Can settlers remain in a Palestinian state?

Creative ideas threatened by continued settlement building
by Ghassan Khatib

From the beginning, these illegal settlements, including in East Jerusalem, were responsible for provoking fierce confrontations. And when the peace process started, this same Israeli policy proved the major obstacle to reaching a solution.

Many ideas have been presented in the course of trying to find a solution as to how the peace process should deal with these illegal facts on the ground. One of the more creative ones is the idea of a land-swap, which was presented first during the Camp David negotiations in 2000, where the Palestinian side accepted the principle, with the condition that swaps be equal in quality and quantity.

Another creative idea for dealing with this problem is the possibility of allowing Israeli citizens to stay inside a future Palestinian state. More than one Palestinian leader has already included such a possibility in their future scenarios and possible solutions.

However, this should also be qualified, particularly in terms of the legal status of those settlers who might choose to stay in an independent Palestinian state, as well as with regards to the land they have been living on.

Full article-Bitter Lemons

Mordechai Vanunu: prisoner of conscience

by Paul Woodward on June 20, 2010

How many countries in the world are there where someone can be thrown in jail for talking to a foreigner? That was one of Mordechai Vanunu’s most recent “crimes” as a citizen in “the only democracy in the Middle East.”

Having spent 18 years in prison — more than 11 of those in solitary confinement — after revealing to the world Israel’s clandestine nuclear weapons program, Vanunu is now back in solitary confinement.

Amnesty International has rightly declared that he is a “prisoner of conscience,” and called for his immediate release.

The state persecution that Vanunu has suffered for decades and other details provide reason to suspect that he may the individual who in a report several days ago was simply referred to a Mr X.

Full story

US-Israeli relations improve — time to bulldoze Palestinian homes

Paul Woodward
"Since US-Israeli relations are so famously cozy, maybe it’s time to extend the familial metaphor a bit further: Washington is a victim of domestic violence.

Every time the Obama administration reaches out to the Netanyahu government, it gets slapped in the face. Netanyahu has once again been invited to Washington — due to the poorly-time Mavi Marmara massacre he had to bail on a visit planned for early this month. He’s now due for his long-awaited kiss and make up session at the White House on July 6. But true to form, as soon as this was announced, word came from Jerusalem that 22 Palestinian homes are going to be bulldozed to clear space for a tourist center.

Another diplomatic snafu? On the contrary. These unfortunate “coincidences” have become so predictable that it’s hard to interpret them in any other way than as a calculated effort by Israeli officials to humiliate their American counterparts."

Article

Syria’s new alliances

At Foreign Policy, Helena Cobban writes:

From 2003 to 2008, when the Bush White House was working hard to encircle and isolate Syria, with a definite view to overthrowing the Asad regime, Damascus’s strengthening tie to NATO member Turkey provided what regime insiders have described as “almost literally, a lifeline for us.”

Today, Syria’s relationship with Turkey has matured even further. At the official level, Syria now has a “no-visa” open border with Turkey, and just last week Turkey’s large, state-backed company Turk Telekom announced a massive deal to install a 2,500-kilometer, state-of the-art fiber-optic network in Syria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia that will link those three countries through Turkey to European networks.

Full story

Maverick McChrystal out of line again

A Rolling Stone profile of Gen Stanely McChrystal due out of Friday “was a mistake reflecting poor judgment and it should have never happened,” the commander of US forces in Afghanistan now says.

It was a mistake to say what he and his staff said, or it was a mistake to make these remarks in the presence of a journalist?

The incident reveals the ambivalence Americans feel when it comes to the institutional power at the center of American democracy. Whatever keeps the wheels of Washington working smoothly, it isn’t candor.

Coming as I do from a country that has a real and ancient monarchy (for which I have little respect), during twenty-some years in the United States I’ve always viewed this country’s republican credentials with a certain measure of skepticism.

Full story-War In Context

(Thanks Mara)

Faked Israeli Flotilla videos provide opening to expose Israeli Espionage in the US

Faked Israeli Flotilla videos provide opening to expose Israeli Espionage here

By Jim W. Dean for Veterans Today

Dear Friends, The Zionists shot themselves in both feet with this rushed spin job to deflect attention on their slaughter of the Gaza Flotilla activists. We can thank the retired Intel folks for the frame analysis exposing the fraud on the Veterans Today link above. Fortunately more and more retired Intel and security people are getting into the life or death struggle defending the country from our ‘domestic enemies’.

These Photo shopped videos were done so poorly as to be almost comical if they were not done to cover up murders. You will have to watch the video several times to really visually catch their mistakes. Don’t be afraid to use the pause button to study the images.

The ending scenes on the fantail immediately struck me as a studio shoot. The lighting was way to bright for a ship in that situation. The actors…well…they did a really poor job. In the real videos you see more confusion…the clothes are not right. If was a completely staged event, even down to the tiny slingshot one guy raises up so it can be noticed. Also, the camera is stationary (on a tripod)…a huge mistake.
Read more

Iranian aid flotilla postponed

Senior Red Crescent official says departure of vessel delayed due to lack of coordination, new date yet to be set. 'The ship isn't carrying any weapons,' he addsAccording to the original plan, the ship was slated to join another aid vessel in an attempt to break the blockade on the Gaza Strip.
The Iranian Red Crescent organization has decided to postpone the departure of its aid vessel to the Gaza Strip, a senior organization official said Monday.

