrigued Washington. A State Department statement issued after Monday’s session in London between Mitchell and Barak said both “reaffirmed their commitment to the common objective of a regional peace ... and the steps necessary to achieve it”. These steps were identified as “measures on security and incitement by the Palestinians; steps by Arab states towards normalization with Israel; and, from Israel, actions on access and movement in the West Bank and on settlement activity”.

But there was regrettably no mention of any Israeli pullback from the occupied territories. Here, Syrian President Bashar Assad stressed last Tuesday to visiting German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier that Israel has first to stop all settlement activity before peace talks can resume.

Although Obama has been inexplicably reticent about reprimanding Israel over its delaying tactics vis-à-vis peace negotiations, he left no doubt that his administration has “absolutely not” given Israel a green light to attack Iran over its nuclear program. This followed Vice President Joe Biden’s half-baked comment earlier that the US would not stand in the way of Israel’s response to Iran’s nuclear ambitions. This may be the first recognition that Israeli policies may touch off a nuclear holocaust.

-George S. Hishmeh is a Washington-based columnist. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. Contact him at: ghishmeh@gulfnews.com.

os habitantes de Sheikh Jarah recusam-se a ser deslocados

fonte:EI



Sheikh Jarrah residents refuse to be displaced
Marcey Gayer writing from occupied East Jerusalem, Live from Palestine, 10 July 2009

Umm Kamel's protest tent in East Jerusalem. (Marcey Gayer)

Fawzieh al-Kurd, 57, clad in black, spends her days on a promontory overlooking Tomb of Simon the Righteous in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of East Jerusalem. Enduring the cold of winter and the summer's blazing sun, she relates her family's tragic story to visitors from around the world with dignity and resolve.

For 38 years al-Kurd, known to all as Umm Kamel, lived in a home with a tiled patio and garden directly above the tomb of Simon the Righteous. The neighborhood was constructed jointly by the Jordanian government and the United Nations in 1956 to provide temporary housing for 28 Palestinian refugee families who were forced to evacuate their homes during the 1948 war. In return for these homes, the families agreed not to claim further food benefits from the UN agency for Palestine refugees, UNRWA. After paying a symbolic rent of five piastres to the Jordanian government for three years, the houses were supposed to pass into the families' ownership. The residents have all the documents from that time and Umm Kamel says that in this house she and her husband Muhammad raised their five children and saw the birth of their 16 grandchildren. It was her intention to pass the house on to her descendants when she died. However, on 9 November 2008 it was all overturned. Without emotion, Umm Kamel related, "My life was blackened. I lost my home, my husband, my furniture, my future."

In the stealth of night, a specially-trained force of 500 Israeli police and border guards surrounded the neighborhood, blocking off all access and forcing any onlooker back into his home. At 3:30am they knocked brusquely on Umm Kamel's door as she was changing the urine tube for her diabetic husband. The urine tube went flying as four Israeli policewomen physically restrained her and forced her into the children's playground outside the walls of her home. The semi-paralyzed Muhammad was dragged out of the house by two burly policemen and deposited unceremoniously in the entranceway of the home of the nearest neighbors, the al-Sabbagh family, and he had a heart attack on the spot.

The women of the al-Sabbagh family ministered to Muhammad to the best of their abilities, but without medical resources they could not prevent the deterioration of his condition. They did manage to call an ambulance; however, it was not allowed to cross the police blockade. The men of the al-Sabbagh family then offered to carry the distressed man to the ambulance on their backs, but that request was also denied. Muhammad did not receive any medical attention until 10am when his sons who live in a village north of Jerusalem were permitted to enter the neighborhood and transport him to the hospital in their own car. Meanwhile, nationalist religious Jews from the Simon the Righteous compound arrived in a minivan and quickly began packing up the al-Kurd household, loading its contents into a waiting truck. With fervent singing and dancing, they rededicated the home as a Jewish household. An Israeli flag now flies from its roof.

The incident is part of Umm Kamel's long history of dispossession, dating from 1972. When she first arrived in the neighborhood in 1970 as a young bride, there was not one Jewish family there. The only Jewish-owned house, one that pre-dated the 1948 war -- when Jews, Christians and Muslims lived together in the same neighborhood -- remained unoccupied. Then the Council of Sephardic Jewry, using an Ottoman document from 1887, made claim to the area and pressured the residents to leave. While it is true that the Sephardic community has deep ties to the catacomb grave where many came to pray and ask blessings prior to 1948, some observers contend that the document is irrelevant since it only states that the Sephardic community had temporary use of the property, not ownership. Moreover, the residents' current lawyer claims that no comparable document was found in the Turkish archives in Ankara when he went there expressly to check on the document's authenticity, fortifying the assertion that the document itself is fraudulent.

