An Israeli solider shoot and kill Mustafa Tamimi at near point-blank range with a tear-gas canister to the face.

There is a famous scene in Mary Shelley's classic where Victor Frankenstein realises that he created a monster and that this monster might be the end of him. Such is the scene that comes to mind when thinking about the news emerging from the occupied West Bank in recent days. Israeli settlers, living in illegal colonies in Palestinian territory, rioted again. This time, however, they did not go after their usual target - Palestinian civilians - rather, they raided an Israeli military base where they injured an Israeli soldier.

Suddenly, the Israeli government sprang into action. An emergency meeting of the Israeli cabinet was called. Officials - Israeli officials - even began to use the term "terrorist" to describe the perpetrators.

Just a day earlier, Israeli settlers from the Settlement of Yitzhar raided the Palestinian village of Asira al-Qibliya, causing damage to property and terrifying residents. Also, in the past week alone, three different Palestinian mosques in Ramallah, Salfit and Jerusalem suffered arson attacks at the hands of Israeli settlers.

These sorts of attacks against Palestinians are a regular occurrence. Arsons, stonings, destruction of property, shootings, physical attacks and harassment are but a few of the daily occurring categories we have kept track of in the Palestine Centre's Settler Violence database. In 2011 there have been a record number of violent settler attacks. In fact, in each of the previous five years, settler violence has increased from one year to the next.

Despite this undeniable fact, the Israeli government has done little to crack down on this type of violence. The main reason why settler violence has been able to increase, year after year, is because the settlers continue to feel emboldened when their attacks against Palestinian civilians go undeterred.

The Oslo Accords divided the West Bank into three geographic areas. In Area A, in which most Palestinian urban centres fall, the Palestinian Authority is responsible for security (although the Israelis routinely enter Area A at will) but in Areas B and C, which comprise over 80 per cent of the territory, it is the Israelis which are responsible for security. This means Palestinian police are not permitted to protect Palestinian civilians from Israeli settlers in most of the West Bank. The problem is, of course, that the Israelis are not doing this job either and so it should come as no surprise that 95 per cent of settler violence occurs in Areas B and C.

Often the Israeli Army turns the other way when Israeli settlers attack Palestinians. In some cases caught on video, Israeli soldiers stand idly by while settlers rampage. In other cases, like the one earlier this year in Qusra, the Israeli army intervenes to protect settlers once they've started altercations with villagers. That is how Isam Oudeh was killed - defending his own village - in September.

Israeli settler violence against Palestinians and the Israeli state's failure to adequately respond to it highlight an important aspect of the Israeli occupation's Apartheid-like policies. The Israeli Human Rights Organisation B'Tselem documented 835 cases of Palestinian minors being arrested for stone-throwing from 2005-2010. Of these, 99.88 per cent were convicted in military trials. There have been hundreds of stone-throwing attacks by Israeli settlers in 2011 alone, yet few are ever arrested - let alone convicted - and throwing stones is among the least of their crimes.

Last week, a 28-year-old Palestinian named Mustafa Tamimi in the village of Nabi Saleh was protesting the continued expansion of Israeli settlements and particularly the confiscation of land and water resources belonging to his village. These had been taken by the neighbouring Israeli settlement of Halamish with the support of the Israeli military.

Tamimi was shot and killed at near point-blank range with a tear-gas canister to the face.

For years, the Israeli military that governs the West Bank and the state that directs it have supported deplorable policies to repress protesters like Tamimi, who oppose settlement expansion. But the state fails to implement policies to crack down on settlers who seek the exact opposite, and often use violent means to achieve their objectives.

No one should be surprised. The problem of settler violence is a monster that Israel has created, nourished and supported. Now, with attacks on Israeli military bases, the monster may even have turned on its creator.

When will this tragic horror end?

When we realise that it is the military occupation and its underlying policies that have brought it to life.

This article originally appeared on AlJazeera.net.

* Yousef Munayyer is a writer and political analyst based in Washington, DC. He is currently the Executive Director of the Jerusalem Fund for Education and Community Development.

As Israeli Jewish terrorist attacks on mosques in occupied Palestine are assuming a phenomenal frequency.

Indeed, with the Israeli government and security establishment doing next to nothing to put an end to this wanton and unprovoked terror, a huge fire is being started in the region.

In religious wars, all sides are usually variably culpable and blamable. However, in the occupied Palestinian territories, Jewish fanatics bear nearly 100% of the blame.

Their attacks against mosques are not provoked by similar Palestinian attacks against Jewish religious places. In fact, Jewish terror groups readily admit that arson attacks against mosques are meant to embarrass the Israeli occupation army.

The attacks are perpetrated under the slogan "Price Tag" every time the Israeli army moves to dismantle a Jewish settlement outpost.

So why is it that the Palestinians and their places of worship are attacked, not the Israeli army?

Well, it takes a thoroughly sick mind to rationalize, even glamorize such attacks, but the Israeli settler camp never faces a shortage of virulence, mental depravity and mental sickness.

We are talking after all about the worst of the worst that racist, Talmudic Judaism could breed, people who view the rest of mankind as subhuman.

The practical implications of such a venomous ideology are enormous and absolutely nefarious. If non-Jews are subhuman, then their lives must be worthless, have no sanctity and expendable.

Think not I am making an exaggeration as it is difficult to exaggerate the evilness of these racist thugs who spend a lifetime demonizing and dehumanizing humanity as they celebrate their Chosen-people or Master-race status.

Unfortunately, the Israeli government and security establishment are giving these criminal-minded thugs a free rein to gang up on virtually unprotected Palestinian civilians, torch mosques and churches and vandalize olive groves throughout occupied Palestine.

It is very hard to buy the Israeli government's argument that these terrorists are a marginal group. But even if they were a marginal group, this wouldn't minimize the gravity of their terrorist actions.

The Nazi Hitler Youth was once viewed as a marginal group. However, the world saw what that "marginal" group was able to do during Kristalnacht in November, 1938.

Hence, the question begs itself whether the Israeli government should wait until the so-called hill-top "troublemakers" morph into a Jewish Hitler Youth.

Unfortunately, the Israeli government, the most fascist ever, can't be given the benefit of the doubt.

In the final analysis, the suspected connivance and obvious leniency with which the Netanyahu government treats these despicable criminals, along with the mind-boggling reluctance to prosecute them raise many hard questions about the nature of that government.

One Israeli writer, when asked recently why the government didn't exercise its legal authority to arrest and try Jewish terrorists who attack Muslim and Christian holy place, said a venomous snake wouldn't bit its own tail.

There is another worrying dimension to this obscenity, namely the virtually complete absence of real condemnations of these terrorist acts by Jewish leaders in Israel and abroad.

Jewish leaders in Europe and North America wouldn't wait a minute to condemn the slightest anti-Semitic attack on Jewish targets, even if this target happened to be a lone Jewish grave in an isolated village in Eastern Europe .

Even remarks or even slip-of-the-tongue jokes are castigated and people are made to pay a price.

However, when fellow Jews carry out outrageous acts of terror, arson and vandalism against mosques and churches, we see that these same Jewish leaders become speechless as if the acts of terror took place in a different galaxy.

The Jewish leadership must realize that the orphans of Kahana and thuggish terrorists of Gush Emunim are more than trouble makers. They are in fact criminal fire-starters whose pyromania could burn Jews as well as non-Jews.

Hence, Jewish leaders must have the necessary courage and rectitude to admit that Jewish terrorism is a two-lane street and that Muslims won't stand idle if their peaceable holy places continue to be torched and vandalized in the most blatant and unprovoked manner.

Of course, it would be naïve to expect verbal condemnations by Jewish leaders to stem the tide of Jewish settler terror against Muslim and Christian holy places.

However, this is the very least Jewish leaders should and can do to exonerate themselves from the ostensibly logical Charge that these leaders adopt a duplicitous attitude toward Jewish terror in Palestine by denouncing it when speaking to a non-Jewish audience while praising it privately.

Finally, the Palestinians themselves must not entrust the task of protecting mosques and Churches to Israel . The Palestinian Authority (PA) must deploy armed guards in the vicinity of mosques in order to protect them from Jewish terror. Crying out for help won't help very much. We have to do our own duty first and none would blame us for doing what anyone else would if they were in our shoes.

* 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.

Truth and Justice have been a historical anathema to all Empires and the powerful oligarchies throughout history.

From all divine revelations to the necessity of humanity's coexistence in peace, Justice has been the highest and noblest of virtues to ensure that no man, no government, and no nation is above the law of equality of rights for all mankind whereby the weakest, poorest, and oppressed, can exact and restore their freedom, equality of worth, dignity, and receive justice for the ills and evil perpetrated against them. Life, liberty, human rights, freedoms, and free will are divinely endowed, thus humanity's purpose is to allow no man usurp such virtues and blessings.

"There is but one law for all, namely that law which governs all law, the law of our Creator, the law of humanity, justice, equity - the law of nature and of nations."
--Edmund Burke

For the first time in human history nations came together in a united institution to prevent and resolve conflicts, to settle disputes, and to provide an international venue where injustice and the inhumanity of man against man can be heard and adjudicated

Thus emerged from the ashes of two world wars in Europe, the United Nations, an institution of hope, freedom, justice, equality, and human rights for all, people's right to self determination, freedom from aggression and occupation; an institution that fosters peace; but sadly it became an institution of the powerful, for the powerful, at the expense of the lives of billions of people around the world. Since its inception the U.N. has served the political, economic, military, and social whims of the oligarchy of five Security Council nations each with a vote or veto that can preserve lives and peace, or commit wanton genocides allegedly acting in self defense and in the national interests. Much of these Security Council decisions are dependent on domestic politics and the power of special interests. It seems western appetite for imperialistic power has not been satisfied by centuries of imperial occupation of most of the world.

National interests boils down to money, especially in alleged democracies where elections are bought and paid for by the top one percent of their populations. Politicians and political institutions are held hostage by the very people who paid for their elections.

The most glaring examples in modern history are the illegitimate creation of the State of Israel in Palestine due to the influence and power of Britain and the United States who imposed their will on the United Nations as well as the illegal, immoral, and genocidal invasion of Iraq by the U.S. (and allies) due to the powerful influence of mostly Jewish Neocons operating in the interest of Israel, along with the unquenchable avarice of oil companies. They manufactured false intelligence and mass propaganda that created an unstoppable hysteria in the White House, Congress, and nation.

"The war in Iraq was conceived by 25 neoconservative intellectuals, most of them Jewish, who are pushing President Bush to change the course of history."
--Ari Shavit, "White Man's Burden", Haaretz, April 3, 2003

After nine years of death and destruction the U.S. finally pulls out of Iraq (not completely) leaving behind a previously prosperous nation converted into a desert, but which they label as a peaceful, democratic, and prosperous Iraq. They killed to spread democracy. Today Iraq is enduring the most violent sectarian violence that threatens the unity of the nation, thanks to Israel and the United States.

"In the emerging world of ethnic conflict and civilizational clash, Western belief in the universality of Western culture suffers three problems: it is false; it is immoral; and it is dangerous...Imperialism is the necessary logical consequence of universalism."
--Professor Samuel Huntington, "The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order", p. 310

These two examples showcase the ineptness, failure, and incompetence of the very United Nations created to prevent just such illegal, unjust and immoral genocidal acts by one nation against another committing unimaginable war crime, crimes against humanity, genocide, and aggression.

Our world has indeed become an Israeli-centric planet where Israel's interest have become the focal point and obsession of all governments, no where more so than in the United States where Israel's interests form the basis of U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. U.S. Presidents usually appoint Jewish Zionists to the National Security Council to direct MidEast policy. Is it any wonder that with U.S. backing Israel has rejected every U.N. Resolution, every International initiative or peace process, even opposing America's national interests, the very hand that feeds, arms, and protects it.

The U.S. Ambassador to Israel, Dan Shapiro, speaking to the Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI) on September 6, 2011 publicly admitted what the entire world already knows; that U.S. foreign policy is an Israeli formulated policy that only serves Israel, not the United States.

He said:

"The first is this: the test of every policy the Administration develops in the Middle East is whether it is consistent with the goal of ensuring Israel's future as a secure, Jewish, democratic state. That is a commitment that runs as a common thread through our entire government, even while approaching the U.S.-Israel relationship and regional challenges from a variety of perspectives.....The test of our policy - that it advances Israel's status as a secure, Jewish, democratic state - also explains our commitment to vigorously battle against those who would attempt to isolate or delegitimize Israel in the international community."

