By Paul J. Balles * | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

JIM Hoagland, writing in the Washington Post, says: "We have seen how information technology can provide a spark that sets afire the kindling of economic and social distress."

That was Hoagland's way of concluding an opening salvo that said: "Grinding civil war in Libya, a state-organised bloodbath in Syria and troubling stumbles in Egypt's march to democracy dim the lustre of Arab revolts that began the year in glory. This Arab summer is a political season of reaction and reversal."

What Hoagland refers to as "the virus of modern communication" most pundits have labelled "the Arab Spring".

The implication is that all protests have occurred for the same reason and in the same part of the world. That's simply not true.

Not all demonstrations have been agitating for democracy. According to Don Tapscott writing in The Guardian:

"A common thread to the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt and protests elsewhere in the Middle East and North Africa is the soul-crushing high rate of youth unemployment. Twenty-four per cent of young people in the region cannot find jobs."

But the reasons for youth rebellions differ from place to place. Not all have been due to unemployment.

Commenting on student dissent in Chile, writer John Daly says:

"An element common to all these events is the population's rising anger over governments' perceived ineptitude and even outright corruption, inflicting financial misery on all but a privileged elite."

Few young people consider what effect their protests will have. Little heed gets paid by these youthful protesters to the cost of their revolutionary zeal. They blithely ignore the disaster their activities have caused to their national economies.

Millions in Tunisia and Egypt, for instance, have been dependent on the tourist trade, now lost and sacrificing the livelihoods of the entire industry's workers.

The demonstrators in the recent revolts only look at perceived injustices and pay scant attention to what will replace the systems they oppose.

Even Israel is hosting an Arab Spring. After experiencing demonstrations that saw "hundreds of thousands of Israelis" take to the streets, a Haaretz editorial comments: "We are in the midst of what is increasingly shaping up to be an Israeli revolution."

Monarchs, presidents and prime ministers are almost never universally opposed.

During the demonstrations in North Africa, those who supported the existing governments didn't take to the streets until large numbers of Libyans rose up to defend the Gadaffi regime in Tripoli.

And what of the prospects for more protests and demonstrations in Europe?

Protests in Europe have been largely due to youth unemployment and worse are expected because of budget cutbacks and debt crises.

Kids with no jobs ran amok in London.

Look for more demonstrations in Europe like those in Greece (with 38.5pc unemployment) and by the jobless in countries facing financial crises like Spain (45.7pc unemployment), Italy (27.8pc unemployment) and Ireland (26.9pc unemployment).

Who knows? Disastrous economics in America could usher in a riotous summer. There are already calls for a "Day of Rage" in the US.

* Paul J. Balles is a retired American university professor and freelance writer who has lived in the Middle East for many years. He's a weekly Op-Ed columnist for the Gulf Daily News. Dr. Balles is also Editorial Consultant for Red House Marketing and a regular contributor to Bahrain This Month.

By Mohamed Khodr * | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

This image shows Anders Behring Breivik from a manifesto attributed to him that was discovered Saturday, July 23, 2011. / AP PHOTO

Where's the label of "Christian terrorist"; where's the label of "radical extremist Jihadist" since the culprit calls for a Christian holy war against Muslims; he called the killing of civilians "necessary"; but leave it to Ms. Rubin, the blind solid and countable zionist delphi oracle to immediately jump on her usual pro israel bandwagon that muslim terrorists are responsible for the Norway attack. This woman's entire purpose at the Pro Israel Post (it didn't use to be that way under Katherine Graham) but now is under her daughter's tutelage.

I'm not surprised that the Post deems Rubin's column worthy of an apology, after all the issue deals with the despicable Muslim world, a world genetically and religiously predisposed to terrorism; never mind the Babylonial Talmud and the multiple Halakic ruling of Israel's rabbis that gentiles are meant to serve and die for Jews and their children can be killed at times of war.

Forgotten is that Zionist terrorists and Israel introduced terrorism to the world of car bombings, hijacking of and shooting down of civilian planes, introduction of letter bombs, assassination of UN representatives, manufacturing deceitful bombings blamed on Arabs to inflame the U.S. such as the Lavon Affairs and the USS LIberty, the impunity of constant wars and attacks upon civilians, Lebanon multiple times, Sabra and Chatils, the multiple attacks on Gaza, imprisonment and torture of Palestinian women and children, and the total defiance of the UN and humiliation of U.S. Presidents.

Europe and the U.S. xenophobia against Islam and Muslim immigrants is so hypocritical given that both invaded and colonized the Arab and Muslim world with Christian soldier "immigrants" that came by overwhelming force to "civilize" and "education", and "Christianize" the southern hemiphere. They were not wanted but they stayed anyway, now Muslim immigrants in Europe, needed to do fill the jobs unwanted by Europeans (Hispanics) are despised and deported. Europe is aging and with low fertility needs foreign workers as long as they are not Africans, Asians, or Muslims.

It is as Prof. Samuel Huntington said in his book "clash of civilizations"

"The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do."

"Hypocrisy, double standards, and "but nots" are the price of universalist pretensions. Democracy is promoted but not if it brings Islamic fundamentalists to power; nonproliferation is preached for Iran and Iraq but not for Israel; free trade is the elixir of economic growth but not for agriculture; human rights are an issue for China but not with Saudi Arabia; aggression against oil-owning Kuwaitis is massively repulsed but not against non-oil-owning Bosnians. Double standards in practice are the unavoidable price of universal standards of principle"

The Post like the rest of the MSM have the same corrupt power on our government and society that Murdoch has in England. You are complicit in Israel's intransigence to avoid peace at all costs as it continues to steal Palestinian land and its water resources to thirst Palestinians while filling illegal settler swimming pools and fountains.

I doubt the Post will apologize for its knee-jerk attack against Muslims or ever change its ways to bring peace in the Holy Land despite its important to U.S. interests.

Rubin's attack on Muslims is the real "Anti-Semitism" since Arabs are the only true remaining Semites (languages not religion or ethnicity) while the Jews of today are not.

* Mohamed Khodr is a political activist who frequently writes on the plight of Palestinians living under the brutal occupation of Israel, U.S. Foreign Policy, Islam, and Arab politics.

By Mohamed Khodr* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

"This must be a world of democracy and respect for human rights, a world freed from the horrors of poverty, hunger, deprivation and ignorance, relieved of the threat and the scourge of civil wars and external aggression and unburdened of the great tragedy of millions forced to become refugees"
--Nelson Mandela, Acceptance Speech of Nobel Peace Prize, 1993

Four Arab Dictators from Left to Right: Zine El Abidine Ben Ali (Tunis: GONE); Ali Abdullah Saleh (Yemen: On the Way); Muammar Al Gaddafi (Libya: On the Way); Hosni Mubarak (Egypt: GONE)

What a difference a few decades make in the Arab world that had patriotic heroes fighting European colonialism in the past only to replace such occupiers with homegrown dictators. What a difference between the martyred, beloved, highly intelligent, well educated, and revered leader of Libya's revolt against Italy, Omar Al Mukhtar, and today's mad delusional psychotic leader of Libya, Muammar Al Gaddafi.

"We the Mujahids (fighters) swore to Allah that we would fight until we die one after the other. We do not surrender nor do we quit. I have never surrendered and I will continue to fight"
–Omar AlMukhtar; A hero fighting foreign occupiers

"I am a fighter, a revolutionary from tents... I will die as a martyr at the end to my last drop of blood....You men and women who love Gaddafi... Get out of your homes and fill the streets....Leave your homes and attack them in their lairs. The police cordons will be lifted, go out and fight them ...for the defense of the revolution and the defense of Gaddafi."
– Muammar Al Gaddafi, on State TV, February 22, 2011; A madman fighting and killing his own people.

The greatest gain from today's Arab Revolutions sweeping across the Middle East is the "Arab Awakening"; from a demoralized dormancy of mind and spirit and a stagnation from hope. The Arab youth are strong, determined, and dedicated to dust off their silence and subservience to tyrants who never knew nor cared that they had a population to serve. They served themselves; they served America's interests and thereby served Israel.

My beloved Arab brothers and sisters, be steadfast, be patient, and never surrender again to fear; with God's promise to help those oppressed you will be victorious. Victory only comes from God. Many of you may die or be injured, but no revolution is without sacrifice, without suffering, hunger, and thirst, Many more have died over the decade's rule of European colonialists, American invasions and hegemony, Israeli genocides, and most egregious of all, at the hands of our tyrannical dictators who like all oppressors see the lives of their people as cheap and expendable. Millions of Arabs and Muslims have been killed by the West, Israel, and their tyrants. They are the forgotten "Unpeople", but not in the hearts and minds of their families, their brethren, and in the larger Arab and Muslim world. They all will be held accountable on this earth and in the hereafter. With divine justice they are the ultimate losers not the martyred innocent who died as victims of western arrogant greed.

Europe and the U.S.'s urgent fear concerning Libya's revolution has nothing to do with civilian casualties and everything to do with the rise in gas prices. The western economies are in a recession and a rise in gas prices could sink them deeper into recession thereby jeopardizing the reelection chances of Obama, Cameron, Sarkozy, Angela Merkel, and others. Hence the contemplation of a military intervention although they are highly sensitive and aware that such an operation is not viewed as another Iraqi invasion and occupation. The Arab world must, must reject any western intervention and continue its revolts against their American doormats, i.e. their tyrants, fighting on their own to liberate their countries. If you let a western nation into your life be prepared to live in perpetual occupation and domination.

The U.S. will never leave Iraq given that it has spent trillions of dollars to "liberate" it from Saddam and its oil The same applies in Afghanistan. God willing all Arab nations will achieve their freedom, democracy, and respect for human rights. Once national, patriotic, and democratically elected governments, legislatures and an independent Judicial system are established, a total reassessment and revision of political, economic, military, social and infrastructure development is done. Budget priorities are set with an eye to return much of the trillions of dollars currently residing in western government bonds, banks, and financial institutions. Domestic and Foreign policies are developed in the national interest not to serve foreign interests. They must support the development of the private sector rather than continue the wasteful and corrupt public sector, currently the major employer in the region. Education must be the number one priority, especially for girls, for it is the sole provider of financial and social stability and future progress. The health sector is non-existent and measures must be developed to ensure quality primary, preventive, and tertiary care is provided.

The Arab world is facing a massive crisis of water shortage which must be addressed immediately. The region must be viewed as starting from scratch and thus short and long term plans must be developed utilizing the expertise of national and international institutions especially from nations that have turned their economies around or developed rapidly since their near total destruction during World War II. People must feel free and secure in their lives thus basic freedoms must be constitutionally guaranteed and all previous security, police, and intelligence services used by the tyrants to oppress their populace must be eliminated immediately. We can take the best the west has to offer in education, industry, technology, and administration but never comprise our faith, culture, or values.

Omar AlMukhtar

Our tyrants for too long have supplied Europe the U.S. and Israel with cheap gas and oil. For too long they've kept America's economy flourishing through the purchase of hundreds of billions of military arms that are simply stored in desert hangers due to a most illiterate, corrupt, untrained, well compensated and fat military leaders who couldn't shoot straight if a target is at arms length. Thus the Arabs have four vital resources to use as political and economic leverage on the West, especially the United States.

1. Oil
2. Military Weapon Sales
3. Trillions of Dollars invested in U.S. Treasury Bonds, Banks, Financial Institutions, Corporations, Real Estate, Media, Casinos, Hotels, and Hollywood.
4. Vast Importation of diverse American and European products.

Western nations are money driven and money is their driving "national interest". They would sell and drop their mothers to make money or prevent the loss of profit. With a legal, smart, rational, and selective strategies of a mixture of political, economic, and military pressure with the subtle hint that Arab resources are easily marketed elsewhere if political gains that serve the Arab national interest are not met, there is no doubt that America will respond positively.

No politician wants to be responsible for an economic crisis; not while America is collapsing under the overwhelming weight of foreign debt, enormous trade and budget deficits at all government levels, high unemployment, and an ever growing gap between the rich and the poor. China is a prime example of how to use economic policies to extract American concessions. If the Arab world, both governments and populations, are united and fully dedicated to such strategies in an unwavering manner with the backbone and courage to say 'NO' to America's demands, America will capitulate.

We must keep in mind that America's demographics will undergo a historic change within forty years where today's minorities will become the majority and thus potentially can become the majority in the government. Building strong bridges with these minority communities now will bring important dividends in the future.

Now, let's take a leap of faith after assuming such a scenario is achieved. A free Arab world with enough strength and pressure on the United States can only lead to the greatest freedom of all in modern world history-the FREEDOM OF PALESTINE-from the grip of Israel and its domination of U.S. politics. America for decades has had its cake and eaten it too. It managed to blindly support the rogue terroristic State of Israel as it commits constant genocides, ethnic cleansing, and illegal occupation of Palestine, a land to which it has no claim, given that the Jews of today are not the Hebrews of the Bible promised a land in Palestine; while simultaneously owning the silent submissive Arab Tyrants who have greedily and cowardly surrendered to America's will. ENOUGH! There needs to be a heavy cost to America for it to change its policies in the Middle East. Given that it owns the Arab tyrants it can easily ignore the legitimate and just cause of the Palestinians and simply concentrate on meeting the needs and demands of Israel and its powerful Israeli lobbies, especially the feared AIPAC, America's shadow government, that is destroying it from within.

