The Holocaust Begins
March 1, 2008
Israeli deputy defense minister Matan Vilnai had promised a ‘holocaust’ in Gaza. Here it begins. (Here Qunfuz provides useful context to the present escalation)
Al Jazeera International reports:
The Palestinian president has accused Israel of “international terrorism”, saying its assault on Gaza constitutes “more than a holocaust”.
Mahmoud Abbas’s comments on Saturday came as more Israeli air raids brought the total death toll over four days to 88 people, at least a third of which have been children, according to medical sources.
Fifty-four people were killed during Saturday’s raids alone.
The limit of Obama’s imagination
February 23, 2008
‘At a time when Obama’s moral voice was most needed, the reach of his wings proved to be cautiously perforated on an AIPAC line,’ writes Hamid Dabashi.
“We are now faced with the fact, my friends, that tomorrow is today. We are confronted with the fierce urgency of now. In this unfolding conundrum of life and history, there is such a thing as being too late . . . Over the bleached bones and jumbled residues of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words, ‘Too late.’ There is an invisible book of life that faithfully records our vigilance or our neglect.” — Martin Luther King, Jr
Click to view caption
‘If only Obama could burn this picture of him sitting with his wife, Michele, at the same table with Edward and Mariam Said’
I HAVE BEEN a silent witness to a succession of US presidential elections for over thirty years now. I came to the United States in August 1976, the very last year of the presidency of the incumbent Republican president Gerald R. Ford, and as he and Jimmy Carter were debating each other in the lead up to November 1976 election, in which President Ford lost and President Carter succeeded him. At the time of writing this article I am yet again witness to a highly contested series of primaries for the presidential election of 2008 — as on the democratic front Senators Hillary Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois have captured and divided the attention of a highly charged and massively divisive American electorate — along the thorny issues of race and gender, establishment versus progressive politics, and above all a regressive politics of the status quo and a buoyant possibility of yet another upsurge of hope for the younger generation of Americans to give political reality to their otherwise moot and mute idealism.
Killing the Children of Gaza
February 17, 2008
The Zionist Entity continues its terrorist war on the caged population of Gaza, and as always, children remain its primeary targets. Imagine how the Western press would report this had a similar attack been carried out by the Palestinians against Israel? A frontpage story, without a doubt, and a healthy dose of condemnation. Why not in this case?
‘Many Die With Targeted Leader‘, reports Mohammed Omer of IPS.
GAZA CITY, Feb 16 (IPS) – Human remains mix with debris following the latest Israeli assault Friday on Bureij Camp in Gaza Strip. Early reports listed nine dead and more than 50 injured.
A targeted leader was killed, but many others were killed too.
“It’s very hard for us to rescue, or even locate bodies beneath the building,” said a medical relief worker from the local Bureij hospital.
Israel has not confirmed responsibility for the missile attack by F-16 aircraft.
“This is a barbaric crime,” said Dr. Hassan Khalaf, head of the local al-Shifa hospital. “They bombed residential areas where people were sleeping in their houses.”
The attack apparently targeted the house of a top leader of the al-Quds Brigades, the military wing of the Islamic Jihad party. The leader, Ayman al-Fayed, 42, was reported killed, along with two of his children and his wife. Other victims were from the Bureij camp.
Palestinian sources said seven houses were destroyed, and about 100 others damaged. According to hospital sources, many of the casualties were children under the age of 12, and included a baby only a few months old.
Read the rest of this entry »
The Experiment in Gaza
February 4, 2008
Hundreds of Palestinians have been killed in the occupied territories by Israel, yet they have all been buried in the inner pages of British press. A Palestinian bomber kills one today, and its front page news. Here is Neve Gordon on the experiment in famine being carried out by Israel which may explain why such attacks are a mere inevitability.
The experiment in famine began on January 18, 2008. Israel hermetically closed all of Gaza’s borders, preventing food, medicine and fuel from entering the Strip. Power cuts, which had been frequent for many months, were extended to 12 hours per day. Because of the electricity shortage, at least 40 percent of Gazans have not had access to running water (which is channeled through electric pumps) for days and the sewage system has broken down. The raw sewage that has not spilled onto the streets is being poured into the sea at a daily rate of 30 million liters. Hospitals have been forced to rely on emergency generators, leading them to cut back, yet again, on the already limited services offered to the Palestinian population. The World Food Programme has reported critical shortages of food and declared that it is unable to provide 10,000 of the poorest Gazans with three out of the five foodstuffs they normally receive.
After five days of extreme suffering, a group of Hamas militants took the lead and blew-up parts of the steel wall along the Egyptian border. Within hours, more than 100,000 Gazans crossed the border into Egypt. They were hungry, thirsty, and sick of being locked up in a filthy cage. Once in Egypt, they bought everything they could get their hands on and waited patiently for the international community to intervene on their behalf. Yet the world leaders failed them again, and on January 28, after a five-day respite, the iron wall was re-erected and the Palestinians were pushed back into the world’s largest prison—the Gaza Strip.
