The message to President Obama, he said, is that this is Jewish land. He did not use the president’s name, but an insulting Hebrew slang for a black man and the phrase “that Arab they call a president.” (more…)

The basic difference between the two undertakings is that the settlement project that preceded Israel’s establishment was intended to create the territorial basis for the future Jewish state. It wasn’t intended to deprive the Arabs of everything that was left or, for that matter, their right to a state of their own alongside the Jewish state. (more…)

The state of Israel was predicated on ethnic cleansing and brutality… These illegal settlements (or “outposts” if you prefer to distinguish between degrees of illegality) are founded on the same ideology of exclusion and oppression. I have to agree with the settlers on this point: their behavior is no different than the behavior that accompanied the creation of Israel…

Netanyahu appears to be suffering from confusion and paranoia. He is convinced that the media are after him, that his aides are leaking information against him and that the American administration wants him out of office. Two months after his visit to Washington, he is still finding it difficult to communication normally with the White House. To appreciate the depth of his paranoia, it is enough to hear how he refers to Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod, Obama’s senior aides: as “self-hating Jews.” (more…)

Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, personally intervened to suppress evidence of CIA collusion in the torture of a British resident, the high court heard today. (more…)

Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.) told Christian Zionists that U.S. policies in the Middle East must be “firmly grounded” in Judeo-Christian principles. (more…)

Dershowitz: Palestinians ‘Played A Significant Role In The Holocaust’

You can download the 2009 Arab Human Development Report here – but if you do, I suggest that you spend more time reading it that the correspondents of Ha’aretz apparently did. I came across an editorial entitled, “It’s a sorry plight to be a citizen in many Arab states”—a self-styled distillation of the report’s findings… Yet while the report spent most of it’s time addressing the problems of human security in Iraq, Somalia and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Zvi Bar’el of Ha’aretz includes only the following token reference to the conditions in Palestine:

The report notes that during the past seven years some 78,000 homes were demolished or damaged in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The infrastructure suffered damage to the tune of $728 million. Economic growth during those years was negative, standing at minus 2.9 percent annually. About a fourth of the workforce in the territories is unemployed. Yearly per capita income stabilized at $1,178 in 2007, about a third less than in the peak year of 1999. (more…)

So who’s behind these terrible conditions? There’s no mention of Israel’s responsibility for any (let alone all) of this. In fact, there’s no mention of Israel in the entire article! Turning to the actual report, it quickly becomes clear why this is. Israel is identified again and again in the report as the primary cause of Palestine’s poor education, miserable infrastructure and generally awful humanitarian conditions. Just a few of the points that Ha’aretz was willing to ignore:

>>> “In … the Occupied Palestinian Territory … people’s basic rights to self-determination and peace have been forcibly annulled. They face threats to their lives, freedom, livelihoods, education, nutrition, health and physical environment from outside forces whose presence wreaks institutional, structural and material violence on them every day” (p. 14).

>>> “Palestinian farmers suffer because Israeli settlers monopolize most ground water sources” (p. 49).

>>> “Food conditions have deteriorated for most Palestinians, but those in Gaza are particularly affected as a result of Israeli restrictions on the movement of goods and persons and as a result of the blockade (p. 126).

>>> “Most threats to Palestinian human security come from Israeli forces” (p. 170).

>>> “Forty one years of occupation, as well as the expansion of Israeli settlements, have prevented Palestinians from controlling their own affairs, and render illusory any notion of the economy as a means of meeting their most basic needs” (p. 177).

>>> “A 2003 World Bank report on the state of the Palestinian economy two years after the Al Aqsa intifada noted a sharp decline in all major economic indicators … The report added that the chief cause of the Palestinian crisis was
Israel’s blockade” (p. 178).

>>> “The Palestinians have paid a heavy price for exercising their democratic
rights via the ballot box” as Israeli punishment for electing Hamas has taken the form of “a total blockade, obstructing all communication with the outside world for whatever purpose” (p. 179).

>>> “In the Occupied Palestinian Territory, the absence of a budget in 2006 and the Western boycott of the Palestinian government caused an acute educational crisis” (p. 182).

