Latest Updates: Palestinians RSS

  • johnpi 7:25 am on February 11, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , Palestinians

    Palestinians petition UN to stop construction of museum on Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem.

    Palestinian and international human rights activists on Wednesday petitioned the United Nations to stop the construction of a Museum of Tolerance on the site of a medieval Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem, saying it would disturb centuries-old graves.

    Campaigners said they are turning to the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights after Israel’s Supreme Court rejected a 2008 appeal to stop the Simon Wiesenthal Center building its museum on part of the Mamilla cemetery.

    “We have nowhere else to go,” Rania Madi of the Palestinian rights group BADIL told reporters in Geneva, where the petition was filed. Any response from the U.N.’s top rights official would carry only moral weight and is not legally binding.

    The group said construction of the museum would violate Muslim religious and cultural rights, and such a project would never have been undertaken if the site was home to Jewish graves.

     

  • johnpi 11:09 pm on February 10, 2010 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , Jaljalat, , Palestinians, , ,

    Al Qaeda sympathisers detained in West Bank, Gaza.

    Palestinian security forces detained six radical Islamists with explosives in the West Bank in the first known arrests of al Qaeda-inspired militants in the territory, a senior Palestinian officer said.

    In the Gaza Strip, controlled by a separate, Hamas-run administration, the authorities announced the arrest of a leader of a pro-al Qaeda group, the latest sign of a crackdown on radicals accused of bombing security offices and Internet cafes.
    ….

    Hamas security officials cited 12 bombings which they believed were carried out by radical movements in recent weeks, the highest number of such attacks since Hamas took over the Gaza Strip.

    Vehicles belonging to two Hamas officials and the office of a Hamas security service were blown up in the bombings. There were no casualties.

    The Hamas-run Interior Ministry said the head of a fundamentalist group known as the Jaljalat was arrested late on Tuesday and that several other members of groups supporting al Qaeda were detained in recent days. “A preliminary investigation linked (him) to several if not all of the bombing attacks against security offices and personnel and Internet cafes. He is being interrogated,” said Ehab al-Ghsain, spokesman for the Hamas-run Interior Ministry.

     

  • johnpi 9:28 am on December 28, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , Palestinians,

    Al Qaeda airline attack, sectarian hirabah against Shiites, provide media diversion while Israel announces its plans to build 700 new homes in East Jerusalem.

    Israel said Monday that it will build nearly 700 new apartments in east Jerusalem, drawing tough criticism from both the Palestinians and the United States, which denounced the plan as an obstacle to peacemaking.

    “We make a distinction between the West Bank and Jerusalem. Jerusalem is our capital and remains such,” said government spokesman Mark Regev.

    Also, here’s a report from the AP about the Institute of Hope, the only orphanage in Gaza. It is home to many of the 1,720 new orphans that were created by last year’s Gaza masssacre.

    No wonder Hamas has kicked Al Qaeda and the caliphate utopians out the Gaza Strip. No doubt they would make short work of sacrificing the Palestinians on the caliphate altar.

    Of course, there are other huge differences between Hamas and Hezbollah and Al Qaeda and the militant groups of South Asia that it colonized.

     

  • johnpi 10:09 am on December 26, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , Palestinians,

    Israel kills six Palestinians in West Bank & Gaza.

    Family members said the troops entered without warning and killed the men in cold blood, insisting that none had resisted arrest or fired any shots.

    The Israelis don’t even bother to make up stories about being shot at any more. They do claim that one of the men was armed.

    The shootings were likely retaliatory violence for the shooting of an Israeli settler on Thursday by Palestinian gunmen.

     

  • johnpi 12:25 pm on December 21, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Barghouti, , , , Palestinians, ,

    Al Jazeera reports that a deal may be near to exchange kidnapped Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit for a group of Palestinians that includes Marwan Barghouti, who is seen by many to be the Palestinian equivalent of Nelson Mandela.

