Posts Tagged ‘Gaza’

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Smile on the face of the tiger

June 11, 2009

John Pilger  | New Statesman, Published 11 June 2009

Obama’s speech in Cairo on the Middle East peace process was seductive, but its content was as morally bankrupt as any of Bush’s spiels

At 7.30 in the morning on 3 June, a seven-month-old baby died in the intensive care unit of the European Gaza Hospital in the Gaza Strip. His name was Zein Ad-Din Mohammed Zu’rob, and he was suffering from a lung infection which was treatable.

Denied basic equipment, the doctors in Gaza could do nothing. For weeks, the child’s parents had sought a permit from the Israelis to allow them to take him to a hospital in Jerusalem, where he would have been saved. Like many desperately sick people who apply for these permits, the parents were told they had never applied. Even if they had arrived at the Erez Crossing with an Israeli document in their hands, the odds are that they would have been turned back for refusing the demands of officials to spy or collaborate in some way.

“Is it an irresponsible overstatement,” asked Richard Falk, the United Nations special rapporteur for human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories and emeritus professor of international law at Princeton University, who is Jewish, “to associate the treatment of Palestinians with [the] criminalised Nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not.”

Falk was describing Israel’s massacre in December and January of hundreds of helpless civilians in Gaza, many of them children. Reporters called this a “war”. Since then, normality has returned to Gaza. Most children are malnourished and sick, and almost all exhibit the symptoms of psychiatric disturbance, such as horrific nightmares, depression and incontinence. There is a long list of items that Israel bans from Gaza. This includes equipment to clean up the toxic detritus of Israel’s US munitions, which is the suspected cause of rising cancer rates. Toys and playground equipment, such as slides and swings, are also banned. I saw the ruins of a fun fair, riddled with bullet holes, which Israeli “settlers” had used as a sniping target.

The day after Baby Zu’rob died in Gaza, President Barack Obama made his “historic” speech in Cairo, “reaching out to the Muslim world”, reported the BBC. “Just as it devastates Palestinian families, the continuing humanitarian crisis in Gaza,” said Obama, “does not serve Israel’s security.” That was all. The killing of 1,300 people in what is now a concentration camp merited 17 words, cast as concern for the “security” of the killers. This was understandable. During the January massacre, Seymour Hersh reported that “the Obama team let it be known that it would not object to the planned resupply of ‘smart bombs’ and other hi-tech ordnance that was already flowing to Israel” for use in Gaza.

Obama’s one criticism of Israel was that “the United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements . . . It is time for these settlements to stop.” These fortresses on Palestinian land, manned by religious fanatics from America and elsewhere, have been outlawed by the UN Security Council and the International Court of Justice. Pointedly, Obama made no mention of the settlements that already honeycomb the occupied territories and make an independent Palestinian state impossible, which is their purpose.

Obama demanded that the “cycle of suspicion and discord must end”. Every year, for more than a generation, the UN has called on Israel to end its illegal and violent occupation of post-1967 Palestine and has voted for “the right of the Palestinian people to self-determination”. Every year, those voting against these resolutions have been the governments of Israel and the United States and one or two of America’s Pacific dependencies; last year Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe joined them.

Such is the true “cycle” in the Middle East, which is rarely reported as the relentless rejection of the rule of law by Israel and the United States: a law in whose name the wrath of Washington came down on Saddam Hussein when he invaded Kuwait, a law which, if upheld and honoured, would bring peace and security to both Palestine and Israel.

Instead, Obama spoke in Cairo as if his and previous White House administrations were neutral, almost divine brokers of peace, instead of rapacious backers and suppliers of the invader (along with Britain). This Orwellian illogic remains the standard for what western journalists call the “Israel-Palestine conflict”, which is almost never reported in terms of the law, of right and wrong, of justice and injustice – Darfur, yes, Zimbabwe, yes, but never Palestine. Orwell’s ghost again stirred when Obama denounced “violent extremists in Afghanistan and now Pakistan [who are] determined to kill as many Americans as they possibly can”. America’s invasion and slaughter in these countries went unmentioned. It, too, is divine.

Naturally, unlike George W Bush, Obama did not say that “you’re either with us or against us”. He smiled the smile and uttered “many eloquent mood-music paragraphs and a smattering of quotations from the Holy Quran”, noted the American international lawyer John Whitbeck. Beyond this, Obama offered no change, no plan, only a “tired, morally bankrupt American mantra [which] essentially argues that only the rich, the strong, the oppressors and the enforcers of injustice (notably the Americans and Israelis) have the right to use violence, while the poor, the weak, the oppressed and the victims of oppression must . . . submit to their fate and accept whatever crumbs their betters may magnanimously deign suitable to let fall from their table”. And he offered not the slightest recognition that the world’s most numerous victims of terrorism are people of Muslim faith – a terrorism of western origin that dares not speak its name.

