Commentary/Op-eds for Mon 27th Nov, 2006

Today’s Commentary, Op-Ed and miscellaneous itmes from Occupation Info. For today’s news headlines, please see this post…

	Interview: MK Dov Khenin: “We must talk to everyone”
	(27-11-06) – Gideon Alon, Haaretz. “I pin direct responsibility on the government of Israel. It should have returned the Gaza Strip under an agreement. When [former prime minister Ariel] Sharon raised the idea of a unilateral withdrawal, I was opposed, because in carrying out that move they made the Gaza Strip into a gigantic prison destined for catastrophe. Instead of a unilateral move we could have reached an agreement with Abu Mazen, but the government of Israel preferred to ignore him.”.
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	Comment: Meshal, en route to victory
	(27-11-06) – Danny Rubinstein, Haaretz. If Meshal brings about the release of 1,400 prisoners in return for Shalit, and the establishment of a government that does not explicitly recognize Israel, this will be a clear message that Abu Mazen and the veteran Fatah and PLO activists have been selling Palestinian interests far too cheaply: They have recognized Israel without any serious quid pro quo, and because of their groveling policies, tens of thousands of Palestinians are today languishing in Israeli jails without any chance of being released.
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	Comment: Genocide or erasure of Palestinians – Does it matter what you call it?
	(27-11-06) – Kathleen and Bill Christison, CounterPunch. During an appearance in late October on Ireland’s Pat Kenny radio show [Ed. Mp3], a popular national program broadcast daily on Ireland’s RTE Radio, we were asked as the opening question if Israel could be compared to Nazi Germany. Not across the board, we said, but there are certainly some aspects of Israel’s policy toward the Palestinians that bear a clear resemblance to the Nazis’ oppression. Do you mean the wall, Kenny prompted, and we agreed, describing the ghettoization and other effects of this monstrosity. Before we could elaborate on other Nazi-like features of Israel’s policies, Kenny moved on to another question. Within minutes, while we were still on the air, a producer handed Kenny a note, which we later learned was a request from the newly arrived Israeli ambassador to Ireland to appear on the show, by himself. Several days later, on the air by himself, the ambassador pronounced us and our comparisons of Israeli and Nazi policies “outrageous”.
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	Comment: Women in the Israeli Army – New films on the social consequences of military occupation
	(27-11-06) – Christiane Passevant and Larry Portis, CounterPunch. The refusnik movement is one of the few encouraging developments in the Israel-Palestine conflict. Given the overwhelming support of Western governments to a Jewish fundamentalist state, and especially the billions of dollars in annual financial aid given by the United States government and used in the Zionist project for the ethnic cleansing of occupied Palestine, the growing refusal of Israelis to participate in this monstrosity needs to be better known. Yes, there are anti-Zionist Israelis, those who understand that only by adapting to their Middle-East environment can the conditions for future peace and harmony with Arabs be established.
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	Comment: Honor the agreement you signed
	(27-11-06) – Daoud Kuttab, AMIN. A little over a year ago, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Quartet envoy James Wolfensohn, Israeli defense minister Shaul Mofaz, the PA’s Muhammad Dahlan and the EU reached an agreement to allow Palestinians free movement in and out of the Gaza Strip. The Agreement on Movement and Access (AMA) signed on November 15, 2005 promised Palestinians freedom of movement of people and goods. A detailed fact sheet published by the Palestinian Monitoring Group shows that since last year, none of the agreement’s provisions have been fully implemented by Israel.
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	Comment: Zionism – Pitting the West against Islam
	(27-11-06) – M. Shahid Alam, Palestine Chronicle. Zionist historiography describes the emergence of Israel as a triumph over Europe’s centuries-old anti-Semitism…It is tempting to celebrate the creation of Israel as a great triumph, perhaps the greatest in Jewish history. Indeed, the history of Israel has often been read as the heroic saga of a people marked for extinction, who emerged from Nazi death camps – from Auschwitz, Belzec and Treblinka – to establish their own state in 1948, a Jewish haven and a democracy that has prospered even as it has defended itself valiantly against unceasing Arab threats and aggression. Without taking away anything from the sufferings of European Jews, I will insist that this way of thinking about Israel – apart from its mythologizing – has merit only as a partisan narrative.
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	Comment: Aftermath of the Beit Hanoun siege and massacre
	(27-11-06) – Dr. Bill Dienst, LiveFromPalestine. The besieged residents of Beit Hanoun suffered widespread collective punishment, such as a cut off of electricity and water. House to house searches were conducted, and males over the age of 16 years were summarily rounded up, imprisoned and interrogated. Many families were forced to huddle into rooms away from windows because Israeli snipers were on the rooftops killing people.
