7/12/07

Briefs: The fence is the line, gas cuts for Gaza
The Jewish Journal of greater L.A – Los Angeles,CA,USA
Haim Ramon indicated that Israel’s West Bank security barrier will be the future Israel-Palestine border. Israel’s deputy prime minister, speaking Monday …
www.jewishjournal.com/home/preview.php?id=18604

Abbas calls on Israel to stop expanding Har Homa settlement
Xinhua – China
… President Abbas called on Israel to stop the expansion of the settlement in the West Bank and to stop its military offensive against the Gaza Strip. …
news.xinhuanet.com/english/2007-12/06/content_7211643.htm

Israeli sanctions, Palestinian protest leads to fuel crunch in Gaza
International Herald Tribune – France
Gaza’s Hamas rulers blame the rival Palestinian government of President Mahmoud Abbas in the West Bank of encouraging the fuel cuts by refusing to pay …
www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/12/06/africa/
ME-GEN-Palestinians-Running-on-Empty.php

Palestinian government closes all alms committees
Reuters – USA
By Wafa Amr RAMALLAH, West Bank (Reuters) – The Palestinian Authority has shut down all alms committees in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and accused some of …
www.reuters.com/article/newsOne/idUSL0533233020071205

ISRAEL-OPT: Fewer resources for a worsening situation – UNRWA
Reuters AlertNet – London,England,UK
Grandi described the split between the West Bank and Gaza as leading to disillusionment within the Palestinian people. “There’s a political problem with the …
www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/IRIN/
917957a2c150cd9dbc36f2fd334a21fd.htm

Pro-palestinian group at Case hosts 1st event
Cleveland Jewish News – Cleveland,OH,USA
“The economy (in West Bank and Gaza) is practically gone. (Palestinians) need medical treatment. Before we can move on to more complex issues, …
www.clevelandjewishnews.com/articles/
2007/12/06/news/local/bcover1207.txt

Abbas Open to Hamas Talks
Alalam News Network – Tehran,Iran
Palestinian negotiators want an independent state in Gaza and the West Bank, with Al-Quds as its capital, but Hamas’s control of the coastal enclave could …
www.alalam.ir/english/en-NewsPage.asp
?newsid=031030120071206231438

Christians Flee Growing Islamic Fundamentalism
The Conservative Voice – Kernersville,NC,USA
Palestinian Christians have a higher rate of emigration compared to Palestinian Muslims and the Christian population of the West Bank and Gaza has plunged …
www.theconservativevoice.com/article/29549.html

Crossing the Line interviews Norman Finkelstein
By via the Electronic Intifada(SF Bay Area Independent Media Center (Indybay))
Thursday, December 6, 2007 : This week on Crossing The Line: The international conference in Annapolis, Maryland recently came to an end. During the talks US Presient George W. Bush stated that the time is right for peace in the Middle …
www.indybay.org/newsitems/2007/12/06/18465429.php

Israeli army use illegal weapons in Gaza, as death toll reaches 16
By CRIMES AND CORRUPTION OF THE NEW WORLD…(CRIMES AND CORRUPTION OF THE NEW WORLD…)
electronicintifada.net/v2/article9148.shtml Abbas calls on Israel to stop expanding Har Homa settlement Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas called on Israel to stop the expansion of the Jewish settlement of Har Homa between …
mparent7777-2.blogspot.com/2007/12/is
raeli-army-use-illegal-weapons-in.html

How Barack Obama learned to love I$rael
By Greg Bacon(Greg Bacon)
Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, 4 March 2007 I first met Democratic presidential hopeful Senator Barack Obama almost ten years ago when, as my representative in the Illinois state senate, he came to speak at the University of …
careandwashingofthebrain.blogspot.com/2007/12/
how-barack-obama-learned-to-love-irael.html

Palestinians in occupied territories denounce Annapolis conference
Workers World – USA
(electronicintifada.net, Nov. 28 and Dec. 2). Articles copyright 1995-2007
Workers World. Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is
…
www.workers.org/2007/world/palestinians-1213

6/12/07

Moving beyond collective denial Arjan El Fassed, The Electronic …
By MECA MEDIA(MECA MEDIA)
Moving beyond collective denial Arjan El Fassed, The Electronic Intifada In the past few days, a lot has been said about the Annapolis gathering of diplomats. Too often I heard the terms “terror” and “terrorism” in the remarks made by …
baqaacamp.blogspot.com/2007/12/moving
-beyond-collective-denial-arjan.html

