Settlers attack Palestinian vehicles near Nablus
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- Written by Saed Bannoura - IMEMC & Agencies Saed Bannoura - IMEMC & Agencies
- Published: 31 July 2009 31 July 2009
- Hits: 2935 2935
Dozens of extremist Israeli settlers of the Shavot Ami illegal outpost, installed on Palestinian lands west of the southern West Bank of Nablus attacked dozens of Palestinian vehicles and hurled stones at them.
Local sources reported that several vehicles were damaged, but no injuries were reported.
Israeli soldiers and policemen were present in the area but did not attempt to stop the settlers.
Ghassan Douglas, in charge of the settlements file at the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, warned of the severity of these attacks, and added that Friday attack came parallel with a statement issued by settler leaders in the West Bank calling for more violence against the Palestinians and their properties.
Last week, the settlers carried repeated attacks against the residents and their homes especially in areas south west of Nablus.
Douglas called on human rights and legal groups to intervene and stop the attacks.
In July, the settlers carried dozens of attacks against the residents, and burnt olive orchards and vines.
Support Iranians, Not US Intervention
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- Written by Sean Penn/Ross Mirkarimi/Reese Erlich Sean Penn/Ross Mirkarimi/Reese Erlich
- Published: 29 July 2009 29 July 2009
- Hits: 3110 3110
Published
on Tuesday, July 21, 2009 by CommonDreams.org
During our travels to
That contradiction
continues today as
Many Iranians believe that
they have experienced a coup d'état, in which the military and intelligence
services have hijacked the presidential election. Through vote buying and
manipulation of the count, Ahmadinejad had guaranteed himself another four
years in office.
In June over a
million Iranians marched in the streets of major cities across the country. The
spontaneous demonstrations included well-to-do supporters of opposition
candidates, but also large numbers of workers, farmers, small business people
and the devoutly religious. They were fed up with 30 years of a system that
used Islam as an excuse for union labor strike breaking, lack of women's rights
and repression.
The Iranian government
responded to these peaceful protests with savagery, killing dozens of people.
Some human rights groups put the number at over 100. The government admits
arresting 2500 people nationwide and continues to hold at least 500. Most are
being held without charges or have simply disappeared.
The repression hasn't
killed the movement. On July 17, over 10,000 people came to Friday prayers in
support of the opposition. Instead of chanting "Death to
Meanwhile in
That doesn't exactly build
credibility among Iranians.
President Obama faces tough
choices on
In reality, the
The
That's why citizen
diplomacy is so important. Iranian demonstrators welcome the support of
ordinary Americans. Joan Baez recorded a Farsi language version of "We
Shall Overcome" that has shot around the world on You Tube.
Iranian activists are
holding a hunger strike in front of the UN in
We
urge you to participate in the July 25 demonstrations around the
Sean
Penn is an actor who wrote about
Article printed from www.CommonDreams.org
URL
to article: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/07/21-10
Militant Jewish settlers set up 11 outposts in the occupied West Bank
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- Written by Rachel Shabi in Tel Aviv Rachel Shabi in Tel Aviv
- Published: 28 July 2009 28 July 2009
- Hits: 3094 3094
[PHOTO: illegal israeli settlement in West Bank]
Givat Tzuria, West Bank: Israeli girls peer through a hole cut through a makeshift structure in an illegal settlement Photograph: David Furst/AFP/Getty Images
Israeli settler groups have set up 11 new outposts in the occupied West Bank, in a direct rebuttal of mounting US calls to freeze settlement activity.
Young Jewish groups are reported to have set up the structures – mostly tents and huts on hilltops – in the West Bank over Monday night, in a move timed as a precursor to the meeting between the US special envoy, George Mitchell, and Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu today. On Monday, hundreds of settlers set up an outpost near the Palestinian village of Tulkarem, reportedly without intervention from the Israeli army.
Settler groups said they were mimicking the fabled activities of 1946, when the area was ruled by British mandate and 11 Jewish outposts were defiantly erected in the Negev desert during one night.
The mostly young Israelis are associated with settler organisations such as Youth for Israel, a militant group set up in response to Israel's evacuation of settlements in the Gaza Strip in 2005.
According to the Jerusalem Post, settlers were canvassing support and distributing flyers over the weekend at existing settlements in the West Bank – which, like the outposts, are illegal under international law.
One flyer read: "The nations of the world do not want us here and we are responding by strengthening the connection to the land and by establishing new communities."
