One State or Two? Neither. The Issue Is Zionism--Jonathan Cook

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"The obstacle to a solution, then, is not about dividing the land but about Zionism itself, the ideology of ethnic supremacism that is the current orthodoxy in Israel. As long as Israel is a Zionist state, its leaders will allow neither one state nor two real states."

Portion below; whole thing here: http://www.counterpunch.org/cook03122008.html

If the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the world’s most intractable, much the same can be said of the parallel debate about whether its resolution can best be achieved by a single state embracing the two peoples living there or by a division of the land into two separate states, one for Jews and the other for Palestinans.

The philosopher Michael Neumann has dedicated two articles, in 2007 and earlier this week, for CounterPunch discrediting the one-state idea as impractical and therefore as worthless of consideration. In response, Kathy Christison has mounted a robust defense, neatly exposing the twists and turns of Neumann’s logic. I will not trouble to cover the same ground.

I want instead to address Neumann’s central argument: that it is at least possible to imagine a consensus emerging behind two states, whereas Israelis will never accept a single state. That argument, the rallying cry of most two-staters, paints the one-state crowd as inveterate dreamers and time-wasters.

The idea, Neumann writes, “that Israel would concede a single state is laughable. … There is no chance at all [Israelis] will accept a single state that gives the Palestinians anything remotely like their rights.”

According to Neumann, unlike the one-state solution, the means to realizing two states are within our grasp: the removal of the half a million Jewish settlers living in the occupied Palestinian territories. Then, he writes, “a two-state solution will, indeed, leave Palestinians with a sovereign state, because that’s what a two-state solution means. It doesn’t mean one state and another non-state, and no Palestinian proponent of a two-state solution will settle for less than sovereignty.”

There is something surprisingly naive about his arguing that, just because something is called a two-state solution, it will necessarily result in two sovereign states. What are the mimimum requirements for a state to qualify as sovereign, and who decides?

"Supporting the troops" = Supporting U.S. Imperialist War

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Portion below; whole thing here: http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_kenneth__080311__22supporting_the_troo.htm

The U.S. has over 700 military bases or sites located in over 130 foreign countries. The U.S. government spends more on its military than the entire rest of the world combined. The hundreds of thousands of troops stationed overseas are not there to preserve or foster freedom and democracy as the Bush regime would like to claim, but to maintain U.S. imperialist domination of the world. If you “support the troops” in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the other more than 100 countries in which they are located, you also support U.S. hegemony in the world. I believe that the vast majority of people who say they support the troops do not wish to support U.S. imperialism, but that is what they are really doing by putting forth the slogan of “support the troops.”

We need to oppose the recruitment of men and women into the military. We need to support resisters within the military who have realized what they are doing and now choose to resist the role of the U.S. military. This includes people such as Lt. Ehren Watada who refused to deploy to Iraq. Watada stated, “Never did I imagine my president would lie to go to war, condone torture, spy on Americans…” He was the first officer to refuse to go to Iraq and he was court-martialed. Another resister is Camilo Mejia. In 2004 Sergeant Mejia was sentenced to one year in prison when he was court-martialed for refusing to assist the military in Iraq. Mejia said, “I am only a regular person that got tired of being afraid to follow his own conscience. For far too long I allowed others to direct my actions even when I knew that they were wrong....”

We need to expose that those in the U.S. military are trained to be part of a “killing machine.” While not every member of the military is an individual murderer, they are all part of a system that commits war crimes, including aggressive wars, massacres, rape, and other crimes against humanity, all in the service of U.S. imperialism. The bottom line is that even if these people are relatives or friends, you can not support the troops without also supporting the objective role that these troops play in the imperialist system.

