By Chris Hedges, Information Clearing House, Reposted April 8, 2010
The author spoke at the Revolution Books Town Hall Meeting at Ethical Culture Society on January 13, 2009 condemning Israel and USA complicity in Israel’s murderous destruction and genocide of the innocent men, women and children of GAZA and the West Bank.
Part 2
Immanuel Wallerstein, Commentary No. 278, April 1, 2010
Anyone who thinks there is going to be any significant change in the status quo in Israel/Palestine is suffering from multiple delusions. The Israeli government is dead set against the creation of a Palestinian state, even a weak Palestinian state, and this view has the support of a very large majority of the Israeli Jews. The Palestinian leaders are more divided. But even the most accommodating are not willing even to consider anything less than a state based on the 1967 frontiers, with East Jerusalem as its capital. The rest of the world cannot budge either side. This is called deadlock.
The question is who gains and who loses by deadlock? The Israeli political elite seem convinced that they will gain. There is a very large group who are so resolutely irredentist that they would consider a peace agreement a veritable disaster. The Israelis have always thought that if they dug in their heels, eventually the rest of the world (including even the Arab Palestinians) would yield to what they call “realities on the ground.”
Richard Greener, The Huffington Post, March 24, 2010
As citizens of the United States, whose government provides essential support to the State of Israel and also supports a two-state settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we must ask ourselves this important question: If we were Palestinians could we start our own nation in 2010 while 500,000 citizens of another country occupy our land and could we agree to watch helplessly as they grow in number to almost two million before the year 2050?
Americans know that the issue of Israeli settlements is an obstacle in the way of Middle East peace. But do we properly comprehend what Israeli settlements really are?
Sonja Karkar, Counterpunch, March 23, 2010
One man dead in Israel and the whole world knows. He actually was not Israeli, but an unfortunate immigrant worker from Thailand. We have been told who killed him too: not by name, but by some shadowy nom de guerre, used by jihadist groups some claim to be loosely affiliated with al-Qaeda in Iraq and elsewhere. The unknown group in Gaza, Ansar al-Sunna, claimed responsibility for the rocket fired into Israel that caused the man’s death by shrapnel.
The Hamas government has had its own problems with such groups, which have challenged its rule in Gaza. But, that is neither here nor there for Israel.
Israel has already said that its response will be strong. And sure enough, Israeli bombers have pounded the southern-most part of Gaza, so far killing and wounding some fourteen Palestinian civilians including children, three of them critically.
By David Cronin, Inter Press Service News
BRUSSELS, Mar 22, 2010 (IPS) – Diplomats representing the European Union (EU) have drawn up a new plan for strengthening their relations with Israel despite the expansion of illegal settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories.
Spain, the current holder of the EU’s rotating presidency, is eager that work proceeds on formally upgrading the Union’s political and commercial ties with Israel over the next few months.
Although both the EU and Israel had agreed in 2008 to undertake steps designed to integrate Israel into the Union’s economy, work on this dossier has partly stalled because of the subsequent war in Gaza. But a confidential paper written by Spanish officials suggests that fresh discussions should soon be opened with Israel so that the upgrading process can regain its momentum.
Last week’s declaration of victory in the ongoing Israel row by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton appears to have been a short-lived win, and media claims that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had “bowed” to US demands appear to be premature.
In his most recent public comments, Prime Minister Netanyahu reiterated that he would like to see the “indirect talks” with the Palestinian Authority resume, but that he absolutely would not ever agree to restrict construction in occupied East Jerusalem, the issue upon which the talks have stalled.
With Netanyahu on his way to the US for AIPAC’s policy conference, and expected to focus his visit on pressing President Obama for more advanced weapons with which to attack Iran, it was widely expected that the Netanyahu government would try to defuse the tensions over the East Jerusalem move, which US officials considered a public insult.
And indeed the tensions do seem to be dying down, though the only thing resembling a concession made by the Netanyahu government was to implement a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy wherein the Israeli government would continue to expand settlements in East Jerusalem with impunity but would stop publicizing them at inopportune times.
But even if US-Israeli relations return quickly to normalcy, there appears to be no rapprochement forthcoming with the PA. This may serve as a recipe for the Obama Administration to default back to chastising the Palestinians for “refusing” negotiations (just two weeks after they agreed to those negotiations, only to see them torpedoed by the most recent construction), but it seems unlikely that it will restart the peace talks.
Margaret Kimberley, Black Agenda Report, March 19, 2010
After last week’s announced settlement expansion effectively torpedoed the indirect peace talks with the Palestinian Authority, the Israeli government is will to do almost anything to build “trust,” so long as it doesn’t involve the only thing the PA actually wants, abandoning that settlement expansion.
Kawther Salam, March 17, 2010
Today Wednesday, the Palestinian newspapers, especially the PA newspaper Al-Hayat Jadidah and Al-Quds in Jerusalem, came out with miserly and censored news about a day of bloody clashes between the Palestinians and Israeli occupation forces in occupied Jerusalem, which was otherwise described as “the hardest clashes between Palestinians and Israeli occupation forces in the years after the outbreak of the Aqsa Intifada”. The Palestinian Authority, under the orders of the corrupt minister of Salam Fayyad, issued censorship instructions to the media, telling them to not concentrate on the news about the daily confrontations between the Israeli occupation and the local Palestinians in East Jerusalem, citing as a pretext that allegedly the Hamas “illegal” government had issued a call to take part in the confrontation and demos.
Israeli soldiers and the so-called borderpolice chasing women in the streets.
Peace and Justice Post 
The U.N. Partition Plan and Arab ‘Catastrophe’
April 14, 2010The following is excerpted from The Rejection of Arab Self-Determination: The Struggle for Palestine and the Roots of the Arab-Israeli Crisis.
In 1947, Great Britain, unable to reconcile its conflicting obligations to both Jews and Arabs, requested that the United Nations take up the question of Palestine. In May, the U.N. Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP) was created by a General Assembly resolution. UNSCOP’s purpose was to investigate the situation in Palestine and “submit such proposals as it may consider appropriate for the solution of the problem of Palestine”.
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