Israel told to tackle West Bank plight
JERUSALEM — Israel is coming under concerted international pressure to give swift agreement to specific measures to improve Palestinian life in the West Bank which senior diplomats believe could eventually make or break negotiations between the Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, and the Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas....Greek Orthodox patriarch looks to the future
JERUSALEM (AP) — The Greek Orthodox Church in the Holy Land is trying to recover from a moral and financial crisis, its top clergyman, Patriarch Theofilos III, told The Associated Press in a rare interview. In recent years, the church has been shaken by secretive real estate deals with Israelis, by Palestinian laymen angry about...
HAMAS offers truce to Israel
April 25th, 20080 CAIRO — HAMAS has proposed a six-month truce with Israel, aimed at easing a blockade on the Gaza Strip. At a meeting with Egyptian mediators in Cairo on Thursday, the Palestinian group offered to cease cross-border rocket attacks if Israel opens crossing points into Gaza and ends military incursions into the Palestinian territory....CNN downplays Israeli crimes in Gaza
The headlines say it all. CNN reported, "Israeli-Palestinian fighting kills 21." Who exactly did the killing is hidden. The article also used photographic trickery to downplay the magnitude of the crimes. The BBC's website read, "Day of Gaza unrest leaves 22 dead," but featured a powerful online video. One...Understanding the six basic issues for HAMAS
Achieving a peaceful Israeli-Palestinian win-win situation is to deal with HAMAS in the total context of its actions. This means understanding that HAMAS represents: resistance, respect, reciprocity, reconstruction, rights and refugees. BEIRUT — The controversy over whether former U.S. President Jimmy Carter...European, North American Christians show solidarity with Hebron’s persecuted orphans
Hebron — In a conspicuous contrast to Christian Zionists who rabidly support Israeli repression of Palestinians, scores of Christian activists from Europe and North America this week arrived in this southern West Bank town to show solidarity with the Islamic Charitable Society, Palestine's largest charity. A few weeks...PLO representative discusses challenges to Palestinian statehood
Palestinian ambassador calls for non-violent resistance movement, discusses peace prospects TUCSON — The Palestinian ambassador to the United States said Palestinians should move toward a non-violent resistance movement in the Occupied Territories, even as latest reports reveal Israel does not intend to halt its settlements in the...Whispers for engagement with HAMAS
WASHINGTON (IPS) — Two years after HAMAS was isolated almost unanimously by the international community following its victory in Palestinian parliamentary elections, the militant Islamist group has repeatedly proved that it can disrupt U.S. President George W. Bush's plans for a decisive agreement on Palestinian-Israeli peace by the...
Death of the two-state solution
March 28th, 20080 It is now clear beyond reasonable dispute that a two-state solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has passed into the realm of fiction. The project — if it ever was a real project — is stone dead. Some Western politicians, U.S. President George W. Bush among them, continue to pay lip service to the notion of an independent...Israel’s ‘religious right’ gains clout, complicating peace with Palestinians
Givat Zeev, West Bank — On a hilltop far enough from the existing Israeli settlement of Givat Zeev that one needs directions to get here stands the framework of a settlement meant to house up to 750 families. Eli Yishai stood on an unfinished balcony of one of the new development's shell homes. He's a key coalition partner of Prime...Evil can’t be kosher
OCCUPIED EAST JERUSALEM — I realize very well that you are not carbon copies of each other. And I also know that there are many Jews around the world who truly despise what Israel has been doing to the Palestinian people in your name. I earnestly commend these conscientious Jews for their morality and human decency. It is these...Missing the context on the yeshiva shooting spree
In this week's look at media coverage, one story really brought to light the lack of crucial context in American media coverage of the Israel-Palestinian conflict. How columnists and editorialists can write about events in Israel-Palestine as if they took place in a vacuum is a mystery. Though many people use the term "cycle...Daze of reckoning in Gaza
It took the Palestinian Authority investigative committee, headed by Tayeb Abdel Rahim, 49 sessions, 29 days and 128 hours to investigate the capture of Gaza by Hamas in June 2007. An original name was found for the committee: "The Investigative Committee on the Matter of the Failure of the Confrontation with the Illegal Armed...Israel defies freeze on illegal settlements
JERUSALEM — Israel approved plans this week to build 330 new homes in a suburban West Bank settlement north of Jerusalem. The move was denounced by the Palestinian Authority as "a slap in the face of the peace process" and called on the Quartet of the United States, European Union, United Nations and Russia to "act to get Israel to...
