I’ve put up a slideshow of the demo pix here.
I find the current frustration incredibly frustrating, partly because of the never-ending despair of the situation in Palestine, but also because of a fundamental ambivalence I have about the policies pursued by Islamist groups in the region. Hizbullah, like Hamas, was born as a resistance organization. It successfully fought a war of attrition against the Israeli occupation, and caused them to eventually move out. For this, it has been cheered throughout the region because it appeared to have struck a blow for an Arab cause after a seemingly never-ending string of defeats. It helped restore some dignity to what, from an Arab perspective, is a humiliating situation. And it put a lot of people like me (nominally Sunni secularists) in a position of admiring a fundamentalist Shia group.
My first instinct after I saw this morning that Hizbullah had conducted a raid on Israel’s northern border was to think, shit, the Israelis are going to bomb Lebanon like they’re bombing Gaza. And, sure enough, the bombing started. My reaction was anger at Hizbullah for provoking Israel to do this — which clearly it has wanted to do for a while — and dragging the rest of Lebanon into a mess. I don’t really see the point of the raid beyond a symbolic gesture of support for the Palestinians — which, fair enough, considering the icy silence or hypocritical posturing of most Arab governments, is a welcome change. I don’t think this will either distract Israel from Gaza (it’s quite capable of waging war on two fronts) nor do I think it’s a clever form of asymmetric warfare. I doubt Israel will release any prisoners because of it.
Maybe I’m wrong. Israel doesn’t even need excuses anymore to do what it wants. Maybe signs of resistance will make it think twice about its policy. Yet, in the current situation of David vs. Goliath, I don’t think that symbolic operations accomplish much beyond allow Israel to kill more people. The lack of balance of power in the region and the refusal of Western states, especially the US, to moderate Israel’s winner-takes-all attitude makes me think that when I’m 80 (if I live that long!) this region will still be in the same mess. In the meantime, a steady trickle of people will die. It’s a depressing thought.
As I inspect the ruins of our infrastructure — the largess of donor nations and international efforts all turned to rubble once more by F-16s and American-made missiles — my thoughts again turn to the minds of Americans. What do they think of this?
They think, doubtless, of the hostage soldier, taken in battle — yet thousands of Palestinians, including hundreds of women and children, remain in Israeli jails for resisting the illegal, ongoing occupation that is condemned by international law. They think of the pluck and “toughness” of Israel, “standing up” to “terrorists.” Yet a nuclear Israel possesses the 13th-largest military force on the planet, one that is used to rule an area about the size of New Jersey and whose adversaries there have no conventional armed forces. Who is the underdog, supposedly America’s traditional favorite, in this case?
I hope that Americans will give careful and well-informed thought to root causes and historical realities, in which case I think they will question why a supposedly “legitimate” state such as Israel has had to conduct decades of war against a subject refugee population without ever achieving its goals.
There is some ambiguity in the concluding paragraph. What does he exactly mean when he says:
If Israel is prepared to negotiate seriously and fairly, and resolve the core 1948 issues, rather than the secondary ones from 1967, a fair and permanent peace is possible. Based on a hudna (comprehensive cessation of hostilities for an agreed time), the Holy Land still has an opportunity to be a peaceful and stable economic powerhouse for all the Semitic people of the region.
He should have been clearer here about whether he means a return to the 48 borders rather than 67 ones or, more likely, underlining the need to look at the right of return and other 48 issues. This, and his definition of hudna (why not just talk about a peace treaty?), leave too much ambiguity in an otherwise fine column.
CAIRO (AFP) – Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak has said that his mediation efforts for the release of an Israeli soldier captured by Gaza militants were sabotaged by an unnamed party.
“I had reached an honourable solution to the crisis of the captured soldier and had obtained from Israel that it free a large number of Palestinian detainees,” Mubarak told the state-owned Al-Ahram daily.
He said he had reached the breakthrough in the negotiations following contacts with Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas and Hamas political supremo Khaled Meshaal.
Hamas’ armed wing is one of three Palestinian militant groups that claimed the June 25 capture of the Israeli corporal following an attack on a southern Gaza border post.
“But Hamas was submitted to pressure and other parties, whom I will not identify, intervened in the contacts engaged by Egypt, raising new hurdles for an agreement which was imminent,” Mubarak said.
Some Israeli newspapers have accused Meshaal’s Syrian and Iranian backers of obstructing a deal.
Incidentally, the growing role Egypt has in mediating virtually every regional conflict has led to this:
CAIRO (AFP) – Egypt and the United States are to start holding frequent inter-ministerial consultations on key issues in the Middle East, Washington’s top regional envoy David Welch has revealed.