Israel recruiting "volunteers" against Lebanese women's flotilla.

The following ad appeared in the Yediot Aharonot ad section -

The ad is translated as:

Security Organiztion
Needs
WOMEN
with great physical strength
& motivation
to evacuate women from the aid flotilla
[sent by] the Hezbollah to Gaza.

The activity is on a volunteer basis

___

Please leave your contact info in voice box 076-5400116
___

The name of the organization is not mentioned, and the voicebox appears to be set up specifically for this purpose, not connected with a longstanding organization.

Modoweiss

MSNBC Host Admits To Parroting White House Talking Points

MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski admitted on air this morning that she was repeating White House talking points she had been advised to include in the channel’s news programming regarding the ongoing BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
Read more

Thieves

Gaza convoy activists claim Israeli soldiers using debit cards stolen in raid

Boarding party troops in deadly flotilla raid confiscated cards and spent on them, claim campaigners who were on board

"Israeli troops have been accused of stealing from activists arrested in the assault on the Gaza flotilla after confiscated debit cards belonging to activists were subsequently used. I can tell you that during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, Israeli occupying terrorists were known to steal cash, cigarettes, liquors, and personal items during searches of homes. People in South Lebanon would hide such items"
Read more- The Guardian

No intention to stop land theft: Ground broken for 600 J'lem settler homes

Jerusalem – Ma'an – Israeli construction vehicles and bulldozers began digging in Jerusalem on Monday morning, in what is believed to be ground work for the building of some 600 new settlement units.

The homes were announced in late February, and are set to be built near the illegal Pisgat Ze'ev settlement and the Palestinian neighborhood of Shu'fat.
Read more

Book review: Victor Kattan's legal history of the colonization of Palestine

From Coexistence to Conquest is a unique work of legal history on the Arab-Israeli conflict. Unlike other works whose main focus is the law (e.g., Musa Mazzawi's Palestine and the Law: Guidelines for the Resolution of the Arab Israeli Conflict and The Palestine Problem in International Law and World Order by Thomas and Sally Mallison) Kattan's book stands alone in the literature because of its reliance on a remarkable amount of archival material. Although the book contains legal analysis of the kind that would mainly be familiar only to international lawyers, Kattan endeavors to simplify the legal issues and make them accessible to a novice reader. In this he meets his objective of writing a book that appeals to a general audience.

From Coexistence to Conquest ends with a quote by former British Foreign Secretary Sir Arthur Balfour describing the 1917 declaration which bore his name. Balfour stated that the policy of creating a Jewish national home in Palestine is a "great experiment, because nothing like it has ever been tried in the world, and because it is entirely novel" (251). While the suffering of the millions displaced ever since, the thousands killed and the further millions whose lives have been affected over the past hundred years until today calls into question the success of Balfour's experiment, Kattan's book successfully and methodically shows how law was used, or rather abused, in this experiment.

Mazen Masri is a PhD Candidate at the Osgoode Hall Law School, York University, Toronto, Canada. A longer version of this book review was first published in volume 15 of the Palestine Yearbook of International Law.
Full article

Are U.S. Warships Gearing Up for a Confrontation With an Iranian Aid Flotilla to Gaza?

A U.S. Navy fleet is moving through the Suez Canal into the Red Sea, probably aiming to head off the Iranian flotilla headed toward Gaza.

"The United States Navy is sending an aircraft carrier and nearly a dozen other warships through the Suez Canal and into the Red Sea, according to the British Arabic Language newspaper Al-Quds Al-Arabi, which reported that the ships carry infantry troops, armored vehicles, and ammunition.

The report was taken very seriously in Israel, where two major newspapers gave it headline coverage -- perhaps because the U.S. fleet is joined by at least one Israeli ship, according to eyewitnesses who saw it pass through the Canal"
Read more

The U.S. War Addiction: Funding Enemies to Maintain Trillion Dollar Racket

Four ways to see the true drivers of current wars around the world.
"On June 7, the day Afghanistan became America’s longest-ever war, the New York Times reported on an ongoing investigation poised to prove that private security companies “are using American money to bribe the Taliban” to fuel combat and thus enhance demand for their services. The news follows a “series of events last month that suggested all-out collusion with the insurgents,” the Times said."
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Israel's World is Changing, Quietly

Uri Avnery

Night. Utter darkness. Heavy rain. Visibility close to nil.

And suddenly – a flash of lightning. For a fraction of a second, the landscape is lit up. For this split second, the terrain surrounding us can be seen. It is not the way it used to be.

Our government’s action against the Gaza aid flotilla was such a lightning flash.

Israelis normally live in darkness as far as seeing the world is concerned. But for that instant, the real landscape around us could be seen, and it looked frightening. Then the darkness settled down over us, Israel returned to its bubble, the world disappeared from view.