Is a third intifada brewing?
March 14th, 20080 Bethlehem — Fadi al-Amour and his friends – high school seniors – spent more time last week on the street than in class. Every day, they marched on Rachel's Tomb, guarded by Israeli soldiers, and, along with hundreds of other young Palestinians, pelted the nearest symbol of Israeli power with rocks and Molotov cocktails. "We were......
Current lull provides opportunity
BEIRUT — Out of crisis comes opportunity, which describes the current brief lull in the war between Israel and the Palestinian resistance movements in Gaza. Rather than just trying to calm things down, this is the moment to push hard diplomatically towards more serious negotiations, on the basis of a new, more credible, balance of...The mega prisons of Palestine
In several articles published by The Electronic Intifada, I claimed that Israel is pursuing a genocidal policy against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, while continuing the ethnic cleansing of the West Bank. I asserted that the genocidal policies are a result of a lack of strategy. The argument was that since the Israeli political......
U.S. conspired to cause civil war in Palestine
March 8th, 20080 Journalist David Rose outlines Iran-Contra-style plot in April issue of Vanity Fair United States officials including President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice participated in a conspiracy to arm and train Contra-style Palestinian militias nominally loyal to the Fatah party to overthrow the...Massacres continue in Gaza
Israel killed 116 Palestinians in Gaza last week in an orgy of air strikes and ground incursions, turning the besieged and starved Strip into an unbearable inferno. Hundreds more Palestinians were wounded. At least half the dead and wounded were civilians, including many young children. So great was the catastrophe that Egypt,...If it bleeds in Israel, it leads in America
But most Palestinian resistance to the occupation is non-violent Recent actions by Palestinians in Gaza seemed designed to expose bias in the American media. Last weekend, they organized a non-violent, symbolic protest at Gaza's borders. Later in the week, Hamas began launching retaliatory rockets into Israel,...
Children killed as Israel pounds Gaza
March 1st, 20080 A boy sits next to the body of 6-month-old Palestinian baby Mohammed al-Borai in a mosque before his funeral in GazaGAZA CITY — Israel pounded the Hamas-run Gaza Strip on Thursday, February 28, killing four children and 10 militants, as Prime Minister Ehud Olmert vowed to make the Islamists pay a heavy price for rocket......
One third of settlements on private land
Not long ago the greengrocer in Ramallah recalled — between weighing locally grown zucchini and stripped hyssop leaves — that his family owned the land on which the gas station at the old entrance to the Jewish settlement of Beit El in the West Bank is located. A Palestinian boy hurling a stone at Israeli troops He would not be...Hamas renews call for ceasefire with Israel
JERUSALEM — A Hamas official this week renewed calls for a ceasefire amid mounting Israeli demands for a broad military offensive in the Gaza Strip. Writing in the Israeli daily Haaretz, Ahmed Yussef, a Hamas foreign policy advisor, called for a long-term ceasefire between Palestinian militants and Israeli forces. Sderot solidarity......
For the world, Gaza is reality TV
GAZA CITY (IPS) — "We are being starved, killed, tortured, and besieged — and all this while the world just watches," says Abu Wael at the funeral of the latest group of Gazans killed by Israeli forces. The death toll is mounting, even if much of the media is taking little note of killings on the Gaza side. Palestinian woman waits...Dimona signals Palestinian defiance
Moral judgments notwithstanding, the suicide bombing in Dimona on Monday is another chink in the siege imposed on all Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and it represents a continuity of the Palestinian rebellion that breached the wall between Gaza and Egypt last week. The fact that two fighters succeeded in reaching Dimona in......