The Israeli Land Registry nevertheless certified the document as valid in 1972. This decision was taken within the framework of the 1950 Law of Absentee Property, which revokes all claims of pre-1948 "absentee Arab property owners" (i.e., Palestinian refugees), while reestablishing title to property owned by Jews prior to 1948. After 10 years of acrimonious negotiation, the court recognized the land claim of the Council of Sephardic Jewry, with the residents of Sheikh Jarrah becoming its "protected tenants." The Sheikh Jarrah residents repudiated this revocation of their rights of ownership granted by the Jordanian government that was signed by their former Jewish lawyer supposedly without their prior consent. The family consequently refused to pay the rent demanded by the Council of Sephardic Jewry. Since 1982 this document has become the subject of intense litigation, with the Palestinian side continually bringing up more and more evidence to prove that the basis for accepting the Sephardic Council's claim of ownership is spurious. Saleh Abu Hussein, the residents' current lawyer, has presented the courts with records from the Registry of Property Taxes dating from 1927 indicating that Suleiman Hijazi, a Palestinian, paid the property taxes on the land and hence is its rightful owner. These documents seem impeccable, yet the court has so far refused to acknowledge them.

In the intervening years the Council of Sephardic Jewry tried to buy some of the Sheikh Jarrah houses outright, offering the residents astronomical sums for their simple homes. A few families accepted the offers and the neighborhood became sprinkled with nationalist religious settlers whose political agenda was to drive the remaining residents from their homes. The Jerusalem municipality hired a private security company to guard the Jewish homes and from a small observation post built on the crest of Nashashibi Street, a security guard armed with a submachine gun descends into the warrens and alleys of the neighborhood every half hour to check for signs of disturbance or suspicious objects. For this formerly peaceful Palestinian community, the constant surveillance is yet another intrusion into their private lives.

Meanwhile, the temporary homes built for the refugee community eventually became too small as the families grew, and the families received permits from the Jordanian government to enlarge them (Jordan administered the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, prior to Israel's occupation of the territory in 1967). Upon receiving permission from the Jordanian authorities, the al-Kurd family built a cement block appendage perpendicular to their house. In 1999, wanting to use this portion of the house as the matrimonial quarters of one of their sons, the al-Kurd family approached the Jerusalem municipality with a petition to resurface the extension with stone.

At the time they were told by an inspector working in the office that no permit was necessary as the extension's foundation already existed. However, when the improvement was completed, an inspector sent to reassess the value of the home for tax purposes delivered instead a court order requiring the family to appear at a hearing that very day regarding a structure built illegally on Jewish land. Feeling deceived, the al-Kurds nevertheless appeared in court and were ordered by the judge to seek an out-of-court settlement with the Sephardic Council. The Council offered the family several million dollars for their home, a price out of proportion to its market value. Conscious of the implications for the Palestinian people in general and the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in particular, the al-Kurds refused to sell. The judge then ruled that the family had to seal the extension that they had formerly occupied and to pay fines of 28,000 shekels (the 1999 exchange rate was 4.14 shekels per US dollar) to the municipality and 120,000 shekels to the court, a sum that Umm Kamel is still paying off despite her forced eviction from the premises.

In 2001, Muhammad al-Kurd was receiving treatment in Hadassah Hospital when religious settlers using a falsified warrant broke into the sealed portion of the house and began living there. The family proceeded to sue the settler family and won; but at the time of the trial, that settler family moved out and a new one moved in, thus invalidating the results of the court procedure though continuing the illegal occupation. In July 2008, the al-Kurds received a letter from the Development Corporation for Rabbi Simon's Patrimony (Nachlat Shimon) stating that they had purchased the deed to the neighborhood from the Council of Sephardic Jewry and demanded that the al-Kurds immediately vacate the house that three generations of the family had lived in for more than 50 years. The Nachlat Shimon Corporation -- financed by American millionaire Irving Moskowitz, who has underwritten many controversial Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem -- indicated its intention to expand the study and prayer complex located in the catacombs of the original Nachlat Shimon compound. The plan was to bulldoze all the houses existing on the property and build 200 housing units complete with a shopping center for ultra-Orthodox Jewish families who would form the core of worshippers at the Tomb of Simon the Righteous.

At this point the al-Kurds realized the enormity of the forces arrayed against them. Umm Kamel broadcast a radio appeal "to all the kind-hearted people of the world" for help. Galvanizing Palestinian civil society, many non-governmental organizations responded to her call. One of the most visible organizations was the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), which agreed to post international volunteers who would maintain a constant presence at the al-Kurd premises to help Umm Kamel nonviolently defend her home. If police attempted to evict the family, the activists intended to handcuff themselves to the door with heavy metal chains that they had coiled in huge circles on the patio. In the course of half a year, more than 200 individuals from all over the world camped out on the al-Kurd's patio.

