Palestine Occupation Info - Archive for Sat 28th Oct 2006

(28-10-06) - Roundup, IMEMC. From Occupied Bethlehem, today's updates from the West Bank and Gaza. This Week In Palestine is a production of the International Middle East Media Centre [audio & transcript].

(28-10-06) - Robert Fisk, The Independent. Scientific evidence gathered from at least two bomb craters in Khiam and At-Tiri, the scene of fierce fighting between Hizbollah guerrillas and Israeli troops last July and August, suggests that uranium-based munitions may now also be included in Israel's weapons inventory - and were used against targets in Lebanon. According to Dr Chris Busby, the British Scientific Secretary of the European Committee on Radiation Risk, two soil samples thrown up by Israeli heavy or guided bombs showed "elevated radiation signatures". See Also: Chris Bellamy: An enigma that only the Israelis can fully explain (Independent), and UN urges Solana to pressure Israel on Lebanon overflights (AFP).

(28-10-06) - Report, Reuters. Israel may soon use "smart" bombs on the narrow border between Egypt and the Gaza Strip to destroy tunnels used to smuggle weapons into the Palestinian territory, an Israeli newspaper reported on Friday. Maariv daily newspaper said the precision-guided weapons would be used to penetrate deep underground in the hope of destroying the tunnel network that Israel says riddles the narrow border area. See Also: Egypt prepares for possible Israeli raids (Reuters).

(28-10-06) - Iaa Hadid, AP. One of three Palestinian factions that captured an Israeli soldier said Saturday that a prisoner swap could be concluded "in the near future." The other two factions, also linked to the Palestinians' ruling Hamas Party, made no similar claims. Reports of an impending deal have been rife for weeks. Abu Mujahed, a spokesman for the Popular Resistance Committees, said his faction had agreed to an Egyptian-brokered deal to release Cpl. Gilad Shalit in return for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners. See Also: Hamas say progress on Shalit deal but no imminent swap (Haaretz).

(28-10-06) - Constant Brand, AP. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) said he will replace the Hamas-led government with a panel of professionals if the militant group doesn't agree to govern with his party, suggesting a new, tough line in a bid to ease crippling sanctions. The message was relayed to visiting EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana by Palestinian officials, who agreed Friday to discuss the confidential information with The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media. See Also: Hamas, Fatah reach militia deal after accusations of 'coup' plot (Reuters), and Marwan Barghouti: Government formation process must be expedited (PNN).

(28-10-06) - Mazal Mualem, Haaretz. MK Zahava Gal-On (Meretz) called on the members of the Labor central committee on Saturday to vote in favor of resigning from the government in response to the addition of Avigdor Lieberman's Yisrael Beiteinu to the coalition. In a letter addressed to the central committee, Gal-On wrote "Le Pen in France and Haider in Austria are political vegetarians compared with Lieberman," referring to extreme right wing politicians Joerg Haider and Jean-Marie Le Pen. Gal-On added that the addition of Lieberman to the coalition poses "a threat to the future of the State of Israel as a democratic Jewish nation" . See Also: Labor MKs move to block Lieberman (JPost).

(28-10-06) - Mustafa Sabre, PNN. The ongoing arrest campaign being carried out by Israeli forces is striking all segments of the Palestinian population. No one has immunity. The latest development in this campaign is the arrest of Palestinian students returning to their universities in neighboring Arab countries after spending the holidays with their families in the West Bank. The students have been detained or arrested on the King Hussein Bridge, which connects the West Bank to Jordan. Palestinian sources report that as many as 720 Palestinian students, many of whom attend universities outside Palestine, are currently being held in Israeli custody.

(28-10-06) - Report, IMC Israel. 500 Palestinians, Israelis, and Internationals demonstrated against the wall in the village of Bi'lin. The village has been struggling for over 20 months against the wall that confiscates half of its land. The Army used teargas and concussion grenades, but a group of demonstrators managed to cross into the next line of wall fortifications. At that point the army and border police started attacking the rest of the demonstration, to try and disperse it with baton charges, teargas, concussion grenades and rubber coated steel bullets. See Also: Peaceful Bilin Protestors Attacked by IOF (ISM), Stormy demonstartion in Bilin (Gush Shalom), and Video - Military fire 'rubber bullets' on Bilin demo, shoot Israeli in head (from 11th August 2006).

