Sim-O

I just heard Jeremy Bowen on Radio 4 talking about the Palestinian/Isreali peace talks…

There is a religious war developing in what has been essentially a nationalist conflict. You can make a deal with nationalists, it’s much harder to deal with people that believe they’re doing gods will.

Oh? As opposed to people that believe god gave them some land?

Come on Jeremy, the Palestinians have been fighting against a religious justification for the occupation of their land for generations.

(Posted using my phone so, please, excuse the spelling)

Electronic Intifada…

Blair is close friends with Bernard Arnault, the chairman of the luxury goods conglomerate Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy Group (LVMH), and has refused to publicly disclose whether or not he accepted a paid post as adviser to Arnault, as reported in the media. LVMH has been implicated in benefiting from Israel’s occupation through its subsidiary, the cosmetics retail chain Sephora.
…
Blair’s friendship with Arnault, LVMH’s chairman, dates to his time as UK Prime Minister. Arnault is one of the richest men in France, with an estimated net worth of more than $27.5 billion. Blair’s three eldest children studied in France while he was prime minister, and often stayed at Arnault’s mansion in Paris. Indeed, the Daily Mail reported in February 2007 that Liberal Democrat Member of Parliament Norman Lamb warned Blair “It is very dangerous to take hospitality from very wealthy individuals who may be seeking to wield influence” (“Cheri’s pride graduate girl”). Blair’s friendship with Arnault continued after he stepped down as premier and accepted the position as Quartet envoy.

In January, the Daily Telegraph revealed that Blair was to be appointed as Arnault’s personal advisor. Although the announcement was repeated by Agence France Press, neither Blair nor LVMH have officially confirmed or denied the appointment. When asked for clarification in a written request from The Electronic Intifada, the office of Tony Blair remained silent. The lack of transparency on Blair’s position stands in stark contrast to his portfolio as Quartet envoy which tasks him with teaching Palestinians how to build up transparent government institutions.

There’s too much to just excerpt, so just go and read the whole thing and be reminded, if you need to be, why Tony Blair is a shister.

Haaretz…

The Ministerial Committee for Legislation on Sunday approved a preliminary proposal which would make it illegal to hold events or ceremonies marking Israel’s Independence Day as a “nakba,” or catastrophe.

Rather than holding barbecues and parades on Independence Day, Israeli Arabs and Palestinians usually take the day to commemorate the dispersal of Palestinians during the 1948 War of Independence.

via Mike Power

I wonder what?

Via Lenin

@timalmond

Some links regarding the shit that Israel is putting in the way of Palestinian higher education. The last link is the better one, although 2 years old now.

Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI):

Israel’s colonial oppression of the Palestinian people, which is based on Zionist ideology, comprises the following:

· Denial of its responsibility for the Nakba — in particular the waves of ethnic cleansing and dispossession that created the Palestinian refugee problem — and therefore refusal to accept the inalienable rights of the refugees and displaced stipulated in and protected by international law;

· Military occupation and colonization of the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and Gaza since 1967, in violation of international law and UN resolutions;

· The entrenched system of racial discrimination and segregation against the Palestinian citizens of Israel, which resembles the defunct apartheid system in South Africa;

Since Israeli academic institutions (mostly state controlled) and the vast majority of Israeli intellectuals and academics have either contributed directly to maintaining, defending or otherwise justifying the above forms of oppression, or have been complicit in them through their silence

Lenins’ Tomb:

[…] lecturers have voted overwhelmingly in solidarity with Palestinian trade unions who are pleading for a boycott of Israeli institutions, including the academia. […] Disgracefully, Sally Hunt, the recently elected leader of the UCU, has issued a statement condemning the vote, claiming that it isn’t a ‘priority’ for the union. I’m sorry, Sally, that doesn’t fucking cut it. Israeli academic institutions are thoroughly imbricated with the occupation of Palestine, are deeply discriminatory in their own right, and have long provided intellectual, linguistic, logistical, technical, scientific and human support for the occupation. It isn’t good enough to say that attacking the infrastructure of the occupation isn’t a ‘priority’.

Jews sans frontieres:

It may be claimed that as an academic institution, Tel Aviv University stands apart from all this. But it is important to stress that the university was built on the lands of the Palestinian village of Sheikh Muwannis, a village largely destroyed in 1948 and its inhabitants ethnically cleansed and forced to flee for their lives. The “Green House”, the former home of the head of the village, is one of the few original buildings of the village that remains and currently serves as a restaurant for university faculty. The President of Tel Aviv University refused to acknowledge its history and objected to the posting of a sign on the “Green House” that would explain its origin. The campaign to pressure the university to recognize its history has been led by the Israeli organization Zochrot. [1]

The university not only refuses to recognize its past, but is also an integral part of Israel’s brutal occupation and apartheid regime imposed on the Palestinians, including the current savage bombardment of 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza. Typical is the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), an external institute of Tel Aviv University, which boasts in its mission statement of its “strong association with the political and military establishment”. Advising governmental decision makers and public leaders on important “strategic issues”, it is no stretch of the imagination to suppose that the INSS has played a direct or indirect role in the current Israeli war crimes in Gaza.