    This would be a huge development in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict that would potentiate change, though it’s hard to know what or how much change is possible given the current political climate in Israel.

     

  • johnpi 11:48 am on December 1, 2009 | 1 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , Palestinians

    EU to give east Jerusalem to Palestinians: report.

    An irate Israel slammed the European Union on Tuesday for the group’s planned proposal to call for east Jerusalem to be named the capital of a future Palestinian state, dividing what Tel Aviv labels its “eternal capital.”
    ….

    The document is also said to “imply” that the EU will recognize a unilateral Palestinian declaration of statehood, a move which the Palesitnian Authority said last month they would seek from the United Nations.

     

  • johnpi 6:48 am on November 13, 2009 | 1 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , Palestinians

    The next Palestinian Authority president could be a Hamas Legislator.

    If Abbas decides to forgo the chairmanship before the elections take place, his successor by default is speaker of the Parliament – Hamas lawmaker Aziz Dweik.

    Dweik, 59, is not slated to run in the elections as a Hamas candidate. The likely candidate would be Isma’il Haniyya, the current prime minister of the de facto Hamas government in the Gaza Strip. But the very notion of a Hamas leader heading the Palestinian Authority is in itself a symbolic victory for the Islamist movement, and a hair-raising option for Israel and Fatah.

    The Palestinian Central Elections Commission announced on Thursday that it did not have the capacity to hold elections on January 24, as originally planned, effectively postponing the elections indefinitely.

    How would Fatah respond:

    A Hamas figure in power is certainly not something that Fatah would take lightly.

    “You’re talking about a rival from a party which carried out a coup in Gaza, a party that is refusing to sign the Egyptian reconciliation paper that Fatah signed,” Dr Milhem said. “So you’re talking about conceding to Hamas. For Fatah this is not acceptable at all.”

    Actually, I think it was Fatah that held the coup, not Hamas.

     

  • johnpi 11:43 pm on November 11, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , Palestinians, ,

    Palestinians in Lebanese refugee camps to be introduced to ‘turntablism.’

    “Turntables are in fact musical instruments,” Danish turntablist Martin Jakobsen explains at his Gemmayze flat the night before the start of a series of DJ workshops for Palestinian youth called: “Turntables in the Camps.”

    “This is our first time in Lebanon, and Den Sorte Skole – the three-man DJ crew that I’m repping – we want to introduce the idea that there is this global DJ culture that Palestinian youth can take part in; a culture that doesn’t exclude them in the ways that they are excluded from Lebanese society, and that through turntablism, we can teach them to use sounds from their own lives to create music.”

    Jakobsen told NOW Lebanon he was not sure what to expect out of the process, but he said, “I am realistic – I know that it’s not going to save anyone – but these workshops are a way of saying to them – ‘Hey, everyone can be a DJ – and, ‘You don’t need all this fancy shit’ – especially if we’re investing the equipment for them to come and experiment on from time to time.”

    Jakobsen’s compatriot, Simon Dokkedal, the crew’s scratch specialist, waxes a little more street on the matter. “We training the next generation of sound pirates!” adding, “Hopefully we’ll plant the seeds here, and from this we can create a new generation of hip-hop DJ’s here in the camps.”

     

  • johnpi 9:34 am on November 1, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , Palestinians,

    Al-Arabiya: ‘Israel wins as US drops call for settlement freeze.’

    Israel savored a victory on Sunday after U.S. Secretary of State Hilary Clinton hailed his “unprecedented” position on settlements and back tracked from a previous call for a complete freeze to settlement construction before possible peace talks with the Palestinians.

    “There is no question that the United States are our staunchest friends and that Israel’s firm stance on its positions pays off,” Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon told public radio on Sunday in a satisfied tone echoed by other officials.

    The Israelis had reason to be satisfied.

    In a joint press conference held, unusually, before talks with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pressed for negotiations to be restarted as soon as possible, despite the Palestinian insistence — which Washington backed only a few months ago — that Israel must first put a stop to all settlement activity in the occupied West Bank.

