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Last update – 09:43 11/03/2010

Biden to address Israelis as peace talks crisis looms: Haaretz

U.S. condemns Israel after E. Jerusalem building plans threaten negotiations with Palestinians.
United States Vice President Joe Biden will address the Israeli public directly on Wednesday amid a growing diplomatic storm after Israel approved the construction of 1,600 Jewish housing units in East Jerusalem.
According to his official itinerary, Biden is due to focus on American commitment to Israel’s security, Iran’s nuclear program and the peace process.
But the vice-president, the most senior official in the administration of President Barack Obama to visit Israel, has already seen his schedule disrupted as the surprise announcement of the new building work by Interior Minister Eli Yishai coincided with his arrival.
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Biden reportedly came close to canceling a state dinner with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the issue and on Tuesday censured Israel in strong language rarely used by the U.S in reference to its close ally.
“I condemn the decision by the government of Israel to advance planning for new housing units in East Jerusalem,” Biden said.
Earlier Tuesday, the Interior Ministry approved the building of 1,600 new housing units in Ramat Shlomo, beyond the Green Line in northeast Jerusalem, with a ministry official saying the plan would expand the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood to the east and south.

Israel’s commitment last year to suspend new settlement construction in the West Bank, a response to continued U.S. pressure, did not include East Jerusalem. But the timing of Tuesday’s decision, which came just as Israel and the Palestinians apparently agreed to renew mediated peace negotiations, aroused anger in the U.S. and across the Arab world.
Biden said: “The substance and timing of the announcement, particularly with the launching of proximity talks, is precisely the kind of step that undermines the trust we need right now and runs counter to the constructive discussions that I’ve had here in Israel.”

On Wednesday Amr Mousa, General Secretary of the Arab League, said that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas had told him he intended to pull out of the negotiations.
Collapse of the latest round of talks before they are even underway would be a blow to the Obama government, which has so far made little progress in its efforts to revive the deadlocked peace process.

Joe Biden steps up pressure on Israel over E Jerusalem: Haaretz

Joe Biden: Israeli government’s decision “undermines trust”
US Vice-President Joe Biden has again condemned Israel over a controversial building project, saying its approval undermined trust in the peace process.
Mr Biden was speaking after meeting the Palestinian Authority President, Mahmoud Abbas, in the West Bank.
Mr Abbas also said the approval of another 1,600 homes in occupied East Jerusalem threatened the peace process and demanded the plans be scrapped.
Israel has insisted the move had nothing to do with Mr Biden’s visit.
‘Lasting peace’
Israel and the Palestinians had agreed to hold indirect “proximity talks” in a bid to restart the peace process, which has been stalled for 17 months.
However, the Israeli settlement announcement has cast a shadow on those talks, with the Palestinian Authority saying the approval showed Israel believed US negotiation efforts had failed before they had even begun.

ANALYSIS
By Jonathan Marcus, diplomatic correspondent, BBC News

Joe Biden was forthright in condemning Israel’s approval of plans for another 1,600 homes in East Jerusalem.
In the future, he asserted, Washington would hold both sides accountable for any statement or actions that inflamed tensions or prejudiced the outcome of talks. Strong words. But was Israel’s prime minister listening?
Many observers see Mr Netanyahu’s priority as being political survival, and he is practiced in the art of navigating between domestic pressures and those coming from Washington.
Historical boldness, as Mr Biden put it, is not in his nature – nor in fairness is it part of the make-up of President Abbas. But that is just what the US now expects.
Mr Biden’s mission underscores the fundamental ambivalence in the US position. It must seek to make Israel feel secure, because only a secure government – it is said – can take the risks needed for peace.
But equally it wants to exert some pressure over a government that, in resisting a full-scale settlement freeze, has pretty well outfoxed the US during the first year of President Obama’s tenure.

Mr Biden told a joint press conference with Mr Abbas that he would condemn all statements that inflamed the situation or prejudiced the peace process.
He said the US would play an active and sustained role in the talks process and warned that it was “incumbent on both sides not to complicate the process”.
“Yesterday, the decision by the Israeli government to advance planning for new housing units in East Jerusalem undermines that very trust – the trust that we need right now in order to begin as well as produce profitable negotiations.”
Mr Biden said achieving peace would require both Israel and the Palestinians to take “historically bold” steps.
Mr Abbas said he was addressing the Israeli people in saying that the “time is right for peace based on two states – an Israeli state living in peace and security alongside a Palestinian state”.
He said there should be a “permanent, lasting and just peace” that took in all areas, including Syria and Lebanon.
But he was also highly critical of the planning decision, saying it represented “the ruining of trust and a serious blow” to peace efforts.
Mr Abbas has refused to resume direct negotiations with the Israeli government because of its refusal to put a complete stop to the expansion of settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Israeli denial
In November, Israel announced a 10-month suspension of new building in the West Bank, under heavy US pressure. But it considers areas within the Jerusalem municipality as its territory and the restrictions do not apply.

Close to 500,000 Jews live in more than 100 settlements built since Israel’s 1967 occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. They are considered illegal under international law, although Israel disputes this.
During their dinner on Tuesday evening, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Mr Biden that he had no prior knowledge of the decision to authorise the new housing units in the ultra-Orthodox settlement of Ramat Shlomo, officials said.
He said the plans had been submitted three years ago and had only received initial approval that day.
“The district committees approve plans weekly without informing me,” Interior Minister Eli Yishai, the chairman of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, told Israel Radio on Wednesday morning.
“If I’d have known, I would have postponed the authorisation by a week or two since we had no intention of provoking anyone.”
But the US government has not accepted Israel’s explanation that the announcement was essentially part of a bureaucratic process that had no connection with Mr Biden’s visit, says BBC Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen in Jerusalem.
Israel, deliberately or not, inflicted something close to a humiliation on the Obama administration and the words they chose in reaction reflected that, our correspondent says.
The UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband condemned the announcement by Israel.
“This is a bad decision at the wrong time. It will give strength to those who argue that Israel is not serious about peace,” he said in a press statement.
“I condemn it as certain to undermine the mutual confidence we need.”
EU foreign affairs chief Catherine Ashton also condemned the move, saying it risked peace talks before they had even begun and called on Israel to reverse the decision.
The Arab League was due to meet in Cairo to decide on a response.
Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev insisted Israel had “a very good working relationship and a very good personal relationship” with the US.
He dismissed speculation that the interior ministry’s announcement was a deliberate move by some members of Mr Netanyahu’s cabinet to scupper any chance of peace talks.
The US special envoy to the Middle East, George Mitchell, is scheduled to arrive in the region next week to conduct the second round of proximity talks.

Palestinians snub peace talks because of Israeli homes expansion: The Guardian

Mahmoud Abbas ‘not ready to negotiate’ after Israel announces 1,600 new homes for East Jerusalem

The Palestinians pulled out of a new round of indirect peace talks last night, even before they had begun, as a protest at Israel’s decision to announce approval for hundreds of new homes in a Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem.
The decision to pull out, announced in Cairo by Amr Moussa, head of the Arab League, represents a major setback to months of diplomacy by the US administration and comes after the US vice-president, Joe Biden, delivered an unusually strong rebuke to Israel.
Amr Moussa said he had been told by the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, that even this low-key process of so-called “proximity talks” could not start unless Israel stopped expanding its settlements.

“The Palestinian side is not ready to negotiate under the present circumstances,” Moussa said.
Israeli and Palestinian leaders have not held direct negotiations since Israel’s war in Gaza last year. The White House had won agreement on Monday from the two sides to begin the indirect talks, hoping they would lead to face-to-face meetings.
The Palestinians had insisted there would be no direct talks unless Israel halted all settlement expansion, in line with the demands of the US administration and the roadmap, which remains the framework of peace talks.

But Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, leading a rightwing coalition government, offered only a temporary, partial curb to new building.
Then, on Tuesday, hours after Biden met Israeli leaders, the Israeli interior ministry announced approval for 1,600 new apartments in Ramat Shlomo, an ultra-Orthodox Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem. All settlements on occupied land are illegal under international law.

Israel’s opposition Kadima party said it is planning a no-confidence vote in the prime minister in parliament for “destroying” the Biden visit.
Yesterday, Biden emerged from talks with Abbas in Ramallah, on the occupied West Bank, and repeated his criticisms of the timing and substance of Israel’s announcement. “It is incumbent on both parties to build an atmosphere of support for negotiations and not to complicate them,” he said.

“The decision by the Israeli government to advance planning for new housing units in East Jerusalem undermines that very trust, the trust that we need right now in order to begin … profitable negotiations.”
Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad said the Palestinians appreciated “the strong statement of condemnation” by the US administration.
Eli Yishai, Israel’s interior minister, apologised for the timing of the announcement, admitting that it had caused Biden “real embarrassment”.

Leading article: Israel shows what it really thinks: The Independent

Thursday, 11 March 2010
Israel apologised apologised for the embarrassment it had caused its most important ally by announcing it would build 1,600 new homes in disputed East Jerusalem at the very moment the US vice-president, Joe Biden, was in the country for a visit. But no apology – nor the implausible explanation that the announcement was a “procedural” matter of which Benjamin Netanyahu had not been informed in advance – can obscure the truth that this episode has revealed.

The timing was breathtaking. Only hours earlier, Mr Biden had sought to banish doubts about President Obama’s support for Israel by proclaiming Washington’s “absolute, total, unvarnished” commitment to the country’s security. The previous day, George Mitchell, the administration’s Middle East envoy, reported that Israel and the Palestinians had agreed to “proximity talks” that would restart the Middle East peace process. The housing announcement however shows what Israel truly thinks of that process. So much for the partial freeze on settlements in the West Bank that Hillary Clinton last year naively hailed as an unprecedented concession by Israel. East Jerusalem, which Israel insists is part of its united capital, was excluded, and the latest announcement makes clear Israel will not yield on this point, crucial to any final deal between the two sides.

The wider message is no less obvious. Mr Netanyahu may be willing to go through the motions of peace talks, but his priority is to create facts on the ground that no subsequent negotiation can roll back. And in a short-term sense, that policy is succeeding. Thanks not least to the wall constructed along the border, terrorist attacks by Palestinians have all but ceased. Why jeopardise this seeming stability by putting everything back on the table in the quest for a final settlement? Instead Israel can focus on the security threat that concerns it far more, namely Iran.

In fact of course, the two issues are linked, since the continuing conflict between Israel and Palestine only fuels Iran’s campaign against the Jewish state. But Israel calculates that no US president – not even Barack Obama who has spoken so movingly of the historical injustice visited on the Palestinians – will dare deliver it a serious slap. And who is to say that calculation is wrong?

An Academic Blunder: Counterpunch

By SASAN FAYAZMANESH
The International Society for Iranian Studies (ISIS), defined on its website as “an academic society to support and promote the field of Iranian Studies,” has found itself in hot water lately. In its forthcoming conference in Santa Monica, California, it has included a paper by an individual representing “Ariel University of Samaria, Israel,” a “university” built on an illegal Israeli settlement in the occupied West Bank.