A free Arab world that has political, economic, and military unity can easily break the shackles and bond between the U.S. and Israel. Here's what the U.S. will face as a choice.

EITHER: Choose Israel and continue your loss of independence to a foreign nation that you've showered with trillions of dollars, the latest weapons and technology, allowed its constant spying on government national secrets as well as industrial espionage, cast countless Vetoes to protect its militaristic Zionist expansionism and send your youth and treasure to fight its enemies, be internationally and constantly embarrassed by having to support it even when it commits "war crimes", as well as have an annual trade deficit where you are forced to buy its products while it receives any American product free. Israel has nothing to offer the U.S. except constant wars.

OR: Partner with the Arab and Muslim world in a mutually beneficial relationship that begins with an end to America's blind support of Israel and together with the rest of the world demand once and for all Israel end its occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem and thus establish a FREE INDEPENDENT PALESTINE. If it refuses then it must be isolated with the U.N. Security Council, imposing trade and travel sanctions, cut off of all financial, military and intelligence aid it receives from any nation, and freeze all its financial assets around the world. Much like America does quite easily against Arab and Muslim nations, from Iraq, to Iran, Sudan, Syria, Somalia, Libya, and Afghanistan.

Here's what America will receive in return for this partnership compared to Israel:

Oil-Military Sales-Vast Import of products by 57 Muslim nations with sales to 1.6 Billion Muslims (compared to Israel's 6 million Jews) -Investments in America-Employment for over one million Americans in the oil and petrochemical industry-and peace in the Middle East because in a democratic Arab and Muslim world all extremist and terrorist groups will end either peacefully or by war. America, your passionate attachment to Israel is the greatest threat to your national interest and security. America, it's your choice.

The Arab Muslim world provides you with enormous benefits while Israel serves as a constant liability to your national interest. To my Arab Christian and Muslim brothers and sisters I pray that in victory you do not take vengeance into your own hands. Be gentle and magnanimous to your enemies but seek Justice in court for the murderers, rapists, thieves, and traitors who killed, harmed, raped, stole, or injured the innocent. That is what our beautiful faith and beloved Prophet taught us.

* Mohamed Khodr is an American Muslim born in the Middle East. He is a political activist who frequently writes on the plight of Palestinians living under the brutal occupation of Israel, U.S. Foreign Policy, Islam, and Arab politics.

Cartoon by Sergei Elkin

Why Europe Fears the North African Uprisings

By Behzad Yahmaian * | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

While millions in the worl are celebrating the popular uprisings in North Africa, Europe is watching with skepticism and fear. The fall of the African dictators will deprive Europe of valuable allies in the fight against irregular migration. The political vacuum and the social and economic instability that follows will create a new wave of desperate migrants daring the high seas to reach the coats of Europe. This will deepen the immigration crisis Europe has been trying hard to manage in recent years. Europe is responding with an increased use of force. A new humanitarian crisis is looming.

Devastated by war and poverty, thousands of Sub-Saharan Africans have been leaving home on a torturous and long journey north every year. Arriving in Morocco, Tunisia, or Libya, they recuperate from the journey fatigue, pay human smugglers, and climb aboard flimsy boats heading to Italy or Spain. Many fall victim to high waves and deadly storms. The survivors join the army of asylum seekers, or undocumented workers in big cities across the continent.

Removing and returning the migrants to their places of origin or the last country they left before entering Europe has proven impractical. As a result, preventing the Africans from reaching Europe has become a policy priority in recent years. To block their arrival, European states have been signing bilateral agreements with North African dictators, recruiting them to guard the EU borders in return for financial assistance.

In a bilateral agreement with Zine Al-Abidine Ben Ali, Italy pledged financial support in exchange for help in preventing African transit immigrants and Tunisians from leaving for Europe. Zine Al-Abidine Ben Ali's fall ended the agreement. Border control collapsed in Tunisia and 5000 Tunisians arrived in the Italian port of Lampedusa. Although in much smaller numbers, Egyptians have been leaving their homes and heading to Italy. Egypt remains politically and economically unstable. The continuation of the situation will only increase the number of Egyptians opting for survival in Europe.

In a 2003 agreement between Spain and Morocco, Moroccan authorities pledged full cooperation in migration control in return for $390 million in aid. Two years later in September 2005, Moroccan soldiers and Spanish guards fired at hundreds of Africans trying to enter the enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla. Gun shots killed 11 migrants and injured many more. The North African protest movement has already reached the streets of Morocco. Here too, the future of the bilateral pact to stop African migration is at jeopardy.

The most notable of the bilateral agreements with North African dictators was the "Friendship Pact" signed between Italy and Libya on August 30th, 2008. The two countries pledged increase cooperation in "fighting terrorism, organized crime, drug trafficking, and illegal immigration." Muammar Gaddafi agreed to keep African migrants from leaving its frontiers for Italy, and readmit to Libya those intercepted in international waters. The price tag for this service was $5 billion Italian investment, and six patrol boats to police the waterways between Africa and Europe.

On May 6, 2009, the Italian coastguard and naval fleet interdicted a migrant boat in high seas and forcefully returned the passengers to Libya. Italy's interior minister Roberto Maroni hailed the act an "historic day" in the fight against illegal immigration. Among the passengers were vulnerable women and children, those in need of medical assistance, and those with legitimate cause for asylum and international protection. The Human Rights Watch has reported widespread abuse, physical violence, torture of returned migrants in Libya. In some cases, the Libyan authorities sold the Africans to human smugglers who kept them in private jails and released them after receiving money from their families.

The political turmoil in North Africa is also threatening the future of the "Friendship Pact." Mummar Qaddafi has threatened his unilateral cancellation of the agreement if the European governments did not stop criticizing his violent suppression of the Libyan protesters. Qaddafi's armed forces killed hundreds of protesters in recent days. Meanwhile, the anti-government protests are raging in different parts of Libya. The future of the Libyan dictator remains unclear.

On February 15th, the Italian Ministry of Interior sent a formal request for help to Frontex, the European Union's border security agency. On February 20th, Frontex launched the Joint Operation Hermes 2011 with the deployment of additional aerial and maritime assets from Italy and Malta to combat the flow of illegal immigrants from North Africa.

Muammar Gaddafi may succeed in crushing the uprising by the use of extreme force. The dictator's fall will be, however, an irrevocable blow to Europe's current migration policy. The loss of Europe's hired gun in the fight against irregular migration will lead to a more open confrontation between the EU armed guards and the African migrants in high seas. How far will Europe go to stop the African from reaching its frontiers?

* Behzad Yaghmaian is a professor of political economy at Ramapo College of New Jersey, and the author of Embracing the Infidel: Stories of Muslim Migrants on the Journey West and the forthcoming The Greatest Migration: a People’s Story of China’s March to Power. He can be reached at behzad.yaghmaian@gmail.com .

By Amjad Atallah and Bassma Kodmani* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

Even as the direct negotiations between the PLO and Israeli government are about to resume, thought needs to be given to the possibility that talks will fail and that an agreement will not be reached within the announced 12‐month timeframe. This paper considers the option of a Security Council recommendation and endorsement of a General Assembly (GA) decision to accept Palestine as a member state at that time. It is an option that has been alternatively raised, discarded, and raised again by Palestinians in the event bilateral negotiations do not succeed.

Such an approach presents important advantages not only to Palestinians but also to the international community as a whole. The United States and European states fully back the Fayyad government’s efforts to build the attributes of a state and have endorsed the timeline set by the PA for the establishment of an independent state by the fall of 2011; United Nations membership is consistent with that goal. More broadly, such membership, as described here, could soon become the sole remaining viable strategy to achieve that objective and, more importantly, to salvage the two‐state solution in a way that addresses all sides’ legitimate concerns.

Describing the approach

Over two decades ago, Palestinians declared a state on the 1967 borders. In 1988, the PNC ‐‐ the PLO’s legislative branch ‐‐ voted to accept a two‐ state solution, eschewing its original goal of a secular democratic state in all of historic Palestine. Although that state was recognized by much of the Muslim, Arab world and by countries of the Global South, the recognition remained symbolic. The State of Palestine enjoyed none of the actual trappings of sovereignty and the PLO exercised no control over any part of Palestine at the time. As Saeb Erakat, a leading Palestinian negotiator, has noted, there is no reason to repeat that exercise.

Instead, the goal this time would be to obtain United Nations membership for that state along with a Security Council resolution in which it assumes responsibility for finalizing the terms of a two‐state deal. Simultaneously, Palestinians would invite those nations which have yet to recognize Palestine as a state to do so, including the member states of the EU and the United States. In other words, Palestinians would gain functional recognition of their state in exchange for handing over to the UN Security Council the authority to determine the specific resolution of all final status issues.

The scenario could play out as follows. First, the PLO and Israel engage in direct negotiations with U.S. facilitation. If after a few months it became apparent that these talks could not produce an agreement because of the difference between the positions of the two sides, the UN Security Council (at Palestinian and European urging) would take hold of the file. It would give itself until September 2011 to pass a resolution recommending to the GA that Palestine be granted UN membership and to come up with solutions to all permanent status issues, including the borders of Palestine. The PLO and Israel would be asked to submit to the Security Council their respective positions at their closest point in negotiations on all final status issues. The U.S. would also present to the UN Security Council the positions which it reached in its capacity as mediator. The Security Council could mandate one or several arbiters to present proposals that would bridge the gaps between the two sides.

At the moment of membership, the Palestinian government would begin to exercise sovereign responsibilities in areas under its control and would be allowed to enter into treaties with other states. As part of this effort, the PLO should request the Security Council to authorize the creation and deployment of a multi‐national force to the Palestinian state upon its recognition to ensure the safety and security of both Israel and Palestine. The PLO would also pledge to maintain political neutrality in all disputes between Israel and any other state and to maintain only a police and coast guard if the multi‐national force were deployed. Should disagreements remain between the states of Israel and Palestine that arbitration has been unsuccessful in resolving, those disagreements can then be submitted to the International Court of Justice.

Why Go Down This Road?

In the past, failure of negotiations has tended to be followed by frustration and mutual recrimination, leading to violence (post Camp David) or prolonged paralysis (post Annapolis). The intervention of the Security Council would minimize risks of confrontation while moving the process forward toward its resolution.

For Palestinians, the only acceptable outcome today is that of a comprehensive solution to the Israeli‐Palestinian conflict that entails creation of an internationally‐ recognized state; other proposals periodically mooted (such as an interim solution or a state within provisional borders) would be viewed as illegitimate by the Palestinian body politic. UN membership coupled with a framework to resolve all outstanding issues thus meets a core Palestinian demand. Acceptance by the General Assembly of a state within the 1967 borders with minimal, specified land swaps, is also a means of addressing the issue of continued settlement construction. For it would make clear to Israel that settlement expansion is in direct contradiction of international law and international consensus and will not have an impact on the final resolution.

A decision by the General Assembly to admit Palestine and recognition by Member States would also begin to address the question of the West Bank/Gaza division and halt the drifting away of Gaza into a separate entity, an option that is dangerously gaining support in the absence of progress toward a two‐state solution. As a further means of reversing the Palestinian divide, the PLO should pledge to conduct internationally‐supervised elections in a sovereign Palestinian state within several months of implementation of the Security Council’s resolution and the international community should pledge to respect its results. This would provide all Palestinian parties a chance to contest elections in less abnormal conditions than occurred under occupation; would give an incentive to Hamas not to undermine the process; and would give Fatah the ability to run with a record of having helped to achieve Palestinian independence.

For Europeans, who have long been simultaneously proud and frustrated at being the largest providers of support for Palestinian institutions and society without enjoying commensurate political clout, this option offers the prospect of a genuine role. Pressuring Israel is problematic for most European politicians and is not believed to be helpful by a majority of European governments. By contrast, supporting the establishment of a Palestinian state through a UN process should fall within their comfort zone and would entrust them with an important role in providing the option with credibility and seeing it through. European states wishing to play a constructive part in peacemaking as a means of advancing their national interests would have an opportunity to do so without simply waiting in the back room with their checkbooks open. This approach also could prevent a scenario under which Europe supports the establishment of all the attributes of statehood yet must stop short of recognizing a state should it be unilaterally declared by the PLO. Indeed, some anxiety is already building in European political circles over the risk of repeating the political failure of 2006 when the EU did everything to support the organization of democratic elections in Palestine only to turn its back on the outcome in the end.

The U.S. might balk at being divested of its heretofore virtual monopoly over the negotiations, yet this option would present the administration with a real prospect of resolving the conflict, a goal it has described as a vital national security interest. Nor, by virtue of its central role in the Security Council, would the U.S. lose its preeminence.

Of course, the U.S. and major European powers would need to be persuaded of the benefits of such an option not only to Palestinians, but to Israel as well. In this respect, giving the Security Council the authority to conclude the terms of an agreement would guarantee protection of core Israeli interests; the United States could not only exercise its veto against any document it deemed unsatisfactory but also inevitably would have a dominant role in putting together the agreement. For Israel, the incentive would be to achieve legitimacy and an end to the conflict sanctioned by the international community as a whole – anyone who rejected the outcome and refused to recognize Israel would thereafter be on the wrong side of the Security Council. In this sense, the option expands on the Arab Peace Initiative’s promise of Arab world acceptance and recognition. By the same token, of course, Israeli rejection of the UN Security Council Resolution would turn it into an international outcast, providing a measure of deterrence against an Israeli rejection and a further reason for it to agree.