The Strangulation of Gaza
February 3, 2008
Saree Makdisi on developments in Gaza. (Thanks IMEU)
The people of Gaza were able to enjoy a few days of freedom last week, after demolition charges brought down the iron wall separating the impoverished Palestinian territory from Egypt, allowing hundreds of thousands to burst out of the virtual prison into which Gaza has been transformed over the past few years–the terminal stage of four decades of Israeli occupation–and to shop for desperately needed supplies in Egyptian border towns.
Gaza’s doors are slowly closing again, however. Under mounting pressure from the United States and Israel, Egypt has dispatched additional border guards armed with water cannons and electric cattle prods to try to regain control. It has already cut off the flow of supplies crossing the Suez Canal to its own border towns. For now, in effect, Suez is the new border: even if Palestinians could get out of Gaza in search of new supplies, they would have to cross the desolate expanses of the Sinai Desert and cross the canal, on the other side of which they would find the regular Egyptian army (barred from most of Sinai as a condition of the 1979 Camp David treaty with Israel) waiting for them.
Azzam Tamimi on Hardtalk
January 31, 2008
I am glad that the very obnoxious Tim Sebastien has been replaced by a sensible interviewer.
‘Israel’s campaign against Hamas has not broken its resolve or turned the people of Gaza against it’, writes Azzam Tamimi.
Blessing in disguise for Hamas
The opening of the Palestinian National Conference in Damascus could not have come at a better time. January 23 was the day when the people of Gaza could no longer tolerate the world’s indifference and the inaction of their fellow Arabs next door. The women’s march on the previous day, which ended with a confrontation at the gate separating Palestine from Egypt, seemed to have been the trigger. Hours later, under the cover of night, young Gazan men blew up the wall that had been contributing to the suffocation of 1.5 million people.
Liberty, democracy, brutality
January 28, 2008
‘Many EU politicians treat Israel as a state that holds the highest European ideals dear. But this is hogwash’, writes David Cronin of the excellent Inter Press Service.
Diplomatic pressure from the European Union has been credited as being partly responsible for how Israel allowed some deliveries of food, medicine and fuel to Gaza over the past few days.
But you would never guess that senior EU officials had been flexing their metaphorical muscles if you saw one particular document distributed to the Brussels press corps.
The World’s Greatest Prison-Break
January 27, 2008
Amos Harel in Ha’aretz on how Hamas outmaneuvered Israel, Egypt and Fatah in three quick moves, while James Hider of Times reports on how Hamas ‘spent months cutting through Gaza wall in secret operation’. In gesture of Egyptian solidarity perhaps, Times reports ‘ Egyptian shopkeepers swiftly raised prices of milk, taxi rides and cigarettes’. Ahdaf Soueif on the threats and opportunities presented Egypt by the exodus. And finally, an in-depth report on the developments in and future prospects for Gaza by Peter Beaumont of the Observer. ‘Gaza’s falling wall changes Middle East map for ever’, he writes.
They came and went in lorries and gas tankers, in flatbed trucks loaded with cattle and sheep, in coaches and mini-buses, loaded by the dozen in the backs of trucks, all shuttling across Gaza’s southern border. Four days ago they went on foot like refugees, but yesterday for the first time the trucks drove through and it felt like an unstoppable momentum had been reached.They carried generators and goats, diesel and huge piles of carrots and cabbages. But most of all they carried the message that Israel’s long blockade of Gaza is over. ‘I want to get some cheese,’ says Ameera Ahmad, after crossing the border from Gaza into Egypt yesterday. ‘And honey. Look, crisps! I haven’t seen a bag of crisps for months.’The teenager in the car’s front sticks his head out of the window into the crush of vehicles and people. ‘Jibna!’ he shouts, meaning cheese. It is not a request, although there are people selling it nearby. It is an affirmation of the possibilities outside Gaza. Read the rest of this entry »
Wall Comes Tumbling Down
January 26, 2008
Breaking barriers: a bulldozer breaches the wall between Gaza and Egypt on January 25 2008. Photo: Getty Images
‘The inspiring breakout of Palestinians from their imprisonment in Gaza is a timely reminder that this is a people who cannot be caged or wished away’, writes Seumas Milne.
Anyone with a sense of human solidarity must surely celebrate the demolition of the wall on the Gaza-Egyptian border on Wednesday and the mass exodus of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians starved of basic supplies of food, fuel and medicine by Israel’s flagrantly illegal act of collective punishment. There was a further breakout today, when a bulldozer pulled down a new section of the barrier.
It has been first and foremost a human triumph. An occupied and imprisoned people has taken its fate into its own hands and broken a shameful blockade, enforced jointly by Israel and Egypt with the support of the Bush administration and the connivance of the US and Israeli-backed rump Palestinian authority in Ramallah.
