Peace and Justice Post

The Israeli Regional Construction and Planning Committee approved a new settlement plan that aims at constructing 900 units for Jewish settlers in an area adjacent to Al Walaja Palestinian town in the Bethlehem District.

File – Israeli Settlement

The units will be built close to the Gilo illegal settlement that was built lands that were illegally annexed from the Palestinians. Israel does not regard Gilo as a settlement, but brands it’s as a “Jerusalem neighborhood”.

The new constructions will be built on 228 Dunams (56.34 Acres) that were illegally annexed from their Palestinian owners, and will include 4, 6 and 8-story apartment buildings, advanced roads and infrastructure.

The newly approved plan comes only one day after the so-called Regional Construction Committee approved the construction of 942 units for Jewish settlers south of Gilo settlement.

The two projects complement each other as they will ensure the expansion of Gilo settlement from the south with a total addition of more than 1800 units.

Israel’s policies of settlement construction and expansion were the main reason that pushed the Palestinians to withdraw from the American “supervised” peace talks with Israel.

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Pakistani Officials Slam Latest Attack Against South Waziristan

Jason Ditz, Antiwar.com, April 13, 2011

Though Pakistani officials were quite clear on Monday in their demand that the US put its entire drone strike program “on hold” for the foreseeable future, drones were active again today in South Waziristan, attacking a village and killing at least six people.

The Zardari government had long been a tacit supporter of such strikes. The ugly number of recent incidents, as well as anger over the Raymond Davis affair and its subsequent revelation that a number of US spies were operating in Pakistan beyond the ones cooperating officially with the government, however, have sparked a backlash. Now it is not just cabinet ministers but Pakistan’s powerful military establishment making the demands that the strikes stop.

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Gareth Porter, Consortium News, April 14, 2011

Editor’s Note: The consequences of George W. Bush’s botched wars in Afghanistan and Iraq continue to reverberate across the region with the Obama administration now facing new resistance from Pakistan over CIA drone strikes and other special operations against alleged Taliban targets near the Afghan border.

With the Afghan conflict dragging on and political support in the United States waning, the Obama administration had stepped up those attacks in hopes of salvaging the increasingly fragile American position, as Gareth Porter reported for Inter Press Service:

The Pakistani military’s recent demands on the United States to curb drone strikes and reduce the number of U.S. spies operating in Pakistan, which have raised tensions between the two countries to a new high, were a response to U.S. military and intelligence programs that had gone well beyond what the Pakistanis had agreed to in past years.

The military leadership had reached private agreements in the past on both the drone strikes and on U.S. intelligence activities in Pakistan, but both had changed dramatically in ways that threatened the interests of Pakistan.

The Pakistani military, which holds real power over matters of national security in Pakistan, is now insisting for the first time that Washington must observe strict limits on both the use of drone strikes and on the number of U.S. military and intelligence personnel and contractors in the country.

And they have backed up that demand with a suspension of joint intelligence operations with the United States – a program that had been strongly sought after by the Barack Obama administration.

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by Jim Lobe, CommonDreams.org, April 14, 2011

WASHINGTON – If President Barack Obama wanted to place Washington “on the right side of history” during the ongoing “Arab Spring”, his reaction to recent events in Bahrain will likely make that far more difficult, according to a growing number of analysts and commentators here.

Funeral prayers are said over the coffin of Ali Isa Saqer, who died while in police custody. Photograph: Mazen Mahdi/EPA While his administration has become ever more outspoken against repression in Syria and Yemen – not to mention Libya, where Obama has called for regime change – it has remained remarkably restrained about the escalating crackdown by the Sunni monarchy against the majority Shia population and prominent pro-democracy figures.

The strongest criticism in weeks came from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton Tuesday night at the U.S.-Islamic World Forum here when she appealed for a “political process that advances the rights and aspirations of all the citizens of Bahrain” and asserted that “security alone cannot resolve the challenges” facing the government.

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by MJ Rosenberg, MWC News, April 13, 2011

It becomes more clear every day that Binyamin Netanyahu’s government is terrified by the prospect that the Palestinians are planning to unilaterally declare a state later this year. In fact, it is safe to say that no other proposed Palestinian action has ever shaken up any Israeli government the way that the idea of a unilateral declaration has.

According to Haaretz, Prime Minister Netanyahu is so frightened at the prospect of a Palestinian declaration that he is considering withdrawing Israel forces (not settlers, of course) from the West Bank as an inducement to prevent the Palestinians from acting.

Netanyahu is weighing a withdrawal of Israel Defense Forces troops from the West Bank and a series of other measures to block the “diplomatic tsunami” that may follow international recognition of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders at the United Nations General Assembly in September. Netanyahu’s fear is well-placed.

Haaretz columnist Ari Shavit describes what would follow a unilateral Palestinian declaration:

At that moment, every Israeli apartment in Jerusalem’s French Hill neighborhood will become illegal. Every military base in the West Bank will be contravening the sovereignty of an independent UN member state. The Palestinians will not be obligated to accept demilitarization and peace and to recognize the occupation.

That is true. But it is also true that an internationally recognized Palestinian state, with a flag flying at the United Nations, would level the playing field for negotiations.

