Antony Loewenstein

Israel, lover of peace:

Israel has solicited bids to build nearly 700 new apartments in Jewish neighborhoods in eastern Jerusalem.

The plan to build in the Pisgat Ze’ev, Neve Ya’akov and Har Homa neighborhoods was announced on Monday. The communities sit on land captured by Israel from Jordan in 1967. Israel has annexed the territory, but that move has never been recognized by the international community, which considers the territory to be Israeli-occupied West Bank.

Eastern Jerusalem was not included in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s commitment to a 10-month settlement construction freeze.

“We make a distinction between the West Bank and Jerusalem. Jerusalem is our capital and remains such,” government spokesman Mark Regev told reporters Monday.

Palestinians say the building projects are a sign that Israel is not serious about peace.

The apartments were part of a tender issued for 6,500 housing units in 54 communities throughout Israel.

Chaos reigns again in Iran, with the Islamic Republic murdering a number of innocent civilians in its quest to maintain power, including an opposition leader’s family member.

Could this really be the end of the regime?

The UN Secretary General is calling for an end of the blockade against Gaza.

Israel will carry out a white-wash investigation into its various war crimes during Operation Cast Lead in an attempt to stem the “political and economic tsunami” caused by the Goldstone report.

Hamas retains a tight control over Gaza.

Gaza is not forgotten, writes the Electronic Intifada’s Ali Abunimah (who is here with me in Cairo for the Gaza Freedom March and his blog about the event is here).

When the political elites fail, civil society must swing into action.

The Gaza Freedom March is one such example.

An American friend of mine, currently living in Cairo, just sent out this missive about current activities here in the Egyptian capital. I also just returned from the French Embassy protest, witnessing around 1000 riot police surrounding around 300 French protestors, demanding the Egyptian government open the borders into Gaza and allow decency to return to the region:

I drove by the French embassy on my way downtown at 7AM. There seemed to be some hundreds of people sleeping in sleeping bags on a 4 or 5 metre footpath across the embassy’s wide frontate. There were perhaps one or two hundred riot police standing shoulder to shoulder facing them, motionless… none of them even slouching. I got to the small hotel where I do some reservations work for my wife’s favorite relative. The Gaza protest guests who had checked out yesterday or the day before were back in large numbers, having, surprise, surprise, surprise, been refused permission to cross into Gaza. Some large contingent of French participants was said to have gone to the French embassy to sit-down and protest the absence of a French government statement on the issue or something.

So that’s what I saw on the way to town and they were still there in some dozens at 4PM, the police maintaining their line of the morning and not encroaching on the territory of the thinning remnants. In the centre of the frontage they occupied, some half the people in front of the police line were gathered around a speaker standing at a slight elevation on the footpath with a megaphone of some sort. The riot police were starving them out through the day, perhaps. There were dozens and dozens of riot police passenger vehicles so perhaps 200-300 riot police, most of them inside their trucks sticking their heads out to look as the whole thing geared down. Some of the hotel guests talked of joining the French in the morning but surely they were turned away.

I doubt very much the Egyptian authorities will let them into Gaza. Or assemble anywhere again. It’s not like Canberra or Washington DC where their are large park areas where protestors are allowed to assemble. The protest at the embassy had little impact on traffic at &AM as there were few police trucks and the protestors were all prone sleeping. But at 4PM traffic was backed up to Independence Square (Midan Tahrir) and after observing this stuff for 3 years, though not previously of this scale, it’s usually a good guess that they’ll disperse any crowd that threatens to bring Midan Tahrir to gridlock. It’s just a big roundabout, not a place where any number of people can gather without bringing traffic to a halt.

Neither this morning nor evening did I see news crews or people being allowed to assemble anywhere in the area outside the cordon of police enclosing the protestors.

Just guessing, none of them will get to Gaza (where the main news lately has been about the construction of a partition wall along the Egyptian border to frustrate construction of the tunnels… which will now just be dug deeper).

