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The slow death of Gaza

November 24, 2008

The collective punishment of Gaza’s civilian population is illegal. But international law was tossed aside long ago

It has been two weeks since Israel imposed a complete closure of Gaza, after months when its crossings have been open only for the most minimal of humanitarian supplies. Now it is even worse: two weeks without United Nations food trucks for the 80% of the population entirely dependent on food aid, and no medical supplies or drugs for Gaza’s ailing hospitals. No fuel (paid for by the EU) for Gaza’s electricity plant, and no fuel for the generators during the long blackouts. Last Monday morning, 33 trucks of food for UN distribution were finally let in – a few days of few supplies for very few, but as the UN asks, then what?

Israel’s official explanation for blocking even minimal humanitarian aid, according to IDF spokesperson Major Peter Lerner, was “continued rocket fire and security threats at the crossings”. Israel’s blockade, in force since Hamas seized control of Gaza in mid-2007, can be described as an intensification of policies designed to isolate the population of Gaza, cripple its economy, and incentivise the population against Hamas by harsh – and illegal – measures of collective punishment. However, these actions are not all new: the blockade is but the terminal end of Israel’s closure policy, in place since 1991, which in turn builds on Israel’s policies as occupier since 1967.

In practice, Israel’s blockade means the denial of a broad range of items – food, industrial, educational, medical – deemed “non-essential” for a population largely unable to be self-sufficient at the end of decades of occupation. It means that industrial, cooking and diesel fuel, normally scarce, are virtually absent now. There are no queues at petrol stations; they are simply shut. The lack of fuel in turn means that sewage and treatment stations cannot function properly, resulting in decreased potable water and tens of millions of litres of untreated or partly treated sewage being dumped into the sea every day. Electricity cuts – previously around eight hours a day, now up to 16 hours a day in many areas – affect all homes and hospitals. Those lucky enough to have generators struggle to find the fuel to make them work, or spare parts to repair them when they break from overuse. Even candles are running out.

There can be no dispute that measures of collective punishment against the civilian population of Gaza are illegal under international humanitarian law. Fuel and food cannot be withheld or wielded as reward or punishment. But international law was tossed aside long ago. The blockade has been presented as punishment for the democratic election of Hamas, punishment for its subsequent takeover of Gaza, and punishment for militant attacks on Israeli civilians. The civilians of Gaza, from the maths teacher in a United Nations refugee camp to the premature baby in an incubator, properly punished for actions over which they have no control, will rise up and get rid of Hamas. Or so it goes.

And so what of these civilian agents of political change?

For all its complexities and tragedies, the over-arching effect of Israel’s blockade has been to reduce the entire population to survival mode. Individuals are reduced to the daily detail of survival, and its exhaustions.

Consider Gaza’s hospital staff. In hospitals, the blockade is as seemingly benign as doctors not having paper upon which to write diagnostic results or prescriptions, and as sinister as those seconds – between power cut and generator start – when a child on life support doesn’t have the oxygen of a mechanical ventilator. A nurse on a neo-natal ward rushes between patients, battling the random schedule of power cuts. A hospital worker tries to keep a few kidney dialysis machines from breaking down, by farming spare parts from those that already have. The surgeon operates without a bulb in the surgery lamp, across from the anaesthetist who can no longer prevent patient pain. The hospital administrator updates lists of essential drugs and medical supplies that have run out, which vaccines from medical fridges are now unusable because they can’t be kept cold, and which procedures must be cancelled altogether. The ambulance driver decides whether to respond to an emergency call, based on dwindling petrol in the tank.

By reducing the population to survival mode, the blockade robs people of the time and essence to do anything but negotiate the minutiae of what is and isn’t possible in their personal and professional lives. Whether any flour will be available to make bread, where it might be found, how much it now costs. Rich or poor, taxi drivers, human rights defenders, and teachers alike spend hours speculating about where a canister of cooking gas might be found. Exhaustion is gripping hold of all in Gaza. Survival leaves little if no room for political engagement – and beyond exhaustion, anger and frustration are all that is left.

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Israel continues starvation of Gazans despite UN pleas

November 23, 2008

Irish Sun, Friday 21st November, 2008

In what the UN has described as collective punishment, the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip continues.

Notwithstanding 56% of the 1.5 million Gazan population consists of children, Israel has shut down access to the region refusing to allow desperately needed food trucks to reach their destination.

UN food agencies in Gaza that have had their food supply cut by the Israeli blockade say they are facing a “humanitarian catastrophe.”

World media continues to ignore the desperate situation, Israel however has contributed to that by barring journalists from entering Gaza, a move condemned earlier this week by the Foreign Press Association. The UN appears to be a lone voice in trying to engineer some relief.

Karen AbuZayd, commissioner-general of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, said the human toll of this month’s sealing of Gaza’s goods crossings was the gravest in eight years.

“It’s been closed for so much longer than ever before and we have nothing in our warehouses. It will be a catastrophe if this persists, a disaster,” said AbuZayd, whose agency is the largest aid body providing services to Palestinian refugees.

“They are not just under occupation, they are under siege, it’s a word I don’t usually use, they are completely closed off,” she added.

United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who issued a statement saying he supported statements by the Gazan office, telephoned Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Tuesday urging him to provide access for UN food trucks. Olmert said he would look into the situation on an urgent basis.