During that time, many dignitaries like Kyler Kornweiller, the political attache to the American consulate, made solidarity visits. In the evenings the Sheikh Jarrah Defense Committee organized cultural events on the al-Kurd patio. Sometimes as many as 50 persons would be seated on the patio drinking sweet tea and bitter coffee, listening to presentations by local politicians or viewing performances of traditional Palestinian dance staged by neighborhood youth. On every occasion, Muhammad al-Kurd led the evening prayers followed by Umm Kamel, who spoke eloquently of her family's long struggle. In this atmosphere thick with festivity and apprehension, the settler family occupying the extension to the al-Kurd's house rarely appeared, preferring to shutter themselves behind closed blinds.

With the arrival of winter only five ISM activists remained to defend the home. When border guards surrounded the neighborhood one night, no one shouted out to warn them. Quickly overwhelmed by the massive force, the activists did not have the time to shackle themselves to the door of the house as planned. So the elderly al-Kurd couple did not resist. Two weeks after the seizure of his home, Muhammad al-Kurd died of a massive coronary attack. His body was laid in a flag-draped coffin in the empty field where Umm Kamel now has her tent. A solemn cortege proceeded on foot to al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem's Old City where thousands of mourners attended the funeral ceremony.

Umm Kamel insider her tent. (Marcey Gayer)
Yet, Umm Kamel's story does not end here. Israeli border police attempted to destroy her protest tent on six occasions and fined her each time. Once they even came with bulldozers and pockmarked the field with huge craters to prevent a tent from being positioned there. However, neighborhood youths began filling in the holes with shovels and within two weeks another tent was erected in time for the Eid al-Adha holiday. The entire neighborhood jubilantly participated in the celebration, providing generator-powered heaters to warm the tent on that cold December evening.

Having surrounded East Jerusalem with Jewish neighborhoods to prevent Palestinian expansion, the Israeli government is now creating Jewish wedges into Palestinian neighborhoods in order to preclude the division of the city as would be required by a two-state solution. The Nachlat Shimon Corporation's plan to expand the religious complex continues, and neighborhood families are displaced one at a time. Following Umm Kamel's eviction, two other families received eviction notices. The Hanoun family consists of three brothers, their wives, and 10 children. The Gawi family has four generations under one roof, 38 members in all. Both families are slated for eviction on 19 July and their cases also have a long history of unsuccessful litigation in the Israeli court system.

Well-versed in all the convoluted legal machinations of the struggle, Maher Hanoun recalls his family's sudden eviction in 2002 and the confiscation of all its furniture in a large-scale police operation similar to that undertaken against the al-Kurd family. This occurred despite that both the Hanoun and the Gawi families paid a sum equal to the disputed rent into an escrow account while awaiting a decision by the Israeli high court regarding the ownership of the land. The families lived in rented dwellings for four years until the high court ruled that the Ottoman document supporting the Council of Sephardic Jewry's claim of ownership was without legal basis. However, the high court refused to declare a rightful owner, stating that the determination should be made by the district court, whose legal purview it is to decide on these matters. In this legal limbo, a lower court ruled that since the original lawyer for the 28 families accepted the Sephardic Council as the owner of the property on which they reside, the 1982 document is still valid, even though the high court had nullified its basis. Consequently, last August Hanoun was sentenced to prison for three months for failing to comply with an eviction order based on this outdated ruling. At the heart of the issue is whether the Israeli courts and the Nachlat Shimon Corporation can continue to treat the case as though it were just a civil issue of a tenant who refuses to pay rent to the landlord, when in reality the issue is political: the court is refusing to recognize the Palestinian families as the true owners of the land.

Meanwhile, the lives these families, who have been innocently living in their homes for 53 years and raising their children and behaving like model citizens, hang in the balance. Once again, on 17 May 2009 at the behest of the Sephardic Council and the Nachlat Shimon Corporation, the court gave the two families until noon on 19 July to voluntarily leave their homes or incur exorbitant fines. In addition, the male heads of the two families, Maher Hanoun, 51, and Abed al-Fateh Gawi, 87, face indefinite incarceration until their families leave. Knowing that neither of the families can pay the exorbitant fines and that the long-term incarceration of the fathers, especially that of the elderly Gawi, would create intolerable hardship, the Israeli litigants presume that they could coerce the families into leaving voluntarily. Hanoun contends that he feels he is about to be taken hostage and emphasizes that his home was never even officially claimed by the Sephardic Council.