Many American politicians, diplomats, military officials, academicians, journalists and national organizations have been saying this for decades, but they've been denied any media exposure to address the power of Israel and its lobby, mainly AIPAC, on the U.S. government.

"President Bill Clinton," said AIPAC was "better than anyone at lobbying in this town," or former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who called it "the most effective general-interest group ... across the entire planet." Former Senator Fritz Hollings (D-SC) said upon his retirement that "you can't have an Israel policy other than what AIPAC gives you around here," (Quote from Professor Stephen Walt, "The Mythical Power of the Arab Lobby", Dec.9, 2010) Thus for whom the bells toll; they toll for Israel and never for its millions of victimized dispossessed Palestinians. According to Golda Meir "There were no such thing as Palestinians."

The world has been indoctrinated to accept Israel's narrative of history of its creation and its professed innocence toward the suffering of the Palestinians. Israel has attacked Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Libya, and Yemeni - and now next stop: Iran.

All the while the U.N. and international community can only profess "concern"; which is meaningless to the dead and injured.

"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 committed the offence and has turned a deaf ear to the victims."
-- Professor Arnold Toynbee, British Historian

Thus too whom do the victims of western and Zionist imperialism turn to for protection and justice? Who on this planet is courageous and principled enough to tell Israel, one of the smallest nations on earth, that its thievery of Palestine, its unabated ethnic cleansing, its utter destruction of hundreds of Palestinian villages, its demolition of thousands of homes, farms and orchards, its oppression and daily violation of the human rights of its subjugated people, its theft of Palestinian water to fill the settler's swimming pools, and its non stop construction of new settlements on stolen Palestinian land despite the repeated "concern" of the U.N., U.S., E.U., the Quartet, and hundreds of U.N. Resolutions that Israel ignores and stomps on with impunity, even humiliating the President of the United States in the Oval office who dared suggest a "freeze" of new settlements.

No such expressed "concerns" have ever stopped one brick from being laid in what the world calls "illegal settlements", but which the U.S. deems only as "illegitimate" as evidenced by the very pandering and humiliating veto cast by the U.S. in the Security Council against a resolution that identifies these settlements as "illegal".

Although fourteen nations in the Security Council somewhat redeemed themselves recently by criticizing the U.S. for blocking condemnation of Israel's continued settlement activity in the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem. Tragically, Israel will once again thumb its nose at the Security Council.

The United Nations has embarrassingly failed in its stated mission and has lost all credibility, with the exception of the U.N. Human Rights Council, that it has any authority or legitimacy to impact Israel's decades of an illegal occupation of over three million Palestinians, much less the status of seven million Palestinian refugees living in squalor camps in neighboring Arab nations. Israel has tried hard to end UNRWA's mission to provide much needed assistance to the Palestinian refugees, even forcing Congress to threaten defunding the organization. According to Israel Palestinian children must not be fed, provided with health care and an education, nor clean drinking water. If it can't kill them with bullets, it'll kill them by starvation and disease.

As long as the world is impotent and cowardly to face Israel there will never be any justice for the Palestinians, or any peace in the region or western hemisphere.

The world has come to accept that Israel is always above the law, that it will never be held accountable for its wars, genocides, and oppression of the Palestinians; that it will continue to rule and act with impunity with American weapons and vetoes against hapless Palestinian and Lebanese civilians.

The world is holding its cowardly breath wondering when will Israel attack Iran, an action with serious consequences for the region, the U.S., Europe, China, and Japan, both militarily and economically.

But let's look at the other side of the coin where the United Nations Security Council flexes its muscle. The UNSC's power is only reflected against weaker nations, in particular in the Arab and Muslim world. Here harsh resolutions with serious political and economic consequences are routinely passed whereby these nations are held accountable and some leaders are sought for prosecution in the ICC.

The independent International Criminal Court, much like the U.N. Security Council, is hampered by its Statute, hypocrisy, double standards, and the political will of the same powerful nations who dominate the U.N. In practice it's a court against southern hemisphere nations and leaders, but never against the U.S., Britain etc, for their illegal invasion and devastation of Iraq; and never against Israel, the world's last colonial power.

According to the Associated Press, December 15, 2011, the International Criminal Court's Prosecutor, Mr. Luis Moreno Ocampo, said this regarding the issue of the potential arrest of the Sudanese President for alleged war crimes:

"The chief prosecutor for the International Criminal Court (Luis Moreno Ocampo) said Thursday that Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir's "destiny" is clear: he will face justice for alleged genocide and crimes against humanity in Darfur... International justice is here to stay."

How courageous against Sudan, but oh, how cowardly against Israel. Is there no courageous state party member of the ICC. that will refer Israel for possible prosecution for its war crimes? Won't anyone refer the two murderous tyrants of Syria and Yemen for their slaughter of innocent civilians yearning to break free from their dictatorships?

Sadly, in the entire structure of the ICC there is not one single Arab or Muslim judge or prosecutor, a glaring omission of representation of 1.7 billion Muslims in the world residing in 57 Muslim nations representing 30% of all nations.
It is conceivable and inhumane that the entire international community has been watching in horror and silence the daily carnage of Syrian and Yemenie civilians without taking any action to stop the ongoing slaughter. The world is more than satisfied to let the impotent and incompetent Arab League, a league of tyrants, to deal with the Syrian issue and allow the Gulf Cooperation Council to resolve Yemen's potential civil war.

The Arabs are doomed to fail given their internal strife and political loyalties to foreign nations, in particular, to the United States and thus indirectly to Israel.

It is hard to fathom why the west, Russia, and China are still attached to Arab dictators given the Arab Spring which will spread to other nations despite its initial growing pains, unless they all fear the rise of "Islamists" who potentially may challenge their hegemony and economic greed.

The Arab Spring is unstoppable and in its conclusion across the Middle East will surely be antagonistic to all the nations that oppressed them, especially the United States and Israel, occupied them, monopolized their resources, and fought and smeared their beloved faith, Islam, and their beloved and revered Prophet Muhammad. The tragedy in the Arab Muslim world is that in their disunity they are their own worst enemies.

Thus the Arabs can vote, they can have a democracy but only if it's a democracy approved by the United States and Israel, free of Islamist, or else, "Remember Saddam.".

The U.N. must reform its charter regarding the Security Council's membership and abolish the Veto structure and adopt resolutions by majority vote. It must be funded in large part by the southern hemisphere nations, especially the wealthy Arab oil nations, to remove the constant American threat to defund the organization. Perhaps even consider moving its headquarters outside of the U.S.

"The United Nations, whose membership comprises almost all the states in the world, is founded on the principle of the equal worth of every human being."
-- Kofi Annan

* 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.

On 19 December, in the Jewish Daily Forward, Josh Nathan-Kazis wrote this:

"Top-level Jewish fundraisers from President Obama's 2008 campaign are sticking with the president in 2012.

"Despite reports that President Obama faces a loss of Jewish funders due to his Middle East policy, analysis of a list of elite bundlers from his 2008 race shows no defections among the president's top Jewish supporters in 2012."

That's not good news for the would-be presidents on the Republican side who are grovelling for Jewish campaign funds and votes.

On the same day, in what the BBC's Barbara Plett called "a highly unusual move", all the regional and political groupings on the UN Security Council sharply criticised Israeli settlement activities. They said in their statements that "continued settlement building threatened the chances of a future Palestinian state." They also expressed dismay at rising settler violence. ("They" were the envoys representing the European Union, the Non-Aligned Movement, the Arab Group and a loose coalition of emerging states known as IBSA).

It was UK Ambassador Mark Lyall Grant who read the statement of the EU group.

"Israel's continuing announcements to accelerate the construction of settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories, including East Jerusalem, (1000 new housing units tendered for last week), send a devastating message. We believe that Israel's security and the realisation of the Palestinians' right to statehood are not opposing goals. On the contrary they are mutually reinforcing objectives. But they will not be achieved while settlement building and settler violence continues."

As Barbara Plett noted,

"Despite the unanimity of views, the envoys did not try to draft a single Security Council statement because they knew the US would veto it." She also noted that the Obama administration's stance was that "anything to do with Israeli-Palestinian peace talks belongs in a US-led bilateral process, not at the UN."

It could be said, and I do say, that such criticism of Israel's settlement activities is 44 years too late. So what, really, is its significance?

My answer is in three parts.

The first is that it's a strong indication of America's growing isolation because of the Obama administration's unconditional support for Zionism's monster child.

The second, related, is that it seems to confirm what I have been saying and writing for several months – that behind closed doors almost all of the governments of the world, European governments in particular, are more than fed up with Israel's contempt for and defiance of international law.

The third is that the governments of most of the member states of the UN have come to terms with the fact that Zionism's assertion that a Palestinian state on the West Bank including East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip could and would pose a threat to Israel's existence is propaganda nonsense of the highest order. (This, of course, is only of academic interest because the two-state solution has long been dead if not yet buried).

When I am thinking about Obama's grovelling, my memory recalls a comment made to me by Dr. Hajo Meyer, the passionate anti-Zionist Nazi holocaust survivor and author of An Ethical Tradition Betrayed, The End of Judaism.

We had shared a platform in London and over breakfast the following morning I asked him a question. I said: "Hajo, you're well into your eighties and you are being vilified by Zionism's verbal hit-men for your efforts to unmask the Zionist monster. Why are you continuing with your truth-telling? Why don't you sit back in peace and quiet and enjoy what's left of your life?"

He replied with nine little words. "The first person I see every morning is me," meaning "I have to live with myself."

It's more than reasonable to assume that Obama looks in the mirror from time to time. I wonder if he can live with himself.

Footnote: My comments on Israel's response

Israel's response as delivered by Karean Peretz, spokeswoman for Israel's UN Mission, included this:

"The main obstacle to peace, has been, and remains, the Palestinians' claim to the so-called right of return and its refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state,"

That, too, is Zionist propaganda nonsense of the highest order.

Israel is not a Jewish state. How could it be when about a quarter of its citizens are Arabs and mainly Muslims? Israel could only be a Jewish state after it had resorted to a final round of ethnic cleansing. Israel is a Zionist state.

Because Arafat kept them informed through a secret channel, Israel's leaders have long known that in the event of a two-state solution, the PLO was reluctantly reconciled to the reality of the right of return being confined to the territory of the Palestinian state, which would mean that only about 100,000 refugees would be able to return, with the rest having to accept financial compensation for the loss, theft, of their land and rights.

As I explain in my book Zionism, The Real Enemy of the Jews, when they decided they had no choice but to be pragmatic, Arafat and his leadership colleagues took a degree of comfort from two hopes. One was that all Palestinian refugees everywhere could and would have a Palestinian passport. The other was that if there was a two-state solution, it could evolve over one or two generations into one state for all - i.e. because in peace and partnership enough Israeli Jews would say something like "We don't need two states". In the event of a one-state solution coming about by mutual consent, it was assumed on the Palestinian side at leadership level that, over time, all Palestinians who wanted to return would be able to return. So in theory the two-state solution was not necessarily the end-game on the right of return.

* Alan Hart is a former ITN and BBC Panorama foreign correspondent who covered wars and conflicts wherever they were taking place in the world and specialized in the Middle East. Author of Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews. He blogs on www.alanhart.net and tweets on www.twitter.com/alanauthor

While Israel keeps urging the Palestinian Authority (PA) to resume largely discredited peace talks, Tel Aviv is continuing unabated the expansion of Jewish colonies throughout the West Bank.

Disingenuous as they are, Israeli calls for resuming peace talks are apparently aimed at giving the impression that the Palestinians, not Israel, is the party impeding efforts to revive the stalled process.

However, for Palestinians at least, facts on the ground speak louder than public relations.

In recent weeks, the Israeli government, arguably the most extremist since the creation of the Israeli state, decided to build thousands of additional settler units in the central West Bank and East Jerusalem.

In Jerusalem, the so-called Planning and Building Committee has been considering a plan to build a "park" in the heart of the Palestinian neighbourhood of Jabal Al-Mukaber in East Jerusalem.

Palestinian officials as well as peace-minded Israelis insist the planned park is nothing but a ruse to set up a new settlement designed to besiege Arab demographic growth in the occupied city.

"The plan is aimed at strangulating Arab presence in Jerusalem," says Khalil Tufakji, a prominent Jerusalemite cartographer. "They hope this will kill any possibility for building a viable Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital."

Israel is also planning to build some 4000 settler units in the Silwan neighbourhood south of the occupied Arab city.

US Vice President Joe Biden protested the plan last year. However, the Israeli government waited a few months until the issue was forgotten before reviving the plan.

Israeli pundits seemed convinced that US officials critical of Israeli settlement activities don't really mean what they say and that in any case they are not capable of acting on statements critical of Israel given Israeli clout and influence on domestic American politics.

