CBS 60 Minutes! Time Running Out For A Two-State Solution?
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- Written by Peter Miller Peter Miller
- Published: 26 January 2009 26 January 2009
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Has peace in the Middle East become nothing more than a pipe dream? As Bob Simon reports, a growing number of Israelis and Palestinians feel that a two-state solution is no longer possible. [An INCREDIBLE and courageous piece of reporting from mainstream media]
http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=4752349n
Read more: CBS 60 Minutes! Time Running Out For A Two-State Solution?
Israeli PM in war crimes pledge: State protection from international prosecution
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- Written by BBC News BBC News
- Published: 25 January 2009 25 January 2009
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Any Israeli soldiers accused of war crimes in the Gaza Strip will be given state protection from prosecution overseas, the country's PM has said.
Ehud Olmert said troops should know Israel would keep them safe after they acted to protect their country.
Palestinians say 1,300 people died during the offensive, and UN officials want independent probes into whether war crimes were committed.
Meanwhile, a Hamas delegation is in Egypt for talks on cementing a truce.
Israel ended its military operation in Gaza on 18 January, and Hamas declared a ceasefire hours later.
No formal framework for a lasting ceasefire has yet been agreed.
While Israel says it requires Hamas to end weapons smuggling into Gaza and rocket attacks on Israel, Hamas has demanded that Israel lift its economic blockade of the territory.
Soldiers 'safe'
In Israel, Prime Minister Olmert told a weekly cabinet meeting that soldiers who had put their lives on the line for their country need not fear prosecution for war crimes overseas.
"The commanders and soldiers that were sent on the task in Gaza should know that they are safe from any tribunal and that the State of Israel will assist them in this issue and protect them as they protected us with their bodies during the military operation in Gaza," he said.
Israel's military tactics have come under intense scrutiny as evidence has emerged of the high numbers of Palestinian civilians killed in Gaza.
Among complaints made by human rights groups are accusations of indiscriminate firing and the use of white phosphorus shells in civilian areas.
Israel has admitted using white phosphorus in Gaza but says it did not break international law in doing so.
White phosphorus is legal for creating smokescreens in open battleground. But rights groups and journalists say it was used in crowded civilian areas.
The weapon sticks to human skin and will burn through to the bone.
Truce talks
In Cairo, delegates from Hamas met Egyptian intelligence officials on Sunday as they sought to bolster the week-long calm in Gaza.
Representatives from Fatah, the main rival Palestinian faction, were also due to attend the talks.
The talks came as Hamas said it was beginning a programme of cash handouts to Palestinians in Gaza whose homes were damaged by the three weeks of Israeli bombardments.
There was no word of the substance of discussions in Egypt with Omar Suleiman, the Egyptian intelligence chief who brokered a previous six-month truce between Israel and Hamas.
Mr Suleiman held talks with an Israeli envoy on Thursday.
In a statement, Egyptian state media said Hamas and Mr Suleiman discussed "Egyptian efforts to consolidate the ceasefire, reach a [permanent] truce, reopen Gaza crossings and resume Palestinian national dialogue".
Israel and Egypt closed their borders with Gaza when Hamas seized control of the territory in mid-2007.
Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/7850085.stm
Published: 2009/01/25 16:07:43 GMT
© BBC MMIX
At the heart of BBC row, the homeless of Gaza
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- Written by Peter Beaumont Peter Beaumont
- Published: 25 January 2009 25 January 2009
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At the heart of BBC row, the homeless of Gaza
Peter Beaumont returns to Jabal Rayas to talk to the children whose desperate struggle to survive in bombed-out shanty towns has led a leading charity to mount an emergency appeal - which BBC executives are refusing to screen
- The Observer, Sunday 25 January 2009
- Article history
Safaa Salam is scared and cold. Last night the 10-year-old girl slept in the ruins of her family house in the Jabal Rayas area of eastern Gaza. So did her four-year-old niece Ghavad. It is not so much a ruin as a cave, the top a tented slab of crumbling concrete, cracked and buckling in the middle.
Safaa's brother, Salman, aged 30 - Ghavad's father - jumps down from the roof that he is clearing, throwing the tail fin from an Israeli bomb. "I found four of these," he says.
"It was cold last night," says Safaa. "And I'm scared of the packs of dogs."
Salman agrees. "All of the women are frightened. They are worried the Israelis might come back. And they are scared of the dogs."