The history of “Ariel University of Samaria, Israel” and academic attempts to boycott it have been discussed recently in CounterPunch essays “Israel’s ‘Army-Owned’ University” and “The Two-Headed Monster” and need not be repeated. Suffice it to say that “Ariel College” began as a campus of Bar-Ilan University in 1982 on “Ariel,” the fourth largest Israeli settlement in the West Bank. Lately, the illegal campus was upgraded and given the status of a university by the Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak. The upgrade created much uproar within academic circles, not only outside of Israel but inside the Jewish State itself.

Initially, ISIS’s inclusion of a representative of the illegal “university” in its conference had come to the attention of several academics, including a professor of religion and politics in England who had written to the leadership of ISIS and raised concerns about the legitimacy of “Ariel University of Samaria, Israel.” Instead of addressing his concerns, the ISIS leadership had tried to change the affiliation from “Ariel University of Samaria, Israel” to simply “Ariel University.” Disappointed by the act of concealment, the university professor in turn contacted a few other professors around the world. A group of eight academics then drafted a letter of protest and collected supporting signatures from other university professors, some very well-known scholars of the Middle East (a copy of the letter is available here).

The letter was mailed to the ISIS leadership and they were informed that more signatures are being collected. The response from ISIS was more cover up. They removed the link to the abstract of the paper affiliated with the illegal “university.” Attempts to view the abstract by following the old URL, would result in the message “ACCESS DENIED.” In the meantime, the eight professors secured signatures of well over 100 academics around the world. The letter, with new signatures, was resubmitted to ISIS.  The leadership of ISIS responded by stating that the “Iranian Studies is already subjected to a very intense scapegoating campaign from the Right” and that the “petition drive is further placing” ISIS “in a highly vulnerable situation.” “Anything that we do,” it was written, “will intensify the rightwing attack.” It was also stated that ISIS is “drafting a public statement that we will release as soon as it is approved by the Board.”

On March 2, 2010, ISIS finally announced its official position on the controversy (http://iranian-studies.com/announcements/516). The opening lines of the announcement, entitled “Scholarly Autonomy and Academic Civility,” were quite interesting. It began by stating that ISIS “has received a petition distributed by the U.S. Campaign for the Academic & Cultural Boycott of Israel [USACBI].” This was a misrepresentation of the letter of protest and an attempt to connect it to the campaign for the academic and cultural boycott of Israel. The intention was to discredit the letter among those who disagree with the boycott.  The academics who had drafted the letter, and collected signatures from other colleagues, had carefully avoided any reference to the general boycott, since some of the signatories even opposed it.  The letter of protest did, indeed, appear on the website of USACBI to alert its own constituency, but it showed no signatures.

The second sentence of the announcement was not much better. It was, once again, an attempt at concealment: “Academics leading this campaign are protesting against the inclusion of a scholar from Ariel University Center, a recently upgraded college located in the occupied Palestinian territories in the heart of the West Bank.” The sentence borrowed from the protest letter the expression “in the heart” of the West Bank, but then substituted “Ariel University Center” for “Ariel University of Samaria, Israel.”

The rest of the announcement was a mixture of incoherent, false, illogical and deceptive arguments intended to confuse the rank and file members of the organization, many of whom are sympathetic to the cause of the Palestinians.  For example, it stated: “While respecting the ethical position of colleagues who have called for the exclusion from our conference of a scholar teaching at an institution illegally established on confiscated Palestinian land, as an academic society ISIS does not regulate the institutional affiliations of its members.” But who had asked ISIS to “regulate the institutional affiliations of its members”? What does it mean to “regulate” such affiliations? Apparently, what the leadership meant to say was that ISIS does not inspect or police the institutional affiliations of its members.  But this implied that the leadership is either inept or ignorant. The affiliation of the representative of the illegal “university” was clearly listed on his abstract and in his curriculum vitae, which was attached to the abstract and posted on the Internet. Didn’t the leadership read the CV? Did they not know where “Ariel University of Samaria, Israel” is? Had they not heard of “Judea and Samaria”?

It is interesting to note that the CV of the representative of the “Ariel University of Samaria, Israel” spells out his research agenda: “The Development of the Mojahedin Khalq Organization and its struggle against the Islamic Republic of Iran, 1987-1997.” The history of the Mojahedin Khalq Organization (MKO) is well known and need not be repeated here. But as my 2003 CounterPunch essay “The Good Terrorists” and subsequent writings point out, prior to the overthrow of Saddam’s regime this cult made strange bedfellows out of the US, Israel and Iraq. Afterward, MKO became a tool in the US-Israeli policy of containment of Iran. It is this containment policy that explains the interest of the Israelis in MKO.

The announcement then goes on to discuss how “rigorous,” “blind” and “stringent” the peer review process of ISIS is. The papers for the conference, the announcement states, are only “selected on the basis of their scholarly merit alone.”

ISIS, of course, had by now hidden the abstract of the paper entitled “The Hojjatiyeh: The Real Bringers of the Islamic Revolution of Iran.” The readers were denied access to it and could not judge for themselves the “scholarly merit of the paper.” Had they had access to the abstract, they could have seen that the “paper’s main questions are: Who are the Hojjatiyeh? . . .  Does nuclear Iran represent their main goal? How does it do so? Why should the West as well as the Islamic Republic fear this group? Do they represent any threat to the Middle East, or maybe to the world itself?”

A cursory check of “Hojjatiyeh” on the Internet shows that the above questions are answered on numerous trashy, gossipy and pro-Israeli websites. Indeed, one of the most popular websites on the subject matter, after Wikipedia, reads “Ahmadinejad’s Connection to the Hojjatiyeh Movement: The Terrorist Nightmare.” It covers the same ground as the “scholarly” abstract that ISIS accepted after “rigorous,” “blind” and “stringent” peer review. Is that why ISIS is hiding the abstract?

The arguments of ISIS’s announcement get even better. “ISIS,” the statement reads, “does not discriminate on the basis of nationality, ethnicity, religious belief, gender, sexual preference, political persuasion, or institutional affiliation.” But who had asked ISIS to discriminate? What does criticizing ISIS’s decision to give legitimacy to an illegitimate “university” and, by extension, legitimacy to the military occupation of a people’s homeland, have to do with discrimination?

Then comes the one-two punch part of the announcement: “Having experienced the politicization and ideologization of our field of scholarly inquiry and having witnessed sustained profiling of our colleagues in different national contexts, we are committed to the scholarly autonomy of our society,” reads the statement. It further reads: “The International Society for Iranian Studies firmly believes that scholarship is not politics by other means, and scholarly societies cannot be substitutes for political parties and political campaigns.” Even though deceptively and intentionally unclear, these statements seem to imply that ISIS is a politically neutral organization. But can a Middle Eastern organization remain politically neutral when it comes to the brutal military occupation of Palestine? Is ISIS a politically neutral “scholarly” organization when it includes a paper from “Ariel University of Samaria, Israel” that deals with “nuclear Iran” and its “threat to the Middle East, or maybe to the world”?

Actually, the ISIS leadership has never been politically neutral. Its non-neutrality and political preferences are well exhibited on its website by the inclusion of a huge and glaring emblem of the Achaemenid Empire.

The last two lines of the “Scholarly Autonomy and Academic Civility” are intended to give the knockout blow:

We stand firm against the attempts by any government to dictate the principles of research in the humanities and social sciences and to regulate and control academic and scholarly inquiry. While respecting the work of political pressure groups and recognizing their significance, we likewise remain fully committed to the scholarly autonomy of our society, and we disapprove any attempt to use it as a venue for the advancement of political agendas, regardless of how justified those agendas might be.

Which government has tried to “dictate the principles of research” to the ISIS leadership? Do the original eight professors who drafted the letter of protest, and the subsequent hundred other professors who signed it, represent a government? Which government do they represent? Who are the “political pressure groups” that are using ISIS “as a venue for the advancement of political agendas”? Are the independent scholars whose signatures appear on the letter of protest a political pressure group?  What is their “political agenda”? Is defending the human rights of a people under military occupation, or protesting against giving legitimacy to a “university” built on an occupied land, a political agenda?

The leadership of ISIS has committed a grave blunder by including in its upcoming conference a paper from “Ariel University of Samaria, Israel.” Subsequently, it has committed more blunders by trying to hide the affiliation, conceal the abstract of the paper, obfuscate the issue by writing an incoherent, false, illogical and deceptive “announcement” against those who have criticized its actions and asked it to correct its ways. These blunders, unfortunately, were expected. While the rank and file of ISIS consists of scholars who, like many other academics, are troubled by the plight of the Palestinians, the leadership of ISIS still represents mostly an old guard of conservative individuals with little or no sympathy for a people living under occupation. The time has come for the rank and file to ask some serious questions from the ISIS leadership.

Sasan Fayazmanesh is Professor of Economics at California State University, Fresno. He is the author of The United States and Iran: Sanctions, Wars and the Policy of Dual Containment (Routledge, 2008).  He can be reached at: sasan.fayazmanesh@gmail.com.

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EDITOR: “Peace Talks” Scene 2

So now we are into the script with earnest. The Peace Talks have started – Mitchell is shuttling between camps, trying work out who wants tea and who is for coffee, and having a difficult time with it, as Israel will not agree to accept any preconditions, and no tea can be ordered until the PNA, with its unelected President, will recognise Israel as Jewish State!

Well he almost succeeded, him with Irish experience of hard bargaining, only to have, together with his Vice President who flew in to be humiliated, the unmitigated pleasure of being spat upon by the Israelis; he did not like it, but took it like a man, and said: “Hey man, isn’t it raining?’

If only Joe Biden would read this website, he will face fewer surprises. Don’t those guys ever read the script?

Now we are waiting for Scene 3…

Biden: East Jerusalem plan undermines peace talks: Haaretz

Israel’s decision to approve 1,600 new homes in an ultra-Orthodox East Jerusalem neighborhood is undermining Middle East peace talks, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden said in Jerusalem on Tuesday.
Earlier Tuesday, the Interior Ministry approved the building of 1,600 new housing units in Ramat Shlomo, with a ministry official saying the plan will expand the ultra-Orthodox East Jerusalem neighborhood to the east and to the south.

“I condemn the decision by the government of Israel to advance planning for new housing units in East Jerusalem,” Biden said.
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The American vice president added that the “substance and timing of the announcement, particularly with the launching of proximity talks, is precisely the kind of step that undermines the trust we need right now and runs counter to the constructive discussions that I?ve had here in Israel.”
“We must build an atmosphere to support negotiations, not complicate them,” Biden said adding that the “announcement underscores the need to get negotiations under way that can resolve all the outstanding issues of the conflict,” Biden said.
“The United States recognizes that Jerusalem is a deeply important issue for Israelis and Palestinians and for Jews, Muslims and Christians.”
Biden also said that the U.S. believed “that through good faith negotiations, the parties can mutually agree on an outcome that realizes the aspirations of both parties for Jerusalem and safeguards its status for people around the world.”