Conclusion

Should the just‐announced direct talks fail, the Security Council option provides all who are interested in concluding an agreement with a realistic, promising fallback other than renewed Israeli‐Palestinian or Israeli‐Arab confrontation. Ultimately, such an effort would require significant diplomatic maneuvering and initiative by a number of players, notably the PLO and Western countries seeking to achieve a two‐state solution. The greater the level of coordination among parties, and the earlier it takes place, the greater the chances of success. Early mobilization around a role for the UN Security Council would help build momentum and the mere discussion of it might help the U.S. administration. Sounding the alarm bell about the urgency of a negotiated settlement has little impact without some form of leverage over the parties. The UN Security Council in the horizon provides precisely this kind of leverage.

* Amjad Atallah is the Co‐Director of the Middle East Task Force at the New America Foundation and an editor for the Middle East Channel at ForeignPolicy.com. He was an adviser to the Palestinian negotiating team in peace negotiations with Israel and the United States on the issues of international borders, security, and constitutional issues from 2000 to 2003 and was also responsible for liaising with US government officials in Washington, D.C. on these issues.

Bassma Kodmani is the Executive Director of the Arab Reform Initiative, a consortium of Arab policy research centers working in partnership with Western think tanks, and coordinator of the European Experts Group on the Israeli‐ Palestinianconflict. Prior to that, she was in charge of the Ford Foundationʹs program on peacebuilding in the Middle East which initiated and supported collaborative projects and Track 2 meetings between Israelis and Palestinians.

Source: US/Middle East Project

Khaled Meshal, the head of Hamas Political Bureau

By Henry Siegman* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

Introduction

Failed bilateral talks over these past 16 years have shown that a Middle East peace accord can never be reached by the parties themselves. Israeli governments believe they can defy international condemnation of their illegal colonial project in the West Bank because they can count on the US to oppose international sanctions.

Bilateral talks that are not framed by US-formulated parameters (based on Security Council resolutions, the Oslo accords, the Arab Peace Initiative, the "road map" and other previous Israeli-Palestinian agreements) cannot succeed.

Israel's government believes that the US Congress will not permit an American president to issue such parameters and demand their acceptance. What hope there is for the bilateral talks that resume in Washington DC on September 2 depends entirely on President Obama proving that belief to be wrong, and on whether the "bridging proposals" he has promised, should the talks reach an impasse, are a euphemism for the submission of American parameters. Such a US initiative must offer Israel iron-clad assurances for its security within its pre-1967 borders, but at the same time must make it clear these assurances are not available if Israel insists on denying Palestinians a viable and sovereign state in the West Bank and Gaza.

This paper focuses on the other major obstacle to a permanent status agreement: the absence of an effective Palestinian interlocutor. Addressing Hamas' legitimate grievances - and as noted in a recent CENTCOM report, Hamas has legitimate grievances - could lead to its return to a Palestinian coalition government that would provide Israel with a credible peace partner. If that outreach fails because of Hamas' rejectionism, the organization's ability to prevent a reasonable accord negotiated by other Palestinian political parties will have been significantly impeded.

If the Obama administration will not lead an international initiative to define the parameters of an Israeli-Palestinian agreement and actively promote Palestinian political reconciliation, Europe must do so, and hope America will follow. Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet that can guarantee the goal of "two states living side by side in peace and security." But President Obama's present course absolutely precludes it.

Road to nowhere

Peace talks at an impasse

The Obama administration has reversed the trajectory of previous administrations' engagement with the Middle East peace process. Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush avoided dealing with the issue in the early stages of their presidency. President Clinton pursued a peace agreement far more seriously than did President Bush, but not until the closing days of his second term. By contrast, President Obama addressed the issue aggressively virtually the day after he took his oath of office. He appointed Senator Mitchell his personal Middle East peace envoy, delivered a historic speech to the Arab and Muslim world in Cairo, and presented Netanyahu's government the toughest demand for a freeze on all further Israeli settlement enlargement in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem ever made by any US administration - and all within the first year of the first term of his presidency.

But it has been all downhill since. The settlement freeze Prime Minister Netanyahu agreed to turned out to be a sham, the proximity talks a monumental waste of time. President Obama's most recent encounter with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House on July 6, at which he felt constrained to express admiration for the seriousness of the commitment to a two-state solution of a man who has shown nothing but disdain for the idea, has triggered despair throughout the region deeper than was experienced during the disengaged Bush administration.

Bilateral talks cannot succeed
The US administration has announced the launching of direct talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority (PA) and that the parties have agreed to place a one-year limit on these talks. But nothing much beyond spin to sustain the illusion of continued American "engagement" can be expected from this administration until at least after the November congressional elections, if then. That interregnum provides time for a reconsideration of this administration's Middle East peace strategies that have been undone with humiliating ease by Netanyahu at every turn.

Such a reconsideration must begin with a rejection of the notion that a Middle East peace accord can ever be reached by the parties themselves, with the US role limited to "facilitation." Failed bilateral talks over these past 16 years have shown that left to their own devices, negotiations between Israeli governments - that believe resorting to overwhelming military power is the solution to every political and security challenge - and a powerless Palestinian adversary can only result in the enlargement and completion of Israel's colonial project in the West Bank, notwithstanding American "facilitation," or "bridging proposals," as this administration prefers to call it. Bilateral talks that are not framed by US- formulated parameters (based on Security Council resolutions, the Oslo accords, the Arab Peace Initiative, the "road map" and other previous Israeli- Palestinian agreements) cannot succeed.

A two-state solution will remain beyond everyone's reach because even the most hardline Israeli governments are convinced that the US Congress will not permit an American president to issue such parameters and demand their acceptance by Israel. Israeli governments believe they can defy international condemnations of their colonial project in the West Bank because they can count on the US to oppose international measures that would sanction their illegal behaviour.

If it is to succeed, a US effort to rescue the two- state option must be prepared to offer Israel iron- clad assurances for its security within its pre-1967 borders, but at the same time make it clear that such assurances are not available if Israel insists on denying Palestinians a viable and sovereign state in the West Bank and Gaza.

Credible Palestinian partner lacking
Which brings us to the other major obstacle to a permanent status agreement - the absence of an effective Palestinian interlocutor, due to the bitter internecine divisions between Fatah and Hamas, divisions that have been fostered and deepened by US and European support for Israel's determination to exclude Hamas from Palestinian political life and to bring about its demise. It should be clear by now that this policy has only strengthened Hamas, and that it has retained the ability to torpedo any Israeli- Palestinian peace agreement it is not party to.

This view, shared by virtually every Middle Eastern political and security expert, was expressed concisely as the conclusion of a recent essay on the subject in Foreign Affairs: "Hamas is here to stay. Refusing to deal with it will only make the situation worse: Palestinian moderates will become weaker, and Hamas will grow stronger. If the Obama administration is to move its plans for peace forward, the challenge of Hamas has to be met first."¹

As argued in this paper, a more balanced approach to Hamas, addressing legitimate grievances, could lead to its return to a Palestinian coalition government that would provide Israel with a credible peace partner. If that outreach fails because of Hamas' rejectionism, its ability to prevent a reasonable accord negotiated by other Palestinian political parties will have been seriously undermined.

The misreading of Hamas

Hamas' democratic mandate
Mahmoud Abbas's rule does not extend much beyond Ramallah. Although Fatah was unopposed by Hamas (or by any other organized political party) in the local West Bank elections of July 17, the party is so dysfunctional and unpopular that its candidates were in danger of losing to local unaffiliated candidates, causing Abbas to call off the elections at the last moment. By contrast, Hamas is not only the effective ruler of Gaza, but the only political party that received a democratic mandate for its rule from the Palestinian electorate in the 2006 election that rejected Fatah.

The Oslo accords declared Gaza to be an inseparable part of Palestine, and obliged Israel to provide an unobstructed territorial connection linking Gaza to the West Bank. That provision was reinforced by a formal Israeli-Palestinian agreement (the Agreement on Movement and Access) in 2005 for the free movement of people and goods between these two areas, brokered by James Wolfensohn, then secretary of state Condoleezza Rice's special envoy for Gaza disengagement, an obligation Israel violated even before the ink on the document dried.²

Hamas was denied its electoral mandate and excluded from the West Bank because Fatah conspired with Israel's government and the Bush administration to carry out a putsch by Mohammed Dahlan's militia forces in Gaza to overthrow Hamas. The attempted putsch was pre-empted by Hamas in a bloody manner.³ But the way Dahlan's forces had previously dealt with Hamas' members that it had imprisoned (or the way Abbas' Fatah has dealt with them in the West Bank since) should not leave anyone with false illusions about the treatment that awaited Hamas had Dahlan's putsch succeeded.

Hamas' obsolete charter
But can Hamas be engaged by Israel, or by the US, while it adheres to a charter that is racist and anti- Semitic, and explicitly commits the organization to the violent expulsion of Jews within Israel's internationally recognized pre-1967 borders?

While the government of Israel does not have a charter promising the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes and the confiscation of their land, it has been doing exactly that - regularly and systematically. These confiscations and expulsions began even before Hamas existed, yet no one in the West demanded Israel be quarantined, or even that it be denied continued massive American financial and military assistance.

More to the point, Hamas has made it abundantly clear that its charter - like the PLO's charter which Arafat famously dismissed in 1989 as "caduque" (obsolete, expired) well before it was formally annulled - no longer represents Hamas' ideology. Its various proposals for a long-term hudna (ceasefire) with Israel, if it were to agree to a Palestinian state within the pre-1967 borders, clearly contradict its charter.

A more direct repudiation of the charter's anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic diatribe came from Khaled Meshal, the head of Hamas' political bureau, in an interview conducted by the Jordanian Arabic-language newspaper Al-Sabeel in July (translated into English by the Afro-Middle East Centre in South Africa).⁴

Meshal was asked whether Hamas' resistance was directed "against Zionists as Jews or as occupiers." Meshal replied, "resistance and military confrontation with the Israelis was caused by occupation, aggression, and crimes committed against the Palestinian people, not because of differences in religion or belief." He said that although "religion is a cornerstone to our lives ... we do not make of religion a force for engendering hatred, nor a cause or a pretext for harming or assaulting others, or grabbing what is not ours, or encroaching on the rights of others" - referring, of course, to the Israeli settlers' invocation of the Bible to justify the theft of Palestinian land in the West Bank.

Contrast this to the declarations of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, a former Chief Rabbi of Israel and the leader of the most important Orthodox political party in Israel, during a recent Sabbath sermon: "Abu Mazen and all these evil people should perish from the world. God should strike them with a plague, them and these Palestinians." In a previous sermon in 2001, he told his followers: "It is forbidden to be merciful to [the Arabs]. You must send missiles to them and annihilate them. They are evil and damnable."

Not a single member of Israel's cabinet condemned Rabbi Ovadia Yosef for these pronouncements.

Recognising Israel
At a press conference in April 2008, Meshal stated that within the context of a Palestinian coalition government of which it was a part, Hamas would authorize Abbas as president of the Palestinian Authority to conduct peace negotiations with Israel. If an accord were reached, he said, Hamas would agree to have it submitted to a Palestinian referendum and, if approved, would abide by the outcome even if Hamas itself were opposed to the accord.⁵ (This arrangement was also part of the agreement reached in Mecca for a Hamas-Fatah unity government that fell apart.)

Shortly after the press conference I told Usama Hamdan, a leading member of Hamas' political bureau, that a Palestinian government cannot sign a peace agreement with Israel and still maintain that it does not recognize it. Hamdan agreed, and told me that Meshal agreed as well. He noted that since state- to-state recognition is a governmental responsibility, not a function of individual political parties, Hamas' refusal to recognize Israel does not prevent a government of which Hamas is a part from granting that recognition. He noted that Israeli governments - including the current one, whose prime minister claims to want a two-state solution - have included political parties that oppose Palestinian statehood, and no one has suggested this disqualifies these governments as partners for peace negotiations, or made them candidates for sanctions of the kind imposed on Hamas.

Israeli contradictions
Israel's government undoubtedly rejects that distinction between political parties and governments as sophistry, and considers those who advance it as peddling pro-Hamas propaganda. But it is a distinction that Netanyahu himself must invoke to explain the contradiction between his declared acceptance of a two-state solution and the formal opposition to a Palestinian state of his own Likud Party.

Indeed, not long after Netanyahu made that two-state declaration, most of his cabinet ministers formed a parliamentary caucus in Israel's Knesset, called the Land of Israel Caucus, whose goal it is to defeat their own government's effort to allow a Palestinian state in any part of Palestine in the unlikely event it were to try to do so. (It is not difficult to imagine how Netanyahu would have reacted to a "moderate" Palestinian government made up of parties dedicated to the denial of Israeli statehood.)