By Friday Ban had received no word back from Olmert, so he bypassed him and telephoned Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni to stress the urgency of the situation. Livni however rebuffed the UN Secretary-General’s plea saying the world should be condemning Palestinian rocket attacks.

“Whoever thinks that a situation of them firing at us, while everything continues as usual, can exist is mistaken,” her office said in a statement. “The international community must be more decisive in making itself heard, and in using its influence, in the face of these attacks.”

Israeli human rights organization Gisha in a letter to the Israeli army on Thursday from its attorney Yadin Elam said the closure of crossings, “is done with the illegal intention of inflicting pressure on the civilian population in an attempt to affect the behavior of militants and political elements. The closure of the crossings is therefore in violation of the absolute prohibition in International Law against collective punishment.” THe UN also this week described the Israeli crackdown as collective punishment.

The blockade is now putting Gaza at breaking point which many believe is the objective of the Jewish nation. A ceasefire, between Hamas and Israel, which had largely held until November 4, was broken when the Israeli army entered Gaza and carried out a raid which killed five militants. Rocket fire into Israel followed, and since then the Israeli army has stepped up activities and closed off more access points. A further 12 Palestinian militants have died. There have been no casualties on the Israeli side as most of the 140 rockets fired into the country have failed to hit any tangible targets.

In addition to preventing access for food supplies Israel has refused to allow European Union-funded fuel supplies into Gaza, starving the power generation plant of fuel which has caused widespread blackouts up to 16 hours a day. Water facilities, including access to clean drinking water, and the treatment of raw sewage continue is also being severely disrupted by fuel shortages. Fifty to sixty million liters of untreated and partially treated sewage are being dumped into the Gaza Strip Mediterranean Sea daily, posing a public health risk.

On Thursday the Associated Press, Reuters, CNN, the BBC and other major news organizations wrote a joint letter to Olmert, protesting the ban on journalists entering Gaza to cover events there. “We are gravely concerned about the prolonged and unprecedented denial of access to the Gaza Strip for the international media,” the letter said.

“We would welcome an assurance that access to Gaza for international journalists will be restored immediately in the spirit of Israel’s long-standing commitment to a free press.”

The letter has been ignored.

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MIDEAST: On Top of Humanitarian Disaster, A News Blackout

November 20, 2008

By Cherrie Heywood | Inter Press Service


RAMALLAH, West Bank, Nov 18 – Israel has imposed a virtual news blackout on the Gaza Strip. For the last ten days no foreign journalists have been able to enter the besieged territory to report on the escalating humanitarian crisis caused by Israel’s complete closure of Gaza’s borders for the last two weeks.

Steve Gutkin, the AP bureau chief in Jerusalem and head of Israel’s Foreign Press Association, said that he personally “knows of no foreign journalist that has been allowed into Gaza in the last week.”

Gutkin said that “while Israel has barred foreign press from entering Gaza in the past, the length of the current ban makes it unprecedented.” He added that he has received no “plausible or acceptable” explanation for the ban from the Israeli government.

AP has relied on reports from two of its journalists who were able to enter Gaza days before the closure began and are currently stuck there.

A delegation of European Union parliamentarians was also prevented from entering Gaza to assess the situation on the ground and to hold talks with Hamas leaders. They subsequently broke the naval siege of Gaza by entering the coast’s territorial waters from Cyprus by boat, defying the Israeli navy.

During talks held with Hamas, the EU parliamentarians were able to get a historic commitment from the Islamic organisation to recognise Israel’s right to exist within the internationally recognised 1967 borders. Hamas further offered a long-term ceasefire in return for Israel legitimising Palestinian rights.

Israel also prevented 20 European Union consul-generals from entering Gaza on Thursday. On Sunday Israeli border police prevented 15 trucks loaded with medication from entering the Gaza Strip.

EU commissioner for external relations and European neighbourhood policy, Bentita Ferrero-Waldner, has expressed strong reservations. “I am profoundly concerned about the consequences for the Gazan population of the complete closure of all Gaza crossings for deliveries of fuel and basic humanitarian assistance,” Ferrero-Waldner said in a statement Friday.

Karen AbuZayd, head of the UN Relief and Welfare Agency (UNRWA) which cares for Palestinian refugees, added that it was unusual for Israel not to let basic food and medicines in. “This has alarmed us more than usual because it’s never been quite so long and so bad, and there has never been so much negative response on what we need,” she said.

Israel closed the borders following a barrage of rockets fired by Palestinian resistance fighters at Israeli towns bordering the Gaza Strip.

The tit-for-tat violence began on Nov. 4 when the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) launched a cross-border raid into Gaza, breaking a shaky five-month ceasefire with Hamas. The purpose was ostensibly to destroy a tunnel built by Palestinians allegedly to smuggle captured Israeli soldiers.

More than 20 Palestinians were killed in Israeli raids. Two Israelis were lightly injured in the subsequent rocket attacks.

The timing of Israel’s breach of the ceasefire is curious in that hundreds of these smuggling tunnels have existed ever since Hamas took over the strip in June last year. They have been used to smuggle everyday necessities as well as arms because the territory is hermetically sealed by Israel.