Israel also calculates, seeming correctly, that the Obama administration will not undermine its own re-election chances at home by pressuring Israel to rethink its settlement expansion plans.

The intensive expansion of settlements in the West Bank has coincided with a serious escalation of Jewish terrorist activities against Palestinians and their property. The wave of terror and vandalism included, among other things, kidnapping Palestinian villagers and shepherds, torching Palestinian olive groves, and denying access to Palestinian traffic.

This week, Jewish settlers kidnapped a Palestinian shepherd near the northern West Bank city of Nablus. Eyewitnesses said the settlers also seized 50 of the man's sheep. Normally, the Israeli occupation army, which controls the area, doesn't take meaningful action against settlers who attack Palestinians and vandalise their property with impunity.

As for the Israeli justice system, it deals quite lightly with settlers as many of the judges in Israeli courts are ideologically affiliated with the religious Zionist camp, or the settler camp.

This week, Israel decided to transfer to the PA the sum of $100 million dollars, which the Israeli government withheld earlier this month in an effort to bully the PA leadership into reconsidering efforts to seek recognition of a Palestinian state by international organisations such as the UN.

According to the Israeli media, Israel released the money after German Chancellor Angela Merkel threatened Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu with halting a German plan to deliver a submarine to Israel if the latter refused to resume the transfer of tax revenues to the PA.

According to a report published in the right-wing Israeli newspaper The Jerusalem Post, Israel yielded to pressure from Berlin and unfroze the Palestinian funds.

Germany reportedly announced it would build and pay up to one-third of the cost of a sixth Dolphin-class submarine to be delivered to the Israeli navy.

The agreement stipulated that Germany would pay the sum of 135 million Euros in partial financing of the deal.

The submarine will cost between 372 million and 520 million Euros. Defense experts believe the submarine will enhance Israel's second-strike capability since it can carry nuclear weapons.

Merkel has repeatedly appealed to Netanyahu to unlock the peace process, only to be met with prevarication from the Israeli premier.

Meanwhile, some Israeli officials have been voicing their anxiety over the initial results of the Egyptian elections; with the Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak admitting that Israel didn't like the ostensible victory of Islamists in the first round of the parliamentary poll.

Barak said he hoped that Israel's partners and friends in Cairo would retain significant influence that would keep the cold peace between Israel and the largest Arab country "as warm as possible".

Some Israeli commentators are already referring to the Egyptian elections results as a "nightmare coming true," bringing to the fore Israel's worst fears.

David Buki, a pro-settler commentator, lashed out at those Western powers that advocated and pressed for democracy in the Arab world. "When you give a Muslim a free voice in electing his leaders, he will pick an Islamist leadership every time because that is what he knows and appreciates."

"Israel's worst fears regarding its relationship with the Arab world -- and with Egypt in particular -- are coming true before our eyes. The rise of the Islamists in Egypt means the end of the peace treaty with Egypt and the rise of a government committed to the ideological Islamist goal of the destruction of Israel."

The Israeli commentator ignored the fact that Israel is made up of several fascist parties advocating discrimination and apartheid and even genocide against non-Jews.

Earlier this year, the spiritual mentor of Shas, a main coalition partner in the current Israeli government, was quoted as saying during a Sabbath homily in West Jerusalem that all non-Jews were very much like donkeys who were created by the Almighty on two legs so that they will serve the master race, the chosen people -- Jews.

Some http://sabbah.biz/mt/archives/tag/rabbis/ have gone so far as permitting a Jew to murder a non-Jew in order to extract his organs if the Jew needs them.

* 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.

Obama should demand an immediate halt to all Israeli destruction of Palestinian property in the West Bank.

Many Palestinians have been left homeless after occupying Israeli forces demolished their homes (EPA)

The idea of a settlement freeze, which was wrongly attributed to the now-resigned special envoy George Mitchell, was actually stipulated in the Bush administration's Road Map and accepted by the parties in 2003. A freeze on all settlement activity was a first-phase Israeli obligation - not to mention an obligation under international law. It should go without saying that the Israelis failed to fulfill this obligation, and instead the Israeli government, then led by Ariel Sharon, presided over the single largest and most aggressive period of settlement activity in the West Bank since the Menachem Begin government in 1977-83.

Still, Israeli settlement construction is not the only belligerent behaviour conducted by the occupation regime in Palestinian Territory. To paraphrase the now-former US Congressman Brian Baird, if the law is "thou shall not build on territory which does not belong to you", an equally important corollary of this law is "thou shall not destroy what belongs to others in territory which does not belong to you". Of course, apart from the regular construction of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, there is also the regular destruction of Palestinian buildings and infrastructure in the same territory.

Both the construction of illegal settlements and the destruction of the homes and property of the native Palestinians stem from the same origin: Israel's unbridled assertion of power over the native Palestinians in the context of total impunity.

Much destruction occurs in Area C of the West Bank. This territory comprises roughly 60 per cent of the West Bank, and Israel maintains full control over security, planning and zoning.

The United Nations Organisation for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the Occupied Territories (UNOCHA) noted in a recent report:

"In the first six months of 2011, OCHA recorded the Israeli authorities' demolition of 342 Palestinian-owned structures in Area C, including 125 residential structures, displacing a total of 656 Palestinians, including 351 children. This is almost five times as many structures demolished and people displaced as during the equivalent period in 2010."

Take, for example, the time when 30 Israeli vehicles and 100 soldiers entered the village of Ein al-Duyuk and demolished the homes of four different Palestinian families deep in the West Bank. Or the dawn raid of Jaba'a near Hebron which led to the demolition of another family's home. Or the demolition of five homes in Khan al-Ahmar, near Jerusalem, which left 71 people, including 60 children, homeless. Or when a mosque, two homes and a barn housing children's pet rabbits were demolished in the village of Um Fagareh. Or the demolition of wells near Idhna, which debilitated Palestinian farmers. Or Khirbet Susa's rural primary school, which currently educates 36 Palestinian children and has recently received demolition orders after it was last demolished a year ago. Or the solar panel complex, built by a Spanish NGO for €300,000 ($401,310) in 2009 to provide much-needed sustainable electricity to the isolated Palestinian village of Imneizel, which also has demolition orders pending.

Or, perhaps most disturbing of all, is that all of the above-mentioned Area C demolitions and demolition orders were executed or handed down only in the past 90 days.

Israeli destruction of Palestinian homes and buildings, like the construction of illegal settlements, is part of a matrix of control aimed at limiting Palestinians to an existence on only a fraction of a fraction of their land. No objective observer can take the argument that the destruction of Palestinian village schools, water wells, solar panels and homes provides anyone with security. Likewise, Palestinian villagers left homeless at the hands of an Israeli bulldozer will rightly find claims that Israeli politicians want peace to be farcical.

Yet this destruction persists today at accelerated levels, with little objection from an Obama administration that races to show its support for Israel as we enter an election year.

Nevertheless, the Obama administration should demand an immediate halt to all Israeli settlement construction because it is illegal, and an immediate halt to all Israeli destruction in the West Bank because it is simply inhumane.

* Yousef Munayyer is a writer and political analyst based in Washington, DC. He is currently the Executive Director of the Jerusalem Fund for Education and Community Development.

By Clive Hambidge *

A military conquest

"... We shall use the ultimate force until the Palestinians come crawling to us on all fours ... When we have settled the land, all the Arabs will be able to do will be to scurry round like drugged roaches in a bottle." (Rafeal Eitan)

A 'moral articulation' by successive American administrations as to the primary reason for their unilateral support of 0.001% of the world's population, namely Israel, is not standing up to international law or American scrutiny. The perpetuated myth of an Israel surrounded by mortal enemies, battling heroically for its democratic rights against all odds fades as the world of right mindedness recognises in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip the daily abuse and horror for Palestinians under illegal occupation in Israel's 'battlefield' to test new weaponry. That abuse, brought into sharp focus by the U.S Department of State in early 2004, is systematic; perpetrated by Israel in 2011 and paid for by U.S tax payers' dollars in the form of indiscriminate, unwise and illegal aid according to America's own laws. The reason? Unquestioning support for Israel's militarised political continuum, where de jure occupation became de facto annexation, and where, according to Special Rapporteur Falk "the unbridled assault upon Palestinian rights" continues.

If one consciously moves in time backward and forward, that is in American/Israeli time, one finds the same pattern no matter the date. There is no change no progress. It is like watching a film, a play no matter where you cut, what montage you see, what curtain is lifted and what scene you view, it is the same film, the same play, the same day, from the same violent script. It is a continuum of brutal actions designed to oppress Palestinians enough to make them leave their own land. Pick a date at random and one finds the paradox of continuum. Israel is waiting for Godot

"Estragon: All the dead voices.
Vladimir: They make a noise like wings."

Matt Bowles, writing for the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, makes plain the facts: America for decades allowing Israel to place "US aid into its general fund, effectively eliminating any distinction between types of aid. [means] Therefore, U.S. tax-payers are helping to fund an illegal occupation, the expansion of colonial-settlements projects, and gross human rights violations against the Palestinian civilian population." Facts continually denied by Israel, as it ruthlessly pursue 'the doctrine of politics free from law'.

Israel's persistent but illusory claim that its 'international human rights treaty obligations do not apply in the OPT' has been, according to Amnesty International, 'rejected' by the U.N Human Rights Committee, the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination Against Women, the Committee Against Torture, the Committee on the Rights of the Child, the International Court of Justice', and every conscionable citizen on the planet.

So to February 2004, the U.S Department of State in its Country Reports on Human Rights Practices makes clear the egregious human rights violations and status of Israel in the OPT 2003, "The international community does not recognize Israel's Sovereignty over any part of the occupied territories." All accredited missions are to be found rightfully, and legally, in Tel Aviv. "Israel's overall human rights record in the occupied territories remained poor and worsened in the treatment of foreign human rights activists." These abuses came in a fiscal year 2003 where Israel received from the U.S "a foreign military financing grant of $3.1 billion and a $600 million grant for economic security." (Jewish Voice for Peace - JVP); U.S dollars used in the advancing of Israel's policy of 'continuum' namely the illegal colonisation of Palestinian lands, the tormenting of its people and those that would assist them. Lest we forget, it was in March 2003 that Rachel Corrie, an American citizen performing a fundamental rule of law principle by campaigning for human rights in the OPT, lost her life under the tracks of a caterpillar bulldozer: 'Made in the U.S.A'.

The U.S Department of State found in the bloody year of 2003 that amongst other violations of international law:

• "Israeli soldiers placed civilians in danger by ordering them [Palestinians] to facilitate military operations."
• "Israeli forces sometimes arbitrarily destroyed, damaged, or looted Palestinian property".
• "Israeli security forces often impeded the provision of medical assistance to Palestinian civilians."
• "Israeli security forces harassed and abused Palestinian pedestrians."
• "Israel conducted mass, arbitrary arrests in the West Bank during military operations, summoning and detaining males between the ages of 15 and 45"
• "Israel carried out policies of demolitions, strict curfews, and closures that directly punished innocent civilians ... Israel often demolished homes after suspects had already been killed or arrested."
• Israel "maintained" according to the Department of State "that such punishment of innocents would serve as a deterrent against future terrorist attacks."

These insidious patterns have been sustained by all Israeli administrations and represent a 'continuum': a calculated militaristic policy of intimidation and worse toward the innocent civilians of Palestine. This being so, I must add my concerns to the concerns of the Rachel Corrie Foundation that "the State Departments Country Reports on Human Rights systematically exclude the State Departments own analysis of Israel's failure to perform a credible investigation into the killing of Rachel Corrie," and further concerns that "reports generated by international NGOs such as Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International, which noted a pattern of negligence in Israeli investigations into civilians killed by the IDF, were ignored in the creation of the Country Reports."

In recognition of the illegality of American Aid to Israel, the Rachel Corrie Foundation in its submission to the U.N Universal Periodic Review called upon the U.S to "enforce 22 U.S.C. 2304 (1994), protocol on Human Rights and Security Assistance, and the "Leahy Amendments" to the Foreign Operations Appropriations and Defence Appropriations Acts (e.g. P.L. 105-118 570), which prohibit the provision of security assistance to countries and military units that engage in a pattern of gross violations of human rights." Where, according to JVP, "Massive military aid promotes militarism, which has led to a reliance on military, rather than diplomatic means to work for a solution to this ongoing conflict.". The planned aim of 'continuum'.