James Circello, who joined the Army after September 11 2001, and was sent to Iraq in March 2003 described his experience there : “We were told that we were giving these people Democracy. Unfortunately what I saw would best be described as martial law, or what we called "The Old West". Soldiers joked that "anything goes", which was true and still is….I never forgot what I did while in Iraq and what I saw happening: Other kids turning into animals. Some as young as 17, brutalizing, bullying and humiliating individuals sometimes old enough to be their grandparents, and sometimes young enough to be their children. And it wasn't just the men on the receiving end, suffering through illegal and tiresome searches of their homes and vehicles, simply for being brown skinned, but the same methods were applied to women and children as well.
No one was innocent.”

James Circello reached a point where he could no longer be part of this killing machine. At an anti war rally in New Orleans, he said “you will never get me to agree with or get me to support genocide against any group of people. Regardless of who they are. An American life is no more valuable than an Arab's life!”

Single-Payer Can't Be Worse Than This

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Portion below; whole thing here: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/11/health/views/11essa.html?em&ex=1205380800&en=d96f2a4b06b40634&ei=5087%0A

Though accurate data is lacking, the overuse of services in health care probably cost hundreds of billions of dollars last year, out of the more than $2 trillion that Americans spent on health.

Are we getting our money’s worth? Not according to the usual measures of public health. The United States ranks 45th in life expectancy, behind Bosnia and Jordan; near last, compared with other developed countries, in infant mortality; and in last place, according to the Commonwealth Fund, a health-care research group, among major industrialized countries in health-care quality, access and efficiency.

And in the United States, regions that spend the most on health care appear to have higher mortality rates than regions that spend the least, perhaps because of increased hospitalization rates that result in more life-threatening errors and infections. It has been estimated that if the entire country spent the same as the lowest spending regions, the Medicare program alone could save about $40 billion a year.

"The Palestinians Make Cynical Use Of Children"--A Post From Lawrence of Cyberia

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Portion below; whole thing here: http://lawrenceofcyberia.blogs.com/

Th[e] title comes from a comment an IDF spokesperson made last August, following an incident in which the IDF killed three Palestinian children (shown below) who were initially alleged to be legitimate targets because they were retrieving a Qassam rocket launcher, but who were subsequently found to have been playing tag.

Sarah, Mahmoud and Yehya Abu Ghazal. Photo: PCHR, via ei

The comment is particularly ironic in view of the fact that if you were compiling a list of organizations that have no standing whatsoever to talk about the cynical exploitation of children, the Israeli military would surely be right up there.

When Israel exploits children for military purposes, it's usually Palestinian children on the receiving end: e.g. in the form of children used as human shields, or child prisoners being recruited as informers (link opens MS Word file). But a report I watched this morning on Ha'aretz/Channel 10 - New program to allow mentally challenged to enlist in the IDF, read the print version here or watch the video here - reminded me that IDF exploitation can be a multicultural phenomenon. Today's report is about how the IDF is enlisting about 200 mentally challenged volunteers into the army, in a project designed to allow the participants more "meaningful integration into Israeli society". It highlights the story of Shimrit, who has Down Syndrome, and concludes with her joyful exclamation: "It's fun to be in uniform!".

Now, I should say at the outset that Shimrit is not a child, and all the individuals who enlist in the IDF under this program will be at least 21 years of age. But the recruitment into the armed forces of the mentally challenged raises some of the same issues raised by the recruitment of children. Furthermore, the IDF actually does use children to perform non-combat tasks at its military installations. ...

Largest operation and Arrest Campaign in Al Ein Refugee Camp in Years

Tweet From Palestine News Service via Uruknet.info

The Israeli army launched a campaign of mass arrests in the city of Nablus and the nearby camps Monday morning.

At least 20 young people were taken to unknown locations, most from Al Ein Refugee Camp. This is the largest invasion of its kind in the camp during the current Intifada.

Local security sources that those arrested were first blindfolded and bound. They include Hatem Aldamouni, Marwan Hamdi, Anas Mohammed Hassan Hamdan, Hassan Khattab, Moatassem Khattab, Raed Abu Daoud, Muhammad Shehadeh, and Bilal Masri, Iyad and Ihab Suesh.