The dogs come to feed on the bodies of the family's sheep, lying stinking in the rubble, 20 feet from where the family sleeps. There is a toddler on a filthy mattress in the gloom. It is Salman's daughter. "She's sick. And she still can't sleep. But I don't know who to talk to about this."
I visit Jabal Rayas twice, walking among the craters, scrambling among the broken concrete into homes that - while ruined - are again in occupation. It is into such places that aid agencies wish to pour resources, raised in part by charitable appeals around the world like the one launched in Britain by the Disasters Emergency Committee that has been rejected for broadcast by the BBC.
On Friday evening, I come across the Khader family, who have set up a makeshift structure on the roof of their ruins. Mohammed Khader, father of eight girls, and his brother Zaid and his family, have found somewhere for the youngest to sleep. But they stay in the wreckage of their home. They pray and wash and cook in what is just a shanty with cloth walls. When the rain falls it hammers on the corrugated-iron roof.
Yesterday evening there were more families among the ruins, dotted among the flattened buildings, crushed by bombs and smashed by the Israeli bulldozers that carved up the sheep pastures as they built high berms. It is from here that rockets were fired into Israel. But it was a place where people also used to live and work and is now utterly destroyed.
Two women in one "cave", whose widest opening was three feet high, crawl out to hang up their washing. Other members of the Salam family bustle around the shelters they built in the churned-up earth, baking bread and tending their chickens, sitting by feeble fires.
They are here for two reasons. Yesterday the schools in which many had been sheltering re-opened. The UN says that people were offered money to find alternative accommodation or directed to new shelters. These families insist they had nowhere else to go and no one had spoken to them.
They are living in the open for another reason, too. These people are all farmers, afraid that, if they do not sit on their ruined lands, they will lose them.
When a small convoy from the UN does arrive in Al-Karim, the heart of the devastation, they cannot reach the Salam families' ruined houses. It is too close to the border with Israel - one kilometre distant. Their rules say they are not allowed to approach this far without permission, although they want to help.
Jabal Rayas is one of the worst places. But because the people could escape when the tanks came in, they did, and did not perish like those who were trapped in areas such as Zaitoun. But it is a sight familiar across the Gaza Strip. A disaster has occurred. And one that many - not least the children - have not chosen.
The Salams and those like them need aid. They do not care where it comes from: whether from Hamas, which has begun its own distributions from warehouses across the Gaza Strip, or from the international community and aid agencies. What those living in Jabal Rayas require desperately is shelter and medicine and food. They need help to rebuild their lives and restore their lands.
Last week in Jerusalem, as the news of the decision not to broadcast the DEC appeal first broke, a British aid worker confided her private and angry opinion. "It is just politics. That's all. We spoke to the BBC. They said they were getting rather bored with these appeals. Then, we were told the real reason. That the decision was political. They should be ashamed."
Last night, as she prepared to go to sleep, Safaa Salam was clutching her bedding in a plastic cover.
"Will you ask someone to help us?" said her brother as we left.
• If you want to donate online to the DEC's Gaza Crisis, visit dec.org.uk/item/200
On The Wrong Side
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- Written by Uri Avnery Uri Avnery
- Published: 24 January 2009 24 January 2009
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OF ALL the beautiful phrases in Barack Obama’s inauguration speech, these are the words that stuck in my mind: “You are on the wrong side of history.”
He was talking about the tyrannical regimes of the world. But we, too, should ponder these words
In the last few days I have heard a lot of declarations from Ehud Barak, Tzipi Livni, Binyamin Netanyahu and Ehud Olmert. And every time, these eight words came back to haunt me: “You are on the wrong side of history!”
Obama was speaking as a man of the 21st century. Our leaders speak the language of the 19th century. They resemble the dinosaurs which once terrorized their neighborhood and were quite unaware of the fact that their time had already passed.
DURING THE rousing celebrations, again and again the multicolored patchwork of the new president’s family was mentioned.
All the preceding 43 presidents were white Protestants, except John Kennedy, who was a white Catholic. 38 of them were the descendants of immigrants from the British isles. Of the other five, three were of Dutch ancestry (Theodor and Franklin D. Roosevelt , as well as Martin van Buren) and two of German descent (Herbert Hoover and Dwight Eisenhower.)