Gisha.org:

Since 2000, the Israeli security services have prevented Palestinian residents of the Gaza from traveling to the West Bank for their studies. This is a sweeping ban that does not relate at all to the question of whether, regarding a particular student, there is security information which the security forces might view as a reason for limiting travel. In addition, the army refuses to allow passage from the West Bank to Gaza even if the passage is not through Israel, claiming that it has the authority to prevent Palestinian residents of Gaza from entering the West Bank.

Adbusters:

On February 29 last year the BBC’s website reported deputy defense minister Matan Vilnai threatening a ‘holocaust’ on Gaza. Headlined “Israel warns of Gaza ‘holocaust,’” the story would undergo nine revisions in the next twelve hours. Before the day was over, the headline would read “Gaza militants ‘risking disaster.’” (The story has since been revised again with an exculpatory note added soft-pedalling Vilnai’s comments). An Israeli threatening ‘holocaust’ may be unpalatable to those who routinely invoke its spectre to deflect criticism from the Jewish state’s criminal behaviour. With the ‘holocaust’ reference redacted, the new headline shifted culpability neatly into the hands of ‘Gaza militants’ instead.

One could argue that the BBC’s radical alteration of the story reflects its susceptibility to the kind of inordinate pressure for which the Israel lobby’s well-oiled flak machine is notorious. But, as I will show in subsequent examples, this story is exceptional only insofar as it reported accurately in the first place something that could bear negatively on Israel’s image. The norm is reflexive self-censorship. To establish evidence of the BBC’s journalistic malpractice one often has to do no more than pick a random sample of news related to the Israel-Palestine conflict currently on its website. In a time of conflict BBC’s coverage invariably tends to the Israeli perspective, and nowhere is this reflected more than in the semantics and framing of its reportage. More so than the quantitative bias – which was meticulously established by the Glasgow University Media Group in their study Bad News from Israel – it is the qualitative tilt that obscures the reality of the situation. This is often achieved by engendering a false parity by stretching the notion of journalistic balance to encompass power, culpability and legitimacy as well. The present conflict is no exception.

Read the rest

Related: Beau Bo D’Or – The BBC reinforces the blockade of humanitarian aid to Gaza

AFP:

GAZA CITY (AFP) — Israeli forces pulled out of the Hamas-run Gaza Strip on Monday after days of clashes that killed more than 110 Palestinians and dealt a major blow to nascent Middle East peace talks.

Residents in the north of the territory cautiously ventured out from their homes and picked through the rubble as Israeli tanks and ground troops withdrew following the deadliest Israeli military blitz on Gaza in years.

“The operation is winding down. Almost all our forces have already returned to Israel,” a military spokesman told AFP.

The bloody assault earned Israel international condemnation for excessive use of force and caused moderate Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas to cut contacts with the Jewish state shortly before US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice arrives in the region aiming to push revived peace talks.

Since the dramatic escalation in violence last Wednesday, 116 Palestinians, including 22 children and dozens of militants, have been killed, according to Gaza health ministry statistics. More than 350 were wounded.

Two Israeli soldiers were also killed in the clashes and one Israeli civilian died in a rocket attack launched by Gaza militants.

Of course, there was the usual bollox spouted about not wanting to kill civilians and they brought it on themselves.
OK, they people of Sderot might be scared of the rocket attacks (I’ve heard them described elsewhere as missiles. They’re hardly that), and have to run for cover now and again, but not only do the Gazans have to worry about the might of the IDF coming to not just kill their fighters, but their children too, they also have to worry about starvation, hypothermia, lack of medical stuff and other things associated with a society being strangled to extinction. Would the people of Sderot sit on their collective arse and let their occupation carry on without letting their oppressor they’re there? No. They wouldn’t. Would Israel let someone else control it’s borders, for example, put up with Syria controlling it’s borders with Jordan? No, but that is what’s happening with Gazas’ border with Egypt. And the Palestinians are just supposed to let it happen, eh?
Oh, the figure quoted above, 116 Palestinians killed, 22 of them children. That’s over a fifth of the people killed are children. Children don’t just wander about with out at least one parents about, so just how many ‘militants’ did Israel kill? Oh, yes, in Israels’ eyes, they’re all militants, aren’t they.
All Israel has done is speed up the genocide.

Haaretz:

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert met Thursday with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in an attempt to solve the so-called settlement crisis that has plagued negotiations since the Annapolis summit late last month.
…
The key bone of contention between the two sides is Israel’s continued construction in the settlements. The Palestinians are particularly upset over a tender by the Housing Ministry for the construction of 307 housing units in the southeast Jerusalem neighborhood of Har Homa, on the Palestinian side of the Green Line.

Crisis? Stopping building on Palestinian land should solve that crisis, eh?

While one third of Egypt’s army was in Yemen and therefore unlikely to start a war, Israel claimed to a believing world that the Arabs attacked Israel and that Israel was in danger of annihilation. Both claims were false.
…
Almost a year after the war, Israeli General Matityahu Peled said: “To pretend that the Egyptian forces massed on our frontiers were in a position to threaten the existence of Israel constitutes an insult not only to the intelligence of anyone capable of analysing this sort of situation, but above all an insult to the Zahal [Israeli army].”
…
Israeli forces captured the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza, along with the Sinai and the Golan Heights. At the end of the war Israel had succeeded in almost doubling the amount of territory it controlled.

Forty years has gone, There has been all sorts of promises from all sides, but the terrortories are still occupied, and the Palestinians still haven’t got their own state.
Lets hope it doesn’t take another forty years.