صلح Pax سلام שלום Pace Hasîtî Barış 和平 Мир Peace Mir Friede Paix
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Thousands of people marched through the streets of London yesterday to show their support for the Palestinian cause. The demonstrators were calling for an end to the siege on Gaza, the right of return for Palestinians, and an end to Israeli occupation. Looks like Neturei Karta were there as well (1:41)
A fair summation of the crisis and interviews with Nicholas Noe, Anwar Wazen and Mohsen Saleh from Al Jazeera’s Inside Story. Saleh is pro-Opposition, Brussels-based Wazen is obviously anti-Hezbollah. This is followed by Nasrallah’s address; a three minute highlights clip with English subtitles followed by a clip of the full speech which has a voice-over translation in English.
Inside Story - Lebanon strike - 07 May 08 - Part 1 (12.52)
Franklin Lamb
Beirut
“Where did they come from?”, the desk clerk at the Royal Plaza Hotel in Rauche by the sea near Hamra wondered out loud. “I have been on duty all night and saw nothing. Suddenly they are everywhere!”
Of course this observer wondered the same thing. The time was around 8:30 am, having ducked into the Hotel to escape a flash shower before the sunny morning returned.
This observer left Haret Hreik neighborhood in Dahiyeh by motorcycle around 6:45 am this morning and headed toward the airport road near the Jnah/Ouzai round-about. Dahiyeh is quiet. Essentially normal. (Around 1 pm returning from Hamra I did notice that none of the Haret Hreik guys were playing football at the local athletic fields—it dawned on me where they were). Read the rest of this entry »
Hundreds of military checkpoints, and no goods — or people — allowed in or out if you live in the Gaza Ghetto, under brutal siege. Need medical attention and care? Pregnant? Want to visit family? Need to go to work? Get fuel? Too bad. All this operates with Israeli regime impunity, who have been choking Gaza — the world’s largest open-air concentration camp — as well as “exporting” its apartheid model: see, in particular, Naomi Klein.
The graphic above was made by a wise fourteen-year-old (Adam) after hearing stories of the difficulties of life in Abu Dis in Palestine. H/T thanks to DesertPeace, originally sourced from WorldPressNetwork. Read the rest of this entry »
Graphic: Carlos Latuff.
The title is a play on the anti-proliferation catchcry: You can’t hug a baby in nuclear arms.
That, of course, is the idea, the result of a deliberate strategy and as a direct consequence of Israel’s prevailing self-definition and worldview. As surely as our cosmology informs our sociology, the abhorrent siege of the Gaza Ghetto continues, the result of the internal logic of Israel’s continued existence as an apartheid expansionist state, producing policies of continued ‘low-intensity’ ethnic cleansing, divide and rule and genocide as Ilan Pappe and others have described. Zaid Khan’s words are worth quoting again:
Nearly 70 years ago, in a small eastern European city, an oppressed and occupied people were under siege, living under atrocious and brutal conditions, lacking food, medicine, electricity, water, and slowly being strangled in the hope they would just disappear.
Warsaw Ghetto 1941 - Gaza 2008. Israel, you are a disgrace.
Mazin Qumsiyeh of the excellent Wheels of Justice peace initiative has drafted this list furnishing facts about why good people of conscience everywhere will not be celebrating Israel at its 60th anniversary this month, just as apartheid-era South Africa was not accepted or celebrated. There are many more reasons, and he invites people to add to it.
Israeli psychologist and exile Avigail Abarbanel notes, “If a day comes, and I hope it does, when Israelis decide to stop living in denial, they will have to realise that real peace will only come through justice. Justice in this context means one thing, that the ideal of an exclusively Jewish state at the cost of an entire people might have to be abandoned. Only a bi-national state and a right of return for the Palestinian refugees will come close enough to rectifying some of the injustices committed in 1948 and since. Having been ethnically cleansed, this is also what the Palestinians are entitled to under international law and common human decency.“
“Nobody can impose terms on us, or commit us to anything we do not believe in. Let me be clear: Israel won’t get through politics what it didn’t get through war, even if the UN resolution gave this to Israel. What they couldn’t do through war, they want to do by peaceful means? It doesn’t work like that.”