In the Askar Refugee Camp Israeli forces arrested Ali Ahmed Abu Zir for the second time. Residents of the camp told PNN that Israeli soldiers broke into numerous homes and conducted invasive searches. The Suesh family said that in addition to losing two of their family members to arrests, Israeli soldiers also stole cash and documents during after storming their home.

Amember of the People's Committee of Ein Camp Services that that the operation was the largest carried out in the eastern Nablus refugee camp in years.

IRAQ: Childhood Is Dying

Tweet Portion below; whole thing here: http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=41524

BAQUBA, Mar 10 (IPS) - Iraq's children have been more gravely affected by the U.S. occupation than any other segment of the population.

The United Nations estimated that half a million Iraqi children died during more than 12 years of economic sanctions that preceded the U.S. invasion of March 2003, primarily as a result of malnutrition and disease.

But childhood malnutrition in Iraq has increased 9 percent since then, according to an Oxfam International report released last July.

A report from the non-governmental relief organisation Save the Children shows Iraq continues to have the highest mortality for children under five. Since the first Gulf War, this has increased 150 percent. It is estimated that one in eight children in Iraq dies before the fifth birthday: 122,000 children died in 2005 alone. Iraq has a population of about 25 million.

According to a UN Children's Fund report released this month, "at least two million Iraqi children lack adequate nutrition, according to the World Food Programme assessment of food insecurity in 2006, and face a range of other threats including interrupted education, lack of immunisation services and diarrhoea diseases."

IPS interviewed three children from different districts of Baquba, the capital city of Iraq's volatile Diyala province, 40 km northeast of Baghdad.

Firas Muhsin is seven, and lives in Baquba with his mother. His father was killed two years ago by militants who shot him in his shop.

Firas attends school four hours every day near his house. On rare occasions he gets to play with neighbours' children, but always under the eyes of his mother.

Firas is allowed to move no more than ten metres from the house; his mother is afraid of strangers. Kidnapping of Iraqi children is common now, and many are believed to have been sold as child labourers or as sex workers.

Iraqi officials and aid workers have recently expressed concern over the alarming rate at which children are disappearing countrywide in Iraq's unstable environment.

IOA Blocks Italian Minister from Visiting Gaza

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From The Palestinian Information Center via Palestinian Pundit

GAZA, (PIC)-- The Israeli occupation authority barred on Monday Massimo Toschi, the Italian minister for international cooperation and peace, from visiting Gaza to inspect the humanitarian condition there in the context of the tight Israeli siege imposed on the Strip more than eight months ago.

In a statement, the health ministry in Gaza said that the IOA blocked the Italian minister from entering Gaza in order to prevent the world from knowing the ongoing Israeli crimes committed against the Palestinian people, pointing out that Toschi was scheduled to visit a number of Gaza hospitals and institutions.

For its part, the popular committee against the siege headed by MP Jamal Al-Khudari strongly denounced the IOA for barring the Italian minister from visiting the Gaza Strip, charging that the arbitrary measure comes within the Israeli policy which tries to prevent anybody especially international personalities from reporting the real image and tragedy in Gaza to the world.

It pointed that the IOA had already prevented many delegations from entering Gaza and banned the entry of humanitarian aid to its people as well.

The committee underscored that such practice was part of the genocidal war waged by the IOA against the besieged Palestinian people in Gaza which aims to tighten its grip on their lives and to block international solidarity with them.

Pink--Dear Mr. President

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Iraq War Entering Year Six: Multiple Crises Rising In Middle East--Phyllis Bennis

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Portion below; whole thing here: http://www.zcommunications.org/znet/viewArticle/16828

And Congress continued to add fuel to the fire by supplying Israel with more weapons, in contravention of the U.S. Arms Export Control and Foreign Assistance Acts. This year, U.S. taxpayers will provide Israel with $2.55 billion in arms shipments, a 9% increase over actual spending in 2007. This is the first installment of a ten-year U.S. commitment to increase arms shipments to Israel by 25%. Of the $30 billion total, Israel will spend 25% on its own arms manufacturers, with the remaining 75% going mostly to U.S. war profiteers such as Motorola, Caterpillar, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics and others. And in the face of the most murderous assault on Gaza in 40 years of occupation, Congress responded with a 404-1 vote to support Israel and condemn Palestinian rocket attacks on civilians; the 130 or so dead Palestinian civilians apparently did not exist. (Ron Paul voted no; Congressmembers McDermott, Moran, Capuano and Abercrombie voted "present")