More recently, in a TV interview with Charlie Rose, Khaled Meshal stated that Hamas will end its resistance activities when Israel ends its occupation and accepts a Palestinian state within the pre-1967 border. This reverses Hamas' previous commitment to a struggle to recover all of Palestine. Israelis and their supporters in the US ridicule anyone who credits such statements, pointing out that in that same interview Meshal insisted on the Palestinian refugees' "right of return," which he knows no Israeli government will accept.⁶

Apparently they expect Hamas to concede that right - one that Abbas and Fatah also demand - before negotiations have begun. But they do not similarly ridicule Netanyahu's declared support for a two-state solution even when he attaches conditions everyone knows no Palestinian leader would ever accept. Defenders of Netanyahu insist he must be left with negotiating room for the compromises he will have to make, but apparently believe Palestinians do not deserve that same consideration.

It is this feigned Israeli ridicule of any Arab opening towards Israel that sank King Abdullah's peace initiative of 2002 offering to normalize the relations of all Arab states with Israel; "feigned," because it is not scepticism of Arab seriousness that is behind Israeli leaders' dismissal of Palestinian or Arab states' outreach to them, but the fear that it may be sincere, and would therefore compel serious Israeli responses that would expose Israel's real positions on final status.

That exposure is something Netanyahu has so far refused to risk, for it would prove that the territorial and security constraints he intends to impose on Palestinian sovereignty amount to a continuation of Israel's occupation under some other name. It was Netanyahu's refusal to provide that information to Obama when they met at the White House on March 23 that precipitated the crisis in Israeli-US relations that Obama sought to diffuse so humiliatingly at their meeting of July 6.

Hamas - pragmatic and opportunistic
But it is not only Israel that has ignored significant changes in Hamas. The United States and Europe have done so as well, insisting that Hamas must first accept conditions for engagement designed by Israel expressly to preclude the possibility of their acceptance. There is no reason for the US to continue to support these conditions. Obama has not imposed similar conditions for talks with the Taliban. To the contrary: he is encouraging the return of the Taliban to a coalition government with President Hamid Karzai even as they are killing American forces and Afghan civilians. Is the Taliban's ideology more congenial to Obama than that of Hamas, many of whose leaders and adherents are university graduates, and who encourage rather than forbid and punish the education of their daughters?

Questioned by his interviewer in Al-Sabeel about the "marginalisation of women's role in political and social life," Meshal stated that this marginalisation "does not come from the text and spirit of the Sharia," but is the result of "cultural backwardness." He declared that Hamas will not allow "the ages of backwardness or the weight of social norms and traditions that stem from the environment rather than the religious text" to distort Islamic concepts, "especially since the environment of Palestine is not a closed one but a historically civilized one, enjoying plurality and openness to all religions, civilizations and cultures."

A recent report⁷ revealed that the view that US policy towards Hamas is based on a serious misreading of the movement is shared by senior intelligence officials at US Central Command - CENTCOM. In a confidential report to CENTCOM's commander, General David Petraeus, these intelligence officials questioned the current US policy of isolating and marginalizing Hamas and Hizbullah, and urged that Washington instead encourage them to integrate with their respective political mainstreams. They reject Israel's view that Hamas is incapable of change and must be confronted with force. They maintain Hamas is pragmatic and opportunistic, and that failing to recognize its grievances will result in our continuing failure to get it to moderate its behaviour.

At the heart of Hamas' grievances is the double standard that Israel, the US and Europe apply to the entire range of issues the peace talks are intended to resolve. Hamas' leadership maintains that what distinguishes its movement from Fatah is its refusal to swallow this hypocrisy. It insists on absolute reciprocity, especially with respect to the Quartet's three conditions for removing the political quarantine against it. These conditions require Hamas to recognize the State of Israel, accept all previous agreements with Israel, and renounce violence. Yet these three obligations - every one of them - have been regularly ignored and violated by Netanyahu and preceding Israeli governments.

Settlements violate agreements
While insisting on Hamas' recognition of Israel (a requirement to which Netanyahu has added the demand that Palestinians also declare Israel the legitimate national home of the Jewish people), Israeli governments have refused to affirm a Palestinian right to statehood anywhere within Palestine's borders. That right has been rejected not only rhetorically but by the creation of so-called "facts on the ground," ie, Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem and in the West Bank, intended to prevent a Palestinian state from ever coming into being.

The argument that the settlements are necessary to assure territorial adjustments required for Israel's security has no credibility. The settlement enterprise long ago exceeded the most expansively defined Israeli security needs. It was not Israel's Peace Now but former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert who, while still in office, ridiculed such claims. Olmert said that for Israel's military and security establishments, "it's all about tanks and land and controlling territories and controlled territories (sic) and this hilltop and that hilltop. All these things are worthless." He added, "Who thinks seriously that if we sit on another hilltop, on another hundred meters, that this is what will make the difference for the State of Israel's basic security?"⁸

Palestinian rights not recognised by Israel
Netanyahu's acceptance of a two-state solution, which has not been taken seriously by anyone in Israel, is not based on his recognition of the Palestinian right to national self-determination. Netanyahu led the successful opposition to Ariel Sharon's effort in 2002 to prevent the Likud's executive committee from declaring its rejection of a Palestinian state, thus precipitating Sharon's departure from the Likud to the newly-formed Kadima party.

As long as Israel's government refuses to delineate its borders and to recognize the right of Palestinians to a state of their own east of the 1967 lines, Hamas will reject demands that a Palestinian state of which it is a part recognise Israel. As noted above, Netanyahu refused to indicate his government's definition of Israel's borders even in the privacy of his meeting with President Obama at the White House on March 23.

The second Quartet condition is that Hamas abide by all previous Israeli-Palestinian accords. Clearly, neither President Obama nor the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, believe Israel has abided by this obligation, or they would not have demanded that Israel halt all further settlement expansion in East Jerusalem and in the West Bank. Israel's violations of previous accords have not been limited to borders and settlements, but include the "road map" and the Oslo accords' provisions that the future status of Jerusalem can be determined only by agreement between the parties, not by unilateral fiat, as Netanyahu's government seeks to do.

Non-violent alternative lacking
As to the third condition, renunciation of violence, Israel again is as much in violation of that requirement as is Hamas. On virtually every Israeli measure whose legality has been challenged by the Palestinians - eg, the confiscations of Palestinian territory for Jewish settlements, the expulsion of Palestinians from East Jerusalem, the demolition of Palestinian homes and the construction of a security fence on Palestinian territory - Israel has prevailed because of its unrestrained resort to violence to subdue or eliminate Palestinians who stand in the way.

As a sovereign state, Israel enjoys a monopoly on the use of violence, but only within its own borders. It has no greater claim to a right to resort to violence to implement measures - such as the transfer of its own population to territories under occupation - that are clear violations of international law, than does its subject population.

It is not reasonable, to say the least, to expect that Palestinians would renounce violence and rely instead on their occupiers - who covet their land and are frantically settling their own population on it - to serve as judge and jury of their grievances. The demand that they renounce violence without being provided a credible non-violent alternative, such as a third-party monitoring authority that is empowered to adjudicate grievances from both sides, is neither defensible nor implementable.

Hamas' religious agenda
What surprises about Hamas' rule in Gaza is not the visible increase in public religiosity - some of it undoubtedly out of fear of Hamas' authorities - but Hamas' relative restraint in imposing such religious behaviour on Gaza's population, especially when compared to certain other Islamic regimes in the region.

That restraint, and Hamas' formal commitment to democratic governance notwithstanding, there is no greater danger to democracy - or to any kind of civilized existence - than the toxic combination of religious zealotry and xenophobic nationalism. That holds as much for Israel as for Islamic movements and regimes. When the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) prepared their onslaught on Gaza, the chief chaplain distributed to the soldiers religious literature authored by nationalist rabbis from the settler community, instructing them that Palestinians must be considered descendants of the Biblical enemy of the ancient Israelites, the Amalekites, whom God wants utterly destroyed. The pamphlet stated it is a sin to show compassion towards Palestinian civilians, including children. What impact that "religious" literature had on the appalling disproportion of Palestinian civilian casualties in that operation, including large numbers of Gaza's children, we will probably never know.

Hamas not an al-Qaeda proxy
Israel would like the world to believe that Hamas is nothing other than a terrorist enterprise, and that Hamas' "resistance" is in the service of a global Salafist effort to defeat the West and restore an Islamic caliphate. That is a lie intended to place Israel in the vanguard of a Western war on "global terrorism", in order to justify its demand that the West make allowances for the illegal measures it claims it must resort to if the terrorists are to be defeated.

In fact, Hamas does not share al-Qaeda's goals, or its hostility to the West and the US. It has consistently rejected al-Qaeda's urgings that it target American and Western interests, limiting itself instead to the Palestinian national struggle, for which it would like American and European support, understanding how critical that support is to the achievement of Palestinian national aspirations. Opposition from more extreme anti-Western jihadist factions and would-be al-Qaeda supporters within Gaza has been brutally put down by Hamas, for ideological reasons no less than the threat these factions pose to Hamas' hegemony.

In his interview in Al-Sabeel, Meshal rejected violence for its own sake, or as dictated by ideology or religion. He argued violence may be necessary for pragmatic reasons, because "negotiations and peace require a balance of power, for peace cannot be made when one party is powerful and the other weak; otherwise this will be surrender." Those who are forced to negotiate out of weakness and on terms that disadvantage their rights "are the ones that will pay the price of the negotiations," he said.

Hamas is an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood. Like its parent body, it has little in common with a Salafist purism that calls for a literalistic Islam insulated from modernity and from a modernizing pragmatism that seeks to adapt Islam to the modern world.⁹ Predictions of its likely behaviour when Palestinian statehood will have been achieved can no more be based on its behaviour during a revolutionary struggle against a powerful occupier than the Yishuv's¹⁰ resort to terror during its pre-state struggle was an indication of its comportment after the founding of the state.

Jewish terror
The targeting of Arab civilians by Jewish terror groups in the 1930s is documented in painful detail by Benny Morris, Israel's leading chronicler of the Jewish struggle for a homeland in Palestine. In Righteous Victims, Morris writes that the upsurge of Arab terrorism in 1937 "triggered a wave of Irgun bombings against Arab crowds and buses, introducing a new dimension to the conflict." While in the past Arabs had "sniped at cars and pedestrians and occasionally lobbed a grenade, often killing or injuring a few bystanders or passengers," now "for the first time, massive bombs were placed in crowded Arab centers, and dozens of people were indiscriminately murdered and maimed." Morris notes that "this 'innovation' soon found Arab imitators."¹¹

That there may also have been yet untold Israeli violations of international law well after the establishment of the state too incriminating to be revealed seems evident from Netanyahu's recent decision to restrict access to government archives on subjects that include, according to a Haaretz editorial entitled "A state afraid of its past,"¹² expulsions and massacres of Arabs during and following Israel's War of Independence.

Zionist terrorism does not condone Hamas' terrorism. But its history serves to make two points: the inevitability of such abuses when non-violent paths to the achievement of legitimate national goals are denied, and the fallacy of the Israeli claim that a state that comes into existence by terrorist means must inevitably become a terrorist state. The leaders of the two major pre-state Zionist terror organizations, Yitzhak Shamir and Menachem Begin, became prime ministers of what Israelis like to believe is "the only democracy in the Middle East." (Not that there are many other democracies in the region, but Israeli democracy increasingly stands on the most fragile of foundations.)

The Israeli charge that, unlike the Zionists who abandoned past excesses once they achieved statehood, Hamas continued its terror assaults on Israel even after Prime Minister Sharon withdrew every Jewish settlement and settler from Gaza is disingenuous. The dishonesty of that comparison lies in its implication that with the withdrawal from Gaza, Palestinians achieved their goal of statehood and independence in a part of Palestine.

Not only the West Bank, but Gaza has remained under Israel's occupation, for it has been surrounded by the IDF on land, sea and air, and subjected to an Israeli campaign of de-development that has completely devastated what had remained of Gaza's economy. The stability that Hamas has achieved in Gaza despite Israel's relentless efforts to bring it down is at least as impressive as what the Palestinian Authority (PA) has achieved in the West Bank, given the vast European and American resources endlessly poured into the PA's treasury.¹³

Breaking the stalemate

Political Islam cannot be ignored
Having decided to join the Palestinian political process in 2005 and won a free and fair democratic election (the first in the Arab Middle East) in 2006, Hamas is surely as legitimate a stakeholder in the Israel-Palestine conflict as is Fatah, the party that lost that election. A peace accord that ignores legitimate stakeholders cannot hope to succeed. But there are fundamental reasons for changing Israeli and US policy towards Hamas that go well beyond Hamas' capacity to prevent a peace accord reached only with Abbas.

Political Islam has emerged as the dominant religious, cultural and political movement in the Arab world and in much of the larger Islamic world. Most Muslim governments recognize this reality and have come to realize that competition with political Islam "can neither be suppressed nor ignored."¹⁴ Israel is a Middle Eastern country, and cannot expect to achieve security by conducting an endless war against political Islam. Its misguided effort to do so is not a sustainable national policy.

If the unresolved Israel-Arab conflict is not to bring the region to more radical instability and deeper conflict that will inevitably exact a heavy price from America as well, the Obama administration must lead an international initiative to define the parameters of an Israeli-Palestinian agreement and actively promote Palestinian political reconciliation. If Obama cannot provide that leadership, Europe must do so, and hope America will at least follow. Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet - not even American-sponsored parameters - that can guarantee the goal of "two states living side by side in peace and security." But President Obama's present course absolutely precludes it.