Palestine: Moving beyond collective denial
Arjan El Fassed, The Electronic Intifada
…It was shocking to see Mahmoud Abbas, the designated head of the US-sponsored Palestinian Authority, warmly applaud the acknowledgement of Israel as a “Jewish state” and “homeland for the Jewish people” in Bush’s inaugural speech at Annapolis. With his clapping hands, Abbas supported the denial of his people’s history, in particular the 1948 mass expulsion that included the destruction of 531 villages and has been followed by the forced removal of Palestinians ever since. With his smile and embrace, Abbas implied just like his partners, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and the US president, that the conflict started in 1967, instead of 1948 and even beforehand, and that the main problem is Palestinian terror rather than Israeli colonialization and oppression. With the US president and the Israeli prime minister demanding Palestinians to recognize Israel as “Jewish state,” Palestinians are expected to participate in the dismantling of their own history…
www.uruknet.de/?p=38922

Some People Never Learn the Lesson
Gilad Atzmon, peacepalestine
On Thursday afternoon, Gordon Brown learned that he was to become only the second sitting British Prime Minister to be subject to a police investigation. This is happening less than six months after Tony Blair had left Downing Street under the severe cloud of a police probe into the Cash for Honours affair. For Blair it was No 1 Labour fundraiser, the Zionist Lord Levy who got him into serious trouble, for Brown it is Mr David Abrahams (in the photo, Abrahams is on the right, with an MP friend) , just another ‘Friend of Israel’ and a provincial chairman of Jewish Labour, who may be the one to finish off his political career….
www.uruknet.de/?p=38921

Thank you to our Readers
Welcome to Baqa’a Refugee Camp
We are pleased to inform you that Welcome to Baqa’a Refugee Camp, was sent the following notification today from the Palestine Daily Voice. Welcome to Baqa’a Refugee Camp has been displayed as being in the “TOP 30 hottest blogs on Palestine” and we welcome this news greatly, in light of previous endorsement for our work from other major media outlets. We were also pleased, when in July 2007, we were contacted by a teachers trade union in the United States, who through the information provided on our site, was able to obtain sponsorship and go over to the kingdom of Jordan to learn more about the Palestinian refugee situation and their approaches to educating children in areas of conflict….
www.uruknet.de/?p=3891

Daily Violations of Palestinian Human Rights
the world have lost its mind – where is the compassion and the justice ?
Hiyam Noir, PalestineFreeVoice
On Monday In an unpredicted grace, the Egyptian authorities allowed a second group of 1,200 Hajj pilgrims from Gaza Strip into Egypt,to travel to Mecca in Saudi Arabia.The opening of the crossing into Egypt, came after pressure from the Hama’s-led Palestinian government in Gaza Strip.Hamas is negotiating with the Egyptian authorities and hope the rest of the Hajj pilgrims will be able to cross through the Egyptian border. Under the slogan “stop the systematic killing of the Palestinian people”,Palestinian medical crews marched on Tuesday in protest against the siege imposed on the Gaza Strip which have caused the death of many sick and seriously wounded,Palestinians….
www.uruknet.de/?p=38907

APPEAL FROM MINISTRY OF HEALTH – GAZA.
Felicity Arbuthnot
As Christmas approaches, the land of Christ’s birth – where, for believers, he walked, preached, encouraged his followers to be ‘fishers of men’, for goodness and justice and where he died at the hands of the greedy and corrupt – is under siege. The residents of Gaza are being collectively punished for supporting a democratically elected government (a process so beloved by the freedom-and-democrocy-spreaders-by-slaughter in Washington and Whitehall, but clearly the wrong kind of democrocy.They did not elect a corrupt quisling puppet.) The greedy and corrupt have been exiling and silently crucifying the Palestinian people for sixty years, in defiance of over forty UN resolutions. Aided, abbeted, armed with allegedly illegal weapons and weapons of mass destruction, by the bigest bully on the global block: the ‘land of the free’. Whilst people are jailed for holocaust denial, as the West witch hunts the very old under the banner of hunting Nazi war criminals, this silent sixty year holocaust, displacement, ghettoisation, home demolishing, infanticide, child killing, arrest without trial, disappearances, the dying of the sick at road blocks, the theft and erosion of ancient lands, olives and citrus groves, themdestruction of education, civil society continues unabated as the world watches on…
www.uruknet.de/?p=38893