John Ging, director of UNRWA in Gaza, who has lived there for the past three years, questioned the alleged security reasoning behind the closure. Since the ceasefire went into place this summer, Ging said, fewer supplies have passed through the crossing than in the beginning of 2006, when the western Negev in Israel suffered incessant rocket fire from Gaza.

At that time the Palestinian Authority (PA), which is supported by Israel and the international community, was ruling Gaza in a unity government with Hamas.

“Last week we were unable to feed 60,000 of Gaza’s neediest refugees due to our warehouses running out of food. UNRWA supplies half of Gaza’s population of 1.5 million people with emergency rations, and 20,000 people are fed per day when there are adequate supplies,” Ging told IPS.

Seventy percent of Gaza experienced electricity blackouts after Israel prevented deliveries of diesel fuel, forcing Gaza’s main power plant to close down.

“The Israelis were only allowing 2.2 to 2.5 million litres of fuel in per week prior to the closure, which was the minimum required to operate the power plant. The plant has a capacity for 20 million litres and this would last two months under normal circumstances and tide over emergency periods. But this has all run out,” Ging said.

Kan’an Ubeid, deputy chief of the Palestinian Energy Authority, said at a press conference in Gaza that in addition to the shutdown of the diesel-fuelled power plant, the electric network bringing in power from Israel collapsed due to increased pressure on the system.

Gazans also ran out of cooking gas while Gaza’s Coastal Municipalities Water Utility (CMWU) was forced to pump tonnes of untreated sewage into the ocean due to fuel shortages and the lack of spare parts for equipment in need of repairs and new parts.

Much of this will flow back into Gaza’s underground water table, and the threat of contaminated drinking water spreading diseases has increased.

Meanwhile, the emergency and ambulance services director-general, Mu’awiyya Hassanein, says Gaza’s health ministry is short of more than 300 types of necessary medication.

Sammy Hassan, a spokesman from Gaza city’s main Shifa hospital said only urgent surgery was being carried out. “We have delayed all non-urgent surgery as our small generator has stopped working, as we can’t import a vital spare part.

“We are down to 30,000 litres of fuel left to run the larger generator which is used when electricity is cut. Under the current circumstances with no electricity we require 10,000 litres per day,” Hassan told IPS.

Philip Luther, deputy director of Amnesty International’s Middle East programme, said that Israel’s latest tightening of the blockade had “made an already dire humanitarian situation markedly worse. This is nothing short of collective punishment on Gaza’s civilian population, and it must stop immediately.”

Following international pressure and protests from the EU, Israel allowed 30 trucks of humanitarian aid to enter the strip Monday. “It will last a matter of days,” said UNRWA spokesman Christopher Gunness. “But then what?”

Oxfam’s spokesman in Jerusalem Michael Bailey, who coordinates a number of humanitarian projects in Gaza, said this response was entirely inadequate.

“Thirty trucks of aid after a closure of 10 days is insufficient. What we need is a complete revision of the embargo on Gaza. Dialogue with the relevant political leaders is the only way forward,” Bailey told IPS.

“Both Israel and Gaza’s other neighbours need to put the human rights and essential needs of Gazans above all considerations if there is to be a way out of this quagmire.”

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The end of Israel as a Jewish state?

November 19, 2008


By Anthony Loewenstein | Axis of Logic, Nov 15, 2008

The vast majority of Israeli citizens oppose the settler movement. Despite this, the colonialists recently launched a campaign to lure Israelis to visit the West Bank, the Jewish Forward newspaper reported. “Some 1,000 billboards have gone up across the country, showing photographs of cherubic settler children dressed in biblical costumes and carrying the slogan ‘Judea and Samaria – the story of every Jew’.”

The gulf between a sizable, vocal and often violent minority and the vast bulk of the population is growing by the day. Just last month a handful of Jewish radicals rioted near the West Bank town of Kiryat Arba and desecrated a Muslim graveyard after the Israel Defence Forces removed an illegal outpost.

Such actions are now occurring many times every week and the Israeli government seems powerless or unwilling to act decisively against it. Fundamentalist Zionists no longer recognise the authority of the Jewish state and demand the establishment of a Taliban-style, rabbinical entity in its place. Arabs will either be forcibly removed or live under authoritarianism.

How did Israel get to this point? Decades of funding and indulging the settler movement have resulted in the current crisis. As Gideon Levy writes in Haaretz: “Every class and institution of Israeli society defends the settlements, finances them from its own pockets, and is a full partner in the [land] theft, even if some of them are disgusted by it.”

The West Bank has become a Hobbesian land. Barely a day goes by without yet another report of settlers and the IDF impeding the daily lives of Palestinians on the “disputed” land.

In the 15 years since the Oslo peace talks, the colonies have multiplied in size and the settlers have more than doubled in number. A two-state solution is now impossible due to the presence of over 400,000 Jewish settlers on Palestinian land. A World Bank report recently revealed that property prices in the West Bank have rocketed out of the reach of most local businesses.

The September pipe bombing by Jewish radicals of Israeli historian Ze’ev Sternhell’s home in Jerusalem – a long-time critic of the settler movement – signalled a profound shift in the struggle against Israel’s internal enemies, a point powerfully made by leading peace activist Uri Avnery. “Israeli fascism is alive and kicking”, Avnery warned. “It is growing in the flowerbed that produced the various religious-nationalist underground groups of the past.” And yet the vast majority of the international Jewish Diaspora is tellingly silent on these issues, preferring to protest against Hamas “terrorism” and Iranian “provocation”. Thankfully Haaretz is unafraid to editorialise on the failure of Israel to uphold its own laws when broken.

