Joseph Massad, The Electronic Intifada, 27 January 2010
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| One of the ways the prejudiced Oslo “process” has survived is through the creation of a Palestinian Authority upon which tens of thousands depend for their livelihood. (Wissam Nassar/MaanImages) |
The 1993 Oslo agreement did not only usher in a new era of Palestinian-Israeli relations but has had a much more lasting effect in transforming the very language through which these relations have been governed internationally and the way the Palestinian leadership viewed them. Not only was the Palestinian vocabulary of liberation, end of colonialism, resistance, fighting racism, ending Israeli violence and theft of the land, independence, the right of return, justice and international law supplanted by new terms like negotiations, agreements, compromise, pragmatism, security assurances, moderation and recognition, all of which had been part of Israel’s vocabulary before Oslo and remain so, but also Oslo instituted itself as the language of peace that ipso facto delegitimizes any attempt to resist it as one that supports war, and dismisses all opponents of its surrender of Palestinian rights as opponents of peace. Making the language of surrender of rights the language of peace has also been part of Israel’s strategy before and after Oslo, and is also the language of US imperial power, in which Arabs and Muslims were instructed by US President Barack Obama in his speech in Cairo last June.
George S. Hishmeh, Al Arabiya News Channel, Feb 5, 2010
Much as the world has responded marvelously and generously to calls to help Haitians after their devastating earthquake last month. The opposite has been true about the impoverished Palestinians in Gaza Strip who have been under an increasingly tighter siege since the Israeli blitz a little over a year ago.
The Obama administration has committed $300 million to help rebuild the heavily demolished area, now home to more than 1.5 million Palestinians, many of them refugees from nearby towns in what is now Israel. The United Nations has also raised $4.5 billion, but to date, neither the American nor the U.N. funds have been spent there because of the tight Israeli blockade which is also enforced by the Egyptians on their border with the once Israeli-occupied strip.
70 percent of emergency food centers face threats to their survival
If there is any indicator of the toll that the Great Recession has taken on the public, it would be the statistics beginning to emerge about hunger in the US.
According to a study from the nation’s largest food bank operator, the number of Americans in need of food aid has jumped 46 percent in three years, including a 50 percent jump in the number of children needing food assistance, and a 64 percent increase in hunger in senior citizens’ homes.
The study, Hunger in America 2010, found that 37 million people, or roughly one in eight US residents, received food aid in 2009. That’s a 46 percent jump from a similar survey carried out in 2006.
“Clearly, the economic recession, resulting in dramatically increasing unemployment nationwide, has driven unprecedented, sharp increases in the need for emergency food assistance and enrollment in federal nutrition programs,” said Vicki Escarra, president and CEO of Feeding America, which operates some 200 food banks across the country.
The study found a growing number of people having to make difficult choices about what to spend their dwindling dollars on, with the rising cost of health care a major contributing factor to hunger.
“More than 46 percent of clients served report having to choose between paying for utilities or heating fuel and food; 39 percent said they had to choose between paying for rent or a mortgage and food; 34 percent report having to choose between paying for medical bills and food; and 35 percent must choose between transportation and food,” the study reports.
“It is morally reprehensible that we live in the wealthiest nation in the world where one in six people are struggling to make choices between food and other basic necessities,” Escarra said in a statement.
She added that “[t]hese are choices that no one should have to make, but particularly households with children. Insufficient nutrition has adverse effects on the physical, behavioral and mental health, and academic performance of children.”
Feeding America’s study is just the latest to show an alarming trend line for hunger in the United States.
Last week, a report (PDF) from the Food Research and Action Center found that nearly one in five in the US — 18.5 percent — report having gone hungry in the past year, up from 16.3 percent at the start of 2008. Households with children were even likelier to experience hunger, with nearly a quarter reporting hunger in the past year.
Perhaps worst of all, the Feeding America study finds that 70 percent of emergency food centers are reporting “one or more problems that threaten their ability to continue operating.”
“While we have reached many more people over the past four years, the need of hungry Americans far outpaces our current level of service,” Escarra said.
By David Cronin, Inter Press Service
BRUSSELS, Feb 2, 2010 – Defenders of Israel’s aggressive stance have for many years been recognised as a powerful force shaping United States foreign policy. A less well-known fact is that the pro-Israel lobby has been making a concerted effort to strengthen its presence in Europe.
The lobby’s determination to make an impression on European Union policy-makers was exemplified by a new booklet published on Jan. 28.
Titled ‘Squaring the Circle?: EU-Israel Relations and the Peace Process in the Middle East’, the booklet advocates that EU should “rebalance its priorities” and pursue closer relations with Israel regardless of whether progress is made in resolving the conflict with the Palestinians.
Middle East Online, Feb 4, 2010
‘The establishment of a Palestinian state with the 1967 borders’
Ismail Haniya: Israel must recognise rights of Palestinian people before asking for recognition.
GAZA CITY – Hamas is ready for dialogue with the international community, including the United States and European Union, the leader of the democratically elected Palestinian movement Ismail Haniya said.
“Hamas is ready to dialogue with the world, international community, the US, the (Middle East) Quartet and the Europeans,” Haniya said Wednesday.