    Sigh. Rewarding the Israelis for being obstinate and disagreeable will yield more of the same in the future. Sucks to be you Mrs. Clinton.

     

  • johnpi 5:38 pm on October 29, 2009 | 1 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , Palestinians, ,

    Kudos to Jon Stewart of The Daily Show fame, for inviting a Palestinian and an anti-Zionist Jew on his show. Adam Horowitz at Mondoweiss was in the audience:

    I don’t want to recount the whole interview, you can watch it. I have to say, I was blown away. Although I was laughing out loud for the first two segments, I was on the verge of tears throughout the interview. Here was a Palestinian leader demanding equal rights and an anti-Zionist Jew calling for boycott, divestment and sanctions to pressure Israel towards peace on The Daily Show and they were being applauded, while the traditional pro-Israel hasbara was being shown the door.

    Palestinian equal rights was placed directly next to health care and the economy on The Daily Show’s progressive agenda and the audience was totally along for the ride. I could hardly believe my eyes, and yet it made perfect sense at the same time. Who can argue that it is necessary to deny people water? Who can argue against equal rights? The answer is increasingly no one, and if The Daily Show’s audience is any indication, the next generation will be leading this fight in a much different direction.

    Follow the link above to see the full, unedited segment.

     

  • johnpi 6:33 am on October 9, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , , Palestinians

    For the first time, the Israelis have arrested a Palestinian, Mohammad Othman, solely for promoting a boycott and divestment from Israel. Othman was very effective in his advocacy:

    While thousands of Palestinians supportive of the international boycott campaign have been arrested by Israel for various reasons, activist groups believe Othman to be the first Palestinian whose imprisonment can be credited solely to international boycott advocacy. Othman was attempting to return to the West Bank following a trip to Norway, where he had met with senior government officials in an effort to convince the country to boycott companies doing business with the Israeli military or involved in Jewish settlement in the West Bank.

    Othman took Norwegian officials on a tour of the West Bank, traveled to Norway and played a major role in convincing a Norwegian state pension fund to divest the $5.4 million from Elbit, one of Israel’s largest defense firms. Norwegian Finance Minister Kristen Halvorsen, whom Othman met, announced the decision early last month.

     

  • johnpi 7:10 pm on October 7, 2009 | 4 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , , , , , , , Palestinians,

    Richard Silverstein sheds light on some interesting facts about Libya’s status at the UN that makes the Goldstone report – which indicts Israel for war crimes – an issue that can’t be easily dispensed with a security council veto from the US.

    Libya not only sits on the Security Council, it also is president of the General Assembly. So that means that Qaddafi has the U.S. over a boulder twice over. If the U.S. vetoes Security Council consideration of the Report, Libya can introduce it before the General Assembly, where we don’t have veto. If Abbas hadn’t singed himself so badly in mishandling this affair, he might’ve been able to weasel out of this by telling Libya to take a hike. But Hamas already has his ass in a sling over his betrayal of the Gazans. He can’t very well dump Goldstone twice.

    So Obama may have the Goldstone nightmare return to haunt him in the Security Council. It might even be passed by the General Assembly. So much for our president’s supposed political adeptness.

     

  • johnpi 5:50 am on October 7, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , , , Palestinians,

    UN council mulls emergency meet on Gaza report.

    The United Nations Security Council will hold closed-door consultations on Wednesday to consider whether to accept a Libyan request for a meeting mainly to discuss a U.N. report that accused Israel and Palestinian fighters of war crimes during Israel’s assault of Gaza, diplomats said.

    Libya’s deputy ambassador Ibrahim Dabbashi told AFP that his country circulated a letter on behalf of the U.N. Arab group requesting “an emergency meeting” of the 15-member body to consider the U.N. report.
    ….

    A spokesman for Libya’s U.N. mission, Ahmed Gebreel, said his country, which currently has a Security Council seat, had requested a meeting “because of the seriousness of the report and because we think it’s too long to wait until March.”