The current escalation of violence demonstrates the urgent need for an immediate ceasefire, including an end to Palestinian rocket-fire against civilian targets and in which Israel ends all of its military attacks (including bombings by plane, helicopter and drone; rocket attacks, naval attacks on Gaza fishermen, tank and foot soldier incursions), deliberate murders known as "targeted assassinations," house and building demolitions, and ends the siege of Gaza. After leaving the region, Condoleezza Rice backed Palestinian Authority head Mahmoud Abbas and asked Egypt to negotiate with Israel and Hamas for "a mechanism to calm down the situation in Gaza Strip." She still would not use the term "ceasefire" because of its implication of legitimacy or recognition of Hamas.

In the dire political situation facing Palestinians living under occupation and apartheid, the choices are mostly limited to forms of violent resistance, forms of nonviolent and popular resistance, or surrender. A real ceasefire might reopen the second Palestinian option for resistance: widespread nonviolent mass mobilization. That option was the strategic choice of the first Palestinian intifada or uprising (1987-1993). It has continued, though less centrally, within the second intifada, and was most recently seen last month in Gaza, in the extraordinary Hamas-enabled involvement of half or more of the entire population who collectively reclaimed their human right to move and travel and find basic necessities of life, long denied by the Israeli military, through the breached Gaza-Egypt border wall at Rafah last month.

And since there is still no serious government or inter-governmental strategy to end the Israeli occupation and reverse its apartheid policies, the role of the international civil society movements remains ever more important. In the U.S. and internationally the BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) campaign is gaining new traction and winning new influence as a means of exerting collective, non-violent economic pressure on Israel.

The World As It Is--Chris Hedges

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Portion below; whole thing here:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080310_the_world_as_it_is/

We live in a world, at home and in the Middle East, hardened and distorted by hate. We communicate in the language of fear and violence. Human beings are no longer viewed as human beings. They are no longer endowed in our eyes, or the eyes of those who oppose us, with human qualities. They do no love, grieve, suffer, laugh or weep. They represent cold abstractions of evil. The death-for-death means we communicate by producing corpses. And we are all guilty, Americans, Palestinians, Iraqis and Israelis. But we are not all guilty equally.

Israel and the United States bear the responsibility for a world that has unleashed twisted killers such as Abu Dheim. It is the decades of repression in Gaza, as well as the callous occupation in Iraq, that has bequeathed to us a new generation of jihadists and gunmen who walk into yeshivas and spray automatic fire at people bent over books. For as the poet W.H. Auden pointed out:

I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

The long, slow drip of collective humiliation and abuse, along with the tiny and large indignities that go into transforming human beings into fanatics, is rarely understood by those on the outside. It ticks away like a clock until it suddenly explodes in our face. Because we do not know where it came from, it strikes us as incomprehensible, irrational, the product of a demented form of humanity. These killers, however, are not formed by the Quran or Islam or a culture that is morally inferior to our own. They are formed by a 40-year occupation, by the continued expansion of Jewish settlements, by the refusal to allow the return of expelled refugees, by the use of fighter jets to bomb squalid refugee camps and by an Israeli siege of Gaza that has blocked fuel, electricity and essential supplies and created a humanitarian crisis for 1.5 million Palestinians. It is what the Israelis have done to the Palestinians, what we have done to the Iraqis, that has brought us to this impasse. We unleashed this violence and only we can end it.

