Another side of Gaza, where cooking and politics meet:
Food and cooking in Gaza have changed radically in the last few years since the whole area has been under siege. The borders of this tiny strip are entirely closed, allowing only humanitarian shipments of basic foods to enter–flour, sugar, salt, oil, pulses–and even these are entering at a rate which, according to the UN, only covers about half of the population’s most immediate needs. (And that calculation assumes a totally equal distribution of aid, unlikely in the best of circumstances.)
Other goods enter through the Israeli border in a very limited number of trucks bearing a somewhat surreal selection of “necessities” determined by the Israel Defense Force’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories. One week when I was there, for example, those necessities included persimmons and bananas but excluded almost all other food products. Everything else required to sustain the Gazan population of 1.5 million can only enter through underground tunnels from Egypt, an extraordinarily expensive clandestine trade in which many have died due to the gassing and bombing of the tunnels.
Via the essential Australian blog, Middle East Reality Check:
Paul Barratt is a former Australian Defense Department official. The following quote is from his post Passionate Supporters of Israel here:
“The Israelis are very good at duchessing people. I had been Secretary to the Department of Defence for only a few weeks when I received a visit from the late Sir Peter Abeles*, with the Israeli Defence Attache in tow. They had come in ostensibly to talk about the merits of Israeli missiles - not a very profitable use of their time or mine because we buy military material through open competitive tender, so however impressed I might be with the capacities of Israeli missiles, it was not going to make any difference to anything. The real purpose of the visit was dropped in right at the end. The Government of Israel would like to invite me to visit Israel, all expenses paid, and of course you must bring your wife, you will have a wonderful time. I thanked them politely and made a mental note that that was never going to happen; how could I as a public official place myself in the position of being beholden to a foreign government? A pity not all of our parliamentarians feel that way.”
[*TNT & Ansett boss, 1924-1999: "It was in 1949... that the 25-year-old Peter Abeles migrated to Australia from Hungary. The following half century saw him amass a powerful fortune and powerful allies on both sides of the political fence... BOB HAWKE: 'I knew when I saw Sir Peter last night that I would not be seeing him again. He was obviously in the very last stages of a great life. I was able to put a kiss on his forehead and say goodbye'." (7.30 Report, 25/6/99)]
What’s the legal, moral and practical differences between apartheid South Africa and present-day Israel/Palestine?
The US is really clashing with Israel over settlements? Don’t believe the hype:
The US has renewed a program of massive loan guarantees to Israel in spite of an ongoing dispute about the construction of illegal settlements in the West Bank.
According to Reuters, the program allows Israel to sell bonds and take out loans with the backing of the US. The nine billion dollar program was originally approved in 2002 to help Israel cope with an economic downturn.
According to Israeli economist Shir Hever of the Alternative Information Center in Jerusalem, the loan guarantees are actually contradictory to the US’ diplomatic stance on settlements.
“The US is allowing its money to be used to violate international law,” Hever told Ma’an in a phone interview. “The US cannot claim to be an impartial arbiter,” because of its overall economic support for Israel.
My following letter appears in today’s Australian newspaper:
Campaigning for universal human rights means condemning occupation and brutality wherever it occurs, whether in a US-backed client state such as Israel or a dictatorship like Iran. A moral blind spot won’t suffice.
Greg Sheridan (”West’s hypocrites betray Iranians”, Opinion, 2/7) accuses me of ignoring gross abuses in Iran and obsessing over Israeli “apartheid”. This is patently untrue. I visited Iran in 2007 to document the role of dissidents and the internet in challenging the authoritarian state. I have written constantly about the draconian behaviour of Iranian goons against peaceful protesters and spoken across the Australian media in the past month documenting the complex relationship between Islamism, democracy and human rights. The situation is not black and white, good versus evil. It’s not our place to dictate what Iranians should want; the vast majority of them want to maintain the Islamic system but demand internal reforms. Very few are calling for the complete dismantlement of the 1979 Revolution.
In Israel, I, along with countless politicians and human rights organisations, recognise the deepening apartheid occupation of Palestine. It is not a reality seen by journalists who choose to look the other way.
