| Al Jazeera, June 30, 2009 | |||
Israel has approved the construction of 50 new homes in a West Bank settlement and announced plans to expropriate more Palestinian land. The move comes just hours before Israel’s defence minister, Ehud Barak, visits the US in a bid to defuse tensions over Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian land. The land grab and new permits come despite a demand from Barack Obama, the US president, for a complete freeze to all Israeli settlement activity, and could exacerbate a rare public spat between the allies. |
Archive for the ‘Zionist Israel’ Category
Israel permits new settlement homes
June 30, 2009
Palestinians in Gaza struggle to survive: ICRC
June 29, 2009Khaleej Times Online, June 29, 2009
(AFP)
GENEVA – Six months after the Israeli offensive and two years of a blockade the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are struggling to survive and sliding into despair, the Red Cross said Monday.
“The people living there find themselves unable to rebuild their lives and are sliding ever deeper into despair,” a new report by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said.
The report said that seriously ill patients were not getting the treatment they needed and thousands of Gazans whose homes were destroyed during Israel’s 22-day military operation at the turn of the new year were still without shelter.
“The poorest residents in particular have exhausted their coping mechanisms and often have to sell off their belongings to be able to buy enough to eat,” said Antoine Grand, head of the ICRC’s sub-delegation in Gaza.
“Worst affected are the children, who make up more than half of Gaza’s population,” he added.
Israel imposed a blockade of Gaza in June 2007 when the Islamist movement Hamas, which is pledged to the Jewish state’s destruction, took control of the Palestinian territory.
In late December last year, Israel launched an offensive in Gaza to stop Hamas from firing rockets into southern Israel, which claimed 12 Israeli lives. Israeli air raids and tanks destroyed swathes of the coastal enclave and 1,400 Palestinians were killed, according to Palestinian emergency services.
The ICRC report said in the wake of the Israeli offensive essential water and sanitation infrastructure remain largely insufficient and that the equivalent of 28 Olympic-size swimming pools of basically untreated sewage is daily pumped into the Mediterranean Sea.
Some 4.5 billion dollars pledged by donor countries to rebuild Gaza is of little use if building supplies cannot get past the Israeli blockade, the ICRC said, calling for the lifting of restrictions on the movement of people and goods.
“Israel has the right to protect its population against attacks,” said Grand. “But does that mean that 1.5 million people in Gaza do not have the right to live a normal life?”
The Geneva-based humanitarian organisation said Gaza urgently needed to import medical equipment and building supplies including cement and steel, and its farmers needed access to their land in the buffer zone and its fishermen should be allowed back into deeper waters.
The ICRC also called for political authorities and the armed groups in Gaza to take the necessary steps to help the civilians.
“Humanitarian action can be no substitute for the credible political steps that are needed to bring about the changes the population of Gaza needs,” the ICRC said.
The necessity of cultural boycott
June 27, 2009By Ilan Pappe | ZNet, June 25, 2009
Source: Pulse Media
If there is anything new in the never-ending sad story of Palestine it is the clear shift in public opinion in the UK. I remember coming to these isles in 1980 when supporting the Palestinian cause was confined to the left and in it to a very particular section and ideological stream. The post-Holocaust trauma and guilt complex, military and economic interests and the charade of Israel as the only democracy in the Middle East all played a role in providing immunity for the State of Israel. Very few were moved, so it seems, by a state that had dispossessed half of Palestine’s native population, demolished half of their villages and towns, discriminated against the minority among them who lived within its borders through an apartheid system and divided into enclaves two million and a half of them in a harsh and oppressive military occupation.
Quartet urges settlement freeze
June 27, 2009| Al Jazeera, June 27, 2009 |
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The international Quartet on Middle East peace has called on Israel to halt Jewish settlements in the Palestinian territories and open border crossings as a first step to advance peace. The Quartet, comprised of the European Union, Russia, the United States and the United Nations, made the appeal on Friday in the northeastern Italian city of Trieste. |
Israel must end indiscriminate blockade
June 27, 2009Morning Star Online, Friday 26 June 2009
Anti-poverty agency ActionAid has called on Tel Aviv to lift its two-year blockade of the Gaza Strip, hours before a tunnel used to smuggle goods from Egypt collapsed, killing a Palestinian.
Even school books and children’s plastic toys are banned from entering Gaza by Israel, as well as essential supplies needed for relief and rehabilitation such as fuel and building materials.
As a result, Palestinians are forced to literally go underground to ferry in supplies.
Gaza emergency services official Mouawiya Hassanein said that five other people had been injured in the collapse.
On the eve of the six-month anniversary of the Israeli bombardment, ActionAid Gaza programme manager Richard Sandison said: “Israel’s blockade is indiscriminate and is affecting the entire 1.5 million-strong population of Gaza. Ordinary women, children and the elderly are the main victims.