In his “reaching out” in Cairo, as in his “anti-nuclear” speech in Berlin, as in the “hope” he spun at his inauguration, this clever young politician is playing the part for which he was drafted and promoted. This is to present a benign, seductive, even celebrity face to American power, which can then proceed towards its strategic goal of dominance, regardless of the wishes of the rest of humanity and the rights and lives of our children.

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Obama in Cairo: a new face for American imperialism

June 7, 2009

Patrick Martin | wsws.com, 5 June 2009

The speech delivered by US President Barack Obama in Cairo yesterday was riddled with contradictions. He declared his opposition to the “killing of innocent men, women, and children,” but defended the ongoing US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the US proxy war in Pakistan, while remaining silent on the most recent Israeli slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza. These wars have killed at least one million Iraqis and tens of thousands in Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Palestinian territories.

Obama declared his support for democracy, human rights and women’s rights, after two days of meetings with King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, two of the most notorious tyrants in the Middle East. He said nothing in his speech about the complete absence of democratic rights in Saudi Arabia, or about the ongoing repression under Mubarak’s military dictatorship. In the days before the US president’s arrival at Al-Azhar University, the campus was raided by Egyptian secret police who detained more than 200 foreign students. Before leaving on his Mideast trip, Obama praised Mubarak as a “steadfast ally.”

While posturing as the advocate of universal peace and understanding, Obama diplomatically omitted any reference to his order to escalate the war in Afghanistan with the dispatch of an additional 17,000 US troops. And he tacitly embraced the policy of his predecessor in Iraq, declaring, “I believe the Iraqi people are ultimately better off without the tyranny of Saddam Hussein.” He even seemed to hedge on the withdrawal deadline of December 2011 negotiated by the Bush administration, which he described as a pledge “to remove all our troops from Iraq by 2012.”

Obama rejected the charge that America is “a self-interested empire”—a perfectly apt characterization—and denied that the United States was seeking bases, territory or access to natural resources in the Muslim world. He claimed that the war in Afghanistan was a “war of necessity” provoked by the 9/11 terrorist attacks. This is the same argument made by the Bush-Cheney administration at the time, which deliberately conceals the real material interests at stake. The war in Afghanistan is part of the drive by US imperialism to dominate the world’s two most important sources of oil and gas, the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Basin.

There was of course a distinct shift in the rhetorical tone from the bullying “you’re either with or against us” of George W. Bush to the reassuring “we’re all in this together” of Obama. But as several commentators noted (the New Republic compared the speech line-for-line to that given by Bush to the United Nations on September 16, 2006), if you turned off the picture and the sound and simply read the prepared text, the words are very similar to speeches delivered by Bush, Condoleezza Rice and other officials of the previous administration.

The vague and flowery rhetoric, the verbal tributes to Islamic culture and the equal rights of nations, constitute an adjustment of the language being used to cloak the policy of US imperialism, not a change in substance. Obama made not a single concrete proposal to redress the grievances of the oppressed peoples of the Middle East. That is because the fundamental source of this oppression is the profit system and the domination of the world by imperialism, of which American imperialism is the most ruthless.

Obama made one passing reference to colonialism, and to the US role in the overthrow of the democratically elected Mossadegh government in Iran in 1953. But in his litany of “sources of tension” in the region, he offered the same checklist as his predecessor, with the first place given to “violent extremism”, Obama’s rhetorical substitute for Bush’s “terrorism.”

The reaction to the Obama speech in the American media was across-the-board enthusiasm. Liberal David Corn of Mother Jones magazine said Obama’s great advantages were “his personal history, his non-Bushness, his recognition of US errors, his willingness to at least talk as if he wants to be an honest broker in the Mideast.”

Michael Crowley wrote in the pro-war liberal magazine New Republic, “to see him unfold his biography, to cut such an unfamiliar profile to the world, is to appreciate how much America will benefit from presenting this new face to the world.”

Perhaps most revealing was the comment by Max Boot, a neoconservative arch-defender of the war in Iraq, who wrote: “I thought he did a more effective job of making America’s case to the Muslim world. No question: He is a more effective salesman than his predecessor was.”

In his speech in Cairo, Obama was playing the role for which he was drafted and promoted by a decisive section of the US financial elite and the military and foreign policy apparatus. This role is to provide a new face for US imperialism as part of a shift in the tactics, but not the strategy, of Washington’s drive for world domination.

Nearly two years ago, former US national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski gave his public backing to the presidential candidacy of a still-obscure senator from Illinois, holding out the prospect that as an African-American with family ties to the Muslim world, Obama would improve the worldwide image of the United States.

Brzezinski was the leading hawk in the administration of Democrat Jimmy Carter and helped instigate the political upheavals in Afghanistan in the hopes of inciting a Soviet invasion that would trap the Moscow bureaucracy in a Vietnam-style quagmire. He has remained steadily focused on what he calls the “great chessboard” of Eurasia, and particularly on oil-rich Central Asia, where a struggle for influence now rages between the United States, Russia, China and Iran.