The face of Obama’s family is quite different. The extended family includes whites and the descendents of black slaves, Africans from Kenya, Indonesians, Chinese from Canada, Christians, Muslims and even one Jew (a converted African-American). The two first names of the president himself, Barack Hussein, are Arabic.
This is the face of the new American nation – a mixture of races, religions, countries of origin and skin-colors, an open and diverse society, all of whose members are supposed to be equal and to identify themselves with the ”founding fathers”. The American Barack Hussein Obama, whose father was born in a Kenyan village, can speak with pride of “George Washington, the father of our nation”, of the “American Revolution” (the war of independence against the British), and hold up the example of “our ancestors”, who include both the white pioneers and the black slaves who “endured the lash of the whip”. That is the perception of a modern nation, multi-cultural and multi-racial: a person joins it by acquiring citizenship, and from this moment on is the heir to all its history.
Israel is the product of the narrow nationalism of the 19th century, a nationalism that was closed and exclusive, based on race and ethnic origin, blood and earth. Israel is a “Jewish State”, and a Jew is a person born Jewish or converted according to Jewish religious law (Halakha). Like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, it is a state whose mental world is to a large extent conditioned by religion, race and ethnic origin.
When Ehud Barak speaks about the future, he speaks the language of past centuries, in terms of brute force and brutal threats, with armies providing the solution to all problems. That was also the language of George W. Bush who last week slinked out of Washington, a language that already sounds to the Western ear like an echo from the distant past.
The words of the new president are ringing in the air: “Our power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please.” The key words were “humility and restraint”.
Our leaders are now boasting about their part in the Gaza War, in which unbridled military force was unleashed intentionally against a civilian population, men, women and children, with the declared aim of “creating deterrence”. In the era that began last Tuesday, such expressions can only arouse shudders.
BETWEEN Israel and the United States a gap has opened this week, a narrow gap, almost invisible – but it may widen into an abyss.
The first signs are small. In his inaugural speech, Obama proclaimed that “We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus – and nonbelievers.” Since when? Since when do the Muslims precede the Jews? What has happened to the “Judeo-Christian Heritage”? (A completely false term to start with, since Judaism is much closer to Islam than to Christianity. For example: neither Judaism nor Islam supports the separation of religion and state.)
The very next morning, Obama phoned a number of Middle East leaders. He decided to make a quite unique gesture: placing the first call to Mahmoud Abbas, and only the next to Olmert. The Israeli media could not stomach that. Haaretz, for example, consciously falsified the record by writing - not once but twice in the same issue - that Obama had called “Olmert, Abbas, Mubarak and King Abdallah” (in that order).
Instead of the group of American Jews who had been in charge of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during both the Clinton and Bush administrations, Obama, on his very first day in office, appointed an Arab-American, George Mitchell, whose mother had come to America from Lebanon at age 18, and who himself, orphaned from his Irish father, was brought up in a Maronite Christian Lebanese family.
These are not good tidings for the Israeli leaders. For the last 42 years, they have pursued a policy of expansion, occupation and settlements in close cooperation with Washington. They have relied on unlimited American support, from the massive supply of money and arms to the use of the veto in the Security Council. This support was essential to their policy. This support may now be reaching its limits.
It will happen, of course, gradually. The pro-Israel lobby in Washington will continue to put the fear of God into Congress. A huge ship like the United States can change course only very slowly, in a gentle curve. But the turn-around started already on the first day of the Obama administration.
This could not have happened, if America itself had not changed. That is not a political change alone. It is a change in the world-view, in mental outlook, in values. A certain American myth, which is very similar to the Zionist myth, has been replaced by another American myth. Not by accident did Obama devote to this so large a part of his speech (in which, by the way, there was not a single word about the extermination of the Native Americans).
The Gaza War, during which tens of millions of Americans saw the horrible carnage in the Strip (even if rigorous self-censorship cut out all but a tiny part), has hastened the process of drifting apart. Israel, the brave little sister, the loyal ally in Bush’s “War on Terror”, has turned into the violent Israel, the mad monster, which has no compassion for women and children, the wounded and the sick. And when winds like these are blowing, the Lobby loses height.
The leaders of official Israel do not notice it. They do not feel, as Obama put it in another context, that “the ground has shifted beneath them”. They think that this is no more than a temporary political problem that can be set right with the help of the Lobby and the servile members of Congress.
