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To Gaza with love

To Gaza, With Love

 by Medea Benjamin

When I traveled to Gaza last week, everywhere I went, a photo haunted me. I saw it in a brochure called "Gaza will not die" that Hamas gives out to visitors at the border crossing. A poster-sized version was posted outside a makeshift memorial at the Shifa Hospital in Gaza City. And now that I am back home, the image comes to me when I look at children playing in the park, when I glance at the school across the street, when I go to sleep at night.  
It is a photo of a young Palestinian girl who is literally buried alive in the rubble from a bomb blast, with just her head protruding from the ruins. Her eyes are closed, her mouth partially open, as if she were in a deep sleep. Dried blood covers her lips, her cheeks, her hair. Someone with a glove is reaching down to touch her forehead, showing one final gesture of kindness in the midst of such inhumanity.
What was this little girl’s name, I wonder. How old was she? Was she sleeping when the bomb hit her home? Did she die a quick death or a slow, agonizing one? Where are her parents, her siblings? How are they faring? 

Of the 1,330 Palestinians killed by the Israeli military during the 22-day invasion of Gaza, 437 were children. Let me repeat that: 437 children-each as beautiful and precious as our own. 

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Israels war on Palestine

By Brian Cloughley

(source:intifada-palestine.com)

aipac-power-in-us-congress

Israel’s war on the Palestinians will continue with the support of Washington. Obama is a good, decent man. But with enemies like AIPAC and its Congressional pawns, he hasn’t a hope of achieving justice for Palestinians in the occupied territories of their own country

President Obama is trying to find a way out of the Israel-Palestine predicament. He can’t resolve it, because that is beyond anyone except Israelis, and they are not going to permit the problem to be dealt with in accordance with international law and human decency. Such a course would mean that Israelis would have to evacuate the 121 settlements, housing over a quarter of a million people, and scores of “outposts” they have built illegally on Arab-owned land.

Aluf Benn, editor-at-large of Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, observed in a recent New York Times opinion piece that “as far as most Israelis are concerned, Mr Obama has made a mistake in focusing on a settlement freeze. For starters, mainstream Israelis rarely have anything to do with the settlements; many have no idea where they are, even when they’re a half-hour’s drive from Tel Aviv.”

The obvious riposte to this is that “mainstream Israelis” most certainly should know the locations of the illegal settlements. To Benn it seems that because “most Israelis” are ignorant of the whereabouts of stolen Palestinian lands, then President Obama “is mistaken” to propose a settlement freeze. What nonsense.

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Is abbas destroying fateh?

Is Abbas destroying Fateh?

Mahmoud Abbas, the de-facto President of the nominally autonomous Palestinian Authority, is steadily and certainly corroding the Fateh movement.

For many years, Fateh was a conspicuous component of the progressive and anti-imperialistic Arab front.

Now, thanks to the Kafkaesque metamorphosis effected by Abbas and his Western-backed junta, Fateh has been transformed into a willing tool utilized by the U.S., Israel and tyrannical Arab regimes to undermine Palestinian national interests in ways unprecedented since the creation of the PLO more than 70 years ago.

 

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