While we continue to remain active here in Cairo, protesting the Egyptian government’s refusal to allow the Gaza Freedom March to enter Gaza, hundreds of participants are staging imaginative displays of solidarity.

Via AFP:

An 85-year-old Holocaust survivor was among a group of grandmothers who began a hunger strike in Cairo on Monday to protest against Egypt’s refusal to allow a Gaza solidarity march to proceed.

American activist Hedy Epstein and other grandmothers participating in the Gaza Freedom March began a hunger strike at 1000 GMT.

“I’ve never done this before, I don’t know how my body will react, but I’ll do whatever it takes,” Epstein told AFP, sitting on a chair surrounded by hundreds of protesters outside the United Nations building in Cairo.

Egyptian authorities had said they would not allow any of the 1,300 protesters who have come to Egypt from 42 countries to take part in the march to enter the Gaza Strip through the Rafah border crossing, the only entry that bypasses Israel.

High-ranking officers and riot police were deployed on the Nile bank where the UN building is located and where hundreds of Gaza Freedom March participants asked the United Nations to mediate with Cairo to let their convoy into Gaza.

“We met with the UN resident coordinator in Cairo James Rawley and we are waiting for a response,” Philippine Senator Walden Bello told protesters.

“We will wait as long as it takes,” he said.

Protesters who wore T-shirts with “The Audacity of War Crimes” and “We will not be silent” held a giant Palestinian flag, as others sang, danced and shouted “Freedom for Gaza” in various langagues.

Egypt has beefed up security measures along the 380-kilometre (236-mile) road to the Rafah border crossing, setting up dozens of checkpoints along the way, a security official told AFP.

“Measures have been tigtened along the road from Cairo to Rafah to prevent activists from the Gaza Freedom March from staging the march,” the official said.

Separately, organisers of another aid convoy trying to reach the blockaded enclave — Viva Palestina led by British MP George Galloway — said it would head to Syria on Monday en route for Egypt after being stranded in Jordan’s Red Sea port of Aqaba for five days.

Turkey dispatched an official on Saturday to try to convince the Egyptians to allow Viva Palestina to go through the Red Sea port of Nuweiba — the most direct route — but Egypt insisted the convoy can only enter through El-Arish, on its Mediterranean coast.

The Gaza Freedom March and Viva Palestina were planning to arrive one year after Israel’s devastating war on Gaza that killed 1,400 Palestinians. Thirteen Israelis also died.

Meanwhile, at least 300 French participants of the Gaza Freedom March spent the night camped out in front of their embassy in Cairo, bringing a major road in the capital to a halt, as riot police wielding plexiglass shields surrounded them.

Foreign ministry spokesman Hossam Zaki accused the French protesters of lying and trying to embarrass Egypt.

“They claimed they had aid to carry to the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, which is a lie,” the MENA news agency quoted Zaki as saying.

“They want media exposure and to pressure and embarrass Egypt,” he said.

On Sunday, police briefly detained 38 international participants in the Sinai town of El-Arish, organisers said.

“At noon (1000 GMT) on December 27, Egyptian security forces detained a group of 30 activists in their hotel in El-Arish as they prepared to leave for Gaza, placing them under house arrest. The delegates, all part of the Gaza Freedom March of 1,300 people, were Spanish, French, British, American and Japanese,” a statement on the group’s website said.

“Another group of eight people, including American, British, Spanish, Japanese and Greek citizens, were detained at the bus station of El-Arish in the afternoon of December 27,” they said.

On Sunday, Egyptian police also stopped some 200 protesters from renting boats on the Nile to hold a procession to commemorate those who died in the Gaza war.

On December 31, participants are hoping to join Palestinians “in a non-violent march from northern Gaza to the Erez-Israeli border,” the organisers said.

The latest news here from Cairo (via AFP):

French protesters camped out in front of the their embassy in Cairo to protest a ban on them from travelling from Egypt to Gaza for a march in support of the blockaded Palestinian enclave.

About 300 protesters set up tents and blocked a road in front of the mission after buses they had rented to take them to El-Arish, a town close to the border with Gaza, never came.

