Zionism – Breaking News

Tutu urges opera group to boycott Isarael

by MRN
January 1, 2013July 25, 2013

(source: SAPA / Independent Online)

Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu has urged Cape Town Opera to postpone its trip to Israel to stage Porgy and Bess, in much the same way he had called on the international community to boycott apartheid South Africa.

In a letter to the group yesterday, Tutu said the trip to Israel would be wrong. During the struggle against apartheid it was inappropriate for international artists to perform in South Africa with its discriminatory laws and racial exclusivity. So, too, would it be wrong for Cape Town Opera to perform in Israel, said the Nobel Peace Prize winner.

“Cape Town Opera should postpone its proposed tour next month until both Israeli and Palestinian opera lovers of the region have equal opportunity and unfettered access to attend performances.

“Only the thickest-skinned South Africans would be comfortable performing before an audience that excluded residents living, for example, in an occupied West Bank village 30 minutes from Tel Aviv, who would not be allowed to travel to Tel Aviv, while including his Jewish neighbours from an illegal settlement on occupied Palestinian territory.

“The Tel Aviv Opera House is state sponsored. By luring international artists to perform there, it advances Israel’s fallacious claim to being a ‘civilised democracy’. Yet, every day, millions of citizens are denied the right to educational and cultural opportunities in Israel and the Palestinian territories it occupies.

Press release reconciliation agreement welcomed

by MRN
January 1, 2013July 25, 2013

The Media Review Network welcomes the decision by the principal Palestinian factions Hamas and Fatah, to set up a transitional government which will oversee general elections to form a new unity government within a year.

It is hoped that this new initiative, driven by the new Egyptian regime, will not succumb to the obvious pressures that will be exerted on it by Israel and the USA. Both these entities wield enormous powers, militarily and financially over the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Government of Mahmood Abbas who has lost all credibility in the eyes of most Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza. Benjamin Netanyahu’s ultimatum to Abu Mazin: “choose between peace with Israel or peace with Hamas” illustrates the point. This further strengthens the view that Israel has neither an agenda nor a solution for peace in the region.

This unity movement is supported by all factions within the Palestinian community in the Gaza and the West Bank. The Media Review Network supports this united position that will advance the quest for freedom and justice for the people of Palestine.

Ibrahim Vawda

Senior Researcher,

Media Review Network

Tell: 012 374 6987

Cell: 072 295 0088

E-mail: webmaster@mediareviewnet.com
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President elect Obama and the prospects for Isaraeli palestinian peace

by MRN
January 1, 2013July 25, 2013

United States President-elect Barack Obama’s election victory has revived hopes that stalled Palestinian-Israeli peace negotiations could finally lead to a two-state solution. Few new presidents have been greeted with such optimism and associated high expectations.

However, the chances for progress depend on more than a new American president. There are several interrelated factors: US engagement, the availability of a viable peace agreement, Israeli and Palestinian internal politics and the broader international situation.

An examination of these factors indicates that the optimism is unjustified and that President Obama will not be more successful in bringing about a two-state solution to the conflict. This does not however mean that the situation will remain static or that those pursuing a just peace have no recourse for action.

The forgotten un resolution

by MRN
January 1, 2013July 25, 2013

By Ghada Karmi – London

Sixty years ago, on 11 December 1948, the United Nations General Assembly passed an important resolution about Israel and the Palestinians. It called on the newly formed Israeli state to repatriate the displaced Palestinians “wishing to live in peace with their neighbours…at the earliest practicable date”, and to compensate them for their losses. A Conciliation Commission was set up to oversee the repatriation of the returnees. Though never implemented and frequently ignored since then, Resolution 194 has haunted the Israeli-Palestinian peace process ever since, and has proved the most insurmountable obstacle in all peace negotiations. It is the legal basis for the ‘right of return’, to which Palestinians have clung for sixty years.

Far from this fundamental plank of the Palestinian cause being protected and preserved, it has been used like a political football between the parties, sometimes to attack, sometimes to defend, and now as something to bargain over. Through this process the discourse about the right of return has become deliberately ambiguous or vague, responding to Israel’s anxieties. To assert, against this background of appeasement, that the right of return is the sine qua non of any solution to the Israeli-Palestinian problem is viewed today as ‘unrealistic’ and old-fashioned, even an obstacle to peace, as if the passage of sixty years had disqualified the Palestinians from entitlement to their homeland. Israel, conversely, shows no such ambiguity in its perennial and unambiguous rejection of the right of return.