Sternhell, even more determined to warn the world against the Jewish state’s threats, has argued since the attack against him and his family that “If Israeli society is unable to muster the courage necessary to put an end to the settlements, the settlements will put an end to the state of the Jews and will turn it into a bi-national state”.

As a believer in this solution, I don’t fear Sternhell’s thesis, but settler violence undoubtedly threatens the (long-discredited) claim that Israel is a Jewish democracy.

The challenge for the international community is to pressure Israel to decide what kind of state it wants to be and enforce its borders. Only a nation where all citizens are treated equally should be acceptable and the ever-growing tensions in cities where Jews and Arabs uncomfortably co-exist is worsening.

Ironically, before Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert recently resigned, he told a leading Israeli newspaper that the country must withdraw from the vast majority of occupied territory. They were fighting words from a disgraced leader and unlikely to be heeded any time soon.

The UN’s special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied territories reported last month that Israel’s occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and, until 2005, the Gaza Strip represented elements of colonialism and apartheid. Despite the current truce between Israel and Hamas, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights found that 68 children had been killed in Gaza in the 12 months to June this year because of “disproportionate and excessive lethal force” by the IDF.

The settler militants are one of the leading impediments to peace in the region yet much of the mainstream media and Zionist leadership remain in denial. The Jerusalem Post editorialised last month that “radical” settlers were “undermining the case for Jewish rights in the West Bank… and harden hearts to Israel’s legitimate security concerns and historic civilisational ties to the land.” International law is clear: every settlement beyond the 1967 Green Line is illegal and must be removed. There can be no lasting peace and justice without this.

It was a point equally ignored by one of America’s leading Zionist leaders, Morton Klein, who wrote recently that, “it is simply a flat-earth statement to describe Judea, Samaria and Gaza as occupied”.

His statement is categorically incorrect though represents the official position of the vocal international Zionist Diaspora: the rampaging settlers, land annexation and anti-Palestinian discrimination is a merely defensive position by Israel. The forthcoming election may set back prospects for peace even further.

The time is approaching soon when the world will recognise what has been clear for decades: the Jewish state has neither the interest nor desire to end its illegal occupation of Palestinian territory. The alternative is now inevitable: the end of Israel as a Jewish entity.

http://antonyloewenstein.com/blog/2008/11/07/the-end-of-israel-as-a-jewish-state/

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Obama Owes Diamond Real Change, Not Perfection

November 17, 2008

Robert Weitzel | November 16, 2008

On Election Day, Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! went to Malcolm X Boulevard in Harlem to interview voters. She asked 18-year-old Diamond, a first-time voter, why she voted for Barack Obama: “Because he’s the best . . . Obama’s going to make a change, going to cure everything, make everything perfect. I believe in him.”

Listening to Diamond and her friends, with shouts of “yeah Obama!” in the background, one might have gotten the impression Goodman was interviewing the just-saved at a pay-for-heaven revival instead of young voters in a historic presidential election. Diamond’s palpable enthusiasm and her refreshingly naïve faith in her candidate are, paradoxically, both reassuring and unsettling.

Diamond and her friends are among the 95 percent of African American voters 18-29 who voted for Obama. Seventy-five percent of Hispanic and 54 percent of white voters in that same age group cast their ballot for him as well.

That a handsome, intelligent, charismatic man whose genome was sufficiently ambiguous enough to break the color barrier has reached savior status and motivated 2.2 million more young people than in 2004 to vote is a reassuring sign that democracy in America can compete with the insularity of ipods and cell phones.

However, the religious-like furor and blind faith that young—and many older— voters have in Obama that he will single-handedly raise America up from the ashes of the Bush presidency and create a “shining city upon a hill” are unsettling.

President-elect Obama is, first and foremost, a consummate politician who has no doubt compromised himself to become the zenith star of one of the two political parties that control the electoral process, and whose well-heeled and connected sponsors are not at all interested in “change you can believe in” if it adversely affects their bottom line or their particular agenda.

Diamond and her friends should let the post victory euphoria subside and then ask Obama a few questions. They need to call in some chits, which will be redeemable only until November 2012.

Diamond might ask him why he was too busy on the campaign trail last February to go on congressional record by voting for the Intelligence Authorization Bill, which banned torture as an interrogation technique. He owes Diamond more of an explanation than it was a politically prudent absence.

Diamond might ask the President-elect why early in his campaign he promised to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq on day one of his presidency, which played well with the dove vote, only to later adjust his withdrawal policy “based on the advice of military commanders,” which played well with the hawk vote. She might also ask about his apparent support for the Bush Doctrine of preemptive strikes against any country deemed to be a threat to US security. Obama owes Diamond more of an explanation than Bush-era bromides about winning the “war on terror.”

Diamond might ask the first president of color—though not a descendent of American slaves—how he can support and defend Israel’s brutal apartheid policies regarding the Palestinians, or what signal his appointment of Rahm Israel Emanuel as Chief of Staff sends to Arabs in the Middle East. Emanuel is literally a son of Israel who rabidly supports its occupation of the West Bank, its imprisonment and unconscionable blockade of the Gaza Strip, and its 2006 invasion of Lebanon. This is not a good faith move for brokering a just and lasting peace in Middle East.

