By Abukar Arman

Indonesian Muslims take part in an anti U.S.-Israel-Egypt protest in front of the Egyptian embassy in Jakarta on Jan. 17, demonstrating against an underground wall being built to block a network of tunnels crossing Egypt’s border with the Gaza Strip. (Photo: Bay Ismoyo/ AFP-Getty Images)

The recent Egyptian government’s decision to seal the few “tunnels of life” that allowed people of Gaza to bypass the ongoing inhumane economic strangulation—along with its harassment and cruel treatment of the participants of Gaza Freedom March and the Viva Palestina humanitarian convoy—earned it a prominent position in history’s page of shame. A page crowded by wealthy Arab nations who failed the Palestinian people and abandoned them at their most vulnerable time.

However, by no means should that sideline drama veil or in any way divert attention away from the root cause of the problem—the over six decades of oppression imposed upon the Palestinian people.

In that period, the state of Israel has occupied Palestine with an iron fist, denying Palestinians the right to self-determination and coercing part of their “elite” to surrender to what seems like a condition of eternal subjugation. However, the gravest of the Palestinian sufferings is embodied in the suffering of the people of Gaza as they endure a vicious economic strangulation unilaterally imposed by Israel. And despite worldwide condemnation of that egregious draconian policy, Israel continues to operate with impunity, devoid of conscience.

In their 575-page report released last September, the fact-finding mission on Israel’s disproportionate use of force in Gaza appointed by the U.N. Human Rights Commission has confirmed the ugly truth that most of the Western media were inoculated to under-report or outright ignore. The mission was led by Judge Richard Goldstone, former member of the South African Constitutional Court and former Chief Prosecutor of the United Nations International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. While the report also blamed Hamas, it highlighted that “there was strong evidence to establish that numerous serious violations of international law, both humanitarian law and human rights law, were committed by Israel during the military operations in Gaza. … Actions amounting to war crimes and possibly, in some respects, crimes against humanity, were committed by the Israel Defense Force.”

According to Article 39 of the report, the Israeli forces intentionally targeted and attacked Al Quds Hospital in the adjacent ambulance depot in Gaza with white phosphorous shells, an internationally banned chemical substance that, among other things, instantaneously burns the human being into skeleton.

Although the key recommendation of Goldstone was for the U.N. Security Council to pass a resolution mandating a credible investigation into the war-crimes allegations by the International Criminal Court, no such action has been taken.

In reaction to the report, the U.S. Congress—while succumbing to the “Israel Lobby”—has passed a non-binding resolution condemning the Goldstone Report. The resolution was intended to express unequivocal blind loyalty to Israel, and to pressure the Obama administration to use its veto power (as a permanent member of the Security Council) against any resolution that might expose Israel. Apparently, the strategy worked; the report is now piling dust in the oblivion.

For whatever it’s worth, it is this kind of culture of impunity that, according to Goldstone, “emboldens Israel and her conviction of being untouchable.” This concern was immediately dismissed as anti-Semitic by loyalists and supporters of oppressive Zionism. Never mind that Judge Goldstone is Jewish and is a supporter of Israel’s right to exist.

Make no mistake, anti-Semitism is a real racist phenomenon; however, the politically motivated excessive use of the term to character-assassinate and silence legitimate critics and peace and justice advocates, such as former President Jimmy Carter and Archbishop Desmond Tutu, simply defeats the purpose.

Meanwhile, though the Obama administration is showing signs of discomfort with the current Israeli government, the U.S. foreign policy toward Middle East is still driven by unconditional loyalty.

As the Obama administration tries to reduce the post-9/11tension between the United States and the Islamic world and rein in the rapid growth of extremism, the Palestine issue remains an open sore that is festering in America’s foreign policy. While the current administration has attempted to demonstrate its intention of becoming an honest broker by appointing a credible diplomat—former Senator George Mitchell—as the Middle East envoy, Israel continues its belligerent oppression and expansionist policy by defiantly building new settlements.

Led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, Israel is adamant to continue the ever-expanding land grab driven by illegal home demolitions and confiscations, daily dreadful human rights abuses at check points, random imprisonment and assassinations, suppression of independent media, and systematic ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. This, needless to say, has frustrated the Obama administration, whose out-of-the-ordinary reaction to Netanyahu’s visit to the United States has caused Israel a big embarrassment.