Israel Approves Expansion of West Bank Settlement

Tweet Link: http://www.almanar.com.lb/NewsSite/NewsDetails.aspx?id=37372&language=en

09/03/2008 Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has approved the construction of hundreds of new housing units at a Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank, the housing ministry said on Sunday. The ministry added in a statement, that it will renew construction of a housing project in Givat Ze'ev's Agan Ayelot neighborhood, which will include hundreds of new homes in the Jerusalem area, outside of the Green Line. An estimated 750 homes are expected to be built.

The Housing Ministry and Israel Lands Administration (ILA) started marketing lots for the housing units in the Agan Ayalot neighborhood in 1999, but stopped near the end of 2000 after the eruption of the second Intifada.

The Israeli cabinet decision came after Thursday's attack on a Zionist religious school in Jerusalem. The attack drew harsh criticism to Olmert and his ministerial and security group.
There were calls by some extreme Israeli political and religious figures to built a whole settlement in the West Bank for each of the eight settles killed in the attack.

Analysts see in Olmert's move a bid to ease down the Israeli street amid new promises of deterrence, power and self confidence. "The state of Israel has the responses to all the threats and the ability to respond to all dangers, and has the force, knowledge and resourcefulness to cope with anything that can threaten the security of Israel and its citizens," the Israeli Prime Minister said.

Olmert had asked Boim to update him regarding similar projects, in order to make decisions and strategize how to explain them to the international community. The international community considers all Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian land illegal.

Boim said on Sunday that "the renewal of construction at 'Agan Ayelot' is good news", adding that "an addition of hundreds of housing units is part of a policy aimed to respond to many requests and the need to balance and maintain reasonable housing prices- through supplying the demographic needs in Jerusalem." He said he "intends to continue and work towards this policy in order to strengthen Jerusalem."

The move was swiftly denounced as hampering efforts to advance faltering talks between the Palestinian authority and Israel. "We condemn in the harshest terms this decision," senior Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said.
"We consider that with this decision, Israel wants to demolish the peace process and international efforts to advance this process," he added. Erekat called on the US administration to pressure Israel to reverse its decision.

Great and Little Satan Free to Aggress and Ethnically Cleanse;Their Targets Have No Right of Self Defense (or Any Other Right Questioned by the Satans

Tweet Found the quoted article on Dissident Veteran. I actually saw the Gates press conference on some Youtube or other. It was so refreshing to see someone ask a reality based question to this guy. Anyway, Herman's whole article on the nuclear double-standard is here: http://www.zmag.org/sustainers/content/2007-12/16herman.cfm

In the discussions about Iran among the leaders in the "international community," their expressed dire fears about Iran and its nuclear program never cause them to raise any questions about Israel's nuclear program, even though it is well known that Israel not only has a "program" but has several hundred nuclear weapons, built in secret but with U.S., French, and British aid, and of course done outside the authority of the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty (NPT) designed to prevent proliferation. Israel's acquisition of this arsenal is obviously disturbing to its Arab neighbors, who are placed at a great military disadvantage by this violation of NPT principles--and equity--accepted and even facilitated by Israel's Western allies. To see those Western allies greatly agitated over the possibility that Iran might have a nuclear program that at some future date would allow it to produce such weapons, while taking Israel's arsenal as a given not even worthy of mention, reflects a gross political double standard that is both racist and illustrative of that famous "clash of civilizations," with the clash coming from Western initiatives, actions and threats.

Gates and the Iranian Versus Israeli Threat

While this double standard is not even discussible in the Western mainstream it is considered a major issue and is debated in the Arab world. Thus, U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates was confronted with the double standard at a conference in Bahrain organized by the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies, where Gates was urging the Arab states to press Iran to halt any nuclear activities. Gates was asked by Bahraini Minister of Labor Majeed al-Alawi whether Gates thought "the Zionist (Israeli) nuclear weapon is a threat to the region." Gates paused, and answered tersely: "No, I do not." A.P. reports that "Asked if U.S. acceptance of that was a double standard in light of Washington's pressure on Iran, Gates again said 'no,' and described the government in Jerusalem as more responsible than the one in Tehran. 'I think Israel is not training terrorists to subvert its neighbors. It has not shipped weapons into a place like Iraq to kill thousands of innocent civilians covertly,' said Gates. 'So I think that there are significant differences in terms of both the history and the behavior of the Iranian and Israeli governments.'" [1] This reportedly elicited a great deal of laughter among the Arab representatives present, but both the laughter and the issue at stake are outside the orbit of accepted thought in the West.