Obama owes Diamond more of an explanation than Israel is our most important ally in the Middle East whose “security is sacrosanct” and “non-negotiable.” He needs to explain to Diamond that national politicians must first pledge allegiance to Israel before they can swear to “protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” Diamond and her friends need to know that Israel’s shadow government on K Street dictates Middle East policy to American presidents. Consequently, in the “war on terror” America’s security is second to that of Israel’s.

Most importantly, Diamond might ask the new president who will be heard the most often. Will it be the voices of the 1.5 million small contributors ($200 or less) to his staggering $850 million war chest, or will it be the whispers of a relatively few on Wall Street and K Street? If Diamond knew that Obama’s economic advisors are the same people who a decade ago helped dismantle Depression-era banking regulations, which has lead to the current economic meltdown and trillion-dollar-plus bailout, she would have her answer.

Moments after Amy Goodman interviewed Diamond, she asked an older, unidentified woman—a mother who wants her daughter to go to college—why she had voted for Obama: “I was going to give my vote to someone else, but since she didn’t win, I gave it to him . . . I just hope he do—I know he can’t do everything, but just do something better than what it is. That’s all.”

President Obama does not owe Diamond perfection, neither can he “cure everything,” but he does owe her the promise to ”do something better than what it is.”

And “something better” will only happen if Diamond and her friends have not already plugged in their earphones and flipped open their cell phones waiting for President Obama to “cure everything.” If they are not calling or text messaging the White House and making their voices heard above the whispers, their “savior” will continue to be nothing but a politician.

Robert Weitzel is a contributing editor to Media With a Conscience (www.mwcnews.net). His essays regularly appear in The Capital Times in Madison, WI. He can be contacted at: robertweitzel@mac.com

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Author hopes to pull Israel to the left with new party

November 17, 2008

The renowned Israeli author Amos Oz has joined 30 intellectuals and public figures to forge a leftwing party in an attempt to defeat the resurgent rightwing Likud party, which is leading the polls.

But Labour, not the hardline nationalists in Likud, may be the biggest losers if the party succeeds in Israel’s elections which are due in February next year.

“I hope the expanded leftist movement will become a replacement for the Labour party. The Labour party has finished its historic role, it isn’t putting forward a national agenda and it joins any coalition,” Oz told the Haaretz newspaper.

In 2006 Labour’s leading light and Nobel peace prize winner, Shimon Peres, defected to join the hawkish Ariel Sharon, who led a breakaway group from the hardline Likud party to form the more centrist Kadima, which heads the coalition government.

More recently Labour’s chairman, Ehud Barak, refused to rule out joining a coalition led by a resurgent Binyamin Netanyahu, whose Likud party is ahead in the polls.

Revelations last week that Barak, who is defence minister in the current coalition government led by Kadima’s Ehud Olmert, had authorised the construction of 400 housing units and lots for Israeli settlers in the West Bank have further tarnished its left-of-centre credentials.

“The Labour party is a body that does not seek political life, and does not fight for its life,” said Ami Ayalon, a former head of Israel’s domestic intelligence agency, the Shin Bet, who resigned yesterday and is expected to join the more centrist party, Kadima.

The new left of centre party hopes to attract disgruntled Labour supporters, environmentalists, Reform Jews and Israeli-Arabs.

The foreign secretary, David Miliband, arrived in Israel yesterday to begin a Middle East trip that will take in the Palestinian territories, Syria and Lebanon in the hope of promoting a regional peace plan.

But the trip has been overshadowed by Britain’s decision to crack down on products sold in the UK that come from Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which are illegal under international law.

Britain recently circulated a note within the EU expressing concern that goods may be entering the country improperly labelled as being produced in Israel when in fact they have been produced in the West Bank.

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Israel punishes Gaza with UN food aid ban

November 15, 2008

RINF.COM, Nov 13, 2008

CRUEL: A UN aid agency said on Tuesday that it will have to halt food aid distribution to 750,000 Gazans by Friday if Israel keeps the territory sealed.

ISRAEL barred UN humanitarian aid shipments from entering the Gaza Strip on Thursday, in its latest act of collective punishment for Hamas rocket attacks.

Israel had planned to let in 30 trucks of food aid to replenish empty warehouses. It had also agreed to let in fuel to power Gaza’s only electrical plant, which was facing shutdown and a power blackout.

But Israeli army officials closed all border crossings into the besieged Palestinian territory after militants had fired five rockets and two mortars into southern Israel.

John Ging, who heads Gaza operations for the United Nations relief and works agency said that, without the shipments, the UN will be forced to suspend food aid to 750,000 impoverished Gazans from Saturday.

A UN flour warehouse in Gaza, that was full early last week, stood empty, while another warehouse held just a few crates of luncheon meat.

“We’ve been working here from hand to mouth for quite a long time, so these interruptions on the crossing points affect us immediately,” Mr Ging said.

“International law requires that civilian populations have access to the goods and services that they need to survive.”

Electrical plant officials said that they expected to run out of fuel yesterday evening, causing widespread blackouts throughout the territory of 1.4 million people.

Israeli jet fighters flew at supersonic speed low over Gaza on Thursday, setting off sonic booms – a well-practised form of harassment against the population.