—Hezbollah deputy secretary-general Naim Qassem, Al-Manar television, 15 August 2006
Joseph Robinette Biden, Jr (”just call me Joe–anything but Sue” as he does his Johnny Cash imitation) Chairman of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and twice Presidential Candidate, is a friendly, loquacious, decent and knowledgeable fellow. Having served on that Committee for nearly a quarter century and traveled widely, Biden thinks of himself as someone who can be confronted with ‘deal breakers’ at the negotiation table and work out mutually acceptable solutions. “I’m the real deal bridge builder!”, he sometimes kids with his devoted staff, as he shadow boxes and mimics his favorite boxer, Evander “the real deal” Holyfield. Read the rest of this entry »
Franklin Lamb
Dahiyeh
“Absolutely not! Without a credible deterrent force, there is no real Lebanese sovereignty. Israel came very close to getting nearly all it wanted with the 1983 May 17th agreement. Had Hezbollah not prevented this, Lebanon today would be colonized with near confederation status with Israel. The Bush administrations democracy and ’save the Christians’ crusade back-fired when each election resulted in Islamist victories while his war in Iraq and support for Israel is making refugees of a high percentage of Christians. It is now Hezbollah and its allies who are protecting the Christians and want free elections in the Middle East, not the Bush administration”.
– American student interviewed as part of a survey of 27 Lebanese institutions of higher education on whether Hezbollah should immediately disarm
As noted previously, the US government is not obsessed by Hezbollah’s deterrent capability. It appears prepared to back off from this issue and signal to Hezbollah that it can keep its weapons if they use them only in legitimate self defense against a foreign attack. Read the rest of this entry »
“Those bastards [the Israeli military] know the rules and what the US Arms Export Control Act requires! The CBU 58’s are decades out of date! We [the US] have not even had them in our weapons inventory since we last used them in 1991 during Desert Storm. They are now complete junk and I am amazed that any of them after 35 years even detonated. By using them this time in Lebanon, Israel was illegally dropping landmines.”
–Pentagon official commenting on Israel’s use of American weapons against civilians in Lebanon during the July 2006 war (chap. II, The Price We Pay)
It has been a fact that, since at least 1982, perhaps the harshest and most frustrated American critics of Israel are those who work in Langley, Virginia, at CIA Headquarters and especially those across the 14th Street Bridge from the White House, on the banks of the Potomac River, who work at the Pentagon. Read the rest of this entry »
“These fools do not learn from their past mistakes. When they withdrew from Lebanon, they continued to occupy the Shebaa Farms and kept our brothers in custody. Had they released them when they left Lebanon, there would not now be a ‘prisoner issue’ between Lebanon and the enemy. They opened the door for us.”
– Hassan Nasrallah, January 2004, during a welcome home ceremony for Lebanese and Arab detainees as a result of a Hezbollah-Israel swap.
As discussed below, and contrary to conventional wisdom, the Bush administration is prepared to concede that Hezbollah keep its weapons. Even though it encourages its marionettes to foment this issue, and does so itself publicly, the Bush Administration knows that Hezbollah is not going to disarm until the Question of Palestine is settled to the satisfaction of the Palestinians. Yet it feels that focusing on Hezbollah’s militia is still a good pre-negotiation bargaining chip. Read the rest of this entry »
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“The Bush administration parking a flotilla from its US 6th fleet off the coast of Lebanon was made necessary, it claims, to demonstrate Washington’s ‘commitment to stability in the region’. This provocation, aimed at Hezbollah and also Syria, is the equivalent of a Sicilian fish wrapped in newspaper with a white rose—left on a doorstep: “This is business. It is not personal. Here is an offer you cannot refuse“.
– Italian officer seconded to UNIFIL outside his Tebnine HQ, South Lebanon
Recent US back channel feelers to Dahiyeh, where Hezbollah’s decision makers are sometimes present, reflect US calculations that given current trends in the Middle East, Hezbollah will play a major regional role.