In an article intended to rally the troops against Obama, Jerusalem Post’s hawkish columnist, Caroline Glick, wrote, “It isn’t every day that a visiting leader from a strategically vital U.S. ally is brought into the White House in an unmarked van in the middle of the night rather than greeted like a friend at the front door; is forbidden to have his picture taken with the president; is forced to leave the White House alone, through a side exit.”

Though this was not a decision to stop or even suspend the roughly $3 billion of unrestricted aid given to Israel every year, it still turned many heads and galvanized the usual suspects to come after Obama with all sorts of accusations.

Not since 1990 when then Secretary of State James Baker sent a blunt public message to then Israeli Prime Minister Ytsakh Shamir, telling him “call us when you are serious about peace … the telephone number is 1-202-546-1414,’ has U.S. leadership sent Israel a stern message that its actions are unacceptable.

At the end of the day, convincing Israel to do the right thing and stop establishing new facts on the ground to further complicate an already complex political issue will require more than symbolism. And nothing substantive is likely to happen until the United States modifies its one-sided Middle East policy. Meanwhile, Israel will continue business as usual. It might invade Gaza again. Some opinion makers in Israel are already boasting about what “Operation Cast Lead 2″ would look like with the use of “advanced Israeli-made Marakava 4 tanks.”

Nothing equates to oppression more than the inaction of an apathetic witness.

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Muffled Screams of Gaza

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on Sunday blamed U.S. President Barack Obama for delaying the resumption of Middle East peace talks by not standing firm on his demand to see a complete freeze in West Bank settlements.

In an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel, Abbas said that he would not rescind his own stance on the matter. He added that the Palestinians expected Obama to convince Israel to announce a complete freeze, accusing the American administration of having changed its stance on the matter.

He told the daily that the optimism he had felt following Obama’s election had waned, and he was no longer satisfied with the American president’s performance.
Abbas has made similar remarks over the last few months, both with regard to his disappointment with Obama as well as his demand for a settlement freeze as a condition for re-launching peace talks.

Obama’s special Mideast envoy, George Mitchell, has laid blame for the stalled talks on Abbas.

Mitchell believed the Palestinians were showing little enthusiasm for talks because inaction was safer than reentering dialogue when the outcome was so uncertain, the London-based A-Sharq-al-Awsat reported a few days ago.

Mitchell has urged Europe to step up pressure on Abbas in an attempt to kick-start stalled peace talks with Israel, said the paper.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed late last year to a 10-month temporary construction freeze, but the Palestinians have declared that to be insufficient.
Source. haaretz.com

The Canadian Charger
“What comes to my mind when I think of our Parliamentary mission to Gaza and the West Bank is one word-apartheid.”
That was how Bloc Québécois MP Richard Nadeau summed up his August visit to the region.

He went with NDP MP Libby Davies and Liberal Boris Wrzesnewskj on behalf of the Canada-Palestine Parliamentary Association. Because the Association does not have 50 members of Parliament, it gets no budget, and so the three had to do it on their own dime. They went with three people from the Code Pink peace group, two of whom speak Arabic.

The Canadian government did not want them to go to Gaza but offered help in going to the West Bank. The Egyptian ambassador in Canada was equally unhelpful. They had to make their way to Egypt to manage their way through bureaucratic red tape, making arrangements with the occasional sympathetic diplomatic or administrative staffer.

At the last minute they got permission to enter Gaza from Egypt, but they still had to spend hours re-negotiating their way with Egyptian officials at the Rafah crossing into Gaza. But before Gaza they first went to Jordan.

“In Jordan,” said Nadeau “Muhammed Ali Siraj, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, spoke of how Israel promotes extremism.” According to him, on leaving South Lebanon and Gaza the Israel Defence Force engaged in a scorched earth program. Siraj sees that tactic as providing the impetus for Hamas and Hezbollah and for giving Iran influence in the region.

After meeting with various officials, they made their way to the West Bank. There they spoke with officials of the Palestinian Authority and the Palestine Liberation Organization. They also visited Bil’in, where the local population is engaged in demonstrations to prevent the separation wall from cutting the town off from their fields. They were informed that at night Israeli forces enter Bil’in to seize and arrest activists. They also set off noise bombs, which terrify the children. Legal action is being taken in Canada by the town against two Canadian companies involved in settlement construction on their land, as such construction is a violation of international law.