* Henry Siegman is president of the US/Middle East Project (USMEP), an independent policy institute. He is also a research professor at the Sir Joseph Hotung Middle East Programme of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Mr. Siegman has published extensively on the Middle East peace process and has been consulted by governments, international agencies, and non-governmental organizations. Major studies directed by Mr. Siegman for the Council on Foreign Relations include Harnessing trade for development and growth in the Middle East (2002), and Strengthening Palestinian public institutions (1999), conducted on behalf of the European Commission and the government of Norway. In 2002, he directed a study commissioned by the US Department of State and the US National Intelligence Council on the implications of "viability" for Palestinian statehood.

1. Daniel Byman, "How to Handle Hamas", Foreign Affairs, vol 85, no. 5, September/October 2010,
http://sabbah.in/cAe7gj , accessed 31 August 2010.

2. Shahar Smooha, interview with James Wolfensohn, "All the dreams we had are now gone", Ha'aretz, 19 July 2007, http://sabbah.in/aMRnZX , acccessed 21 August 2010.

3. David Rose, "The Gaza Bombshell", Vanity Fair, April 2008, http://sabbah.in/a55MCL , accessed 21 August 2010.

4. Afro-Middle East Centre, "Hamas' Meshal lays out new policy direction", 30 August 2010, http://sabbah.in/cr8GCc , accessed 30 August 2010.

5. Barak Ravid, "Meshal offers 10-year truce for Palestinian state on '67 borders", Ha'aretz, http://sabbah.in/bb21v0 , accessed 21 August 2010.

6. Charlie Rose, transcript of interview with Khaled Me- shal, 28 May 2010, http://sabbah.in/bUzAOn , accessed 21 August 2010.

7. Mark Perry, "Red Team", Foreign Policy, 30 June 2010, http://sabbah.in/bufmrQ , accessed 21 August 2010.

8. Ethan Bronner, "Olmert says Israel should pull out of West Bank", New York Times, 28 September 2008, http://sabbah.in/ajJ46D , accessed 21 August 2010.

9. Marc Lynch, "Veiled truths: the rise of political Islam in the West", Foreign Affairs, July/August 2010, http://sabbah.in/clMfgb , accessed 21 August 2010.

10. The pre-state Jewish community.

11. Benny Morris, Righteous victims: a history of the Zionist-Arab conflict, 1881-2001, Vintage Books, 2001, p 147.

12. "A state afraid of its past", Haaretz editorial, 29 July 2010, http://sabbah.in/bbMj7q , accessed 21 August.

13. Yezid Sayigh, "Hamas rule in Gaza: three years on", Middle East Brief 41, March 2010, Crown Center for Middle East Stud- ies, Brandeis University, http://sabbah.in/b3k4ln , accessed 21 August 2010; Nathan Brown, "Are Palestinians building a state?", Carnegie Endow- ment for International Peace, June 2010, http://sabbah.in/9U9LJ6 , accessed 21 August 2010.

14. Ian S. Lustick, "Israel could benefit from Hamas", Forbes magazine, 17 June 2010, http://sabbah.in/cCy3Di , accessed 21 August 2010.

Source: Norwegian Peacebuilding Centre (PDF)

Dear Europe,

Sorry about that cloud of ash over your heads and that you could not travel anywhere.

We feel just the same everyday since few years.

Sincerely,
Gaza

By Dr. Sami Alrabaa* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

The Holocaust Hypocrisy

Undoubtedly, the "Holocaust" which was inflicted on the Jews before the II World War was a crime against humanity; it was an egregious genocide, like several other genocides inflicted on the Native Americans, African Americans, and the Armenians, for instance. But as far the Jews are concerned the Holocaust is a "unique" crime, incomparable with any other crime. Day in and day out, the Jews across the globe insist that comparing the Holocaust with other crimes is politically incorrect and impermissible.

You can question the severity of any crime, but not the Holocaust, otherwise you are branded as anti-Semitic and one of those right-wing populists.

This is reminiscent of the racial discrimination in the US until the 1960s. Racial discrimination was "politically correct" at least in the America. Critics of racial discrimination were portrayed as "anti-American" and "communists".

Every chapter in the human history was dominated by a certain mindset, regardless how irrational and inhumane it was. What was politically correct proved later to be incorrect. Over more than three centuries, racial discrimination against African Americans was politically correct, at least in America.

After the II World War, the Jews have set out to single out their "Holocaust" as the WORST atrocity ever inflicted on a religious minority. They have insisted that any description short of that is improper and anti-Semitic. This implies a perverse discrimination against victims of other genocides. This mindset dominates the media and political life at least in the West and handled as politically correct per excellence. But, like other mindsets, sooner or later, this prevailing mindset will disappear and the Holocaust will be treated as not superior to other crimes against humanity. Many field studies, which have not been published for fear of provoking the Jewish lobby, prove without any shred of doubt that ordinary people view the Holocaust as a crime like any other crime.

In Germany and in the West at large, you are not allowed to compare any crime to the Holocaust. For the German establishment (media and politics across the board), controlled by an influential Jewish lobby, the Holocaust is a "UNIQUE" crime in the history of mankind. If someone slips and compares the Holocaust, even metaphorically, to any crime anywhere in the world, they are immediately urged to withdraw their comparison. The Holocaust is more "sacred" than the Bible and the Koran. Most recently, the Pope's secretary compared the media campaign about child abuse in Catholic institutions to the hate campaign against Jews under the Nazis before the II World War. The Jewish lobby rushed to muzzle him and ordered him to apologize, which he did.

Discrimination of any kind is politically incorrect. But it seems that Jews insist that discrimination against other victims of atrocities is "legitimate". It also seems that Jewish blood is more precious than other bloods.

By the way, denying the "Holocaust" is illegal and punishable in Germany and Austria. Think of the British David Irving who was jailed in Austria for simply saying that the 6 million Jews who were burned to death by the Nazis is exaggerated. Recently, a German court ruled that the British bishop, Richard Williamson had to pay a fine of € 10 million for claiming that the Holocaust never took place.

Likewise, if the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinajad happens to visit Austria or Germany, he would be persecuted and jailed, although he never denied the Holocaust. He simply criticized the number of Jews killed by the Nazis; Ahmedinajad believes that the 6 million is an exaggerated figure.

However, when you talk in private to Germans, they tell you, this is absurd. Nobody dare to compare the Holocaust to other crimes and genocides in the history of mankind. If you criticize that then you are branded as "anti-Semitic"!

By the way, the political establishment in Germany avoids conducting surveys about sensitive issues like the Holocaust and Islamism, for example, constructing minarets. More often than not, the public thinks differently than the political establishment and main stream media preach.

Jewish history is omnipresent in contemporary Germany. No day passes by without a Jewish story. All kinds of stories are told in newspapers, radios, and TVs, short, long, true, and fictitious stories are told.

How about crimes committed against the Native Americans and African Americans, just to name a few? For the Jewish lobby and mainstream media, you are comparing apples to oranges.

According to the British Encyclopedia, the Belgium King Leopold II (1835-1909) ordered the killing of 12 million Africans in Congo. This is real Holocaust. But this fact is as dead as Leopold himself. African Americans, Congolese, and Native Americans never received any kind of compensation, but the Jews received huge sums of money.

Along their history until now, the Jews have always marketed themselves as victims in the Diaspora; in Spain, Europe, and the Middle East.

The Iranian nuclear program which Israel blasts, day in and day out, is a welcome opportunity to play the victim. But how about the Israeli nuclear arsenal? Neither the West nor the IAEA dare check out this arsenal.

Further, Israel in not interested in peace. Peace with its Arab neighbors would mean an end to the "victim theory".

The Media Hypocrisy

I have been living in Germany for the past 30 years working as a sociology and communication professor. Hence, I know what I am talking about. I could fill up volumes about the hypocrisy and contradictions reproduced by the German media and German politics.

The German mainstream media and political establishment divide the world into democratic countries and dictatorships. Countries of the so called Third World which hold elections and have a parliament are branded as democratic, provided of course they are friendly to the West. It does not matter whether these countries introduce political and socio-economic reforms or not. Despotic Arab regimes with dismal human rights records are rarely criticized. They are branded as "moderate" and allegedly play a "geo-strategic role in the Middle East".

The truth of the matter, the West benefits from the Saudi billions of petrodollars. These huge sums of money are largely invested in the West. In addition, introducing real democracy in the Arab world would leave the West without stooge allies.

Democratic countries, like Iran, Bolivia, and Venezuela, for instance, which have introduced huge economic reforms and narrowed the gap between the rich and poor, are arbitrarily depicted by the Western media and political establishment as "dictatorships".

Also, the West accuses Third World countries of being corrupt. But how about the West? Isn't it also corrupt and greedy? Siemens and Mercedes, for example, have spent and still spend billions of dollars in corrupt channels in countries of the Third World. They bribe officials in these countries to gain bids. Siemens spent in the 1990s one and a half billions of dollars in corrupt transactions in Saudi Arabia alone. This was confirmed to me by a Siemens manager. Most recently, Mercedes agreed to settle corruption charges in a US court by paying a fine of 200 million dollars. Tony Blair, the former British Prime Minster ordered British courts and legislation NOT to investigate corruption charges in an arms deal of $ 20 billion instigated by the Saudi Bandar Bin Sultan. Blair argued at the time, "an investigation into the corruption charges" is not in British national interests and would harm the deal and damage thousands of jobs in the British arms industry.

Having said that, you can see that the West freezes democracy and human rights principles when their interests are in jeopardy. They use these principles when they conveniently suit them.

In the 1990s I used to teach at King Saud University and once in a while I was asked by the German Embassy to translate for German politicians visiting Saudi Arabia. In one of those visits by Juergen Moellemann, former chairman of the German Free Democratic Party (FDP), he received a gift check of 40 million dollars from Prince Salman, the governor of Riyadh. What for is the money? Moellemann distributed part of the money among influential journalists in Germany so that they keep silent as far as Saudi Arabia is concerned.

When the money, which Moellemann deposited in a secret account in Switzerland, was discovered he committed suicide in 2003.

Germany is celebrating the 20th anniversary of the fall of Berlin wall and the unification of east and west Germany. The German media brag: East Germany is now free. However, when you talk to people from East Germany, they tell you: "yes we are free now, we can travel wherever we want, but we do not have the money to do so. 40% of East Germans are jobless.

In contrast, it is big business in Germany which has benefited most from the unification. Whole state-owned industries and agricultural cooperatives were sold for peanuts.

Since the riots in Teheran after the latest presidential elections, the German correspondent of ARD TV, Peter Mezger has reported from Iran. He still reports from Teheran and concocts lies. He interviews "dissidents", but he never interviews supporters of the Iranian government.

If I were the Ambassador of Iran in Berlin, I would sue Mr. Mezger and his ilk for spreading lies. Certainly, the Ambassador would not win the case, where the German constitution, at least in theory, guarantees freedom of speech. But the case would instigate a debate on fair reporting.

In view of the fact that fewer people buy and subscribe daily papers and increasingly turn to the Internet for information, and in order to save costs and keep managing editors' salaries up, many of these German papers have withdrawn their correspondents from overseas. These journalists sit now in their cozy offices and concoct distorted reports about Iran, Venezuela, Bolivia, China, and Syria, for example. Insiders have confirmed this practice.

German TV stations, radio, and newspapers interview dissidents in Germany pretending that they were interviewed in their own home countries. People, who support their governments in the aforementioned countries and elsewhere, are sparsely interviewed. Their views seem not to be important for the German public.

I get sick when I see or read in German media that Mr./Ms. so and so is described as an expert in Iranian and Afghan affairs, for instance. When you check out their qualifications, you find out that they neither speak the language of these countries nor have studied their culture. Besides, they have never been to Iran or Afghanistan. They have read a couple of articles about these countries and hence have become "experts".

The German media condemn violence when Germany is not involved. As the American marines attacked an American ship, kidnapped by Somali pirates and freed the crew last year, the German media rushed to condemn the attack. When recently the Dutch marines attacked a German vessel and freed its crew from Somali pirates, the German media jubilated and approved of the attack.

Democracy and Human Rights Hypocrisy

How honest/dishonest is the West with regard to human rights?

The West claims that human rights are universal and must be respected everywhere in the world.

But does the West really support human rights activists equally across the world?

The answer is a big NO. The West supports human rights activists selectively as long as they suit them and serve their political and economic interests. The West blasts dismal human rights records in countries that are not friendly to the West and turns a blind eye to lack of these rights in "friendly" states.

While the West awards the Sacharov prize to Chinese dissidents, it ignores human rights activists in the Arab world.

Most recently, in his latest visit to Saudi Arabia, the German foreign minister, Guido Westerwelle ignored addressing the dismal human rights record of the Al Saud. Later as he was visiting China, he loudly urged the Chinese government in a press conference to respect human rights.

As far as Westerwelle is concerned, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Egypt play a "vital strategic economic and political role". China is an economic and political adversary.

Obviously, the Cold War is not completely dead. Western propaganda is still active towards those countries which do not submit to the will of Western establishments. Western media and political establishments operate according to the motto: If you are friendly to us, we let you do whatever you want. If you are not friendly to us, then you are our enemy, and we will do everything in our power to topple you.