The Continuum

"Zionism is a colonising adventure and therefore it stands or falls by the question of armed force. There is no other ethic" (Jabotinsky)

The U.N Mission Report (UNMR) on the Israeli operation in Gaza between December 27^th 2008 and 18^th January 2009 highlights that all Israel's operations must be viewed not as isolated moments in history where Israel feels threatened and then responds but, operation[s] that decidedly fit "into a continuum of policies aimed at pursuing Israel's political objectives with regard to Gaza and the Occupied Palestinian Territory as a whole." Reel back, fast forward, press hold, you find 'continuum': "After we become a strong force, as the result of the creation of a State, we shall abolish partition and expand to the whole of Palestine." (Ben Gurion)

"The continuum is evident most immediately with the policy of blockade that preceded the operations [i.e Cast Lead] and that in the Mission's view amounts to collective punishment intentionally inflicted by the Government of Israel on the people of the Gaza Strip." (UNMR). Further, the Mission found "An analysis of the modalities and impact of the December-January military operations [also] sets them, in the Mission's view, in a continuum with a number of other pre-existing Israel Policies with regard to the Occupied Palestinian Territories. The progressive isolation and separation of the Gaza Strip from the West Bank, a policy that began much earlier and which was consolidated in particular with the imposition of tight closures, restrictions on movement and eventually blockade, are among the most apparent." 'The plan that never changed' is the continuum that ever is, until God forbid "There is no more Palestine. Finished . . ." (Moshe Dayan)

Nothing has changed since 2004, nothing has changed since 1948. And nothing has changed in 2011. Pick a date between 1948 and 2011 and one finds systematic abuse, atrocities, and deaths of Palestinian civilians. One might pick Operation 'Defensive Shield' 2002, Operation 'Summer Rains' 2006 or 'Autumn Clouds' November 2006, I have picked December 2008/January 2009 and 'Cast Lead' from Israel's seasonal slaughter. Here's a U.N Report of 2009.

The 2009 Report of the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict concluded, "The Mission found numerous instances of deliberate attacks on civilians and civilian objects (individuals, whole families, houses, mosques) in violation of the fundamental international humanitarian law principle of distinction, resulting in deaths and serious injuries. In these cases the Mission found that the protected status of civilians was not respected and the attacks intentional, in clear violation of customary law reflected in article 51 (2) and 75 of Additional Protocol 1, article 27 of the Four Geneva Convention and articles 6 and 7 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. In some cases the Mission additionally concluded that the attack was also launched with the intention of spreading terror among the civilian population."

In addition, the Mission found all of this was planned meticulously by Israel, "legal opinions and advice were given throughout the planning stages and at certain operational levels during the campaign. There were almost no mistakes according to the Government of Israel. It is in these circumstances that the Mission [concluded] that what occurred in just over three weeks at the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009 was a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorize a civilian population, radically diminish its local economic capacity both to work and to provide for itself, and to force upon it an ever increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability."

One would remind Israel's planners of Article 7 of the Draft Code of Crimes Against the Peace and Security of Mankind (1996), "The official position of an individual who commits a crime against the peace and security of mankind, even if he acted as head of State or Government, does not relieve him of criminal responsibility or mitigate punishment." And of these compassionate words thundering through the centuries from Caliph Abu Bakr to "the first Moslem Arab Army invading Christian Syria:

Do not commit treachery, nor depart from the right path. You must not mutilate, neither kill a child or aged man or woman. Do not destroy a palm tree, nor burn it with fire and do not cut any fruitful tree." (634 A.D)

After Cast Lead, Adalah, The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, reported that "During and after "Operation Cast lead", human rights organizations asked the Attorney General (AG) to open an investigation based on prima-facie evidence of gross-violations of international law; the AG rejected our request. Previous requests to the Military Advocate General (MAG) to open investigations into numerous other cases were also denied." Adalah further found "petitions filed to the Supreme Court against the MAG and AG's policy of not opening criminal investigations into the killing of Palestinians remain pending years later. It also appears that the Supreme Court's inaction has resulted in a brake on the submission of petitions by human rights organizations."

"Israel cannot build a society based on the principles of democracy, human rights, and compliance with international law while brutally occupying another people and their land. The United States is currently paying for that occupation with its annual aid," (JVP, Statement on Peace, U.S Military Aid and Israel, 2004.) and further, "When Palestinian doctors remove bullets from the bodies of Palestinian children, the bullets are typically stamped. Made in the U.S.A." Nevertheless, and, in remorseless fashion the United States defies international opinion, its own law and international law in providing massive military aid to its client state Israel. America supplies the boots that fit the feet that press on the necks of Palestinians.

Massive military aid for continuum

"The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as war" (Ben Gurion)

The Congressional Research Service Report (CRSR) of 16^th September 2010 U.S Foreign Aid to Israel reported, "Almost all U.S. bilateral aid to Israel is in the form of military assistance." The Bush Administration unsurprisingly sanctioned an increase of 6 billion dollars in U.S military assistance to Israel in August 2007. And the Obama Administration, also unsurprisingly, responded to the Bush Neo Con reverberation by requesting $3 billion U.S in Foreign Military Financing (FMF) to Israel for fiscal year of 2011. So, add those figures in your moral mind space to this cumulative 'conservative estimate' given by the U.S organisation 'If Americans Knew' of "total direct aid to Israel [1949 to 2008] of $113. 8554 Billion. Massive by any standards.

Decades of murder and mayhem began with a trade loan in 1949 of $100.000. God only knows when and how it will end. Today the billions of US taxpayers dollars that pour through the 'aid funnel' are used to buy arms and equipment such as caterpillar bulldozers made in the U.S; indeed a stipulation by the U.S is that Israel uses "75% of its military aid from the U.S. It funnels this money to more than 1,000 U.S arms suppliers, which in turn lobby for policies that benefit them at the expense of peace in the Middle East." (JVP).

According to the CRSR, by giving unconditional aid to Israel, America seeks to and "maintains ...[Israel's] qualitative military edge over potential threats, and prevent[s] a shift in the security balance of the region." in fact that aggressive 'military edge' keeps Palestinians locked down in interminable suffering and the region a tinderbox. And make no mistake the 'qualitative military edge' is not for Israel but for The United States of America and its continued hegemonic ambitions through its proxy, Israel.

U.S blood money was/is for "a militarized Israel that will serve the U.S. interest of controlling the Petroleum reserves of the Middle East ... policy debate in elite circles takes for granted, on all sides, the goal of maintaining U.S. control over Middle East petroleum resources and the flow of petrodollars." (Chomsky, Fateful Triangle). If we take a sordid trip down Israel's blood soaked memory lane we find U.S Aid increasing in direct proportion to Israel's military aggression, perceived success therefore usefulness to American interests. Israel's continuum is vital for American control over the oil reserves of the region.

Stephen Zunes, The Strategic Functions of U.S. AID to Israel, shows how U.S Aid shoots up after Israeli military successes and its long term strategic cooperation with America. From the "spectacular victory" in the 1967 war, through the Civil War in Jordan 1970-71 and the countering of 'attacking Arab armies' in 1973, to the "fall of the Shah, election of the right wing Likud, and the ratification of the Camp David Treaty in 1979", through the years 1983-84 "when the United States and Israel signed memoranda of understanding on strategic cooperation and military planning." U.S Aid kept rising 450%, 800%, increasing, sevenfold, quadrupling, as did Israel's aggression. America force feeding Israel with military aid through the 'aid funnel,' whilst Palestinian children can scarcely keep mind, spirit, and body together.

Then came Clinton, Bush, Obama, all maintaining Israel's 'qualitative edge', all maintaining Israel's brutal military occupation. All, letting down the Palestinians' lawful drive for legitimate Statehood. All U.S Aid equated with destruction, acquainted with death. The long suffering Palestinians sold out with 'no objections' from the 'liberal left of America.'

Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush Senior, Clinton, Bush "I'm doing it for my daddy" junior, and Obama, all preserving 'Continuity Of Government' (C.O.G.) indeed, all cogs in the all consuming gas guzzling American machine. It will all end in tears and it won't be Palestinian tears, for they have wept too much and for too long for their lost freedom and their lost children.

O Captain My Captain

"Our American friends offer us money, arms, and advice. We take the money, we take the arms, and we decline the advice." (Moshe Dayan)

Questions are being asked of Captain America from unlikely and likely quarters. Walter Pincus of the Washington Post, "The question for the Obama administration, Congress and, in the end perhaps the American public, is given present economic problems, should the United States supply the money to make up for the reductions the Israelis are making in their own defence budget." A financial question of course. A superior question, because a moral one, is if, the American public, who should be asked first, were informed of the extent, nature and illegality of U.S Aid to Israel, would the American public then sanction any military aid to Israel at all?

As Hassan Fouda of Northern California Friends of Sabeel reminds, "Congress is planning deep cuts in social security, unemployment compensation, educational grants and other programs that help vulnerable Americans. Transferring billions of taxpayer's money to Israel now is immoral. Americans need to speak up and be heard.

Valuing Human Rights

Special Rapporteur John Duggard stated, "It is pointless for the Special Rapporteur to recommend to the Government of Israel that it show respect for human rights and international humanitarian law ... in these circumstances, the Special Rapporteur can only appeal to the wider international community to concern itself with the plight of the Palestinian people." (2006). After the end of the Israeli military operation Cast Lead 2008-2009 in Gaza, John Ging the UNRWA Director of Operations recalled a discussion that he had with a teacher in Gaza about 'strengthening human rights education in schools'. One would assume that the teacher had for obvious reasons a sceptical view of such an undertaking. In fact, recounts Ging "the teacher unhesitantly supported the resumption of human rights education." She said, "This is a war of values, and we are not going to lose it."

* Clive Hambidge is Human Development Director at Facilitate Global. He can be contacted at: clive.hambidge@facilitateglobal.org

By Stephen Lendman* | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

Rogue state lawlessness and contempt for humanity define both nations.

At home, America is plagued by police state laws, contempt for human and civil rights, out-of-control corruption, banker occupation, corporate control of Washington, record budget and national debt levels, as well as depression-sized unemployment, poverty, homelessness, hunger and despair.

Abroad, America wages permanent wars on humanity, killing millions for wealth, power, and unchallengeable global dominance at the expense of suffering billions.

The rancid stench of Washington's war on the world permeates everywhere, threatening human and environmental survival.

It's no better in Israel, a nation believing only Jews have rights, and increasingly less of them under neoliberalized harshness, favoring the few at the expense of most others.

Like America and other Western states, Israeli policies disproportionately favor the rich. Since at least the mid-1980s, they've caused extreme wealth disparities, unemployment, poverty, hunger, homelessness and gradual loss of social benefits, heading toward ending them entirely.

Israelis finally reacted, protesting for weeks about unaffordable housing, high food and energy prices, onerous taxes on working households, lack of free education and better healthcare benefits, weak labor rights, and a nation no longer fit to live in for Jews.

It never was for Arabs comprising one-fifth of the population. Yet they're treated more like fifth column threats than citizens with equal rights.

On September 3, Haaretz writer Ilan Lior headlined, "Hundreds of thousands of Israelis expected (Saturday night) at massive 'March of the Million' rallies," later saying in a follow-up article:

At 9:30PM, Tel Aviv's Kikar Hamedina plaza filled for the main event, preceded by a march from Habima Square via Marmorek, Ibn Gvirol and Jabotinsky streets.

Protest leaders and supporters addressed eager crowds. Featured entertainers heightened the popular spirit for change. Earlier, student union head Yuval Bdolah expected the rally's size to be unprecedented in Israeli history.

It didn't disappoint as around half a million Israelis massed in cities nationwide. Over 300,000 filled Kikar Hamedina. Protest leader Yonatan Levy said the atmosphere was like "a second Independence Day."

National Student Union Chairman Itzik Shmuli addressed the crowd, saying:

"Mr. Prime Minister, the new Israelis have a dream and it is simple: to weave the story of our lives into Israel. We expect you to let us live in this country. The new Israelis will not give up. They demand change. They demand change and will not stop until real solutions come."

Protest leader Daphni Leef added:

"My generation always felt as though we were alone in this world, but now we feel the solidarity. They try to dismiss us as stupid children, and as extreme leftists," but hundreds of thousands rallying for social justice prove otherwise.

Over 50,000 massed in Jerusalem's Paris Square, double the previous largest number. Actress Orna Banai addressed the crowd, saying:

"I am not amused that there are hungry children here, that we have a soldier rotting in captivity for five years, (and) that Israel is one of the poorest examples there (is for) human rights."

Others also spoke across the country for long denied social justice. Their common theme was keeping up enough pressure to succeed, and in Haifa to end discrimination against Arabs.