Unidentified armed arsonists set fire to the Shopping Festival main stage under the watch of Israeli troops patrolling Nablus’ city center Monday before dawn. (more…)

During the 22-day war that Israel launched on December 27, 280 schools were damaged, including 18 that were completely destroyed. “Today, one month before the start of the new school year, more than six months after the ceasefires, none of these schools have been properly rebuilt or rehabilitated due to lack of construction materials,” the agencies said. (more…)

Three years after being shot by a Border Guard officer during an anti-security fence rally in the West Bank village of Bil’in, Limor Goldstein was awarded damages in the amount of NIS 3.25 million (about $860,000). (more…)

Egypt on Tuesday condemned the Hamas move to ban Fatah members from traveling to a key party convention in the West Bank, saying the decision was “unacceptable.” (more…)

Netanyahu noted that the question for the Palestinian Authority running the West Bank, where he is seeking to promote the Palestinian economy as a cornerstone of a future peace deal, is “do they progress economically like Dubai, or do they go backwards like Gaza?” (more…)

The U.S. government revoked the visas of four members of Honduras’s de facto government Tuesday, escalating the pressure on officials there to reinstate the president, who was kicked out of the country a month ago. (more…)

“We don’t have a police state here in Palestine. We have two police states. One in Gaza and one in the West Bank,” says Rabie Latifah from the Palestinian human rights organization Al Haq.

“The abuse of Palestinian civilians by both Fatah and Hamas security forces has become systematic and is no longer the exception to the rule,” Latifah told IPS. (more…)

The scrolling electronic sign, a low-tech version of New York’s Time Square ticker, escalated the US’s propaganda war with Cuba’s leader three years ago by flashing human rights messages in five-foot high crimson letters. But history, or more specifically Barack Obama, appears to have pulled the plug on the billboard which flitted across 25 windows of the US interests section in Havana. (more…)

According to Abu Aita and the Martyrs Brigade, Abu Aita is not a member of the organisation, although he reportedly has had links in the past. He is a political representative for the Fatah party in Bethlehem and a board member of the Holy Land Trust, a non-governmental organisation promoting Palestinian rights with a commitment to non violence. (more…)

“Israelis aren’t paying any price for the injustice of occupation,” says columnist Gideon Levy, a vigorous critic of Israeli policy. “Life in Israel is just peachy. Cafes are bustling. Restaurants are packed. People are vacationing. Who wants to think about peace, negotiations, withdrawals – the ‘price’ we might have to pay. The summer of 2009 is wonderful. Why change anything?” (more…)

Obama’s choice of words might not have been politic, but he was merely stating the obvious when he said the police behaved “stupidly.” (more…)

“Shut up or I will f*** you,” a Christian Peacemaker Team observer quoted an Israeli soldier yelling at the mother of a boy bound in military custody near Hebron on Monday. (more…)

Settlers threatened on Friday to set the West Bank city of Hebron on fire if Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak carries out a recent decision to open a street into the Jabber neighborhood. (more…)

Legislation that Israel’s Arab citizens fear could limit their freedom of speech came a step closer on Sunday to becoming law.
The bill, proposed by a legislator from the ultranationalist Yisrael Beitenu party of Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, would withhold government money from any state-supported institutions that fund activity deemed detrimental to the state.
Such activity includes “rejecting Israel’s existence as the state of the Jewish people” and supporting “armed struggle or terrorist acts” against Israel. (more…)

Maher Hanoun, a resident of the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood in east Jerusalem, has been ordered by court to vacate his home. Dozens of the neighborhood’s residents, as well as Jewish and Arab politicians and human rights activists arrived at Hanoun’s house on Sunday to protest the court’s decision. (more…)

According to Saudi newspaper, Suha Arafat blackmailed into denying any knowledge of Abbas and Dahlan’s involvement in alleged plot to poison deceased Palestinian leader. Reportedly, Abbas’ office threatened not to pay her monthly salary if she declined (more…)