Terrorists Wear Suits

Tweet Another poster by SF Bay Area graphic artist Doug Minkler. Click on the image to enlarge it.

Found on Dissident Veteran

The Curse of Gaza--Yossi Sarid in Haaretz

Tweet Portion below; whole thing here: http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/961779.html

The curse of Gaza is as powerful as death: if the entire occupation is a tragedy, the occupation of Gaza is its essence: 360 square kilometers, some 1.5 million people, 1 million refugees, and the responsibility is all ours. From the beginning there were those who warned us of the curse, and not only Sapir; even Moshe Dayan used words of caution. It did no good. The euphoria is contagious, the war rolls on, and a wise people is a foolish one. In the Zionist enterprise's march of folly, Gaza stands out as a major milestone, a signpost of weeping. The foundation stone of our tears.

A Defeated Policy, Not a Defeated People--Ali Abunimah

Tweet Portion below; whole thing here: http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9381.shtml

Compared with the international silence that surrounded Israel's recent massacres of Palestinian civilians in the Occupied Gaza Strip, condemnation and condolences for the victims of the shooting attack that killed eight students at the Mercaz HaRav Yeshiva in Jerusalem has been swift.

"I have just spoken with [Israeli] Prime Minister [Ehud] Olmert to extend my deepest condolences to the victims, their families, and to the people of Israel," US President George W. Bush said. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon added his "condemnation" and "condolences," as did EU High Representative Javier Solana.

The day before the Jerusalem attack, Amira Abu 'Aser was buried in Gaza. She had lived just 20 days on this earth before being shot in the head by Israeli occupation forces who attacked the house of friends she and her family were visiting. Needless to say, she had not been firing rockets at Sderot when she was killed. One of the house's inhabitants was found the next day, shot dead and his head crushed by an army jeep, an apparent victim of an extrajudicial murder by Israeli forces.

But confirming their status in the eyes of the "international community" as less than complete human beings, neither Amira's killing, nor any of the dozens of Palestinian civilian victims of Israel's onslaught in Gaza have merited condemnation or condolences.

The fallacy that lies behind the differential concern for the lives of innocent Israelis and Palestinians is that the massacre in Jerusalem and the massacres in Gaza can be separated. Israeli deaths are "terrorism," while Palestinian deaths are merely an unfortunate consequence of the fight against "terrorism." But the two are intricately linked, and what happened in Jerusalem is a direct consequence of what Israel has been doing to the Palestinians for decades.

Let me be clear that the killing of civilians, Israeli or Palestinian, is wrong, repugnant, and cannot bring this one-hundred-year war caused by the Zionist colonization of Palestine to an end. There will be an Israeli propaganda effort -- as always -- to present Palestinian violence as being simply motivated by hatred, and divorced from the context of brutal occupation that Palestinians live under. What greater proof could you need than an attack on religious students, devoting their life to the study of the Torah?

We cannot expect much analysis in the media of why the Mercaz HaRav yeshiva might have been chosen as a target. Was it mere coincidence that the school, named for Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, and led after his death by his son Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, is the ideological cradle of the militant, Jewish supremacist settler movement Gush Emunim?

Colombian Defense Minister Says Ties with Israel Strong and Growing Stronger

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Israel's President Shimon Peres, left, shakes hands with Colombia's Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos during their meeting in Jerusalem, Thursday, Feb. 7, 2008. Santos is on an official visit to the region

Portion below; whole thing here: http://www.militaryphotos.net/forums/showthread.php?t=128389

JERUSALEM: Colombian Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos on Thursday praised his country's long defense relationship with Israel, saying he sought to boost it further by setting up a bilateral fund for technological research and development.