Shahin Nasser, Haifa's Arab Wadi Nisnas representative, addressed protesters, saying:

"Today we are changing the rules of the game. No more coexistence based on hummus and fava beans. What is happening here is true coexistence, when Arabs and Jews march together shoulder to shoulder calling for social justice and peace."

"We've had it. Bibi, go home. Steinitz (Israel's finance minister), go and don't come back. Atias (Israel's housing minister), goodbye and good riddance."

Rallying for social justice across Israel since mid-July so far shows no signs of ebbing. Succeeding, of course, depends on sustaining enough energy disruptively for change. Though never easy, it's the only way.

Approaching Zero Hour for Palestinian Statehood

Sovereign independence and full de jure UN membership is the only acceptable alternative for Palestine. However, dark Israeli and Washington forces aim to subvert it.

In February, Washington vetoed a Security Council resolution denouncing expanding Israeli settlements. In a White House statement, Obama "emphasized that a vote at the United Nations will never create an independent Palestinian state," even if the General Assembly grants it by a simple two-thirds majority.

Moreover, Congress near unanimously condemned Palestine's legitimate right to independence. In addition, it threatens to withhold support and perhaps impose sanctions if achieved.

In fact, political Washington contemptuously spurns universal rights, especially everywhere not under its control. As a result, whether democrat or despot, regime change threatens all independent leaders by one means or other, including naked aggression.

Ask Iraqis, Afghans, Haitians, and Libyans among others. They'll explain.

A previous article discussed The New York Times opposition to Palestinian statehood.

In fact, its longstanding policy staunchly supported Israel's occupation, belligerence, and right to reign terror on Palestinian civilians with impunity, in less than so many words.

On September 3, Steven Lee Myers and Mark Landler headlined, "US Appeals to Palestinians to Stall UN Vote on Statehood," saying:

"The Obama administration has initiated a last-ditch diplomatic campaign to avert a confrontation this month over" Palestinian statehood and full UN membership.

Once again it's playing the peace talks game even though past efforts for decades proved stillborn. Moreover, how can Palestinians negotiate without a willing partner, especially since its legitimate government is entirely shut out.

Both writers omitted these and other key facts, focusing instead on worrying whether "Obama would be put in the position of threatening (a) veto (or going along and) risk alienating Israel and its (US) political supporters...."

They also suggested support for Obama "trying to translate the broad principles (he) outlined in May into a concrete road map for talks that would succeed where past efforts have failed...."

In fact, as both writers know or should, equitable peace talks are impossible because Washington and Israel never tolerated them and don't now. Neither country negotiates. They demand. For Occupied Palestinians, it's stay that way, or else.

At the same time, past articles explained that Washington earlier provisionally recognized Palestine as an independent nation. According to UN Charter Article 80(1), it can't reverse its position by vetoing a Security Council (SC) resolution calling for Palestine's UN admission.

Doing so is illegal, subject to further SC action under the Charter's Chapter VI. Ultimately, the SC only recommends admissions. The General Assembly affirms them by a two-thirds majority. At this time, enough support exists to get it.

Moreover, if Washington does, in fact, play its veto card, the General Assembly can circumvent it under the 1950 Uniting for Peace Resolution.

Abbas Holds the Wild Card

Ultimately, long-time Israeli collaborationist Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas may prove the wild card. Ahead of petitioning the General Assembly, he's expected to explain his strategy, according to presidential aide Nabil Abu Rudaineh, saying:

"The president will define all the political moves which will be taken before submitting the UN bid, so as to make clear where the Palestinian cause is headed."

He'll "address the Palestinian people, telling them exactly why the (PA) will go to the UN, and what caused the current political situation after negotiations stopped, and after the international community failed to work out solutions to the question of Palestine, and to move the negotiation process forward based on clear foundations."

Abu Rudaineh added:

Palestinian leaders will petition the UN "as long as negotiations have not started, and Israel has not committed to clear references to start" them.

"We will go to the UN Security Council in coordination with all Arab countries. Going to the UN will be the only way to gain our rights and to maintain our gains."

Clearly, Abbas left himself wiggle room to avoid confronting Washington and Israel by backing down at the 11th hour, despite enough world support and international law on his side to succeed.

If so, millions of Palestinians will be betrayed by their own president, proving again his collaborationist ties to to Israel and Western interests for whatever personal benefits he's afforded.

Planned Settler West Bank/East Jerusalem Belligerence

According to International Middle East Media Center writer Saed Bannoura, Palestinians also face another threat.

On September 2, he headlined, "Settlers Plan Attacks Against Palestinians In September," saying:

Armed by Israel's military with tear gas, stun grenades and other weapons, "extremist right wing factions (are) preparing (to) respond to any popular Palestinian move" to petition the UN for statehood and full membership.

Already, settlers are heavily armed with automatic weapons and "unlimited amounts of ammunition." Using them and other weapons, they prepared a plan called "children against children, women and women" to attack unnamed West Bank and East Jerusalem populations.

Extremist MK Michael Ben-Ari heads the scheme along with militant settlers, apparently spoiling for a fight and using Palestinian statehood efforts as a pretext.

"The eight-page plan includes instructions regarding operations in Palestinian cities and villages in the West Bank and in Jerusalem. Its main slogan is 'let's transform September from a threat to a historic opportunity to change the rules of the game.' "

It adds:

"should the UN officially recognize a Palestinian independent state, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians will take off to the streets, to celebrate, and they might approach the settlements."

"Unarmed Palestinian women and children will lead the processions heading to the settlements. This will push the Israeli soldiers to open fire at them, and this issue will lead to a full collapse in the security situation, and the Palestinians will resume their attacks against the settlements."

The plan calls for Israeli children to confront their Palestinian counterparts, Israeli women and men doing the same thing.

Palestinian settlers have a long history of attacking Palestinians with impunity, including acts of vandalism, desecrating mosques, and murder.

Their most extremist elements now see a chance to escalate violence to the next level, aided and abetted by Israel's military, operating under Operation Summer Seeds provisions.

A previous article explained.

* Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon.

Jerusalem remains contested as the desired capital of a future Palestinian state, yet divisive West Bank barriers have made this a further challenge (GALLO/GETTY)

By Yousef Munayyer * | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

Since the Palestine Liberation Organisation led by Yasser Arafat recognised the state of Israel over 20 years ago, the general framework for a claims-ending solution accepted by the Israeli and Palestinian leadership has been a deal that would create a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. But now, two decades later, that framework has been completely exposed as a sham, and the number of people who believe such a solution is achievable, let alone worthwhile, is consistently dwindling.

So, do the Palestinians want a state? Or, perhaps more importantly, should the Palestinians want a state? This seems like a straightforward question with an even more straightforward answer. At the beginning of the Washington-led peace process and during creation of the Palestinian Authority in the mid-1990s the answer sure seemed to be a resounding 'yes'. There were plenty of reservations about this strategy however, especially among Palestinians concerned that such a solution would disenfranchise the rights of refugees. Nevertheless, many Palestinians including the formal leadership was on board.

Today, the answer to this question is not so clear, and for good reason. In the course of 20 years of negotiations, Palestinians learned that the concept of a "state" that they had in mind was different from the one that Israel - their occupier - would permit them to have, and in turn different from what the United States was willing to support. Despite the "historic compromise" PLO leaders often refer to - the relinquishing of claims on 78 per cent of historic Palestine - a Palestinian state would not emerge on the remaining 22 per cent. Instead of getting closer to a territorially contiguous and sovereign political entity they could call a state, Palestinians were constantly facing increased Israeli colonisation of their territory.

Wanting a true state

The size of the territory allotted for this "state" continued to shrink with every new settlement home. The Israelis remained adamant about maintaining control over the air space and borders of any Palestinian state, retaining a military presence in the Jordan River valley (about 30 per cent of the West Bank), retaining the illegally annexed occupied Jerusalem and refusing a new Palestinian state to have an army. Essentially, this would be a state in name only, lacking the all important features of sovereignty, and would be the de facto continuation of the occupation with different window dressing.

The question then is: do the Palestinians want this state? No, clearly not. In fact, the Palestinian cause was only about statehood insofar as a state could be a vehicle for realising Palestinian human and political rights. Since its inception, the Palestinian cause has been about two central issues 1) the right of Palestinians to live in Palestine (this includes the right of refugees to return to their towns and villages if they choose) and 2) the right to self-determination and sovereignty. It has never, contrary to Zionism, been about a fear driven desire for ethno-centric domination.

Public opinion polling of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza reveals that 74 per cent of Palestinians consider ending the occupation and achieving the right to return as the two most important Palestinian goals. The maximalist version of the concept of a Palestinian state permitted by the Washington sponsored Peace Process does not even accommodate the minimalist version of Palestinian rights.

Perhaps one reason the process has drifted into this morass is because the intended goal has focused on a Palestinian state in name only, without much regard for what that state would look like or whether it would afford Palestinians their rights. This peace process would seemingly go forward endlessly if it could loosely attach the concept of a state to any hilltop in the West Bank, so long as there was a Palestinian leadership willing to go along with it. Palestinians cannot and should not accept a "state" at any cost.

A strategy to end occupation

For 20 years, the Washington-led peace process has succeeded in doing one thing better than anything else; giving Israel every incentive to maintain its occupation. By assigning the policing responsibilities for the urban centers to the Palestinian Authority and having the Europeans and the Americans pay for this project, Israel has effectively retained the security domination and colonial usurpation benefits inherent in occupation without having to be responsible for any of the costs. It can build settlements in Palestinian land and steal Palestinian water, both acts in direct opposition to international law, but simultaneously ditch obligations it has to the population it occupies and use the ongoing Peace Process to deflect international criticism for obviating Palestinian self-determination.

This game has to end, and the continuation of a Peace Process that only encourages relentless Israeli occupation exacerbates the situation. It's time for a dramatic shift in the Israeli/Palestinian dynamic which places costs where they belong, on the occupier. Whether this will be born out diplomatic initiatives at the United Nations, non-violent popular uprising, or Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions is still unclear. Perhaps it's all of the above.

What we know for sure is that Washington's insistence on a failed status quo has only proved costly for Palestinians and beneficial for Israel. Palestinians should not be subjected, or subject themselves, to engaging Israel in an arena they are cornered into and disadvantaged in, but rather should choose to meet them in an arena where the the playing field is fair or to their advantage. Increasingly, this is anywhere in the world outside of Washington.

Any new Palestinian strategy must put reversing this "cost-free occupation" dynamic at its centre. Israel will only end its occupation when pressured to do so and it must be made to realise that it is more costly to maintain the occupation than end it.

* Yousef Munayyer is Executive Director of the Palestine Center. This policy brief may be used without permission but with proper attribution to the Center.

This article originally appeared in AlJazeera.net.

"We need advocates for the truth," they tell him

By Stuart Littlewood * | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

Dr Williams is the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury

Kairos Palestine, the voice of Palestinian Christians, has given the Archbishop of Canterbury a strong ticking-off for remarks he made during a BBC interview.

Rifat Kassis, Coordinator of Kairos Palestine, said he was "deeply troubled" by the archbishop's "inaccurate and erroneous remarks" about the situation of Christians in the Middle East. He called the archbishop's failure to mention the Israeli occupation and the regime's oppressive policies "shocking".

In a letter [.PDF] to the archbishop, he said:

We were deeply saddened by your declarations because we know that Your Grace is well informed ... and you know very well that in the Bethlehem area alone there are 19 illegal Israeli settlements (such as nearby Har Homa built on Jabal Abu Ghneim) and the wall that have devoured Christian lands and put Bethlehem in a chokehold. You know well that only 13 per cent of Bethlehem area is available for Palestinian use and the wall isolates 25 per cent or the Bethlehem area's agricultural land. Not to mention the situation of Christians in Jerusalem, which you know very well, since you should have received reports from the Anglican bishop in the city whose residency permit was denied by the occupying power.

Mr Kassis ended by saying: "We would like to remind Your Grace that Christian Palestinians need advocates for the truth. It is the truth, and only the truth, that will lead to peace and justice in our home."

So what did Archbishop Rowan Williams say to the BBC that so infuriated his Palestinian brethren?

Apparently, it was the way he talked about the ethnic cleansing of Christians, referring to extreme pressure in Iraq while suggesting that the exodus of Christians from Palestine was due to "a much more undramatic but equally steady and strong pressure".

Interviewer: But that's a strong term to use isn't it, ethnic cleansing?

Archbishop: It is a strong term but I think not disproportionate where Iraq is concerned. The level of violence has been extreme.

