German Chancellor Merkel defended Israeli onslaught on Gaza

 

German Chancellor Angela Merkel gave her full backing to the  attack launched by Israel on Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. On the 29th December, government spokesman Thomas Steg said that Merkel, in a telephone call to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, declared that the responsibility for the war lay “clearly and exclusively” with Hamas.

“The chancellor attaches importance to the fact that in evaluating the situation in the Middle East there should be no mistaking or forgetting the chain of cause and effect,” Steg said. Merkel is of the opinion, he continued, that Israel has the right to protect its population and defend its national territory.

 Chancellor Merkel did not issue a word of regret for the suffering of Israel’s victims. Instead, she remarked that she presumed the Israeli government was doing everything it could to avoid civilian casualties.

According to Israeli sources, on the first day of the offensive its military dropped no less than 100 tons of bombs on a densely populated area approximately 40 kilometers by 10 kilometers and home to 1.5 million people. The first attack took place during daylight, at a time when many Palestinians, including school children, were conducting everyday business.

Merkel went on to demand that Hamas “immediately and permanently” stop its rocket attacks on Israeli territory. Not a single Israeli had been killed by the primitive Kassam rockets fired by Hamas recently, while repeated provocations by the Israeli military over the same period had killed many Palestinians.

 At the start of the Israeli bombardment, Spiegel Online reported on the difficulties in treating the thousands of injured, writing, “In the Schifa hospital in Gaza the injured are being treated on the floor because no more stretchers or beds are free.” The report quoted Raed al-Arini of the hospital administration: “The hospital has a bed capacity of 585, but we have 700 injured here.”

Contrary to the declarations of the German chancellor, the Israeli offensive is not aimed at the protection of Israeli territory or its population. The purpose of the “shock and awe” campaign against Gaza is to overthrow the Palestinian Gazan government. This policy of “regime change” is the very policy conducted by the US in Iraq.

 Since 1967, Israel has defied all relevant United Nations resolutions and, contrary to international law, either occupied or imposed siege conditions on the Gaza Strip. In 1967, the strip of land was inhabited by 380,000 people, half of whom were Palestinian refugees from Israel. Today, approximately 1.5 million live in the Gaza Strip, more than two thirds of whom are either refugees or their descendants.

In 2005 the Israelis withdrew their troops, and some settlers also had to leave the area. But Israel kept control of the air space, the territorial waters and the border crossings. This makes the Gaza Strip into little more than a prison camp.

Since the victory by Hamas in the 2006 Palestinian elections, the US and Israel have worked to force Hamas from power in Gaza.

When all its attempts failed, Israel imposed a blockade, preventing supplies of food, medicine, drinking water and electricity to the Gaza Strip and provoking a humanitarian disaster. Three quarters of the population depend on food assistance and 80 percent live below the poverty level. Some 90 % of factories in Gaza were forced to close down last year. Whenever the Israeli government considers it necessary, it closes the border crossings and bombards the Palestinian areas. In the past eight years the Israeli military has killed nearly 5,000 Palestinians.

The demolition of institutional and educational life in Gaza is designed to produce, wrote Karma Nabulsi, a Palestinian exile in Britain, “a Hobbesian vision of an anarchic society: truncated, violent, powerless, destroyed, cowed… Look to the Iraq of today: that is what [former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon] had in store for us, and he has nearly achieved it.”

However, the Islamic Hamas movement has no real perspective to counter the Israeli offensive. The firing of Kassam rockets on Israel and the dispatch of desperate young Palestinians to carry out suicide missions are aimed at pressuring Israel to return to the negotiating table in order to secure a lifting of sanctions.

In 2003, Merkel, in her function as chairman of the Christian Democratic Union, unconditionally threw her weight behind the US in the Iraq war. Merkel’s support for Israel’s assault upon Gaza was consistent with this record of complicity with US imperialism and its chief ally Israel in the Middle East.

Sources:

World Socialist Website:

http://www.wsws.org/articles/2009/jan2009/merk-j02.shtml

John Pilger:

http://www.johnpilger.com/page.asp?partid=519

Naomi Klein on Israel’s Occupation of Palestine: “Israel: Boycott, Divest, Sanction”

 

“It’s time. Long past time. The best strategy to end the increasingly bloody occupation is for Israel to become the target of the kind of global movement that put an end to apartheid in South Africa. …

… Every day that Israel pounds Gaza brings more converts to the BDS cause, and talk of cease-fires is doing little to slow the momentum. Support is even emerging among Israeli Jews. In the midst of the assault roughly 500 Israelis, dozens of them well-known artists and scholars, sent a letter to foreign ambassadors stationed in Israel. It calls for “the adoption of immediate restrictive measures and sanctions” and draws a clear parallel with the antiapartheid struggle. “The boycott on South Africa was effective, but Israel is handled with kid gloves.… This international backing must stop.” …

