Category: News

[Photo by Rachel Shabi]

A Christian-Palestinian microbrewery is defying the hardships of occupation

Taybeh the beer is crisp, clean and very drinkable. It comes in light and dark versions, with a label that proudly reads “The Finest in the Middle East.” Its makers seem to have tapped an unlikely region for venturing into the beer business.

“Everybody thought I was nuts to build a brewery in a Muslim region,” said Nadim Khoury, the company’s master brewer, regarding the glaringly obvious problem that the Quran forbids the consumption of alcohol.

Yet Palestinian Christians, who make up just under 2 percent of the total population of the Occupied Territories, aren’t the only ones drinking Taybeh beer. “We produce 600,000 liters a year,” said Khoury. “Of that, 30 percent sells to Israel and the remaining 70 percent within Palestine.” Sales of Taybeh, he added, account for only 15 to 20 percent of total beer sales in the West Bank.

“I don’t want to say exactly that the Muslims enjoy the beer more than the Christians — but they do,” said Sayib Nasser, a member of the Fatah Party and deputy governor of the local council in nearby Ramallah. Nasser, who is a Muslim, took part in the festival’s opening ceremony. “The festival has our support and our blessing,” he said. “We are proud of it.”
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Standards of human rights in the Palestinian territories have fallen to intolerable new levels, says a UN expert on the Mid-East conflict.
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Up to a million cluster bomblets discharged by Israel in its conflict with Hezbollah remain unexploded in southern Lebanon, the UN has said.

The UN’s mine disposal agency says about 40% of the cluster bombs fired or dropped by Israel failed to detonate – three times the UN’s previous estimate.

It says the problem could delay the return home of about 200,000 displaced people by up to two years.

The devices have killed 14 people in south Lebanon since the August truce.
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But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.
-George Orwell

It is important to note that the board of directors of AP is composed of 22 newspaper and media executives that include the CEOs and presidents of ABC, McClatchy, Hearst, Tribune and the Washington Post. Two of the directors are members of very conservative policy councils that include the Hoover Institute. The Hoover Institute is a Republican policy research center that has been referred to as “Bush’s brain trust.” Its fellows include Condoleezza Rice and Newt Gingrich, a Distinguished Visiting Fellow, along with George Shultz.

Douglas McCorkindale, also on the board of directors at AP, is on the board of Lockheed Martin, the world’s largest defense contract company. One does not require crystals to see that the board of AP displays a clear tilt toward right-wing conservative views, and comprises representatives of a huge corporate media network of the largest publishers in the US.
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While Bil’in has become emblematic of non-violent resistance, it is far from alone, as pointed out by Mohammed Khatib, secretary of the Bil’in village council and resistance committee member. During an interview in France last fall, he mentioned Budrus as another “notable” example of resistance, attributing Bil’in’s visibility to operational originality and media coverage. Khatib sees the presence of supporters from abroad as natural and inherent in the situation: “It is the international community which created the state of Israel, and, through its tribunals, has also condemned the construction of the wall, settlement activity and the Occupation. Together we must make Israel comply with international law.”

A mighty thread connects Birmingham with Bil’in. The organic outrage which was channeled into, and given form by, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, is the same passion that sustains the International Solidarity Movement, Ta’ayush, Gush Shalom, Palestinian Centre for Rapprochement, Holy Land Trust, and others.
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Torture in Iraq is worse now than it was under the regime of Saddam Hussein and “is totally out of hand”, according to a United Nations investigator.

“The situation is so bad many people say it is worse than it has been in the times of Saddam Hussein,” said Manfred Nowak, a UN special investigator on torture, at a press conference in Geneva.

He said government forces, private militia and terrorist groups were all involved.
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Whatever the fate of the captive soldier Gilad Shalit, the Israeli army’s war in Gaza is not about him.

As senior security analyst Alex Fishman reported, the army was preparing for an attack months earlier and was constantly pushing for it, with the goal of destroying the Hamas infrastructure and its Government. The army initiated an escalation on June 8 when it assassinated Abu Samhadana, a senior appointee of the Hamas Government, and intensified its shelling of civilians in the Gaza Strip.

Fishman reported recently that the army is worried that what threatens to bury this huge military and diplomatic effort is reports of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Hence, the army would take care to let some food into Gaza. From this perspective, it is necessary to feed the Palestinians in Gaza so that it would be possible to continue to kill them undisturbed.
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[Jewish Peace News Commentary: Even saying that the fields are sown with cluster bombs is an understatement, since the bomblets are embedded in trees, are on roofs, are everywhere outdoors…And because they are small, it’s hard to see them before it’s too late. This is beyond enraging and horrifying. I can’t conjure up any kind of rational thinking which would allow the meting out of such punishment on anyone. – RG]

The war in Lebanon has not ended. Every day, some of the million bomblets which were fired by Israeli artillery during the last three days of the conflict kill four people in southern Lebanon and wound many more.

The casualty figures will rise sharply in the next month as villagers begin the harvest, picking olives from trees whose leaves and branches hide bombs that explode at the smallest movement. Lebanon’s farmers are caught in a deadly dilemma: to risk the harvest, or to leave the produce on which they depend to rot in the fields.
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Israelis have always been horrified at the idea of parallels between their country, a democracy risen from the ashes of genocide, and the racist system that ruled the old South Africa. Yet even within Israel itself, accusations persist that the web of controls affecting every aspect of Palestinian life bears a disturbing resemblance to apartheid. After four years reporting from Jerusalem and more than a decade from Johannesburg before that, the Guardian’s award-winning Middle East correspondent Chris McGreal is exceptionally well placed to assess this explosive
comparison. Here we publish the first part of his two-day special report

Its backers question how anyone can accuse them, as Jews at the end of a long line of persecuted generations, of racism, or in any way of resembling the old Afrikaner regime. But for years, much of South Africa’s Jewish population and successive Israeli governments made their own pact with apartheid – a deal that exchanged near silence by most South African Jews on a great moral issue for acceptance, and clandestine cooperation between Israel and the Afrikaner government that drew the two countries into a hidden embrace.
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During the second world war the future South African prime minister John Vorster was interned as a Nazi sympathiser. Three decades later he was being feted in Jerusalem. In the second part of his remarkable special report, Chris McGreal investigates the clandestine alliance between Israel and the apartheid regime, cemented with the ultimate gift of friendship – A-bomb technology
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