Haaretz newspaper reported that 40 teenage girls spent three days in an established West Bank outpost in "spiritual preparation" for the "relentless battle on the right to settle the Land of Israel".
One 16-year-old girl from Tel Aviv told the paper: "I don't know if I personally would live in an outpost but it contributes to the entire people of Israel that the land is being settled."
Today, the Israeli army chief of staff, Gabi Ashkenazi, said he had not received orders to prepare for the evacuation of outposts in the West Bank.
Netanyahu and Mitchell said they had made progress in their meeting in Jerusalem to discuss the settlements issue, but reported no firm development.
Obama! Yes, you can!
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- Written by Uri Avnery Uri Avnery
- Published: 28 July 2009 28 July 2009
- Hits: 3266 3266
A historic responsibility rests on the shoulders of Barack Obama: not to fold, not to give in, not to “compromise”. To insist on the total freeze of the settlements, as a first and necessary step towards peace. For his sake, and for ours too
{josquote}The battle is not about 20 outposts, nor about 20 apartments in the
grounds of the Shepherd hotel. Every house in every West Bank
settlement serves one supreme purpose: to destroy any possibility for
peace. Every Israeli house in East Jerusalem serves the same sublime
aim. The opponents of peace know that no Arab leader will ever sign a
peace agreement that does not designate East Jerusalem as the
Palestinian capital, and no Arab leader will ever sign a peace
agreement that does not assign all of the West Bank to the State of
Palestine.{/josquote}
BINYAMIN NETANYAHU’S AIM is to Judaise Jerusalem. This week he boasted that in his last term in office, ten years ago, he had set up the fortified Jewish neighbourhood of Har Homa.
To Har Homa — whose real name is Jebel Abu Ghneim, Mountain of the Father of Sheep — I have a sentimental attachment. I spent many days and nights in the struggle to prevent the creation of the monstrous housing project that looms there now.
The leader in this struggle was the unforgettable Feisal Husseini. I held him in high esteem. I don’t hesitate to say that I loved him. He was a nobleman in the real sense of the word: a scion of nobility but modest in his manners, generous and approachable, a man of peace but fearless in his confrontations with the occupation troops, a real Palestinian patriot, moderate in his opinions, wise and courageous. He was the son of Abd-al-Kader al-Husseini, the leader of the Arab fighters in the Jerusalem district in the 1948 war, who was killed in the battle for the “Castel” near the city. I had no part in that battle, but I passed by a few hours later in a relief convoy for the besieged Jewish part of Jerusalem. Like most of my comrades, I respected him as an honourable enemy.
The site of Har Homa, for those who have already forgotten, used to be a unique place of beauty between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, a rounded hill covered with a dense wood. The destroyers of Jerusalem — that brutal coalition of real estate sharks, fanatical Zionists, American millionaires and religious mystics — had decided to eliminate that last spot of beauty in order to build a dense, fortified and particularly ugly Jewish settlement.
Under the leadership of Feisal and Ta’amri, the former husband of a Jordanian princess, a tent camp was set up. When the bulldozers started to cut down the trees and level the top of the hill, we held dozens of demonstrations and vigils. In one of them I suffered a haemorrhage and would have ended my life there and then, if a Palestinian ambulance had not succeeded in reaching me in that road-less stone desert and got me to the hospital in time. So I have a sentimental attachment to the place.
The Shepherd hotel provocation is a part of the tireless effort to “Judaise” Jerusalem. In simple words: to carry out ethnic cleansing. This campaign has been going on for 42 years already, from the first day of the occupation of East Jerusalem, but the timing of this particular operation results from tactical considerations.
Netanyahu is facing heavy American pressure to freeze the settlements in the West Bank. He is quite unable to do so, as long as he remains at the head of the coalition he himself chose, which consists of Rightists, religious zealots, settlers and outright fascists. He has offered several “compromises”, all based on various fraudulent ploys, but the Americans have learnt the lessons of the past and did not fall into any of his traps.\
His Siamese twin, Ehud Barak, is busy leaking to the media “news” about a grandiose operation: at any moment, with one stroke, like Alexander and the Gordian knot, the dozens of settlement “outposts” that have been set up since 2001 with secret government support will be uprooted. But except for the media people themselves, hardly anyone believes that this will really happen. Certainly not the settlers, judging by their knowing smiles.
