Category: News

[Israel’s Apartheid system is tightening its grip over the lives of Palestinians]

Dr. Raphael Levine, the Hebrew University chemistry professor who accepted Ms. Salameh as his student, said he understood Israel’s security concerns but was baffled by the ban. “I think it is in Israel’s interest to strengthen the Palestinian middle class, and strengthening academic institutions in Palestinian areas is one sure way of achieving that,” he said.

“There is a Jewish tradition in which value is put on learning; Mr. Ben-Gurion said he wanted Israel to be a shining light to all nations,” he said, referring to Israel’s first prime minister. “You have to deliver on these things.”

“Both by sentiment and cold practicality, it is not in our interest to act like this,” Dr. Levine said in a telephone interview from Los Angeles, where he is teaching at the University of California.

Meanwhile, Ms. Salameh, a high school science teacher, continues her life in Anata. She attends meetings as an elected member of the municipal council and is working to set up the village’s first women’s center.

She longs to begin work on her doctorate and one day become a role model for other Palestinian women and girls as the first woman to be a Palestinian professor of chemistry in the West Bank.
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WASHINGTON, Oct. 10 (JTA) – A top staffer for billionaire philanthropist George Soros met recently with senior representatives of the dovish pro-Israel community to discuss setting up an alternative to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, JTA has learned.

Morton Halperin, a director of Soros’ Open Society Institute and a veteran of senior positions in the Clinton, Nixon and Johnson administrations, confirmed to JTA that the meeting took place late last month. He would not add details.

“It was a private meeting, it was an effort to get this off the ground,” said Halperin, who directs the institute’s U.S. advocacy.

The meeting focused on how best to press Congress and the Bush administration to back greater U.S. engagement toward resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and how to better represent American Jews who don’t buy into AIPAC’s often hawkish policies.
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“I stressed to him that I was about to establish a desalination plant on the border of the Gaza Strip,” Zaslavsky related. “Peres burst out in response that he opposed it, because it did not concern us, and we did not need to worry about the Arabs, as they would look after themselves.” He claims that the project was consequently canceled.
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The death toll among Iraqis as a result of the US-led invasion has now reached an estimated 655,000, a study in the Lancet medical journal reports today.

The figure for the number of deaths attributable to the conflict – which amounts to around 2.5% of the population – is at odds with figures cited by the US and UK governments and will cause a storm, but the Lancet says the work, from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, has been examined and validated by four separate independent experts who all urged publication.

“Although such death rates might be common in times of war, the combination of a long duration and tens of millions of people affected has made this the deadliest international conflict of the 21st century and should be of grave concern to everyone,” write the authors, Gilbert Burnham and colleagues.
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Almost no one bothered to report it. A search of the nation's largest newspapers turned up nothing in USA Today, the Boston Globe, Boston Herald, Chicago Sun-Times, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, San Francisco Chronicle, Seattle Times, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Houston Chronicle, Tampa Tribune, etc.

There was nothing on CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, PBS, NPR, Fox News. Nothing.

The LA Times, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and Associated Press each had one sentence, at most, telling about her. All three left out the details, the LA Times had her age significantly off, and the Washington Post reported that she had been killed by an Israeli tank shell.

It hadn't been a tank shell that had killer her, according to witnesses. It had been bullets, multiple ones, fired up close.
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ONCE, WHILE traveling in a taxi, I had an argument with the driver – a profession associated in Israel with extreme right-wing views. I tried in vain to convince him of the desirability of peace with the Arabs. In our country, which has never seen a single day of peace in the last hundred years, peace can seem like something out of science fiction.

Suddenly I had an inspiration. “When we have peace,” I said, “You can take your taxi in the morning and go to Damascus, have lunch there with real authentic Hummus and come back home in the evening.”

He jumped at the idea. “Wow,” he exclaimed, “If that happens, I shall take you with me for nothing!”

“And I shall treat you to lunch,” I responded.

He continued to dream. “If I could go to Damascus in my car, I could drive on from there all the way to Paris!”
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JERUSALEM — Out on Highway 60, the bulldozers are at work.

Next to the road that leads south from Jerusalem to Israeli settlements in the West Bank, the big yellow machines are scraping the earth, carving a flat, white, dusty shoulder. Along that strip, a high concrete wall is already being built, part of the newest segment of Israel's "separation fence." The planned route loops around the cluster of settlements known as the Etzion Bloc, putting them on the Israeli side of the de facto border.

Israeli-Palestinian diplomacy is stalled. The bulldozers are not. Once again they are changing the face of the land in a way that makes life far more difficult for Palestinians while damaging Israel's own long-term interests.

As described by Israel's Defense Ministry, the fence is purely a security measure intended to protect Israelis from Palestinian terrorists. Instead of running along the Green Line, the Israel-West Bank border, the route has been drawn to place major "settlement blocs" on the Israeli side — supposedly only to defend them as well.
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The teams will be concentrating on clearing from homes, schools, gardens, access routes and other populated areas in the Nabatieh region, as well as providing education programmes to manage the risk to thousands of returnees. The UN recently stated that they have seen around 100,000 unexploded cluster bomblets at 359 separate sites in Lebanon and, according to figures from the Lebanese military, there have been 39 injuries and 8 deaths – though these figures are rising.
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NEW YORK, USA, 4 October 2006 – Ninety-one children have been killed already this year in the West Bank and Gaza, almost double the number killed during the whole of 2005. Fear and violence are part of daily life in the occupied Palestinian territory, and children are suffering from increasing levels of stress.

“They are confronted with regular military operations, shelling, house demolitions, checkpoints on their way to schools,” says UNICEF Child Protection Officer Anne Grandjean. “As a result, we find a high prevalence of signs of stress such as anxiety, eating and sleeping disorders, and difficulties concentrating in school.

“All of these signs need to be tackled as soon as possible to avoid a long-lasting impact on the child’s development.”
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Republican Jews say Democrats have the problem, citing surveys that show rank-and-file Democrats much likelier to favor a more balanced U.S. approach to Israeli-Arab issues.

“We’re illuminating the fact that support for Israel is eroding within the Democratic Party,” said Matt Brooks, executive director of the Republican Jewish Coalition. “They need to address the root causes.”
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