    “We are welcoming Libya’s step that they have asked the Security Council to meet to discuss the Goldstone report,” Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas said in a telephone conversation from Rome.

    “Libya’s step is supporting the Palestinian people’s rights.”

    Critics of the Palestinian Authority have accused Abbas of letting his people down by agreeing to the postponement. A statement by the Palestinian observer mission at the United Nations said it fully supported the Libyan request for a Security Council meeting.

     

  • johnpi 5:03 pm on October 6, 2009 | 1 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , , Palestinians

    Palestinians to ask UN to pass Goldstone report after all.

    The move appeared to mark a change in position, as the Palestinian delegation on Friday backed a move at the U.N. Human Rights Council to defer a vote on whether the report should be passed on.

    Erakat said Abbas’s decision came “in light of the controversy that has arisen” around the report, which accused Israel and Palestinian armed groups of committing war crimes during the three-week land, air and sea assault on Gaza that Israel started on Dec. 27.

    “We want to discuss the report in international bodies so they will take decisions on what emerged in the report, in order to insure that the crimes committed by Israel against our people are never repeated,” he said.
    ….

    The Palestinian Islamist Hamas movement ruling Gaza has led a chorus of criticism of the move, accusing Abbas of betraying the 1,400 Palestinians killed in Israel’s.

     

  • johnpi 4:50 pm on October 6, 2009 | 1 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , , , Palestinians

    Marc Lynch considers the ramifications to the Obama administration and the Palestinian Authority of the stifling of the Goldstone report (via Richard Silverstein).

    The most likely tactical considerations behind the administration’s decision [to block Goldstone] seem short-sighted. Its move likely responded to the intense public and private Israeli campaign against the report, and probably aimed at winning back some positive relations with the Israelis and maintaining momentum on the peace process. But if the administration’s hope was that killing the report would make the issue quietly go away while winning some political capital with the Israelis, it is likely to be disappointed. Quite the contrary: the report is becoming a major political issue in the Arab world, badly damaging the legitimacy of the Palestinian Authority, while Obama seems to be getting little credit from Israeli public opinion or the Israeli government.

    …There seems to be little question that Abbas’s decision to go along with American pressure will have a significant impact on the popularity and legitimacy of the PA…Whatever gains made by Fatah after its Bethlehem conference and by Fayyad with the announcement of his agenda for a Palestinian state are likely to be washed away in this deluge. The credibility of the Hamas narrative about the PA’s collaboration with Israel and unrepresentative nature will be strongly enhanced. And it will not help Salam Fayyad establish authority that he has been fingered by some sources as the person directly responsible for the decision.

    Why was the PA leadership put in this untenable situation?

    Lynch goes on to point out that the Israelis seem to have taken the American protection for granted while continuing to villify and dismiss Obama. Lose-lose for Obama all the way around.

     

  • johnpi 9:02 pm on October 5, 2009 | 3 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , Mamoud Abbas, , Palestinians

    There are three dominant theories being floated as to why the West Bank government of Mahmoud Abbas scuttled a resolution “calling for the most incendiary international criticism of Israel’s actions during the Gaza War to date.”

    The first posits that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas made a clandestine deal with the U.S. to scuttle the Goldstone report in return for U.S. pressure to stop all Israeli construction in the Palestinian territories. Ibrahim Khraishi, the ambassador of the PLO to the U.N., was quoted as saying that the Palestinian negotiation had only agreed to postpone voting on the resolution so as to avoid creating “an obstacle” for the Americans.
    ….

    The second theory is that Israel threatened to cancel the licensing of Al-Wataniya, a second Palestinian mobile phone operator into which a number of Palestinian political leaders have personally invested [a $700 million investment].
    ….