However, Williams seemed careful to avoid connecting the term "ethnic cleansing" with Israel's programme to dispossess and terrorize Palestinians:

Interviewer: Do you think that the British government, other governments, should be more vocal in their support for Christians who you are seeing at the moment under great difficulty in a number of these countries?

Archbishop: Well, to be honest, I think at the moment there is quite a lot of support. And I can't fault what's been said by our government on this issue because I think the issue of religious freedom in general has very high priority in the Foreign Office at the moment. So I hope that continues.

The truth is that the British Foreign Office is infested with pro-Israel placemen and has not lifted a finger for religious or any other freedoms in the occupied Palestinian territories.

The archbishop continued: "Also I think people in the West know perfectly well that if foreign powers take up the cause of a minority in another country it can be utterly counterproductive."

Was he, by any chance, thinking about the foreign powers that implanted Jewish aliens in the Holy Land in 1947 and the running sore ever since?

He went on the say:

I think there are still perhaps too few people in this country who are aware of the haemorrhaging of Christian populations from the Holy Land. The fact that Bethlehem, a majority Christian city just a couple of decades ago, is now very definitely a place where Christians are a marginalized minority. We want that to be a little bit higher on people's radar...

But the archbishop was careful not to offend the Israeli occupiers.

Interviewer: Would you see what's happening in Bethlehem as another example of what you've described as ethnic cleansing?

Archbishop: It's not ethnic cleansing exactly because it's been far less deliberate than that I think. What we've seen, though, is a kind of Newtonian passing on of energy or force from one body to another so that some Muslim populations in the West Bank, under pressure, move away from certain areas like Hebron, move into other areas like Bethlehem. And there's nowhere much else for Christian populations to go except away from Palestine.

I'm sure that trapped and imprisoned Palestinian Christians will be relieved to hear that their misery is all down to Newtonian energy effects.

Archbishop Williams's comments about Bethlehem were "particularly faulty and offensive", according to Rifat Kassis, especially his claim that Muslims coming into the Bethlehem area, where space is limited, was forcing Christians to leave.

Are the archbishop and his Anglican Church the "advocates for the truth" so desperately needed?

It is not the first time the archbishop has upset Palestinian Christians. For decades the Israelis' game has clearly been to obstruct and paralyse Christianity in the Holy Land. When Palestine was under British mandate, Christians accounted for 20 per cent of the population. Sixty-three years of hostilities, dispossession, interference and economic ruination have whittled their numbers down to less than 2 per cent. At this rate, there will soon be no Christians left in the land where Christianity was born.

And in November 2008, while Israel was planning its murderous assault against Gaza's civilians (including the Christian community), the Archbishop of Canterbury was gallivanting with Chief Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks on a visit to the former Nazi camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland to demonstrate their joint solidarity against the extremes of hostility and genocide.

"This is a pilgrimage not to a holy place but to a place of utter profanity," said the archbishop, "a place where the name of God was profaned because the image of God in human beings was abused and disfigured. How shall we be able to read the signs of the times, the indications that evil is gathering force once again and societies are slipping towards the same collective corruption and moral sickness that made the Shoah possible?"

Evil was again gathering its forces and corruption and moral sickness were on the rampage even as he spoke. And did the Archbishop and the chief rabbi afterwards go to sniff the stench where the name of God had been profaned in the ruins of the Gaza Strip and utter the same brave words?

Did they hell!

When the Church of England's head honcho finally visited Gaza, the Israelis refused him access to the Strip but at the last minute allowed him into the shattered enclave for just one-and-a-half hours, enough time to show his face at the hospital and no more. He said nothing about his experience to the House of Lords where he has a seat and the support of a large gaggle of bishops.

This despite his claim to be "in a unique position to bring the needs and voices of those fighting poverty, disease and the effects of conflict, to the attention of national and international policy makers", despite his declaration that "Christians need to witness boldly and clearly", and despite his urging greater awareness of the humanitarian crisis to ensure that the people of Gaza are not forgotten.

The archbishop's website, however, did report how he hobnobbed with the Chief Rabbinate of Israel, paid his respects to Yad Vashem and the Holocaust, and talked with the president of Israel. There was no mention of any similar get-togethers with senior Islamic figures, leaving a question-mark over his real commitment to inter-faith engagement.

The archbishop's agreeing to accept the hospitality of Jewish political and religious dignitaries while they squished his wish to carry out his Christian duties in Gaza, tells us a great deal.

So is the guy a closet Zionist like so many other so-called Christians?

I'm reminded of the he words of Desmond Tutu: "Where there is oppression, those who do nothing side with the oppressor."

"Christianity destroyed not by Muslims but by Israel"

The archbishop has a chance to redeem himself with the international conference on Christians in the Holy Land he plans to hold next month. For two days I've been asking his press office for details of delegates, keynote speakers, etc but have received nothing. We are left to speculate.

It would be nice if the conference were addressed by that excellent trio from the Holy Land: Archbishop Theodosius Hanna (Greek Orthodox Church), Monsignor Manuel Musallam (Latin Catholic) and Mr Constantine Dabbagh (Executive Director of the Middle East Council of Churches). These courageous spiritual leaders and human rights defenders toured Ireland last November to raise awareness of the situation in their homeland under Israeli military occupation and the plight of the dwindling Christian community. Their central message was simple: "We need only one thing - to be protected by the world against the crimes of Israel" (For details please see my article "No such thing as justice in the Holy Land".)

Fr Manuel told members of the Irish government:

Christianity in the region has been destroyed not by Muslims but by Israel. Israel destroyed the church of Palestine and the church of Jerusalem beginning in 1948. It, not Muslims, has sent Christians in the region into a diaspora... Christians in Palestine are not suffering persecution, because we are not considered to be a religious community, but rather the people of Palestine. We have the same rights and the same obligations.

We have spoken to Israel for more than 18 years and the result has been zero. We have signed agreements here and there at various times and then when there is a change in the government of Israel we have to start again from the beginning. We ask for our life and to be given back our Jerusalem, to be given our state and for enough water to drink... I have not seen Jerusalem since 1990.

However, given the Anglican Church's recent form, it wouldn't surprise me if the conference is hosted by the CMJ (the Church's Ministry among Jewish People). The CMJ is "propelled by devotion to God and the fulfillment of His promises to His people Israel". In its statement of faith the CMJ says Christians have "a special responsibility to love, defend and share the Gospel with God's historic, chosen People, the Jews".

The CMJ's attitude to the Israel-Palestine struggle is unhelpful to the Palestinians. For example:

• Gentiles are "fellow-citizens with God's people"...
• CMJ rejoices that, "after 2,000 years ... the Jewish people now, at last, have returned to the land from which the majority were dispersed in AD70..."
• CMJ recognizes that the state of Israel was set up "as a result of a majority vote of the United Nations in 1947..." However the ministry does not hold any official position as to the appropriate location of the borders of the state.

That signifies approval for Israel's continuing land-grab and lawlessness. If CMJ recognizes the UN's partition it should also accept the borders on which it was based.

According to Wikipedia, "CMJ has always adopted a Zionist position, and expressed the view that the Jewish people deserved a state in the Holy Land decades before Zionism began as a movement."

The CMJ was adopted as an official ministry of the Church of England in 1995 and has been operating in the shadows ever since. It is, if you like, the Church of England's Zionist wing.

* Stuart Littlewood is author of the book Radio Free Palestine, which tells the plight of the Palestinians under occupation. Read other articles by Stuart, or visit Stuart's website.

By Dr. Alan Sabrosky * | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

Far too often, what is not said, or cannot be said, publicly is more significant than the platitudes bandied about by assorted political leaders and pundits. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the ongoing Palestinian-Israeli matrix of death and disinformation.

President Obama in particular acts as if he were mesmerized by all this. He has all the power, but acts as if he were powerless. He can make things happen if he chooses to exert himself, yet has ended up positioning himself as a supplicant to Israel and pretending ignorance of Palestinian realities. He thinks and speaks, but does nothing of substance that Israel does not want him to do.

The Indictment

So let us look at those uncomfortable truths, politically unspeakable at least in the US but not necessarily elsewhere, and frequently discussed openly in many non-governmental forums, just so we all appreciate where we stand:

1. Gaza, Mr. Obama, Gaza. It holds three-fourths of the Palestinians under a government that electorally beat the faction that supports that Israeli puppet you call the Palestinian Authority. Deal with Gaza, deal with Hamas who governs there, or forget it: you are not dealing with Palestinians. You have got to know this. Why be in denial?

2. There is no two-state solution, and never has been one, so long as Israel held US support in its political palm. Look at the maps of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, look at the Israeli settlements and Israeli military protection for them in place, and the Wall – the Wall, Mr. President, longer & higher than the now-defunct Berlin Wall – and embattled Gaza. Just where and how do you think you will find a Palestinian state acceptable to Israel that has even a shred of the trappings of legitimacy and sovereignty that the now-defunct Bantustans had in apartheid-era South Africa?

3. The settlements are critical, and you, Mr. Obama, come across as a failure or a Zionist tool, or both together. Does projecting this image please you? And if you did not have the balls to force a halt to Israeli settlement expansion, much less the creation of new settlements, how do you expect to find the courage to dictate the removal of those settlements, without which there is no Palestinian entity of any kind in the West Bank, alone or not?

4. You can be pro-peace or pro-Israel, but not both together, and all of the rhetoric to the contrary, all of the money AIPAC and its confederates spend on Capitol Hill and elsewhere, all of the media attention Israel commands, cannot alter this essential reality. Why do you persist in playing to AIPAC, J Street, and the rest of the Hasbara crew, avowed or not?

5. Just why do you feel obliged to let your Administration's foreign policy staffing look like it was arranged by the Israeli Government? There are many experts in foreign policy, and in the Middle East, with US citizenship and no loyalty to a foreign government. Why are they not in your Administration? You have many Israeli partisans in your Administration, but where are your American partisans?

The Conundrum

And you, Mr. President, few of your predecessors have come into office with such high expectations and high hopes, and seen them squandered in such a short time. None of your predecessors since Carter signaled a willingness to view the Middle East through something other than an Israeli prism, and even Carter lacked John Kennedy's willingness to stand up to Israel. Your speech in Cairo signaled a stance on this issue in the tradition of Kennedy and Carter, and it went nowhere at all.

I understand the constraints, dealing with a Congress that does not now seem to contain a single person in either party in either House willing to stand up to the Jewish lobby. But are you so blind, so ignorant, so lacking in courage that you cannot and will not go directly to the American people? Do you like being cast as a laughing-stock and a weakling in public by Israel and its supporters? Do you like being an "Uncle Tom" to the Zionists?

Now, I do not care greatly for Obama as a person, nor anything at all for his domestic political agenda, but appearances notwithstanding, it would be wrong to dismiss him as simply a fool or a puppet. A fool or a puppet would never have made the Cairo speech two years ago in the first place. No politician anywhere enjoys taking the lead, and then looking behind, finding no one in support and clouds of criticism, and then having to back down from so public a stance. The egos of the breed cry out against such exercises in futility.

The same applies in part to some in his Administration, and to others, I suspect, in the Congress. Those who are Jewish, especially with dual Israeli citizenship, need no prompting to follow the Zionist agenda; that agenda is their agenda, heart and mind. The so-called Christian Zionists, mostly evangelical Protestants, are much the same, although for very different theological reasons, some of which ought to make Jewish Zionists more than a little nervous. And there are those in this and previous Administrations who have made their own Faustian bargain with AIPAC and its cohorts in the service of their own ambition.

But there are many in both houses of the Congress, and more within the armed services and the bureaucracy, who do not fit comfortably into any of these categories. Those in the Congress in particular have been bribed, blackmailed or bullied into submission, servility or silence, and few if any can be happy with their situation. Most simply make the best of an uncomfortable bargain, trading their own continuation or advancement in office for their support of Israeli ambitions, and their silence when confronted by Israeli crimes.

Yet this is a potential weakness in the edifice of Zionist influence and control in the US, and it should and must be our task to focus on that political battlefield, and not simply shuttle trucks and ships toward Gaza in the hope that some will get through the Israeli blockade. The remainder of the series that follows, Palestine and the United States: A Battle Lost, A War to Win, which has been completed and will be published in the coming weeks, is one attempt to define the parameters of a strategy to do precisely that. Executed properly, it and others like it may be a first step toward the saving of both the United States and Palestine.

* Alan Sabrosky (Ph.D, University of Michigan) is a ten-year US Marine Corps veteran and a graduate of the US Army War College. He can be contacted at docbrosk@comcast.net

By Uri Avnery * | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

In a rare late-night session, the Knesset has finally adopted two obnoxious racist laws. Both are clearly directed against Israel's Arab citizens, a fifth of the population.

