Added: 15. October 2009
Palestinians
Ecuador Becomes 5th Latin American Country to Recognize Palestinian State
Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Bolivia have announced this month that they recognize Palestine as state within 1967 borders.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas waves at the Palestinian Presidential compound in the West Bank city of Ramallah, Thursday, Oct. 14, 2010.
Ecuador President Rafael Correa formally recognized Palestine as an independent state on Friday, following its neighboring countries Bolivia, Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay earlier this month, French news agency AFP reported.
According to AFP, Correa signed “the Ecuadoran government’s official recognition of Palestine as a free and independent state with 1967 borders.”
Ecuador’s foreign ministry issued a statement explaining that the country’s decision “vindicates the valid and legitimate desire of the Palestinian people for a free and independent state,” AFP reported.
Read moreEcuador Becomes 5th Latin American Country to Recognize Palestinian State
Prof. Israel Shahak: The History of the Jews (Video)
See also:
Israel Shahak (Hebrew: ????? ????; born Himmelstaub, April 28, 1933 — July 2, 2001) was a Polish-born Israeli professor of chemistry at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, known especially as a radical political thinker, author, and civil rights activist. Between 1970-1990, he was president of the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights and was an outspoken critic of the Israeli government. Shahak’s writings on Judaism have been a source of widespread controversy.
Born in Warsaw, Poland,[1] Shahak was the youngest child of a cultured, religious, pro-Zionist, Ashkenazi Jewish family.[2] During German occupation of Poland, his family was forced into the Warsaw Ghetto. His brother escaped and joined the Royal Air Force. His mother paid a poor Catholic family to hide him, but when her money ran out he was returned. In 1943 he and his family were sent to the Poniatowa concentration camp, near Lublin, where his father died. Israel and his mother managed to escape and returned to Warsaw, but within the year, they were both sent to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Shahak was liberated from the camp in 1945, and shortly thereafter emigrated to the British Mandate of Palestine, where he wanted to join a kibbutz, but was turned down as “too weedy”.[3]
Read moreProf. Israel Shahak: The History of the Jews (Video)
Robert Fisk: An American $3 Billion Bribe to Israel That Stinks of Appeasement
See also:
– FACTS!!! Gaza War Lies Vs. Facts (Video)
Hillary Clinton meets the Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas, in Ramallah last year
In any other country, the current American bribe to Israel, and the latter’s reluctance to accept it, in return for even a temporary end to the theft of somebody else’s property would be regarded as preposterous. Three billion dollars’ worth of fighter bombers in return for a temporary freeze in West Bank colonisation for a mere 90 days? Not including East Jerusalem – so goodbye to the last chance of the east of the holy city for a Palestinian capital – and, if Benjamin Netanyahu so wishes, a rip-roaring continuation of settlement on Arab land. In the ordinary sane world in which we think we live, there is only one word for Barack Obama’s offer: appeasement. Usually, our lords and masters use that word with disdain and disgust.
Anyone who panders to injustice by one people against another people is called an appeaser. Anyone who prefers peace at any price, let alone a $3bn bribe to the guilty party – is an appeaser. Anyone who will not risk the consequences of standing up for international morality against territorial greed is an appeaser. Those of us who did not want to invade Afghanistan were condemned as appeasers. Those of us who did not want to invade Iraq were vilified as appeasers. Yet that is precisely what Obama has done in his pathetic, unbelievable effort to plead with Netanyahu for just 90 days of submission to international law. Obama is an appeaser.
The fact that the West and its political and journalistic elites – I include the ever more disreputable New York Times – take this tomfoolery at face value, as if it can seriously be regarded as another “step” in the “peace process”, to put this mystical nonsense “back on track”, is a measure of the degree to which we have taken leave of our senses in the Middle East.
It is a sign of just how far America (and, through our failure to condemn this insanity, Europe) has allowed its fear of Israel – and how far Obama has allowed his fear of Israeli supporters in Congress and the Senate – to go.
Three billion dollars for three months is one billion dollars a month to stop Israel’s colonisation. That’s half a billion dollars a fortnight. That’s $500m a week. That’s $71,428,571 a day, or $2,976,190 an hour, or $49,603 a minute. And as well as this pot of gold, Washington will continue to veto any resolutions critical of Israel in the UN and prevent “Palestine” from declaring itself a state. It’s worth invading anyone to get that much cash to stage a military withdrawal, let alone the gracious gesture of not building more illegal colonies for only 90 days while furiously continuing illegal construction in Jerusalem at the same time.
Read moreRobert Fisk: An American $3 Billion Bribe to Israel That Stinks of Appeasement
Israel: Influential Rabbi Ovadia Yosef Calls For Palestinians To ‘Perish From The World’
Netanyahu distances himself from his own policy?
