I am innocent of any crime, says Olmert (full article…)

Although the Labor Party seeks to give up most of the West Bank to the Palestinians, more settlement homes were begun and completed per year under Barak than under either Sharon, Olmert or during Netanyahu’s first term. (more…)

Outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has told the United States and the European Union that Israel will lift restrictions on food items, such as pasta and cheese, entering Hamas-ruled Gaza, diplomats said on Monday. (more…)

This is about as far as Obama is willing to pressure Israel. The level of discourse about the siege on Gaza does not even approach the basic immorality of imprisoning 1.5 million people. Instead, it directs attention to the minutia of whether or not toilet paper constitutes a necessary humanitarian supply and people no longer wonder about why Israel decides these things to begin with.

Oh, sorry… I forgot that Israel no longer occupies Gaza.

We must not be led astray in this election campaign and consider both Livni and Barak as moderates, in contrast to the “extremist” Netanyahu. This is a deception. Kadima and Labor, the center and left-wing parties, have led Israel to two awful wars within two years. Netanyahu has yet to go to war once. True, he speaks more radically than the other two, but so far it has only been words, while the “moderates” have taken radical, aggressive action. (more…)

“I do not know of any military that is more moral, fair and sensitive to civilians’ lives than the IDF,” he said. (more…)

They had just gone a little distance when there was an explosion. We were hit. We fell down, and I couldn’t see or hear anything. Then I started hearing again. I heard combat helicopters and gunfire, and I didn’t know where they were firing. Husam, Mahmoud, and I stayed where we were for about an hour, maybe more. Then the daughters of our neighbors came and took us into one of the houses. My father and uncle came there and took us to an ambulance. They told me that Husam had been killed and Mahmoud was wounded. My eyes were hurt, and I don’t know if I’ll be able to see again. (more…)

Contrary to the claims of Mr Haniyeh and Mr Olmert, this was a war without victors – just hundreds of thousands of losers. (more…)

In the case of Israel, the self-image of its leading politicians is far more crazed and split than such common-sense reminders can hope to remedy. Tzipi Livni says in 2009 that the assault was necessary, that it is going according to design, that there is no humanitarian crisis, and that the invasion will be good for the Palestinians. Yet Ehud Barak in 1999, in answer to a question from the reporter Gideon Levy about what he would have done if he had been born Palestinian, replied without pause: “Joined a fighting organization.” Ehud Olmert says in a daring interview in his penultimate season in office that there will have to be a two-state solution and that Israel will have to give up a large part of the settlements it now holds. Yet Olmert devotes his final weeks in power to the merciless waging of this war, and refuses to convene his cabinet to take up the encouragement of a cease-fire…From the imposition of state terror in one generation spring the soldiers of guerrilla terror in the next generation. Those to whom evil is done, do evil in return. Just as the Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza brought on the Second Intifada, and just as both of these, together with the American footprint in Saudi Arabia, were a substantial motive in the making of the September 11 attacks, so the present attacks in Gaza, backed by America’s financial and political support and America’s F-16s and Apache helicopters, are nursing hatreds for a new round of terrorism to come. The assault on Gaza endangers the security of Israel, and it endangers the security of the United States. (more…)

In the face of U.S. denials, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s office confirmed Wednesday that he personally intervened to ensure that the U.S. abstained from voting on UN Security Council Resolution 1860 last week. According to Olmert, U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was forced to abstain from voting on the resolution, which called for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, and which she was largely responsible for authoring and putting together. (more…)

Israeli troops and tanks began heavy fighting in a suburb of Gaza City for the first time yesterday as medics reported 29 Palestinian deaths and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert declared that Israel was “getting close to achieving the goals it set for itself”. (more…)

As the Palestinian body count approaches 900, I can’t help but wonder if Olmert’s goal was 1,000 dead Palestinians.

He says that international monitors must be deployed to ensure that the rocket fire does not resume. (more…)

How about international monitors to ensure that the occupation ends?

It was just before noon when I heard the first explosion. I rushed to my window, barely did I get there and look out when I was pushed back by the force and air pressure of another explosion. For a few moments I didn’t understand, then I realized that Israeli promises of a wide-scale offensive against the Gaza Strip had materialized. Israeli Foreign Minister, Tzpi Livni’s statements following a meeting with Egyptian President Hussni Mubarak the day before yesterday had not been empty threats after all.