Following US President Barack Obama's recent speech at the University of Cairo, international interest in this case has been mounting. In mid-June a 40-member delegation from the European Parliament visited the Hanoun family and promised to take up their cause during the very next session of parliament. The families still assert that under no circumstance will they voluntarily leave. Meanwhile, as recently as 28 June a notice from Hotza'ah Lepoal, the agency empowered to execute court orders, was delivered to the homes informing the Palestinian families that at any time they are liable to be evicted. Looking out at the troubled neighborhood from her tent, Umm Kamel averred, "Victimization lasts but an hour, but truth goes on until the Day of Judgment. I am seeking the truth."

Marcey Gayer is an Israeli-American activist residing in Tel Aviv. Information about a letter-writing campaign on behalf of the Hanoun and Gawi families can be found at: http://bit.ly/Z0er5


e os 11 mil prisioneiros palestinianos?

fonte:Palestine Chronicle









The Hamas movement on Wednesday (July 8) reiterated that it will not change its demands and conditions for releasing an Israeli soldier. "There has been no new thing on Gilad Shalit's case and the ball is in Israel's court," said Sami Abu Zuhri, a Hamas spokesman. "Hamas is still sticking to the conditions it outlined to accomplish a prisoner exchange," he added. On Tuesday, Egyptian president Hossni Mubarak said that Shalit, who has been captured by Hamas in 2006, was still alive, adding that Egypt is still mediating between Hamas and Israel to free the corporal. Hamas says Israel has to release more than 1,000 Arab and Palestinian prisoners in exchange for the soldier, including 450 names that the Islamic movement selects. Israel has several reservations on Hamas' list of prisoners. Earlier, a senior Hamas leader, Khalil al-Hayya, told Xinhua that the indirect negotiations to exchange the prisoners have stopped since the Israeli general elections in February. (Reference for text: Xinhua. Photo: Via Google/file)

Estudo: a universidade de Tel Aviv faz parte integrante da ocupação israelita

fonte:EI


Study: Tel Aviv University part and parcel of the Israeli occupation
Report, SOAS Palestine Society, 9 July 2009

As part of Tel Aviv's centenary celebration, the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London hosted a Tel Aviv University Special Lecture Series from January to March 2009. Taking place in the midst of Israel's war on Gaza -- which had already mobilized SOAS students to organize a number of activities in solidarity with Gaza, including the first student occupation in the UK -- students and a number of lecturers expressed their opposition to the lecture series.

The student union overwhelmingly passed a motion criticizing the lecture series' attempt to whitewash Tel Aviv's colonial past and present and called for the end of SOAS's collaboration with Tel Aviv University (TAU) in hosting the series on the grounds of its role in giving key legal, technological and strategic support for maintaining and expanding Israel's colonial occupation. The School's Director, Professor Paul Webley, opposed the cancellation and defended the continuation of the lecture series by invoking a prerogative of freedom of speech and citing the pedagogic value of diversities of opinion. Conspicuously absent in the Director's defense was any engagement with the nature and scope of TAU's research portfolio.

In response to the director's failure to acknowledge the serious implications of collaboration with TAU that undermined the reputation, integrity and fundamental ethical principles of SOAS, the SOAS Palestine Society prepared a briefing paper for him and the Governing Body outlining TAU's intensive, purposive and open institutional contributions to the Israeli military. While the signatories of the briefing paper recognized the importance of freedom of speech, they were also keenly aware of the need to uphold the rights of the oppressed and expressed that no right reigns absolute over the fundamental right to life. It is precisely therefore that it is wholly untenable that partnerships with institutions facilitating, advocating and justifying ongoing war crimes can be legitimized with recourse to an ideal of academic freedom.

The briefing paper presented irrefutable evidence of TAU's deep investment in the facilitation and prosecution (at both the material and conceptual level) of what amount to war crimes. Along with many other examples of expansive institutional culpability, it identified the leading role played by TAU in developing an explicit military doctrine of "disproportionality" calling for the targeting of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians and civilian infrastructures. All of the data assembled and clearly sourced in the briefing paper is publicly available and widely known both at TAU and to the wider Israeli public. Indeed, TAU's valorization of its contributions to the military is an emphatic feature of its domestic public image, repeatedly underlined by university president Zvi Galil and celebrated in public relations campaigns. It is in part for this reason that demonstrating the complicity of TAU in the commissioning and enabling of ongoing war crimes is a relatively straightforward task. At the same time, this transparency discloses the extent to which the institution's overt roles in illegal and oppressive military programs go unchallenged, which reflects troubling patterns of acquiescence across Israeli academia and reveals the degree of mobilization obtaining in wider Israeli society.