Popular committee warns: Eight water wells stopped operating in Gaza
Palestinian Information Center
The popular anti-sanctions committee warned that eight water wells stopped pumping in different districts of the Gaza Strip as a result of reducing the amount of fuel supplied by Israel. It appealed to the concerned international organizations and friends of the Palestinian people to intervene to save the Strip from a looming disaster. In a press release received by the PIC on Monday, the committee stated that the stop of these wells heralds environmental and human disaster in the Gaza Strip, noting that one of those pumps was used in dispensing sewage….
www.uruknet.de/?p=38891

Gaza Strip hospitals face “humanitarian disaster”
Maan News
Hospitals in the Gaza Strip have been forced to shut down their emergency power generators, resulting in a looming “humanitarian disaster” due to Israel’s severe reductions in fuel supplies, said Muawiya Hassanein, the director of ambulance and emergency services in the Palestinian Health Ministry. “At nine in the morning, the major generator which supplies all the health facilities, medical storehouses, pharmacies and refrigerators for keeping vaccines stopped,” Hassanein explained. The power cut will result in the destruction of millions of dollars of crucial vaccines and food supplies….
www.uruknet.de/?p=38900

Israei army tortures teenager over false allegations
International Solidarity Movement
During the Israeli army’s latest crackdown on the residents of Azzoun village, undercover police abducted a youth of 16 years for extended interrogation interspersed with beating. The Azzoun teenager, Mahmoud Radouan, was riding in a friend’s donkey cart on road 55 just outside Izbat at Tabib, en route to the friend’s agricultural land in nearby An Nabi Elyas, when undercover police dressed in Palestinian civilian clothes and driving what appeared to be a Palestinian taxi stopped the two youths, pointing a handgun at them and forcing them to sit on the road beside the guardrail. After 30 minutes, Mahmoud’s friend was released but he was kept, the police reportedly telling him: “we have something on you; we know you make problems.”….
www.uruknet.de/?p=38888

A Hanukkah of light vs. a Hanukkah of darkness
Comment by Khalid Amayreh
Hanukkah is the Jewish holiday of light that recounts the Talmudic story of the Maccabees’ victory over the armies of King Antiochus IV. The story symbolizes the triumph of good over evil and light over darkness. This year, the celebration of Hanukkah coincides with a slow-motion genocide the legions of Zionism are carrying out against nearly 1.5 million helpless human beings in the Gaza Strip. According to human rights organizations, Gazans are dying in significant numbers as Israel continues to bar them from accessing food and work. Scores of patients have also succumbed to their illnesses thanks to Israel’s refusal to allow these unfortunate people to travel abroad or reach the West Bank to seek proper medical care. This week, the Israeli Supreme Court, a mere rubber stamp in the hands of the occupation army, authorized further cuts of fuel supplies and electricity to Gaza. This, coupled with the sinister policy of denying Gazans access to fresh food, vaccines, and clean water, is already having a disastrous impact on innocent people whose only crime is that 23 months ago, they elected a government that Israel didn’t like….
www.uruknet.de/?p=3888

The shadowy role of Labour Friends of Israel
Such lobbyists and their back-room influence should make us very uneasy
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown
Pardon me for asking. Perhaps I shouldn’t. For an easy life, some things, you learn, are best left unsaid. Nervous, am I? You bet. But these questions will not stand aside or lie down. They have been bothering me since the Labour party donor row broke last week. They are raised here in good faith. I have no wish to bring the wrath of Moses upon me and I can already hear the accusations of anti-Semitism because I dare to raise the question: Can someone explain what exactly is the role of the Labour Friends of Israel (LFI) in our political life? And its twin, the Conservative Friends of Israel (CFI) too. In an open democracy, we are entitled to make such queries – indeed, it is a duty…
www.uruknet.de/?p=38895

5/12/07

A generous offer to the Palestinian refugees?
Neta Golan, IMEU
…Under international humanitarian law the right of refugees to return to their homes is an inalienable, individual human right. Like all human rights, it is invaluable and cannot be bought. Under Israel and Bush’s “solution”, Palestinian refugee families who had been expelled from what is now Israel would be consigned to return, not to their homes, but to small, non-contiguous parts of less than 22% of their original homeland. Jews from anywhere in the world, on the other hand, would be free to “return” to more than 78% of historic Palestine, frequently to live on land seized from those same Palestinian refugees. Such clear discrimination against Palestinian refugees and privileging of Jews from anywhere in the world illustrates clearly that these proposals would further a separate but unequal solution that cannot result in peace.
www.uruknet.de/?p=38952