“during the Gaza war I felt as though every radio station was staffed by propagandists, every newspaper by a government spokesman or spokeswomen. It was not any law which told them to say and write as they did. There was no need for a law – the journalists and analysts probably felt what I was feeling, that the public had no patience for a different point of view.” (more…)

Chief Justice of the High Court of Justice, Head of the Higher Justice Council in Gaza gas issued a new decision concerning the clothing of lawyers. PCHR believes that this decision constitutes a violation of the law and an unjustified intervention into lawyers’ affairs. It also undermines personal freedoms and women’s rights through forcing female lawyers to wear traditional robes known as “Jilbab” and veils (Hijabs). (more…)

Israeli forces at the Erez crossing stopped a 5-month old baby from crossing into Israel. His mother and five-year old sister both had a permission to leave the Strip, so the 5-year old girl could receive medical treatment in Israel. (more…)

Fighting between Islamist militias and government-aligned forces has caused 204,000 people to flee Mogadishu since May and forced the closure of some of the Somali capital’s few health centres, the UN refugee agency said today. (more…)

A new survey of global opinion reveals strong negative feelings toward U.S. foreign policy, even as an average of 61 percent of those polled have at least some confidence in President Barack Obama to make sound decisions. (more…)

Ls services secrets britaniques sont une nouvelle fois secoués par une affaire de torture. Un citoyen britannique, condamné pour terrorisme, assure qu’un agent des services secrets lui a offert d’abandonner ses accusations pour torture en échange d’une somme d’argent ou d’une réduction de peine. (more…)

By the end of the 20th century, more and more aging people were claiming to remember that Jack Kennedy had secretly promised them that he would abandon Indochina to the communist bloc if he were reelected, a remarkable example of repressed-memory syndrome unknown elsewhere except among people who claim to have recovered memories of UFO abductions. How convenient it was, then, to declare that the “architect” of the Vietnam War was neither Kennedy nor Johnson but their secretary of defense. “The Tsar is good, the mistakes are to be blamed on his ministers.” (more…)

As the predictions for global warming get more and more alarming, talks on a worldwide climate treaty have stalled — largely due to the United States.(more…)

So I put the cruelest of questions to Alex Frank, currently in an infantry officer training course, after hearing him argue that counterinsurgency could be made to work in Afghanistan. McNamara thought that about Indochina, I said. Why should it be different in Central Asia? (more…)

A person who knows a lot about Middle East affairs and knows the persons in question, tells me that contrary what is widely perceived, Dayton hates Muhammad Dahlan and Dahlan hates Dayton. Dayton never forgave Dahlan for the performance of his gangs in Gaza against Hamas. (more…)

But as his presidency progressed, Zelaya veered to the left and was in constant conflict with business groups, lawmakers from his own party, the news media and the army.”Over the last year, Zelaya’s positions moved to the left. He pushed social programs and more attention for the poor who have no work,” said Giuseppe Magno, the outgoing Italian ambassador. “This switch was not in line with the program he was voted in on. He was too close to Ortega and Chávez, a position the middle and upper classes did not appreciate.” (more…)

The problem with Goldstone (more…)

Robert McNamara died today. If anyone has not seen Errol Morris’s documentary, The Fog of War, it is well worth it.

Hiliary Clinton does not want to call it a coup because she does so, the Foreign Assistance Act would kick in and she would have to withdraw all the military support to the 600 US military personal who are based in Honduras. (more…)

The English-language cousin of the Qatar based news channel Al Jazeera launched yesterday in the Washington D.C. area after signing its first major U.S. cable deal with non-commercial MHz Networks last week.

The MHz deal means 2.3 million subscribers will now have access to the channel, adding to the 140 million households currently receiving Al Jazeera English worldwide. (more…)

Two Givati Brigade soldiers are suspected of raping two female soldiers after spiking their drinks with a date-rape drug.

The IDF said it launched an investigation into the incident and that its findings, as well as a recommendation, will be transferred to the Military Prosecution. (more…)

Not to trivialize these crimes, but Israel’s mass slaughter in Gaza demands at least the same concern – if not significantly more so.