According to Brzezinski in August 2007, Obama “recognizes that the challenge is a new face, a new sense of direction, a new definition of America’s role in the world… Obama is clearly more effective and has the upper hand. He has a sense of what is historically relevant and what is needed from the United States in relationship to the world.”

Brzezinski, a ruthless defender of the interests of US imperialism, has repeatedly issued warnings to the American ruling elite of the danger of what he calls the “global political awakening.”

In one particularly pointed comment, he told the German magazine Der Spiegel, only months before he endorsed Obama, that the vast majority of humanity “will no longer tolerate the enormous disparities in the human condition. That could well be the collective danger we will have to face in the next decades.”

To call it by its right name, what the more perceptive elements in the US ruling class fear is world revolution. The effort to prevent such a social upheaval is what impelled them to install Obama in the White House and what set him on his pilgrimage to Cairo.

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Posted in Commentary, imperialism, Islam and Muslims, Muslims, President Barack Obama, Uncategorized, US policy, USA, war | Leave a Comment »

Galloway: Our Convoy to Gaza

June 6, 2009

Don’t Carp, Organize

By GEORGE GALLOWAY | Counterpunch, June 5 / 7,  2009

“Where is the ummah; where is this Arab world they tell us about in school.”

Those words will forever remain etched on my brain. They were spoken by a 10 year old girl in a bombed out ruin in Gaza in March. She had lost her almost her entire family in the 22-day Gazat earlier this year. The second time she spoke, it was to the back of my head. I had to turn away; what answer could you give her?

While Hugo Chavez expelled the Israeli ambassador to Venezuela, the leaders of the Arab League, with a handful of exceptions, spent those murderous weeks in December and January scarcely summoning even the synthetic indignation that has so often attended previous bloody episodes in the Palestinian tragedy.

But that was not so of public opinion, not only in the Muslim world, but mobilized on the streets of Western capitals. In Britain, over 100,000 people took to the streets and night after night we blockaded the Israeli embassy. Above all, the Gaza onslaught produced in the US an unprecedented outpouring. There have, for sure, been protests before, but this has turned out to be more than an ephemeral release of impotent rage. Something is changing.

That has become more and more apparent to me over the last two months as I’ve spoken on Palestine at packed meetings and fundraisers across the US.  The opinion polls in January showed a plurality of Americans against the Israeli onslaught. It may not have been a surprise to those of us who witnessed Ariel Sharon’s leveling of Beirut in the late summer of 1982, but the sight of white phosphorous – which forms a gaseous cloud – being used against civilians in Gaza stunned the senses of millions or people who had up to that point been led to believe that it was somehow the Palestinians who were occupying Israeli land rather than the other way round.

Seasoned activists in the Palestinian cause confirm that there is now a window of opportunity to take this case beyond the ghetto and into the mainstream of political life – in the US and in Britain, which between them bear the heaviest responsibility for the suffering in Palestine: the US as the cashier for Israeli colonization; Britain, as the author of the tragedy in 1917, when a leader of one people, British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour (an anti-Semite), gave to the purported leaders of another people, the Zionist movement, the land belonging to a third people, the Palestinians. And all without asking any of the people, which even by the standards of British imperialism is quite a triumph.

How then to bring to the cause of Palestine the kind of political movement that helped shatter apartheid, between the hammer of the ANC resistance and the anvil of international solidarity? This is the question that has led to me flitting backwards and forwards across the Atlantic, between lectures and fundraisers here, and the unfolding of an extraordinary political crisis at home. It was the question we asked ourselves as we marched past the Israeli embassy on those cold days in January.

The demonstrations were important. Anyone who doubts that should listen to those living under siege whose capacity to resist was strengthened every time they saw those protests on Al Jazeera and Press TV. But they were not enough, nor were the speeches, though they too have their place. It is actions that speak louder than words. That’s why on January 10 I announced at the big London demonstration that I would be leading a convoy of humanitarian aid from Britain to Gaza.

We decided to head off just five weeks later and to go through a difficult route – down to Spain, cross to Morocco and then driving across the Maghreb. We hoped to take a dozen or so vehicles. In the end, we left Hyde Park on February14 with 107 vehicles, 255 people and around $2 million of aid. Some 23 days and 5,500 miles later we entered Gaza. And now, we’re doing it all again, this time from the US.

On July 4, the Vietnam vet Ron Kovic, myself and hundreds of US citizens will fly out from JFK to Cairo where we will form up a convoy of hundreds of vehicles carrying medical aid and head into Gaza. We will be in Egypt exactly one month to the day from when President Obama delivered his historic speech offering a new and more egalitarian relationship between the US and the Muslim world. And that speech makes it all the more imperative that anyone and everyone gets on board this convoy.