“Unilateral action taken by either party cannot prejudge the outcome of negotiations on permanent status issues. As George Mitchell said in announcing the proximity talks, ‘we encourage the parties and all concerned to refrain from any statements or actions which may inflame tensions or prejudice the outcome of these talks,’” Biden said.
The Palestinian Authority had also remarked on the announced plan Tuesday , saying that it ended efforts to renew negotiations with Israel.
The statement approving the 1,600 new houses, released by the Interior Ministry’s Jerusalem district planning committee, headed by Ruth Yosef, said that at least 30 percent of the units will be allocated to young couples.
Public facilities and spaces which were, the statement said, lacking in the existing parts of the neighborhood, are also to be added as part of the new plan, including a new central park.

PA:
Also Tuesday, the Palestinian Authority said that Israel’s decision to approve new East Jerusalem houses effectively prevents any peace negotiations from taking place.
Director of policy and strategy of the U.S. pro-peace organization J Street, Hadar Susskind, said in a statement that the organization joined Biden “in condemning Israel’s announcement of new East Jerusalem construction that only serves to hinder Middle East peace efforts, particularly as the Israelis and Palestinians begin proximity talks.”
“Continued construction in East Jerusalem and the West Bank only diminishes the chances of achieving a viable two-state solution to the conflict,” Susskind added.

The statement also said that Israel’s approval of new East Jerusalem homes marked a “disappointing inflaming of tensions and undermining of trust – and is particularly surprising given Vice President Biden’s present visit to Israel aimed at underscoring the U.S.-Israel relationship and the American commitment to a two-state resolution of the conflict.”
“We echo Vice President Biden’s call for all parties to refrain from unilateral actions that may inflame tensions and prejudice the outcome of peace talks,” the J Street statement added, saying that “If we are to achieve a true resolution to the conflict – and secure Israel’s future as a Jewish, democratic homeland – all sides must demonstrate their commitment to the diplomatic and constructive engagement needed to succeed.”

Meir Margalit, Meretz’s representative to the Jerusalem city council, claimed that the statement was meant to disrupt the Biden visit, saying that he had “no doubt that the timing isn’t coincidental,” calling the announcement Interior Minister Eli Yishai’s “answer to Netanyahu’s willingness to renew indirect peace talks with the Palestinians.”
“The fact that Eli Yishai couldn’t restrain himself for another two-three days until Biden left Israel means his intention was to slap the U.S. administration in the face,” Margalit said, adding that the announcement was “a provocation to the U.S. and to the prime minister.”

Following a request for a statement by Prime Minister’s Office, Yishai said in response that the timing of the announcement had no connection to Biden’s visit.
The Interior Ministry had announced the decision to build 1,300 new homes in Ramat Shlomo, in 2008, with the approval of the regional planning board as part of Jerusalem’s housing master plan.
Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat at the time called the announcement part of “a systematic policy to destroy the peace process,” urging then secretary of state Condoleezza Rice to make the issue her top priority

Joe Biden steps up pressure on Israel over E Jerusalem: BBC

Joe Biden: Israeli government’s decision “undermines trust”

US Vice-President Joe Biden has again condemned Israel over a controversial building project, saying approval had undermined trust in the peace process.
Mr Biden was speaking after meeting the Palestinian Authority President, Mahmoud Abbas, in Ramallah.
Mr Abbas also said the approval of 1,600 more Jewish homes in East Jerusalem threatened the peace process and called for it to be cancelled.
Israel insists the move has nothing to do with Mr Biden’s visit.
The timing of the move, shortly before Mr Biden’s visit, angered the US.
Israel and the Palestinians had agreed to hold indirect “proximity talks” in a bid to restart the peace process, which has been stalled for 17 months.
However, the Israeli settlement announcement has cast a shadow on those talks, with the Palestinian Authority saying the approval showed Israel believed US negotiation efforts had failed before they had even begun.

ANALYSIS
Senior Palestinian officials have described as catastrophic Israel’s decision to push ahead with a planning process for 1,600 new homes in East Jerusalem.
This is a part of the city which the rest of the world sees as occupied territory and which the Palestinians want as a capital for their new state.
The Americans are still hoping that Israel and the Palestinians will begin a round of indirect talks, but now members of the Arab League are threatening to withdraw their grudging support for fresh negotiations.
Before the discussions have even started, accusations of bad faith abound.
Mr Biden said at a joint press conference with Mr Abbas that he would condemn all statements that inflamed the situation or prejudiced the peace process.
He said the US pledged an active and sustained role in the talks process and it was “incumbent on both sides not to complicate the process”.
“Yesterday, the decision by the Israeli government to advance planning for new housing units in East Jerusalem undermines that very trust – the trust that we need right now in order to begin as well as produce profitable negotiations.”
Mr Biden said achieving peace would require both Israel and the Palestinians to take “historically bold” steps.
Mr Abbas said he was addressing the Israeli people in saying that the “time is right for peace based on two states – an Israeli state living in peace and security alongside a Palestinian state”.
He said there should be a “permanent, lasting and just peace” that took in all areas, including Syria and Lebanon.
But he was also highly critical of the planning decision, saying they represented “the ruining of trust and a serious blow” to peace efforts.
Mr Abbas has refused to resume direct negotiations with the Israeli government because of its refusal to put a complete stop to the expansion of settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
Israeli denial
In November, Israel announced a 10-month suspension of new building in the West Bank, under heavy US pressure. But it considers areas within the Jerusalem municipality as its territory and the restrictions do not apply.
Israel, deliberately or not, inflicted something close to a humiliation on the Obama administration and the words they chose in reaction reflected that, our correspondent says.

Close to 500,000 Jews live in more than 100 settlements built since Israel’s 1967 occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. They are considered illegal under international law, although Israel disputes this.
During their dinner on Tuesday evening, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told Mr Biden that he had no prior knowledge of the decision to authorise the new housing units in the ultra-Orthodox settlement of Ramat Shlomo, officials said.
He said the plans had been submitted three years ago and had only received initial approval that day.
“The district committees approve plans weekly without informing me,” Interior Minister Eli Yishai, the chairman of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, told Israel Radio on Wednesday morning.
“If I’d have known, I would have postponed the authorisation by a week or two since we had no intention of provoking anyone.”
But the US government has not accepted Israel’s explanation that the announcement was essentially part of a bureaucratic process that had no connection with Mr Biden’s visit, says BBC Middle East editor Jeremy Bowen in Jerusalem.
The Arab League will meet in Cairo later to decide on a response.
Israeli government spokesman Mark Regev insisted Israel had “a very good working relationship and a very good personal relationship” with the US.
He dismissed speculation that the interior ministry’s announcement was a deliberate move by some members of Mr Netanyahu’s cabinet to scupper any chance of peace talks.
The US special envoy to the Middle East, George Mitchell, is scheduled to arrive in the region next week to conduct the second round of proximity talks.

When Israelis degrade Israel by humiliating Joe Biden: Haaretz

By Bradley Burston
Why would Israeli officials degrade Israel by humiliating the vice-president of the United States?
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What conceivable advantage is there in the Interior Ministry choosing the occasion of a high-profile visit by Joseph R. Biden, Jr., a mission aimed at soothing strained relations between Israel and the Obama administration, to announce the approval of 1,600 new homes for Israelis in East Jerusalem?

Or to add, in insult to injury, that construction on the new homes could begin as soon as early May.

What could officials here gain from what is, in effect, an Israeli version of the incitement the government so keenly – and correctly -decries in its Palestinian incarnations?
It the same edge that Knesset Deputy Speaker Danny Danon of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud stood to gain by telling the Washington Post, “While we welcome Vice President Biden, a longtime friend and supporter of Israel, we see it as nothing short of an insult that President Obama himself is not coming.”

It is the base sentiment that Avigdor Lieberman’s Foreign Ministry has courted in trying to make Israel appear to loom large by treating dignitaries from overseas to petty indignities and frank disrespect.
The profit, for the hard right, is political. It mines an emotional vein along a relatively small but potent segment of the Israeli electorate, which holds that to insult Israel’s indispensible ally is to assert the Jewish state’s independence.
In their drive to expunge any trace of hitrapsut – groveling to the colonial master – there are those among the ostensible super-patriots of the right who revel in shots across the bow of the American ship of state.

On the whole, the farther right one goes in Israel, the more pronounced the sentiment. Avowedly pro-Kahane extremists, now strong enough to have placed their own representative in the Knesset, have gained shock cred by lining highway underpasses with posters of the “Jew-hater Obama” photoshopped into wearing a Palestinian kaffieh.
Harder to fathom was the Defense Ministry’s Monday announcement that work would resume on 112 homes in the ultra-Orthodox settlement of Beitar Illit, units whose construction had been suspended under a White House-spurred settlement freeze.
Chalk it up, if you like, to the powerful pro-settler presence in certain strata of Israel’s bureaucracy. Or credit the mercurial, not to say, erratic, policy style of Defense Minister and Labor Party Chairman Ehud Barak. Or accept the official explanation that the timing of the decision was coincidence, entirely unconnected with the vice-presidential visit.

In the anarchic swirl of current Israeli governance, the correct answer may well be: all three.

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EDITOR: Some sane signs amidst the media glitz and medness

For Haaretz to publish a call for Israel to speak with Hamas, at the very moment of preapring another war on Gaza while talking ‘peace’ with the US, however mild the article may be, is not a usual practice in country where the mere name of Hamas is used to frighten the public into docile submission. Let us hope some more sane voices may follow.

Israel must talk to Hamas before it’s too late: Haaretz

By David Zonsheine
Israel must talk to Hamas. Not secretly. Not indirectly. Not for a politician to rehabilitate himself on the way to taking over the leadership of a party, as Kadima’s Shaul Mofaz tried to do, but openly and seriously. Just as the United States regularly talks to the Israeli opposition, Israel should maintain a dialogue with the Palestinian opposition. The dialogue should cover all core issues including a final settlement.

It’s not a simple matter, of course. There is agreement across the political spectrum to reduce the debate to a demonization of Hamas, dwelling on the organization’s external attributes as perceived by Israel – religious, extremist and desiring all the territory between the river and the sea. This debate does not focus on the Israeli interest. We should be asking ourselves the following questions: Is it worthwhile to speak with Hamas? What are our reasons for not talking to them? Is boycotting them linked to an erroneous preconception?
Israel rigorously insists that Hamas is not a partner and that our partner is Fatah, headed by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. But negotiations with Fatah have been going on for nearly two decades, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s declaration that he accepts the principle of two states for two peoples looks like just another trick to postpone the demise of the current negotiation process.

In 2004, the Israeli government decided that Yasser Arafat was not relevant. Abbas, Israel’s leaders have said, is weak. At the same time, Israel has for years been doing all it can to weaken the Palestinian Authority. That way, it will be possible to prove yet again that although “we have to talk, there’s no one you can close a deal with.” Even if an agreement is signed under American pressure, the PA will not be able to implement it because more than half the Palestinians don’t accept its authority. This is why the refusal to speak with Hamas is pointless. It is no more than a continuation of avoiding talking to the Palestinians by other means.

