3/11/2010

The Obama Administration Asked for the East Jerusalem Fiasco
Yossi Sarid, CounterPunch 3/11/2010
Don’t believe Benjamin Netanyahu for one moment when he says he "never knew." The Jerusalem planning committee is only too aware of what the bosses want, and the government has decided to step up construction in greater Jerusalem. Dispossession and taking possession, kicking out and moving in - that’s what it’s all about.Over the years, a streamlined and generously lubricated machine has evolved, one that makes it possible to take solace in the building of Jerusalem (in the phrase used to console mourners) and to take pride - but also to take cover - behind a facade of disingenuousness and disowning. Yesterday, it was convenient to disown.No pretext is more dismal than "bad timing." Ehud Barak immediately put out a press release about the "harmful timing of the publication." As if there were a proper time for provocations. If the announcement of the 1,600 planned housing units had come before Joe Biden’s trip, they would have said it was aimed at sabotaging the visit, and if it happened after he left, they would have said Biden himself was in on the secret.But with Barak, that willing slave-minister of Netanyahu’s, everything’s cool, but if only they had kept that call for bids confidential, if only they built apartments in some dark secluded hideaway, like the Western Wall tunnel.Don’t believe for a moment that they never knew: The chaos works like clockwork......

Border Control / Biden and the bulldozer
Akiva Eldar, Ha'aretz, International Solidarity Movement 3/10/2010
March 9, 2010U.S. Vice President Joe Biden, who arrived in Israel yesterday, didn’t look for camels among the cars on the road from Ben-Gurion International Airport to Jerusalem. In a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing held two years ago for the United States Ambassador to Israel, James Cunningham, Biden heard that the Israelis even know how to ride bulldozers.Then a senator from Delaware, who chaired the committee, Biden asked for a detailed report on the affair of American peace activist Rachel Corrie, who was run over and killed by the treads of an Israeli bulldozer.If Biden schedules a meeting with Corrie’s parents here, the Israeli Information and Diaspora Ministry will have to work overtime. The parents, who arrived in advance of the scheduled deliberations on their suit against the state of Israel, will tell him that his hosts are continuing to deny any responsibility for their daughter’s death.Rachel was a 23-year-old student run over by a 64-ton bulldozer in March, 2003, when she and others from the International Solidarity Movement tried to use their bodies to stop the demolition of a house in Rafah.At the Senate hearing, Cunningham spoke about the Israel authorities’ refusal to open a thorough investigation into the affair and not rest content with an internal report.Cunningham detailed numerous written and oral requests to top people in the Israeli government by senior people in the American administration and his predecessor at the embassy. In reply to Biden’s question, Cunningham undertook to stand by the Corrie family in the demand for a credible investigation of the tragic event.... -- See also: Source

Revolutionary roses
Al-Ahram Weekly 3/11/2010
Sukant Chandan interviews Leila Khaled and Shireen Said for International Women’s Day 2010.The Palestinian people’s oppression continues primarily due to the financial, diplomatic and military support that Israel receives from the US, and secondly the acquiescence of pro-Western states in the region. After the fall of the Zionists state’s long lost brother — the apartheid state of South Africa — the Palestinian struggle remains perhaps the leading and most potent anti-imperialist struggle in the world. Unsurprisingly therefore Palestinian women are a central example of what role women can play in the struggle to free themselves, their families, communities and their nation from imperialism and Zionism.Leila Khaled brought the Palestinian struggle to the world’s attention by means of two dramatic plane hijackings in 1969 and 1970 in which only one of her own comrades was killed, the American-Nicaraguan Patrick Arguello. Khaled retells her account of this hijacking in her autobiography My People Shall Live (1973) in which she writes: “Patrick Arguello, age 27, father of three children, a Nicaraguan citizen of the world, born in San Francisco, was pronounced dead. What had prompted someone half-way across the world from Palestine to undertake this dangerous mission? Patrick was a revolutionary Communist. His gallant action was a gesture of international solidarity. A flame of life was extinguished; it lit the world for a moment; it blazed a trail on the road back to Palestine. Arguello lives, so do my people, so does the revolution!”Khaled remains one of the most inspirational and influential leftist anti-imperialist women in the post-WWII period. She remains active today in the leadership of the Palestinian revolution, as she is one of the central committee members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) as well as a representative of the Palestinian National Council.

Flouting its own laws, EU accommodates "Made in Israel"

Electronic Intifada: 12 Mar 2010 - In 2008 Britain expressed concern about how goods originating from Israeli settlements in the West Bank may be benefiting illegally from European Union trade preferences that theoretically only apply to businesses within Israel's internationally-recognized borders. However, EU officials have not only failed to defend international law, they have accommodated Israel's abuse of it. David Cronin analyzes for The Electronic Intifada.

Sending a laptop to Gaza

Electronic Intifada: 12 Mar 2010 - I sat outdoors at a cafe on the Mediterranean Sea in al-Arish, a dusty seaside town in Egypt's northern Sinai. I drank a tea and smoked a water pipe; it gave me something to do while I waited for Ismail -- that's not his real name -- an Egyptian Bedouin tunnel smuggler who was going to deliver a package for me into Gaza. Ahmed Moor writes from al-Arish.

Homes and livelihoods gone in an instant

In Gaza: 11 Mar 2010 - Israeli bulldozers destroyed three homes and 17 dunams of agricultural land in eastern Khan Younis on 18 February. Electronic Intifada Radia Abu Sbaih, 47, lives with her sister and one niece on family land roughly 700 meters from the “green line” boundary between Israel and Gaza. Until 18 February 2010, they had nearly 600 olive, fruit, date and nut trees, an agricultural cistern, a water well, various vegetables and a house. Theirs was one of three homes demolished by Israeli military bulldozers that day in al-Mossadar, eastern Gaza. Around 8am that morning, approximately five Israeli military bulldozers and upwards of 10 Israeli tanks, accompanied by more than 50 foot soldiers,...

The Decline of Israel: Interview with Jonathan Cook

Palestine Chronicle: 12 Mar 2010 - By New Left Project In a wide-ranging interview with the New Left Project, Nazareth-based journalist Jonathan Cook describes the increasingly repressive nature of Israeli society and the prospects for a solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict NLP: What did you make of Ehud Barak’s recent comparison of Israel to South Africa? JC: We should be extremely wary of ascribing a leftwing agenda to senior Israeli politicians who make use of the word “apartheid” in the Israeli-Palestinian context. Barak was not claiming that Israel is an apartheid state when he addressed the high-powered delegates at the Herzliya conference last month; he was warning the Netanyahu government that its approach to the two-state...

America To The Rescue, (Not) Again

Palestine Chronicle: 12 Mar 2010 - By Sam Bahour We are told that President Obama has taken a leap of political faith in trying to bridge a final peace settlement between Palestinians and Israelis. The United States' new weapon is "proximity talks": if either side fails to meet American expectations, the US will squarely and publicly lay blame. If this was a sitcom it would be the opportune time to crack up laughing; regretfully this is not the case. Real people - whole generations - of Palestinians are on the verge of being locked into another decade of protracted and violent military occupation. Many Israelis’ lives and hopes are at stake as well. It has been...