PLO operatives told the MP’s of the impact of Israeli actions in the West Bank. Only a bit over half is left to them. 9% has been taken by settlers, 8% has been turned into security zones, mainly around settlements, and 28.5% is a military buffer along the Jordan River. Israeli expansion of settlements and the separation wall along with Jewish expansion in Jerusalem virtually cut the West Bank in two. With 2.8 million Palestinians in the West Bank, there are now 485,000 settlers.

The delegation also visited Hebron, deep in the West Bank, where they met with UN officials and the mayor. It is a city of 170,000, with perhaps 800 Jewish settlers. The settlers are extremists who engage in frequent incidents against the Palestinians. UN officials recorded 291 such incidents in the first ten months of 2008. In 1994, Israel shut down the main market area to provide a buffer to protect the settlers. While the Hebron settlers do not recognize Israel and rely on financial support from sympathizers in New York, the Israeli army supplies them with military protection. When Israel has attempted to dismantle some of their facilities, they have responded by attacking and firing on Palestinians. The settlers, unlike the Palestinians, are allowed to carry fire arms.

Jerusalem was another stop on their trip. According to the PLO representatives, Palestinians living there pay the same taxes as Jews, but they receive much poorer services. They are apt to encounter poor water pressure and frequent unexpected loss of electricity. They also do not have garbage collection. Then, as a final indignity, they run the risk of expulsion from their homes without warning or compensation, to make way for Jewish families. The MP’s ran into this phenomenon first hand.

They encountered a scene in East Jerusalem where a Palestinian family was ensconced in a tent across the street from a house from which they had been evicted a few days before. They were replaced by a Hasidic family. Then Nadeau and his fellow members were led by reporters to another situation a few streets away. There they met the Hamoun family, who were thrown out of their home. This is an extended family, living together in the house which was built in 1954. Yet, Israel claimed that it had been owned by Jews in 1948! The army took their belongings from the house and carted them off to a dump, but the UN employees retrieved their things and gave them assistance. One soldier took the laptop belonging to a university student and deliberately broke it.

When the delegation arrived in Gaza, they encountered devastation and abject poverty. They were escorted around by Stephanie Fox, from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). They also met business people and Palestinians from the health system. While the war lasted 22 days, there was virtually no resistance during the last four days. That is when Israel completely destroyed the industrial park, where furniture and textiles were manufactured, according to Fox. Israel also destroyed the water filtration system. As a result, raw sewage flows directly into the Mediterranean. “The sea smells terrible, and the water is murky,” said Nadeau in commenting on his visit to the shore.

70% of the government buildings were destroyed, including the parliament building, the Ministry of Education, and the fishing authority. The MP’s spoke to the head of a fishermen’s organization, who told them that Israel severely limited how far out they could go, resulting in an 80% reduction in their catch and in their landing only very small fish. As they will never grow to size, the future of the fishing is in danger.

14,000 houses were destroyed, including dwellings in the refugee camp which had been established in 1948. “I saw people in the camp living in tents,” he said. There were 225 of them in the camp. These were ordinary camping tents, and they were deteriorating because of the long exposure to sun and wind. The tents are very hot inside and must remain closed to keep out the blowing sand. Some people had attached sheds to their tents with sleeves of aluminum sheeting. Sheds were made from salvaged two-by-fours, and the connection to the sheds made it possible to get some indirect breeze into the tents to relieve the miserable heat.

The embargo on goods going into Gaza, enforced by an Israeli-Egyptian blockade, has resulted in a resort to tunnels into Egypt to bring in all kinds of goods, from gasoline to cows. Gasoline is sold in bottles. Goods cost ten times what they ordinarily would, and only people in public employment can afford them. Their salaries continued to be paid by the European Union, even if, for example, some teachers are unable to teach because their schools are no longer there. Almost a third of the tunnels were eliminated by Israeli action during the war.

There is a rather sinister side to the tunnel traffic. Some of the smugglers bring in illicit drugs, and an underworld is growing in Gaza, “a kind of mafia,” Nadeau called it. Israel limits normal kinds of delivery severely. Construction materials were forbidden. Disposable diapers and hair conditioner were also on the prohibited list. Seed and fertilizer are banned, eliminating greenhouse production.