Hamas’ rule in Gaza is the outcome of despair with the Fatah leadership. The deterioration of the situation in Gaza after the ongoing failure of negotiations and the total dependence on Israel for receiving basic needs intensify the despair and extremism. (And no one is talking about the right to free movement, to go abroad to study.) Even today, there are groups resisting Hamas that resemble Al-Qaida. We can drag things out as much as we want, but we have to admit that the notion that time is on our side is baseless. The people who led Abbas to consider resigning and who refuse to talk to Hamas will find themselves in five years with a partner who reports to Osama bin Laden.
Nothing is possible without Gilad Shalit. People may say that the fate of a country cannot be dependent on what happens to one abducted soldier. There is no greater mistake. The abandonment of Shalit is symptomatic of Zionism’s failure, the elevation of pride over wisdom and tactics over strategy. It’s the denial of the sanctity of life and redeeming prisoners, values that are at the heart and soul of the nation.

Precisely here, the soft underbelly of public opinion, it would be possible to makes progress on the delicate matter of contacts with Hamas. More than 7,000 Palestinians are being held prisoner in Israel. There is one Israeli prisoner in Palestine. The suffering of both sides, and with it the tremendous joy that a prisoner exchange would produce, can and should be the lever for a stepped-up conciliation process.
For years Israel and its citizens have been paying the price of choosing solutions that were appropriate for the last war. Hiding our head in the sand at such a critical stage is dangerous. We have to declare our readiness to speak with the Palestinian opposition, immediately.

The writer is a joint founder of an initiative seeking direct and open talks with Hamas.

Possibilities of war: Iran: Al Ahram Weekly

Despite how alarming the prospect of a nuclear Iran might be to Washington, enhancing sanctions or authorising pre-emptive strikes could lead to an all-out war the US might lose, writes Azmi Bishara
The Obama administration’s reappointment of the Bush administration’s secretary of defence, Robert Gates, reflects the growing involvement of the US military establishment in decision-making processes on matters of war and peace, and hence in US foreign policy in general. The primary catalyst in this development has been the dismal results of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan leading to attempts to reform the military establishment’s modus operandi, which isn’t directly affected by elections, a couple of years before the end of Bush’s tenure. The new programming was scripted to a considerable extent in the Baker- Hamilton Report, submitted to Bush in December 2006. The most important recommendations of this report were, first, its call for a dialogue with countries neighbouring Iraq, including Syria and Iran, in order to persuade them to help promote stability in order to extricate the US from the Iraqi quagmire it created after having invaded that country and demolished its existing governing infrastructures, and second its call to renew efforts towards a political solution to the Palestinian cause, which is to say to revive the so-called “peace process”.

Against this backdrop, the appointment of Gates as secretary of defence, instead of Rumsfeld, was a manifestation of the military establishment’s rejection of the latter and of the neoconservatives’ adventurism. Gates is now the military establishment’s man in the White House and his influence has increased under Obama. He epitomises that conjunction between the refusal to allow Iran to arm itself with nuclear weapons and the desire to avert an all-out war with Iran. This is the current position of the establishment in the West, regardless of the Tony Blair-like histrionics that only a handful of Arab officials buy.

Washington’s refusal of a nuclear Iran has its roots in its relations with Tehran since the Islamic Revolution. Its position is based on both rational and irrational reasons, even from the American perspective, and these are precisely the reasons that compel a regime that feels itself under perpetual threat from the US, which has not recognised it until today, to contemplate possessing a nuclear weapon for deterrent purposes. The mutual antagonism between Washington and Tehran is fed by the former’s declared and applied intent to overthrow the Iranian regime and by the latter’s refusal to accept US hegemony and its consequences in the Middle East. However, the more immediate cause for hostility is the Israeli attitude towards Iran, even in the reformist era, versus the Iranian attitude towards Israel.

It is this factor that accounts for why the tenor of Iranian-US relations has remained unchanged even after much has changed in both countries. It is what fuels that dynamo that whirs tirelessly in the international domain to impose sanctions and to keep the Iranian question a top priority on the global agenda. Israel is the most active country in this dynamo. It is the party that most clearly and persistently urges the use of all means to prevent Iran from attaining the ability to produce its own nuclear weapon, and it is the most adamant about keeping the military option open, if only in theory, in the game of tug-of-war with Iran. The Israeli lobby in Congress and the White House is steering the campaign against Iran. Its success in this regard was crowned with the appointment of Dennis Ross as the White House’s advisor and special envoy on matters pertaining to Iran. Western leaders, in general, can come up with no other justification for their opposition to the Iranian nuclear programme than their anxiety over “its potential threat to Israel’s security and existence”.

While European officials were discussing the question of tougher sanctions on Iran, Israel marked the 61st anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz with even louder than the previous year’s commemorations. In the process, teams of Israeli officials were deployed in every European capital to mount podiums, wag their fingers and deliver lectures on the relationship between the Nazi Holocaust and the Iranian position on the existence of Israel. Needless to say, the wiles and ruses of political exploitation know no bounds. Few are the arenas that have not come under pressure from Israel and the US to prevent Iran from arming itself and to tighten sanctions. The campaign extends across the whole of Europe, Russia, China, India, the Arab world and even Africa. No field of industry, banking and even the media has escaped being turned into a means for weakening and surrounding Iran. Even the Lebanese/Syrian front, from the Israeli perspective, has been subordinated to calculations pertaining to the primary front against Tehran. The existential threat comes from there, according to the current Israeli thinking, and the chief strategic threat is Iran’s missiles with regard to which Israelis are keeping very close watch on range, accuracy, the type of warhead they can carry, and their destructive power.

In the distant past, the Arab nationalist regimes of the 1960s constituted the real threat. They were existentially antithetical to Israel and applied their energies against it on all fronts. Today, the visible danger resides in a hostile regime that is ideologically opposed to Israel, that has given no hint of an inclination to reach an understanding, and that possesses advanced missilery. The Arabs, of course, remain the existential antithesis in the long run, but they are unorganised and they are not collectively represented by a sovereign state or even several separate states.

Binyamin Netanyahu has taken this thinking so far as to dub Iran the “new Amalek” ( Haaretz, 18 February 2010). The reference is to the Biblical Amalekites who occasioned the first divinely ordained genocide in history when the Old Testament Yahweh commanded the Israelites to destroy them totally, sparing no one, including women, children and even their livestock. Of course, such a thing is not possible in our modern day and age. However, apparently it is possible for a secular prime minister of a “democratic” state to hurl an allusion to this blood-steeped legacy at his contemporary political enemies without raising the eyebrows of the civilised world, where the current bent of literature, arts and dialogue conferences of every sorts is to heap scorn and derision on Ahmadinejad, and without stirring The New York Times into devoting even a small editorial to this dangerous and provocative indulgence in religious imagery.

Turning to the other half of Washington’s dilemma, its reluctance to start a full-fledged war against Iran resides in its anxieties over the fallout from such a war on the rest of the region, inclusive of Iraq, all the more so given that the repercussions are impossible to predict with any degree of accuracy. It also has to do with doubts over whether the US and its allies could sustain the costs of a war, and with the lack of any volunteers to side with the US in such a war in spite of the many parties prodding and plotting for a military showdown. To further aggravate this factor, the US remains mired in Iraq and Afghanistan, where resistance movements remain strong, and it is doubtful whether it could stretch its forces to other fronts.

It should be mentioned here that Arab countries could be certain of preventing a war, for there could not be a war without their approval, whereas their approval alone is not sufficient to make a war. Evidently, they have opted for the less certain path. This is also the place to register a reminder that if the Arabs had systematically opposed the American invasion of Iraq they would have prevented that war.

Of course, the Obama administration has political considerations for avoiding combat against Iran. Obama was elected largely on the basis of his pledge to put an end to wars begun by his predecessor. He was not elected to start new wars. If he has yet to score any major inroads towards the fulfilment of that pledge, imagine the political risks he would incur if he plunged his country into another war, especially one that would be so unpredictable.

There are, nonetheless, the seeds of a different approach to the Iranian question, but they are unlikely to find fertile ground in view of the hold the Israeli perspective has over US strategy for the region. The alternative viewpoint is to learn to cope with the idea of Iranian nuclear capacity; it would not be the end of the world. Iran is better organised and more institutionalised than Pakistan. Of course, there would have to be comprehensive understandings, but these are reachable with a state that is developing a nationalist pragmatism that seeks to translate economic, political and strategic advantages into regional and international status. No one has anything to gain if this power is built under boycott, and certainly those who violate the boycott do not do so free of charge: some receive payment in material goods or cash (Russia), others in reduced oil prices (China), and others in commercial, financial and real estate returns (Dubai). So, according to this point of view, what’s wrong with containing Iran within a framework that acknowledges its standing? In return, Iran would accept conditions that not only meet the approval of the US but also of a large segment of Iranian public opinion that wants the Iranian government to give priority to the needs of its citizens and the country (a policy of “Iran first” one might say).

In fact, Iran has come a long way in this direction. The development is particularly apparent in its relations with neighbouring Arab countries in which it is constantly trying to turn local sectarian affiliation into political affiliation to Tehran (“Iran first”). However, the Shia Islamist ideology on which the Iranian regime is founded restricts the tendency towards state pragmatism, for not only does it highlight what separates Iran from its surroundings it also underscores what it has in common with it, namely Islam and antagonism towards Israel. Still, in the absence of the abovementioned alternative, the US position remains caught between its rejection of a nuclear Iran and its desire to avoid an all-out war.

Within this framework, both sides have a margin of manoeuvrability. The US-Israeli margin ranges from pressing for harsher sanctions (covering economic, commercial and financial activities, as well as transportation and communications) to calculated raids on specific targets (along the lines of the Israeli bombing of the Iraqi nuclear reactor or its “pre-emptive” strike against Deir Al-Zor). Somewhere in the middle lie intelligence operations, such as supporting armed insurgents in Iranian border regions, and — more recently on the American agenda — supporting the new Iranian opposition. In the not so distant past, US intelligence efforts focussed on backing the conventional opposition made up of members and supporters of the ancien régime. However, the US could not pass up the window of opportunity presented by the front that rallied behind the rejection of the Ahmadinejad approach and the results of last June’s presidential elections. This opposition is deeper, broader and morally weightier than the conventional opposition, for which reason it will obtain unconventional assistance, both directly and indirectly.

The Iranian margin of manoeuvrability covers warding off harsher sanctions for as long as possible, announcing conciliatory initiatives — especially at times when it makes another breakthrough in uranium enrichment — and sustaining good relations with countries that are more concerned about promoting their economic interests than about pleasing the US, such as China and Russia. Even a country such as India, which has entered the US-Israeli alliance (largely because of the Arabs and Pakistan) and has more reasons than China to value this alliance, has strategic reasons for not jeopardising its relationship with Iran. In addition to such concerns as a shared position towards Afghanistan, for example, India refines some 40 per cent of the gasoline that is imported into Iran. Turning off the taps to refined gas is the furthest the US is contemplating on going in terms of “effective sanctions” and this step it would save for last. At that point Washington would not only have to pressure China, it would have twist India’s arm too. However, its ability to do so has gradually dwindled with respect to India because of the US’s declining fortunes in its war against the Taliban which, in my opinion, it will ultimately lose, and with respect to China because of the repercussions of the global financial crisis.