The resistance movement has been in power in the Israeli-besieged Gaza Strip since June 2007 after a routing out Fatah forces, to prevent a US-backed coup against Hamas’s democratic election.
Under pressure from Israeli lobbies, the US and the EU refuse to hold formal talks with the democratically elected movement, branding it a “terrorist” organisation.
One of the main obstacles to opening a dialogue is the Hamas’s refusal to officially recognise Israel. The Quartet demands an explicit recognition.
“They have to recognise us first, the right of the Palestinian people, we are the victims,” said the 48-year-old, who repeated that Hamas supports “the establishment of a Palestinian state with the 1967 borders.”
The Palestinians want their future state based on borders before the Israeli occupation of June 1967, which are recognosised by the international community, with its capital in East Jerusalem, a Palestinian territory under illegal Israeli occupation.
The Hamas prime minister said his movement had come “closer in political terms” to conditions issued by the Quartet — the US, EU, Russia and the United Nations — to open dialogue, including a “long-term ceasefire.”
Hamas has stopped resistance rocket attacks against Israel since a Hamas-Israeli ceasefire following the end of Israel’s devastating offensive against Gaza a year ago.
Haniya said he was determined to “establish Palestinian reconciliation and to have fair elections… in all Palestinian homes, including Jerusalem.”
Regarding “reconciliation, it is moving. It needs a strong push to reach a signature” with Fatah, the rival movement headed by Palestinian Authority president Mahmud Abbas.
A senior Fatah official, Nabil Shaath, made a rare visit to the Gaza Strip on Wednesday in a bid to encourage stalled reconciliation efforts.
Shaath, a member of the central committee of Fatah, met with Khalil al-Hayya, a senior official from Hamas.
“We are one people, we have one homeland. Every Palestinian has the right to move in his own land at any time,” Haniya said. “If he (Shaath) asks for a meeting, we will do nothing to prevent it.”
After talks mediated by Egypt, Hamas has refused to sign a unity deal that was proposed by Cairo in October unless it is amended to reflect what the group says were previous understandings reached with Fatah.
Both Egypt and Fatah have said the deal is final.
In addition, relations between Hamas and Egypt have deteriorated recently after an armed confrontation at the Rafah border crossing that killed one Egyptian and wounded several Palestinians.
“What happened in Rafah did not affect the strategic relationships between Egypt and Hamas,” said Haniya, adding the “Egyptian role should continue and we welcome all Arab efforts for reconciliation, and Egypt has to be there.”
“It is no secret that the US and Israel do not want reconciliation but we are committed to reach it.”
Paul Koring, The Globe and Mail, Feb 3, 2010
Barack Obama may have banned the Bush-era term “war on terror,” but the scope of the conflict hasn’t diminished. In fact, with covert and mostly deniable violence, the President has vastly escalated the war against Islamic extremists, far beyond the obvious 30,000 additional troops sent to Afghanistan.
It’s more than a year since Israel launched its immoral attack on Gaza and Palestinians are still living on the verge of a humanitarian disaster. So what has Tony Blair done to further peace in the region? Virtually nothing, argues the historian Avi Shlaim
Tony Blair in June 2009 speaking at a press conference in Gaza calling for a quick reconstruction. Photograph: Hatem Moussa/AP
The savage attack Israel unleashed against Gaza on 27 December 2008 was both immoral and unjustified. Immoral in the use of force against civilians for political purposes. Unjustified because Israel had a political alternative to the use of force. The home-made Qassam rockets fired by Hamas militants from Gaza on Israeli towns were only the excuse, not the reason for Operation Cast Lead. In June 2008, Egypt had brokered a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, the Islamic resistance movement. Contrary to Israeli propaganda, this was a success: the average number of rockets fired monthly from Gaza dropped from 179 to three. Yet on 4 November Israel violated the ceasefire by launching a raid into Gaza, killing six Hamas fighters. When Hamas retaliated, Israel seized the renewed rocket attacks as the excuse for launching its insane offensive. If all Israel wanted was to protect its citizens from Qassam rockets, it only needed to observe the ceasefire.
Americans have largely stopped thinking about Iraq, even though we still have approximately 110,000 troops there, as well as the largest “embassy” on the planet (and still growing). We’ve generally chalked up our war in Iraq to the failed past, and some Americans, after the surge of 2007, even think of it as, if not a success, at least no longer a debacle. Few care to spend much time considering the catastrophe we actually brought down on the Iraqis in “liberating” them.
Peace and Justice Post 
Violence against women is a global struggle
February 7, 2010by Humaira Shahid and Ritu Sharma, The Boston Globe, Feb 6, 2010
Eight years ago, Nasreen (not her real name) walked into the office of the Daily Khabrain newspaper in Lahore, Pakistan, and demanded justice. She stripped off her clothes, revealing a black and blue body covered with wounds and cigarette burns. She’d been gang raped. With tears in her eyes, she said, “My husband hired three men and got me raped in front of him because I was tired of his abuse and demanded the divorce that Islam gave me a right to. He didn’t even respect me as the mother of his children. . .. I just want justice in the name of God.”
Continues >>
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Tags:abuse of wmen, acid attacks and torture, forced marriages, global violence against women, honor killings, Humaira Shahid, Pakistan, Ritu Sharma
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