By Dr. Salman Abu Sitta

(source: Palestine Chronicle)

While the news headlines were occupied with the freeze or suspension of Jewish settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories or with the competition for positions in the sixth Fateh conference in Bethlehem, Israel is putting into effect the most devastating operation since the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in al Nakba of 1948.  This new operation aims to eliminate irrevocably Palestinian rights and historical roots in Palestine.

Ironically, Arab and Palestinian leaderships remain oblivious to these cataclysmic developments. In particular, the Palestinian leadership, whose main duty is to defend Palestinian rights, is bogged down with the assignment of internal political posts and fighting what it sees as its primary enemy, Hamas.

The Zionist leadership in Israel felt bold enough to transform  the ideological slogan of ‘Jewish Israel’ into a reality on the ground.  The Knesset, the Israel Parliament, passed a law on August 3rd, 2009, after its second and third readings, which allowed the sale of “Absentees” Palestinian refugees’ land to Jewish individuals and Jewish institutions exclusively anywhere in the world. Thus, the legal right of the original Palestinian owner to his land would be severed through creating a barrier between the owner and his property.  The passing of the new law represents an audacious initiative by the current Israeli government that no previous Israeli government dared contemplate or venture into.

Read More »Dividing war spoils Isaraels robbery of Palestinian property

(source: HAARETZ)

by Staff Writers

The $25 million deal is said to have been clinched through Amit Sadeh, a middle-man implicated in the "controversial sale of air and sea drones by the Yavneh-based Aeronautics Ventures to the Nigerian defense ministry," the AllAfrica Web site reported.

Read More »Israel eyeing Africa arms exports

By Khaled Amayreh

(source: Palestine Information Centre)

When addressing Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims, Fatah indulges in all sorts of bombastic rhetoric about the liberation of Palestine.

However, in negotiations with Israel and meetings with visiting Western officials, the leaders of the movement would dutifully  assure their interlocutors that the rhetoric was only meant  for public consumption and that Fatah would eventually accept  a “peace” deal  with the Zionist state even if  such a deal didn’t meet Palestinian expectations.

I recently asked a prominent Palestinian intellectual who maintains close  ties with the Palestinian Authority (PA)  leadership if he  thought that PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, who is Fatah’s undisputed leader,  had any alternative plan in case the Obama peace efforts collapsed.My interlocutor didn’t mince his words. He said that the only alternative Abbas had to failed negotiations with Israel was more failed negotiations.

Unfortunately, this seems to be completely true.

Abbas views lightly, even contemptuously Fatah’s occasional allusion about resuming “armed struggle” in case Israel refuses to end the occupation. Well, Israel not only refuses to end the occupation, but is also consolidating and perpetuating it by making the prospect of creating a Palestinian state on the West Bank unrealistic and illusive.

But why would Abbas look  down on these late-time pseudo revolutionaries within his party, who threaten to rise up anew against Israel while enjoying the fruits of political and security coordination with the enemy they are threatening to fight?

Well, the answer is clear. Abbas thinks, probably correctly, that these Fatah leaders are either hypocrites or liars, or both. After all, most of them have reached the positions they are now having thanks to the close cooperation and collaboration with Israel, mainly against other Palestinians, especially Hamas. Read More »Fatahs schizophrenia

By Raj Patel & Eric Holt-Gimenez & Annie Shattuck

(Source: The Nation)

More than a billion people eat fewer than 1,900 calories per day. The majority of them work in agriculture, about 60 percent are women or girls, and most are in rural Africa and Asia. Ending their hunger is one of the few unimpeachably noble tasks left to humanity, and we live in a rare time when there is the knowledge and political will to do so. The question is, how? Conventional wisdom suggests that if people are hungry, there must be a shortage of food, and all we need do is figure out how to grow more.

This logic turns hunger into a symptom of a technological deficit, telling a story in which a little agricultural know-how can feed the world. It’s a seductive view, and one that appears to underwrite President Obama’s vision for ending hunger. In an interview with an African news agency, he shared his frustration over "the fact that the Green Revolution that we introduced into India in the ’60s, we haven’t yet introduced into Africa in 2009. In some countries, you’ve got declining agricultural productivity. That makes absolutely no sense."

In a squat beige Seattle office building, the world’s largest philanthropic organization has been thinking along the same lines as the president. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, with an endowment of more than $30 billion, has embarked on a multibillion-dollar effort to transform African agriculture. It helped to set up the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) in 2006, and since then has spent $1.3 billion on agricultural development grants, largely in Africa. With such resources, solving African hunger could be Gates’s greatest legacy.

But there’s a problem: the conventional wisdom is wrong. Food output per person is as high as it has ever been, suggesting that hunger isn’t a problem of production so much as one of distribution. It’s true that African soil fertility is poor, though, which might explain why President Obama feels that the continent needs a Green Revolution. Read More »Ending Africas hunger