(28-10-06) - Aluf Benn, Haaretz. Vice Premier Shimon Peres had an angry exchange with visiting European Union foreign policy coordinator Javier Solana yesterday, after Solana demanded to know why Israel is keeping the Gaza Strip's border crossings closed. Solana argued that this causes hunger and frustration, which ultimately encourage anti-Israel violence. But Peres snapped back that "Israel is first and foremost obliged to provide security for its citizens." Therefore, he said, as long as missiles are fired at Israeli communities and terrorist activity continues, the crossings will not be opened.

(28-10-06) - Report, AFP. A Palestinian woman shot by Israeli troops during an incursion into the north of the Gaza Strip earlier in the week died in hospital. Naama Adwan, 50, was wounded on Monday in Beit Hanun in an Israeli operation during which seven Palestinians died Saturday. Her death, according to an AFP count, brings to 5,458 the number of people killed since the Palestinian intifada, or uprising, erupted in September 2000, the vast majority of them Palestinians.

(28-10-06) - Report, AP. After 35 days at sea, a group of American evangelicals traveling on a creaky World War II-era cargo ship landed in Israel on a solidarity mission only to run aground in red tape, with long delays in unloading their cargo of clothes, toys, and medical supplies. Still, the crew was unfazed Thursday, keeping a positive attitude in a demonstration of the growing alliance between evangelical Christians and the Jewish state. "The Bible says, 'Who blesses Israel will be blessed," said Don Tipton, the group's leader. "We believe that".

(28-10-06) - Amira Hass, Haaretz. Almost every day during Ramadan, Michael Philips, a student from New Orleans, was invited to eat the Iftar (the meal that breaks the fast) with one of his acquaintances or friends in Nablus. He started to feel at home already during the first days after his arrival, to be impressed by the friendliness with which he was welcomed, by the warmth, the simplicity and the generosity, in spite of the difficult living conditions. All these impressions of the Palestinians in general, and of the residents of Nablus in particular, were not erased and have not changed, in spite of the fact that two weeks ago he was kidnapped by an anonymous group and was held captive for about 26 hours.

(28-10-06) - John Kampfner, New Statesman. Wherever you go in Israel nowadays, it is hard to find an Israeli who has any meaningful contact with a Palestinian - the odd car mechanic, perhaps, or gardener, but that's about as far as it gets. This applies even to the dwindling number of Israelis who describe themselves as liberals. A wall has developed in minds, making them see the other side exclusively as a threat. Almost nobody has been into Gaza or the West Bank except as a soldier or to visit settlers; few venture even into East Jerusalem.

(28-10-06) - Ilene R. Prusher, Christian Science Monitor. Sheikh Raed Salah's decision to stay away from national politics has given him a kind of popularity no other Israeli-Arab leader appears to enjoy. His party deals instead with the issues of funding for municipal budgets, a sore point since Arab towns and schools generally receive lower allocations than Jewish ones. While other Arab politicians get tainted, either from wheeling and dealing or failing to deliver, Salah's reputation among followers is impeccable.

(28-10-06) - Report, UN News Service. The United Nations has established the institutional framework for a registry of damages incurred by Palestinians to their homes, business and agricultural holdings as result of Israel’s construction of a barrier in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including in and around East Jerusalem, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said in a report released today. The purpose of the “Register of Damage” is to document damages for possible future international adjudication, not to settle claims, he said in the report to the UN General Assembly.

(28-10-06) - Mohammed Assadi, Reuters. Bankers in the Palestinian territories worry less about boardroom battles and more about the daily fight to stay in business. The threat of U.S. sanctions has stopped banks dealing with the government. Disgruntled state workers, largely unpaid since March, have been vandalizing automated teller machines and other bank property. And the economy is in freefall.

(28-10-06) - Mark Lilla, Richard Sennett et al, Letter to the NY Review of Books. The following letter was sent to Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, regarding the ADL's role in the cancellation of Professor Tony Judt's scheduled lecture at the Polish Consulate of New York in October. To lecture was to be entitled "The Israel Lobby & US Foreign Policy". Given the attention this affair has received in the press, and the important principles at stake, we thought this document might be of interest to readers of the NY Review of Books.

(28-10-06) - Yossi Schwartz, Marxist.com. The crisis in the Middle East is no longer a local or regional crisis. It is part of the global crisis of the entire imperialist order, something not seen since the 1930s. Following the fiasco in Lebanon, some in the US are now pushing for a new military intervention, this time against Syria and Iran. But this could easily escalate into a regional war. Therefore the US would likely not commit itself to such an intervention on its own. It would be more likely done by Israel with the backing of NATO, which is deploying soldiers and warships in the Persian Gulf and in the Eastern Mediterranean.