“I conveyed this morning an invitation from Secretary (of State Condoleezza) Rice to Foreign Minister Abul Gheit to begin a high-level strategic dialogue between Egypt and the United States,” Welch told reporters after meeting Abul Gheit.
“The foreign minister has accepted this invitation,” said Welch, who added that Abul Gheit and an Egyptian delegation were expected in Washington on Tuesday.
“We will cover all the topics of interest in our relationship. This means naturally that we shall discuss the critical regional issues, that will include Iran, Iraq, issues of concern in Africa, for example Sudan and Somalia, and particularly the Israeli-Palestinian question,” Welch said.
He said the concept had been in the works for some time and stressed that “a good format” was needed for exchanges between “two countries like Egypt and the United States that have important responsibilities on the global stage.”
Aw, bestest friends again!
Nazzal will be holding a press conference tomorrow Thursday 1pm, at the Egyptian Press Syndicate, in 3abdel Khaleq Tharwat St., where he’ll discuss Israel’s invasion of Gaza and southern Lebanon.
UPDATE: For “security reasons,” Nazzal’s press conference has been moved to the Heliopolis Meredien Hotel, and will be held at 12 noon.
UPDATE (5:30pm Cairo Time): Hassan Nasrallah, Hizbollah’s secretary-general, is now giving a press conference on today’s operations. He’s saying the operation was launched in 9:05am. “The aim is not escalation in the Lebanese south,” he is saying, stressing the aim of the resistance strikes are to liberate Lebanese and Arab prisoners in Israeli jails. Nasrallah also called up on Shiites and Sunnis in Iraq to halt their sectarian strife, and unite against the foreign occupiers of their country.
By bombing the plant, the Israelis cut power to 65 percent of the Gaza Strip, a region that is one of the most impoverished in the Middle East. By destroying the plant, the Israelis also decimated one of Palestine’s most valuable companies, the Palestine Electric Company, whose shares are traded on the Palestine Stock Exchange. Further, the Israelis have destroyed any chance for industry in Gaza to grow.
It is axiomatic among the world’s economies: as electricity consumption increase, so does wealth. Gazans are impoverished, in large part, because they don’t have enough electricity. Residents in Gaza consume just 654 kilowatt hours of electricity per year or about one-tenth of what Israelis consume. The average Israeli consumes about 6,183 kilowatt hours of power per year, a rate that places Israel 27th among the world’s countries in terms of power use. By comparison the residents of Gaza rank number 136 among the world’s countries in per capita power use, a status that places them behind residents of Peru.
Not to mention, of course, the costs to businesses, students, traders, etc. Incidentally, kudos to Egypt for pledging to give Gaza free electricity.
Also check out MERIP’s new online piece, Gaza in the Vise, for a detailed look at the humanitarian impact of Israel’s war, especially on children.
Some time ago I noticed a small article in U.S. Defense News about the Europeans ‘somehow’ planning to employ NATO as their military arm as a Rapid Response Force. My alarm bells started ringing that this was a threshold move to gather sufficient military power to cross the Mediterranean Sea and occupy the Jewish nation of Israel, claiming it was a “necessary move toward regional peace” – for the good of all”. Nothing in that small article suggested that there was a far greater ‘Game Plan’, intended to pacify the Arab and Muslim oil nations by driving the Jews either onto a smaller sliver of land, as originally proposed by the U.N. or to extinction….whatever was doable first. That translates to seeing that which was not supposed to be seen.
Sometimes clues expose the intentions without the hard evidence of what is called the “‘smoking gun”. So, let’s start accumulating the bits and pieces which, by themselves, don’t tell all of the story but point us in the right direction.
. . .
Continue reading Conspiracy Watch: EU, NATO to invade Israel
Israel bars Palestinian Americans for first time since 1967
By Amira Hass, Haaretz Correspondent
For the first time since 1967, Israel is preventing the entry of Palestinians with foreign citizenship, most of them Americans.
Most of those refused entry are arriving from abroad, but have lived and worked for years in the West Bank.
. . .
The Interior Ministry and Civil Administration made no formal announcement about a policy change, leaving returnees to discover the situation when they reach the border crossings.
By various estimates, the ban has so far affected several thousand American and European nationals, whom Israel has kept from returning to their homes and jobs, or from visiting their families in the West Bank. This could potentially impact many more thousands who live in the territories – including university instructors and researchers, employees working in various vital development programs and business owners – as well as thousands of foreign citizens who pay annual visits to relatives there. The policy also applies to foreigners who are not Palestinian but are married to Palestinians, and to visiting academics.
Read the whole thing, and don’t miss the comments for the debate…
Update: Five Arab and Jewish members of a Belgian NGO, Artists Against the Wall, were refused entry yesterday.