When the SOAS director and the Governing Body of the school were confronted with the evidence in the briefing paper and the repeated demand to cancel the lecture series was made once again, the school's response was that:

"[N]either SOAS as an institution nor the governors as a group have decided to take a stand on the issue of continuing to work with TAU and ... it is unlikely that they would do so. Whatever the sympathies of individual governors may be, it would be virtually impossible and inappropriate for SOAS to take a political stand of this nature with regard to an individual academic institution or group of institutions in a particular country. This would go against the basic principles of academic freedom to which SOAS is legally and constitutionally bound."

This response utterly -- and most likely willfully -- ignored the evidence implicating TAU's role in death, destruction and oppression and stands testimony to the abject failure of educational institutions such as SOAS to place even minimal pressure on TAU to dissociate itself from oppression, illegality, and war-craft. Yet even this failure of omission, casting a shadow on the ethical integrity of scores of academic institutions such as SOAS, is translated into a far more serious failure of commission when universities offer themselves (their institutional reputations along with those of their faculty and studentship) as partners in the production and projection of an occlusive image of TAU as an unproblematic center of higher learning. This failure cannot be glossed over by recourse to notions of academic freedom or assertions about the pedagogic value of diversities of opinion unless these principles are elevated to an absolute status, absolving academia itself from an entire field of ethical responsibility.

SOAS has previously lived up to such ethical responsibilities when challenged to do so. In 2005, the institution responded to revelations about its holdings in weapons industries on the part of the Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT) by immediately divesting from these companies. In doing so, SOAS implicitly recognized the need to fully dissociate itself from institutions profiting from war and producing its technologies. TAU's overt privileging of military research and development, its institutional primacy in the authoring and propagation of illegal military doctrines and its celebratory self-definition as a "front line institution" in the production of Israel's "military and technological edge" makes its embrace at SOAS a betrayal of the ethical principles upheld in 2005.

Undoubtedly, SOAS's collaboration in the production of a celebratory public image of TAU and the oppressive and criminal activities fostered, facilitated and celebrated by that institution signals a profound disregard for the consequences of such institutional partnerships on SOAS's integrity and ethical reputation as an institution. Perhaps this should not come as a surprise given that the restructuring of universities into profit-orientated organizations in much of the western world, and in the UK in particular, means that university managements perform and conform with the interests of the powers that be more than ever before. The boycott, divestment and sanctions movement that is gaining rapid support across many campuses in the UK remains the only effective tool to confront collaborating universities and demand the boycott of Israeli academic institutions involved in the perpetration of war crimes.

Download the full study [PDF]

Seis meses depois, a reconstrução de Gaza não começou ainda

fonte:EI


Six months later, no reconstruction in Gaza
Rami Almeghari writing from the occupied Gaza Strip, Live from Palestine, 8 July 2009

Umm Naim sits with two of her children in the tent that the family has have lived in since their home was destroyed in January. (Rami Almeghari)

Mahmoud Abu al-Anzain and his wife, Umm Naim, and their three children used to live in a two-room, cement-roofed house. It wasn't a palace, but it was a home. The house was completely destroyed by Israeli army fire during last January's assault on the Gaza Strip.

Since that day, al-Anzain, 32, and his family have lived in a tent in al-Rayan refugee camp in the northern Gaza Strip. "As you can see, under the heat of the July sun, and with the fear of mosquitos and snakes, we have lived in this tent for six months with no one taking care of us," said al-Anzain, as he reclined on a mattress on the ground.

Al-Anzain's is one of 10 displaced families from the northern Gaza Strip living in al-Rayan refugee camp, recently erected by local nongovernmental organizations with a total of 93 tents. Other families sleep there at night, and others still come during the day, each according to its own circumstances caused by the Israeli assault. The al-Rayan refugee camp houses families from three areas in the northern Gaza Strip: Jabaliya refugee camp, Beit Lahiya and Sheikh Zayed.

"I used to live in Block 1 in the Jabaliya refugee camp, before my house was destroyed by Israeli shells," al-Anzain explained. "I don't have work, I only take compensation payment of 750 Israeli shekels monthly [$190 dollars]." This amount, provided by a Palestinian society that assists those injured during the conflict, is insufficient to rent a house and cover his family's other needs. "I am forced to stay in this tent, despite difficult conditions," said al-Anzain, serving Pepsi out of disposable cups, since he felt they could offer better hospitality to his guests than the glasses he keeps in the tent.

To make matters even more difficult, Umm Naim is about to deliver a baby, and one of the couple's children recently had to be taken to the hospital for an infection that came on top of other health complications. "What care can I provide for my new baby?" al-Anzain said. "Even dogs could not bear such a life!"

The al-Anzain's tent has two main parts: a "living room" where the family sits and sleeps, and a "bedroom" where they pile up their mattresses, blankets and clothes. Just near the living room, there is a small corner used as kitchen, with a kerosene stove, a frying pan and a pot for cooking. Opposite the living room, a "bathroom" consists of a small basin.