For Obama’s speech, like his election campaign and presidency, can be looked at two ways. There were the expressions of general support for Israel and continuity in foreign policy which it would be naïve not to expect from any US president. How easy it would be to slump into the cynical and knowing snorting that has been such an unappealing trait of too much of the left for far too long. Because at the same time, his skilful appeal for a more respectful East-West dialogue opens up many roads for friends of Palestine and the Arab cause. If you doubt that, look at the frenzied reaction of the Israeli right who, in their usual understated way, are likening opposition to the settlement program to genocidal murder.

Our case is that Obama is right to identify that if the US wants to drain the swamp of hatred against it, then it needs a radical change in policy. The road he marked out in Cairo points in the right direction. But he stopped short. Literally. The road leads a couple of hundred dusty desert miles further from the Nile Delta, across the Sinai and to the Rafah crossing into Gaza. Hence the convoy, whose aims are manifold.

First, it is to take much-needed aid to a people subsisting under siege. We are a link in the supply chain that others who have sent delegations to Gaza have also helped establish.

Second, it is to take people – lots of American people. No one should underestimate the impact that will have on the Palestinian people. It was emphasized by our hosts in March that the presence of so many Britishers was even more valuable than the aid we brought. It meant hundreds of people going back as ambassadors for Palestine in towns and cities across the country. For the people of the Gaza Strip it was proof positive, in front of their very eyes, that they had not been forgotten.

Third, it is to contribute to the mighty process of changing US public opinion on this issue. And where public opinion changes, public policy follows – even if the mechanism is complex and difficult. The eight dark years of the Bush era saw, in effect, the criminalization of solidarity with the Palestinian cause. Whole organization, Muslim and Arab, were closed down, their leaders disappeared and deported or imprisoned, witness the appalling trial and verdict of the Holy Land Foundation organizers. This convoy is about ending that. We want a cross-section of US society, including prominent figures, to take part and demonstrate that this is no longer a no go area; that Palestine is the issue and nobody is going to turn us around.

In Gaza, Ron Kovic will hand over wheelchairs to Palestinian amputees. That’s the image the world’s media will carry. Let the rabid supporters of the Netanyahu-Lieberman regime raise their voices against that. That’s a public relations battle we should relish.

There’s no point passively bewailing what this presidency might be failing to do. If we make an impact in July and beyond, it can help shift the balance, throwing the die-hard defenders of Israeli aggression on the defensive and making it more politically attractive for President Obama to move further down the dusty road.

In a sense George W Bush had an excuse for the mayhem he unleashed: he was a complete and utter imbecile. Barack Obama does not have that excuse. He’s highly intelligent and cultured. He met the sorely missed Edward Said. He doesn’t just know who the President of Pakistan is, he can pronounce the name of the country.

If the new sentiment for Palestine in this country is roused and made politically effective, there will be no excuse for anyone not to do the right thing.

Go to www.vivapalestina-us.org for information on the US to Gaza convoy or phone 773 226 2742

George Galloway is the Respect Party Member of Parliament for Bethnal Green and Bow.

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The Rape of Gaza

June 2, 2009

by Roane Carey | The Nation, June 2, 2009

How would you feel if you found out that an American school, paid for with your tax dollars, was bombed and completely destroyed by a US ally? This happened in Gaza just a few months ago, during Israel’s now-infamous Operation Cast Lead.

I’ve been touring Gaza for the past three days as part of a Code Pink delegation, and the concrete rubble and twisted rebar of the American International School in Gaza is just one of the many horrifying images we’ve seen on this trip. The school, which taught American progressive values to Palestinian kids in grades K-12, was bombed by US-supplied Israeli F-16s in early January. The Israelis claimed, without supplying evidence, that Hamas fighters had fired rockets from the school. Now several hundred kids have not only lost the school they dearly loved; they have been given a very different lesson in American values, one no doubt unintended by the school’s founders and teachers.

The people of Gaza suffered immensely from the Israeli assault, which not only killed some 1,400 and injured 5,000 but destroyed or heavily damaged mosques, schools, hospitals, universities, and industrial and other business establishments, in addition to thousands of private homes. Dr. Marwan Sultan, who practices at Kamal Adwan Hospital in Beit Lahiya, told me his hospital was so damaged they had to send all patients to al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City–which was itself damaged. The bombing of one school in Beit Lahiya killed about forty kids and injured a hundred, Sultan told me. He saw scenes of death and mutilation that still give him nightmares. Thousands are living in tent cities all over the Strip, and the entire population of Gaza is being strangled to this day by a blockade that is choking off any possibility of reconstruction or recovery.

Make no mistake about it: the blockade, directly enforced by Israel and Egypt but conspired in by their superpower patron in Washington, is a continuing act of war against an entire civilian population of 1.5 million, a form of collective punishment and a crime against humanity. John Ging, director of operations for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which officially invited Code Pink to come to Gaza, told our delegation that billions in aid had been promised in the wake of Israel’s massacre, but so far nothing had arrived. Our delegation, he said, is the first concrete action of solidarity with an oppressed, long-suffering population. Four months after a devastating conflict, he added, the siege continues. “The first thing we need to see is the opening up of crossing points and an end to collective punishment because of the political failures and security problems created by a few.” It’s a matter of life and death, he said, “and we’re running out of time…. The people of Gaza are asking for help, justice and the rule of law.”