In calculating the limits of military confrontation in that space between the desire to avoid comprehensive engagement and the rejection of a nuclear Iran it is best to exclude actions that could lead to a full-scale war, even if that is not their initial nature or intent. For example, tactical raids are theoretically possible as an upper threshold of engagement, yet one side or the other could take such an action as an act of war and respond accordingly, on the basis of the reasoning that that is what war is. Thus, attacks against certain locations in Iran could escalate into a full-scale war, but the same might apply to a cut-off of imports of refined gas. Much would depend on the Iranian reaction. If Tehran saw this as grounds for retaliatory skirmishes in the Straits of Hormuz, would the US not respond to the challenge? In other words, might not the imposition of certain types of sanctions feasibly degenerate into all-out war?

While the US, now, seems to be treading these waters with care, it will still continue its gradual push no notch up sanctions in a way that will guarantee a favourable response from the countries that count. It will simultaneously build on the development of the Iranian opposition. This is now Iran’s fundamental problem and it should compel Tehran to deal more seriously with the dialectic of citizenship and the official ideology of the state. The Soviet Union, the countries of Eastern Europe and China have passed through such a phase. This is not the place to elaborate on those battles. However, the civil rights camp, as rightful as its demands are, continues to regard foreign policy and ideology as the cause of its tragedies, although there is not necessarily a connection between the two, apart from the regime’s attempts to use ideology and the banner of solidarity with the oppressed as a pretext for abusing the rights of citizens, restricting freedoms, and nurturing and protecting corruption among the ruling classes. I stress “as a pretext”. The oppressed and those who side with them, wherever they might be in the world, are not to blame for the mismanagement of the kolkhozy, domestic repression or the failure of five-year plans. In addition to people’s tendency to blame an ideology that had become totally devoid of substance at the time of the state’s collapse, and hence an easy target, the opposing camp, too, plays on ideology in its propaganda campaigns against its adversary and in marketing itself. Some self-appointed spokesmen for the oppressed do this in the course of their praise for domestic policies in totalitarian states. Iran faces a dialectic of this sort. It will have to come to terms with it in order to strengthen its resilience against outside pressures.

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EDITOR: The ‘Peace Process’ is taken out of the deep freeze, but is there any life left in this corpse?

Hopeful Overtures, or Distant Thunder?

Now, some 14 months after Obama has taken over the Oval Office with much trumpeting about ‘change’, he finally remembered to start worrying about the Middle East and Palestine. This reminds us of the similar timetable of all US presidents before him, and also of the less than auspicious results of such sham up to now. On the one hand, Obama and Clinton have to be seen to be doing something, as the noises from Palestine and the Arab world, not to mention sectors of the Israeli society, are all speaking about the ‘last chance for peace’. On the other hand, he cannot do anything; he is a prisoner of his own ‘convictions’ seeing Israel as the most important ally in the coming war on Iran, and the following chaos which will no doubt overtake the Middle East. Israel, for Obama and Clinton, who are facing a stalemate if not defeat in Afghanistan, and unknown dangers in Pakistan, Yemen, Iran and parts of the Gulf, with certain unrest in Egypt, seems like the only ’stable domino piece, and on their side, for better or worse.

So, what will they do? What can they do? How new can this initiative be?

Unfortunately, Both Obama and Clinton are fully committed to the decades-old game of the so-called Two State solution, woefully ignoring all that was done since 1967, not to mention 1948. Their solution is a Pax Isriaeliana – a forced agreement denying the minimum basic rights and needs of Palestine, and fully colluding with the Israeli agenda of only one meaningful entity, political, military and financial, between the river Jordan and the sea, to be a vassal state of the US and serve its regional interests. Nothing else is on the table, and nothing ever was. This is the reason that despite the rush of talks, talks about talks, Nobel prizes and photo-opportunities, and a much reduced Palestinian leadership, especially after the split with Hamas, there was no meaningful movement towards a just solution in Palestine. As the US/Israel position concentrates and is predicated on Israel’s ’security needs’, which as we know, engulf the globe rather than just the region, and Israel’s notion of what it needs in terms of territories, control and sheer military power, there was nothing for any Palestinian leader, however desperate (and most of them were, and still are) to sign on behalf of their people, if they do not wish to sign away any future prospects altogether. Every Palestinian leader knows that continuing with the charade of the ‘peace talks’, in the way it was established over the last few decades, is playing with fire near an open oil drum; the Palestinian population has suffered more than possibly any other since 1945, and there is no end in sight. Palestinians know clearly enough that all the Oslo agreements, promises and procedures were used by Israel for one aim – to advance, deepen and secure its stranglehold on Palestine through a system combining settlements, brutal military occupation, the ’separation’ (apartheid in Afrikaans) wall, daily repression and mass starvation in Gaza. Even the most pliant Palestinian leader, and there was no one more pliant than the current one, must understand that they cannot puta signature to something which will not only stifle hope, but cannot be delivered. The Oslo cloud of misguided optimism has long been blown away.

So, what is the agenda of the current revival of the ‘peace’ rain-dance by Obama, Clinton and Mitchell? Surely, they also know what has been described here, and know it without any possible doubt?

As much as one would like to believe in the benign aims of US foreign policy, (not a position one could easily recommend) it seems that like in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and many other fronts of the current conflict between Western Huntingtonian ‘civilizational’ crusade and the Moslem/Arabic cultures, with Palestine becoming the iconic conflict of this ‘clash of civilizations’. Pundits have told the various US administrations for decades that as long as the Palestine conflicts festers and occasionally boils over, the chance of stemming the anger in the Muslim and Arab world against the West is minimal; the US has overlooked, not to say ignored, such advice with surprising tenacity which seems foolhardy, to say the least. All the various efforts to quell unrest in the Muslim East have been on the US/Israel terms: “we will tell you how to behave, if you wish us to speak to you, and you better follow the instructions”. Such a policy could only produce the results which we know today.

So, is Obama able to ascend beyond the platitudes and destructive patterns which have dogged not only the Palestine conflict, but the whole US foreign policy? Is he able to reverse the trends of decades? Is he indeed willing to do so?

The answer to date must be a resounding NO. In all his foreign policy initiatives, Obama, and Clinton and Mitchell as his semi-autonomous apparatchiks, have proven their deep conservatism, their dependence on doctrines which have failed time and again to achieve the stated aims, and their beholden commitment to what they call ‘a strong Israel’, meaning the corollary of a weak Palestine, and a weak Arab Middle East. As long as this remains the order of the day, no amount of photo-opportunities will change the realities in Palestine, in the region, in the world. The US elite, its administration, its powerful economy, its military-industrial complex, have all combined to react in the well known rituals of the declining empire – a denial of unpalatable realities, a failure to think beyond their power grip, a selfishness bred by ultimate control for far too long, an inability to transcend patterns of behaviour ingrained by being so strong, that no other force need be consulted or taken into account.

This bodes ill for Palestine, of course; it does not herald some excellent times for Israel either, of course. Unless the Israeli leadership, its social, intellectual and financial elites, all colluding fully in the brutal occupation, are brought to book, are faced with the results of the decades of their crimes, there is no hope for Palestine, Israel, or the Middle East.

There is also no hope for the rest of us, as the current US administration is failing its first major test.

A slightly different version was sent to the Guardian today, by Haim Bresheeth

Joe Biden and George Mitchell arrive to kick-start Israeli-Palestinian talks: The Guardian

Indirect negotiations mark first return to peace process since Gaza war
George Mitchell meets Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu in Jerusalem yesterday as he began a round of regional talks lasting four months. Photograph: Moshe Milner/EPA
The US vice-president, Joe Biden, is due in Israel tomorrow for an American diplomatic initiative to start indirect negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians.
The new round of so-called “proximity talks” could be announced as early as tomorrow, but there is scepticism on both sides about the chance of any agreement. George Mitchell, the US special envoy to the Middle East, will shuttle between Israeli and Palestinian leaders for four months hoping to find common ground. Although the talks are low-key, they mark the first return to a peace process since Israel’s war in Gaza more than a year ago.
Mitchell flew into Israel on Saturday night and met with Ehud Barak, the Israeli defence minister, for 90 minutes. He saw Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, today and will meet Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas tomorrow.
Mitchell’s team will handle the talks, while Biden’s visit is reportedly focused on trying to win Israeli support for the US administration’s policy on Iran and on discouraging Israel from any military action against the Iranian regime over its nuclear ambitions.

Abbas won the support of the Arab League and today the executive committee of the Palestine Liberation Organisation to go ahead with the talks. Yet they represent a partial climbdown for the Palestinian leader, who for a year has insisted there will be no talks with Israel without a full halt to the construction of Jewish settlements on occupied Palestinian territory. However, construction continues, with Israel offering only a limited, temporary halt that expires in a few months.
In a speech on Saturday in Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank, Abbas warned the peace process had “almost reached a dead end. The Israeli government continues to procrastinate to gain time and strengthen its control of the occupied territories to prevent any realistic possibility of establishing an independent, viable … state of Palestine,” he said.
The Palestinian leadership wants an independent state in Gaza and the West Bank, with a capital in East Jerusalem. However, Netanyahu says he will not give up East Jerusalem, which Israel captured in the 1967 war, occupied and later annexed ‑ a move not recognised by the international community. He also insists on holding on to large Jewish settlement blocs in the West Bank and says Israel must maintain a key presence in the Jordan valley, along the border with Jordan.
Some Israeli commentators were doubtful about the new diplomacy and said the gap between Israeli and Palestinian leaders was too wide to bridge. “If the talks are held in the planned indirect format, they are not going to lead anywhere,” wrote Shimon Shiffer, a columnist in the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper. “They are going to lead neither to increased trust between the leaders nor to final status arrangement talks in the near future.”
The diplomacy comes at a time of heightened tension. There have been several days of clashes between Palestinians and Israeli police at the Haram al-Sharif, or the Temple Mount, in Jerusalem’s Old City. There has been criticism of an Israeli announcement about more houses planned inside East Jerusalem settlements and on Friday a 14-year-old Palestinian boy was critically injured when he was shot in the head with an Israeli rubber-coated bullet during a demonstration in Nabi Saleh, in the West Bank, against Israeli confiscation of village land.

In Jerusalem on Saturday night, more than 2,000 Israelis and Palestinians held a protest against the eviction of Palestinian refugees and the growing presence of rightwing Jewish settlers.

US to relaunch peace talks in Middle East: The Independent

US ready to apportion blame if new round of talks fails to make progress again
By Donald Macintyre in Jerusalem
Monday, 8 March 2010SHARE PRINTEMAILTEXT SIZE NORMALLARGEEXTRA LARGE
US Vice-President Joe Biden will arrive in Israel today following a formal decision by the West Bank Palestinian leadership to approve Washington’s proposal for indirect peace negotiations with Israel.
The Palestinian Liberation Organisation gave President Mahmoud Abbas a mandate to take part in the talks – the first with Israel for over a year – while warning that without real progress to a deal on borders they would pull out of the negotiations after four months.
With both US presidential envoy George Mitchell – who will shuttle between the two sides during the process – and Mr Biden in the region, a more detailed timetable for the talks is likely to emerge this week. The Palestinian negotiators have so far ruled out direct talks without the full freeze on settlement construction that had been sought by Washington.