(28-10-06) - Debate, Diagonal. A Palestinian, an Israeli, a European and a European pan-Arabist face off on the ultimate question of 'Israel’s Legitimacy: Is There Any Life After Zionism?' Exclusively for the Spanish newspaper Diagonal, two heavyweights of pro-Palestine intellectual activism, Khalid Amayreh and Gilad Atzmon, enter the polemic between the Spanish thinkers Santiago Alba-Rico and Raúl Sánchez-Cedillo about the State of Israel’s historical responsibility in the Middle East tragedy. This is the English translation of the debate.

(28-10-06) - Patrick Seale, International Herald Tribune. Israel has killed 2,300 Gazans over the past six years, including 300 in the four months since an Israeli soldier, Corporal Gilad Shalit, was captured in a cross-border raid by Palestinian fighters on June 25. The wounded can be counted in the tens of thousands. Most of the casualties are civilians, many of them children. The killing continues on a daily basis - by tank and sniper fire, by air and sea bombardment, and by undercover teams in civilian clothes sent into Arab territory to ambush and murder, an Israeli specialty perfected over the past several decades.

(28-10-06) - Khaled Amayreh, Al-Ahram Weekly. Israel appears hopeful that in the case of failing to topple the Hamas- led government its policies would at least trigger civil war between Fatah and Hamas. It is a miscalculation. Indeed, it is ever more clear that escalated inter-Palestinian conflict would soon evolve into a new Intifada against Israel. Both Hamas and Fatah realise that they can retain their support bases only through fighting Israeli occupiers, the root cause of Palestinian misery and suffering.

(28-10-06) - Azzam Tamimi, The Guardian. During his recent visit to the Middle East, EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana met Avigdor Lieberman, leader of the Yisroel Beitenu party, which advocates the forced expulsion of the Palestinians from their land. Solana told reporters after the meeting that he disagreed with everything Lieberman said but that "we have to talk to everybody". But this "everybody" clearly does not strictly mean everybody, because it continues to exclude the elected Hamas-led government of the Palestinian people.

(28-10-06) - Tom Segev, Haaretz. Latif Dori came to Kafr Qasem this week and could barely make it down the street. The 72-year-old peace activist is considered a local hero. Whenever he comes here, passersby recognize him and want to stop him and shake his hand warmly. Passing drivers honk their horns and wave. The local council bestowed honorary citizenship upon him. He is part of the history of this village, and of the state: In 1956, Dori was the first one to record the horror stories told by survivors of the massacre perpetrated by Border Police troops.

(28-10-06) - Rami G. Khouri, Daily Star. One of the depressing aspects of reading, viewing and listening to the mass media in the United States on an extended trip, as I am doing these days, is to suffer the very superficial and often ideologically skewed coverage of important movements such as Hizbullah and Hamas. For various reasons, directly or indirectly related to American government support for Israel over Arab parties, such groups usually are referred to simply as terrorist groups.

(28-10-06) - Ze'ev Sternhell, Haaretz. By turning to Lieberman, Olmert is declaring that he does not have the strength to lead the country on his own, while Defense Minister Amir Peretz, for his part, is admitting that he does not have the political and emotional strength to fight back. This is a process that typically occurs among a defeated elite: In order to save itself, it tends to call in the bully for assistance. Olmert and Peretz know they have lost the public's confidence.

(28-10-06) - Eitan Bronstein, Palestine Remembered/Nakba in Hebrew. In Israel, Nakba denial is found in the geography and the history taught in schools, on the maps of the country and in the signs marking places on its surface. All of them ignore almost completely the event which made possible the establishment of the Jewish State as a state with a Jewish majority and a Palestinian minority, after the majority of the indigenous people of the country were evicted, their properties destroyed and/or confiscated for the benefit of the new state.

(28-10-06) - Interview, Democracy Now. Amy Goodman speaks with Yehuda Shaul, a former Israeli soldier, who has just begun a tour of the United States to give an inside look at how the Israeli military treats Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Shaul is a co-founder of Breaking the Silence - a group of former Israeli soldiers committed to exposing human rights abuses by the Israeli military. Last year the group revealed that Israel soldiers had been ordered to open fire on unarmed Palestinians. The group has also gathered photographic evidence that proved Israeli soldiers have abused Palestinian corpses. [audio, video & transcript].