Israel, via the Interior Ministry, continues to spit in the face of friendly countries, and those countries continue to admire the falling raindrops. The ministry’s most recent gob of spit was the cancellation of the work visas that citizens of those countries who are employed by international NGOs have been getting for years.
Human Rights
Obama also needs to take on the Gaza blockade, imposed by Israel and abetted by Egypt. If private diplomacy shows no results soon and Israel does not end its wholesale restrictions on the movement of goods and people, the president should publicly criticize the blockade as collective punishment and specify consequences, including reductions in military aid.
A few days before Israeli physicians rushed to save the lives of injured Haitians, the authorities at the Erez checkpoint prevented 17 people from passing through in order to get to a Ramallah hospital for urgent corneal transplant surgery… So what if the Goldstone Commission demanded that Israel lift the blockade on the Strip and end the collective punishment of its inhabitants? Only those who hate Israel could use frontier justice against the first country to set up a field hospital in Haiti.
See also: Larry Derfner: The pride and the shame
Because of this delay, the medical window of opportunity to perform the transplants for these patients was closed, because corneas can be transplanted only within the shortest time frame (24-48 hours after they are extracted from the donor’s body). The patients from Gaza whose exit was prevented will therefore have to wait for another donation, which may or may not happen.
The Israeli authorities must immediately release, or bring before a fair trial, three Palestinian human rights activists detained in Israel following their protests against the construction of the West Bank fence/wall, Amnesty International said today.
In Israel… institutional discrimination is meant to preserve the supremacy of a group of Jewish settlers over Palestinian Arabs. As far as discriminatory practices are concerned, it’s hard to find differences between white rule in South Africa and Israeli rule in the territories; for example, separate areas and separate laws for Jews and Palestinians.
Ismail Haniyeh: “The Palestinian nation will never give up its national aspirations or its right to Jerusalem, the capital of Palestine and the Islamic people,” [speaking] to the 300 Israeli activists positioned at the Erez crossing via Israeli Arab MK Taleb A-Sana’s mobile phone. On the Gazan side of the border, nearly 100 international activists joined about 500 Palestinians, chanting and carrying signs denouncing the blockade.
More on the Gaza protest: Boycott / Protest / Resistance
It’s not that we can’t imagine life in Gaza. It’s that we are determined not to try to imagine. If we did, we might not stop there. Next we might try to imagine what it would be like if our country were in the condition in which we left Gaza. And sooner or later we might try to imagine what we would do if we were living over here like they’re living over there. Or not even what we would do, just what we would think – about the people, about the country, that did that to us and that wouldn’t even allow us to begin to recover after the war was over.
Would you email the editors at the New York Times and the Washington Post and ask them why they are not covering these incredibly important events?
The siege prohibits the export of Palestinian goods and severely limits the import of humanitarian supplies, such as food, medicine and reconstruction materials. The United Nations reports that Israel allows into Gaza less than 25% of the goods it did before the siege began in June 2007.
Anna Tinsley: “I’ll be with people from all over the world who want to show humanity and show Palestinians that we haven’t forgotten them.”
Egypt has… barred more than 1,000 international campaigners from visiting the territory… Some 150 aid trucks organised by the Viva Palestina campaign led by George Galloway, a British member of parliament, are stuck in the Jordanian port of Aqaba, because the Egyptian authorities have refused to grant them permission to enter the country through the nearby Red Sea port of Nuweiba.
Magda Bayoumi, of Syracuse, said Israeli forces block shipments of food and medicine, and keep people from going to hospitals. Children have died as a result.
The war the police and the Israel Defense Forces are openly waging against protests by left-wing and human rights activists has heated up in recent weeks. As a result, concern is growing over Israel’s image as a free and democratic country.
It is shameful to be Israeli today, much more than it was a year ago. In the final tally of the war, which was not a war but a brutal assault, Israel’s international status was dealt a severe blow, in addition to Israeli indifference and public blindness to what happened in Gaza.
The New York-based rights group also criticised the Israeli blockade which “created massive humanitarian need and prevented the reconstruction of schools and homes” in the Hamas-run Palestinian territory.
[I]n two of the three cases the troops behaved as if they were preparing for an execution, not an arrest. Relatives and eyewitnesses told B’Tselem that the two were unarmed and did not attempt to flee, and that the soldiers weren’t trying to stop them, but rather shot them from close range once their identity was revealed.
The Egyptian government has denied entry to the Viva Palestina aid convoy carrying medical and humanitarian aid to Gaza.
Palestinians have a long history of nonviolent resistance but Israel has continuously deployed methods to destroy it… Israel’s response to [the] first strike was immediate and severe: it issued military orders categorising all forms of resistance as insurgency.
During the first and last days of Hanukkah, the Jerusalem police arrested drummers and clowns who believe in nonviolence, coexistence and equality between Jews and Arabs in Jerusalem.