Code Pink–whose organizers, I might add, have done a fabulous job in arranging this tour–is urging Obama to break the siege himself by visiting Gaza on his Middle East tour. That’s not likely to happen, of course, but the least he could do is demand an end to the blockade. He’s more likely to do so if Americans put on the pressure. Readers: it’s your turn.

© 2009 The Nation

Roane Carey, managing editor at The Nation, was the editor of The New Intifada (Verso) and, with Jonathan Shainin, The Other Israel: Voices of Refusal and Dissent (New Press).

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MIDEAST: Bloody New Battles Suit Israel

June 1, 2009

By Mel Frykberg | Inter Press Service News

RAMALLAH, May 31 (IPS) – The inevitable has happened. Simmering tensions between rival Palestinian factions Hamas and Fatah have left six Palestinians dead, in the bloodiest confrontation between the two groups since Hamas ousted Fatah from Gaza in June 2007.

A bloody gun battle broke out Sunday morning in the northern West Bank town of Qalqilia between a group of Hamas gunmen and security forces from the Fatah-affiliated Palestinian Authority (PA).

The PA had tried to arrest and flush out a group of Hamas gunmen who were hiding in a building in the northern city, just over an hour’s drive north-west of Ramallah.

The exchange of gunfire left two Hamas members and three PA police officers dead. The owner of the building where the Hamas fighters had taken refuge also succumbed to his wounds.

The PA placed Qalqilia under curfew as they searched for additional gunmen in the areas surrounding the building where the clash had taken place.

Palestinian security forces were put on a state of high alert with throngs of soldiers and jeeps surrounding PA President Mahmoud Abbas’s government compound, the Muqata, in Ramallah.

Each side blamed the other for instigating the violence. According to the PA, the Hamas men had refused to surrender or identify themselves, and had opened fire on PA forces first.

However, Hamas spokesmen said the cornered men only returned fire after the PA men refused to back off.

Tensions between the two Palestinian rivals have been building ever since the Gaza coup.

Both factions have tortured, abused and killed opponents during interrogation in their respective jails in the Gaza strip, controlled by Hamas, and the West Bank ruled by the PA.

Resentment and anger between the two organisations reached boiling point last week following Israel’s assassination of a top Hamas leader near the southern West Bank town Hebron, 30 km south of Jerusalem.

Abed Al-Majid Dudin, 45, head of Hamas’s military wing in Hebron was assassinated last Thursday by Israeli commandos, backed by jeeps and a helicopter.

According to the Israelis he was shot dead in a firefight after he had barricaded himself inside a house and refused to surrender. Hamas accused the PA of helping Israel carry out surveillance on Dudin prior to the killing.

Dudin was one of Israel’s most wanted men, and had apparently managed to elude Israel security forces for 14 years. The Jewish state accused him of being behind several suicide bombings within Israel proper.

Following the assassination, Israel declared a state of high alert in anticipation of retaliatory attacks.

Hamas, meanwhile, told its fighters in the West Bank that the gloves were off, and they were free to carry out retaliation of their choosing against any legitimate targets in the occupied territory.

According to Hamas officials, the PA was also a legitimate target, due to its alleged collaboration with Israel.

Hamas further accused the PA of carrying out a witch-hunt against its members in the West Bank, stating that prior to bloody Sunday, over 20 Hamas sympathisers had been arrested during the previous two nights.

The PA continues to deny that the arrests were politically motivated, instead saying that embezzlement, fraud and criminal activity led to the arrests.

Several human rights organisations have charged repeatedly that PA prisons are full of political prisoners and Hamas sympathisers, many of them not even members of its armed wing Izzedin Al-Qassem.

Due to the escalating events and yet another round of failed Palestinian unity talks in Cairo several weeks ago, it was just a matter of time when bloody violence would break out.

But Israel’s timing, and the reasoning behind carrying out the provocative assassination of Dudin, which provided the spark to the West Bank powder keg, is curious.

There have been no attacks against Israel proper emanating from the West Bank for years, despite rampaging Israeli settlers stepping up their attacks against Palestinian civilians in the territory.

Furthermore, Israeli intelligence would have been sure of the assassination provoking retaliatory attacks, and increasing friction between Hamas and Fatah.

But Israel’s government, under the right-wing leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, appears to be rudderless, and uncertain of its future direction.

The attacks come at a time when the rest of the international community, propelled forward by U.S. President Barack Obama, appears to be developing the resolve to pressure Israel into fulfilling its part of various peace agreements.