Antony Loewenstein
New York, US
The Western-funded and armed rogue state:
Amnesty International on Thursday accused Israeli forces of war crimes, saying they used children as human shields and conducted wanton attacks on civilians during their offensive in the Gaza Strip.
The London-based human rights group also accused Hamas of war crimes, but said it found no evidence that the Islamist rulers of Gaza used civilians as human shields during the 22-day offensive Israel launched on December 28.
It also reiterated its call for an international arms embargo against Israel.
“Much of the destruction was wanton and resulted from direct attacks on civilian objects,” Amnesty said in a study.
Israeli troops forced Palestinians to stay in one room of their home while turning the rest of the house into a base and sniper position, “effectively using the families, both adults and children, as human shields and putting them at risk,” the group said.
“Intentionally using civilians to shield a military objective, often referred to as using ‘human shields’ is a war crime,” Amnesty said.
The role of Western multinationals assisting repressive regimes is now ubiquitous. Iran is just the latest.
One American-based, Muslim group is resisting:
Back in April The CRIME Report reported that Nokia had provided the Iranian regime with an advanced data monitoring center. The full implications of Nokia’s partnership did not become clear until a few days ago, when the Iranian government began arresting hundreds of peaceful dissenters tracked via intercepted wireless communications. In the wake of post-election protests, Iran has put Nokia’s technology to use on a massive scale.
Under the title “Nokia: Jailing People” (a parody of Nokia’s slogan “Connecting People”), an urgent campaign has been launched to pressure Nokia to immediately end its contract with the Iranian regime, disable its monitoring center, and explain how Iranians can circumvent the monitoring system. At the site www.NokiaNo.com, over five thousand people in just five days have signed a petition and simultaneously sent an email to Nokia executives. Supporters have pledged to boycott Nokia products until Nokia stops helping Iran jail peaceful dissenters.
Egyptian blogger Wael Abbas, who I profile in my book The Blogging Revolution, is facing the wrath of the US-backed dictatorship:
Reporters Without Borders condemns well-known Egyptian blogger Wael Abbas’s arrest on “national security” grounds at Cairo airport on 29 June on his return from Sweden, where he openly criticised the Egyptian government at a conference in the presence of members of Egypt’s ruling National Democratic Party. He spent the entire day at the airport before being able to leave.
“Wael Abbas’s arrest is an insult to free expression, which he symbolises in Egypt,” Reporters Without Borders said. “The Egyptian blogosphere regards him as a key figure in the country’s society. This is yet another example of the government’s constant harassment of human rights activists. We demand the return of everything the customs police took from him.”
After being detained by the airport customs police, Abbas was subjected to a body search, his personal possessions were examined, some of his documents were photocopied and files relating to the conference in Sweden were confiscated. The authorities held on to his passport for four hours and still have not returned his computer.
The Magnes Zionist blog on Israel’s inherently discriminatory Right of Return laws:
The Law of Return inherently discriminates against a group of people – who happen to be citizens and natives — on the basis of ethnicity alone.
Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch, reminds the world of a few inconvenient facts:
The debate over Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories is often framed in terms of whether they should be “frozen” or allowed to grow “naturally.” But that is akin to asking whether a thief should be allowed merely to keep his ill-gotten gains or steal some more. It misses the most fundamental point: Under international law, all settlements on occupied territory are unlawful. And there is only one remedy: Israel should dismantle them, relocate the settlers within its recognized 1967 borders and compensate Palestinians for the losses the settlements have caused.
Removing the settlements is mandated by the laws of the Geneva Convention, which state that military occupations are to be a temporary state of affairs and prohibit occupying powers from moving their populations into conquered territory. The intent is to foreclose an occupying power from later citing its population as “facts on the ground” to claim the territory, something Israel has done in East Jerusalem and appears to want to do with much of the West Bank.
The legal principles were reaffirmed in 2004 by the International Court of Justice, which cited a U.N. Security Council statement that the settlements were “a flagrant violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention.” The International Committee of the Red Cross and an overwhelming number of institutions concerned with the enforcement of international humanitarian law have concurred in that view.
