Israeli Apartheid

By Peter  Eyre

(source:  Palestine Telegraph)

Whenever I try to break away from talking about the deeply disturbing use of American and Israeli WMD’s both during the Lebanon conflict in 2006 and in Gaza during Cast Lead in 2008/9 I find myself being haunted by more gut-wrenching stories coming out of the strip.

Christmas for the people in the West is a very special time for family and friends to gather round in a cosy, warm, healthy and secure environment to share the joy of this special time of year. We share the love of family and the joy of distant relatives coming to stay with us. We share the opening of presents and see the faces of the children as they unwrap these colourful parcels. We eat and drink until one can hardly move and feel so bloated.

Unfortunately I also want to experience this same joy but the anniversary of the attack on Gaza is casting a very dark grey cloud over my home and it is when I research more and more into this terrible act against humankind that I know in my heart the people of Gaza will not share the luxuries that we enjoy.

Read More »Gaza continues to fall victim by the iofs use of du eu weapons

By Timothy Reeder

(source: Countercurrents.org)

General Stanley McChrystal wasn’t fired for the name calling and sarcasm in the recent Rolling Stone article, or for a lack of military decorum and good discipline. He was fired for telling the truth about the mission in Afghanistan in a statement he made in March.

"We’ve shot an amazing number of people and killed a number and, to my knowledge, none has proven to have been a real threat to the force." This statement is the most embarrassing and potentially crippling to Obama’s AFPAK effort, for it brings attention to how badly the war is going with a focus on the killing of innocent people.

McChrystal’s statement is candid admission of the futility and failure of the so called counter-insurgency campaign. Troops are supposed to be protecting more civilians by defending them and their villages, but with the price of that security coming in part from paying off warlords, and an Afghan military with shifting allegiances, the resulting chaos ensures lots of innocents who happen to look like the ”insurgents” are just in the wrong place at the wrong time. And with simultaneous JSOC missions and drone attacks and bombardments, the human debris of collateral damage is piling up.

Read More »Mcchrystal method out sacked by the truth

By Professor Farid Essack

(source: Mail & Guardian / City Press – Friday, 15-10-2010)

Robert Fine’s piece “Blame Game won’t lead us to peace” (October 8), commenting on the rather tepid University of Jo’burg senate resolution to the call by (now more than 270) South African academics, including the vice-chancellors of three South African universities to end its apartheid-era relationship with Ben Gurion University, raises some interesting points.

Desmond Tutu is indirectly, but not so subtly, accused of anti-Semitism because he warns that those who support the severance of ties may lose research funding and, at the same time, urges Jews not to forget their own past as victims of discrimination.

Tutu does not say who might withdraw research funding, so he is not trotting out some canard about “Jewish money power”.

He is making the (clearly accurate) statement that opposition to Israeli policies is not popular among those who dole out research money (mostly in Europe and the United States) and that people critical of Israel can be, and often are, penalised. Those who do the penalising are not necessarily Jewish — most are probably not. And to ask Jews to remember their past is hardly anti-Semitic. Jewish activists do this all the time.

During apartheid, it was common for liberal Jews to say that their fellow Jews should empathise with the oppressed because Jews had the same experience: no one except the right-wing fringe accused them of being anti-Semitic or “self-hating”.
Read More »Why Isarael only is tired hypocritical

The world is not interested in Israel’s housing and bureaucratic problems, or in the achievements of its students in mathematics. The world is looking at how the only democracy in the Middle East conducts itself in the occupied territories.

By Niva Lanir

(source: Haaretz)

Whether or not Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu uses “a supertanker against the bureaucracy,” as he calls it, to alleviate the housing shortage, a no-fly zone for supertankers already exists. It exists whether his idea crashes in the Knesset debates on housing reforms, or flies high above the railway line that’s supposed to be extended to Irbid in Jordan – in the East, where there are no procedures or bureaucracy.

Here is its description, from an article in these pages earlier this (“Gilad Farm has been sacrificed,” Karni Eldad, March 6 ): “At age 15, they expelled Elisaf Orbach from his home in Gush Katif in the Gaza Strip. He was paid a small amount of compensation and went to Samaria, to build a small, 90-square-meter house to meet his needs until he gets married and has children.” Despite the sad continuation – “With his hands bound, on the way to the police van, Orbach heard a tractor destroying his house, five years after his house in the Gaza Strip had been leveled” – I clicked “Like.”

The concepts and the division of labor did that to me: expulsion and settling. A small house and a comfortable future, and even a twist in the plot: The forces of evil (police, army, Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak ) gang up on Elisaf and his friends and destroy all that good. And the Palestinians? In this story there are no Palestinians. Go see another movie.

Stealing land and illegal construction, evacuating a few buildings and rebuilding them, the state’s report to the High Court of Justice that by the end of the year it would evacuate all outposts built on private Palestinian land – all this is not new. These36repeat themselves like the periodic table. And yet, who would have believed that Netanyahu would get stuck in his second term in the construction business, of all things: freezing construction in the territories, the real-estate bubble, the housing shortage and the sky-rocketing prices. And who would have believed that the housing shortage, of all things, would threaten his coalition?

Read More »World looks at Isarael as it looked at apartheid era south Africa