According to US Senate Intelligence Committee sources, the efforts to date have run tepid and less ‘qualitative’ than informal Iran-USA contacts. US diplomat Thomas Pickering has revealed that he has been a participant in secret Iran-US ‘back channel’ discussions for the past five years. The subjects discussed include Iran’s nuclear program, the broader relationship between the two and US relations with Hezbollah. Other participants include former US diplomat William Luers and MIT nuclear expert Jim Walsh. While “unofficial”, the discussions, organized by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute and the UN Association of the USA, are thought to be useful.
Dismissive of Republican Presidential candidate John McCain’s pledge to “drive Hezbollah out of Lebanon”, serious US officials want to engage the Lebanese Resistance partly because they are concerned with Israel remaining a Jewish state in the region. Read the rest of this entry »
Hezbollah is re-grouping amid war jitters and Israeli war games, Nicolas Blanford writes in the Christian Science Monitor. The heightened tensions may simply mean more posturing, but since the assassination of Imad Moughniyeh two months ago, the Lebanese Shia group are recruiting more Sunnis, Druze and Christian Lebanese to their ranks, and undertaking intensive training stints in Iran. (Excerpted, read in full at the CSM)
Over the past few weeks, military activity on both sides of the border has contributed to war jitters … The Israeli military just wrapped up a nationwide war drill it dubbed “Turning Point 2,” and Hizbullah appears to have devised new battle plans that include cross-border raids into Israel and has mounted a sweeping recruitment and training drive, even marshaling non-Shiites and former Israeli-allied militiamen into new reservist units.
[...] Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, the party’s leader, in February said that Hizbullah had evolved into an “unparalleled new school” that is part guerrilla force and part conventional army.
A European diplomat in Beirut, who has been watching Hizbullah’s preparations, likened attacking the organization to “punching a sponge” – it absorbs the blow then bounces back – and questioned whether Israel still fully appreciates what it is up against.
Hizbullah’s military buildup is not confined to Shiite Lebanese. Sunnis, Christians, and Druze also are being recruited into reservist units called “Saraya,” or battalions. Read the rest of this entry »
Obama flew east, Likud flew west, Zionists occupied the Cuckoo’s nest.
In weird world U.S.A. it’s cool to call Obama a stinkin’ Commie, but you can’t call would-be Democrat vice president and Senator Lieberman a Zionist mole.
And now they’re telling me I’m crazy over here because I don’t sit there like a goddamn vegetable. — If that’s what’s being crazy is, then I’m senseless, out of it, gone-down-the-road wacko. — Randal Patrick McMurphy via Ken Kesey
Two excellent videos. The first offers an on-the-ground look at what is going on in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, militarily occupied by Israel: youngsters and civilians being terrorised and several foreigners being deliberately targeted and killed to discourage the outside world scrutinizing the Israeli regime’s actions. This is an eyewitness report from Dispatchers Reporter Sandra Jordan on the unconscionable Israeli violence in Gaza directed both at Palestinian civilians as well as international aid volunteers and foreign reporters.
Produced by Rodrigo Vasquez and broadcast by Channel 4 in the UK (one could not imagine its equivalent broadcast in the USA, not even PBS), this 2006 report is, sadly, one of the best I have seen in terms of showing the daily impact of shocking Israeli violence on Palestinians, at a human level.
Within hours of arriving Sandra and Rodrigo are shot at and tear-gassed by Israeli troops breaking up a memorial service for Rachel Corrie, an American peace activist crushed by an Israeli Army bulldozer two days before—deliberately. Tom Hurndall and James Miller, a British peace protester and British cameraman were also both shot by the IDF, leaving one in a coma,and the other shot dead. While this is disturbing, it is a raw and important window into the levels of violence to which Palestinians are daily subject, particularly in but not limited to Gaza.
Following this, having just passed the sixtieth anniversary of the Deir Yassin massacre, a timely reflection from Deir Yassin Remembered on the pivotal event of the Nakba and what it means for Israelis and Palestinians today.
Dispatches: The Killing Zone (49 minutes)
Read the rest of this entry »
Electronic Intifada Global Research t r u t h o u t