    The final theory, and arguably the most conspiratorial among them, centers on the premise that Israel has recordings of senior Palestinian officials encouraging Israel to continue the January war with Hamas in Gaza, including a video of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas enthusiastically trying to convince Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak to continue the attack on Hamas. The theory is that an Israeli threat to release the tapes to the U.N. committee led to the Palestinian leadership pulling out of the resolution.

    “Aside from the threat regarding Al Wataniya, Avigdor Lieberman threatened the PA to expose evidence of their deep complicity in Israel’s massacre in Gaza,” Omar Barghouti, a Palestinian analyst and founding member of the Palestinian civil society campaign for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, told The Media Line. “That would have caused several top heads to roll, so to speak.”

     

  • johnpi 9:49 pm on October 3, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Christian Phalangists, , Lebanese Christians, , Palestinians, Sabra-Shatilla, Waltz with Bashir

    Last month’s anniversary of 9/11 passed uneventfully but with much remembrance, but another anniversary passed for another modern massacre of cvilians that went completely unremarked: The Sabra-Shatilla massacre during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 that was carried out by Christian Phalangist troops with Israeli assist.

    For an interesting comparison, read the description of the event at Wikipedia versus that published at Lawrence of Cyberia’s blog.

    Sabra-Shatilla was also the subject of a recent Israeli animation movie “Waltz with Bashir” that was nominated for an Academy Award. That too, from what I can tell, soft pedals the Israelis’ involvement.

     

  • johnpi 6:24 am on October 2, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , Palestinians

    Israel swaps 19 Palestinian women for soldier tape.

    All but one of the Palestinian women due to be released are from the West Bank and none has been directly implicated in killing Israelis.

    The women include members of Hamas, Fatah, Islamic Jihad and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

    A 15-year-old Palestinian girl who was on the initial list of prisoners to be released in the swap was freed on Wednesday after a parole board shortened her sentence in a development unconnected with the prisoner swap.

    The teenager was serving 11 months for attempted murder and an attack on a police officer.

    The story goes on to report that there are 320 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails under the age of 18.

     

  • johnpi 6:40 pm on September 30, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , Palestinians

    Palestinian suicides on the rise.

    A new Palestinian police report notes a worrying rise in the number of Palestinians attempting or committing suicide

    The number of suicide attempts among Palestinians in the West Bank has gone up by 65% since 2008, a new Palestinian police report says.

    The Palestinian police’s Department of Planning and Research said that although the number of successful suicide attempts has gone down, the numbers collected so far show that more people have tried to kill themselves since the beginning of 2009 than during the whole of 2008.

     

  • johnpi 8:00 am on September 26, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , , , , , , Palestinians, ,

    Palestinian-Israeli conflict could get much worse if tolerated.

    If he [Obama] allows Israel to continue to stall and to demonstrate that it will make no end to the West Bank occupation, he will disappoint the highest hopes that have existed among both Jews and Arabs since 1967 that a positive outcome is possible between Israel and the Palestinians.

    In that case, there may be still another, and more violent, intifada, and more regional violence and terrorism. Or perhaps nothing will happen. An apartheid Israel will survive, and the Palestine population will grow, whether within or without the legal frontiers of Israel.

    The Palestinian leaders, their people, the Hezbollah and Hamas leadership, and the Palestinians’ external Arab supporters, as well as the Israelis themselves, will decide that, and will have to accept the consequences.

    But there will be other consequences. The present condition of low-level but generalized war, or state of terrorism, or institutionalized hostility by Muslims against the United States and against Americans, will continue and undoubtedly widen.

    Americans convinced that America must dominate the Middle East will grow in influence; there will, in some sense, be a restoration of the national leadership and outlook that existed under George W. Bush.

    The governments and public opinion of the European Union will disengage from U.S. pro-Israeli policies. There will be sanctions on Israel of various kinds, and no doubt measures of intellectual, cultural, sportive and other boycotts of Israel, of the kind already envisaged in some Western circles.

    Emigration from Israel of the young, the talented, the morally alienated—also a reality today—will increase. But further speculation is undoubtedly unprofitable.