To Read the rest of Naomi Klein’s Article:

http://www.naomiklein.org/articles/2009/01/israel-boycott-divest-sanction

“Scholasticide” in Gaza – the Destruction of Palestinian Educational Institutions

 

“The Palestinians are among the most thoroughly educated people in the world. For decades, Palestinian society – both at home in the West Bank and Gaza, and scattered in the diaspora – has put a singular emphasis on learning. After the expulsions of 1948 and after the 1967 occupation, waves of refugees created an influential Palestinian intelligentsia and a marked presence in the disciplines of medicine and engineering across the Arab world, Europe and the Americas.

In the current offensive, Israel began attacking Gaza’s educational institutions immediately. On only the second and third day of air attacks last week, Israeli planes wreaked severe damage in direct strikes on Gaza’s Islamic University. The main buildings were devastated, destroying administrative records, and, of course, ending studies. The Ministry of Education has been hit twice by direct hits from the air.

In a recent lecture, Nabulsi at St Edmund Hall recalled the tradition of learning in Palestinian history, and the recurrent character of the teacher as an icon in Palestinian literature. “The role and power of education in an occupied society is enormous. Education posits possibilities, opens horizons. Freedom of thought contrasts sharply with the apartheid wall, the shackling checkpoints, the choking prisons,” she said.

This week, following the bombing of schools in Gaza, she says:  “The systematic destruction of Palestinian education by Israel has countered that tradition since the occupation of 1967,” citing “the calculated, wholesale looting of the Palestinian Research Centre in Beirut during the 1982 war and the destruction of all those manuscripts and archived history.”

“Now in Gaza,” she says, “we see the policy more clearly than ever – this ’scholasticide’. The Israelis know nothing about who we really are, while we study and study them. But deep down they know how important education is to the Palestinian tradition and the Palestinian revolution. They cannot abide it and have to destroy it.” …”

To Read More of this Article:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/10/gaza-schools

1.2 Million Human Beings Dead in Iraq

 

A survey of the population of Iraq which was released in 2008, stated that up to 1.2 million people have died because of the conflict in Iraq - this lends weight to the 2006 Lancet survey that reported similarly high levels.

More than one million deaths were already being suggested by anti-war campaigners, but such high counts have consistently been rejected by US and UK officials. The estimates, extrapolated from a sample of 1,461 adults around the country, were collected by a British polling agency, ORB, which asked a random selection of Iraqis how many people living in their household had died as a result of the violence rather than from natural causes.

Previous estimates gave a range between 390,000 and 940,000, the most prominent of which – collected by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and reported in the Lancet in October 2006 – suggested 654,965 deaths.

Although the household survey was carried out by a polling organisation, rather than researchers, it has again raised the spectre that the 2003 invasion has caused a far more substantial death toll than officially acknowledged.

The ORB survey follows an earlier report by the organisation which suggested that one in four Iraqi adults had lost a family member to violence. The latest survey suggests that in Baghdad that number is as high as one in two. If true, these latest figures would suggest the death toll in Iraq now exceeds that of the Rwandan genocide in which about 800,000 died.

The Lancet survey was criticised by some experts and by US President George Bush and British officials. In private, however, Britain’s Ministry of Defence’s chief scientific adviser Sir Roy Anderson described it as ‘close to best practice’.

Sources:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/sep/16/iraq.iraqtimeline

http://www.greenleft.org.au/2008/739/38228

http://www.opinion.co.uk/Newsroom_details.aspx?NewsId=88

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ORB_survey_of_casualties_of_the_Iraq_War

http://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140673604174412/fulltext

Venezuela and Bolivia break diplomatic relations with Israel

 

On Tuesday, January 6th, Venezuela ordered Israel’s ambassador expelled from the country on Tuesday in protest over the Israeli military offensive in the Gaza Strip. Last Wednesday, January 14th, Venezuela and Bolivia formally broke diplomatic relations with Israel due to the Gazan Offensive. 

Bolivian President Evo Morales announced that Bolivia was breaking diplomatic relations with Israel and urged that Israeli President Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Ehud Olmert be declared war criminals.

The decision by President Hugo Chavez to expel the diplomat appeared to be the strongest reaction yet to the Gaza offensive by any country with ties to Israel.

The Venezuelan Foreign Ministry announced the move in a statement, saying it “has decided to expel the Israeli ambassador and part of the Israeli Embassy’s personnel.”

“How far will this barbarism go?” Chavez asked on state television before the ambassador’s expulsion was announced. “The president of Israel should be taken before an international court together with the president of the United States, if the world had any conscience.”