Hosting Santos at his official Jerusalem residence, Israeli President Shimon Peres said that in the 1950s, Colombia defied international embargoes to ship weapons to the newly created Jewish state, a statement from Peres' office said.

"In recent years the situation has come full circle, and Israel is able to repay Colombia in kind," it quoted Peres as saying, without elaborating.
Israel does not publish details of its arms exports but local media reports have said it is a major supplier of military hardware and expertise to Colombia.

The Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot wrote last week that Israel has been supplying Bogota with drone aircraft, arms, ammunition and electronic equipment for use in combatting the country's drug lords, quoting the Colombian weekly Semana as saying that Santos had confirmed that Israeli advisers had been working with his men.

Gaza Unites Palestinians, Fatah, Hamas

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It broke our heart, but united us

Portion of story below; here is whole thing: http://palestinechronicle.com/news.php?id=778e4031eb3d8813e77a6d759c98c3e7&mode=details

The heart-wrenching scenes that keep unfolding from the Gaza Strip have made national unity at the top of the ladder of priorities.

"It is high time we united and let bygones be bygones," Aziz, a Fatah supporter, said after offering his heartfelt condolences to the family of a Hamas victim in Gaza.

Abu-Ghaleb Al-Banna, a Hamas supporter, said the Israeli onslaught is a bittersweet incident.

"It broke our hearts, but united us," he said.

The Mega Prison of Palestine--Ilan Pappe

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Portion below; whole thing here: http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9370.shtml

They are different in shape: the West Bank is made of small ghettos and the one in Gaza is a huge mega ghetto of its own. There is another difference: the Gaza Strip is now, in the twisted perception of the Israelis, the ward where the "most dangerous inmates" are kept. The West Bank, on the other hand, is still run as a huge complex of open air prisons in the form of normal human habitations such as a village or a town interconnected and supervised by a prison authority of immense military and violent power.

As far as the Israelis are concerned, the mega prison of the West Bank can be called a state. Advisor to Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas, Yasser Abed Rabbo, in the last days of February 2008, threatened the Israelis with a unilateral declaration of independence, inspired by recent events in Kosovo. However, it seemed that nobody on the Israeli side objected to the idea very much. This is more or less the message a bewildered Ahmed Qurei, the Abbas-appointed Palestinian negotiator, received from Tzipi Livni, Israel's foreign minister, when he phoned to assure her that Abed Rabbo was not speaking in the name of the PA. He got the impression that her main worry was is in fact quite the opposite: that the PA would not agree to call the mega prisons a state in the near future.

This unwillingness, together with Hamas' insistence of resisting the mega prison system by a war of liberation, forced the Israelis to rethink their strategy towards the Gaza Strip. It transpires that not even the most cooperative members of the PA are willing to accept the mega prison reality as "peace" or even as a "two state settlement." And Hamas and Islamic Jihad even translate this unwillingness into Qassam attacks on Israel. So the model of the most dangerous ward developed: the leading strategists in the army and the government embrace themselves for a very long-term "management" of the system they have built, while pledging commitment to a vacuous "peace process," with very little global interest in it, and a continued struggle from within, against it.

The Gaza Strip is now seen as the most dangerous ward in this complex and thus the one against which the most brutal punitive means have to be employed. Killing the "inmates" by aerial or artillery bombing, or by economic strangulation, are not just inevitable results of the punitive action chosen, but also desirable ones. The bombing of Sderot is also the inevitable and in a way desirable consequence of this strategy. Inevitable, as the punitive action cannot destroy the resistance and quite often generates a retaliation. The retaliation in its turn provides the logic and basis for the next punitive action, should someone in domestic public opinion doubt the wisdom of the new strategy.

In the near future, any similar resistance from parts of the West Bank mega prison would be dealt with in a similar way. And these actions are very likely to take place in the very near future. Indeed, the third intifada is on its way and the Israeli response would be a further elaboration of the mega prison system. Downsizing the number of "inmates" in both mega prisons would be still a very high priority in this strategy by means of ethnic cleansing, systematic killings and economic strangulation.