The calls from a growing number of world leaders for Israel to freeze settlement building are growing louder. Obama has reportedly given himself two years to reach a diplomatic settlement on a two-state solution as a means of resolving the protracted Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Israel argues that natural growth in the settlements has to be taken into account. However, most of the settlement building has been to accommodate increasing settler numbers – and as their numbers increase, further settlement building would be required.

There are currently about 500,000 illegal settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, according to Israeli rights group B’Tselem.

Additionally, Israeli attempts to outlaw Palestinians commemorating their Nakba (meaning catastrophe, to mark the day of the Israeli onslaught that drove them out of their land in 1948) with threats of three years imprisonment is not winning Netanyahu any support regionally or internationally either.

During the Nakba, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians either fled or were expelled from their homes, while over 500 villages were razed to make way for the establishment of Israel.

Neither are Israel’s accelerated attempts to Judaise East Jerusalem by expelling Palestinians and demolishing their homes there, helping its PR efforts.

Bloody Palestinian infighting might just be what a cornered Israeli government needs at the moment to focus attention elsewhere.

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Medical supplies finally let into Gaza

May 27, 2009
Morning Star Online, Tuesday 26 May 2009

Egyptian officials have finally allowed about 20 solidarity activists into Gaza to deliver medical equipment, having left them stranded at the Rafah border for two days.

But Palestinian Rafah border chief Ghani Hamad said Egyptian authorities had prevented 19 others from getting through during Monday’s crossing.

Derry Sinn Fein councillor Gerry Mac-Lochlainn, who accompanied the Hope for Gaza Convoy, said the weary activists had handed over 25 ambulances, a kidney dialysis machine, wheelchairs and more than $47,000 (£29,535) worth of medicine paid for with money raised by charities and donations.

Egypt and Israel have enforced a strict blockade on Gaza since the democratically elected Hamas administration quashed a Western-backed coup bid by Fatah forces two years ago, allowing only limited amounts of humanitarian supplies in.

Medical equipment has been in especially short supply since Israel’s bloody offensive against Gaza ended in January.

Solidarity activist Arafat Madi condemned Egypt’s decision to block the 19 activists.

“It took us almost two months to prepare the convoy and the lorries and gather the desperately needed medical equipment,” Mr Madi stormed.

MPs from Italy, Greece, Ireland, Switzerland and Britain took part in the Hope for Gaza convoy, led by Italian senator Fernando Rossi.

Speaking in Gaza, Mr Rossi condemned the international community’s tolerance of Israel’s punishing blockade.

“Those who do not say ‘No’ to this siege and ‘No’ to this oppression in Gaza are against freedom for the Palestinian people,” he said.

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EGYPTIAN COLLABORATION WITH ISRAEL IS STRANGLING GAGA

May 25, 2009
author Sunday May 24, 2009 23:46author by Saed Bannoura – IMEMC & Agencies Report this post to the editors

The Egyptian Authorities blocked on Sunday the European Hope Convoy, filled with medical aid, from crossing into the Gaza Strip despite all preparations and calls on Egypt to facilitate the entry of the convoy into the besieged and impoverished coastal region.

Image by PalTelegraph
Image by PalTelegraph

The Egyptian authorities only allowed some members of the convoy and some said to cross into Gaza , but the European Campaign to End the Siege said that is insufficient and would not enable Gaza hospitals to treat the patients, especially those injured during the three-week Israel offensive earlier this year.

Nearly 160 peace activists and workers of non-governmental organizations from different European countries were about to enter Gaza after the Egyptian authorities stamped their passports, but then were not allowed through.

Gerry MacLauchlan, a member of the Derry City Council in Ireland, stated that the convoy was transferring 12 ambulances, wheelchairs, medicine worth more than $47.000, and a kidney dialysis machine, in addition to advance computer programs for the blind.

MacLauchlan added that there are patients who were wounded during the war, and others who suffer from chronic diseases, and that hundreds of patients in Gaza are in urgent need for medical aid.

Meanwhile, Ahmad Al Kurd, Minister of Social Affairs at the dissolved government in Gaza, demanded the Egyptian Authorities to allow the convoy to enter Gaza.

AL Kurd added that the Egyptian Authorities only allowed 16 members of the Hope Convoy to enter Gaza, but the participants refused and demanded Egypt to allow all of the members and the aid they carry to enter the Gaza Strip and deliver the supplies.

160 figures and activists are part of the aid convoy which consists of 40 aid trucks. The equipment, ambulances and other medical necessities were donated by nongovernmental organization in Europe and individual donations.

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MIDEAST: ‘Hamas Against Zionist Ideology, Not Judaism’

May 14, 2009

By David Cronin | Inter Press Service

GAZA CITY, May 14 (IPS) – A founding member of Hamas says he hates all weapons and insists that his organisation is not anti-Jewish.

In an interview with IPS, Sayed Abu Musameh described frequent claims in the European and U.S. press that Hamas’s charter is based on enmity towards Jews as a “big lie”.