This split second was enough to reveal a dismal scene. On almost all fronts, the situation of the State of Israel has worsened since the last flash of lightning.

The flotilla and the attack on it did not create this landscape. It has been there since our present government was set up. But the deterioration did not start even then. It began a long time before.

The action of Ehud Barak & Co. only lit up the situation as it is now, and gave it yet another push in the wrong direction.

How does the new landscape look in the light of Barak’s barak? (“barak” means lightning in Hebrew.)

The list is headed by a fact that nobody seems to have noticed until now: the death of the Holocaust.

Read more

Robert Fisk: Fighting talk: The new propaganda

Journalism has become a linguistic battleground – and when reporters use terms such ‘spike in violence’ or ‘surge’ or ‘settler’, they are playing along with a pernicious game, argues Robert Fisk

Following the latest in semantics on the news? Journalism and the Israeli government are in love again. It's Islamic terror, Turkish terror, Hamas terror, Islamic Jihad terror, Hezbollah terror, activist terror, war on terror, Palestinian terror, Muslim terror, Iranian terror, Syrian terror, anti-Semitic terror...

But I am doing the Israelis an injustice. Their lexicon, and that of the White House – most of the time – and our reporters' lexicon, is the same. Yes, let's be fair to the Israelis. Their lexicon goes like this: Terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror, terror.

How many times did I just use the word "terror"? Twenty. But it might as well be 60, or 100, or 1,000, or a million. We are in love with the word, seduced by it, fixated by it, attacked by it, assaulted by it, raped by it, committed to it. It is love and sadism and death in one double syllable, the prime time-theme song, the opening of every television symphony, the headline of every page, a punctuation mark in our journalism, a semicolon, a comma, our most powerful full stop. "Terror, terror, terror, terror". Each repetition justifies its predecessor.

Read more-The Independent

The Lethal Dove . The Lobby didn't like it. The paper apologised

This cartoon by Jeff Darcy appeared in the Cleveland Plain Dealer on June 3. This was clearly a breakthrough. The ADL and CAMERA immediately unleashed the Israel Lobby’s flak machine; they wouldn’t tolerate such favourable representation of what the American Jewish Committee calls ‘The Terror Flotilla‘. It did not take long for the editors to cave and issue a grovelling apology. It is now time for you to register your opinion.

But quickly the paper apologised to the lobby: Here

Huge outpouring of Oakland picketers stop unloading of Israeli ship

Henry Norr- Mondoweiss

"If anyone had any doubts that the movement for justice in Palestine is growing by leaps and bounds, in numbers, breadth, and determination, check out what happened this morning in Oakland, CA:

• somewhere between 700 and 1,000 demonstrators from all over the San Francisco Bay Area made their way at 5:30 on a Sunday morning deep into the Port of Oakland to stage a spirited community-labor picket line in front of a berth where an Israeli freighter, the Zim Shenzhen, was due to dock;"

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First Bullets, Now Bulldozers: Nabi Saleh Pays The Price For Protests

Palestine Monitor

16 June 2010

The village has been targeted with demolition orders in an attempt to repress the popular struggle. Nine homes are due to be demolished next month. Reporting and photography from Nicky Elliott.

The Ayoub family in their home which is slated for demolition next month.

My arrival in Nabi Saleh tells me a lot about the village nestled deep in the West Bank, north of Ramallah. As the servees enters village land we pass a synagogue and a forest villagers are forbidden from reaching. We get out of the sunshine-yellow minibus to a view of scorched land, burnt when tear-gas canisters ignited the dry grass below the olive trees. Standing outside my hosts house, one of the nine slated for demolition, Bassem Tamimi must knock on his own door which his mother always keeps locked for fear of the soldiers.

Read more

Gaza Freedom Flotilla 2 - Will Carry 4000 Passengers

By Palestine Free Voice

Hiyam Noir

Updated June 18 2010 4:59 PM

The European campaign to break the siege on Gaza,has confirmed that the arrangements for the second"fleet Freedom #2" are finale, the aid ships will take off to Gaza in the second part of July. The fleet of vessels will be larger in number than the first one and the registration to participate is past, 4 days ago. The second Flotilla of aid-ships will carry almost 4000 passengers.

According to a member of the European campaign to lift the siege on Gaza, Mazen Kahil who stated in at a news conference held by the coalition at the European Parliament in Strasbourg: "We have many of the ships ready to leave Europe right now, we hope to navigate towards Gaza in the second half of the month of July."

Kahil noted that the "Freedom Flotilla # 2" will be larger in number than the previous fleet of activists and in number of vessels involved." The Israelis must know that there is a high price to be paid through the international commission of inquiry," the prosecutions of the Israelis will continue in many world capitals".

He explained that the Freedom Flottila # 2 is formed by an international coalition of all the participants and institutions governing more than 32 countries, to prosecute the Israelis before the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

The campaign kicked off in the European communication campaign and during the meetings with parliamentarians in the European Union a decision was made to form a binding official resolution condemning the Israelis criminal occupation the blockade of Gaza, and the massacre on the Freedom Flotilla #1, and the Turkish aid ship, Marvi Marmara.