How Bad Does IT Have To Get For People To Do The Slightest Little Thing to Support The People of Gaza & Palestine?
Stop The Siege on Gaza
There are many online groups that say they support Palestine. There are thousands & thousands that say they support Palestinian Issues. Here is one way to support the people in Palestine, Join with the many groups and people and support the End The Siege on The Gaza Strip.

stopthesiegeongaza.blogspot.com/
At last look there were only 720 or so signatures on what is suposed to be an urgent petition regards a Siege on the Gaza Strip. At last glance Gaza is supposed to be in Palestine & now there is another petition to help stop the crisis in Gazan hospitals – how bad does it have to get for people to do even the slightest little thing for support of the people of Gaza.
www.uruknet.de/?p=38946

The Israelis Cut of Fuel & Electricity To Gaza Strip Will Also Collapse the Systems of Drinking Water & Sanitation
Hiyam Noir, PalestineFreeVoice
The Israelis continues its strangulation of the Gaza Strip and its 1.5 million inhabitants. The Palestinian General Petroleum Corporation reported that the Israelis have cut the delivery of fuel to a half of its normal supply to the Gaza Strip on Monday.The fuel companies in Gaza Strip imported up to 350,000 liters of diesel and the same amount of gasoline and 300 tons of gas used for cooking on an average. On Tuesday most gas stations have closed and there are not many cars on the roads.Medical services in some health centres were disrupted as petrol stations closed down after Israel cut back fuel supplies to the Gaza Strip. Gaza Strip is completely dependent of fuel import.The normal and average transport of fuel to the people on Gaza Strip tangents over 100 thousands of liters/day…
www.uruknet.de/?p=38943

Analysis: After Annapolis
BBC News – UK
On the Palestinian side Hamas, the main opponents of Annapolis, are not getting too worried either. At one demonstration in Hebron on the West Bank, …
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/7126541.stm

Palestinians expand security drive with new forces
Reuters – USA
Tulkarm is the second West Bank city to welcome the new Palestinian force. The security drive, which comes as Palestinians start talks with Israel about …
www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSL0457902720071204

Israel releases 429 Palestinian prisoners
International Herald Tribune – France
By Isabel Kershner RAMALLAH, West Bank: Israel released 429 Palestinian prisoners from Israeli prisons Monday as a gesture intended to bolster the political …
www.iht.com/articles/2007/12/03/africa/mideast.php

Israel Plans New Homes in East Jerusalem
The Associated Press –
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has been tightening his control of the West Bank in the aftermath of the Hams takeover of Gaza in June. …
ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5jD4YSkD
Plclqd9dHvg2f0Ij18zEgD8TARKPO0

Voices: Middle East peace conference
Toronto Star – Ontario, Canada
The two leaders met to discuss the split in the Palestinian government between the western-backed government of Mahmoud Abbas that controls the West Bank, …
www.thestar.com/Speakout/Voices/article/282393

Little reason for optimism
International Herald Tribune – France
Given that Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza, and dismantlement of settlements, led only to more rockets, Israelis will need convincing to believe that a …
www.iht.com/articles/2007/12/04/opinion/edgreenway.php

Palestine Behind the Wall: A Refined Viciousness
Pacific Free Press – Victoria,BC,Canada
In addition, Palestinians in Gaza aren’t able to enter Israel or the West Bank for any purpose including essential medical care unavailable in the Strip. …
www.pacificfreepress.com/content/view/1958/81/

A Jewish Israel needs a healed Palestine
Daily Star – Lebanon – Beirut,Lebanon
… in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem; the condition and rights of the Palestinian Arab citizens who comprise nearly one-fifth of Israeli citizens; …
www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition
_id=10&categ_id=5&article_id=87235

Palestinians Deploy Security Forces in West Bank Town
Voice of America – USA
Uniformed, armed policemen Tuesday fanned out across the Palestinian city of 50000 in the north of the Israeli-occupied West Bank. …
voanews.com/english/2007-12-04-voa52.cfm