Part of Mr Biden’s purpose in talks with Israeli leaders has been widely reported to be to urge Israel not to contemplate an Israeli military strike on Iran while President Obama continues to try for more stringent international sanctions to press Tehran to abandon its perceived military nuclear ambitions.
But the Vice President, the highest ranking US official to visit Israel since President Obama took office, will also meet Mr Abbas and other Palestinian leaders in Ramallah during his three-day visit. Yesterday’s PLO decision was expected after the heavily qualified approval given to the talks by the Arab League in Cairo last week.

There have been indications from the administration that it is ready to apportion blame for any failure to progress in the Israeli-Palestinian talks. At the same time, low expectations for the outcome were underlined by an internal Israeli Foreign Ministry paper assessing that the Middle East will be a relatively low priority for Washington in the run-up to November’s mid-term Congressional elections. The paper, leaked to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, says that in preparatory discussions for the so-called “proximity talks” US officials took positions closer to Palestinian requirements than to Israel’s. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been demanding that the Palestinians explicitly recognise Israel as a “Jewish state”, has continued to affirm his opposition to the sharing of Jerusalem as a capital – regarded as a sine qua non by Palestinian negotiators – and envisages a continued Israeli presence in the Jordan Valley.

But the document also suggests that the US administration will avoid taking any position that suggests disagreement with Israel because of the support that Israel enjoys in Congress. The unspoken implication is that that will be particularly true as President Obama seeks to prevent heavy Republican gains in the mid-term elections.
The talks co-incide with an increase in grass-roots protests by some Palestinians, partly exacerbated by the inclusion of religious shrines in two West Bank cities, Hebron and Bethlehem, in a list of Jewish heritage sites published by Mr Netanyahu.
A 14-year-old boy Ehab Fadel Barghouthi was still critically ill yesterday after being shot by border police with a rubber-coated bullet that penetrated his skull during an anti-settlement protest in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh on Friday. Eyewitnesses say he was shot at a range of around 20 metres during stone-throwing incidents.

And the Palestinian Authority has protested at the military detention of a 13-year-old boy Hasan El-Muhtaseb for six days for allegedly throwing stones during protests in Hebron. A military court yesterday released the boy on a £875 surety.

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Photographer Ryuichi Hirokawa’s best shot: The Guardian

Interview by Melissa Denes, The Guardian – 30 Apr 2009

I took this in 2002, at Al-Ram checkpoint on the West Bank. All the checkpoints had been closed by Israeli troops and these women were demonstrating to have them opened, so that food and medical supplies could come through. An hour before, a group of men had been demonstrating, but the soldiers pulled out their batons so the women – who were both Palestinian and Israeli – moved to the front.
On the left is a line of Israeli soldiers; that man at the front, with his hands in his pockets, is a policeman. I was drawn to the young woman standing second from the right, who is holding up her hand in a V-sign. She held that for a long time, at least 30 minutes – until the soldiers began to throw tear gas canisters.
You can see the press at the back. I don’t like to work from such a position of safety. I’ve been taking photographs in Israel and the West Bank since 1967. This one became symbolic for me, and last year I included it in my film Nakba (Catastrophe), which features hundreds of photographs and interviews with Palestinians displaced after 1948.
As a student in Japan, I was very idealistic. I read the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber and decided to work on an Israeli kibbutz. One day, I found some bullets in a field nearby and asked where they might have come from. No one knew – then a young Jewish man showed me an old map that had the Palestinian name for the place where we were working.
I began photographing the ruins of Palestinian villages and exhibited them in Jerusalem in 1969, in a show called Security. There was an angry response: people wanted to know whose security I was referring to. But one entry in the visitors’ book, written by a Jewish student, said: “In Israel we only ever hear one side; these pictures show us the other side.” I have been to Palestine 30 to 40 times now, most recently to Gaza in January. This is what I keep trying to show.

EDITOR: Gideon Levy has always been the most thoughtful, challenging and morally founded columnists in Haaretz, and in Israel. He has moved his political positioning much to the left over the last couple of years, and this article is the clearest he has written yet, a condemnation of the cozy self-image of the so-called Israeli left “peace camp”. Timely and accurate.

There has never been an Israeli peace camp: Haaretz

By Gideon Levy
The Israeli peace camp didn’t die. It was never born in the first place. While it’s true that since the summer of 1967, several radical and brave political groups have been working against the occupation – all worthy of recognition – a large, influential peace camp has never existed here.

It’s true that after the Yom Kippur War, after the first Lebanon War and during the giddy days of Oslo (oh, how giddy those days were), citizens took to the streets, generally when the weather was nice and when the best of Israeli music was being performed at rallies, but few people really said anything decisive or courageous, and fewer still were willing to pay a personal price for their activities. After the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, people lit candles in the square and sang Aviv Geffen songs, but this certainly isn’t what one would call a peace camp.

It is also true that the stance advocated by the so-called Matzpen movement immediately after the Six-Day War has now more or less become the Israeli consensus position – but it is mere words, devoid of content. Nothing meaningful has been done so far to put it into practice. One would have expected more, a lot more, from a democratic society in whose backyard such a prolonged and cruel occupation has existed and whose government has primarily invoked the language of fear, threats and violence.

There have been societies in the past in whose name frightful injustice has been committed, but at least within some of them, genuine, angry and determined left-wing protest took place – of the sort that requires personal risk and courage, and which is not limited to action within the cozy consensus. An occupying society whose town square has been empty for years, with the exception of hollow memorial rallies and poorly attended protests, cannot wash its hands of the situation. Neither democracy nor the peace camp can.

If people didn’t take to the streets in large numbers during Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, then there isn’t a genuine peace camp. If people don’t flood the streets now – when dangers lie in wait and opportunity is wasted time after time, and democracy sustains blow after blow on a daily basis and there are no longer sufficient resources to properly defend it, and when the right wing controls the political map and settlers amass more and more power – then there is no genuine left wing.

There is nothing like the debate over the future of the Meretz party to demonstrate the sorry state of the left. This comes in the wake of the strange and ridiculous report last week about the party’s poor showing in the last election, and which gives every possible recommendation. Meretz disappeared because the party fell silent; you don’t need a commission to find that out. But even during its relatively better days, Meretz was not a real peace camp. When Meretz applauded Oslo, it deliberately ignored the fact that the champions of the “historic” peace accords never intended to evacuate even a single settlement over the course of the great “breakthrough” that earned its promoters Nobel peace, yes, peace prizes. This camp also overlooked Israel’s violations of the agreements, its illusions of peace.

Above all, however, the problem was rooted in the left’s impossible adherence to Zionism in its historical sense. In precisely the way there cannot be a democratic and Jewish state in one breath, one has to first define what comes before what – there cannot be a left wing committed to the old-fashioned Zionism that built the state but has run its course. This illusory left wing never managed to ultimately understand the Palestinian problem – which was created in 1948, not 1967 – never understanding that it can’t be solved while ignoring the injustice caused from the beginning. A left wing unwilling to dare to deal with 1948 is not a genuine left wing.

The illusory left never understood the most important point: For the Palestinians, consenting to the 1967 borders along with a solution to the refugee problem, including at least the return of a symbolic number of refugees themselves, are painful concessions. They also represent the only just compromise, without which peace will not be established; but there’s no sense in accusing the Palestinians of wasting an opportunity. Such a proposal, even including the “far-reaching” proposals of Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert, has never been made to them.

Meretz will surely find some kind of organizational arrangement and will again get half a dozen members elected to the Knesset, on a good day maybe even a dozen. This doesn’t mean much, however. The other left-wing groups, both Jewish and Arab, remain excluded. No one has any use for them, no one thinks about including them, and they are too small to have any influence. So let’s call the child by its real name: The Israeli peace camp is still an unborn baby.

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EDITOR: The Al Ahram Nakba Archive is a useful research source for finding sources and quotes, but has not been recently updated. It will be available as a permanent link on this website, on the right, within the LINKS category.

The Nakba Archive

David Ben-Gurion, one of the father founders of Israel, described Zionist aims in 1948 thus: “A Christian state should be established [in Lebanon], with its southern border on the Litani river. We will make an alliance with it. When we smash the Arab Legion’s strength and bomb Amman, we will eliminate Transjordan too, and then Syria will fall. If Egypt still dares to fight on, we shall bomb Port Said, Alexandria and Cairo… And in this fashion, we will end the war and settle our forefathers’ account with Egypt, Assyria, and Aram” *.

50 years after the Arab defeat in the1948 war, which resulted in the establishment of Israel, many of Ben-Gurion’s stated aims can still be discerned in the language of Israeli and Zionist leaders. Some modifications have become apparent, in large part as a result of Arab resistance, but the biblical language in which Ben-Gurion chose to state his meaning starkly expresses the deeply-rooted nature of these violent fantasies of conquest and destruction.

Resistance, in this instance through a better comprehension of the history of the struggle, as well as the writing of our own version of it, becomes more necessary than ever. Israel cannot be allowed to write the history of the past fifty years unchallenged. It is in this conviction that Al-Ahram Weekly presents the first in a regular series of articles designed to document the history and nature of Arab-Israeli struggle, as well as that of Palestinian dispossession and exile.

Policy of provocation: Al Ahram Weekly

Israeli provocations, including annexing Islamic sites to an alleged heritage list, are creating a powder keg in the occupied territories, writes Khaled Amayreh in the West Bank

Palestinian officials have warned that recent Israeli provocations, including government-backed attempts by Jewish religious extremists to claim a foothold at the Al-Aqsa Mosque, are creating an incendiary situation in the occupied territories.

Visibly frustrated by Israel’s utter disregard for Palestinian objections to Israeli encroachment on Muslim holy places in Hebron, Bethlehem and East Jerusalem, Palestinian Authority (PA) officials have been appealing to the international community, especially Israel’s guardian-ally, the United States, to rein in the Israeli government.
“These provocations are killing the last hopes for peace. Israel is turning the occupied Palestinian territories into a powder keg. If these provocations continue, there can be no peace process, and the international community will have to bear the consequences,” said the erstwhile chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat.
Arguing that Israel is provoking the religious sensibilities of Palestinians, Erekat urged the Obama administration to stop Israel “before it is too late”.

Similarly, Ismail Haniyeh, the prime minister of the Gaza-based Hamas-run government in the Gaza Strip has called for a new Intifada, or uprising, against Israeli provocations.
Haniyeh said it was unacceptable that Israel could seize Islamic holy places in the West Bank while the Palestinians watched passively.
In recent days, Israel took a series of provocative measures Palestinians insist would alter the status quo in occupied Palestine, including adding two important Islamic sites to an alleged Jewish heritage list.
The two sites are the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron and the Bilal Ibn Rabah mosque in Bethlehem. Palestinian leaders, along with Arab and Muslim states, argue forcefully that the Israeli decisions nullify any serious talk of a peace process.