     

  • johnpi 11:03 am on September 5, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , Palestinians, Tel Aviv

    “Israeli propaganda” ruins Toronto Film Festival.

    Some 50 intellectuals and filmmakers, including Briton Ken Loach, have accused the Toronto film festival of “complicity with the Israeli propaganda machine” over its spotlight this year of Tel Aviv.

    The Toronto International Film Festival chose this year to present 10 films on the Jewish metropolis by local filmmakers for its “City to City” program, which each year focuses its lens on a different city.
    ….

    “Looking at modern, sophisticated Tel Aviv without also considering the city’s past and the realities of Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza strip, would be like rhapsodizing about the beauty and elegant lifestyles in white-only Cape Town or Johannesburg during apartheid without acknowledging the corresponding black townships of Khayelitsha and Soweto.”

    The 50 signatories to the letter include Canadian sociologist Naomi Klein, British filmmaker Ken Loach, American actress Jane Fonda and several Israeli filmmakers.

     

  • razib, murtad fitri 2:06 pm on August 1, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , Palestinians

    there was some reference below to the possibility of shifting focus from the israeli-palestinian conflict to the uighurs in china. i’m not too interested in the specific details of that issue, but, would offer that the number of issues one can focus on are multitudinous, and the set of issues one focuses on is conditioned by background and values. as it happens most of the muslim world has not paid much attention to the uighurs. who has? the government of turkey this shows the power of *ethnicity* and *linguistic affinity*, which serves as a separate, if related, identity to that of religion. but that is likely not the only parameter, after all, indian muslims do not have any ethno-linguistic connection to arabs any more than they do to uighur turks.

    no only are there *endogenous* parameters of identity, but there are *exogenous* parameters of pragmatism. the possibility of affecting great change in china through moral or public pressure seems low, the chinese gov. has marginal interest in world opinion. additionally, the key endogenous parameter of economic self-interest is also an issue. china is an economic superpower, not just as an exporter of cheap goods, but now as a direct investor to underdeveloped countries or potential collaboraters.

     

  • johnpi 5:29 am on July 17, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , , Palestinians

    US agrees to resettle 1,350 Palestinians displaced by Iraq War – with full rights to become US citizens down the line.

    Mr. Asali cautioned that it is bound to irk Palestinian and Arab leaders who interpret U.S. willingness to resettle Palestinians — which comes with full rights such as citizenship down the road — as “a conspiracy to liquidate the Palestinian refugee issue.” With the exception of Jordan, no country in the Middle East has granted citizenship to Palestinian refugees. Many Arab countries believe that fully integrating large numbers of Palestinian refugees would undercut their demand for an independent state.

    At least one pro-Israel group in the U.S. deems it a mistake to absorb the Palestinian Iraqis, who were welcomed by Saddam Hussein and regarded as loyal supporters of his regime. “We don’t think that Washington should be bringing in a group of people who we know were publicly and consistently hostile to the United States and its closest ally, Israel,” said Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America.

     

  • johnpi 9:45 pm on July 2, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , , Palestinians,

    Max Blumenthal praises the “courageous decision” of the US media for broadcasting Neda’s killing “vividly and repeatedly.” Wishes they would do the same for Palestinian victims.

    The outpouring of American public sympathy for Iranian demonstrators might never have occurred had cable news outlets not made the courageous decision to broadcast Neda’s killing vividly and repeatedly.

    Yet when Palestinians employ direct action tactics to protest Israeli oppression, and when Israeli forces respond with wanton brutality, they are ignored by the US media, even when footage is already available through online sources.

     

  • johnpi 10:21 pm on May 8, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , Israeli embargo, , Palestinians

    Marvel at the ingenuity and adaptive capacities of the Palestinians as they – or at least this one man – rebuilds his home out of mud in response to the embargo on cement:

    Jihad el-Shaar got the idea from his travels in Asia and the Middle East. “I travelled in Bangladesh, India, Yemen, Turkey…they all use some similar technique of building houses from earth. All you need is clay, sand and some straw.” These he mixed with water, and poured into brick moulds that were left in the sun to dry for three days. Good enough to build a fine house with….