But there are wedges that prevent the destructive machine from rolling. It seems that a growing number of Jews in Israel (a majority according to a recent CNN poll) wish their government to begin negotiations with Hamas. A mega prison is fine, but if the wardens' residential areas are likely to come under fire in the future then the system fails. Alas, I doubt whether the CNN poll represents accurately the present Israeli mood; but it does indicate a hopeful trend that vindicates the Hamas insistence that Israel only understands the language of force. But it may not be enough and the perfection of the mega prison system in the meantime continues unabated and the punitive measures of its authority are claiming the lives of many more children, women and men in the Gaza Strip.

As always it is important to be reminded that the west can put an end to this unprecedented inhumanity and criminality, tomorrow. But so far this is not happening. Although the efforts to make Israel a pariah state continue with full force, they are still limited to civil society. Hopefully, this energy will one day be translated into governmental policies on the ground. We can only pray it will not be too late for the victims of this horrific Zionist invention: the mega prison of Palestine.

Ilan Pappe is chair in the Department of History at the University of Exeter.

So How, at Just 23, Did Rachel Corrie Become a Palestinian Martyr?

Tweet Portion below; whole thing here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/mar/02/israelandthepalestinians

The Corries take me around Olympia in their car, past the places where Rachel grew up. While Craig drives he recalls descriptive passages from her journals and tries to retrace his daughter's steps in his mind's eye. Even on a winter's day you can see how beautiful it is: noble Douglas firs, a glint of water, secluded wooden houses with verandas.

Two years ago some of the Nasrallah family visited Olympia. They were the owners of the concrete house, pockmarked with tank shell holes, that Rachel had died defending. The two families were invited on a speaking tour to talk about the situation in the Middle East. When Khaled Nasrallah saw where Rachel had grown up he turned to her parents and said, wide-eyed: 'She gave up this paradise, for us?'

In turn, the Corries have twice visited Gaza since Rachel was killed. 'My feeling,' says Craig, 'was that she wrote about those people with warmth. Going to Gaza was a real need to see who Rachel wrote about and to thank them for the care they took of her while she was there.' They negotiated the same checkpoints, the same rubble-strewn streets as their daughter had done. Armed men in watchtowers looked down on them. At night they slept through the sound of tracer fire. I imagine how proud, and perhaps astonished, their daughter would have been (on occasion she'd railed against her father for having 'his head in the sand' politically). The Corries' instinct is to play down the danger they were in: gunfire whistled past Craig and, one evening, dinner with the Nasrallah family was interrupted by the menacing sound of a bulldozer outside the window. On their second visit in 2006 they were woken in the middle of the night by men with Kalashnikovs. Craig and Cindy Corrie would be valuable bargaining tools in an area that has become even more desperate since Rachel was killed. As it was, the Nasrallahs managed to persuade the men to go on their way. It was said that they killed two security guards on the Egyptian border instead.

In one of her final emails home Rachel said, 'This has to stop! I think it is a good idea for us all to drop everything and devote our lives to making this stop.' It's clear that her parents have taken her at her word. Sarah says, 'She wanted them to go there. In her writing she says you need to meet these people. Now our lives are intertwined with what goes on in Rafah and Gaza and Israel and Palestine.' Meanwhile, in the five years since Rachel was killed, the humanitarian situation in Gaza - effectively imprisoned by Israel, with limited fuel, electricity and medical supplies - has grown worse, not better.

The family is still seeking information about what happened to Rachel and to have her death accounted for. According to former US secretary of state Colin Powell's chief of staff, the Israeli government's report was not 'thorough, credible or transparent', yet there is no sign that the US government plans to take any further action. Four months ago Sarah discovered distressing reports that Rachel's autopsy was not carried out according to their stipulations. The Corries, along with four Palestinian families, are waiting for court action against Caterpillar Inc, the American company that makes the bulldozer that killed Rachel, to be reheard.

Latuff from Brazil on Gaza

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