They said they were told by the bus company that security authorities had banned the trip.

Egypt had earlier said it would not allow any of about 1,300 protestors who have come from 42 countries to take part in the Gaza march to enter the enclave.

The French protesters, who chanted pro-Palestinian slogans and held up French flags and signs in Arabic asking for entry into Gaza, were persuaded to set up camp on a curb in front of the embassy after police threatened them with water cannons.

“No more talk, we want our busses,” they chanted when the French ambassador negotiated with them. One protester said she wanted to travel to Gaza to “show the Palestinians that they are not alone.”

Elsewhere in Cairo, police stopped about 200 protesters from the United States and other countries from renting boats on the Nile to hold a procession marking a year since a devastating war in Gaza killed 1,400 Palestinians and 13 Israelis.

Egypt shares the Rafah border crossing with Gaza, the only passage to the impoverished coastal enclave that bypasses Israel. Gaza has been blockaded since the Islamist Hamas movement took it over in 2007.

Egypt has said it would not allow the passage of the protesters into Gaza because of the “sensitive situation” there.

Gideon Levy in Haaretz on his scathing assessment of Israel’s deluded soul over its Gaza war:

Today it is more shameful to be an Israeli because the world, as opposed to Israelis, saw the scenes. It saw thousands of dead and injured taken in the trunks of cars to something between a clinic and a primitive hospital in an imprisoned and weakened region one hour from flourishing Tel Aviv, a region where the helpless had nowhere to run from Israel’s arsenal. The world saw schools, hospitals, flour mills and small factories mercilessly bombed and blown up. It saw clouds of white-sulphur bombs billowing over population centers, and it saw burned children.

The world refused to accept the excuses and lies of Israel’s propaganda. It was not prepared to compare Sderot’s suffering to Gaza’s suffering; it did not agree that the sulphur mushroom clouds were for self-defense, that the killing of dozens of police on a parade ground was legitimate, that telephoned warnings for people to leave their homes cleared Israel of criminal responsibility for the bombing of those homes.

The world saw the Israeli Goliath strike mercilessly at the Palestinian David.

More of my photos here.

Gazans are remembering their dead after Israel’s attack.

But according to the New York Times:

In the year since Israel launched its devastating military offensive against Hamas in Gaza, the country’s political and military leaders have faced intense international condemnation and accusations of possible war crimes.

But Israel seems to have few qualms. Officials and experts familiar with the country’s military doctrine say that given the growing threats from Iranian-backed militant organizations both in Gaza and in Lebanon, Israel will probably find itself fighting another, similar kind of war.

Only next time, some here suggest, Israel will apply more force.

“The next round will be different, but not in the way people think,” said Giora Eiland, a retired major general and former chief of Israel’s National Security Council. “The only way to be successful is to take much harsher action.”

Such talk has raised alarm among some critics in Israel, but so far it has stirred little public debate.

These actions are only allowed to continue because the Western world, including the US, Australia and the UK, continues to provide political and military cover for war crimes.

Ben White, writing on Al-Jazeera English, explains how these kinds of wars are part of Israel’s inner logic:

That this was a “carefully planned” assault intended “to punish, humiliate and terrorise a civilian population” was clear at the time.

The Jerusalem Post reported Shimon Peres, the Israeli president, as saying that Israel’s aim was to “to provide a strong blow to the people of Gaza so that they would lose their appetite for shooting at Israel”.

As hundreds of Palestinians were being killed, The Washington Post related how the “hope” of Israeli officials was that “Gazans become disgusted with Hamas and drive the group from power”.

An Israeli ex-national security adviser told The New York Times that “the terrible devastation” caused by going beyond just “military targets” would lead to “a lot of political pressure” on Hamas.

Targeting civilians to advance a political goal is a standard definition of terrorism: in the words of the US state department, “premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against noncombatant targets”. US federal law describes terrorism as violence or “life-threatening acts” apparently intended “to intimidate or coerce a civilian population”.