Nadeau noted that the European Union funded the construction of government buildings in Gaza. Canada built the airport. These things were wiped out, along with 50 UN buildings. 200 schools were destroyed or damaged.

“How can the donor nations stand for Israel’s destruction of these things that they paid for?” he asked. UNRWA’s Christer Nordahl responded, “I’ve been here for the last nine years, and I ask the same question every day, and I have gotten no answer.”

Gazans want the blockade lifted. They also want people to come to see what things are like. “They treated us like kings,” said Nadeau. “They were so glad that someone wanted to see what they have to put up with.”

According to Nadeau, the Palestinians want a renewal of the negotiations on the road map to peace and a two-state solution. As to the settlers, Palestinians want a halt to all construction, to all planning and authorizations, and all subventions. They want as well an end to land seizures and a halt to arrival of any more settlers.

They want Canada to refuse to recognize the settlements and to forbid financial support from Canada in any form, charitable or otherwise. They call for a total ban on all business and investment arrangements with settlers. Canadians should not, they urge, be involved in buying or renting land for settlers in the Territories. Goods from the Occupied Territories should be barred, or at least they should be clearly labelled as to place of origin.

Additionally, Canada has been paying $16 million a year for UNWRA. “UNRWA is a godsend in Gaza,” said Nadeau. They carry out a variety of relief functions, including running a summer youth camp. Canada has not paid this year. UNWRA and the Gazans are waiting.

A final thought on what is at stake in the Israel-Palestine conflict. A Palestinian psychiatrist from Gaza told Nadeau that there is general paranoia on both sides. The Jews have endured horrendous persecution, culminating in the Holocaust. They now find themselves a small country in a Muslim sea. The Palestinians see themselves as victims of the Nakba and its aftermath, facing a militarily powerful Israel with important support from the United States. They are seriously frightened of each other. Nadeau observed that Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank think that the treatment that they receive from Israel reflects an Israeli desire that they should leave.
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“Mission to Gaza and the West Bank is one word-apartheid.”

Hamas is interested in opening a dialogue with the Obama administration because its policies are much better than those of former US president George W. Bush, Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal said on Sunday.
He denied reports about progress in negotiations for the release of kidnapped IDF soldier Gilad Schalit.

Mashaal also denied that Hamas was seeking to impose strict Islamic rule in the Gaza Strip, saying religion should not be enforced through coercion.

The Damascus-based leader’s remarks came in an interview with the Qatari newspaper Al-Watan and were published a day after Hamas foiled an attempt by a more radical Islamist group to establish an Islamic emirate in the Gaza Strip.

At least 28 Palestinians were killed and more than 120 were wounded in clashes that erupted between Hamas security forces and the Jund Ansar Allah group in Rafah.

The group’s leader, Sheikh Abdel Latif Mousa, died when he and one of his bodyguards blew themselves up during attempts to persuade them to surrender.

“We’re not courting anyone, but we are dealing with matters with openness and realism,” Mashaal said when asked whether his recent statements about accepting a Palestinian state alongside Israel marked a shift in Hamas’s policy.

“We have no problem dealing with any party in the world expect for the Zionist occupier. As for the US or any other country in the west or east, we are prepared to conduct dialogue with them because we are owners of a just cause.”

He praised President Barack Obama for using a different language than his predecessor.

“As long as there’s a new language, we welcome it,” Mashaal said. “But we want to see not only a change of language, but also a change of policies on the ground. We have said that we are prepared to cooperate with the US or any other international party that would enable the Palestinians to get rid of occupation.”

Mashaal stressed, however, that his statements did not mean that Hamas would accept the demands of the Quartet to recognize Israel, renounce violence and honoring all previous agreements reached between Palestinians and Israelis.

Mashaal strongly denied that his organization was trying to impose Shari’a in the Gaza Strip. Hamas, he said, was a national liberation movement whose main priority was to “liberate the homeland and restore Palestinian rights.”

Hamas did not have a policy of “imposing religion on anyone, because faith should come through persuasion, not coercion.”
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Khaled Mashaal: Hamas can speak with Obama

Israel’s Hi-tech Military solutions