In general, Western Europe has always looked down at East European countries and has never recognized Turkey as part of the European continent.

During the Cold War Turkey was a member of the NATO. After the Cold War and collapse of the Soviet Union, Western Europe rushed to admit East European countries in the European Union (EU) and in the NATO. Turkey's wish to join the EU has so far been rejected, especially by Germany, Austria, and France. The EU argues Turkey is still backward and not European enough, although Turkey is not less developed than Bulgaria, Rumania, and Poland. All these countries, including Turkey have the same level of development in all walks of life. Why is this so?

Turkey has never been a "friend" of Russia (the core left of the Soviet Union) and would never ally itself with Russia. But East European countries could become allies of Russia if they were left outside the EU and NATO. Therefore, the EU was strategically more than happy to admit East European countries before they ally themselves with Russia, the old and new adversary of the West. Turkey was left out. It is politically insignificant in this equation.

The German media and the Western media at large come up with headlines like, "Tibet in Flames" and demand independence for this integral part of China. They allege that the natives of Tibet are oppressed and not allowed to practice their culture, language, and religion.

The truth of the matter is Tibet has been part of China for the past three centuries and its people are free to exercise their religion and culture. And Tibetans are not discriminated against as the Western media allege.

But how about Palestine and Kurdistan? For decades, the people of these countries have been fighting for independence. Until now, the West has ignored the basic rights of the Kurds for independence although they constitute an ethnic and cultural entity living in Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran. Yet, until recently, the Kurds in Turkey have been forbidden to use their own language and practice their own culture. In Syria, the Kurds are not recognized as an ethnic minority.

Viva Western rationale of democracy and human rights!

* Dr.ٍ Sami Alrabaa is a 60-year old retired sociology professor. Among other universities, he taught at Michigan State University, King Saud University, Kuwait University. He also published extensively in academia and print media. His latest book is "Veiled Atrocities" published by Prometheus Books, New York, 2010.

Some Palestinians held candles, others turned their fingers into candles during a protest calling for the release of Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails, in front of the Red Cross headquarters in Gaza City. photos: Reuters, AP

By Saleh Al-Naami | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

Dr Moawya Hassanein, head of Emergency Medicine at the Palestinian Ministry of Health, warns that the lives of thousands of patients with kidney failure who require dialysis three times a week are at risk because of power failures. "There is little we can do at hospitals for patients with heart disease, cancer, in the ICU or premature babies," Hassanein declared. "We have power generators but no one can guarantee that they are enough or will not run out of fuel."

There is concern in Gaza about deteriorating environmental conditions, since water treatment stations could shut down because currently they rely solely on power generators. Several have already stopped operating, resulting in sewage water flooding some streets and refugee camps.

Walid Sayel, the executive director of the Palestine Electricity Company and chairman of the Gaza Power Generation Station, called on all Arab, international and Palestinian parties to swiftly find a solution for the power outage in Gaza. "The blackout is a critical development which requires everyone to shoulder their responsibility in saving the residents of Gaza, first and foremost, for humanitarian reasons," Sayel asserted. "The need for electricity is tantamount to the need for water and air. We are facing a serious humanitarian crisis and no one knows how it will end."

Although some Palestinian officials claim that a partial solution has been reached to resolve the crisis, thanks to $3 million from the EU to buy fuel, it is a temporary answer which will generate electricity to some areas in Gaza for only 12 hours a day. At the same time, there are no guarantees that more funds will be available to provide electricity in Gaza, even if only partially.

The power outage has resulted in a war of words between the governments in Gaza and Ramallah. In the beginning, the government in Ramallah stated that the power cut is a result of the EU not transferring the necessary funds to buy fuel. The EU vehemently denied this, saying that it regularly and routinely sends money for fuel. The Brussels-based European Campaign to End the Siege of Gaza (ECESG) confirmed that the EU had transferred the necessary funds. In a recent statement, ECESG called on the Ramallah government "to stop using unrealistic excuses to evade its responsibility, and direct the needed funds to Gaza, as provided by the EU, to pay for electricity fuel in Gaza."

The statement continued that "we have received messages from several EU foreign ministers assuring us that funds are transferred to the Fatah authorities in Ramallah, and that they have clearly pledged that they will pay for the heavy fuel needed for the power station." ECESG condemned "manipulating the humanitarian needs of 1.5 million Palestinians in political bickering, since this could cost hundreds of Palestinians their lives, including the sick, and threatens severe humanitarian disasters." The statement further denied claims that the EU has halted or reduced funds for fuel at the main Gaza power station, saying that payments for Palestinian service sectors are made regularly to Salam Fayyad's government.

Some Palestinians held candles, others turned their fingers into candles during a protest calling for the release of Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails, in front of the Red Cross headquarters in Gaza City. photos: Reuters, AP

For his part, Ziyad Al-Zaza, deputy prime minister and minister of economy in Ismail Haniyeh's cabinet in Gaza, accused the government in Ramallah of "stealing" the funds needed for Gaza's power station. "Salam Fayyad's government is embezzling the funds for Gaza's electricity and sends limited amounts of solar fuel, only a third of what is needed," stated Al-Zaza.

He asserted that his government is in consultations to import industrial solar, gasoline, regular solar and natural gas energy through the Rafah border crossing. "We do not wish to remain hostage to the occupation and its agents," Al-Zaza retorted. "The Rafah crossing must be opened to people and commodities. We want to rely on the Arab and Muslim world, not Israeli occupation." He further argued that the blackout is caused by a "conspiracy" against the Palestinian people in Gaza "in order to bring them to their knees and break down their willpower".

Meanwhile, the power outage is claiming more lives. Buying a power generator is no guarantee of improving standards of living, but could result in the opposite. For instance, the three Boshr children were playing at their home in Abssan, southeast of Gaza, happy that their power generator was working at a time when the entire area was in pitch darkness. Shortly afterwards, the generator exploded, instantly killing all three. Thus, their family joined a long list of Palestinian families who have lost loved ones to exploding generators.

For many in Gaza, power generators have become time bombs at home. In Gabalaya Refugee Camp, a mother and three of her children died when the generator at their family home blew up. In other instances, gases from the generators have killed residents. Three members of the same family living in Khan Younis died after inhaling exhaust fumes containing carbon dioxide from their generator.

According to statistics by the Civil Defence Authority in Gaza, 82 fires occurred in the past three months as a result of faulty usage of power generators. Several died or suffered from burns and asphyxiation in the fires. Salem Abu Ouda, a technician who specialises in generators, told Al-Ahram Weekly that the biggest problem is that the majority of generators being smuggled into Gaza are of poor quality. Abu Ouda, who repairs tens of generators in his workshop, stated that long operating hours and substandard quality are the reasons behind these disastrous accidents.

On another plane, it was announced that the Ship Intifada will relaunch soon as a sign of intensified efforts to lift the siege on Gaza. Gamal Al-Khodari, the chairman of the Popular Committee for Confronting the Siege, revealed that some 10-20 vessels will participate in this effort, including ones from Malaysia, Turkey and Europe. Ship Intifada is scheduled to begin at the end of April or early May, depending on weather conditions.

The ships will be carrying several parliamentarians, politicians and media people from around the world, as well as much needed supplies. These include construction materials such as steel and cement, supplies to meet medical, humanitarian relief, school and children's needs, as well as power generators. Al-Khodari hoped that the campaign would result in lifting the siege and establishing a route by sea between Gaza and the rest of the world, which would allow freedom of movement. Several vessels have already arrived in Gaza, while many were prevented by occupation forces from approaching the coast of Gaza as a result of the last war.

Source: Al-Ahram Weekly

Palestinians and Arabs Should Be More Responsible

By Khalid Amayreh* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

Foreign ministers of the 27 member states of the European Union (EU) have unanimously adopted a resolution or "policy statement"calling for the creation of a Palestinian state with East (Al-Quds) Jerusalem as its capital.

Rejecting the Israeli annexation of the holy city, which took place soon after the Israeli army seized it from Jordan in June 1967, the statement said that the European Union would not recognize any changes to the pre-1967 borders, including East Al-Quds

Israel claims that Al-Quds Al-Sharif (Noble Jerusalem) is part of its "united and undivided" capital, a claim not recognized by the international community, including Israel's guardian/ally, the United States, which maintains that the fate of the city must be decided through bilateral negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

Palestinian officials reacted with a degree of ambivalence to the EU statement, with Salam Fayyad, the prime minister of the Western-backed government in Ramallah, describing the statement as a "landmark decision" and a "historical step toward the realization of Palestinian statehood."

"This path is going to take us to freedom, which will make Palestinians] be able to live like all peoples around the world as a free people with dignity in a country of our own on the territories occupied in 1967, including East [Al-Quds]," said Fayyad.

Other Palestinian officials, however, were less euphoric and more circumspect in their reactions.

"We had hoped that the European Union would adopt the original Swedish draft," said PA Chief Negotiator Saeb Erekat. The Swedish draft called for the EU recognition of Al-Quds as the capital of a future Palestinian state.

Erekat and other Palestinian official castigated French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner for currying favor with Israel by opposing the Swedish draft resolution.

Other Palestinian officials spoke of "French perfidy and betrayal", calling on fellow Arab leaders to take a stance against French flabbiness with Israel.

During the EU foreign ministers' meeting in Brussels on December 7, Kouchner reportedly warned his European colleagues that a European recognition of East Al-Quds as the capital of Palestine would alienate the Israeli government and make a negotiated settlement even more elusive.

Actions Speak Louder

Many view the European policy as a monotonous repetition of platitudes long echoed by the EU.

There is no doubt that the European statement provides a certain booster to the enduring Palestinian struggle for freedom and independence from decades of Jewish colonialism.

However, unless acted upon, which should be done sooner than later, the EU resolution would remain a futile exercise in international power politics.

Indeed, this is exactly how the apartheid Israeli regime is viewing the latest European posture.

The Israeli media has quoted Danny Ayalon, the number-two man in the apartheid state's foreign ministry, as saying that the EU statement was "nothing new", and that the "EU had made similar declarations in the past".

Ayalon went further in his insolence saying that he did not expect Israeli-EU relations to be affected by the European decision. "Our interests are what counts, even if there is criticism of us in the world."

This shows that Israel, which relies on virtually limitless backing from the United States, does not really take the latest European stance very seriously, or at least seriously enough to make Israel rethink of its present policies which are based on ethnic cleansing and settlement expansion.

Skeptics, who are many, view the European policy statement as a monotonous repetition of platitudes long echoed by the European Union, both as an entity and individual states, but without having any tangible effect on the ground.

Indeed, even manifestly pro-Israeli EU member states, such as Germany, the Netherland, and now Italy, as well as the former East European states which joined the European Union fairly recently, have more or less maintained that any durable peace settlement in occupied Palestine would have to be based on UN resolutions 242 and 338 and the land-for-peace formula.

However, this did not prevent Israel from continuing to effectively liquidate the Palestinian cause by building Jewish-only settlements all over the West Bank, especially in East Al-Quds.

The Same Old Promises

The EU statement would remain just an innocuous statement.

Similarly, the unmitigated liquidation of the Palestinian cause has not really drawn a proactive European reaction that would force Israel to reconsider its brazen temerity and arrogance.

Israel is actually stepping up an already rapid settlement drive aimed at "creating facts" and forestalling the possibility of establishing a viable and territorially contiguous Palestinian state.

The implications here are amply clear. Without meaningful efforts to transform EU policy into a manual for action, the EU statement would remain just an innocuous statement with little or no relevance on reality in the West Bank, especially in Al-Quds.

This reminds us of what one Israeli official once said about American criticisms of Israeli settlement policies in the West Bank: he said: "Let the Americans say what they want, and we do what we want."

The Israeli official tone is likely to be harsher when relating to the latest European step since Israel has always viewed Europe as a "toothless and gutless power" that talks too much and pays a lot of money, but does virtually nothing to affect reality on the ground.

As far as Israel is concerned, this role, affecting reality on the ground, is reserved for the United States, whose continued backing and support for the apartheid regime in Tel Aviv overrides and overshadows any European role.

Realpolitik

The most important part must be done by Palestinians themselves.

Nonetheless, it is obvious that international politics are not charitable field of work where altruism looms large, which means that the European Union will not be more Palestinian and more Arab and Muslim than Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims themselves.

This is what Palestinian politician Abdullah Abdullah alluded to in an interview with IslamOnline.net following the adoption of the new EU declaration in Brussels on December 8.

He said that the responsibility for translating the EU declaration into tangible political realities does not solely rest with the Europeans, but also with Palestinians and the Arab world.

"We must constantly urge the European Union to act on this declaration; we must challenge them to be true to their own words. Otherwise the declaration would go into oblivion," said Abdullah.

Recognizing that Arab and Muslim rights in Palestine will not be given back on a silver platter, Abdullah urges Arab states, in the strongest terms, to match their rhetorical support for Palestinian rights with aggressive diplomatic action in Europe, North America, and elsewhere.

"You want to support the Palestinians? Well, that is fine, but if you are really sincere about this, then make sure there is a constant linkage between vital Western interests in the Arab-Muslim world and Western positions and policies on the Palestinian question; otherwise, none will take us seriously," assured Abdullah

To be sure, the most important part must be done by Palestinians themselves. If Palestinians do not help themselves, no power, Arab or any other one, would help them.

