Israel's War Against Palestine: Documenting the Military Occupation of Palestinian and Arab Lands
Israel should consider ousting Norwegian monitors from Hebron due to Oslo’s “hostility” toward Israel, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman told the cabinet Thursday.
IOA Editor: Israel is preparing to remove the Norwegian threat to its colonial program. The Baruch Goldstein massacre is nearly forgotten, overshadowed by mass killings on a far grander scale. And, Norway has been showing too much independence from the US-Israeli Occupation-as-usual view.
Meanwhile, Israel has warned the Palestinian Authority that it would condition permission for a second cellular telephone provider to operate in the West Bank – an economic issue of critical importance to the PA leadership – on the Palestinians withdrawing their request at the International Court.
For Netanyahu, the threat of peace has passed. At least for the time being. It is difficult to understand how Obama allowed himself to get into this embarrassing situation.
Following the release last week of the Goldstone commission findings which accused Israel of committing war crimes during its offensive in the Gaza Strip, [Israeli] diplomatic officials feared that the report would weigh heavily on the agenda of this week’s United Nations General Assembly meeting. Israel’s fears proved to have no basis in fact as the report was cited by just a few world leaders.
MPAC leaders joined more than 30 of the nation’s most prominent and diverse religious leaders in signing onto a public letter in support of “strong U.S. leadership to achieve a negotiated sustainable resolution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. In the letter, which was coordinated by Churches for Middle East Peace, the leaders said that the opportunity for a two-state solution for achieving peace and security was “rapidly closing.”
Meshal clearly stated that the Palestinian struggle was anything but a conflict between Muslims and the Jewish people. He insisted that the Palestinians were fighting against the occupier who had dispossessed them of their homes and lands, regardless of religion, creed or race.
The all-too-long history of the “peace process” has taught us that a summit can be a desirable goal, but also a place of unsurpassable danger. When participants come with insufficient preparation, and without a safety net, the depth of the fall can be as high as the summit itself.
IOA Editor: Eldar rightly points out that Hamas will not miss “an opportunity to present the summit as yet more proof of its claim… that support for Fatah is flimsy.” But he does not analyze what a shift in favor of Hamas would mean for Israel. Historically, Hamas has been Israel’s preferred enemy: the argument that Hamas cannot be a partner, although fundamentally wrong, has been readily accepted in the West. Thus, as Hamas’ popularity among Palestinians grows stronger, Israel can more easily repeat the convenient untruth that “there is no Palestinian partner,” when it is the Israeli government itself that refuses to become a partner to a peace agreement.
Read the following IOA items for coverage of Hamas and its attitude toward agreements with Israel:
1. Israel could have made peace with Hamas under Yassin
2. Adam Shatz: Mishal’s luck
“My greatest frustration this year has been the Palestine situation,” he told the 192-nation assembly in his final address on 14 September… He found it “disgraceful” the way influential members of the UN Security Council had shown “passivity and apparent indifference” about the long and cruel Israeli blockade of Gaza.
IOA Editor: Thank you, Messrs Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, and our very own Mr. Obama.
Initially, Western states tried to stop the resolution from going to a vote, arguing it would be counterproductive to single out Israel, particularly after a resolution had been passed the day before calling on all states in the Middle East to foreswear nuclear weapons.
The conflict is the outcome of aggression and occupation. Our struggle against the Israelis is not because they are Jewish, but because they invaded our homeland and dispossessed us. We do not accept that because the Jews were once persecuted in Europe they have the right to take our land and throw us out. The injustices suffered by the Jews in Europe were horrible and criminal, but were not perpetrated by the Palestinians or the Arabs or the Muslims.
American failure to pressure Israel is increasingly frustrating the Palestinian leadership which dreads a repetition of the futile peacemaking efforts that characterised the Bush administration. One Palestinian official was quoted this week as saying that the Mitchell approach was “unconvincing and raises a lot of question marks”.
[W]hether we like it or not, Hamas is the legitimate representative of at least half of the Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. To deny this is to eliminate any chance of peace. You cannot make peace with half a people, and a viable peace must include the extremists.
Netanyahu’s message is that the Goldstone Commission report hinders the United States’ war on terror. The Foreign Ministry decided Wednesday to focus their efforts to combat the report’s accusations on the United States, Russia and a few other members of the United Nations Security Council and the Human Rights Council that are involved in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
IOA Editor: The Israeli propaganda machine is going full blast. To protect democracy from terrorism, the UN report deserves every possible rejection, naturally.