Mr Sandison went on to observe that: “schools are lying damaged or destroyed and cannot be rebuilt because we do not have the materials needed for construction.”
Author Naomi Klein Calls for Boycott of Israel
June 26, 2009 Published on Friday, June 26, 2009 by Agence France Presse
BILIN , West Bank – Bestselling author Naomi Klein on Friday took her call for a boycott of Israel to the occupied West Bank village of Bilin, where she witnessed Israeli forces clashing with protesters.
![[Bestselling Canadian author Naomi Klein on Friday took her call for a boycott of Israel to the occupied West Bank village of Bilin, where she witnessed Israeli forces clashing with protesters. 'Boycott is a tactic . . . we're trying to create a dynamic which was the dynamic that ultimately ended apartheid in South Africa,' she said. (Photograph by: John Kenney, National Post)]](https://i0.wp.com/www.commondreams.org/files/article_images/klein-2.jpg "klein-2.jpg")
Bestselling Canadian [Jewish] author Naomi Klein on Friday took her call for a boycott of Israel to the occupied West Bank village of Bilin, where she witnessed Israeli forces clashing with protesters. ‘Boycott is a tactic . . . we’re trying to create a dynamic which was the dynamic that ultimately ended apartheid in South Africa,’ she said. (Photograph by: John Kenney, National Post)“It’s a boycott of Israeli institutions, it’s a boycott of the Israeli economy,” the Canadian writer told journalists as she joined a weekly demonstration against Israel’s controversial separation wall.”Boycott is a tactic . . . we’re trying to create a dynamic which was the dynamic that ultimately ended apartheid in South Africa,” said Klein, the author of “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.”
“It’s an extraordinarily important part of Israel’s identity to be able to have the illusion of Western normalcy,” the Canadian writer and activist said.
“When that is threatened, when the rock concerts don’t come, when the symphonies don’t come, when a film you really want to see doesn’t play at the Jerusalem film festival . . . then it starts to threaten the very idea of what the Israeli state is.”
She briefly joined about 200 villagers and foreign activists protesting the barrier which Israel says it needs to prevent attacks, but which Palestinians say aims at grabbing their land and undermining the viability of their promised state.
She then watched from a safe distance as the protesters reached the fence, where Israeli forces fired teargas and some youths responded by throwing stones at the army.
“This apartheid, this is absolutely a system of segregation,” Klein said adding that Israeli troops would never crack down as violently against Jewish protesters.
She pointed out that her visit coincided with court hearings in Quebec in a case where the villagers of Bilin are suing two Canadian companies, accusing them of illegally building and selling homes to Israelis on land that belongs to the village.
The plaintiffs claim that by building in the Jewish settlement of Modiin Illit, near Bilin, Green Park International and Green Mount International are in violation of international laws that prohibit an occupying power from transferring some of its population to the lands it occupies.
“I’m hoping and praying that Canadian courts will bring some justice to the people of Bilin,” Klein said.
Her visit was also part of a promotional tour in Israel and the West Bank for “The Shock Doctrine” which has recently been translated into Hebrew and Arabic. Klein said she would get no royalties from sales of the Hebrew version and that the proceeds would go instead to an activist group.
© Copyright (c) AFP
The ruins of Gaza
June 22, 2009Laura Durkay describes what she witnessed as part of a Code Pink delegation that visited Gaza earlier in June.
Socialist Worker, June 22, 2009
The American School in Gaza was destroyed during Israel’s onslaught (Laura Durkay | SW)
“PEOPLE ARE being kept alive.” It was one of the first things that John Ging, the director of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) in Gaza told us.
It’s a pretty accurate description of the conditions in Gaza, four months after the end of Israel’s Operation Cast Lead, which left 1,400 dead, over 5,000 wounded and at least 40,000 homeless. People are being kept alive–and that’s about all.
Four months after the ceasefire, not a brick has been rebuilt in Gaza. Thousands of buildings–from the Palestinian parliament building (heavily damaged) and presidential residence (obliterated), to the Islamic University, the American School, Al Quds Hospital (hit with white phosphorus) and thousands of homes, shops, factories and police stations–stand exactly as they were on January 18, the last day of the war.
Peace and Justice Post 
The Elephant in the Room: Israel’s Nuclear Weapons
June 30, 2009by David Morrison | The Electronic Intifada, June 30, 2009
“Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon would not only be a threat to Israel and a threat to the United States, but would be profoundly destabilizing in the international community as a whole and could set off a nuclear arms race in the Middle East.”
By his side was Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In the room with them, there was an elephant, a large and formidably destructive elephant, which they and the assembled press pretended not to see.
Continued >>
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