Umm Naim, sitting in the bedroom holding a broom, and finding little relief from the midday heat, spoke of the difficulty of caring for her children in a tent. "The place is not clean at all, there is dust everywhere inside and out," she complained. "I often can't get enough water even to wash the kitchen utensils." She expressed the constant fear that her children, her husband or herself might be bitten by a snake. "Life in this tent is unbearable," she said.

With a deep sigh, Umm Naim uttered an old Palestinian proverb: "What forces you to bear something bitter? Only that which is more bitter."

Umm Abdallah Abu Eita sat in her own tent in al-Rayan camp, where she has lived since the Israeli army destroyed her home in Block 3 of Jabaliya refugee camp. In her early sixties, she is old enough to have survived the original displacement from historic Palestine to refugee camps in the Gaza Strip and elsewhere. Indeed, the erection of six new refugee camps in Gaza, each of about 100 tents, recalls the 1948 Nakba, when hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were forced from their homes in what became Israel, and sought refuge in "temporary" camps such as these. Eighty percent of the Palestinians in Gaza are refugees from the Nakba or their descendants.

Each morning, Umm Abdallah comes to the camp and spends time with a friend, Umm Khamis, whose tent is next to hers, and they cook and chat. By sunset they leave their tents and head to relatives' houses where they sleep.

Abu Nimer Hasan, 53, welcomed this reporter into his tidy tent where he spends the night along with his four children.

"My house was hit by an Israeli shell on 17 January at 3am, in Beit Lahiya residential neighborhood," Hasan said. "My two-story building was completely burned."

Hasan and his children stay in the tent because they have no place else: "I have a married son who lives with his in-laws, while my wife sleeps at her parents' house."

"This is the most difficult time I have ever gone through in my life," Hasan said. "Can you imagine? On the weekends, we all gather from the different places we are scattered in, just to see each other and talk."

Twelve people used to live in Hasan's house. "We had many things and furniture, but everything was burned," he said. The tent now contains all their belongings: a few pieces of furniture provided by local charities, and a few plates and kitchen utensils.

His face reddening, Hasan added, "Can you imagine, I have even been deprived of my own basic human right to live with my wife under one roof for the past six months."

Khaled Abu Ali, who as a member of a local higher committee in charge of services for al-Rayan camp, says it is increasingly difficult to care for the residents who enjoy little privacy or space: "Financial support has eroded considerably, but the displaced people have no choice but to be steadfast."

According to local and international estimates, thousands of Palestinians in Gaza remain displaced after the Israeli attack there. A more than two-year-long blockade has prevented building supplies from entering the territory, thus internationally-pledged reconstruction efforts have yet to even begin.

Last week, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) issued a lengthy report on the humanitarian situation in Gaza. The report described woresning conditions six months after the Israeli attacks on the coastal territory.

"The objective of this report is to raise awareness, and to call on Israel and others to take all possible measures to reopen the crossing points so that the population of Gaza stops paying the price for this conflict," Antoine Grad, head of ICRC Gaza sub-delegation, told The Electronic Intifada. "What I can say is if the situation continues, the people of Gaza will get poorer and poorer, and more and more people will fall into poverty and misery."

Rami Almeghari is a journalist and university lecturer based in the Gaza Strip.

Thursday 9 July 2009

a destruição de Gaza

fonte:EI


Destroying Gaza
Sara Roy, The Electronic Intifada, 9 July 2009

Gaza has been reduced to a state of abject destitution. (Wissam Nassar/MaanImages)

The recent meeting between US President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu generated speculation over the future relationship between America and Israel, and a potentially changed US policy towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Analysts on the right and left are commenting on a new, tougher American policy characterized by strengthened US demands on Israel. However, beneath the diplomatic choreography lies an agonizing reality that received only brief comment from Obama and silence from Netanyahu: the ongoing devastation of the people of Gaza.

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. This context is undeniably one of mass suffering, created largely by Israel but with the active complicity of the international community, especially the US and European Union, and the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.

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. Although economic restrictions actually increased before Hamas' electoral victory in January 2006, the deepened sanction regime and siege subsequently imposed by Israel and the international community, and later intensified in June 2007 when Hamas seized control of Gaza, has all but destroyed the local economy. If there has been a pronounced theme among the many Palestinians, Israelis and internationals who I have interviewed in the last three years, it was the fear of damage to Gaza's society and economy so profound that billions of dollars and generations of people would be required to address it -- a fear that has now been realized.

After Israel's December 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 Israeli army admitted was indefensible. In Gaza today, there is no private sector to speak of and no industry. Eighty 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.