Venezuela’s Foreign Ministry said its U.N. mission is joining with other countries in demanding the Security Council “apply urgent and necessary measures to stop this invasion.”

While many countries have protested Israel’s offensive, none besides Venezuela so far have expelled the ambassador.

Mauritania, which established relations with Israel in 1999, called home its ambassador from the Jewish state on Monday.

Jordan and Egypt, the other two Arab nations with relations with Israel, summoned their Israeli ambassadors to protest the Gaza attacks, but they have resisted popular calls to expel them.

In the announcement issued by the Venezuelan Foreign Ministry, on January 14th, the government cited “the gravity of the atrocities against the Palestinian people.”

The statement accused the Israelis of having “ignored, systematically, calls from the United Nations, violating in a repeated and shameless manner the resolutions approved by the overwhelming majority of their members and placing themselves ever more on the margin of international law.”

It described “19 days of continuous bombardment, the assassination of more than 1,000 people and the destruction of the infrastructure of the population of Gaza,” calling it “a human catastrophe that is unraveling before the eyes of the entire world.”

It further accused Israel of participating in “state terrorism” against “the most weak and innocent human beings: children, women and the aged.”

The statement called for Israeli leaders be tried before an international court for crimes against humanity.

Sources:

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/world/6197446.html

http://www.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/americas/01/14/bolivia.israel/index.html

John Pilger on Israel’s War on Gaza

 

“When the truth is replaced by silence,” the Soviet dissident Yevgeny Yevtushenko said, “the silence is a lie.” It may appear the silence is broken on Gaza. The cocoons of murdered children, wrapped in green, together with boxes containing their dismembered parents and the cries of grief and rage of everyone in that death camp by the sea, can be viewed on al-Jazeera and YouTube, even glimpsed on the BBC. But Russia’s incorrigible poet was not referring to the ephemeral we call news; he was asking why those who knew the why never spoke it and so denied it. Among the Anglo-American intelligentsia, this is especially striking. It is they who hold the keys to the great storehouses of knowledge: the historiographies and archives that lead us to the why.” …

Read the rest of this Article at:

http://www.johnpilger.com/page.asp?partid=519

UN Gaza Declaration Blocked by Britain and Germany

 

Britain and Germany refused to back a UN-sponsored declaration that condemned Israel’s military offensive in Palestinian cities and accused it of “mass killings” in West Bank refugee camps including Jenin.

The UK and Germany broke with the majority ­ five countries signed up to the text criticising Israel ­ at the annual session of the Geneva-based UN Commission on Human Rights.

 

The resolution, framed by Arab and Muslim states, attacked Israel for “gross violations” of humanitarian law and affirmed the “legitimate right of Palestinian people to resist”.

At a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Luxembourg, the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, said he rejected the resolution because it did not reflect worries about terrorism against Israel.

“We judge resolutions by their wording,” said Mr Straw. “I judged the wording of that particular resolution to be unacceptable because it was unbalanced and it did not give a firm statement on terrorism.”

Mr Straw rejected the idea that Britain’s refusal to back the resolution would appear callous, coinciding as it does with evidence of the death and destruction at Jenin. It was more important to be “consistent”, Mr Straw said.

 

German officials echoed Mr Straw’s words. “Germany remains deeply concerned at the extremely serious human rights and humanitarian situation in the occupied territories,” the German ambassador, Walter Lewalter, said, adding that it backed calls for an immediate Israeli military pullout. But he said Germany could not back the resolution because “the text contains formulations that might be interpreted as an endorsement of violence.”

 

France, Spain, Sweden, Portugal and Belgium backed the resolution and Italy abstained. In all, the commission, which has representatives from 53 states, passed the motion by 40 votes to five, with seven states abstaining and one member not present. In addition to Britain and Germany, Canada, Guatemala and the Czech Republic voted against the resolution.

In order to maximise support, Arab states had softened the text of their resolution, removing references to Israel committing acts of “state terrorism” and to the Palestinians’ right to use “any means” to fight military occupation.

Meanwhile the European foreign ministers meeting in Luxembourg gave only limited backing to a German-inspired plan for the Middle East, and rejected European economic sanctions against Israel.

 

The German plan envisages a peace conference to conclude negotiations on all unresolved issues within two years and calls for Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza and the clearing of settlements. The Israelis and Palestinian would recognise each other’s right to exist and “any country which continues to support terrorism or its organisations or members will be completely isolated, politically and economically”.

 

The foreign ministers welcomed the proposal but did not formally endorse it, deciding instead to bolster the mission of Colin Powell, the US Secretary of State. “We all recognise the key importance of Colin Powell’s mission and have expressed our backing,” Mr Straw said. “The situation is dire but what hope there is rests on his efforts.”