Our leaders are still intoxicated with war and drunk with violence. They have re-phrased the famous saying of the Prussian general, Carl von Clausewitz into: “War is but a continuation of an election campaign by other means.” They compete with each other with vainglorious swagger for their share of the “credit”. Tzipi Livni, who cannot compete with the men for the crown of warlord, tries to outdo them in toughness, in bellicosity, in hard-heartedness.
The most brutal is Ehud Barak. Once I called him a “peace criminal”, because he brought about the failure of the 2000 Camp David conference and shattered the Israeli peace camp. Now I must call him a “war criminal”, as the person who planned the Gaza War knowing that it would murder masses of civilians.
In his own eyes, and in the eyes of a large section of the public, this is a military operation which deserves all praise. His advisors also thought that it would bring him success in the elections. The Labor party, which had been the largest party in the Knesset for decades, had shrunk in the polls to 12, even 9 seats out of 120. With the help of the Gaza atrocity it has now gone up to 16 or so. That’s not a landslide, and there’s no guarantee that it will not sink again.
What was Barak’s mistake? Very simply: every war helps the Right. War, by its very nature, arouses in the population the most primitive emotions – hate and fear, fear and hate. These are the emotions on which the Right has been riding for centuries. Even when it’s the ”Left” that starts a war, it’s still the Right that profits from it. In a state of war, the population prefers an honest-to-goodness Rightist to a phony Leftist.
This is happening to Barak for the second time. When, in 2000, he spread the mantra “I have turned every stone on the way to peace, / I have made the Palestinians unprecedented offers, / They have rejected everything, / There is no one to talk with” - he succeeded not only in blowing the Left to smithereens, but also in paving the way for the ascent of Ariel Sharon in the 2001 elections. Now he is paving the way for Binyamin Netanyahu (hoping, quite openly, to become his minister of defense).
And not only for him. The real victor of the war is a man who had no part in it at all: Avigdor Liberman. His party, which in any normal country would be called fascist, is steadily rising in the polls. Why? Liberman looks and sounds like an Israeli Mussolini, he is an unbridled Arab-hater, a man of the most brutal force. Compared to him, even Netanyahu looks like a softie. A large part of the young generation, nurtured on years of occupation, killing and destruction, after two atrocious wars, considers him a worthy leader.
WHILE THE US has made a giant jump to the left, Israel is about to jump even further to the right.
Anyone who saw the millions milling around Washington on inauguration day knows that Obama was not speaking only for himself. He was expressing the aspirations of his people, the Zeitgeist.
Between the mental world of Obama and the mental world of Liberman and Netanyahu there is no bridge. Between Obama and Barak and Livni, too, there yawns an abyss. Post-election Israel may find itself on a collision course with post-election America.
Where are the American Jews? The overwhelming majority of them voted for Obama. They will be between the hammer and the anvil – between their government and their natural adherence to Israel. It is reasonable to assume that this will exert pressure from below on the “leaders” of American Jewry, who have incidentally never been elected by anyone, and on organizations like AIPAC. The sturdy stick, on which Israeli leaders are used to lean in times of trouble, may prove to be a broken reed.
Europe, too, is not untouched by the new winds. True, at the end of the war we saw the leaders of Europe – Sarkozy, Merkel, Browne and Zapatero – sitting like schoolchildren behind a desk in class, respectfully listening to the most loathsome arrogant posturing from Ehud Olmert, reciting his text after him. They seemed to approve the atrocities of the war, speaking of the Qassams and forgetting about the occupation, the blockade and the settlements. Probably they will not hang this picture on their office walls.
But during this war masses of Europeans poured into the streets to demonstrate against the horrible events. The same masses saluted Obama on the day of his inauguration.
This is the new world. Perhaps our leaders are now dreaming of the slogan: “Stop the world, I want to get off!” But there is no other world.
YES, WE ARE NOW on the wrong side of history.
Fortunately, there is also another Israel. It is not in the limelight, and its voice is heard only by those who listen out for it. This is a sane, rational Israel, with its face to the future, to progress and peace. In these coming elections, its voice will barely be heard, because all the old parties are standing with their two feet squarely in the world of yesterday.
But what has happened in the United States will have a profound influence on what happens in Israel. The huge majority of Israelis know that we cannot exist without close ties with the US. Obama is now the leader of the world, and we live in this world. When he promises to work “aggressively” for peace between us and the Palestinians, that is a marching order for us.