One powerful expression of Gaza's economic demise -- and the Gazans' indomitable will to provide for themselves and their families -- is its burgeoning tunnel economy that emerged long ago in response to the siege. Thousands of Palestinians are now employed digging tunnels into Egypt -- around 1,000 tunnels are reported to exist although not all are operational. According to local economists, 90 percent of economic activity in Gaza -- once considered a lower middle-income economy (along with the West Bank) -- is presently devoted to smuggling.

Today, 96 percent of Gaza's population of 1.4 million is dependent on humanitarian aid for basic needs. According to the World Food Program, 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 10 May, for example, 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. According to the Israeli journalist Amira Hass, Gazans still are denied many commodities (a policy in effect long before the December assault): building materials (including wood for windows and doors), electrical appliances (such as refrigerators and washing machines), spare parts for cars and machines, fabrics, threads, needles, candles, matches, mattresses, sheets, blankets, cutlery, crockery, cups, glasses, musical instruments, books, tea, coffee, sausages, semolina, chocolate, sesame seeds, nuts, milk products in large packages, most baking products, light bulbs, crayons, clothing and shoes.

Given these constraints, among many others -- including the internal disarray of the Palestinian leadership -- one wonders how the reconstruction to which Obama referred will be possible. There is no question that people must be helped immediately. Programs aimed at alleviating suffering and reinstating some semblance of normalcy are ongoing, but at a scale shaped entirely by the extreme limitations on the availability of goods. In this context of repressive occupation and heightened restriction, what does it mean to reconstruct Gaza? How is it possible under such conditions to empower people and build sustainable and resilient institutions able to withstand expected external shocks? Without an immediate end to Israel's blockade and the resumption of trade and the movement of people outside the prison that Gaza has long been, the current crisis will grow massively more acute. Unless the US administration is willing to exert real pressure on Israel for implementation -- and the indications thus far suggest they are not -- little will change. Not surprisingly, despite international pledges of $5.2 billion for Gaza's reconstruction, Palestinians there are now rebuilding their homes using mud.

Recently, I spoke with some friends in Gaza and the conversations were profoundly disturbing. My friends spoke of the deeply-felt absence of any source of protection -- personal, communal or institutional. There is little in society that possesses legitimacy and there is a fading consensus on rules and an eroding understanding of what they are for. Trauma and grief overwhelm the landscape despite expressions of resilience. The feeling of abandonment among people appears complete, understood perhaps in their growing inability to identify with any sense of possibility. The most striking was this comment: "It is no longer the occupation or even the war that consumes us but the realization of our own irrelevance."

What possible benefit can be derived from an increasingly impoverished, unhealthy, densely crowded and furious Gaza alongside Israel? Gaza's terrible injustice not only threatens Israeli and regional security, but it undermines America's credibility, alienating our claim to democratic practice and the rule of law.

If Palestinians are continually denied what we want and demand for ourselves -- an ordinary life, dignity, livelihood, safety and a place where they can raise their children -- and are forced, yet again, to face the destruction of their families, then the inevitable outcome will be greater and more extreme violence across all factions, both old and increasingly new. What looms is no less than the loss of entire generation of Palestinians. And if this happens -- perhaps it already has -- we shall all bear the cost.

Sara Roy is a senior research scholar at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University. She is the author of Failing Peace: Gaza and the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict. This article was originally published by The Harvard Crimson and is republished with the author's permission.

a solução de dois Estados, no estilo de Israel

fonte:Palestine Chronicle

The Two-State Solution, Israeli-Style

In the West Bank, the carrot for the leadership is even more tantalizingly visible. By Jonathan Cook - Ramallah

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's prime minister, has been much criticized in Israel, as well as abroad, for failing to present his own diplomatic initiative on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process to forestall US intervention.

Mr. Netanyahu may have huffed and puffed before giving voice to the phrase “two states for two peoples” at Sunday’s cabinet meeting, but the contours of just such a Palestinian state -- or states -- have been emerging undisturbed for some time.

In fact, Mr. Netanyahu appears every bit as committed as his predecessors to creating the facts of an Israeli-imposed two-state solution, one he and others in Israel’s leadership doubtless hope will eventually be adopted by the White House as the “pragmatic” -- if far from ideal -- option.

While Israel has been buying yet more time with Washington in bickering over a paltry settlement freeze, it has been forging ahead with the process of creating two Palestinian territories, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, that, despite supposedly emerging from occupation, are in reality sinking ever deeper into chronic dependency on Israeli goodwill.

This is creating a culture of absolute Israeli control and absolute Palestinian dependency, enforced by proxy Palestinian rulers acting as mini-dictatorships.

For a growing number of Palestinians, the conditions of bare subsistence and even survival are Israeli gifts that few can afford to spurn through political activity, let alone civil disobedience or armed resistance. The Palestinian will to organize and resist as their land is seized for settlements is being inexorably sapped.