Now listen to Benjamin Netanyahu:
Firebrand: Rabbi Ovadia Yosef said Palestinians and their president Mahmoud Abbas should ‘perish from this earth’
Aug. 31 (Daily Mail) –Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has distanced himself from an influential rabbi after he said Palestinians and their President Mahmoud Abbas should ‘perish from the world’.
Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, spiritual head of the religious Shas party in Israel’s government, gave a fiery sermon as Middle East peace talks were set to begin next week.
The 89-year-old rabbi – founder of the ultra-orthodox Shas Party – said: ‘Abu Mazen and all these evil people should perish from this earth.
‘God should strike them and these Palestinians – evil haters of Israel – with a plague.’
Mr Netanyahu said Israel wanted to reach a peace deal with the Palestinians that would ensure good neighbourly relations.
A statement from his office said: ‘The comments do not reflect Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s view or the position of the government of Israel.’
It added that Mr Netanyahu is going to the peace talks with a goal of ‘reaching an agreement with the Palestinians that will put an end to the conflict’.
Mr Abbas’ government responded angrily and demanded that the Israeli government put a stop to what it described as a ‘culture of hatred in Israel toward Palestinians’.
Peace talks: Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has distanced himself from the comments ahead of negotiations with the Palestinians next week
U.S. State Department spokesman P.J.Crowley condemned the rabbi’s comments in a statement, saying they were ‘not only deeply offensive, but incitement such as this hurts the cause of peace’.
Read moreIsrael: Influential Rabbi Ovadia Yosef Calls For Palestinians To ‘Perish From The World’
Benjamin Netanyahu: ‘America is something that can easily be moved.’ ‘The world won’t say a thing.’ ‘The world will say we’re defending.’
See also:
– Exposed: The Truth About Israel’s Land Grab In The West Bank (The Independent)
Israel calls this self-defense:
(Click on image to enlarge. Can’t show this often enough.)
Does this look like self-defense???
Added: 15. July 2010
The Washington Post, and Glenn Kessler, have picked up the story that Netanyahu said that “America is a thing that can be easily moved,” back in 2001. Good to have this knowledge inside the Beltway at last.
Below is a transcript of the Second-Intifadah era conversation, supplied by Dena Shunra, a Hebrew<>English translator living and working in the United States. Note that Netanyahu quotes his extremist father counseling him to give up 2 percent of Hebron (during the Wye negotiations) so as to maintain the Jewish settlements there and get people off Israel’s back. And note that Netanyahu’s defiance about American opinion extends to the whole world. When his interlocutor asks about world opinion re continued conquest/settlement, he says, “The world won’t say a thing. The world will say we’re defending.”
Shunra: “I went from 3:15 to about 8:00 – the rest wasn’t very interesting.
“Background: Netanyahu is visiting the home of a woman who just lost her husband, and she is being cheered by five other widows. There’s a young boy present, and Netanyahu asks (at about 3:00) that they turn off the camera so he can speak to them ‘freely’. The camera gets turned on again in mid-conversation.”
Transcript follows:
Exposed: The Truth About Israel’s Land Grab In The West Bank
“Jewish settlers, who claim a divine right to the whole of Israel” … like Hitler’s ‘divine right’ to claim land for his supreme Aryan race.
Israel calls this self-defense:
(Click on image to enlarge.)
I guess Hitler would have called this self-defense too!
See also:
– Now truth is bad for you: ‘Obama warns Erdogan international Gaza flotilla probe bad for Turkey’
Report reveals more than 42 percent of territory is controlled by settlers
A Jewish settler hangs the Israeli flag over a vacated building in the West Bank town of Beit Sahur (AFP)
Jewish settlers, who claim a divine right to the whole of Israel, now control more than 42 per cent of the occupied West Bank, representing a powerful obstacle to the creation of a Palestinian state, a new report has revealed.
The jurisdiction of some 200 settlements, illegal under international law, cover much more of the occupied Palestinian territory than previously thought. And a large section of the land has been seized from private Palestinian landowners in defiance even of an Israeli supreme court ruling, the report said, a finding which sits uncomfortably with Israeli claims that it builds only on state land.
Drawing on official Israeli military maps and population statistics, the leading Israeli human rights group, B’Tselem, compiled the new findings, which were released just as the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, arrived in Washington to try to heal a gaping rift with US President Barack Obama over the issue of settlements.
“The settlement enterprise has been characterised, since its inception, by an instrumental, cynical, and even criminal approach to international law, local legislation, Israeli military orders, and Israeli law, which has enabled the continuous pilfering of land from Palestinians in the West Bank,” the report concluded.