We want to be on the right side of history. That will take months or years, but I am sure that we shall get there. The time to start is now.
Children of Gaza: stories of those who died and the trauma for those who survived
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- Written by Rory McCarthy Rory McCarthy
- Published: 23 January 2009 23 January 2009
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Rory McCarthy reports from Gaza City on the individual stories of some victims and the physical and psychological toll on an estimated 350,000 youngsters
Amira Qirm lay on a hospital bed today with her right leg in plaster, and held together by a line of steel pins dug deep into her skin. For several days after her operation Amira, 15, was unable to speak, and even now talks only in a low whisper.
In her past are bitter memories: watching her father die in the street outside their home, then hearing another shell land and kill her brother Ala'a, 14, and her sister Ismat, 16, and then the three days that she spent alone, injured and semi-conscious, trying to stay alive in a neighbour's abandoned house before she could be rescued last Sunday.
Ahead of her, she has a long recovery. First there is an imminent flight to France for the best possible medical treatment, many more operations and then months of rehabilitation and psychiatric care.
Only now, after most of the dead have been buried, is the first properly researched reckoning of the toll emerging. What already stands out is the striking cost borne by the children of Gaza, who make up more than half of the 1.5 million people living in this overcrowded strip of land.
The Palestinian death toll after three weeks of Israel's war was 1,285, according to the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, or 1,268, according to the al-Mezan Human Rights Centre. Among those dead were at least 280 children.
The impact will be felt by many more for years to come. Among the more than 4,000 people injured more than a quarter were children, some left with severe disabilities. The Gaza Community Health Programme estimates that half Gaza's children – around 350,000 – will develop some form of post-traumatic stress disorder.
Amira Qirm, who lived in Tel al-Hawa, the scene of some of the heaviest fighting in Gaza City, is among the few in line to receive medical treatment abroad.
Already she has a dream to fulfil once she returns to Gaza. "I want to be a lawyer," she said today , "and to stand in court facing the Israelis for what they have done."
Most of the other children will have to make do with treatment in Gaza. Last week some psychologists were walking through the ruins of a house in Atatra, talking to a boy from the Abu Halima family who had lost his father, three brothers and an infant sister in a horrific fire after an Israeli phosphorus shell hit the house.
"The problem is they are not feeling safe even in their own homes, on the streets, in the mosques," said Ehassan Afifi, the psychologist. "This boy is seeing what happened as if it is an endless movie. The physically affected can be operated on, sometimes cured. But these mental problems may lead to problems for the rest of their lives."
Israel has consistently rejected international criticism that its forces used excessive and indiscriminate firepower.
Asked about the criticisms, the prime minister, Ehud Olmert, said in an interview yesterday in the Israeli paper Ma'ariv that the mental health of the children of southern Israel had suffered in recent years. He added: "So now there is talk about Israel's cruelty. When you win, you automatically hurt more than you've been hurt. And we didn't want to lose this campaign. What did you want, for hundreds of our soldiers to die? That, after all, was the alternative."
On the Israeli side 13 died in this conflict, three of them civilians. In total in the past eight years, 20 people in Israel have died from rocket and mortar attacks launched by militants in Gaza.
Halting this rocket fire was Israel's primary goal and for the last few days, at least, it has achieved its aim.
But Eyad al-Sarraj, a prominent psychiatrist who leads the Gaza community health programme, said that years of violence in Gaza had only fostered radicalism among its young people, who have seen their fathers humiliated and now left defenceless.
His organisation is training 1,000 people to spread out across Gaza to offer help with grief and mourning and to pass serious cases on to professional therapists.
Already there were reports, he said, of children bed-wetting, stuttering, falling mute, having trouble sleeping, becoming violent or restless and losing their appetites.
The difference between this war and the uprisings, like the first intifada of the late 1980s, was that whereas there was once a frontline, with tanks near the border, now the bombing and artillery reached deep inside Gaza's urban areas and into the homes of ordinary families. "Yes, we have developed a coping strategy but we are still frightened of the Israelis doing this again and again," said al-Sarraj.
"The devastation is a reminder of what the Israelis will do. You need to give children a protective environment and give a chance to the fathers to regain their status as protectors and providers by giving them jobs and homes to live in … This is a massive, man-made disaster and we have to tackle the results."