It is little mentioned but Israel all but abandoned completing its massive separation wall in the West Bank some time ago. There are significant gaps waiting to be filled, but, with things having grown so quiet and the cost of each kilometer of wall so high, the sense of political and military urgency has evaporated.

Suicide bombers, had they the determination, could still slip into Israel. But increasingly Palestinians view such attacks as futile, if not counterproductive: Israel simply wins greater international sympathy and has the pretext to turn the screw yet tighter on Palestinian life.

None of this has been lost on Israel’s leaders of either the so-called Left or Right.

Rather than being an aberration in response to rocket attacks, the blockade of Gaza has become Israel’s template for Palestinian statehood. The West Bank is rapidly undergoing its own version of disengagement and besiegement, with similar predictable results.

Gaza’s blockade -- and the savage battering it took in December and January -- has suggested even to Mr. Netanyahu that the Israeli version of the carrot-and-stick approach works.

The stick – a devastated Gaza unable to rise from the rubble because aid and basic goods are kept out – has transformed most of the population into a nation dependent on handouts, borrowing where possible to buy necessities smuggled through the tunnels, and concentrating on the lonely art of survival.

As the normally restrained International Committee of the Red Cross reported last month: “Most of the very poor have exhausted their coping mechanisms. Many have no savings left. They have sold private belongings such as jewellery and furniture and started to sell productive assets including farm animals, land, fishing boats or cars used as taxis.”

The carrot -- if it can be called that -- is directed towards Gaza’s leaders, Hamas, rather than its ordinary inhabitants. The message is simple: keep the rocket fire in check and we won’t attack again. We will allow you to rule over the remnants of Gaza.

In the West Bank, the carrot for the leadership is even more tantalizingly visible. The Palestinian Authority under Mahmoud Abbas is colluding in the creation of a series of mini-fiefdoms based on the main cities.

Trained by the US military, Palestinian security forces with light weapons are taking back control of Jenin, Nablus, Jericho, Qalqilya, Ramallah and so on, while the PA is encouraged by promises of economic charity to prop up its legitimacy.

The leader of a Palestinian non-governmental organization in Ramallah confided at the weekend that what is being created are “City Leagues” -- a mocking reference to the Palestinian regional militias known as the Village Leagues armed by Israel in the early 1980s to stamp out Palestinian nationalism by threatening and attacking local political activists. Those were a dismal failure; this time Palestinians are less sure Israel will not succeed.

Palestinian prisons are starting to fill not only with those suspected of belonging to Hamas but those who dissent from Fatah rule. The ground is being carefully tended by Israel to create a brutal client state.

The stick, as in Gaza, is directed at the ordinary population. The news headlines are of the easing of movement restrictions at the checkpoints. That may be true at a few places deep in the West Bank. But at the big checkpoints that separate Israel from what is left of the West Bank, such as the one at Qalandiya between Ramallah and Jerusalem, the monitoring of Palestinian movement is becoming fearsomely sophisticated.

These checkpoints are now more like small airport terminals, with limited numbers of “trusted” Palestinians entitled to pass through. To escape the poverty of the West Bank each day to reach manual work inside Israel, they must have a magnetic ID card storing biometric data and a special permit. Cards are denied by Israel not only to those with a record of political activity but also to those who have distant relatives deemed to be politically engaged.

The same NGO leader concluded, again with bitter irony: “Our leaders are declaring victory: the victory of defeat.”

Should Mr. Abbas and his PA functionaries sign up to this Israeli vision of statehood, the defeat for the Palestinians will be greater still.

- Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. Visit: www.jkcook.net. A version of this article originally appeared in The National - www.thenational.ae - published in Abu Dhabi

patiente em Gaza morre por causa do bloqueio

fonte:IMEMC

Patient dies in Gaza due to the siege, death toll reaches 349



A Palestinian man from Gaza was announced dead on Wednesday after doctors were unable to treat him because of the Israeli siege on the Strip.

Patient in a Gaza Hospital � file photo 2009
Patient in a Gaza Hospital-- file photo 2009

Abed Al Haleem Zo'rob, aged 44, had brain cancer; he was denied from leaving the costal region to get the life saving medical care he needed. Doctors tried to save his life but due to the lack of equipments and needed medicine his condition became worse, until he was announced dead on Wednesday afternoon, medical sources reported.

The Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza announced that with Zo'rob's death, the total number of patients who died due to the Israeli siege has now reached 349. Israel placed the Gaza Strip under total siege in June of 2007. The cutting of food-,medical- and fuel supplies has left Gaza's hospitals unable to treat most patients. The military rarely allows patients to leave Gaza to receive medical care in the West Bank or Egypt.

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