This view has been further enforced by the storming of the Al-Aqsa Mosque compound by Israeli occupation police forces on Sunday 28 February.
Palestinians said that the police attacked Muslim worshipers in order to provide protection for Talmudic Jewish fanatics seeking to gain “prayer rights” at one of Islam’s holiest shrines. Israeli spokespersons said the police had to intervene in order to protect “visitors” from stone-hurling Muslims.

As many as 200 crack policemen and para-military soldiers stormed the Al-Aqsa compound to evict dozens of Muslims who had barricaded themselves inside the Mosque, ostensibly to protect the site and repulse Jewish fanatics who were celebrating a Jewish holiday called “Purim”.
Showing no discretion and failing to take the sacredness of the place into consideration, Israeli forces shot tear-gas canisters throughout the Haram Al-Sharif esplanade (Noble Sanctuary), causing several injuries, mainly as a result of tear- gas inhalation.
Earlier, the Israeli occupation police sealed all gates leading to the Haram Al-Sharif, apparently in order to prevent Jerusalemites from converging on the holy place, as has happened on previous similar occasions.
The storming of the Al-Aqsa Mosque drew verbal reactions from Arab and Muslim capitals, that warned Israel that it was creating a tinder box.

Eventually, the Jordanian government seemed to have convinced the Israeli government to withdraw police forces from the Haram Al-Sharif and restore normality at the holy place.
Nonetheless, it is highly likely that tensions will continue to increase, especially in East Jerusalem, mainly due to further Israeli provocations, including plans to demolish dozens of Arab homes in the occupied city.
According to the Israeli media, the Jewish mayor of Jerusalem, Nir Barkat, has taken a final decision to demolish dozens of Arab homes, especially in the Silwan neighbourhood, in order to create flats for Jewish settlers.

The Silwan neighbourhood, labelled by Israeli sources “the second most incendiary place after the Al-Aqsa Mosque,” would witness the expulsion from their homes of hundreds of Palestinian families. Khalil Tufakji, an East Jerusalem geographer and cartographer, described the plan as “demographic ethnic cleansing”.
“They [the Israelis] want to obliterate the Arab identity of the city. They claim they want to develop the city, but in truth what they want is to destroy the Arab presence here. This is an ongoing demographic genocide.”

“The declared goal is not development. The real goal is depopulation of Arabs,” Tufakji said.
Israel has been planning to destroy hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Arab homes in Jerusalem that the occupation authority claims were built without a valid construction licence.
However, Palestinians and human-rights activists operating in the occupied territories argue that the licence issue is only an excuse since successive Israeli governments have routinely and systematically refused to grant non-Jews building licences, forcing frustrated Palestinians, languishing under a severe housing crises, to build unlicensed homes.
Arab sources in occupied Jerusalem have warned that the implementation of the Barkat plan would trigger a real Intifada in Jerusalem and the rest of the occupied territories.

“Of course, there will be violent reactions. What would you do if someone destroyed your home in order to build a flat for someone else? That would be an act of rape, and rape must be resisted,” said Jamal Moussa, a resident of the Silwan neighbourhood, the main focus of the Israeli plan.
Political and religious leaders of the estimated 350,000 Jerusalemite Palestinian citizens have reacted similarly, warning Israel that carrying out “this spate of ethnic cleansing would make the powder keg go off”.
Last week, Palestinian youths hurled stones at Israeli occupation soldiers in the southern West Bank town of Al-Khalil (Hebron). The soldiers fired rubber- coated bullets, stun grenades and shot tear-gas canisters.

Some eyewitnesses described the violence, which lasted for five days, as “a possible preview of things to come,” especially if the “present trend continues”.
Facing a difficult situation, stemming mainly from the refusal of the Obama administration to put pressure on Israel, PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad decided to hold his weekly cabinet session in Hebron this week.

The meeting was meant to highlight Palestinian rejection of the latest Israeli decisions to take over Islamic holy places in Hebron and Bethlehem.
Fayyad and other PA officials have pointed out that they don’t want to see violence return to the streets of the West Bank.
However, it is abundantly clear that the possible return of violence to the streets of the West Bank depends more on what Israel does than on what the PA says.

Report: Hamas admits losing control in Gaza: Haaretz

Gaza in anarchy as extremist groups challenge Hamas regime, military chief tells Damascus leader.
In a letter to Hamas political chief Khaled Meshal, the group’s senior military commander has admitted losing control in Gaza, the Arabic-language newspaper As-Sharq Al-Awsat reported on Saturday.
According to the London-based newspaper, quoted by Army Radio, Ahmed Jabri sent an urgent dispatch to the Damascus-based Meshal, warning him that the security situation in Gaza is “deteriorating”.

“Recently a series of explosions has raised fears in Gaza,” Jabri wrote. Gaza had descended into “anarchy”, he said.
In the letter, Jabri reportedly admitted to a string of errors in governing the strip, where Islamist Hamas seized control in a bloody confrontation with its rival secular movement, Fatah, in the summer of 2007.
Hamas is convinced that extremist ‘jihadi’ Islamist movements are behind the bombings, which could mark the start of a push to oust the de facto government, the newspaper said.

Other Palestinian sources told As-Sharq Al-Awsat the attacks were the result of internal strife within Hamas, however.
On Thursday, Haaretz correspondents Amos Harel and Avi Issacharroff wrote in their MESS Report blog that extremist groups pose a growing threat to Hamas rule in Gaza.
They wrote: “Israel, which until now has viewed Hamas as its biggest enemy in Gaza, needs to take into account that within a couple of years Hamas will be the moderate force in Gaza protecting the calm while a monstrous and more dangerous threat is growing in the form of the ultra-radical groups.”

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EDITOR: Judge, Jury, Executioner and Public Relations firm

That the US will decide and punish those responsible for the breakup/nonexistence of those talks, useless even before the handshakes begun, is not just bizarre, but also malicious. This is done to force the PNA into another round of totally meaningless ‘negotiations’ just at the time that Netanyahu is acting with ever more impunity to make a solution even less than impossible.

Exclusive: U.S. vows to assign blame if Israel-PA talks fail: Haaretz

The United States government has committed to playing a role in indirect talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, and promised that if the talks were to fail, the U.S. will assign blame and take action, according to a document sent by the U.S. to the Palestinian Authority, which Haaretz obtained on Friday.
The U.S. government sent the document to the Palestinians responding to their inquires regarding the U.S. initiative to launch indirect talks between Israel and the Palestinians.

“We expect both parties to act seriously and in good faith. If one side, in our judgment, is not living up to our expectations, we will make our concerns clear and we will act accordingly to overcome that obstacle,” it was written.
This commitment by the U.S. was a determining factor in the Palestinians’ and the Arab League’s decision to agree to the U.S. proposal on indirect talks.

The document also reveals that U.S. involvement will include “sharing messages between the parties and offering our own ideas and bridging proposals.”
The U.S. also emphasized that their main concern is establishing a Palestinian state.

“Our core remains a viable, independent and sovereign Palestinian State with contiguous territory that ends the occupation that began in 1967,” the document read.
Regarding the settlements, the U.S. noted its continued commitment to the road map, which dictates that Israel must freeze all construction in the settlements, and dismantle all outposts erected since March 2001.

“Palestinian leaders gave the U.S. response a warm welcome”
A prominent Palestinian official told Haaretz that the Palestinian leadership welcomed the U.S. response, and the only reason PA President Mahmoud Abbas delayed responding to the U.S. initially was so he could receive support from the Arab League.
The Palestinians are especially satisfied from the U.S. commitment to put the blame on the side responsible if the talks fail.

Israeli apartheid week: Al Jazeera

A controversial campaign in the Western world links Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to the treatment of blacks in apartheid South Africa.
It is called Israeli apartheid week.
University campuses in more than 40 cities around the world are marking the week with lectures, films, multimedia events, cultural performances and demonstrations.
Since it was first launched in 2005, the week has become one of the most important global events in the Palestine solidarity calendar, according to its organisers.
The organisation says its goals are ending the Israeli occupation of Arab lands, and the recognition of Palestinians’ right to return to their homes in Israel.

They also want Arab citizens of Israel to be treated equally and the separation wall to be torn down.

Several Israeli officials have criticised it and condemned the participation of senior Israeli academics and artists.
Is criticism of specific Israeli policies raising doubts about Israel’s right to exist? And is Israel now on the PR offensive to fight back?
Inside Story presenter Imran Garda is joined by Gidi Grinstein, the president and founder of the Reut Institute, Hazem Jamjoum, one of the organisers of the Israel Apartheid Week, and Eyal Sivan, a filmmaker and research professor in media production at the University of East London (UEL).

This episode of Inside Story aired from Wednesday, March 3, 2010.

Israel’s Supreme Court slams police over Sheikh Jarrah protests: IOA

Sheikh Jarrah, Jerusalem demonstration (Activestills.org)
By Nir Hasson, Haaretz – 4 March 2010
Supreme Court justices harshly criticized Jerusalem police on Thursday over their handling of the protests in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in East Jerusalem.
This criticism was issued by the justices during a court hearing on a petition filed by residents of Sheikh Jarrah, who demanded to be allowed to protest on this coming Saturday night, a demonstration the police hasn’t authorized.
The justices sided with the residents and stressed that the police should not seize the residents’ right to protest.
“The police’s behavior regarding these protests takes us 30 years backwards,” the justices said.
Protesters demand the right to demonstrate in Sheikh Jarrah near the contested houses inhabited by settlers which once belonged to Palestinians.
Last December, police arrested 25 left-wing activists during a protest which turned into a violent confrontation with security forces. Some 300 activists took part in the demonstration.

UN official to Haaretz: Israel ‘nourishing despair’ in Gaza: Haaretz

By Akiva Eldar
The combination of diplomatic caution and British understatement threatened to turn my interview with John Holmes, UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, into a trap of boredom. However, perhaps due to his approaching retirement, Holmes came out with several incisive, even scathing remarks.
This summer, after three and a half years in office, Holmes will return to Britain to head an important research institute. He no longer has to fear the sharp tongue of Israeli officials, who see any criticism of Israel as a synonym for anti-Semitism.
This morning, after visiting the Gaza Strip and West Bank and meeting officials on both sides, including Hamas “technocrats”, Holmes is going home dejected. As the official in charge of the UN’s rescue mission in disaster areas such as Haiti, he knows what depression is.

In a previous interview with you more than a year ago, you suggested that Israel shake off the delusion that pressure on the Gaza Strip would lead to Hamas’ downfall. In your visit to Gaza this week, did you have the impression that the blockade was weakening Hamas?
I don’t think my voice alone would have changed Israeli policy. It is hard to be sure what exactly the objective of this policy is. Of the blockade, the siege, the collective punishment. It is hard to see that it has been achieved, because Hamas is still there, firmly in control. Meanwhile, the condition of the people there [in Gaza] remains grim.

How grim?