    “In the winter it is warm, and in the summer it will be cool. There’s no problem with leaking, and this type of house will last a lifetime,” he says. “And it was cheap to build. A house this size made of cement would cost around 16,000 dollars at least. This one, because it was made with simple, local materials cost just 3,000 dollars.”

     

  • johnpi 6:22 am on April 4, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , , , , Palestinians,

    Chas Freeman truly understood the nature of US power. It is a great loss to the US that after appointment to the National Intelligence Council, he was the victim of “a sustained campaign against the appointment by right-wing leaders of the so-called “Israel Lobby” concerned about his past criticism of Israel’s relations with its Arab neighbours, and particularly its treatment of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories.”

    Here’s Freeman on the US dollar:

    The role of the dollar as a universal currency for reserve and trade settlement purposes is absolutely central to our international power and reach. (…) Furthermore, we have used the fact that the dollar is an extension of our sovereignty to impose unilateral sanctions all over the place and to manipulate the global banking sector to enforce our policies, even when those policies — say, with respect to Iran — are not supported by others. So we have a big stake in this, and when we get the dollar into trouble, as we have done, this is very, very fundamental.

     

  • johnpi 7:04 pm on March 24, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , , Palestinians,

    Lieberman’s Israel.

    The Umm al-Fahm settler march to “demand loyalty” is another sign of the trend that the settler movement is turning its sights onto the Palestinian areas inside Israel in an effort “judaize” all of historic Palestine. But this movement is just a symptom of a broader ideology that now is getting explicitly articulated and publicly embraced. Uri Avnery describes a case argued recently before the Israeli Supreme Court that involved the Israeli law which prevents a Palestinian citizen of Israel from sharing their Israeli citizenship, or even living, with a spouse if they are living in the occupied territories or a “hostile” Arab country:

    (More …)

     

  • johnpi 7:25 am on March 13, 2009 | 3 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , Palestinians, ,

    Funny money.

    In Israel and the Occupied Territories, the Obama administration has announced it will withdraw its entire $900 million aid pledge if the pending Palestinian unity government doesn’t recognize Israel’s “right to exist.” The warning was reportedly delivered by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas last week. Clinton told Abbas the US Congress won’t approve Palestinian aid unless the Palestinian government also renounces violence. No such conditions have been imposed on Israel. The Israeli government refuses to renounce violence and has never recognized the right of Palestine to exist. Palestinians have also criticized the demand they recognize Israel’s “right to exist” because it forces them to go beyond recognizing Israel within secure borders, but in fact affirm the legitimacy of their dispossession and ongoing occupation. Also here.

     

  • johnpi 7:39 pm on March 10, 2009 | 0 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: Jon Kyl, , Palestinians

    Following his shameful decision to show the anti-Muslim video “Fitna” with Dutch MP Geert Wilders, Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ) introduced a disgraceful amendment to the Omnibus Appropriations legislation-the bill that will fund the federal government for the 2009 fiscal year – to restrict funding for Palestinian refugees seeking entry into the United States. Today, after bipartisan opposition, Kyl withdrew the bill.

     

  • johnpi 7:39 am on January 26, 2009 | 5 Permalink | Reply
    Tags: , , Palestinians,

    An exhibition commemorating Muslim Albanians who rescued Jews during the Holocaust will open at the mixed Jewish-Arab town of Ramle, near Lod, on Tuesday, International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

    As a means of educating the Arabic-speaking public about the atrocities of the Holocaust, along with countering Holocaust denial, Yad Vashem has recently launched a website and YouTube channel in Arabic. Link.

    It’s antagonizing to see the Israelis attempting to “sensitize” Arabs to holocaust horrors while denying at the same time that they are inflicting them on the Palestinians.

     

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