Hence, it is extremely important that Palestinians end their silly game of mutual recrimination and passing-the-buck game. Palestinians shall build a united, solid front against gluttonous Israeli rapacity which would not stop unless the Palestinian cause disappeared into the dustbin of history?

* Khalid Amayreh a journalist based in the Occupied Palestinian town of Dura. He obtained his MA in journalism from the University of Southern Illinois in 1983. Since the 1990s, Mr. Amayreh has been working and writing for several news outlets among which is Aljazeera.net, Al-Ahram Weekly, Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA), and Middle East International.

Ali Abunimah debates Israeli Zionist about Jerusalem.

As EU Foreign ministers prepare to meet on Monday to discuss a Swedish proposal to recognise Jerusalem as the capital of both Israel and Palestine, the EU accuses Israel of working deliberately to alter the citys demographic balance and sever East Jerusalem from the West Bank. Can the EU play a role in peace making after being marginalised for so long? Or is the battler for Jerusalem already over?

Video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iz1SJnQe1fE

Support Sweden's Proposal to the European Union to Proclaim East Jerusalem as Capital of a Palestinian State.

Friends:

Many of us search for an avenue, act, effort, or voice to demand that Israel stop being treated as a separate nation on this planet, a nation above all divine and human laws, a nation that can get away with ethnic cleansing, murder, wars, invasions, genocides, and war crimes without any accountability to the rest of humanity including you and me.

If you seek such an avenue then here's the unique opportunity to do so. Sweden holds the current Presidency of the European Union and is deciding to introduce a resolution to be adopted by the E.U. that proposes recognizing East Jerusalem as a capital of a future Palestinian State.

This is the first time in 61 years that any nation has had the courage of its convictions and is willing to defy Israel's power and hold on western governments, none more so than ours, especially upon our slavish Congress that has never seen an AIPAC initiative or resolution it doesn't automatically adopt in large bipartisan numbers. This proposal only seeks to implement and adopt what the U.N. Security Council Resolutions and the rest of the world already have proclaimed for decades that Israel's annexation of East Jerusalem is "null and void"

We can't let Sweden face Israel's juggernaut alone. All of us must send letters of support to the Swedish Government, especially its Prime Minister, Minister of E.U. Affairs, and its Foreign Minister. Let them know we stand with them and support their noble efforts that Jerusalem is a Holy City for all Faiths not just a Jewish only city. Christians and Muslims have the inalienable right to worship in freedom from occupation in their Holy City as well.

Please be active and brave in this effort otherwise hold your peace. You're either with human justice and freedom or with your silence you're complicit with the evil called Israel.

Below is the website to use for your letters as well as my letter to the Swedish Prime Minister that I also forwarded to the appropriate Ministers on E.U. Affairs and Foreign Affairs.

http://bit.ly/pqqTS

December 2, 2009

"Right and wrong are the same in Palestine as anywhere else. What is peculiar about the Palestine conflict is that the world has listened to the party that has committed the offence and has turned a deaf ear to the victims."

--British Historian Arnold Toynbee

Dear Honorable Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt

I honor your decision to support the Goldstone Report despite Israel's threat to sever diplomatic relations with Sweden. Now Israel is threatening the entire E.U. with retaliation for the possibility of considering East Jerusalem as a future Capital of a Palestinian State. What other nation has the chutzpah to threaten an entire continent for its freedom of speech and action except Israel.

No nation has so blatantly defied the will of the international community including close to 85 UN Security Council Resolutions (not including the 44 Resolutions the U.S. vetoes) that condemn Israel's actions such as the illegal occupation of Arab territories, the building of illegal settlements, annexation of East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights, the protected violence of its settlers against Palestinian civilians and their total destruction of farms and olive trees, and its flaunting of the Fourth Geneva Convention while demanding Israel's withdrawal from such occupied land and its safeguarding of civilians under its control. Israel's annexation of East Jerusalem was unanimously condemned by UNSCR 478 of August 20, 1980 that declared Israel's annexation of East Jerusalem "null and void" adding that "this action constitutes a serious obstruction to achieving a comprehensive, just and lasting peace in the Middle East."

There have been many UN Security Council Resolutions that dealt with the status of Jerusalem, among them Resolutions 252 (1968) of 21 May 1968, 267 (1969) of 3 July 1969, 271 (1969) of 15 September 1969, 298 (1971) of 25 September 1971 and 465 (1980) of 1 March 1980.

Yet for 42 years Israel has defied and insulted all International organizations, peace efforts and agreements, EU and U.S. policies, the Arab initiatives, the Road Map Quartet, and recently thumbed its nose at President Obama's modest proposal to simply freeze settlements. This while demanding the U.N. pass and immediately implement Resolutions against Arab nations and Iran.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had the hypocritical audacity to insult the U.N. from the General Assembly's podium by stating that such body "has no shame or decency" to deal with Iran that according to him defies the few UN Security Council Resolutions dealing with its nuclear program.

The U.S., the Arab and Muslim world are paralyzed to deal with Israel and its policy of force and war upon innocent civilians to achieve its goal of "Greater Israel" The U.S. is constrained by the power of Israel's lobby and its supportive financial and media institutions while the Arab world is impotent given the dependence of its corrupt leaders on U.S protection for their dictatorial hold on power.

The single courageous and humanitarian hope left for occupied Palestinians is Sweden's extraordinary proposal to encourage the E.U. to proclaim East Jerusalem as a future Palestinian capital.

There is no doubt that Sweden, like other nations, organizations such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, ICRC, B'tselem, Peace Now, media outlets who dare criticize Israel including BBC's simple act of raising funds for besieged Gazans, academicians, universities, politicians and individuals who believe in the freedom from oppression for all peoples; will endure an Israeli smear and attack campaign upon your government and people supported by its Lobbies, the U.S. Government, especially the ever compliant Congress, and much of the Pro Israel American media.

The freedom, justice, peace, and saving of human lives from oppression, ethnic cleansing, and the constant use of force and wars, is most worthy of Sweden's, the E.U.'s, and the world's sacrifice and endurance for such inalienable rights for all peoples as enshrined in the U.N. Charter, the Declaration of Universal Human Rights as well as countless U.N. Resolutions.

In a recent interview Israeli former minister of education Shulamit Aloni

admitted that Israel's weapon of mass destruction: "Anti-Semitism" is a trick: She said:

"Well it's a trick, we always use it. When from Europe somebody is

criticizing Israel then we bring up the Holocaust. When in this country

(U.S.A) people are criticizing Israel then they are anti-Semitic."

Sir, no nation or individual must be considered above any divine or human law. Israel must be held accountable for its expansionist military policies on defenseless civilians.

The world, although intimidated into silence, surely supports your honorable efforts on East Jerusalem. Such a decision will definitively break Israel's domination regarding Middle East peace and bring hope to the world that someone somewhere does value justice for all and is willing to speak loudly and proudly. The world is sure to follow your courage and finally demand Israel, a historically persecuted people, cease persecuting another people innocent of their history.

May God bless your efforts and may I personally express to you, your government and the Swedish people my deepest gratitude and respect for being the world's first nation to act for justice.

Respectfully;

Mohamed Khodr

USA

Illustration by Khalil Bendib

By Maidhc Ó Cathail | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

In their 2006 article "The Israel Lobby," John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt famously assert, "Other special-interest groups have managed to skew foreign policy, but no lobby has managed to divert it as far from what the national interest would suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that US interests and those of the other country - in this case, Israel - are essentially identical." Having for decades successfully steered policymaking in Washington in a pro-Israel direction, Israel's American Lobby has more recently turned its attention to Europe. Despite its brief presence in Brussels, it appears to have already had marked success in influencing the nascent foreign policy of the European Union.

One of the most important of the more than 60 organizations that make up "the Lobby" is the American Jewish Committee (AJC). Jeff Blankfort, an American Jew who is one of the Lobby's most trenchant critics, described the AJC as "the Lobby's unofficial foreign office." Extending its global diplomatic mission, the AJC opened an office in Brussels in 2004. Since then, according to Blankfort, it has held weekly meetings with a high official or the chief of state of EU member states. The meetings seem to be having the desired effect. As Blankfort wrote in 2006, "Over the past year the EU has moved away from relative support for the Palestinians to adopting one position after another reflecting Israeli demands."

As part of its lobbying efforts in Brussels, the AJC founded the Transatlantic Institute (TAI) in February 2004. According to its mission statement, the institute functions as "an intellectual bridge between the United States and the European Union" with the aim of "strengthening transatlantic ties." Although it describes itself as "nongovernmental, non-partisan and independent," TAI's publications leave little doubt that it intends to shift the EU in a more aggressively pro-Israel direction, as the neoconservatives succeeded in doing with the Bush administration's Middle Eastern policy.

Like American neocons, the TAI's executive director, Dr. Emanuele Ottolenghi, has a "special affinity for Israel." Before moving to Brussels, the Jewish Italian academic taught Israel Studies (a discipline which Mearsheimer and Walt describe as "intended in large part to promote Israel's image") at the Oxford Centrefor Hebrew and Jewish Studies, after having received his Ph.D. in political science from Hebrew University in Jerusalem. And like the current Israeli government and pro-Israeli groups worldwide, Iran's non-existent nuclear weapons are Ottolenghi's overriding concern at the moment - now that the threat of Iraq's non-existent WMDs has promptly been forgotten. In his 2009 book, Under a Mushroom Cloud: Europe, Iran and the Bomb, Ottolenghi urges Europeans to stop Iran's nuclear program. Despite his concern about the bomb, it's unlikely that he would support a comprehensive ban on nuclear weapons in the Middle East - since Israel is the only country in the region that currently possesses them.

Israel's crying wolf is nothing if not predictable though. As for the "mushroom cloud" that's supposedly looming over Europe, who, bar the mainstream media, could forget Condoleezza Rice's pre-Iraq invasion soundbite: "we don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud"? It was Michael Gerson, Bush's pro-Israeli speechwriter, who thought up that one. Incidentally, Gerson was so incensed by Mearsheimer and Walt's criticism of the Lobby that he accused them in his Washington Post column of "sowing the seeds of anti-Semitism."

Anyone for World War IV?

Before European policymakers give too much credence to the prescriptions of Ottolenghi and his "non-partisan" institute, they should familiarize themselves with the geopolitical outlook of Commentary, the magazine for which Ottolenghi blogs. Like the Transatlantic Institute, what became "the flagship of neoconservatism" in the 1970s was also founded by the American Jewish Committee, a relationship that lasted from 1945 to 2006. But above all, Commentary has been dominated by the political views of Norman Podhoretz.

Podhoretz, who has edited Commentary since 1960, claims that September 11, 2001 marked the beginning of World War IV (he considers the Cold War to have been World War III). "We are only in the very early stages of what promises to be a very long war," declares the doyen of neoconservatism, "and Iraq is only the second front to have been opened in that war: the second scene, so to speak, of the first act of a five-act play." Whatever about the incalculable cost in blood and treasure to the United States, presumably Israel won't have any enemies left standing by the end of this bloody drama. Coincidentally or not, in 2007, the same year he published World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism (Vintage), Podhoretz was honoured by

Bar-Ilan University with its Guardian of Zion Award, bestowed on Jews who have been supportive of the State of Israel.

However, those who question the motives behind Podhoretz's enthusiasm for World War IV, or believe that his belligerent Zionism poses a far greater threat to world peace than "Islamofascism" - a nebulous concept that lumps together disparate entities such as Hamas, Hezbollah, Syria, Iran and Al Qaeda - are invariably smeared as anti-Semites. It's not surprising, of course, that Zionists like Ottolenghi, in a transparent attempt to discredit their opponents, claim that "anti-Zionism is anti-semitism." After all, "the charge of anti-semitism," as Mearsheimer and Walt point out, is one of the Lobby's "most powerful weapons."

What is worrying, however, is that the EU now legitimates the deployment of that weapon by pro-Israelis against their critics. According to the definition given by the European Union's Fundamental Rights Agency, it seems that you're an anti-semite if you agree with Mearsheimer and Walt that pressure from Israel and the Lobby played a "critical" role in the decision to invade Iraq, or if you suspect that the likes of Podhoretz and Ottolenghi may be more loyal to Israel than they are to their respective countries. Before coming up with their working definition of anti-Semitism in 2004, the EU consulted with Jewish organizations, including the American Jewish Committee. If they were asked about the question of loyalty, the AJC probably forgot to mention the case of Jonathan Pollard.

Pollard, an American Jew, is now serving a life sentence for stealing thousands of documents while employed as an analyst for US naval intelligence during the mid-1980s. In Dangerous Liaison, Andrew and Leslie Cockburn write, "Though he always maintained that he was motivated purely by devotion to Israel, he was well paid for his services." That money may have come from the US-Israeli Binational Industrial Research and Development Foundation (BIRD), according to Claudia Wright, the author of Spy, Steal, and Smuggle: Israel's Special Relationship With the United States. When Jordan Baruch, an adviser to BIRD's board, was asked for an audit report, he replied, "Even if I did (have one), I couldn't release it." Interestingly, it was Baruch and his wife, "long-time AJC leaders," who funded the Transatlantic Foundation.