Speaking in the remains of the Palestinian Legislative Council headquarters in Gaza City – bombed by Israel on the third day of the offensive against Gaza it launched in late 2008 – Husameh drew a distinction between followers of Judaism and the Zionist ideology to which most politicians in Israel’s main political parties subscribe. Such an ideology, he said, has led Israel to tighten its control of the Palestinian territories and their most important natural resources, including water.

“In our culture, we respect every foreigner, especially Jews and Christians,” he said. “But we are against Zionists, not as nationalists but as fascists and racists.”

Musameh also contended that Hamas has long been ready to agree a truce – known in Arabic as a hudna – with Israel but that Israel had refused all offers and imposed a crippling economic blockade on Gaza. The firing of Qassam rockets on the Israeli cities of Ashkelon and Sderot was designed “not to destroy Israel or to destroy Israeli people” but to “make them notice our siege.”

Described by some observers of Middle Eastern affairs as one of the key “moderates” in the Islamic resistance movement, Musameh has expressed a strong interest in visiting Belfast to study whether lessons learned from the Irish peace process could be used to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Hamas leaders recently held discussions with Gerry Adams, who as leader of the political party Sinn Féin has convinced the Irish Republican Army (IRA) to cease using violence.

“I hate all kinds of weapons,” said Musameh. “I dream of seeing every weapon from the atomic bomb to small guns banned everywhere.”

Since Hamas won a surprise victory in Palestinian elections in January 2006, 40 of Musameh’s fellow members of the legislative council, including chairman Aziz Duwaik, have been jailed. Contact with his imprisoned colleagues – or with the 11,000 other Palestinians held by Israel – is impossible, Musameh said.

The destruction of the council’s building has meant that video conferences between Hamas and its rival Fatah can no longer take place. Yet even before the attack, the council (described as a parliament by many Palestinians) was unable to operate properly as Israel had prevented Fatah politicians in the West Bank from travelling to Gaza for meetings.

After a joint Fatah-Hamas government – that was shunned by the U.S. and European Union – collapsed, Hamas took charge of running the Gaza Strip in 2007. Local human rights activists have protested strongly at some of the measures it has undertaken, particularly how it closed down more than 200 non-governmental organisations (NGOs) that it accused of being affiliated to Fatah. Most have subsequently been allowed to resume their activities.

Despite speaking out against Hamas’s tactics, the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) in Gaza says it is vital that Europe and the U.S. encourage reconciliation between Fatah and Hamas. “If the coalition government had been accepted by the international community or at least by Europe, we wouldn’t have an internal conflict (in the Palestinian territories),” said the PCHR’s Hamdi Shaqqura.

Governments that have refused to deal with Hamas because they consider it extremist are displaying double standards now that they agree to have contacts with an Israeli government that includes Avigdor Lieberman, who is seeking that Arabs within Israel’s internationally recognised boundaries should be stripped of their rights as Israeli citizens unless they pass a ‘loyalty test’ to the state, Shaqqura said.

“Europe can do a lot in terms of Palestinian dialogue,” he added. “It must encourage Palestinians to reach a compromise, and if parties can reach a compromise, it must be respected by the international community. The international community must end its hypocrisy. It has accepted Lieberman, it has accepted a racist.”

Khalil Abu Shammala, director of the Al-Dameer Association for Human Rights, said: “Hamas won the (2006) election. This was the Palestinians’ democratic choice, so the international community should accept it. Why not give Hamas the chance to govern and give people the choice of whether they trust it or not?”

Some analysts believe that hawkish politicians in Israel and their allies in the previous U.S. administration led by George W. Bush deliberately sought to foment strife between Fatah and Hamas as part of a colonialist ‘divide and rule’ strategy.

Amjad Shawa from the Palestinian NGOs Network said that bickering between the political parties “suits completely” the agenda being pursued by the Israeli government. Still, he argued that human rights activists should denounce any violations that occur regardless of who perpetrates them.

“I cannot say that Hamas has prevented the right to association but there is a violation,” he added. “We will face any violations by Hamas or Fatah or whoever. We will not keep silent.”

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Haaretz reporter Amira Hass arrested upon leaving Gaza

May 13, 2009

Amira Hass
 (Ariel Schalit)

By Haaretz Service, Israel, May 12, 2009
Israel Police on Tuesday detained Haaretz correspondent Amira Hass upon her exit from the Gaza Strip, where she had been living and reporting over the last few months.

Hass was arrested and taken in for questioning immediately after crossing the border, for violating a law which forbids residence in an enemy state. She was released on bail after promising not to enter the Gaza Strip over the next 30 days.

Hass is the first Israeli journalist to enter the Gaza Strip in more than two years, since the Israel Defense Forces issued an entry ban following the abduction of IDF soldier Gilad Shalit in a 2006 cross-border raid by Palestinian militants.

Last December, Hass was arrested by soldiers at the Erez Checkpoint as she tried to cross into Israel after having entered the Gaza Strip aboard a ship run by peace activists from Europe.