The first makes it possible to annul the citizenship of persons found guilty of offences against the security of the state. Israel prides itself on having a great variety of such laws. Annulling citizenship on such grounds is contrary to international law and conventions.

The second is more sophisticated. It allows communities of less than 400 families to appoint "admission committees" which can prevent unsuitable persons from living there. Very shrewdly, it specifically forbids the rejection of candidates because of race, religion, etc. – but that paragraph is tantamount to a wink. An Arab applicant will simply be rejected because of his many children or lack of military service.

A majority of members did not bother to show up for the vote. After all, it was late and they have families, too. Who knows, some may even have been ashamed to vote.

But far worse is a third law that is certain to pass its final stages within a few weeks: the law to outlaw the boycott of the settlements.

Since its early stages, the original crude text of this bill has been refined somewhat.

As it stands now, the law will punish any person or association publicly calling for a boycott of Israel – economic, academic or cultural. "Israel", according to this law, means any Israeli enterprise or person, in Israel or in any territory controlled by Israel. Simply put, it is all about the settlements. And not only about the boycott of the products of the settlements, which was initiated by Gush Shalom some 13 years ago, but also about the recent refusal of actors to perform in the settlement of Ariel and the call by academics not to support the so-called University Centre there. It also applies, of course, to any call for the boycott of an Israeli university or an Israeli commercial enterprise.

This is a fundamentally flawed piece of legislation: it is anti-democratic, discriminatory, annexationist and altogether unconstitutional.

Everybody has the right to buy or not to buy whatever he or she desires, from whomsoever he or she chooses. That is so obvious that it needs no confirmation. It is a part of the right to free expression guaranteed by any constitution worth its salt, and an essential element of a free market economy.

I may buy from the store on the corner, because I like the owner, and shun the supermarket opposite, which exploits its employees. Companies expend huge sums of money to convince me to buy their products rather than others.

What about ideologically motivated campaigns? Years ago, while on a visit to New York, I was persuaded not to buy grapes produced in California, because the owners oppressed the Mexican migrant workers. This boycott went on for a long time and was – if I remember right – successful. Nobody dared to suggest that such boycotts should be outlawed.

Here in Israel, rabbis of many communities regularly paste up posters calling upon their flock not to buy at certain shops, which they believe are not kosher, or not kosher enough. Such calls are commonplace.

Such publications are fully compatible with human rights. Citizens for whom pork is an abomination, have the right to be informed about which shops sell pork and which do not. As far as I know, no one in Israel has ever contested this right.

Sooner or later, some anti-religious groups will publish calls to boycott kosher shops, which pay the rabbis – some of them the most intolerant of their kind – heavy levies for their certificates. They support a vast religious establishment that openly advocates turning Israel into a Halakha state – the Jewish equivalent of a Muslim Shari'ah state". Many thousands of Kashrut supervisors and myriads of other religious functionaries are paid for by the largely secular public.

So what about an anti-rabbinical boycott? It can hardly be forbidden, since the religious and the anti-religious are guaranteed equal rights.

So it appears that not all ideologically motivated boycotts are wrong. Nor do the initiators of this particular bill – racists of the Lieberman school, Likud rightists and Kadima "centrists" – claim this. For them, boycotts are only wrong if they are directed against the nationalist, annexationist policies of this government.

This is explicitly stated in the law itself. Boycotts are unlawful if they are directed against the State of Israel – not, for example, by the State of Israel against some other state. No Israeli in his right mind would retroactively condemn the boycott imposed by world Jewry on Germany immediately after the Nazis came to power – a boycott that served as a pretext for Josef Goebbels when he unleashed on 1 April 1933, the first Nazi anti-Semitic boycott (Deutsche wehrt euch! Kauft nicht bei Juden!)

Nor does any upright Zionist find fault with the boycott measures passed by Congress, under intense Jewish pressure, against the late Soviet Union, in order to break down the barriers to free Jewish emigration. These measures were hugely successful.

The Palestinian prime minister, Salam Fayyad, promotes the Store to Store campaign, part of drive to boycott of goods produced by Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank. Photograph: Jaafar Ashtiyeh/AFP/Getty Images

No less successful was the worldwide boycott against the Apartheid regime in South Africa – a boycott warmly welcomed by the South African liberation movement, though it also hurt the African workers employed by the boycotted white businesses (an argument now repeated by Israeli settlers, who exploit Palestinian labourers for starvation wages).

So political boycotts are not wrong, as long as they are directed against others. It's the old "Hottentot morality" of colonial lore – "if I steal your cow, that's right. If you steal my cow, that's wrong".

Rightists can call for action against left-wing organizations. Leftists cannot call for action against right-wing organizations. It's as simple as that.

But the law is not only anti-democratic and discriminatory, it is also blatantly annexationist.

By a simple semantic trick, in less than a sentence, the lawmakers do what successive Israeli government did not dare to do: they annex the Palestinian occupied territories to Israel.

Or maybe it's the other way round: are the settlers annexing Israel?

The word "settlements" does not appear in the text. God forbid. Much as the word "Arabs" does not appear in any of the other laws.

Instead, the text simply states that calls for the boycott of Israel, which are forbidden by the law, include the boycott of Israeli institutions and enterprises in all territories controlled by Israel. This includes, of course, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights.

This is the core of the matter. Everything else is camouflage...

Recently, the folly of the law was demonstrated by a French judge in Grenoble. This incident concerned the quasi-monopolistic Israeli agricultural products export company, Agrexco. The judge suspected the company of fraud, because products of the settlements were falsely declared as coming from Israel. This could well be fraud, too, because Israeli exports to Europe are entitled to preferential treatment which the products of the settlements are not.

Such incidents are occurring more and more often in various European countries. This law will cause them to multiply.

In the original version, boycotters would have committed a criminal offence and been fined. That would have caused us great joy, because our refusal to pay the fines and and subsequent imprisonment would have dramatized the matter.

This clause has now been omitted. But every single company in the settlements and, indeed, every single settler who feels hurt by the boycott can sue – for unlimited damages – any group calling for the boycott and any individual connected with the call. Since the settlers are tightly organized and enjoy unlimited funds from all kinds of casino owners and sleazy sex merchants, they can file thousands of suits and practically paralyze the boycott movement. That, of course, is the aim.

The fight is far from over. Upon the enactment of the law, we shall call upon the Supreme Court to annul it, as contrary to Israel's fundamental constitutional principles and basic human rights.

As Menachem Begin used to say: "There are still judges in Jerusalem!"

Or are there?

* Uri Avnery is an Israeli journalist, writer and peace activist. Author of 1948: A Soldier's Tale - The Bloody Road to Jerusalem.

By Lawrence Davidson * | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

On 23 March 2011 the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that the United Nations Rapporteur Richard Falk (Professor Emeritus of International Law at Princeton University) told the world organization's Human Rights Council that the "continued pattern of settlement expansion in East Jerusalem combined with the forcible eviction of long-residing Palestinians are creating an intolerable situation.." In fact, he continued, the present process "can only be described in its cumulative impact as ethnic cleansing." Falk concluded by asking the UN Human Rights Council to request an investigation by the International Criminal Court into whether Israeli actions in the West Bank amount to "colonialism, apartheid and ethnic cleansing inconsistent with international humanitarian law."

This is not a particularly startling or rare point of view. There are many well versed Israelis, including several reporters for Haaretz (such as Amira Hass and Gideon Levy), who would probably agree with Falk's position. There are millions of people around the world who are willing to actively boycott Israel due to, in part, its illegal settlement policies. And, the UN Human Rights Council itself has, in the past, repeatedly condemned Israeli settlement policies in the West Bank of Palestine.

Nonetheless, Israeli officials found Falk's statement highly insulting. Soon after the Rapporteur made his presentation to the Human Rights Council, Israel's envoy to the UN mission in Geneva, Aharon LeshnoYaar, labeled Falk an "embarrassment to the United Nations." He went on to explain that "Israel doesn't participate (sic) with Falk" and that when Falk speaks in a UN venue he, Yarr, "leaves the room." (As an aside, Ambassador Yaar does not like a number of Americans. For instance, he does not like the documentary film maker Michael Moore because the man makes his money in a capitalist society while being critical of aspects of capitalism. According to Yaar, that makes Moore a hypocrite).

It would seem that in order to be a good diplomat, a reliable representative of your government, you have to be able to twist facts in a juvenile way. You know, in the way kids manipulate information to excuse some bad act, even when they have been caught at it in real time. Ambassador Yaar's behavior is a good example of this. The United Nations Human Rights Council has passed resolutions condemning Israeli behavior toward the Palestinians over 20 times. Given that record you can safely apply the old saying, "where there is smoke there is likely to be fire." Yet, how do loyal diplomats like Yaar react? They often: 1. Yell loudly and repeatedly that the fellow pointing out their sins is bias. So, he is anti-Semitic (alas, Dr. Falk is Jewish), and that is why he keeps pointing fingers in our direction, Or, 2. The other guy made me do it. Those Palestinians (allegedly) hit me first. How come you never yell at them? Or, 3. (Particularly in the case of Israel) God made us do it and so, if you don't like it, go argue with God. And, finally, when the fellow who has seen you commit the nasty deed over and again insists that you are the culprit, you get up and run out of the room with your hands over your ears.

While Yaar and the rest of the Israeli establishment engage in these practices and complain about the bias of their critics, the consequences of their governmental policies is to institute bias against the Palestinians wherever they exercise authority. In the recent past there has been a spate of such actions . Thus, the Israeli Knesset has recently passed two bills along these lines. One, known as the "Nakba Bill," institutes a fine on "local authorities and other state-funded bodies for holding events marking the Palestinian Nakba Day...." Nakba is the term the Palestinians, who constitute more than 20% of Israel's citizens, use for the catastrophe that led to there loss of a homeland as a consequence of the creation of Israel. The other bill "formalizes the establishment of admission committees to review potential residents of Negev and Galilee towns that have fewer than 400 families." The bill is designed to keep such towns wholly Jewish by preventing Palestinians from taking up residence. As one Arab Israeli noted, "this is a racist law, a law against Arabs."

Yaar makes no reference to this sort of bias, but only to the alleged bias of those who point out Israeli bias. No doubt, over time, diplomats and politicians come to believe their own excuses. Like naughty children, they don't know what double standards mean, and end up creating an alternate world of fabrications. Unlike most children who eventually grow up, professionals like Yaar come to dwell in this alternate world more or less at will. In fact, the ability to do so has been part of the standard job description for a career in diplomacy and politics for a very long time. Back in 1909 the Austrian satirist Karl Kraus asked "How is the world ruled and how do wars start?" His answer was, "Diplomats tell lies to journalists and then believe what they read" (Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, 2001, p. 445, #18).

Almost at the same time as Ambassador Yaar was describing Richard Falk as an "embarrassment to the United Nations," Ahmed Tibi, an Arab Israeli member of the Knesset, debating the racist laws cited above, told his Jewish colleagues the following, "You must read Jewish history well and learn which laws you suffered from...Do you need an Arab on the stand to remind you of your history?" The Knesset's reaction? Loud and repeated yelling about how bias and insulting Tibi was. "Go back to Ramallah" they told him.

Now, just who is an embarrassment to the United Nations, an organization which began its life back in the late 1940s by, among other things, the issuance of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights? Is it Richard Falk, a man who has dedicated his entire professional life to the fight for a better world, governed by humane laws? Or is it Aharon LeshnoYaar and the political establishment he represents? For anyone beyond childhood, and with accurate information, the answer ought to be obvious.

* Lawrence Davidson is professor of history at West Chester University. He is the author of numerous books, including Islamic Fundamentalism and America's Palestine: Popular and Official Perceptions from Balfour to Israeli Statehood.

WARNING: STRONG LANGUAGE

By Mantiq al-Tayr * | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

The illegal town of Ariel

2. Hey goys and girls, are you interested in supporting terrorism, violating international law, stealing other people's property and being in general a smug narcissistic asshole and getting the US taxpayer to subsidize this behavior? Of course you are, who wouldn't be? So you will be most interested in a new occasional feature that the tuyuur here at Mantiq al-Tayr have come up with called "Support Your Own Illegal Israeli Settlement". Once every couple of weeks or so we will choose a nice Israeli settlement built on Palestinian land and we'll give you some links about it so you can learn about what a great place it is. We will also provide you a link so that you can make US tax-free donations in order to keep the illegal settlement going – something you really should go to jail for, but here in the US this sort of theft and support of insane Israelis is encouraged and the taxpayers as usual get to foot the bill. What a deal.