A final part of Israel’s political strategy for the Gaza Strip is to turn the territory into a depoliticised humanitarian crisis, its population rendered utterly dependent on international aid. This is the strategy of ‘de-development’ that has been going on for decades and which is now intensified and more brutal.

The one-year anniversary of the Gaza onslaught is being noticed by some of Israel’s leading human rights groups.

B’Tselem:

One year after Operation Cast Lead, B’Tselem is today (27 December) launching a public campaign demanding that Israel lift its siege on the Gaza Strip. This is necessary in order to rehabilitate the Gaza Strip from the destruction wrought by the hostilities. As part of the campaign, the organization is releasing a new animated short film, by Alon Simone. The film shows how goods that are forbidden entry into Gaza from Israel enter from Egypt through tunnels, a process that enriches Hamas, which collects taxes on the goods. Through the film, B’Tselem hopes to demonstrate the absurdity of the Israeli siege policy: while seeking to topple the Hamas government, Israel is gravely harming Gaza’s million and a half residents, and is achieving the opposite outcome.

…

Not only is the siege unlawful and immoral, it is also utter folly. Two and a half years after it began, not only has Israel’s siege not eroded the status of the Hamas government, it has even achieved the opposite effect. One reason is that Palestinians have built hundreds of tunnels under Gaza’s border with Egypt, which they use to smuggle in goods, as well as to flood Gaza with weapons. The media and international agencies have extensively documented the way in which the Hamas government controls the tunnel economy and collects taxes on the goods passing through them.

Israel has the right and the duty to protect its citizens from attacks coming from Gaza, yet it is not allowed to exploit its control of the crossings to collectively punish one and a half million persons.

Gisha:

Despite the fact that a year has passed since the start of the Gaza military operation, the damage caused by three weeks of war and the near total closure preceding it has yet to be repaired. The reason: Israel’s ongoing policy blocking goods from entering the Gaza Strip, including a near total ban on reconstruction materials.

Funds for Reconstruction:

• Reconstruction funds pledged at the Sharm el-Sheikh Summit Some $4.5 billion.
• Number of months international community negotiated with Israeli government over mechanism for transferring reconstruction funds and materials: 9 months.
• Implementation of mechanism for transferring reconstruction funds and materials: None.

Housing:

• During the war: Some 3,500 homes were completely destroyed, some 2,800 sustained heavy damage, and some 54,000 were lightly damaged.These homes housed about 325,000 people.
• Policy on import of construction materials (cement, glass, iron) prior to the war: Banned, few humanitarian exceptions.
• Policy on import of construction materials today:Construction materials (cement, glass, iron, etc.) banned; 19 trucks of mostly cement and gravel permitted to enter for exceptional humanitarian projects.
• Needed to rebuild homes: At least 40,000 tons of cement, 25,000 tons of iron.

Humanitarian Infrastructure (Electricity, Water and Sewage):

• During the war: Seven out of 12 electric lines were shut down; the power station operated only 50% of the time. One million people were without electricity, and half a million people were without running water.
• Needed prior to the war to repair and maintain infrastructure: 172 types of spare parts that were either completely out of stock or were below minimum supply; 3.5 million liters/week industrial diesel for power station.
• Needed today to repair and maintain infrastructure: 240 types of spare parts that are either completely out of stock or are below minimum supply; 3.5 million liters/week industrial diesel for power station.

• Policy on import of materials prior to the war: Industrial diesel supply for power station limited to no more than 63% of need; parts stood idly for months in warehouses in Israel and the West Bank? due to the restrictions and delays on their import into the Gaza Strip.
• Policy on import of materials for infrastructure today: Permission granted exceptionally for the entrance of fewer than 100 trucks carrying spare parts and building materials; industrial diesel still limited to no more than 63% of need.
• Repercussions: 40,000 people have no electricity; 10,000 have no running water; power outages eight hours a day, four days a week for most areas; 87 million liters of untreated or partially treated sewage dumped into the sea daily for lack of electricity and spare parts.