Israel also continued to block diplomats and journalists from entering the territory, including a group of some 20 European officials. The Israeli military said that crossings were closed to all but humanitarian operations.

Israel agreed to allow some shipments into Gaza in June, following an Egyptian-brokered ceasefire by Palestine’s elected-Hamas government.

The agreement will expire in December, although both sides claim that they want it to continue.

The truce began eroding last week when Israeli forces invaded Gaza to try to destroy a smuggling tunnel. Eleven Palestinians have been killed in more than a week of fighting, with more than 130 rockets and mortars fired from Gaza at Israel.

Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum said: “The rockets are a natural response to Israel’s aggression.”

Continued . . .


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Robert Fisk: Obama has to pay for eight years of Bush’s delusions

November 15, 2008

He will have to get out of Iraq, and he will have to tell Israel a few home truths

The Independent, Saturday, 8 November 2008

Barack Obama

REUTERS

How is Barack Obama going to repair the titanic damage which his vicious, lying predecessor has perpetrated around the globe and within the US itself?

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American lawyers defending six Algerians before a habeas corpus hearing in Washington this week learned some very odd things about US intelligence after 9/11. From among the millions of “raw” reports from American spies and their “assets” around the world came a CIA Middle East warning about a possible kamikaze-style air attack on a US navy base at a south Pacific island location. The only problem was that no such navy base existed on the island and no US Seventh Fleet warship had ever been there. In all seriousness, a US military investigation earlier reported that Osama bin Laden had been spotted shopping at a post office on a US military base in east Asia.

That this nonsense was disseminated around the world by those tasked to defend the United States in the “war on terror” shows the fantasy environment in which the Bush regime has existed these past eight years. If you can believe that bin Laden drops by a shopping mall on an American military base, then you can believe that everyone you arrest is a “terrorist”, that Arabs are “terrorists”, that they can be executed, that living “terrorists” must be tortured, that everything a tortured man says can be believed, that it is legitimate to invade sovereign states, to grab the telephone records of everyone in America. As Bob Herbert put it in The New York Times a couple of years ago, the Bush administration wanted these records “which contain crucial documentation of calls for a Chinese takeout in Terre Haute, Indiana, and birthday greetings to Grandma in Talladega, Alabama, to help in the search for Osama bin Laden”. There was no stopping Bush when it came to trampling on the US Constitution. All that was new was that he was now applying the same disrespect for liberty in America that he had shown in the rest of the world.

But how is Barack Obama going to repair the titanic damage which his vicious, lying predecessor has perpetrated around the globe and within the US itself? John F Kennedy once said that “the United States, as the world knows, will never start a war”. After Bush’s fear-mongering and Rumsfeld’s “shock and awe” and Abu Ghraib and Bagram and Guantanamo and secret renditions, how does Obama pedal his country all the way back to Camelot? Our own dear Gordon Brown’s enthusiasm to Hoover up the emails of the British people is another example of how Lord Blair’s sick relationship with Bush still infects our own body politic. Only days before the wretched president finally departs from us, new US legislation will ensure that citizens of his lickspittle British ally will no longer be able to visit America without special security clearance. Does Bush have any more surprises for us before 20 January? Indeed, could anything surprise us any more?

Obama has got to close Guantanamo. He’s got to find a way of apologising to the world for the crimes of his predecessor, not an easy task for a man who must show pride in his country; but saying sorry is what – internationally – he will have to do if the “change” he has been promoting at home is to have any meaning outside America’s borders. He will have to re-think – and deconstruct – the whole “war on terror”. He will have to get out of Iraq. He will have to call a halt to America’s massive airbases in Iraq, its $600m embassy. He will have to end the blood-caked air strikes we are perpetrating in southern Afghanistan – why, oh, why do we keep slaughtering wedding parties? – and he will have to tell Israel a few home truths: that America can no longer remain uncritical in the face of Israeli army brutality and the colonisation for Jews and Jews only on Arab land. Obama will have to stand up at last to the Israeli lobby (it is, in fact, an Israeli Likud party lobby) and withdraw Bush’s 2004 acceptance of Israel’s claim to a significant portion of the West Bank. US officials will have to talk to Iranian officials – and Hamas officials, for that matter. Obama will have to end US strikes into Pakistan – and Syria.

Indeed, there’s a growing concern among America’s allies in the Middle East that the US military has to be brought back under control – indeed, that the real reason for General David Petraeus’ original appointment in Iraq was less to organise the “surge” than it was to bring discipline back to the 150,000 soldiers and marines whose mission – and morals – had become so warped by Bush’s policies. There is some evidence, for example, that the four-helicopter strike into Syria last month, which killed eight people, was – if not a rogue operation – certainly not sanctioned byWashington or indeed by US commanders in Baghdad.

But Obama’s not going to be able to make the break. He wants to draw down in Iraq in order to concentrate more firepower in Afghanistan. He’s not going to take on the lobby in Washington and he’s not going to stop further Jewish colonisation of the occupied territories or talk to Israel’s enemies. With AIPAC supporter Rahm Emanuel as his new chief of staff – “our man in the White House”, as the Israeli daily Maariv called him this week – Obama will toe the line. And of course, there’s the terrible thought that bin Laden – when he’s not shopping at US military post offices – may be planning another atrocity to welcome the Obama presidency.