In his address to the United Nations General Assembly on September 24, Benjamin Netanyahu portrayed Israel's grievance against Iran as a conflict which "pits civilization against barbarism." It's tempting to dismiss the Israeli leader's assertion as the hyperbolic trope of a demagogue, but there may be some truth to what he said. After all, what better word than "barbarism" to describe what Israel has done to the Palestinians for the past six decades? Or the havoc that Israel's supporters in America have wrought on the people of Iraq? Or the untold devastation they have in mind for the Iranians? The influence the Israel Lobbywields in Washington has ensured that the United States has long been complicit in Israel's barbarism. And if the Lobby gets it way in Brussels, so too will the European Union.

* Maidhc Ó Cathail is a freelance writer living in Japan. He has written for Antiwar.com, Dissident Voice, The Palestine Chronicle, OpEd News, Media Monitors Network and many other publications.

Illustration by Carlos Latuff

By: Mohamed Khodr

Never in its 61 year history has Israel ever been held accountable for its military invasions, indiscriminate bombings of civilians in Lebanon and the Occupied Territories, its illegal siege and collective punishment of mass civilian populations, and its constant denial of all humanitarian and medical aid to populations its military has attacked and controls despite dozens of U.N. Security Council Resolutions to the contrary. It began in 1949 at the Lausanne Conference when Israel refused to accept any responsibility for the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinians despite President Truman's insistence, the very President who gave this illegitimate rogue nation its birth.

In six months, from late November 1947 to early May, Israel committed the largest theft of land and war crimes against Palestinian civilians since the Nazis. One of the most murderous war crimes committed by the Zionists was in the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin where according to the New York Times at the time 254 Palestinian men, women, and children were massacred or blown up in their homes. The U.N. founded to secure peace for humanity after World War II discovered its total impotence in regard to Israel, thanks to the protection of the U.S. that has continued till this day.

Was Deir Yassin the only act of its kind?

"By 1948, the Jew was not only able to 'defend himself' but to commit massive atrocities as well. Indeed, according to the former director of the Israeli army archives, 'in almost every village occupied by us during the War of Independence, acts were committed which are defined as war crimes, such as murders, massacres, and rapes'...Uri Milstein, the authoritative Israeli military historian of the 1948 war, goes one step further, maintaining that 'every skirmish ended in a massacre of Arabs.'" Norman Finkelstein, "Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, New and Revised Edition
." (1)

In 1982 Israel (Sharon) invaded Lebanon destroying villages and killing civilians on its way to Beirut that it besieged and indiscriminately bombed from the air, sea, and land killing thousands of civilians. It did not spare schools, hospitals, electrical and water plants, orphanages, nursing homes, mosques, churches, roads, television and radio stations; not even ambulances carrying the injured were sacred. That invasion resulted in close to 20,000 civilian deaths.

To Israel Arab Muslims and Christians are fodder in a perceived concentration camp worthy of extermination, ethnic cleansing, and gassing. This is not just a policy of Israel's political and military leaders but a policy of Jewish Zionists prior to Israel's establishment and of its most beloved and respected Rabbis who consider one million Arabs are not worth a Jewish fingernail or, publicly call for the total annihilation of Arabs who are subhuman. (The Jewish Babylonian Talmud states that "children of goyim are subhuman").

During the summer of 1982 the UN Security Council passed several Resolutions "asking" Israel to lift its siege of Beirut and allow food, water, and medicines into the city. It was then that the Sabra and Chatila massacre occurred, ironically and superficially investigated by Israel, but not by the International Community that ignored the deliberate massacre of over 1000 Palestinian men, women, and children killed in their sleep by Israel's allies, the Lebanese Christian Phalangist Party, under Sharon's supervision and protection.

A U.N. Report investigating the 1996 Israel shelling of a UN Compound in Qana, Lebanon (Israel occupied southern Lebanon from 1982 to 2000) found Israel responsible for the deliberate bombing of the compound that killed 102 civilians seeking shelter.

Robert Fisk called the shelling a "massacre".

For releasing the report despite U.S. objections the U.S. vetoed the reappointment of Boutros Ghali for a second term as UN Secretary General despite Clinton's high praise of him just a few months earlier thanking him for his "outstanding leadership". According to the Israeli dominated media and U.S. foreign policy--no one should dare criticize Israel, or else.

Need Proof: Here's just one example. A headline from the Norwegian paper, Aftenposten, 12/1/06:

"US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice threatened Norway with "serious political consequences" after Finance Minister and Socialist Left Party leader Kristin Halvorsen admitted to supporting a boycott of Israeli goods" (2)

Tragically, in 2006, exactly a decade later, Israel again bombed Qana killing 53 civilians, most were children. Human Rights Watch's investigated the massacre and squarely blamed Israel for the indiscriminate bombing and found no Hezbollah fighters or rockets as declared by Israel for the justification of this mass murder, a fact Israel later confirmed. As usual, there was no U.N. investigation and Israel was off the hook. The colonial west doesn't give a damn about Arab, African, Asian, or Latin American blood, but one drop of Jewish blood and the world is inflamed with Zionist attacks and claims of Anti Semitism and Holocaust deniers.

In 2002 Israel launched a massive incursion into the West Bank devastating its six largest cities, but especially it besieged, bombed, and wholly devastated a large swath of the Jenin refugee Camp killing at least 54 civilians. The devastation of Jenin prompted the UN Security Council to pass Resolution 1405 of 19 April 2002 calling for an investigative team of respectable international leaders and specialists to visit Jenin and assess the situation.

While the team was in Geneva heading to Jenin Israel refused to accept the team, thus under Israel and U.S. pressure the team was ultimately disbanded. Thus Israel's military, again, was politically absolved.

Recently the UN Human Rights Council created a highly respectable investigative team led by the renowned Judge (Jewish) Richard Goldstone to assess if any war crimes were committed by Israel in its massive military strike on Gaza's 1.5 million civilian population. As usual Israel refused cooperation with the team while Hamas accepted. The Goldstone Report found evidence of war crimes committed by Israel and to a lesser extent by Hamas.

The U.S. and Israel have succeeded in minimizing the report and pressuring Mahmoud Abbas to withdraw the report given that it could provide governments and organizations the right to arrest and prosecute Israeli leaders involved in the all out war on Gaza. Israeli soldiers involved in the Gaza massacre confirmed the indiscriminate and callous murder of civilians and their use as human shields. Their order was shoot and ask questions later.

Mahmoud Abbas is nothing short of a corrupt traitor, an Israeli-American, "moderate" Arab regime puppet. He must be thrown out of office to keep the right and just cause of the Palestinians, the world's largest refugee population and one that has endured the world's longest occupation by a Zionist murderous regime that owns America's capital. Palestinians must take to the street and reclaim the justice of their cause and elect a moral and honest government willing to stand up to Israel, America, Europe, Arab puppets, and demand their independence sooner rather than later and by any means necessary. After all isn't that what Bush did to liberate Iraqis from oppression?

The question before the international community and its legal obligations to protect and serve all of humanity without exception is when will Israel ever be held accountable for its repeated massacres on civilian populations. Is Israel above international laws? Does Israel enjoy a special immunity to kill with impunity? Will America's and Europe's hypocrisy and double standards to favor one nation, Israel, above all nations, while enforcing "their" international standards upon the rest of the world ever end?

The west has not only enabled Jews to steal Palestine from its owners but incredibly has given Israel the right to determine the lives and deaths of millions of Palestinians, a fact accepted by the world, especially the cowardly Arabs and Muslims around the world who see Jerusalem being Judaized and slowly striped of its Muslim and Christian foundations and can only whimper in the privacy of their homes. Damn their silent voices, damn their fear and paralysis, and damn their acceptance of the most incompetent rulers in the world whose only accomplishment is the length of their rule.

Let us pray that Planet Earth will cease to be "Israeli Occupied Territory" where the western world besieges the planet politically, economically, and militarily for the sake of Israel.

It is impossible to comprehend that six million Israeli's so dominate over six billion people, i.e. with a ratio of 1000:1 Gentiles to Jews.

Perhaps the Jewish domination of the world's money, media, and movies that besieges a gullible, superficial, uninformed, literate but uneducated western mind whose soul is driven by wealth and worldly pleasures, but one that is devoid of intellectual curiosity and a spiritual foundation.

The west has been transformed from "I think therefore I am" to "I don't think therefore I'm not"

God help this fragile Planet from the greed and inhumanity of all governments.

1. The Origin of the Palestine-Israel Conflict: Published by Jews for Justice in the Middle East
2. http://www.aftenposten.no/english/local/article1196096.ece
3. "Hidden History of Zionism": http://www.marxists.de/middleast/schoenman/index.htm (MUST READ)

A German legal dispute over imports from Israel's settlements in the occupied territories could lead to the imposition of customs duties

By Ralf Beste and Christoph Schult

As the largest Israeli settlement in the Palestinian-administered areas of the West Bank, Maale Adumim is home to 40,000 people. Bulldozers are clearing lots for new houses on its outskirts. Its population is growing by the week and, in recent years, it has grown faster than any other settlement.

On the edge of the settlement's industrial zone, there is a factory operated by a company called Soda-Club. The steel gate is painted blue and green to match the company's curvy, modern-looking logo. A camera records the movements of anyone approaching the gate. The plant produces tabletop devices that add carbonation to flat water, like the ones used in many German kitchens. And for those who prefer a sweeter taste, there's also syrup coming out of Maale Adumim.
 
Journalists are not welcome to visit Soda-Club. As Marketing Director Asaf Snear claims on the telephone, it's to protect against industrial espionage.
 
But there's another reason behind this aversion to media attention: Soda-Club's products are at the center of a legal dispute with Germany that could significantly intensify the already heated debate over Israel's settlement policy.
 
The Hamburg Finance Court must now decide whether Soda-Club devices made in Maale Adumim can be imported into the European Union duty-free, like all other Israeli industrial products. Brussels doesn't want the company's products to fall into this category because they are manufactured in Israeli settlements located in the occupied territories.

The real question revolves around whether Maale Adumim is part of Israel. The EU has not formally recognized Israel's claim to Maale Adumim and other settlements. But, in practice, it has done little to stand in the way of Israeli settlement activities.

But that could now change. The Hamburg court has consulted with the European Court of Justice about obtaining a "preliminary ruling" that would settle the issue in a binding manner for all 27 EU member states. The decision is expected to come down in the coming months. If the court decides that a customs duty can be assessed, it will be tantamount to handing down a decision against Israel's settlement policy. The delicate question at hand is whether Germany and the EU should accept how Israel handles the occupied territories or should wield their sharpest sword -- economic sanctions.
 
A 'Highly Explosive Case'

In formal terms, the judges are merely being asked to reach a decision about €19,155.46. Brita GmbH, a German company, had imported Soda-Club water-carbonating machines and syrup from Maale Adumim. The company also labeled the products as being "Made in Israel" and claimed that they should consequently be exempt from customs duties.
 
But the main customs office in Hamburg's harbor refused to allow this policy to continue. German customs agents contacted their Israeli counterparts to find out where exactly the products were made. When the response came, it said that they had been made in an area "under Israeli customs administration." When the Hamburg agents wrote back, asking whether the products had actually been manufactured in Israeli settlements, they received no response. So the Germans slapped a duty on the products.
 
Then Brita filed a lawsuit against this decision. The matter quickly made its way to the EU Commission, which wants to use the legal dispute over Soda-Club to make an example of Israel. In an internal memo, it has asked EU member states for "support." The German Foreign Ministry is monitoring the "highly explosive case" with some interest -- and a certain amount of sympathy.
 
The EU is already prepared for confrontation when it comes to Israel's new nationalist, right-wing government. The 27 EU foreign ministers have temporarily put a planned diplomatic "upgrading" of relations with Israel on hold.
 
Now Europe hopes to use the customs dispute to apply additional pressure on Israel. The EU is the second-largest market for Israeli goods, after the United States. In 2008, for example, Israeli companies exported €12 billion ($16.8 billion) in goods to Europe. An estimated one-third of these goods are either fully or partially made in the occupied territories. Most apparently reach Europe duty-free, and an Israeli reimbursement fund for exports subject to duties was hardly used at all last year.
 
In response to EU pressure, Jerusalem signed an agreement in 2005 that requires every Israeli exporter to provide the customs agency with the location and postal code of the factory where any given product was produced. But when Israeli importers deliberately declare an incorrect place of origin, customs agents  are powerless to react.
 
The situation has aggravated the British government and prompted it to urge the other 26 EU member states to agree on a procedure that would allow consumers to see exactly where Israeli goods come from. The proposal makes many Israelis uneasy. Could this mean, they worry, that European governments will soon be telling consumers: "Don't buy from Jews"?

Given the country's history, this is understandably a very sensitive issue in Germany. This makes it all the more surprising that the German government has been willing to openly comment on the Soda-Club affair. In response to a parliamentary question from the opposition Green Party, the government has said that there can be no exemption from customs duty for "goods from the occupied territories."
 
Meanwhile, the Soda-Club company is doing exactly what many Israelis do when it comes to the Palestinian conflict -- ignoring the problem. When asked for Soda-Club's reaction to people criticizing it for manufacturing its products in a settlement, Marketing Director Snear says: "Soda-Club is a non-apolitical company."

Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

Provided by Spiegel Online