Read moreExposed: The Truth About Israel’s Land Grab In The West Bank
Israeli Commandos Ordered To Stop Gaza Aid Ships
Israeli commandos were ordered yesterday to stop five ships carrying 700 supporters and thousands of tons of supplies and construction materials to the besieged city of Gaza.
Israel has warned that if the ships cross the 20-mile exclusion zone it maintains off the Gaza coast, they will be boarded and towed to the port of Ashdod.
White House Press Corps longest-serving member Helen Thomas on her one question for Obama
President Obama could never ever admit that Israel has nuclear weapons, because the US would have been forbidden by law to support Israel for all those years and so Obama would have admitted that the US government has illegally supported Israel (by looting and stealing from the US taxpayer).
White House Press Corps longest-serving member says Obama lost credibility when he dodged her question on Israeli nukes.
Added: 27. March 2010
UK Jewish MP: Israel acting like Nazis in Gaza
– Former Israeli Minister: ‘It’s a Trick, We Always Use It.’ (calling people ‘anti-Semitic’)
Added: 16. Januar 2009
Israel calls this self-defense:
(Click on image to enlarge.)
More:
– Palestinian children are stoned while walking to school (Christian Peacemaker Teams)
– Israel admits organ harvesting from Palestinians, and others, without consent (Guardian)
– UN assembly votes for probes of Gaza war crimes charges (Reuters)
– U.N. rights envoy: Israeli war crime of the greatest magnitude under international law in Gaza (Reuters)
– U.S. shipped 989 munitions containers to Israel week before Gaza invasion (Australien Herald)
– Paul Craig Roberts: Israel and the Goldstone Report – War Criminals Are Becoming Arbiters of the Law (CounterPunch)
– Israel’s war crimes in Gaza (Independent)
– Amnesty International: Gaza white phosphorus shells were US made (Times)
– Did Israeli soldiers kill unarmed civilians? (Toronto Star):
‘The most moral army in the world’ killed civilians without cause
– Israeli soldiers report abuses in Gaza (Los Angeles Times)
– Tony Benn to BBC: If you won’t broadcast the Gaza appeal then I will myself (BBC)
– Israel admits troops may have used phosphorus shells in Gaza (Guardian)
– Outcry over Israel’s reported use of phosphorus in Gaza (IHT)
– Israel accused of executing parents in front of children in Gaza (Telegraph)
– Gaza: ‘I watched an Israeli soldier shoot dead my two little girls’ (Independent)
– Israel ‘admits’ using white phosphorus munitions (Times)
– Gaza building apparently hit by phosphorus: UN (Vancouver Sun)
– Israeli use of white phosphorus ‘undeniable’: Amnesty International (The Age)
– Israel used phosphorus in heavily populated areas, doctors charge (Kansas City Star)
– Israeli army investigates use of white phosphorous in Gaza (Guardian)
– Israel shelled UK war graves in Gaza (Telegraph)
– Israel ‘will resume bombing’ of Gaza if Hamas reopens tunnels (Telegraph)
– Gideon Levy / Gaza war ended in utter failure for Israel (Ha’aretz)
Palestinian children are stoned while walking to school
Israeli army negligence permits Israeli settler attack on children
Added: 6. Januar 2010
[Note: According to the Geneva Conventions, the International Court of Justice in the Hague, and numerous United Nations resolutions, all Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) are illegal. Most settlement outposts are considered illegal under Israeli law.]
(Christian Peacemaker Teams) — At-Tuwani, South Hebron Hills On Wednesday morning, 30 December 2009, an Israeli settler from the outpost of Havat Ma’on (Hill 833) chased and threw stones at Palestinian schoolchildren from the villages of Tuba and Maghayir Al-Abeed. The Israeli army exposed the children to this attack by arriving more than ninety minutes late to escort the children to their school in the village of At-Tuwani.
The schoolchildren had been waiting for the army escort to arrive for nearly thirty minutes when an Israeli settler came out from a house within Havat Ma’on. The fourteen Palestinian children, ages six to fifteen, immediately began to move away from the settler, towards their village. Witnesses reported that when the settler saw the children moving away, he charged towards them, hurling stones at the children with a slingshot. He chased them several hundred meters, all the way back to their village. Tareq Ibrahim Abu Jundiyye, a fifteen-year-old boy from Tuba, said, regarding the experience, “The younger kids started crying as we were running away because they were afraid the settler would catch them. I mean, we had to run away. If I had stayed I would have been struck on the head by a rock.”
While the children were waiting, CPTers made calls to the local army office, urging them to send soldiers to escort the schoolchildren. The army dispatcher claimed that the soldiers thought there was no school because of the rain. The army only arrived after the mayor of At-Tuwani called the Palestinian District Coordinating Office (DCO), a Palestinian body responsible for liaising with the Israeli military regarding civilian affairs in Area C, and the DCO, in turn, spoke with the Israeli army. The army’s late arrival caused the children to miss their first two classes of the day.
The children require a military escort to and from school because of repeated attacks by Israeli settlers from Ma’on and Havat Ma’on. The children must wait for the Israeli military in an area controlled by the Israeli settlers, a location where settlers have attacked the children several times in the past.
Read morePalestinian children are stoned while walking to school
Egypt deports British MP George Galloway from country
– Egypt bars George Galloway from country (Reuters):
CAIRO (Reuters) – Egyptian security escorted MP George Galloway to take a flight out of the country on Friday and he was barred from returning after violent protests over an aid convoy he led into Gaza, MENA news agency said.
The Foreign Ministry declared the left-wing politician an “unwelcome individual,” the agency said.
– Three Palestinians killed in Israeli air strike on Gaza (BBC News):
Three people, including a 14-year-old-boy, have been killed in Israeli air strikes overnight in the Gaza Strip, Palestinian medics say.
The Israeli military said it was responding to mortar and rocket attacks on Thursday on Israel from Gaza.
 Mr Galloway had been in Gaza with an aid convoy |
British MP George Galloway has been deported from Egypt, say activists working with him to take an aid convoy into Gaza.
The Bow and Bethnal Green MP had been with international activists trying to take 200 aid trucks into the blockaded Gaza Strip.
Egypt had refused some of the vehicles access and there have been protests and clashes on the Egypt-Gaza border.
The state news agency says Mr Galloway has left Egypt and returned home.
There have also been reports the Respect MP has been declared “persona non grata” and will not be allowed to enter Egypt again, following his criticism of Cairo over delays to the aid convoy.
Convoy tension
The BBC’s Cairo correspondent Yolande Knell said Mr Galloway had returned from Gaza, where the convoy arrived two days ago, and had been planning to head back to London.
But when he and his assistant returned to Egypt they learnt that seven other members of the convoy still in Gaza were due to be arrested on their return to Egypt.
Mr Galloway wanted to go back to accompany them out but it is understood the Egyptians would not allow him to return, bundled both men into a van and escorted them to the airport.
There has been much tension around the aid convoy after Egypt made it take a big detour, delaying its arrival. There were clashes with Egyptian police at a port close to the Rafah crossing, our correspondent said.
Read moreEgypt deports British MP George Galloway from country
Israel admits organ harvesting from Palestinians, and others, without consent
“We have the most moral army in the world.” – Defense Minister Ehud Barak
… with the most moral doctors …
Israel has admitted pathologists harvested organs from dead Palestinians, and others, without the consent of their families – a practice it said ended in the 1990s – it emerged at the weekend.
The admission, by the former head of the country’s forensic institute, followed a furious row prompted by a Swedish newspaper reporting that Israel was killing Palestinians in order to use their organs – a charge that Israel denied and called “antisemitic”.
The revelation, in a television documentary, is likely to generate anger in the Arab and Muslim world and reinforce sinister stereotypes of Israel and its attitude to Palestinians. Iran’s state-run Press TV tonight reported the story, illustrated with photographs of dead or badly injured Palestinians.
Ahmed Tibi, an Israeli Arab MP, said the report incriminated the Israeli army.
The story emerged in an interview with Dr Yehuda Hiss, former head of the Abu Kabir forensic institute near Tel Aviv. The interview was conducted in 2000 by an American academic who released it because of the row between Israel and Sweden over a report in the Stockholm newspaper Aftonbladet.
Channel 2 TV reported that in the 1990s, specialists at Abu Kabir harvested skin, corneas, heart valves and bones from the bodies of Israeli soldiers, Israeli citizens, Palestinians and foreign workers, often without permission from relatives.
The Israeli military confirmed to the programme that the practice took place, but added: “This activity ended a decade ago and does not happen any longer.”
Hiss said: “We started to harvest corneas … whatever was done was highly informal. No permission was asked from the family.”
However, there was no evidence that Israel had killed Palestinians to take their organs, as the Swedish paper reported. Aftonbladet quoted Palestinians as saying young men from the West Bank and Gaza Strip had been seized by the Israeli forces and their bodies returned to their families with missing organs. The interview with Hiss was released by Nancy Scheper-Hughes, professor of anthropology at the University of California-Berkeley who had conducted a study of Abu Kabir.
She was quoted by the Associated Press as saying that while Palestinians were “by a long shot” not the only ones affected, she felt the interview must be made public, because “the symbolism, you know, of taking skin of the population considered to be the enemy, [is] something, just in terms of its symbolic weight, that has to be reconsidered.”
Read moreIsrael admits organ harvesting from Palestinians, and others, without consent
Robert Fisk, The Independent’s award-winning Middle East correspondent: Obama is a Disaster, Worse than Bush
Added: 07. December 2009
More from Robert Fisk:
– America is performing its familiar role of propping up a dictator: Robert Fisk
– Robert Fisk Reveals The Truth Behind ‘The Demise Of The US Dollar’ Report
Paul Craig Roberts: The Obama Puppet – The World’s Least Powerful Man
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan’s first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University.
Paul Craig Roberts
It didn’t take the Israel Lobby very long to bring President Obama to heel regarding his prohibition against further illegal Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian land. Obama discovered that a mere American president is powerless when confronted by the Israel Lobby and that the United States simply is not allowed a Middle East policy separate from Israel’s.
Obama also found out that he cannot change anything else either, if he ever intended to do so.
The military/security lobby has war and a domestic police state on its agenda, and a mere American president can’t do anything about it.
President Obama can order the Guantanamo torture chamber closed and kidnapping and rendition and torture to be halted, but no one carries out the order.
Essentially, Obama is irrelevant.
President Obama can promise that he is going to bring the troops home, and the military lobby says, “No, you are going to send them to Afghanistan, and in the meantime start a war in Pakistan and maneuver Iran into a position that will provide an excuse for a war there, too. Wars are too profitable for us to let you stop them.”
And the mere president has to say, “Yes, Sir!”
Obama can promise health care to 50 million uninsured Americans, but he can’t override the veto of the war lobby and the insurance lobby. The war lobby says its war profits are more important than health care and that the country can’t afford both the “war on terror” and “socialized medicine.”
The insurance lobby says health care has to be provided by private health insurance; otherwise, we can’t afford it.
The war and insurance lobbies rattled their campaign contribution pocketbooks and quickly convinced Congress and the White House that the real purpose of the health care bill is to save money by cutting Medicare and Medicaid benefits, thereby “getting entitlements under control.”
Read morePaul Craig Roberts: The Obama Puppet – The World’s Least Powerful Man
Paul Craig Roberts: Republic of Fools & The Evil Empire
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan’s first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University.
Paul Craig Roberts
The US government is now so totally under the thumbs of organized interest groups that “our” government can no longer respond to the concerns of the American people who elect the president and the members of the House and Senate. Voters will vent their frustrations over their impotence on the president, which implies a future of one-term presidents. Soon our presidents will be as ineffective as Roman emperors in the final days of that empire.
Obama is already set on the course to a one-term presidency. He promised change, but has delivered none. His health care bill is held hostage by the private insurance companies seeking greater profits. The most likely outcome will be cuts in Medicare and Medicaid in order to help fund wars that enrich the military/security complex and the many companies created by privatizing services that the military once provided for itself at far lower costs. It would be interesting to know the percentage of the $700+ billion “defense” spending that goes to private companies. In American “capitalism,” an amazing amount of taxpayers’ earnings go to private firms via the government. Yet, Republicans scream about “socializing” health care.
Republicans and Democrats saw opportunities to create new sources of campaign contributions by privatizing as many military functions as possible. There are now a large number of private companies that have never made a dollar in the market, feeding instead at the public trough that drains taxpayers of dollars while loading Americans with debt service obligations.
Read morePaul Craig Roberts: Republic of Fools & The Evil Empire
UN assembly votes for probes of Gaza war crimes charges
Israeli soldiers prepare white phosphorus 155mm artillery shells (light green) (AFP)
UNITED NATIONS, Nov 5 (Reuters) – In a move that angered Israel, the U.N. General Assembly voted on Thursday to urge the Jewish state and Palestinians to investigate war crimes charges leveled in a controversial U.N. report on the Gaza war.
The Arab-drafted resolution is nonbinding and unlikely to lead to inquiries by either Israel or the militant Palestinian Hamas movement that rules Gaza into their conduct during the December-January conflict.
But the outcome was seen by Arab states as a public relations coup and a public discomfiture for Israel, which has reacted with outrage to the findings of the U.N. report, as have American Jewish groups.
Following a two-day debate, 114 countries voted for the resolution with 18 opposed — including Israel and its ally the United States — and 44 abstaining. No country has veto power in the assembly.
Read moreUN assembly votes for probes of Gaza war crimes charges
Amnesty International Report: Israel Is Denying Palestinians Access To Water
– Israel accused of denying Palestinians access to water (Independent)
– Paul Craig Roberts: Israel and the Goldstone Report – War Criminals Are Becoming Arbiters of the Law
 Some Palestinians only get 20 litres of water a day, Amnesty says |
Israel is denying Palestinians access to even the basic minimum of clean, safe water, Amnesty International says.
In a report, the human rights group says Israeli water restrictions discriminate against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank.
It says that in Gaza, Israel’s blockade has pushed the already ailing water and sewage system to “crisis point”.
Israel says the report is flawed and the Palestinians get more water than was agreed under the 1990s peace deal.
‘Basic need’
In the 112-page report, Amnesty says that on average Palestinian daily water consumption reaches 70 litres a day, compared with 300 litres for the Israelis.
 |
 Israel must end its discriminatory policies, immediately lift all the restrictions it imposes on Palestinians’ access to water  Donatella Rovera Amnesty International  Gaza thirsts as sewage crisis mounts Water shortages plague West Bank |
It says that some Palestinians barely get 20 litres a day – the minimum recommended even in humanitarian emergencies.
While Israeli settlers in the West Bank enjoy lush gardens and swimming pools, Amnesty describes a series of Israeli measures it says are discriminating against Palestinians:
- Israel has “entirely appropriated the Palestinians’ share of the Jordan river” and uses 80% of a key shared aquifer
- West Bank Palestinians are not allowed to drill wells without Israeli permits, which are “often impossible” to obtain
- Rainwater harvesting cisterns are “often destroyed by the Israeli army”
- Israeli soldiers confiscated a water tanker from villagers who were trying to remain in land Israel had declared a “closed military area”
- An unnamed Israeli soldier says rooftop Palestinian household water tanks are “good for target practice”
- Much of the land cut off by the West Bank barrier is land with good access to a major aquifer
- Israeli military operations have damaged Palestinian water infrastructure, including $6m worth during the Cast Lead operation in Gaza last winter
- The Israeli-Egyptian blockade of Gaza has “exacerbated what was already a dire situation” by denying many building materials needed for water and sewage projects.
The report also noted that the Palestinian water authorities have been criticised for bad management, quoting one audit that described the sector as in “total chaos”.
“Water is a basic need and a right, but for many Palestinians obtaining even poor-quality, subsistence-level quantities of water has become a luxury that they can barely afford,” Amnesty’s Donatella Rovera said.
“Israel must end its discriminatory policies, immediately lift all the restrictions it imposes on Palestinians’ access to water.”
Recommended for short-term survival: 20 litres For the medium term: 70 litres Recommended for the long term: 100 litres (Source: WHO)
Read moreAmnesty International Report: Israel Is Denying Palestinians Access To Water
Philip Giraldi: The Best Congress AIPAC Can Buy
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D. is the Francis Walsingham Fellow at The American Conservative Defense Alliance (www.ACDAlliance.org) and a former CIA counter-terrorism specialist and military intelligence officer.
Philip Giraldi was the foreign policy advisor to Ron Paul during his last presidential run.
Philip Giraldi
Many Americans who thought that the health care debate was important must have wondered where their congressmen were in early August during the first two weeks of the House of Representatives recess. It turns out they were not hosting town hall meetings or listening to constituents because many of them were in Israel together with their spouses on a trip paid for by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Fully 13% of the entire US House of Representatives, 56 members, traveled to Israel in the largest AIPAC-sponsored fact-finding visit by American politicians ever conducted. And the leaders of the two congressional groups, 25 Republicans for a week starting on August 2nd followed by 31 Democrats beginning on August 13th, were drawn from the top ranks of their respective parties. House Minority whip Eric Cantor headed the Republican group and House Majority leader Steny Hoyer led the Democrats.
Cantor and Hoyer are longtime enthusiasts for Israel and all its works. In January, when Israel was pounding Gaza to rubble and killing over a thousand civilians, Hoyer and Cantor wrote an op-ed entitled “A Defensive War,” which began with “During this difficult war in the Gaza Strip, we stand with Israel.” Why? Because “Instead of building roads, bridges, schools and industry, Hamas and other terrorists wasted millions turning Gaza into an armory.” Hoyer and Cantor, clearly noticing a militarization of the Gaza Strip that no else quite picked up on, also affirmed that Israel occupied the moral high ground in the conflict, “While Israel targets military combatants, Hamas aims to kill as many civilians as possible.” That Hoyer and Cantor were completely wrong on this vital point as well as others, in fact reversing the truth, has never resulted in an apology or a correction of the record from either lawmaker.
And there’s more. In May 2009, Cantor and Hoyer teamed up again in a congressional letter sent to their colleagues in congress. The message described how Washington must be “both a trusted mediator and a devoted friend to Israel” because “Israel will be taking the greatest risks in any peace agreement.” AIPAC couldn’t have put it better. In fact, AIPAC wrote the missive since Cantor and Hoyer apparently needed a little help to get the message just right. The actual source of the letter was revealed when the document was circulated with the file name “AIPAC Letter Hoyer Cantor May 2009.pdf,” which the intrepid congressional duo had failed to change before sending out.
Barack Obama at AIPAC (Flashback)
On June 4, 2008, Barack Obama spoke to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in Washington, DC.
Paul Craig Roberts: Israel Kidnaps Peace Boat Crew; Pirates of the Mediterranean
Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan’s first term. He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal. He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University.
Paul Craig Roberts
On June 30, the government of Israel committed an act of piracy when the Israeli Navy in international waters illegally boarded the “Spirit of Humanity,” kidnapped its 21-person crew from 11 countries, including former US Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney and Nobel Laureate Mairead MaGuire, and confiscated the cargo of medical supplies, olive trees, reconstruction materials, and children’s toys that were on the way to the Mediterranean coast of Gaza. The “Spirit of Humanity,” along with the kidnapped 21 persons, is being towed to Israel as I write.
Gaza has been described as the “world’s largest concentration camp.” It is home to 1.5 million Palestinians who were driven by force of American-supplied Israeli arms out of their homes, off their farms, and out of their villages so that Israel could steal their land and make the Palestinian land available to Israeli settlers.
What we have been witnessing for 60 years is a replay in modern times, despite the United Nations and laws strictly preventing Israel’s theft of Palestine, of the 17th, 18th, and 19th century theft of American Indian lands by US settlers. An Israeli government spokesman recently rebuked the President of the United States, a country, the Israeli said, who stole all of its land from Indians, for complaining about Israel’s theft of Palestine.
I knew the “Spirit of Humanity” would fall to Israeli piracy the minute I received on June 25 from an official of an Israeli peace organization a “public advisory” that the government of Cyprus had withheld permission for the “Spirit of Humanity” to leave for Gaza. The US State Department had advised that “The Israeli Foreign Ministry informed U.S. officials at the American Embassy in Tel Aviv that Israel still considers Gaza an area of conflict and that any boats attempting to sail to Gaza will not be permitted to reach its destination.” The “Spirit of Humanity” obtained permission to leave Cyprus when all aboard signed a waiver absolving Cyprus of all responsibility for the crew’s safety at the hands of the Israelis.
Related article: UN expert says Israeli seizure of aid ship a crime (Reuters):
GENEVA, July 2 (Reuters) – A U.N. human rights investigator on Thursday called Israel’s seizure of a ship carrying relief aid for the Gaza Strip “unlawful” and said its blockade of the territory constituted a “continuing crime against humanity”.
As President Obama has called for humanitarian aid to be sent to Gaza, and as the International Red Cross has damned the inhumanity of Israel’s blockade of Gaza, the question that immediately comes to mind is why did not the United States send sufficient US Navy escort to see the “Spirit of Humanity” safely through international waters to Gaza? We send ships against Somalian pirates, why not against Israeli ones?
Read morePaul Craig Roberts: Israel Kidnaps Peace Boat Crew; Pirates of the Mediterranean
U.S. shipped 989 munitions containers to Israel week before Gaza invasion
In the dying days of the Bush administration, and a week before Israel launched an aerial bombing campaign, followed by a land invasion of the Gaza Strip, the U.S. military shipped 989 containers of munitions to Israel.
Each container was 20-feet long with a total estimated net weight of 14,000 tonnes. The shipment reportedly reached Israel last month at Ashod, 40 kiometres north of Gaza. The huge arsenal of munitions will replenish those expended in the Gaza War.
According to Amnesty International in the UK, the shipment included white phosphorous.
The international organization says 300 of the containers had been unloaded at Ashod in March by a German cargo ship, Wehr Elb.
“We are sure that the consignment contained arms and munitions.” We have a strong suspicion that it contained white phosphorous which has been used against civilians in Gaza,” Brian Wood, head of Arms Control Campaign at Amnesty International in London said late this week.
“The cargo ship had been chartered and controlled by US Military Sealift Command. It left the USA for Israel on December 20, one week before the start of Israeli attacks on Gaza. The vessel was carrying 989 containers of munitions, each of them 20-feet long with a total estimated net weight of 14,000 tonnes,” he said.
“The world community including the Palestinians should be able to know where the remaining 680 containers on board the Wehr Elbe have gone and why the US is not transparent about the final destination of the dangerous cargo.
“A Pentagon spokesperson confirmed to Amnesty International that “the unloading of the entire US munitions shipment was successfully completed at Ashdod on March 22,” Wood pointed out.
Read moreU.S. shipped 989 munitions containers to Israel week before Gaza invasion
Israel’s war crimes in Gaza
Army veterans reveal how they gunned down innocent Palestinian families and destroyed homes and farms
Palestinians’ lives were seen as ‘very, very less important than our soldiers’
Israel was last night confronting a major challenge over the conduct of its 22-day military offensive in Gaza after testimonies by its own soldiers revealed that troops were allowed and, in some cases, even ordered to shoot unarmed Palestinian civilians.
The testimonies – the first of their kind to emerge from inside the military – are at marked variance with official claims that the military made strenuous efforts to avoid civilian casualties and tend to corroborate Palestinian accusations that troops used indiscriminate and disproportionate firepower in civilian areas during the operation. In one of the testimonies shedding harsh new light on what the soldiers say were the permissive rules of engagement for Operation Cast Lead, one soldier describes how an officer ordered the shooting of an elderly woman 100 metres from a house commandeered by troops.
Another soldier, describing how a mother and her children were shot dead by a sniper after they turned the wrong way out of a house, says the “atmosphere” among troops was that the lives of Palestinians were “very, very less important than the lives of our soldiers”.
A squad leader said: “At the beginning the directive was to enter a house with an armoured vehicle, to break the door down, to start shooting inside and – I call it murder – to shoot at everyone we identify. In the beginning I asked myself how could this make sense? Higher-ups said it is permissible because everyone left in the city [Gaza City] is culpable because they didn’t run away.”
Israel annexing East Jerusalem, says EU
- Confidential report attacks ‘illegal’ house demolitions
- Government accused of damaging peace prospects
40-year-old Palestinian Mahmoud al-Abbasi stands amid the rubble of his home after it was demolished by the Jerusalem municipality in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan. Photograph: Gali Tibbon
March 7 (The Guardian) – A confidential EU report accuses the Israeli government of using settlement expansion, house demolitions, discriminatory housing policies and the West Bank barrier as a way of “actively pursuing the illegal annexation” of East Jerusalem.
The document says Israel has accelerated its plans for East Jerusalem, and is undermining the Palestinian Authority’s credibility and weakening support for peace talks. “Israel’s actions in and around Jerusalem constitute one of the most acute challenges to Israeli-Palestinian peace-making,” says the document, EU Heads of Mission Report on East Jerusalem.
The report, obtained by the Guardian, is dated 15 December 2008. It acknowledges Israel’s legitimate security concerns in Jerusalem, but adds: “Many of its current illegal actions in and around the city have limited security justifications.”
“Israeli ‘facts on the ground’ – including new settlements, construction of the barrier, discriminatory housing policies, house demolitions, restrictive permit regime and continued closure of Palestinian institutions – increase Jewish Israeli presence in East Jerusalem, weaken the Palestinian community in the city, impede Palestinian urban development and separate East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank,” the report says.
The document has emerged at a time of mounting concern over Israeli policies in East Jerusalem. Two houses were demolished on Monday just before the arrival of the US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, and a further 88 are scheduled for demolition, all for lack of permits. Clinton described the demolitions as “unhelpful”, noting that they violated Israel’s obligations under the US “road map” for peace.
The EU report goes further, saying that the demolitions are “illegal under international law, serve no obvious purpose, have severe humanitarian effects, and fuel bitterness and extremism.” The EU raised its concern in a formal diplomatic representation on December 1, it says.
Interview With Former Knesset Leader: ‘We Are Such an Angry People’
In a SPIEGEL interview, former Knesset president Avraham Burg discusses the right-wing surge in elections, the “monopoly of the Holocaust” on Israelis’ everyday lives and opportunities missed by the Palestinians and Israel.
Avraham Burg on the election of the right-wing parties and Likud Party leader Benjamin Netanyahu’s imminent return as prime minister: “The Israeli society has been kidnapped by the settler movement.” (AP)
SPIEGEL: Mr. Burg, a majority of Israelis voted for right-wing parties, and now Benjamin Netanyahu is prime-minister designate. As someone who supports the Israeli left, are you feeling a bit lonely these days?
Burg: I feel I am losing my political, ideological and spiritual home. My political home today, the Meretz party, shrank to only three seats in the Knesset. As an Israeli I feel lost because so many of my fellow countrymen are in love with war — as the solution for everything. But the most existential loss is spiritual: For me, being a Jew is being a universalist, a humanist. I can’t understand any Jew who votes right-wing. I can’t understand how a Jew can speak a language of xenophobia. And yet so many of them just did.
SPIEGEL: You’re referring primarily to the ultranationalist Avigdor Lieberman, whose Israel Beytenu Party became the third-strongest in Israel’s parliament.
Burg: If you had told me 20 years ago that a day would come when this racist ideology would be represented with 15 seats in the Knesset, I would have said that was impossible. Now it’s as if the crossing of this red line were natural. Lieberman doesn’t talk about the West Bank and the borders of 1967. He brings us back to 1948, when tens of thousands of Palestinians were expelled from their homes. Now Lieberman wants the remaining Israeli-Arabs to leave the Jewish state.
SPIEGEL: How could an election result like this have happened?
Read moreInterview With Former Knesset Leader: ‘We Are Such an Angry People’