Economy:

• During the war: More than 1,000 factories, businesses and private sector institutions were damaged, at an estimated cost of $45 million.
• Policy on import of goods prior to the war: Just 25% of the demand for goods was met (2,500 trucks per month versus 10,400); fewer than 40 kinds of items permitted (versus some 4,000 prior to the closure); ban on import of raw materials for industry and on export.
• Policy on import of goods today: Just 25% of the demand for goods is met, permitting entrance of about 60 kinds of goods; ban on import of raw materials for industry and on export.
• Repercussions: Some 97% of factories have remained closed; 42.3% unemployment in the third quarter of 2009 (compared to 32.3% unemployment in June 2007); 80% of the population dependent on food aid.

Education:

• Policy on import of school supplies prior to the war: Banned, except for UNRWA schools.

Policy on import of school supplies today: Banned, except for UNRWA schools.

The following press release was released by Code Pink today (and I’m currently in Cairo with the Gaza Freedom March and witnessed first-hand the various attempts to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the Gaza invasion. More soon):

What: Egyptian security forces detain internationals in el-Arish, break up memorial actions in Cairo

When: Sunday, December 27, noon: the Egyptian security forces detained a group of 30 internationals in their hotel in el-Arish and another group of 8 at the bus station. They also broke up a memorial action commemorating the Cast Lead massacre at the Kasr al Nil Bridge

At noon on 27 December, Egyptian security forces detained a group of 30 activists in their hotel in el-Arish as they prepared to leave for Gaza, placing them under house arrest. The delegates, all part of the Gaza Freedom March of 1,300 people, were Spanish, French, British, American, and Japanese. The Egyptian security forces eventually yielded, letting most of the marchers leave the hotel, but did not permit them to leave the town. When two younger delegates, a French and Japanese woman, attempted to leave el-Arish, the Egyptian authorities stopped their taxi and unloaded their luggage.

Another group of eight people, including citizens from American, British, Spanish, Japanese and Greece, were detained at the bus station of Al Arish in the afternoon of December 27. As of 3:30 PM, they were still being held.

Simultaneously, Egyptian security police broke up a commemoration of the Israeli invasion of Gaza organized by the Gaza Freedom March at Kasr al Nil Bridge, one of the main bridges connecting Zamalek Island, in the middle of the Nile, to Cairo. As a nonviolent way of commemorating the more than 1300 Palestinians killed in the Israeli assault on Gaza that began a year ago on December 27, 2008, Gaza Freedom Marchers tied hundreds of strings with notes, poems, art and the names of those killed to the bridge.

“We’re saddened that the Egyptian authorities have blocked our participants’ freedom of movement and interfered with a peaceful commemoration of the dead,” said Medea Benjamin of CODEPINK, one of the March’s organizers.

Benjamin added that the Gaza Freedom March participants are continuing to urge the Egyptian government to allow them to proceed to Gaza. They visited the Arab League asking for support, various foreign embassies and the Presidential Palance to deliver an appeal to President Mubarak. They are calling their supporters around the world to contact Egyptian embassies and urge them to free the marchers and allow them to proceed to Gaza.

Via AFP:

International activists planning to enter Gaza from Egypt for a march appealed to President Hosni Mubarak on Saturday to allow them to enter the blockaded enclave through the Rafah crossing.

Organisers of the Gaza Freedom March had earlier said they would try to defy the ban after Egypt turned down their request to pass through Rafah, the Gaza Strip’s only crossing that bypasses Israel.

“We plead to you to let the Gaza Freedom March continue so that we can join the Palestinians of Gaza to march together on December 31,” the activists said in a statement addressed to Mubarak.

Egypt said it would prevent their passage because of the “sensitive situation” in Gaza and warned Monday of legal repercussions for anyone defying the ban.

Around 1,300 international delegates from 42 countries have signed up to join the Gaza Freedom March which was due to enter Gaza via Egypt during the last week of December.

On the morning of December 31, participants were due to join Palestinians “in a non-violent march from northern Gaza to the Erez/Israeli border,” organisers said on their website.