Our inaugural voyage into the realm of illegal Israeli settlements is the lovely (and did I mention illegal?) town of Ariel, which lies not far from Nablus and which the Jewish Virtual Liebrary has the chutzpahpahpah to call "the capital of Samaria."

Founded in 1978 by Likudnik Ron Nachman, this 8-mile long illegal settlement has about 20,000 residents – many of them Russian Jews imported during the 1990's. It also has a "university" of about 12,000 students a few hundred of whom are Arabs which makes everything better. Residents get highly subsidized by the Israeli government as it is clear that this settlement was and is designed as part of a major land grab in the northern West Bank. Again, the Liebrary tells us:

"The city's position expands Israel's narrow waist (which was 9 miles wide before 1967) and ensures that Israel has a land route to the Jordan Valley should Israel needs to fight a land war to the east. Because of its size, most Israelis favor the incorporation of the Ariel bloc within whatever may be the final borders of Israel. It is more controversial than the other "consensus" settlements because it is the furthest from the 1949 Armistice Line. Nevertheless, Prime Minister Barak's proposal at Camp David included Ariel among the settlement blocs to be annexed to Israel; the Clinton plan also envisioned incorporating Ariel within the new borders of Israel."

The residents of Ariel are there because of the "higher standard of living they enjoy and the economic incentives provided by the government. In particular, residents can obtain better mortgages and repayment terms because the government designated Ariel as a "national priority" development area."

You will be glad to know that Israeli ass-kisser and very likely to become the next Israeli Vice President for American Affairs, Mike Huckabee, went to Ariel early this month and made a complete ass of himself, something he is very good at doing.

Huckabeestein went to the Ariel Regional Center for the Performing Arts, which btw is the subject of a boycott initiated by Israeli artists who have a conscience – unlike Huckabee obviously – and said, and I'm not making this up:

"what some people from outside would call a settlement, most of us would look at this and tour it and call it a community – a thriving community – where people are being educated, encouraged, enjoying life and raising families ."

When the boycott of the ARCPA was mentioned to him by reports, Huckabilly actually made an indirect threat to those who support the boycott.

When asked about the artists' boycott of the Ariel Regional Center for the Performing Arts, Huckabee said: "People have boycotted me previously. I consider it a badge of honor. I am sure that this university and this community will thrive. I am not sure that the people who do the boycotting will."

And of course, the neo-con nutcase Jennifer Rubin who blogs for, surprise surprise, the Jerusalem Washington New York Times Post (JEWNYTP) recently visited Ariel and managed to learn nothing at all as she drove on the West Bank's "Jewish only" roads. She, like Huckabee, believes in a "one-state" solution to the problem – that is that only Israel exist. Not quite what Ali Abu Nima might have in mind. But I digress.

Huckabuthead, an ordained Baptist minister and living proof that American Christianity is pretty much just a bunch of Zionist Bullshit, got interviewed for Politico and said stuff that no doubt made Jennifer Rubin get really excited.

"The trips also have political lessons. Huckabee met with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and a committee of the Knesset on this trip, making headlines for his dismissal of the land-for-peace bargain that underlies the peace process and of the very idea of a Palestinian state in the West Bank.

Such a state "can't be on top of the same real estate that the Israelis control," he told POLITICO. "There's no such thing as a realistic hope of this two-state solution."

He said demands that Israel rein in settlements have only encouraged Palestinian demands. Instead, he said, the U.S. should "encourage the Israelis to build as much as they can and as rapidly as they can."

I love this quote from the interview:

A parliamentarian who backs Israel's settlements, Danny Danon, told POLITICO that if Huckabee "had to get elected in the Knesset, I'm sure he would be the president of the United States."

Yet again, I digress. Let's get back to Ariel as we go down the "Jewish only" road.

So if you are the kind of person who admires a Huckabee or a Rubin, you can go to the "American Friends of Ariel" website and make your tax-exempt contributions to a one-state solution – one state that will end up having no Palestinians at all.

To go to their donation page, click here and see the message at the bottom of the page that says:

"Please note that all donations are tax deductible in the U.S.A."

3. Now, I have to comment on something. It's not the sort of thing readers of this site come here to read, but it is such an urgent matter that I feel I have to make a comment.

As hard as it is to believe, it does appear that the owners of the National Football League are going to lock out the players starting March 4^th and NFL fans around the country are facing the prospect that if no labor agreement is reached by late in the summer, some of all of the coming football season will be in jeopardy.

I want you all to know that we here at Mantiq al-Tayr are fully on the side of the NFL owners in this dispute. The owners are among the ruling elites in this country and they for the most part hate your guts and they would do anything they possibly could to fuck you over in a New York minute if they had the chance. And in fact they do so on a regular basis and NFL fans seem to enjoy it. I hope the owners totally crush the players union and do so in a way that even Shas Party members can see just how much the rich hate the guts of working people. I want them to stomp the players into the ground and when it's all over – and I hope there is no football season at all in 2011, the players have to go back to one-year contracts making the wages of your average Walmart assistant manager. Your NFL ticket prices still won't come down, you will still have to buy PSL's, you will continue to subsidize their huge fucking stadiums, and you'll still have to pay through the nose for Direct TV's "NFL Ticket" and the cable companies showing the games will just jack up their rates. And you – you stupid dumb tax-paying Israeli-supporting Fox-fed American morons won't do a damn thing about it. You deserve it. Fuck you.

I feel better now.

4. Man, do we need something to cheer us up.

How about this?

American Christianity - AP Photo

Hmm. Guess that one doesn't work, does it?

How about this? Huckabee vs. Derwoshitz

Video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fw1aCRyPPjs

Nah, that just makes me even more upset.

How about this:

Video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrOW4df3H68

Gosh, I am just striking out today. Give me another chance.

Video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R611drTEHPA

Okay, one more chance. Please.

Video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1it2EGo9h_o

Just one more, I promise.

Video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBe-U4owMG8

See, I'm getting better. And here's one more. It's real short so Shas Party members can follow it.

Video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZJhBtBfb3E

* Mantiq al-Tayr is a blogger who is attempting to wake up other American citizens to the true dangers and challenges which face their country and is devoted to justice for the Palestinian people. Truth is his objective, satire is his tool. He also enjoys reading the Qur'an from time to time. See his website.

Hang you head in shame, O Peace Prize laureate.

By Stuart Littlewood * | Sabbah Report | www.sabbah.biz

The Nobel award, said Barack Obama at the time, was "an affirmation of American leadership on behalf of aspirations held by people in all nations" and must be shared with everyone who strives for "justice and dignity". Where was the justice and dignity in the sad story of America's UN veto?

Having blocked the United Nations Security Council draft resolution on Friday, which would have condemned Israeli squatter colonies as illegal, Obama has now written America completely out of the script on Middle East peace.

Many will see it as a blessing that the US has so spectacularly disqualified itself from serious discussion, and that Obama has finally lifted the scales from the eyes of all those who unwisely invested high hopes in him.

Netanyahu's office was cock-a-hoop and said Israel was "deeply grateful" to be let off the hook and as a reward the delinquent promises to be a good boy and "pursue negotiations vigorously" with the Palestinians. The US veto made it clear that "the only path to such a peace will come through direct negotiations and not through the decisions of international bodies".

Some people will do anything to stop the United Nations getting a grip on the crisis. It would be more than a tad inconvenient to the crazed Greater Israel project. No doubt the champagne corks were popping in the US-Israeli Combined Ops headquarters as the Zionist luvvies danced late into the night to celebrate their victory.

The resolution, besides condemning the continuation of settlement activities and other measures aimed at altering the demographic composition, character and status of the Territory, in violation of international humanitarian law and relevant resolutions, demanded that Israel ceased forthwith and fully respected all of its legal obligations in that regard.

The US argued that although it opposes Israeli settlements, taking the issue to the UN would only complicate efforts to resume stalled negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians on a two-state solution. Why that should be the case wasn't explained. Nor was the reason why negotiations should be re-started in the teeth of Israel's uncompromising territorial objectives and clear dislike of peace.

It seems, from what US ambassador Susan Rice says, that craven Washington cannot bring itself to call Israel's settlements on stolen Palestinian land what they really are - illegal - and is only prepared to label them "illegitimate", presumably in case the correct term ruffles too many Israel lobby feathers.

Falling back onto the administration's familiar double-speak, Rice explained that the veto "should not be misunderstood to mean we support settlement activity" but the US thinks it "unwise for this council to attempt to resolve the core issues that divide Israelis and Palestinians".

In other words, the United States would much prefer to have the Israel-Palestine question resolved by arm-twisting behind closed doors, in the guise of "direct talks", than let the Security Council intervene with another binding resolution.

This latest resolution had nearly 120 co-sponsors and the other 14 Security Council members voted in favour. There are reports that Washington earlier threatened to slash aid to the Palestinian Authority if it wasn't withdrawn, as if to remove any lingering doubt as to the crooked purpose of America's meddling. When this failed the US, as one of the five permanent council members with blocking power, struck it down.

In doing so, the United States has advertised itself to the whole wide world as the willing tool of Zionist ambition and branded itself an enemy of Palestine and of all other countries threatened by the Israeli regime.

Sucked into the swamp of "direct negotiations"

Right on cue, British foreign secretary William Hague chimed in with some carefully-crafted balderdash:

"I have made clear my serious concern about the current stalemate in the Middle East Peace Process. Today the UK voted with others, including France and Germany, to reinforce this and our longstanding view that settlements, including in East Jerusalem, are illegal under international law, an obstacle to peace and constitute a threat to a two-state solution..."

He started well but quickly showed his eagerness to be sucked down by the US and Israel into the swamp of direct negotiations.

"I call on both parties to return as soon as possible to direct negotiations towards a two-state solution, on the basis of clear parameters...

• An agreement on the borders of the two states, based on June 4 1967 lines with equivalent land swaps as may be agreed between the parties.
• Security arrangements that, for Palestinians, respect their sovereignty and show that the occupation is over; and, for Israelis, protect their security, prevent the resurgence of terrorism and deal effectively with new and emerging threats.
• A just, fair and agreed solution to the refugee question.
• Fulfillment of the aspirations of both parties for Jerusalem. A way must be found through negotiations to resolve the status of Jerusalem as the future capital of both states."

Just pause there, please, Mr Hague. First, if a state is doing something that's illegal and an obstacle to peace, and won't stop when asked, it surely becomes the responsibility of international community and its law courts, and especially the United Nations, to sort it out. The victim can hardly be expected to NEGOTIATE an end to it.

Secondly, why are Israel's accumulated crimes now deemed negotiable when the issues were long ago determined by the UN and by international law and wait to be implemented? Not once do you mention delivering that long-awaited justice. Instead you are obsessed with endless, unequal negotiations that are dishonestly convened and favour a very strong party that literally holds a gun to the weak party's head.

And always the talk is of security for the Israelis rather than the Palestinians. You mention security arrangements to "prevent the resurgence of terrorism and deal effectively with new and emerging threats" against Israel. I don't hear you pressing for equivalent arrangements to prevent Israeli terrorism against the Palestinians.

"We therefore look to both parties to return to negotiations as soon as possible on this basis. Our goal remains an agreement on all final status issues and the welcoming of Palestine as a full member by September 2011. We will contribute to achieving this goal in any and every way that we can."

What has the British government done over the years to pave the way towards Palestinian statehood, Mr Hague? Now you're in an all-fired hurry to rush it through in six months but still unwilling to act positively to establish any likelihood of a JUST solution.

"We understand Israel's deep and justified security concerns. As friends of Israel, we share those concerns, and will strive with Israel to preserve her security and the stability of the region around her. It is precisely because of those concerns that we vote today in favour of this resolution."

And not for the key reason that the settlements are illegal and moving Israeli squatters onto occupied territory seriously breaches the Geneva Convention and amounts to a war crime? Is that not of sufficient concern for you to say so loudly and clearly?

"We regret anything which sets back the prospects for peace because we believe it also sets back Israel's security."

There you go again...this slavish attachment to Israel's security above all else. How can Britain be seen as an honest broker any more than the Zionist lackeys of the US administration?

The fact is, Mr Hague, the country you represent does not regard itself particularly as a friends of Israel and is not interested in preserving Israel's security at the expense of its neighbours. It certainly doesn't wish to be thought of as an enemy of Palestine just to appease your funny friends in Tel Aviv and Washington.

* Stuart Littlewood is author of the book Radio Free Palestine, which tells the plight of the Palestinians under occupation. Read other articles by Stuart, or visit Stuart's website.