Ever since Israeli-Palestinian negotiations began in 1993, they have been fundamentally unbalanced. On one side is the most powerful military power in the Middle East, backed to the hilt by the United States. On the other is a stateless people who control no territory, have no military, and are barely surviving economically.

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By Reuters,  The Raw Story, April 12th, 2011

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Syrian security forces prevented wounded protesters reaching hospitals and stopped medical teams from treating them in two towns during last Friday’s demonstrations, Human Rights Watch said on Tuesday.

Pro-democracy protests against President Bashar al-Assad’s 11-year rule have been shaking the country, known for its heavy-handed security apparatus, for more than three weeks.

Protests after mass Friday prayers have generally been the largest because emergency law, in force since the Baath Partytook power in 1963, bans any gatherings and demonstrations not sponsored by the state.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) said 27 people were killed in the southern city of Deraa and one other in the Damascus suburb of Douma on Friday.

“To deprive wounded people of critical and perhaps life-saving medical treatment is both inhumane and illegal,” said Sarah Leah Witson, HRW’s Middle East director.

“Syria’s leaders talk about political reform, but they meet their people’s legitimate demands for reform with bullets.”

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by Saed Bannoura – IMEMC News, April 12, 2011

According to the Palestinian Minister of Detainees, a one-day hunger strike was held on Monday to protest the conditions where Palestinian prisoners are being held by Israeli authorities, including medical negligence, prevention of family visits, poor food quality, and the continual imposition of fines on prisoners who, because they are imprisoned, have no means to pay.

Palestinian prisoners (image by press tv)

Minister Issa Qaraqi said that 7,000 Palestinian prisoners participated in the hunger strike. Around 8,000 total Palestinian prisoners, including several hundred children, are believed to be held in Israeli detention facilities. At least 1,000 are being held without charges, in so-called ‘administrative detention’.

As the hunger strike was held inside the detention centers, supporters gathered in several West Bank and Gaza Strip cities in advance of the annual ‘Prisoners Day’, held each year on April 17th, and to call for the release of all Palestinian prisoners – a call which represents one of the three core demands of the Palestinian people, along with a state with Jerusalem as its capital, and the return of Palestinian refugees.

The Arab News website reports that, “Palestinian prisoners [have] held dozens of hunger strikes since the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories in 1967. Abdulqader Abu al-Fahem was the first Palestinian prisoner to die after 15 days of a hunger strike at the Asqalan prison in 1970. The prisoners Rasim Halaweh, Alial-Ja’fari and Ishaq Maragheh died in the Nafha prison in 1980 after 32 days. The prisoners Anees Douleh and Hussein Obaidat died in 1992 after 15 days.”

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A United Nations diplomat charged with investigating claims of torture said Monday that he is “deeply disappointed and frustrated” that U.S. defense officials have refused his request for an unmonitored visit with Pfc. Bradley Manning, the Army intelligence analyst accused of passing classified material to WikiLeaks.

Juan E. Mendez, the U.N. special rapporteur on torture, said his request for a private interview with Manning was denied by the Defense Department on Friday. Instead, he has been told that any visit must be supervised.

Mendez has been seeking to determine whether Manning’s confinement at a military brig at Quantico amounts to torture, following complaints about his treatment and an incident in which the private was forced to strip in his cell at night and sleep without clothing.

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Freedom Flotilla 2, Press Release, OpedNews.com, April 11, 2011

Athens — The Freedom Flotilla 2 Steering Committee met in Athens 9 and 10 April to continue preparations for the upcoming flotilla. Since the last meeting in Amsterdam, Israel has launched an international campaign of incitement against the Flotilla and its coalition members who are participating from around the world.

The Greek Ship to Gaza hosted this international meeting and emphasized that the Greek government has failed until now to pressure Israel to release the two Greek boats hijacked from international waters and held in Israel since 31st May 2010. The Greek Ship to Gaza has complied with all of the roadblocks put into place by Israel in order to bring back its ships, but our efforts have been to no avail.

The Greek government should have pressured Israel to release immediately the ships, as Israel did for the Turkish ships in August, 2010.Now, on the eve of the second Freedom Flotilla 2 voyage, the Israeli government is threatening to attack us again. As occurred last year before the first Freedom Flotilla, Israeli leaders are busy developing an atmosphere of hostility that should leave no doubt as to their intentions if and when they illegally attack this civilian flotilla.

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Bruce Ackerman and Yochai Benkler, The New York Review of Books, April 28, 2011

Bradley Manning is the soldier charged with leaking US government documents to Wikileaks. He is currently detained under degrading and inhumane conditions that are illegal and immoral.

For nine months, Manning has been confined to his cell for twenty-three hours a day. During his one remaining hour, he can walk in circles in another room, with no other prisoners present. He is not allowed to doze off or relax during the day, but must answer the question “Are you OK?” verbally and in the affirmative every five minutes. At night, he is awakened to be asked again “Are you OK?” every time he turns his back to the cell door or covers his head with a blanket so that the guards cannot see his face. During the past week he was forced to sleep naked and stand naked for inspection in front of his cell, and for the indefinite future must remove his clothes and wear a “smock” under claims of risk to himself that he disputes.

The sum of the treatment that has been widely reported is a violation of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment and the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee against punishment without trial. If continued, it may well amount to a violation of the criminal statute against torture, defined as, among other things, “the administration or application…of… procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality.”

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