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Palestine – Features

A country of sacred cows and ten commandments

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By Ershad Abubacker

(source: South Lebanon blog)

The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance; it is the illusion of knowledge. -Stephen Hawking .

The media portrays the Middle East violence as though it is inherent part of the culture and the region, implying that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is an ancient problem with little hope of a solution. The world, educated by this media, often sees the issue of Palestine through the tragedy and horror of suicide bombings-an expression of despair by powerless people against an oppressor armed with modern weapons.

The suicide bombings are presented to the Israeli public as an insane act by an insane people with whom there is no chance for peace. Instead of putting a wider analysis that would say that there is a way out of the suicide bombs, while everybody condemns them and rightly so, there is a way out of this. And the way out of this is to provide circumstances in which these young people would find every news of hope instead of every news of despair. But perversely there is an orchestrated campaign to silence that kind of an analysis inside Israel and it is trying to scare people into silence by conflating any criticism of Israeli policies as Anti-Semitism.

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Israeli general brigadier general uzi eilam denies Iran is nuclear threat

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By Uzi Mahnaimi in Tel Aviv

(source: The Wisdom Fund)

A general who was once in charge of Israels nuclear weapons has claimed that Iran is a very, very, very long way from building a nuclear capability.

Brigadier-General Uzi Eilam, 75, a war hero and pillar of the defence establishment, believes it will probably take Iran seven years to make nuclear weapons.

The views expressed by the former director-general of Israels Atomic Energy Commission contradict the assessment of Israels defence establishment and put him at odds with political leaders.

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World must deny legitimacy to Isarael

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The world worked together to help bring apartheid to an end, writes Kader Asmal. So why allow it to live on in Israel/Palestine?

(source: Mail & Guardian Online, Friday,25/06/2010)

In 1980, I served on a commission of enquiry into reported violations of international law by Israel following its invasion of Lebanon. We spent 22 days in Lebanon, Israel and the surrounding areas. The devastation in Lebanon was quite overwhelming. Bombings were carried on while we were there; whole new blocks of flats in Beirut were destroyed simply because they were there. The noise, the dust and the sound of bullets were ceaseless.

And then, after our preliminary work had been done, there were the Sabra and Shatila massacres of hundreds of defenceless refugees, shot dead by the Israeli surrogates, the Phalange. The Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) had been expelled from Lebanon. Golda Meir had said coldly that there was no such thing as a Palestinian. Now the visible signs of such people had to be destroyed, as with the famous Palestine Library in Beirut and the hospital records in the West Bank.

Israel Shahack, head of an Israeli civil-liberties body, drew my attention to the similarities between Israel and apartheid South Africa: "You see," he said, "the West Bank and Gaza are our bantustans, reserves of labour for Israel but no freedom of labour."

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