The ugly truth of Britain’s ruling party:
A secret report by Army bosses to be presented to the Iraq war inquiry blames Tony Blair and Gordon Brown for the botched occupation of the country.
The dossier - prepared for ex-military chief General Sir Mike Jackson - criticises then Chancellor Mr Brown for withholding funds to rebuild Basra for FIVE months after our troops went in. And the 100-page document attacks Mr Blair for “uncritically” accepting flawed US plans for the March 2003 invasion, which led to tens of thousands of deaths, including those of 179 British troops.
Of course, if you’re the editor of Vanity Fair, it’s far easier to fawn over Blair and ignore such inconvenient truths:
This is what American arrogance and neo-conservatism looks like. Pretty, isn’t it?
In the course of Donald Morrison’s review of Au Revoir to All That by Michael Steinberger, we learn that McDonald’s is the largest private employer in all of France, which is sort of like being the largest provider of health insurance in North Korea, but nonetheless, it feels like a major triumph for American culture and cuisine. I once ate at the McDonald’s right next to the Arc de Triomphe. My quarter pounder tasted like hegemony.
Jeremy Scahill marvels at democracy in Iraq:
It is very doubtful that—decades from now—Iraqis will tell their grandchildren about where they were on June 30, 2009, “National Sovereignty Day.” At the end of the day, this is U.S.-style Hallmark hype and will remain so until every last occupation soldier leaves Iraqi soil.
The Jerusalem Post reports on growing fears in the US that Israel is failing to impress the West anymore (occupation and wars in Gaza will do that):
Nina Tannenwald, an associate research professor of international relations at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International Studies, explained that the Israeli self-perception of an underdog was no longer a widely accepted narrative outside of Israel - another factor which now must be taken into account.
“I’ve been struck by the way the Israeli self-narrative of a besieged underdog, no longer resonates to outside observers,” she said.
“That was a narrative that I think had a lot of truth earlier on in Israel’s history, but I think there’s a widespread perception that that self-narrative doesn’t resonate with the outside world, given that Israel is now the world’s 14th or 15th most powerful military country,” she continued. “And so there’s a disconnect between how Israelis see themselves in their situation, and how observers outside see it, and that is a disconnect that needs addressing.”
This site has reguarly discussed the massacres in Sri Lanka and the oppression of the Tamil people.
For the global Tamil Diaspora, the war is far from over. Time magazine reports:
Many Tamil youth living around the world became committed to raising awareness of Sri Lanka’s plight in the West after they visited their parents’ country between 2002 and 2008, a period of truce between troops and the Tigers, and saw how their families were living there. Vasuki Guna, a 20-year-old university student in Australia, says she can’t forget images of children running through a landmine-cleared field or an infant cousin screaming at the sound of a firecracker, confusing it with a grenade. “You come back and can’t get the images out of your mind,” Guna says. “After I saw that, I was so much more active in organizing campaigns. We have no control of Sri Lanka’s government and its corruption, but we haven’t just washed our hands. We’re determined to fix it.”
A new American, Jewish online magazine, Tablet, has launched.
Thus far, it seems to have a great deal of naval-gazing and little about the key moral question of our age, Israel/Palestine.
A publication to watch.
The accusations just keep on coming:
An international human rights group on Tuesday accused the Israel Defense Forces of failing on six occasions to verify the targets of drone aircraft during the Gaza conflict in January, killing at least 29 Palestinian civilians.
The report by Human Rights Watch (HRW) states that in the six incidents in question, “Israeli forces either failed to take all feasible precautions to verify that the targets were combatants, apparently setting an unacceptably low threshold for conducting attacks, or they failed to distinguish between combatants and civilians and to target only the former. As a result, these attacks violated international humanitarian law (the laws of war).”
Marc Garlasco, a senior military analyst with HRW, charged that drone operators had fired before making sure their targets were actual threats, calling drones the most precise weapons available.
“We should not find so many civilian casualties from these incidents,” he said.