See also Norman Finkelstein’s interview and Gideon Levy’s commentary on the UN report.
The U.S. intelligence community is reporting to the White House that Iran has not restarted its nuclear-weapons development program, two counterproliferation officials tell NEWSWEEK. U.S. agencies had previously said that Tehran halted the program in 2003.
Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu’s planned visit to Israel has been left in doubt after Jerusalem warned that he would not be allowed to enter the Gaza Strip from Israeli territory.
IOA Editor: It’s us or them. Remember, We’re-Always-Right. Even after international organizations pointed to Israel’s international law violations, Israel maintains a position of totalitarian self-righteousness, as if the truth could be concealed by preventing a Gaza visit.
We found a growing sense of concern and despair among those who observe, as we did, that settlement expansion is continuing apace, rapidly encroaching into Palestinian villages, hilltops, grazing lands, farming areas and olive groves. There are more than 200 of these settlements in the West Bank.
“You don’t make peace with friends,” he told Ma’an in Ramallah. “You negotiate with those who are regarded as pariahs.”
Photo: Desmond Tutu, center, placed a stone on a grave on Thursday in Bilin, site of weekly protests against the Israeli Wall. With him, from left: Gro Brundtland, Jimmy Carter, Ela Bhatt and Abdullah Abu Rahma.
Also: The New York Times coverage of The Elders’ Bilin visit
Palestinians have finally started to act in a different way. Instead of cursing the occupation, the new strategy is aimed at building up the desired Palestinian state. The idea is to force the Israelis to the negotiating table rather than beg them to come. The way to do that is to work for a state as if there were negotiations. This idea has been brilliantly developed by the Palestinian prime minister.
U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Jeffrey Feltman summoned… Israel’s ambassador to Washington, to tell him that the United States views Sunday’s eviction of two Palestinian families from homes in East Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood as a “provocative” and “unacceptable” act that violates Israel’s obligations under the road map peace plan.
Breaking the Silence added: “The attempts to silence voices from Israeli civil society are dangerous. As opposed to reports, the IDF has never denied the [validity of the] testimonies and it and the foreign ministry’s virulent reaction… only strengthens the position of the testifying soldiers, who are not willing to be exposed.”
British diplomats touring the Shepherd Hotel recently in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah expressed concern about Israeli construction plans there, particularly in light of the site’s close proximity to the British consulate in East Jerusalem. The tour, which also included American diplomats, was led by Jerusalem city councilman Meir Margalit of Meretz, who is also active in the Committee Against House Demolitions. During the visit, Margalit said, the British diplomats asked their American colleagues to pressure Israel on the issue and take the lead in applying international pressure to stop settlement building. “The British said explicitly – the Israelis don’t pay attention to us, but if you apply pressure, there is a chance,” Margalit recounted.
The United States views East Jerusalem as no different than an illegal West Bank outpost with regard to its demand for a freeze on settlement construction, American sources have informed both Israel and the Palestinian Authority. This clarification came in the context of a growing crisis in U.S.-Israel relations over the planned construction of some 20 apartments for Jews in the Shepherd Hotel, in East Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood. The U.S. has demanded that the project be halted, but Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told the cabinet meeting Sunday that “Israel will not agree to edicts of this kind in East Jerusalem.
Two Israel Navy warships made a rare crossing of Egypt’s Suez Canal on Tuesday, heading from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea in a voyage that could be seen as a warning signal to Iran. Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit said that the crossings were legitimate in accordance with an agreement between Cairo and Jerusalem.
America’s best Jewish minds are wracking their brains, trying to find a magic formula that will put the settlements close to the hearts of Israel’s supporters, not to mention its critics. A new guide to the perplexed, disseminated by the leadership of the Israel Project, the organization spearheading Israel’s public relations efforts in the United States, offers a glimpse into its very own internal confusion
Ever since the Gaza operation, British MPs and nongovernmental organizations have been trying to persuade London to impose a complete arms embargo on Israel. However, the British government has rejected this demand…
“Future decisions will take into account what has happened in the recent conflict. We do not grant export licenses where there is a clear risk that arms will be used for external aggression or internal repression… We do not believe that the current situation in the Middle East would be improved by imposing an arms embargo on Israel. Israel has the right to defend itself and faces real security threats.”
