Tel Aviv announced on Monday that it has officially approved the construction of 366 new flats for Israeli settlers in illegal West Bank colonies.
And Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak said that he intends to approve about 84 more soon.
The first new construction that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hawkish government has approved since taking office in March threatens to derail attempts to get Middle East peace efforts back on track.
Yahoo! News, Sep 6. 2009
WASHINGTON (AFP) – Former US president Jimmy Carter said Sunday Palestinian leaders were “seriously considering” a one-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, following a visit to the Middle East.
“A majority of the Palestinian leaders with whom we met are seriously considering acceptance of one state, between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea,” Carter wrote in an op-ed piece in The Washington Post.
“By renouncing the dream of an independent Palestine, they would become fellow citizens with their Jewish neighbors and then demand equal rights within a democracy,” he explained. “In this non-violent civil rights struggle, their examples would be Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and Nelson Mandela.”
Carter noted that in doing so, Palestinian leaders were taking into consideration current demographic trends.
He said non-Jews were already a slight majority of total citizens in this area, “and within a few years Arabs will constitute a clear majority.”
Carter added that a two-state solution for the conflict was “clearly preferable” and had been embraced at the grass root level but that a one-state solution was “a more likely alternative to the present debacle.”
By Sydney L evy, Mail & Guardian Online, Sep 3, 2009
Israeli academic and activist Neve Gordon’s recent Los Angeles Times article, in which he explained why he supports Palestinian calls for a boycott of his own country, has drawn furious fire against him from within Israel, apparently endangering his job. Here is a call from the Jewish Voice for Peace, to support his right to express his views.
Following the publication of Neve Gordon’s article, there has been a vehement and aggressive attack against him in Israel that calls into serious question Israel’s commitment to academic freedom and the democratic right to free speech.
Media with Conscience, September 2, 2009
by Dr Gideon Polyana
Exposing Racist Zionist WW2 crimes
On 1 September 1939 German forces invaded Poland and on 3 September Britain declared war on Nazi Germany. Iran’s pro-peace, anti-drug, anti-racist President Ahmadinejad is correct that we need more research and education about WW2 – the racist Zionists (RZs) were involved in Nazi collaboration, Holocaust denial and the Holocaust.
Here is a 20 item selection of well-researched, racist Zionism (RZ)-related realities deriving from top scholars and authoritative sources that are deliberately kept secret from ordinary citizens by racist Zionist (RZ)-dominated academia, Mainstream media and politicians in the Western Murdochracies.
| Al Jazeerah, Aug 31, 2009
Interview: Jaswant Singh |
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Jaswant Singh, a former leader with India’s main opposition party, has sparked controversy in his own country with a book on Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founding father of Pakistan. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) expelled Singh over his book Jinnah: India-Partition Independence, which offered a sympathetic portrayal of Jinnah by an Indian writer. The local government in Gujarat, a state controlled by the BJP, even moved to ban the book, saying it ran counter to public and national interests. In an interview with Al Jazeera, Singh, a former finance and foreign minister, gave his thoughts on the controversy sparked by his book, as well as on his former political party. Al Jazeera: When you say that perhaps we need controversy to educate people, that seems to imply that there is some problem for India and Pakistan confronting that history. Jaswant Singh: We have been manufacturing history, inventing history. For example, India has demonised Mohammad Ali Jinnah just as Pakistan has demonised Mahatma Gandhi, or [Jawaharlal] Nehru or [Sardar Vallabhbhai] Patel. They were all Indian. All of them were great Indians. Gandhi and Jinnah were really contemporaries … and Gandhi himself called Jinnah a great Indian. In terms of the book that you have written, what is more important – that discussion takes place in India about that history or that Jinnah is viewed differently?
Once the full book is read, [and] the narrative is grasped, then you understand the enormity of the tragedy and the fruitlessness of the partition, certainly to me.This is not to question the reality of Pakistan, of Bangladesh, but we have to find an answer to the problems of that period. We created a partition to end peace. There is no peace in Pakistan (inside it), there is no peace in India and there is no peace in Bangladesh. There is no peace between the countries. You say in the book that “Pakistan is doubtless Muslim but theocentrically it’s not a theocratic state”. I mean, that’s quite a loaded statement to make. Not at all. “Theocentricism”, where society is centred on Islam – this is in line whether Pakistan, India or Bangladesh, where faith is of paramount importance. Pakistan is not theocratic in the sense it is not the Mullah that is governing Pakistan … but Pakistan society is governed by Islam. That is the difference. It is a very vital and important difference that has to be understood by the West about Islam. Should Pakistan be governed in a secular fashion though? Pakistan should be governed as they determine for themselves … I can wish that it would be better that they were governed as Jinnah had dreamt that they ought to be governed, but it’s for Pakistan to decide. You say in the book that the modern mind just cannot comprehend Islam precisely because it is a totality. It makes it very difficult for Pakistan to govern in anything that might resemble a secular fashion. The Western mind cannot grasp the enormity and subtlety of Islam. India has more Muslims living in it as citizens of India today than Pakistan has. We have lived with Islam for centuries. Islam has been absorbed by the ethos of India. I think India understands Islam much better than the West does. You see it as an adversary. We see it as part of the Indian vividity. The real renaissance of Islam would have taken place in undivided India if there had not been a partition. I’m asking you a very personal and direct question because you’ve been such an integral part of the BJP. Do you take any responsibility for the state of affairs? Do you think that the BJP, not just for the country but for the good of itself, needs to reform? Of course I take responsibility for everything that the party has done up till the moment of my exit. Until the day, I am a member of the party [and] I am responsible for everything the party has had to do or done. As it is, the political parties that exist in the country are really functioning like private limited companies or family concerns … congress of course is purely and unashamedly a family concern and they don’t make any bones about it, but the same problems seem to have afflicted my former political party. It has become sycophantic, full of time-servers. These are not the ideals with which we began. The purpose of the party was the service of the nation. |
Gaza’s troubles have somehow been relegated, if not completely dropped from the mainstream media’s radar, and subsequently from the world’s conscience and consciousness. Weaning the public from the sadness there conveys the false impression that things are improving and that people are starting to move on and rebuild their lives.
But nothing could be further from the truth. Since the conclusion of Israel’s war last year, the Palestinian Ministry of Health declared that 344 Gaza patients have reportedly been added to the swelling number of casualties.
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, Page 7
Special Report
ISRAEL’S actions from the beginning have directly contradicted the image it projects to the West. The founding of a country that was to be “a light among nations” required the forcible expulsion of most of its original inhabitants. The “Middle East’s only democracy” became the brutal oppressor of three million Palestinians. The nationhood that was to endow the Jewish people with “normality” gave them instead a garrison state in which military strength is the dominant value.
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The most enduring myth of all is that Israel would welcome peace with the Palestinians and the Arab nations if they agreed to recognize Israel’s legitimacy as a state. In 1955 then-Prime Minister Moshe Sharett recorded in his diary a statement by Israel Defense Minister Moshe Dayan that revealed Israel’s true policy: preserving the unity of an immigrant population by discouraging peace efforts and maintaining a sense of permanent beleaguerment.
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Peace and Justice Post 
Israeli academics must pay price to end occupation
September 8, 2009Anat Matar, Haaretz/Israel, Sept 9, 2009
Several days ago Dr. Neve Gordon of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev published an opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times. In that article he explained why, after years of activity in the peace camp here, he has decided to pin his hopes on applying external pressure on Israel – including sanctions, divestment and an economic, cultural and academic boycott.
He believes, and so do I, that only when the Israeli society’s well-heeled strata pay a real price for the continuous occupation will they finally take genuine steps to put an end to it.
Continues >>
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Tags:academic freedom, Anat Matar, boycott, Dr. Neve Gordon's article, Gaza scools in ruins, Israel, occupation, Palestinians, students in Israeli jails
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