The head of Mossad, Israel’s overseas intelligence service, has assured Benjamin Netanyahu, its prime minister, that Saudi Arabia would turn a blind eye to Israeli jets flying over the kingdom during any future raid on Iran’s nuclear sites. (more…)

The United States, Mr. Biden said in an interview broadcast on ABC’s “This Week,” “cannot dictate to another sovereign nation what they can and cannot do.” (more…)

Jordanian police Sunday arrested 11 people, including trade union leaders, to break up a demonstration against fruit and vegetable imports from Israel, protest organizers said. (more…)

A baker scraping by when American tanks rolled into Baghdad, Mr. Mohsin recently spent $50,000 to throw a one-night bacchanal at the exclusive Hunting Club here. When guests visit his second home, in Baghdad, he proudly shows off the two peacocks he imported from Dubai, to join a menagerie of exotic birds that he sometimes gives away to friends.

“I have four cars,” he said proudly. “The Land Cruiser cost $80,000.”

The car is parked on a street still littered with debris and lined with blast walls from the sectarian war that was fiercely fought in his neighborhood, Mansour. Fingering his gold watch — the one he is wearing costs $2,000; he reserves a $20,000 timepiece “for big parties” — Mr. Mohsin said that only in America, or an American occupation, was his story possible. (more…)

Political, legal assault against Israel is just beginning (more…)

The Defense Ministry has recommended a partial lifting of the embargo on the Gaza Strip as a goodwill gesture toward the Palestinians to spur talks to free a long-held captive soldier, Israeli media reported Friday. (more…)

If only I could laugh. Israel mulls loosening its death grip on Gaza and they dare to refer to it as a goodwill gesture? I cannot even begin to comment on the staggering arrogance of this notion. Disgusting.

“There is a war being waged against us in the legal sphere. Its aim is to delegitimize Israel and to create deterrence against a possible use of force in Gaza and Lebanon again,” a senior defense official told The Jerusalem Post. (more…)

Housing Minister Ariel Atias on Thursday warned against the spread of Arab population into various parts of Israel, saying that preventing this phenomenon was no less than a national responsibility. (more…)

“Still, administration officials said that they did not expect that the military would go so far as to carry out a coup. “There was talk of how they might remove the president from office, how he could be arrested, on whose authority they could do that,” the administration official said. But the official said that the speculation had focused on legal maneuvers to remove the president, not a coup.” (more…)

They removed him over fears that he was trying to undermine the Constitution and extend his tenure. (more…)

The government will agree to preserve the secret overseas sites where a defendant in a terror case was once held and, his lawyers say, subjected to harsh interrogation techniques after his capture in 2004, a prosecutor indicated in court in New York on Thursday. (more…)

Nineteen foreign activists of the pro-Palestinian Free Gaza Movement were being held in Israel awaiting deportation on Thursday, two days after the Israeli Navy seized control of their boat off Gaza. (more…)

He made no mention of American troops in a nationally televised speech, even though nearly 130,000 remain in the country; most had already pulled back from Iraq’s cities before Tuesday’s deadline. The excitement, however, has rung hollow for many Iraqis, who fear that their country’s security forces are not ready to stand alone and who see the government’s claims of independence as overblown. (more…)

The Iraqis really want the U.S. occupiers to stay? Yeah, only if every poll in existence is wrong about the overwhelming desire that the U.S. get out now.

When Manuel Zelaya was elected president on November 27, 2005 in a close victory, he became president of one of the poorest nations in the region, with approximately 70% of its population of 7.5 million living under the poverty line. Though siding himself with the region’s left in recent years as a new member of the leftist trade bloc, Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas (ALBA), Zelaya did sign the Central American Free Trade Agreement in 2004. However, Zelaya has been criticizing and taking on the sweatshop and corporate media industry in his country, and increased the minimum wage by 60%. He said the increase, which angered the country’s elite but expanded his support among unions, would “force the business oligarchy to start paying what is fair.” (more…)