There is just one little problem, though, and that’s the “missing” prisoners. Not the victimswho have been (still are being?) tortured in Guantanamo, but the thousands who have simply disappeared into US custody abroad or – with American help – into the prisons of US allies. Some reports speak of 20,000 missing men, most of them Arabs, all of them Muslims. Where are they? Can they be freed now? Or are they dead? If Obama finds that he is inheriting mass graves from George W Bush, there will be a lot of apologising to do.

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A new Middle East under Obama?

November 5, 2008
Al Jazeera, Nov 5, 2008
By Firas Al-Atraqchi

Many in Egypt remain sceptical that change will come to the Middle East [EPA]

Even though Barack Obama has been elected the 44th president of the United States, there are some in the Middle East who believe his policies towards the region will differ little from those of his defeated Republican rival, John McCain.

Al Jazeera asked a number of people in Egypt, the Arab world’s most populous country, whether Obama would bring change to the US presidency.

Omar Kamel, musician

“In terms of actual policy, I do not think there is much difference at all when it comes to Obama or McCain’s Middle Eastern viewpoints.They have both committed themselves publicly and explicitly to the Zionist cause, with Obama promising Aipac an ‘undivided Israeli Jerusalem’ as a goal.

More so, they have both said that ‘nothing is off the table’ when dealing with Iran, which implicitly means they both consider a military attack on Iran a strategic option.

That Obama has implied he would not want to use nuclear weapons is a small consolation when we consider the devastation wrought on Iraq by ‘conventional’ warfare.

Obama has also made it quite clear that he is a subscriber to the whole ‘war on terror’ notion – which to the rest of the world simply means he will continue the march of Empire Amerika.

Unfortunately, there is a geist of optimistic negative-racism that chooses to see Obama as an actual opportunity for change – when in fact he offers absolutely nothing new save for his skin colour and relative eloquence.

Obama reminds me far too much of Clinton. Clinton, quite literally, got away with murder simply because the world found him charismatic and charming.

Clinton helped destroy Iraq with sanctions and was an accomplice to the murder of over 500,000 Iraqi children and yet most people in the Middle East still like the murderer, still believe that, somehow, he was a good man.

That is my fear with Obama, that he will pacify the world as he rapes it.

At least with McCain, like Bush, the world would have been acutely aware of its rape.”

Abdel-Rahman Hussein, journalist

“There is an apathy among Egyptians regarding the US election because many say it makes no difference who wins. The US will always pursue the same policies in the region.

Even with a Democratic win in the White house, it is American – and almost by default Israeli – interests which will always come first.

The fulcrum of American policy in the region is support for Israel above all else, and both parties unequivocally adhere to that.

Additionally, as opposed to Great Britain where the divide between left and right has become less pronounced in recent years, the American political spectrum has always been more centrist.

One position both candidates straddled quite comfortably is their staunch support for Israel.

Obama’s promise to the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) that Jerusalem will remain the “undivided” capital of Israel does not bode well for the future of the peace process which is currently proposing East Jerusalem as the capital of a future Palestinian state.

Nevertheless, Jewish and pro-Israel groups remain sceptical about Obama and feel he is merely paying lip service to secure the election, so again it is difficult to surmise exactly how it will pan out.”

Jen Zaki Hanna, university professor

“Unfortunately, I do not believe that Obama will have significantly different foreign and financial policies.

I considered the one person who could have brought about real change in the Middle East, to be Ralph Nader.

Nader dissected the real problem with America’s financial policies – that being the unfettered control of the transnational corporations and their lack of respect for human rights and environmental rights at home and globally.

Unfortunately, every time Nader tries to enter the presidential race he is called a spoiler for the Democrats. This just goes to shows me, and I believe others around the world and in the Middle East, that the Democrats and Republicans are one and the same.

Perhaps Hillary Clinton was the lesser of the two evils than Obama who has changed his mind multiple times on issues such as Iraqi troop withdrawal.

Both parties will always be loyal first and foremost to Israel as a necessary ingredient to US foreign policy and according to most Middle Easterners it has always meant one thing: there will be no progress on Israeli-Palestinian peace.

There has yet to be a Democratic or Republican party in the US which has demonstrated a real significant move on a two-state solution.

I do not think things will change now.”

Yousef Gamal il Din, broadcast journalist with NileTV

“There is also … a belief that the foreign policies of both candidates do not really vary much.The debates did not highlight key differences that will help regional problems in the Arab World, Afghanistan, Sudan, Lebanon, Iraq and Palestine.

My impression from talking to Egyptians who are well-read in international affairs and business is that they perceive McCain to be hawkish (more so than Obama) and that his policies would have been less-suitable for Arab interests.

Obama appears to be better for our region, but the key word here is appears.

The Middle East would look different under Obama but it will be difficult to judge because the rhetoric during the campaign does not necessarily translate into decisions or policies once the candidate reaches the White House.

Once candidates are confronted with certain realities in the White House or realities that emerge later on, they may have to adapt their policies. The international arena is very dynamic, things change very quickly.

It is difficult to accurately predict US foreign policy.”

Ahmed Samy, marketing analyst

“Israel won’t be that happy that Obama won because they might not trust that he would fully back them, even though he has said before that he would fully support them.

As for the Middle East, not much would change with Obama in office.