It depends on how you look at it. People are not starving in Gaza. There are plenty of goods available, some coming in through legitimate crossing points but mainly through the tunnels. While it relieves the pressure in a sense, it isn’t good at all, because all it really does is encourage a smuggler-gangster economy, which incidentally benefits Hamas financially.

The smuggler-gangster economy is undermining some of the best legitimate forces in Gaza’s civil society, which do exist, whatever people might think. It is therefore not in anyone’s interest, certainly not in Israel’s. So I think this policy continues to be ineffective and indeed counterproductive.
What the policy of the blockade is doing is not encouraging the forces you want to encourage. Gaza is not a nest of terrorists. For the most part there are people who just want to live ordinary lives, and they are being undermined by what’s happening. So you are in danger of creating a generation of people who are nourished on despair.

Do you agree with Israel’s claim that there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza?

Even though there are plenty of goods available in Gaza, and that people should be able to get them, the problem is of course that most people have no money. Eighty percent of the people in Gaza are essentially dependent on outside food aid, either from UNWRA or the World Food Program. Not because there isn’t food in the shops – there is – but they can’t afford it, or they can’t afford enough of it because any livelihoods that there were, any jobs that there were outside the government have effectively disappeared. Most private businesses have been destroyed, essentially by the blockade – bulldozed – and the rest finished off by Cast Lead.

Other than the people that work for Hamas, or are paid by the PA, there is no income, so people are forced to live on handouts.
What do you think will happen after Egypt completes its wall and closes the tunnels? How do you see Gaza’s future?
If Egypt did complete the wall and effectively block all the tunnels, the amount of goods going in across the crossing points – if it remained at the current level – would be completely unsustainable.

The trouble is that most of the avenues that could lead to change are blocked.
If Gilad Shalit was released, although the link between his fate and the fate of 1.5 million people is not a reasonable one, that might at least lead to some improvement. It is unclear how great that improvement would be, but let’s hope so. But that negotiation seems to have run into a dead end, and negotiations between Hamas and Fatah seem to be stuck, so it is hard to see how it can get any better.

I assume you’ve warned the Israeli authorities of the political implications. What response do you get from them?
The answer is A., Gilad Shalit, and B., we don’t want to do anything that would benefit Hamas, or from which they would get credit, and C., we’re not aiming to hurt ordinary Gazans. But they are being hurt.
Israel has certain responsibilities as to the siege in Gaza. Israel, as we see it, continues to be the occupying power. And it is not fulfilling those responsibilities as we believe it should.

The basic medical position [in Gaza] is not unreasonable, but there is a wider point which is not just about Gaza, but about the West Bank and East Jerusalem, where barriers, checkpoints and restricted movement means that access for many people to basic medical services is getting more and more difficult. The staff of hospitals in East Jerusalem can’t get to work, and the patients can’t get there either.

This is only one illustration of a much bigger problem of how restrictions of movement and difficulties of access to basic services is being cut off, and people can’t do the things they used to be able to do.

Your division is responsible for many distressed areas worldwide. Why do you devote so much energy to this small place?

It is a small geographical area but also a very focused problem with very significant humanitarian problems – people facing eviction after living in one place for 60 years, because of settler pressure; the Bedouins in Area C increasingly being squeezed from all directions and finding it very difficult to survive.

But there are many more long-running problems, and every time I come back I don’t find that things have improved. By and large the facts on the ground continue to go against the kind of settlement that everyone wants to see, which is the two-state solution.

What’s your advice?

I feel depressed when I listen to and see what is going on, because I don’t think it’s going in the right direction. There is a need on the part of everybody to fully recognize that, but also to look to the long term. Where is this really going to finish off in the longer term, rather than thinking how I can manage the situation for the next six months.

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EDITOR: To understand what is in store for Palestinians, read below. This monster is the creature created by ALL Israeli governments, without exception.

Sheikh Jarrah Jews praise Baruch Goldstein on Purim: Ynet

(Video) Residents of east Jerusalem neighborhood celebrate holiday with songs of praise for Cave of Patriarchs massacre. Left-wing activists plan protest. To see the video use link above.

VIDEO – A video obtained by Ynet depicts Jewish residents of east Jerusalem’s Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood during their Purim celebrations singing songs of praise for Baruch Goldstein, a Jewish terrorist who murdered 29 Palestinians 16 years ago at the Cave of the Patriarchs.

Tensions in east Jerusalem have peaked recently over the building plans in Silwan.

The recent documented Purim festivities were reminiscent of scenes from Hebron. The residents adopted well-known childhood songs in order to praise the massacre at the Cave of the Patriarchs carried out by Goldstein.
The video was filmed this past Monday, and shows residents singing and dancing next to their Arab neighbors: “Dr. Goldstein, there is none other like you in the world. Dr. Goldstein, we all love you… he aimed at terrorists’ heads, squeezed the trigger hard, and shot bullets, and shot, and shot.”
One of the leaders of the leftist campaign in the neighborhood, Assaf Sharon, described to Ynet: “The settlers are allowed to hold political activities and aggravating and offensive as could possibly be, and the neighborhood’s original residents, who are still a majority there, are not allowed to do a thing. We saw them enter a house, have a party, and play very loud music.”

Ynet asked the Jewish residents themselves for a response to the songs of praise for Goldstein, but they preferred not to respond.
Left-wing activists plan on holding a demonstration this upcoming Saturday night in protest of the events. “Such an event, which takes place under the watchful eye of the police, needs to make every citizen of Israel lose sleep. Such displays of violence on the part of the settlers are becoming more abundant.
“Therefore, it is important that people come and demand from the government and the Jerusalem municipality to stop the settlement enterprise in the east of the city, which is destroying the delicate fabric of life and is thwarting all possibility for a future peace accord,” said Sharon.

EDITOR: It takes one to know one…

While it is difficult to argue with the statement about Israel, for a Saudi politician to say this carries its humourous weight!

Saudi FM: Israel a religiously oriented culture: Ynet

Prince Saud al-Faisal tells New York Times about enlightened ‘liberal’ trends in his country, compared to ‘extreme’ conservative religious movement in Jewish state

WASHINGTON – Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal, whose country is considered one of the most conservative Muslim states, believes his Saudi Arabia is “moving in the direction of a liberal society, while Israel is moving into a more religiously oriented culture.”

Faisal told the New York Times that while Saudi Arabia was moving forward, “what is happening in Israel is the opposite.”
Nationwide crackdown launched on stores selling items that are red or in any other way allude to banned celebrations of Western holiday
The interview was conducted by columnist Muareen Dowd, who arrived in Saudi Arabia for a 10-day visit to examine the improvement in the woman’s status.

Dowd noted in her column that Saudi Arabia was an absolute Muslim monarchy ruling over one of the most religiously and socially intolerant places on earth, and that the country Faisail deemed too “religiously determined” and regressive was the democracy of Israel.
“We are breaking away from the shackles of the past,” the prince said. “We are moving in the direction of a liberal society. What is happening in Israel is the opposite; you are moving into a more religiously oriented culture and into a more religiously determined politics and to a very extreme sense of nationhood,” which was coming “to a boiling point.”

Faisal linked the alleged religious radicalization in Israel with the difficulty to strike a peace agreement with the Palestinians and Arab countries, saying that “the religious institutions in Israel are stymieing every effort at peace.”
Asked about the situation of women in his country and extreme statements made by Muslim clerics, the prince said, “I think the trend for reform is set, and there is no looking back. Clerics who every now and then come with statements in the opposite direction are releasing frustration rather than believing that they can stop the trend and turn back the clock.”

EDITOR: The Show must go on!

For the 359th time (I didn’t really count…) the ‘peace negotiations’ are to start. This is good news for the media, politicians, and T Shirt manufacturers. For the rest of us, especially for the Palestinians, this is really bad news; Israel always used ‘peace talk’ to further its settlements at high speed. Not a single US President could resist the Photo Call round, but there again, Obama already has his Nobel Peace Prize, so what does he care?

Mideast peace talks could begin as early as Sunday: Haaretz

Indirect talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority may begin as early as Sunday, Haaretz had learned. U.S. Middle East envoy George Mitchell will land in Israel on Saturday night, and the American administration is hoping the sides will declare the beginning of indirect talks the following morning, ahead of the arrival of U.S. Vice President Joe Biden on Monday.
The foreign ministers of the Arab League announced in Cairo Wednesday they were supporting the American initiative for indirect negotiations, qualifying their support with a four-month deadline. They said no progress will be possible without a complete settlement freeze.

The announcement came after heavy American, Egyptian, Jordanian and Saudi pressure was put on the Palestinians and on other members of the League. The pressure also resulted in the Palestinians’ withdrawing a much tougher and reserved statement about the negotiations than the one eventually released. The Arab League decision was not unanimous and was strongly contested by Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Moallem, who went as far as to interrupt when Amr Moussa, the secretary general of the Arab League, was reading out the statement, to say the decision on entering negotiations rested ultimately with the PA.

The foreign ministers set a four-month deadline for the first phase of indirect negotiations after which the Arab League will assess the progress of the talks and decide whether to offer further support.
The foreign ministers said their decision was a last effort to promote peace through negotiations and was meant to allow the American administration an opportunity to facilitate the process. “Despite the lack of conviction in the seriousness of the Israeli side, the committee sees that it would give the indirect talks the chance as a last attempt and to facilitate the U.S. role,” the statement read.

Moussa stressed that even indirect negotiations are doomed to failure if Israeli measures such as settlement construction continue. He warned that if indirect talks fail to yield results, the Arabs will call for an emergency United Nations Security Council meeting to address the Arab-Israeli conflict and would ask Washington not to use its veto.
The Americans proposed the indirect talks as a way to allow the process to move forward without PA President Mahmoud Abbas’ losing face by being seen as giving up on his demand for a complete settlement freeze. Abbas had also sought the Arab League’s support to preempt Palestinian criticism of the move.

Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh said Wednesday in Gaza that he calls on the Arab League to review its decision.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu commented Wednesday in a Knesset speech that “it seems the conditions for proximity talks are ripening.” He said: “All said and done, the world understands that this government is striving for negotiations. It has made some difficult steps to further these negotiations. It said things and did things,” he said.

The prime minister also slammed the Palestinians for refusing “without justification and no reason whatsoever to reenter negotiations.”
Netanyahu said: “I’ve said before that although you normally need two to tango, in this case you might need three. These negotiations may require some going back and forth, but Israel is not and never was an obstacle to negotiations.”
American Vice President Joe Biden is expected to arrive here on Monday, and the American administration is keen to have the announcement of indirect negotiations before he lands, so he can congratulate the sides and present the talks as an American achievement.

Special envoy Mitchell will mediate the talks, which will be the first formal negotiations after a 15-month hiatus, since before Netanyahu took office. These will also be the first Israeli-Palestinian negotiations to take place under the Obama administration.
Negotiations have been at a standstill as Abbas refused to enter talks so long as any construction takes place in any settlement, including East Jerusalem.
At this stage, negotiations will focus on border issues, with the hope that if these can be resolved, the issue of settlement construction will be next on the agenda, followed by the core issues of the status of Jerusalem and the Palestinian refugees.

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