2/7/2010

Gaza in Plain Language
Joe Mowrey, Dissident Voice 1/19/2010
In articles acknowledging the one year anniversary of the assault on Gaza, blunt and unsparing language about what really happened is often avoided. Despite sympathy for and support of the Palestinian people in their struggle against dispossession and oppression, the description of what took place in January 2009 is sometimes buffered by a misguided sense of political correctness. Yes, it’s terrible. Yes, it is unjust. But we don’t want to be inflammatory or risk offending the sensitivities of those who through their own willful ignorance cling to the notion that Israel is a victim state, fighting for its very survival. The argument is that we should reach out to them and attempt to educate them and win them over.I’ll be more forthright in this commentary.The sociopathic Zionist administration of Israel, as part of its continuing brutal colonization of Palestine, set out to deliberately devastate the already nearly-incapacitated infrastructure which supports the existence of one and a half million human refugees. The people of Gaza, second-, third-, and fourth-generation dispossessed Palestinians, are living in forced exile from land their families inhabited and cultivated for generations. Half of them are children under the age of fifteen. Their culture and their economy has been systematically ravaged by Israel for decades and since 2006 a criminal siege supported by the United States, as well as much of the international community, has deprived them of all but the most minimal resources for subsistence. This oppressed and brutalized population was then bombed, bulldozed and terrorized mercilessly for twenty-three days.Below is a small sampling of facts concerning what the fourth largest military in the world did to a captive and defenseless population. The source materials used to substantiate these statistics are available on request. If the reality presented here goes beyond the stretch of your imagination, you can verify the data yourself. Though you’d better hurry. Much of this information appears to be disappearing down Google’s memory hole, just as is the fate of the people of Gaza...

Between the Wall and the Occupied Space: 'To Exist Is to Resist'
William Parry, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs 2/6/2010
January-FebruaryA PLAQUE DEPICTING Jerusalem’s Dome of the Rock stands over the main entrance to Abdul Halim’s unfinished three- story home, asking Allah to bless the house. It is dated 1999. The Israeli army took over the building in January 2003 and, ever since, has been stationed on the rooftop, with the family unable to complete and live in the building. It’s what you might call a mixed blessing, for in June 2004, Abdul Halim received notice that the home had a demolition order placed on it because it straddled the route assigned to Israel’s illegal separation wall. But the home’s military occupiers intervened, asking the Civil Administration to freeze the demolition order given the rooftop’s strategic value. “I’m happy for the army to stay on the roof, as long as it means they won’t destroy my house,” Abdul Halim says with pitiful gratitude.The absurd reality that Abdul Halim and his family have had thrust upon them does not stop there, however. The concrete wall, about 15 feet high, slices its way through their property and, instead of detouring around the house, has been built right up to one side, so that the house actually becomes part of the separation wall before the latter continues in its brutal cement form.The handsome, sandstone colored building now stands out in the village of Nazlit Issa, which is situated close to the Green Line in the northern West Bank. That’s not because of the camouflage netting that covers Abdul Halim’s rooftop and spills over the edges, or the mounted video camera that monitors everything and everyone in sight. What sets it apart is its stasis—life, growth and development unnaturally put on hold in a landscape that has since been strangled......

National reconciliation imminent
Ahmad Yousef, Ma’an News Agency 2/7/2010
That Fatah leader Nabil Sha’ath took the initiative and visited Gaza after three years of ruptured relations with this beloved part of the homeland, in an attempt to break the ice between Gaza and Ramallah, is a praiseworthy step.No doubt, the bloody events in 2007 created a discrepancy between compatriots who share the same national cause.Thus, this visit to the Gaza Strip indicates a desire to meet with the brothers in Hamas and to maintain contact, in order to work out an exit strategy for the so-called "Impasse of signing the Egyptian document." The visit also aims at speeding up reconciliation in accordance with the document, which crowned general efforts, recurrent meetings in Cairo and follow up meetings in Ramallah and Damascus.Nobody denies that Egypt made a move to rescue Palestinians from the situation. They exerted significant efforts by sponsoring dialogue between all Palestinian factions including Hamas and Fatah. No doubt that dialogue took time, and that there was a boring rigidity for the details.This resulted from the lack of mutual trust, and of the defamation campaigns between Hamas and Fatah. If there was mutual trust, dialogue wouldn’t have taken long, but because the cut was so deep, we didn’t trust each other, and so each step was scrutinized and defined very strictly.We hope this visit will be a good omen for our internal relations, and lay the groundwork for cooperation and noble competition between Fatah and Hamas in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. We hope each party will not fear that the other’s victory will lead to a monopoly of sovereignty because everyone has realized that, under occupation, we have no choice but to work together, dedicating all we have to our homeland....

United solidarity with Gaza

Electronic Intifada: 8 Feb 2010 - Once the Gaza Freedom March arrived in Cairo I repeatedly heard justification that organizers did not want to put Egyptian protesters at risk. Yet, Egyptians regularly protest in Egypt despite the risks. For a group of outsiders to justify the exclusion of our involvement without asking our opinion -- in spite of the good intentions of "protecting" us -- felt paternalistic and demeaning. Philip Rizk comments for The Electronic Intifada.

Justice denied in Gaza

Electronic Intifada: 8 Feb 2010 - RAMALLAH, occupied West Bank (IPS) - Gazans hoping for a modicum of justice following Israel's indiscriminate military assault on the coastal territory during December 2008 and January 2009 -- which left 1,400 Palestinians, mostly civilians, dead -- could be waiting in vain. The Israeli government has taken the offensive in the propaganda battle and attacked United Nations-appointed Justice Richard Goldstone's report into war crimes committed during the war.

The Useless Logic of Round Numbers: War is Criminal Any Day

Palestine Chronicle: 8 Feb 2010 - By Ramzy Baroud The media's habit of revisiting certain issues at set intervals can be strange and even illogical at times. For example, many news outlets commented on President Barack Obama’s first 100 days in office, as well as on the anniversary of his election win, and then again one year after his inauguration day. With every new round number, more commentators joined in and discussions heated up between proponents and detractors of his government’s performance. I am not exactly sure why we like round numbers. Is it because they make valuations easy, even when the particular number is irrelevant? Some philosophers, Plato included, believed that order and symmetry are...

Is One Iraqi's Self-Hatred Newsworthy?

Palestine Chronicle: 7 Feb 2010 - By M. Shahid Alam An Arab-American of Lebanese descent, fluent in Arabic, Anthony Shadid was one of a handful of unembedded Western journalists reporting from Iraq during the US invasion in 2003. At the time, he was The Washington Post's correspondent for Islamic Affairs in the Middle East. His dispatches from Iraq were about Iraqis, about the destruction visited upon them by a war whose architects claimed that they were bringing democracy to that country. He reported the destruction and mayhem caused by this war by letting the Iraqis speak for themselves: and they spoke of their pain, their anguish, their perplexity and their anger. For his honest reporting, for...