Upon discovering that she had no permit to be in Gaza, the soldiers transferred her to the Sderot police.

When questioned, Hass pointed out that no one had stopped her from entering the Strip, which she did for work purposes.

Hass was released then under restriction, and Nahmani said her case would be sent to court.

Israel Press Council chairwoman Dalia Dorner, a former Supreme Court justice, commented then that even journalists are subject to the law and the council cannot defend a reporter who breaks the law. Instead, she said, local journalists ought to petition the High Court of Justice against the army’s order.

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Christian by name and by nature

May 11, 2009

Morning Star Online, Sunday 10 May 2009

By Stuart Littlewood

Father Manuel Musallam, the Catholic priest in Gaza, has finally retired at 71. His will be a hard act to follow.

Many thought that ill health had forced Musallam to hang up his cassock last year, but he returned to the fray to be with his community during its darkest hour when Israel, with a nod and a wink from the US and the EU, unleashed its lethal assault intended to finally crush the isolated and half-starved Gazans.

I was privileged to meet the crusty old churchman in 2007, when things in Gaza were already unbearable after 18 months of blockade and savage sanctions.

For nine years, Musallam had been unable to leave the strip to see his family in the West Bank for fear that the Israelis would block his return and leave his church and school without a priest. We were the first visitors from the outside world he had seen for many months.

Musallam has frequently spoken out about the torment and hardship inflicted on the Gazan people. He has said in plain language what other churchmen – and politicians and diplomats – are afraid to.

He told reporters that, after 14 years as the parish priest, he had seen the humanitarian situation get drastically worse. And he warned that the people were becoming more aggressive. “There is a lot more hate towards the situation they are in – especially among the young.”

Musallam was also greatly troubled by the exodus of Christians to escape the never-ending Israeli oppression and seek a better life elsewhere, reflecting the worry expressed by many others that Christendom is allowing itself to be “religiously cleansed” from the Holy Land with scarcely a murmur of protest.

He has seen Gaza’s Christian contingent dwindle to just 5,000 souls out of a tight-packed population of 1.5 million.

Musallam also speaks with anguish of the 1,400 Gazans killed in the latest blitz, the many thousands left homeless and the hundreds of thousands without running water, sanitation, a proper diet or medical care – thanks to the already overburdened infrastructure having been blasted to smithereens by US-supplied weaponry and explosives.

In January, at the height of Israel’s killing spree, Fr Manuel sent this message from the smoking ruins to anyone who would listen.

“Our people in Gaza … eat but remain hungry, they cry, but no-one wipes their tears. There is no water, no electricity, no food, only terror and blockade … Our children are living in a state of trauma and fear. They are sick from it and for other reasons such as malnutrition, poverty and the cold … The hospitals did not have basic first aid before the war and now thousands of wounded and sick are pouring in and they are performing operations in the corridors. The situation is frightening and sad.”

A few days later, he wrote: “Hundreds of people have been killed and many more injured in the Israeli invasion. Our people have endured the bombing of their homes, their crops have been destroyed, they have lost everything and many are now homeless.

“We have endured phosphorus bombs which have caused horrific burns, mainly to civilians. Like the early Christians our people are living through a time of great persecution, a persecution which we must record for future generations as a statement of their faith, hope and love.”

Yet the leaders of the West turned their backs while their “ally,” with whom they claim to share so many values, committed these and other atrocities. It was their duty to intervene but they didn’t. As if this infamy weren’t enough, humanitarian aid and reconstruction materials for Gaza are still obstructed by Israel and the international community is too spineless to ensure that they flow.

Musallam’s Catholic school in Gaza is highly regarded by Muslim families and many send their children there.

The only official tribute I’ve seen to Musallam says that he “has done great work over the many years he has been in Gaza where he has given a lot to support the Christian community and many others.”

Is that it? Is that all the church can find to say about one of its most remarkable representatives, who has served his God and community for many perilous years in the world’s most notorious hell-hole?

Let us hope the Pope, during his trip to the holy land this week, manages to find time between visits to the Yad Vashem memorial and the Wailing Wall and hob-nobbing with the great and good of the zionist regime, to say hello to Musallam and acknowledge the dedication and courage of this extraordinary man.

The Vatican describes the Pope’s visit as a pilgrimage, which usually suggests a journey of high purpose and moral significance. Will his holiness be joining the queue of Palestinians at the Bethlehem crossing into Jerusalem and waiting in line for the three humiliating hours it often takes before being allowed to shuffle through the steel-barred cattle pens to start a full day’s work?

He has decided to skip Gaza so he will miss the state-of-the-art dehumanisation process at the Erez crossing and the experience of being forced to strip to his underwear like so many others.

It’s a shame he won’t see Gaza. He’d weep like he has never wept before. Then at least he would have had something morally significant to say to Israel’s dignitaries.

As for Musallam, I doubt if his God has finished with him just yet. There’s a mountain of work to be done and good men are hard to find.

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