What followed seems pretty much surreal at this point. Never had we imagined anything like this. It all happened so fast but the amount of death and destruction is inconceivable, even to me and I’m in the middle of it and a few hours have passed already passed.

6 locations were hit during the air raid on Gaza city. The images are probably not broadcasted in US media. There are piles and piles of bodies in the locations that were hit. As you look at them you can see that a few of the young men are still alive, someone lifts a hand here, and another raise his head there. They probably died within moments because their bodies are burned, most have lost limbs, some have their guts hanging out and they’re all lying in pools of blood. Outside my home, (which is close to the 2 largest universities in Gaza) a missile fell on a large group of young men, university students, they’d been warned not to stand in groups, it makes them an easy target, but they were waiting for buses to take them home. 7 were killed, 4 students and 3 of our neighbors kids, young men who were from the same family (Rayes) and were best friends. As I’m writing this I can hear a funeral procession go by outside, I looked out the window a moment ago and it was the 3 Rayes boys, They spent all their time together when they were alive, they died together and now their sharing the same funeral together. Nothing could stop my 14 year old brother from rushing out to see the bodies of his friends laying in the street after they were killed. He hasn’t spoken a word since. (more…)

In the run-up to the election, observed Michael Warschawski, a founder of the Alternative Information Center in Jerusalem, “all Israeli leaders are competing over who is the toughest and who is ready to kill more.” (more…)

One of the biggest foreign policy challenges facing the incoming administration of President-elect Barack Obama will be reinvigorating what looks like a completely stalled Palestinian-Israeli peace process.

Repeated failures in the struggle for peace make clear that a change in direction is needed. And many observers think that taking advantage of the Arab Peace Initiative put forward by the Arab League in 2002 is just the ticket to jumpstarting the process.

A push by Pres. George W. Bush in the final year of his two-term presidency yielded the Annapolis process which, though having made minimal procedural gains and bringing in regional players, largely ignored the existing Arab proposal spearheaded by then-Crown Prince and now King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. (more…)

Two documents appeared side by side in Haaretz last week, on November 21: a giant advertisement from the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and the results of a public opinion poll.The proximity was accidental, but to the point. The PLO ad sets out the details of the 2002 Saudi peace offer, decorated with the colorful flags of the 22 Arab and the 35 other Muslim countries which have endorsed the offer.

The public opinion poll predicts a landslide victory for Likud, which opposes every single word of the Saudi proposal.

The PLO ad is a first of its kind. At long last, the PLO leaders have decided to address the Israeli people directly.

The ad discloses to the Israeli population the exact terms of the all-Arab peace offer: full recognition of the State of Israel by all Arab and Muslim countries, full normalization of relations – in return for Israeli withdrawal to the pre-1967 borders and the establishment of the Palestinian state, with East Jerusalem as its capital, in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The refugee problem would be solved by mutual agreement – meaning that Israel could veto any solution it considered unacceptable.
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The Israeli peace camp was born in sin and died because of a lie: It was born as the legitimate son of the sin of occupation, and died the illegitimate son of the lie that “there is no partner” with whom to negotiate on the other side. Between September 1967 and October 2000, it spent 33 years waging the brave and determined struggle of a minority against a majority, “traitors” against “patriots,” “defilers of Israel” against “lovers of Israel,” David against Goliath. Today, we must painfully admit that it was struggle that did not produce much.

The peace camp was born of a small ad – a statement bearing only a dozen mostly unknown signatures – addressed to the general public, and then began to die a pathetic death, which is lamented by no one. Since then, its body has laid in public squares that are void of protesters, in streets empty of struggle and in public discourse free of ideas. On occasion, it lets out a desperate and dying gasp from the direction of a group of determined but marginalized groups, near the separation fence in Na’alin or in Gush Shalom’s advertisements in the Friday paper.

On occasion, it wraps itself in the guise of a mass demonstration, mostly at deceptive memorial rallies for Yitzhak Rabin – also featuring pop stars Aviv Geffen and Ninet – and in public opinion polls in which the majority claims to adopt its positions. But the interim balance sheet of history is clear and razor sharp: The occupation, the settlements, the police thugs and the brutality have been victorious over everything else. Never have so many people said we need to put a stop to things, and never have so few done anything about it. (more…)

This week, we have seen once again how Israel employs the “unlimited use of limited force” to provoke a response from Gaza and to thereby undermine the fragile tahdiya—the Egyptian-brokered ceasefire in place since last June.