IOA Editor: Indeed, the British government continues to view Israel as having the right to carry out massive campaigns of destruction against civilian populations, as it did in Gaza, Lebanon, and elsewhere. Such twisted and morally reprehensible positions, along with the very limited nature of the actual steps taken, when evaluated in terms of their impacts, indicate that the “partial embargo” is merely an act of political lip service in the face of growing popular opposition at home to the government’s military support of Israel.
Not only is it wrong for Israel to pass a law punishing those who extend aid to refugees, but we must pass a law that amounts to the opposite of this – a law that requires the state to assist refugees and allocates resources to the organizations and individuals that do so.
Rydberg slammed the settlements as creating a new reality on the ground in the occupied territories and spawning obstacles… He said the ideology that guides most settlers is based on utter denial of the rights of Palestinians in the occupied territories.
This is Cynthia McKinney and I’m speaking from an Israeli prison cellblock in Ramle. [I am one of] the Free Gaza 21, human rights activists currently imprisoned for trying to take medical supplies to Gaza, building supplies – and even crayons for children, I had a suitcase full of crayons for children. While we were on our way to Gaza the Israelis threatened to fire on our boat, but we did not turn around. The Israelis high-jacked and arrested us because we wanted to give crayons to the children in Gaza. We have been detained, and we want the people of the world to see how we have been treated just because we wanted to deliver humanitarian assistance to the people of Gaza.
The head of Mossad, Israel’s overseas intelligence service, has assured Benjamin Netanyahu, its prime minister, that Saudi Arabia would turn a blind eye to Israeli jets flying over the kingdom during any future raid on Iran’s nuclear sites.
Ramallah’s intellectual elite, foreigners and curious spectators gathered last Saturday at the Friends School in Ramallah to hear writer and political activist Naomi Klein lecture to a packed auditorium… She chose to speak in Ramallah about her Jewish roots. “There is a debate among Jews – I’m a Jew by the way,” she said. The debate boils down to the question: “Never again to everyone, or never again to us?… [Some Jews] even think we get one get-away-with-genocide-free card… There is another strain in the Jewish tradition that say,’Never again to anyone.’”
One of the main accomplishments of the Israeli government’s bombing and invasion of the Gaza Strip last winter was to inspire new vitality within leftist and peace groups in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for justice and liberation. This wave of activity has continued after the supposed ceasefire, with demonstrations and direct actions from New York to Los Angeles, Paris, Jaffa, and Tel Aviv. Most noteworthy has been a coming out of sorts of an increasingly large and vocal segment of the Jewish world that is not only opposed to the Israeli government’s wars and military occupations, but critical of Zionism itself.
Entitled “Israel/Palestine: Mapping Models of Statehood and Paths to Peace,” the three-day meet features presentations by dozens of speakers, including Palestinian and Israeli scholars.
IOA Editor: So-called “Supporters of Israel” (a misnomer because, invariably, they object to an equitable solution to the Israeli-Palestinian confilct, thus excluding any viable solution) again show their true anti-democratic faces: trying to block an academic conference assessing potential future peace arrangements which they choose not to tolerate. Thus, not for the first time, charges of “anti-Semitism” are leveled. Anyone who experienced the anti-Occupation struggle in the past 42 years is familiar with this dynamic.
The United States has stepped up pressure on Israel regarding the Gaza Strip: Three weeks ago it sent Jerusalem a diplomatic note officially protesting Gaza policy and demanding a more liberal opening of the border crossings to facilitate reconstruction.
IOA Editor: Clearly, the “stepped up pressure” is not too onerous on Israel: after three weeks, it has yet to result in any meaningful change in Gaza.
American policies in the average Lebanese voter’s mind are not exemplified by Obama’s pious pronouncements in Cairo on June 4th, but by a long record of unrestricted support for Israel’s meddling in internal Lebanese affairs and oppression of Palestinians, as well as American alliance with despotic Arab regimes, the devastation of Iraq, and aggressive interventions further East.
The prime minister’s speech last night returned the Middle East to the days of George W. Bush’s “axis of evil.” Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a patriarchal, colonialist address in the best neoconservative tradition: The Arabs are the bad guys, or at best ungrateful terrorists; the Jews, of course, are the good guys, rational people who need to raise and care for their children.
A day before Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivers what has been described as a key policy speech at Bar-Ilan University, former U.S. president Jimmy Carter told Haaretz in an exclusive interview on Saturday that President Barack Obama will not change his position on the two-state solution and Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Carter added that Israel and the United States are on a collision course if Israel refuses to comply on these two issues.
NOAM CHOMSKY:
