Category: News

A DETECTIVE trying to solve a crime always asks "cui bono?" (who would profit?) When we try to solve the crime called the Second Lebanon War, this question must head the list.

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The standoff between the Lebanese army and Islamic militants has focused attention on the 400,000 Palestinian refuges in the country

In Lebanon's dusty, overcrowded Palestinian refugee camps people live in abject poverty, with many families surviving on food rations and handouts from the UN, in what was once temporary housing.

In the teeming streets of Shatilla camp, the scene of a notorious civil war massacre, malnourished children play in little more than rags between crumbling bullet riddled buildings and amidst open sewage.

"We have no rights and no future. We have a lot of problems; We can't work freely, we cannot own a house, we cannot move around. We are treated as if we are not human," said 20-year-old Samar, from Shatilla.
 

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Children Of The Dust
Israel Annihilates Remainder Of Palestine – World Yawns
By John Pilger
The New Statesman
5-25-7

Israel is destroying any notion of a state of Palestine and is being allowed to imprison an entire nation. That is clear from the latest attacks on Gaza, whose suffering has become a metaphor for the tragedy imposed on the peoples of the Middle East and beyond. These attacks, reported on Channel 4 News, were "targeting key militants of Hamas" and the "Hamas infrastructure". The BBC described a "clash" between the same militants and Israeli F-16 aircraft.

Consider one such clash. The militants' car was blown to pieces by a missile from a fighter-bomber. Who were these militants? In my experience, all the people of Gaza are militant in their resistance to their jailer and tormentor. As for the "Hamas infrastructure", this was the headquarters of the party that won last year's democratic elections in Palestine. To report that would give the wrong impression. It would suggest that the people in the car and all the others over the years, the babies and the elderly who have also "clashed" with fighter-bombers, were victims of a monstrous injustice. It would suggest the truth.

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The Israeli authorities are planning to build three new Jewish neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem, an area regarded as occupied land under international law.

The plan, which has yet to receive final approval, would involve building about 20,000 homes.

The Palestinian chief negotiator, Saeb Erekat, said the plan destroyed efforts to re-start the peace process.

He said Israel had to choose between settlements or peace, but could not have both.

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{mosimage}In the complex situation in which Palestinians and Israelis currently find themselves, two things seems equally evident: First, a viable and truly sovereign Palestinian state alongside Israel is an absolute prerequisite for a just and lasting peace; and second, Israel needs a Palestinian state. Without a Palestine state Israel faces what it considers as two unacceptable options . . .

One indisputable fact that has accompanied the entire "peace process" is that Israel will simply not relinquish control voluntarily over the West Bank and East Jerusalem. It will not relinquish the core of its settlement system, or control of the West Bank aquifers, or sway over the area's economy or it "security arrangements" extending over the entire Palestinian area. . . .

Click Here for Full Size Map

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RAMALLAH, West Bank: A new World Bank report says the troubled Palestinian economy cannot recover unless Israel dismantles its web of physical and administrative obstacles to Palestinian movement in the West Bank. Here are some figures from the report.

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Since Israel signed an agreement on improving movement and access for Palestinians in November 2005, restrictions have instead become tighter. Since the agreement, the number of physical obstacles in the West Bank increased by 44 percent, to 547.

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Security fence and spread of Jewish settlement risks way of life for thousands

The bulldozers came for Hamid Salim Hassan's house just after dawn. Before the demolition began, the Bedouin family scrambled to gather what they could: a fridge, a pile of carpets, some plastic chairs, a canister of cooking gas and a metal bed frame.

Now, with their house a wreck of smashed concrete and broken plastic pipes, Mr Hassan and his family are living in a canvas tent on a neighbour's land. Their possessions are piled outside, along with boxes of supplies, including washing-up liquid, toothpaste, corned beef, wheat flour and tomato paste, provided by the International Committee of the Red Cross.
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WALTHAM, Mass. (AP) – Venturing into the lion's den, Jimmy Carter headed Tuesday to Brandeis University, a historically Jewish college, to confront the furor over his new book on the Middle East, which has been attacked as slanted against Israel.

The uproar has been going on for several months and recently prompted 14 members of an advisory board at the former president's international-affairs think tank, the Carter Center, to resign in protest over the book, “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.''
{josquote}Closing our eyes to injustice is not a Jewish value{/josquote}
A tightly controlled discussion was planned, with 15 questions selected in advance. Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz had also hoped to debate Carter but was told he would not be allowed inside.

Metal barricades were erected along the road leading to the athletic center, where Carter was to speak, and people entering the place had to go through a metal detector.
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Uri Avnery’s Column

[Uri talks about the recent ruling, now delayed, that would have forbade Israeli drivers from giving a ride to Palestinian passengers.  Uri also talks about the use of the word Apartheid as attached to Israel and the dangers of applying the South African model to the Israel / Palestine situation]

Mahatma Gandhi would have loved it. Nelson Mandela would have saluted. Martin Luther King would have been the most excited – it would have reminded him of the old days.

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Those seemingly minor inconveniences that make life hellish

DURING 2006, according to B’tselem, an Israeli human-rights group, Israeli forces killed 660 Palestinians, almost half of them innocent bystanders, among them 141 children. In the same period, Palestinians killed 17 Israeli civilians and six soldiers. It is such figures, as well as events like shellings, house demolitions, arrest raids and land expropriations, that make the headlines in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. What rarely get into the media but make up the staple of Palestinian daily conversation are the countless little restrictions that slow down most people’s lives, strangle the economy and provide constant fuel for extremists.

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