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	Comment: Been there, done that
	(27-11-06) – Joharah Baker, MIFTAH. This is deja-vu for many Palestinians. The most recent truce, declared by President Mahmoud Abbas on November 25 seems to be reflecting a time and place we have visited before and several times over. While everyone involved – the government, factions and people – are expressing their guarded optimism over whether this time, the fragile truce will finally stick, past experiences are the best indicators of future events, especially when the major points of contention are still firmly in place.
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	Comment: The ‘niggerization’ of Palestine
	(27-11-06) – Jonathan Scott, Black Agenda Report. There is a startling abundance of empirical evidence documenting Israel’s “niggerization” of the Palestinians, from the various studies conducted by international human rights organizations to local Palestinian and Israeli monitoring groups, who document meticulously everything from daily torture in Israeli prisons, water theft and house demolitions, to racial profiling, harassment and physical assault at military checkpoints, collective punishment and the systematic use of “administrative detention” (imprisoning a person without charge or evidence) as a means of incarcerating a whole generation of rebellious Palestinian youth, in other words, those who have rejected the “niggerization” process.
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	Comment: After a breakthrough in Gaza, sanity has a better chance of prevailing
	(27-11-06) – Editorial, Daily Star. Sunday’s implementation of a fragile cease-fire between Israel and most Palestinian factions in the Gaza Strip demonstrates how quickly progress can be achieved when actors on both sides refuse to be held hostage by those who insist on using violence. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert broke no new intellectual ground when he acknowledged that his military strategy has failed utterly to prevent Palestinian rocket attacks from Gaza, but the realization nonetheless constitutes a breakthrough of sorts.
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	Comment: A tale of two Ayalons
	(27-11-06) – Patrick Seale, Gulf News. Two men called Ayalon have achieved considerable prominence in Israel. I do not know whether they are brothers, cousins or more distant relatives but, at any rate, although they have the same name, their views differ widely. One is a hardliner, the other a peacenik, which is a reminder that Israeli opinion is far from monolithic. This, in itself, is reason to hope that some form of Arab-Israeli understanding may one day be reached.
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	Comment: Gemayel assassination: Syria and Israel both have motives
	(27-11-06) – Tarif Abboushi, Houston Chronicle. Like the Syrian Moukhabarat, Israel’s secret intelligence agency, the Mossad (whose motto is “By way of deception thou shalt do war”), has a track record that evidences means in Lebanon. As far back as the early 1970s an Israeli reporter, Raphael Rothstein, revealed that the assassination in Beirut of Ghassan Kanafani, the editor of the weekly newspaper of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, had been carried out under Operation God’s Wrath, a Mossad campaign targeting Palestinian resistance leaders. More recently, the 2002 assassination of Elie Hobeika, a Lebanese militia leader killed a day after agreeing to testify in a war crimes case brought in Belgium against then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, left many in Lebanon accusing the Mossad of the crime.
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	Comment: Israeli settlers, or squatters?
	(27-11-06) – Gershom Gorenberg, LA Times. The revelation that much of the West Bank land for settlements is owned by Palestinians damages Israel’s self-image as a country of laws… The irony is this: The bulldozers used to build settlements have extended Israel’s de facto control of territory. Yet, at the same time, they have weakened Israel as a state built on the rule of law — the kind of state that its truest patriots have sought to create. The Peace Now report is certain to sharpen, not end, the arguments about who owns which specific pieces of real estate. But the overall lesson of history remains clear: Difficult as dismantling the settlement enterprise will be, it is essential not only for a diplomatic solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is needed to restore Israel to itself.
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	Comment: An evening in Jounieh
	(27-11-06) – Uri Avnery, Gush Shalom. During the first Lebanon war, I visited Jounieh, a town some 20 km north of Beirut. At the time, it served as a port for the Christian forces. It was an exciting evening. In spite of the war raging in nearby Beirut, Jounieh was full of life. The Christian elite spent the day in the sun-drenched marina, the women lounging in bikinis, the men slugging whisky. The three of us (myself and two young women from my editorial staff – a correspondent and a photographer) were the only Israelis in town, and so we were feted. Everybody invited us onto their yachts, and one rich couple insisted that we come to their home as guests of a family celebration.
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	Comment: The problem with Israel
	(27-11-06) – Jeff Halper, ICAHD. Let’s be honest (for once): The problem in the Middle East is not the Palestinian people, not Hamas, not the Arabs, not Hezbollah or the Iranians or the entire Muslim world. It’s us, the Israelis. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the single greatest cause of instability, extremism and violence in our region, is perhaps the simplest conflict in the world to resolve. For almost 20 years, since the PLO’s recognition of Israel within the 1949 Armistice Lines (the “Green Line” separating Israel from the West Bank and Gaza), every Palestinian leader, backed by large majorities of the Palestinian population, has presented Israel with a most generous offer: A Jewish state on 78% of Israel/Palestine in return for a Palestinian state on just 22% – the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza. In fact, this is a proposition supported by a large majority of both the Palestinian and Israeli peoples.
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