After ransacking three homes Israeli forces blasted into a fourth through the back door. They threw rocks at the door and windows, report witnesses. A 16 year old high school student had begun a summer job with his father as an apprentice carpenter. Israeli soldiers took the teen from his bed: no shoes and in his underpants. The boy’s parents pleaded with the Israeli soldiers that their child be allowed to dress. Soldiers claimed they were only taking the 16 year old for a “minute or two.” His family has not seen him since, reports the International Women’s Peace Service, a humanitarian mission based in the West Bank’s Salfit. (more…)

Israel has pledged to pay compensation for material damage it caused by shelling UN property during its Gaza offensive more than six months ago, a UN official said on Friday. (more…)

And, yes, this was a military coup. It does not matter that there is no military junta, or that the arrest of the president was allegedly approved by other state institutions (Supreme Court and congress). I heard a news item today that the US government has not officially branded the act a military coup, because to do so would force the cutoff of aid. If that is true, shame on the Obama administration. If it is actually governed by a democratic administration, the US must cut off military aid and diplomatic relations until the coup is reversed and the proper constitutional order is restored in Honduras. This must not be allowed to stand, and mere words of condemnation are not enough. The military needs to feel some economic pain for its actions. Update: See Two Weeks Notice on the question of aid and military coups. Which is, of course, what this coup was, except in the Obama administration’s hairsplitting terminology. How very Clintonian of the US government. (more…)

The promotion of Middle East adviser Dennis Ross to a senior White House position may open the door to a more positive tone by the United States toward the Israeli government, experts believe. (more…)

Mr. Zelaya, who took office in 2006, has moved steadily to the left during his presidency, railing increasingly against the country’s elite, who he says have opposed his politics of inclusion. Critics accuse Mr. Zelaya, who comes from a well-off family of landowners, of blatant populism and of doling out cash to try to solidify a shaky political base. (more…)

“They told us ‘go west or we will shoot you,’” says Ashraf Sadallah. “Initially, we refused, so they began shooting very close all around our boat.” (more…)

Those steps would probably include permitting Israeli airplanes to fly in Arab airspace and establishing limited ties. (more…)

Of course, as the New York Times well knows… controlling Palestinian air space is hardly a new idea. The Israeli terrorist military has controlled Palestinian skies since before 1967. What I’m sure the Times intended to report was that Israel wants to continue its mechanisms of control… And don’t even discuss the near daily illegal flights over Lebanese and Syrian airspace. Regional bully?

“Such a pattern of continuing blockade under these conditions amounts to such a serious violation of the Geneva Conventions as to constitute a continuing crime against humanity,” Falk said in a statement released in Geneva. (more…)

Unwavering support for Israeli policy has eroded dramatically both on American college campuses and within the United States as a whole, according to a group of American university professors who on Sunday concluded an academic exchange program here, sponsored by the Yitzhak Rabin Center. (more…)

Gaza Civilians Killed by Israeli Drone-Launched Missiles

The security company also dictates the quantity of items allowed: Five pitas, one container of hummus and canned tuna, one small bottle or can of beverage, one or two slices of cheese, a few spoonfuls of sugar, and 5 to 10 olives. Workers are also not allowed to carry cooking utensils and work tools. (more…)

An Israeli submarine sailed the Suez Canal to the Red Sea as part of a naval drill last month, defense sources said on Friday, describing the unusual maneuver as a show of strategic reach in the face of Iran. (more…)

A 17-year-old Palestinian girl has been killed in Gaza by Israeli fire.
After initial denials, Israeli army officials said the girl was killed by Israeli troops during a clash with Palestinian militants on Thursday. (more…)

Franklin said he felt betrayed by the two former AIPAC staffers. He believed that he was sharing information with them so that they could pass it to other government officials, and was disappointed to learn they conveyed it to Israeli diplomats and to the press. “I do think they crossed a line when they went to a foreign official with what they knew was classified information,” Franklin said. (more…)

The missile attacks targeted a suspected Taliban camp and a religious school used by fighters in the rugged tribal border region of South Waziristan, said a local official from the region and a resident, who said at least 13 people were killed. (more…)

On Thursday morning, 4,000 American Marines began a major offensive to try to take back the region from the strongest Taliban insurgency in the country. (more…)