So what to do in order to avoid having to dismantle the outposts? Netanyahu, the King of Spin, has a solution: a new provocation to draw attention away from the last one. The Shepherd hotel is now diverting the world’s attention away from the hills of “Judea and Samaria”. When you have a toothache, you forget about your bellyache.
What, he says, the Goyim want to stop us building in Jerusalem, our Holy City?! Our eternal capital, which has been reunited for all eternity?! What Chutzpah! Will they prohibit Jews from building in New York?! Will they forbid Englishmen to build in London?!
Netanyahu really hit his stride when he declared that any Arab can live in West Jerusalem, so why should a Jew not build a home in East Jerusalem?
Clear and to the point — and absolutely false. When Netanyahu says things like that, it is hard to know whether he is spreading lies consciously (though they can easily be exposed), or if he believes his falsehoods himself. Thus, for example, he claimed to remember the British soldiers in front of his home when he was a child — when the last British soldier left the country a year before he was born.
The truth is that with extremely rare exceptions, no Arab can acquire an apartment in West Jerusalem, not to mention building a house there — though large sections of the Western part of the city consist of former Arab neighbourhoods, whose inhabitants fled or were driven out during the 1948 war. The former owners of the houses in these quarters (including Talbiya, Katamon, Dir Yassin), who found refuge in East Jerusalem, were not allowed to return to their homes when Jerusalem was “united” in 1967, neither were they paid compensation (as I proposed in the Knesset).
But Netanyahu does not care so much whether people believe him or not. This week, like every other week since he returned to power, he was fully occupied with survival. In order to survive, the coalition must remain intact. To achieve this, he must show that he does not “fold” under American pressure. No better place to prove this than Jerusalem.
About Jerusalem, as official spokesmen never tire of telling us, about Jerusalem there is a national consensus. From wall to wall. From left to extreme right.
However, this myth is long dead. No such consensus exists. Right now, most Israelis are ready to return the Arab quarters of East Jerusalem to Palestinian rule in return for real peace. I know of no Jewish mother who is ready to sacrifice her son in a war for the Shepherd hotel.
I beg to contradict yet another myth that is being propagated relentlessly by our media: that a national consensus against President Obama is forming.
As we say in classical Hebrew: No bears and no forest. Or more colloquially: No birds and no shoes.
Many Israelis, very many, hope that Barack Obama will do for them what seems impossible without him: bring them peace. They have despaired of our political system, of both the coalition and the opposition, of both Right and Left. They are convinced that only an outside force can realize this hope.
If indeed Obama does clash with Netanyahu over his refusal to freeze the settlements in the West Bank and his insistence on continuing to build in East Jerusalem, it is for Obama’s victory that many Israelis will be praying. They know that in this battle, it is not Netanyahu but Obama who represents the true interests of Israel.
The question is whether Obama has the power to follow through, as no preceding president since Dwight Eisenhower has done.
Netanyahu does not believe so. His American partners — the defeated Republicans, the neocons who are now in hiding, the almost-silent Evangelical preachers — this defeated camp is hoping to recover its fortunes by encouraging the Jewish lobby and the Israeli government to provoke Obama. Netanyahu, who has mobilised Congress against the White House in the past, believes that he can do it once again.
Our newspapers are gleefully reporting, with charts and graphs to bear them out, that Obama’s standing in America is sinking. It is not hard to divine that most of this information emanates from Avigdor Lieberman’s Foreign Office, the same source that is feeding the American media with reports of the growing opposition of the Israeli public against Obama. Soon the American media will show Israeli protesters waving posters with Obama in SS uniform, as happened with Yasser Arafat and Yitzhak Rabin before him.
The battle is not about 20 outposts, nor about 20 apartments in the grounds of the Shepherd hotel. Every house in every West Bank settlement serves one supreme purpose: to destroy any possibility for peace. Every Israeli house in East Jerusalem serves the same sublime aim. The opponents of peace know that no Arab leader will ever sign a peace agreement that does not designate East Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital, and no Arab leader will ever sign a peace agreement that does not assign all of the West Bank to the State of Palestine.
A historic responsibility rests on the shoulders of Barack Obama: not to fold, not to give in, not to “compromise”. To insist on the total freeze of the settlements, as a first and necessary step towards peace. For his sake, and for ours too.
As an Israeli, I feel like calling out to him: Yes, You Can!