Last Tuesday, while the world’s attention was focused on the United States’ presidential election, Israel invaded the Gaza Strip… Ostensibly there to destroy several smuggling tunnels, they encountered resistance (naturally) and killed six Palestinian militants. In response, dozens of Palestinian rockets were subsequently fired into Israel. And in response, Israel made a statement “regretting” Hamas’s hostility and eagerly shut Gaza’s borders, exacerbating the already disastrous humanitarian conditions. Soon after, Israel also forced Gaza’s main power plant to close by cutting fuel supplies, a move which plunged hundreds of thousands into darkness (yet again). Ehud Olmert threateningly declared that a “full-scale” Israeli operation in Gaza is not a question of “if” but “when”, even as he blamed Gaza for breaking the truce! And in response, rockets continue to fly over the border from Gaza into Israel.

And in response… and in response…
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Apparently, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has ordered a halt to Israeli attacks in Gaza and has instead entered into talks with Hamas via Egyptian mediators.

It should not be necessary to point out that Hamas has previously offered to talk with Israel on more than one occasion and that it was Israel, not Hamas, that finally broke the ceasefire in October 2006. Nevertheless, Olmert’s detractors cried for blood and he delivered. Over 125 Palestinians (half of whom were children) killed last week is enough to satiate the wolves for now, so this week why not put on the mask of peacemaker? Israel is no stranger to playing Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in this way.

“We certainly appear to have entered a period of talking rather than fighting now,” Al Jazeera’s Jacky Rowland reported from Gaza.

“For more than three days now there have been virtually no rocket attacks into Israel … and also there have been no Israeli air strikes, no overflights of Gaza.”

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“I heard shooting, then screaming. I rushed upstairs to see what had happened, and they were both on the floor. Jaqueline was already dead, but Iyad was still alive. The neighbours called an ambulance and we ran to the hospital with him, but he died as soon as we arrived.”

East Jabaliya in the northern Gaza Strip bore the brunt of Israel’s latest military incursion into Gaza. The incursion, which was launched in the early hours of Thursday February 28, lasted four days and nights. In that time Israeli troops killed 108 Palestinians, including 54 unarmed civilians, 26 of whom were children. The Palestinians who live in and around Abed Rabbo Street in east Jabaliya suffered intense air strikes by F16 planes and helicopters, tank shelling, snipers, and having their houses invaded and vandalised by Israeli soldiers, who tied adults up with ropes, or else locked whole families into single rooms in order to use their homes as sniper towers to target local Palestinian fighters. Sixteen year old Jaqueline Abu Shebak and her fourteen year old brother, Iyad both lived on Abed Rabbo Street with their mother and three other young brothers and sisters. The children’s uncle, Hatem Hosni Abu shebak, who lives next door, found the bodies of Jaqueline and Iyad in the early hours of Saturday March 1st, when he rushed upstairs after hearing intense shooting and then screaming. (more…)

It’s almost impossible to comprehend the hypocrisy behind American actions in the Middle-East. U.S. Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice—a woman whose grasp of Middle-Eastern issues was made acutely apparent during Israel’s bombardment of Lebanon in 2006 (birth pangs, remember?)—recently appealed to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on behalf of the Palestinian civilians currently being bombed into a powder by the IAF.

“I am concerned about the humanitarian condition there and innocent people in the Gaza who are being hurt. We have to remember that the Hamas activities there are responsible for what has happened in Gaza … But, of course, we are concerned about innocent people and we are concerned about the humanitarian situation,” she said after the one-hour breakfast meeting. <<< more

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I wanted to wait for a few days before jumping to conclusions about the Annapolis Summit (they seem to have finally stuck to a name). Now that I have had some time to sniff around (i.e. sit in front of the TV flipping between the news networks), I have reached two conclusions and some predictions about the future of this process.

First, I find it amusing that this-and-that pundit from such-and-such think tank hail the attendance of various Arab leaders as a success. This is not a success. The puppet tyrants of the Arab world live to serve their master: Bush (and Syria is no exception). When the White House whistles, the would-be lapdogs come running. This has been true since at least the end of the Cold War… and when it isn’t, the United States launches a war. (more…)