 

There was little appetite to follow last week’s call from the European Parliament, which asked the EU to suspend its six-year-old association agreement giving Israel preferential trade terms with the EU.

 

Source:

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/britain-and-germany-snub-unled-criticism-of-israel-657383.html

Total War in Gaza – One thousand dead

 

The official figure of Palestinian dead has now risen to over a thousand. The number of Palestinians killed in the Gaza conflict has reached an “unbearable point” according to UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-Moon.

Ban Ki-Moon also expressed outrage that the UN compound was hit by Israeli fire twice injuring three UN workers.

Israeli forces have moved deeper into Gaza City pounding densely populated neighbourhoods with artillery and tank shells.

The main UN compound in Gaza was in flames today after being struck by Israeli artillery fire, and a spokesman said that the building had been hit by shells containing the incendiary agent white phosphorus.

The attack on the headquarters of the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) came as Ban Ki Moon, the UN Secretary-General, arrived in Israel on a peace mission and plunged Israel’s relations with the world body to a new low.

Mr Ban told reporters in Tel Aviv that he had expressed “strong protest and outrage” to the Israeli Government over the shelling of the compound and was demanding an investigation. He said that Ehud Barak, the Israeli Defence Minister, had told him that it was “a grave mistake”.

 

The Israeli military has denied using white phosphorus shells in the Gaza offensive, although an investigation by The Times has revealed that dozens of Palestinians in Gaza have sustained serious injuries from the substance, which burns at extremely high temperatures.

The Geneva Convention of 1980 proscribes the use of white phosphorus as a weapon of war in civilian areas, although it can be used to create a smokescreen. The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) said today that all weapons used in Gaza were “within the scope of international law”.

The attack on the UN compound came as Israeli forces pushed deeper into Gaza City and unleashed their heaviest shelling on its crowded neighbourhoods in three weeks of war. At least 15 Palestinians were killed in the Israeli attacks, medical officials said, pushing the death toll up towards 1,100

There were reports that the al-Quds hospital in the Tal El Hawa district, Gaza’s second-largest, had been shelled, while more than 500 patients were being treated inside.

An explosion also blasted a tower block that houses the offices of Reuters and several other media organisations, injuring a journalist working for the Abu Dhabi television channel.

 

Sources:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article5521925.ece

http://thousand-shades-of-grey.blogspot.com/2009/01/people-in-palestine-are-burying-dead.html

 

Seven Reasons for Haiti’s Unending Agony

 

“The reason Haiti is in its present state is pretty simple. Canada, the United States and France, all of whom consider themselves civilised nations, colluded in the overthrow of the democratic government of Haiti four years ago. They did this for several excellent reasons:

 

• Haiti 200 years ago defeated the world’s then major powers, France (twice) Britain and Spain, to establish its independence and to abolish plantation slavery. This was unforgivable.

 

• Despite being bombed, strafed and occupied by the United States early in the past century, and despite the American endowment of a tyrannical and brutal Haitian army designed to keep the natives in their place, the Haitians insisted on re-establishing their independence. Having overthrown the Duvaliers and their successors, the Haitians proceeded to elect as president a little black parish priest who had become their hero by defying the forces of evil and tyranny.

 

• The new president of Haiti, Jean Bertrand Aristide refused to sell out (privatise) the few assets owned by the government (the public utilities mainly);

 

• Aristide also insisted that France owed Haiti more than $25 billion in repayment of blood money extorted from Haiti in the 19th century, as alleged compensation for France’s loss of its richest colony and to allow Haiti to gain admission to world trade;

 

 

• Aristide threatened the hegemony of a largely expatriate ruling class of so-called ‘elites’ whose American connections allowed them to continue the parasitic exploitation and economic strip mining of Haiti following the American occupation.

 

• Haiti, like Cuba, is believed to have in its exclusive economic zone, huge submarine oil reserves, greater than the present reserves of the United States

 

• Haiti would make a superb base from which to attack Cuba.”

 

To Read the Article in full click on the following link:

http://www.haitiaction.net/News/JM/10_26_8/10_26_8.html

John Pilger on the Intensifying Oppression of the Aboriginal People in Australia

 

 

“With its banks secured in the warmth of the southern spring, Australia is not news. It ought to be. An epic scandal of racism, injustice and brutality is being covered up in the manner of apartheid South Africa. Many Australians conspire in this silence, wishing never to reflect upon the truth about their society’s untermenschen, the Aboriginal people….”

 

To read this article in full clink on the link below:

 

http://www.johnpilger.com/page.asp?partid=507