Uri Avnery is an Israeli peace activist who has advocated the setting up of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. He served three terms in the Israeli parliament (Knesset), and is the founder of Gush Shalom (Peace Bloc)
Obama administration officials in Israel to demand end to settlement building
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- Written by Chris McGreal in Washington and Ian Black Chris McGreal in Washington and Ian Black
- Published: 27 July 2009 27 July 2009
- Hits: 3123 3123
Middle East envoy George Mitchell reportedly discussing deal to allow completion of homes currently under construction
Barack Obama has dispatched a clutch of senior American officials to Jerusalem to press his demand for an end to Jewish settlement construction and move along a diplomatic process aimed at imposing a blueprint for peace if negotiations fail.
Obama's Middle East envoy, George Mitchell, is reportedly discussing a deal with the Israeli leadership that would allow the completion of several thousand homes for Jewish settlers already under construction but impose a total halt to building once they are complete. Such an agreement would amount to a concession by Obama, who laid down an immediate and complete freeze on construction as a marker of a more interventionist policy at a testy meeting with the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, in Washington in May.
But American sources close to the negotiations say that getting Netanyahu to agree that no new construction can begin is an important step toward forcing a new diplomatic process that is no longer hostage to Israeli intransigence.
The diplomatic moves came as the Israeli military announced that the number of Jewish settlers on the West Bank has risen above 300,000 for the first time with about 200,000 more in East Jerusalem. About 2.5 million Palestinians live in the same territory.
The US defence secretary, Robert Gates, is also in Israel as part of the drive to secure a comprehensive Middle East peace agreement.
The aim is to win a regional consensus on Iran's nuclear programme but also reassure the Israelis that Washington has not gone soft on the issue in an effort to dampen Israeli threats of military action. Gates said he did not believe that Barack Obama's timetable would "increase the risks to anybody" — a reference to Israeli concerns that its nuclear monopoly may soon be challenged by the Islamic republic.
Israel has hinted at a pre-emptive attack on Iran should it deem diplomacy to be at a dead end. Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office said today that he reaffirmed to Gates "the need to use all means to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear military capability".
While the Obama administration continues to say that negotiation is the way forward, Gates today said that the promise of talks with Iran "is not an open-ended offer".
Two other US officials are also visiting Jerusalem as part of the diplomatic push - Obama's national security adviser, James Jones, who in an Israeli diplomatic memo was reported to have told European officials that the administration will take a hard line with the Israelis, and Dennis Ross, Bill Clinton's special envoy to the peace process who was brought back to focus on Iran.
The immediate effort is around a settlement freeze.
Tel Aviv newspapers report that Israeli officials say that talks are moving toward a deal in which the Americans will permit the completion of 700 buildings with nearly 2,500 new homes in them that are already well under construction, mostly in two settlements close to the green line which are likely to fall inside the Jewish state's border under a final agreement.
But as part of the agreement, the US intends to rigorously monitor the building work to ensure that the Israelis do not push it beyond the agreed limits.
The Americans are acutely aware that in the past Israel has agreed to contain settlement expansion and then promptly broken its word. This time the US is insisting on detailed plans of what would amount to a final bout of construction before a total halt to building comes in to force.
Mitchell is also pressuring Arab countries for gestures in response to an Israeli settlement freeze such as trade delegations or overflight rights.
Mitchell said at a press conference that the disagreement over settlement construction is a "discussion among friends" but it is also a test of Obama's authority.
One former official who monitors the negotiations closely said that the US is prepared to give ground because it sees a settlement freeze as an important step toward reviving Israeli-Palestinian talks.
There is no great expectation in Washington that talks will go anywhere but that they should have been tried and failed once again will help smooth the diplomatic path for the administration's plan to force its own proposals on to the table later this year which could force Israel to make significant territorial concessions.
The Palestinians have been insistent that there can be no talks without a settlement freeze.
That still leaves the question of Jerusalem as a major obstacle.
Netanyahu very forthrightly spurned US demands to block a new settlement project in the occupied east of the city where an American millionaire plans to bulldoze an old hotel and build Jewish-only housing.
The prime minister said that Israel will not be dictated to on where its citizens can live in what it says is its eternal and indivisible capital. Netanyahu later said that all of Jerusalem will remain under Israeli jurisdiction even after a peace settlement.
Some American officials think Netanyahu may be overplaying his hand because if he puts himself in a position where he is unable to give ground on Jerusalem, that will require others to lay down Israel's final borders.