The situation in the region might stay the same or get a bit better or put on hold till the following elections.

The American people are the only ones to benefit if Obama wins.

Now Obama being the first black president in America is a history-making event; if he stays in office the full term, that is good. But if he gets assassinated or something like that, then it will be a tragedy.”

Ahmed Kafafi, author

“An Obama win doesn’t mean so much to me because whoever comes to power will never dare to change certain basics in the US foreign policy and assuming there will be any, those will be slight changes that would never reverse the situation in the Middle East.

I do not think Egypt and the Middle East will look any different; there is a fear that things will move from bad to worse. The financial crisis has peaked and the wealth of the Middle East is the only way out for the US.

Egyptians see the US as working for its own interests and is a big supporter of Israel. For them the US is a big power that will never ever work for their interest, so it doesn’t matter if Obama or McCain is in power.”

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Peace process? What peace process?

November 3, 2008
Posted by: Wafa Amr | Global News Blog, Nov 3, 2008

This is a common phrase used by both Israelis and Palestinians when asked about the negotiations process that was launched by U.S. President George W. Bush at Annapolis last year and which, according to Bush’s timeline, should have produced a Palestinian state by the end of his presidency in January.

Since the signing of the Oslo provisional peace deal 15 years ago, Israeli and Palestinian intellectuals, professionals, and politicians have held hundreds of meetings in Israel and in most European cities to promote dialogue and coexistence, in the hope that eventually Palestinians will have the state the accords outlined for them, living in peace alongside Israel.

This week, the Peres Center for Peace, established after the Oslo peace accords, drew hundreds of Israelis, Arabs, and international leaders and professionals to discuss peace during its 10th anniversary event in Tel Aviv, under the aegis of former Prime Minister Shimon Peres, now Israel’s largely ceremonial president.

I attended sessions of the 3-day event and also took part, as a journalist covering the conflict for the past 14 years, in a meeting a week earlier between Israeli and Palestinian representatives of the media and academics in Seville, Spain, hosted by the Three Cultures Foundation , a non-profit organization founded under the aegis of the Andalusian Regional Government and Morocco, and organized by the Israeli and Palestinian branches of the Geneva Initiative Peace Coalition.

The mood at both meetings among activists committed to a peaceful solution to the 60-year-old conflict was sombre.

In between the two meetings, Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, Israel’s chief negotiator with the Palestinians who won her party’s elections to replace Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, announced she had failed in forming a government and called for early elections scheduled for February.

A key sticking point was the refusal of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish religious Shas party to join her in a coalition because of its opposition to her negotiating with Palestinians on dividing Jerusalem between Israel and a new Palestinian state.

Divisions in Israeli society over the Oslo accords, divisions that led to the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995 – coincidentally on Nov. 4, the date of this week’s U.S. presidential election — continue to pose obstacles to peacemaking.

In Seville, a historic place of meeting, and conflict, among Jews, Muslims and Christians, Israelis and Palestinians sat in cafes and in formal sessions to discuss coexistence, and chances for an elusive peace that has weakened the peace camps in both neighbouring societies.

During the two-day seminar, professor Tamar Hermann, Dean of Academic Studies at the Open University in Israel, who conducts monthly opinion polls on Israeli positions regarding the peace process, presented figures that show that in 10 or 20 years, there won’t be a population in Israel receptive of peace ideas. She said some 70 percent of Orthdox Jews in Israel identified themselves as right-wing, and noted that the Orthodox community is growing fast as a proportion of the population.

The poll also showed that only 12 percent perceived an escalation of the Palestinian resistence as a threat. Hermann, a political scientist, said that “making peace with their Palestinian neighbours was not the prime goal of the Jews in Israel.”

Palestinian writer Hassan Khader, another participant in the Seville conference said the Israeli state of denial was harming the Jews. “Does it really serve the Israeli interests to defeat the Palestinians? In the 1967 war, they won the war, but forty years later it showed it was one of their worst traps.”

Palestinians have been increasingly disillusioned with peace as Palestinian negotiators conduct frequent sessions of negotiations with their Israeli counterparts without progress. The Palestinians have seen their lands confiscated for more settlements and walls and fences constructed around the Gaza Strip and West Bank that have isolated them from the rest of the world.

The only Israelis many Palestinians know are the soldiers at checkpoints or armed settlers attacking farmers harvesting their land in the West Bank. One secular Israeli politician said: “The extreme settlers are forming militias. They’re armed and claim they represent God, yet we don’t confront them. We say they’re a small group.But they will turn into a Hezbollah and eventually they will turn against us. We still can’t see this.”

The younger generation in Israel, which has come to adulthood since the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin on Nov. 4, 1995, is less supportive of peace since the images they have seen were of exploding buses and have never visited the Palestinian areas, Hermann said.
Gadi Baltiansky, director of the Israeli branch of the Geneva Initiative said time was running out and people must feel a sense of urgency to make dramatic decisions about peace.But as time is running out, there is a state of limbo. The Palestinians are divided as never before and may go to elections next year when President Mahmoud Abbas’ term ends. Israel too is heading for elections in February.

The mood among the activists is one of alarm.

“If two governments will be elected in both sides which are anti-peace … then unfortunately we are heading towards a tragedy. I can hope rationalism will win,” said Ron Pundak, one of the Israelis closely involved in the Oslo peace process.

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