Thursday, November 30, 2006

ISRAEL-PALESTINE: APARTHEID OR CONFEDERATION

By Jeff Halper

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s address to both houses of the American Congress in May, 2006, was the clearest, most explicit presentation of Israel’s conception of where it is going vis-à-vis the Palestinians. It is perhaps the most skilled use of Newspeak since George Orwell invented the term in his novel 1984. Just as Orwell’s totalitarian propagandists proclaimed WAR IS PEACE, so Olmert declared in Washington: ISRAELI EXPANSION IS WITHDRAWAL and UNILATERAL REALIGNMENT IS PEACE. (He had help with the language. Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel drafted large sections of the speech together with an American advisor who specializes in “Republican language.”)

Because of Olmert’s use of Orwellian language (can anyone, including President Bush or members of Congress, explain to us what “convergence” and “realignment” mean?), we must listen carefully to what is said, what is not said and what is meant. For “convergence” in one form or another, if not this year then next, is where Israel has to go if it continues to pursue its agenda of territorial expansion at the expense of the Palestinians.

What was said in Congress sounds fine if taken at face value. Olmert, extending “my hand in peace to Mahmoud Abbas, the elected president of the Palestinian Authority,” declared Israel’s willingness to negotiate with him on condition that the Palestinians “renounce terrorism, dismantle the terrorist infrastructure, accept previous agreements and commitments, and recognize the right of Israel to exist.” If they do so, Olmert held out Israel’s commitment to a two-state solution.

What wasn’t said? While reference to a Palestinian state sounds forthcoming, two key elements set down in the Road Map defining that state were missing: an end to the Israeli Occupation and the establishment of a viable Palestinian state. “A settlement,” says the text of the Road Map to which Olmert and Bush constantly declare their allegiance, “will result in the emergence of an independent, democratic, and viable Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security with Israel. The settlement will…end the occupation that began in 1967.”

Olmert’s “convergence” (or “realignment”) plan is based on the massive “facts on the ground” – what I have called its Matrix of Control – that are intended to foreclose completely the emergence of a viable Palestinian state (although Israel needs a Palestinian Bantustan to “relieve” it of the Palestinian population). Any plan which includes the Matrix of Control cannot possibly address Palestinian needs, and in fact creates a permanent regime of Apartheid. According to Olmert’s plan, the “Separation Barrier” will become Israel’s permanent “demographic border,” with Israel annexing some 10% of the West Bank. That may not sound like much, but consider this: the settlement blocs thus incorporated into Israel (together with a half-million Israeli settlers) carve the West Bank into a number of small, disconnected, impoverished “cantons” and remove from the Palestinians their richest agricultural land and all the water. Hardly the basis for a viable state.

The convergence plan also creates a “greater” Israeli Jerusalem over the entire central portion of the West Bank, thereby cutting the economic, cultural, religious and historic heart out of any Palestinian state. It then sandwiches the Palestinians between the Barrier/border and yet another “security” border, the Jordan Valley, giving Israel two eastern borders. Palestinian freedom of movement of both people and goods is thus prevented into both Israel and Jordan but also internally, between the various cantons. Israel will also retain control of Palestinian airspace, the electro-magnetic sphere and even the right of a Palestinian state to conduct its own foreign policy.

The Road Map, like international law regarding the end of occupations in general, also insists on a negotiated solution between the parties. Olmert made a great issue of Palestinian terrorism (playing on American sensibilities to this buzz-word), placing pre-conditions on negotiations. Israel is willing to negotiate with the Palestinian Authority, he said, if it renounces terrorism, dismantles the terrorist infrastructure, accepts previous agreements and recognizes the right of Israel to exist (a right Israel has not recognized vis-a-vis the Palestinians). What is not mentioned is Israel’s Occupation which, regardless of an end to terror and negotiations, is being institutionalized and made permanent. For neither security nor terrorism are really the issue; Israel’s policies of annexation are based on a pro-active claim to the entire country. Virtually no element of the Occupation – the establishment of some 300 settlements, expropriation of most West Bank land, the demolition of 12,000 Palestinian homes, the uprooting of a million olive and fruit trees, the construction of a massive system of highways to link the settlements into Israel proper or the tortuous route of the Barrier deep in Palestinian territory – can be explained by security. Terrorism on all sides is wrong (let it be noted that Israel has killed four times more civilians than the Palestinians have), but to demand that resistance cease while an occupation is being made permanent is unconscionable.

Finally, what was meant? In a word: Apartheid. The “A” word was missing from Olmert’s speech, of course, but the bottom line of his convergence plan is clear: the establishment of a permanent, institutionalized regime of Israeli domination over Palestinians based on separation between Jews and Arabs. Now this is a far cry from the vision of the Road Map. “A settlement,” says the Road Map text, “will result in the emergence of an independent, democratic, and viable Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security with Israel. The settlement will…end the occupation that began in 1967.” The “convergence plan” also eliminates any possibility for negotiations – not because of Palestinian intransigence, but because Israel has nothing of meaning to negotiate. So how do we adapt this unilateral plan to Europe’s insistence on preserving the moribund Road Map? Simple. Just switch from “convergence” to “realignment.” In Olmert’s new formulation, Israel is merely “realigning” its borders in an “interim” manner that conforms to Phase Two of the Road Map. The Palestinians get their state, albeit with “provisional borders.” And that’s where we stay forever. De facto convergence in Road Map clothing.

This, of course, is the Palestinians’ greatest fear, that the Road Map gets “stuck” in Phase Two and never gets to Phase Three, an independent, democratic, and viable Palestinian state.” De facto for Israel means permanent. Once it has turned the Separation Barrier into a border, annexed the settlement blocs and “greater” Jerusalem and created the semblance of a two-state solution, no further pressures to advance to Phase Three will be forthcoming.

And where are the Palestinians in all this? Irrelevant, in Israel’s view, and manipulated as usual. “Should we realize that the bilateral track with the Palestinians is of no consequence,” said Olmert to Congress, “should the Palestinians ignore our outstretched hand for peace, Israel will seek other alternatives to promote our future and the prospects of hope in the Middle East. At that juncture, the time for realignment will occur. Realignment would be a process to allow Israel to build its future without being held hostage to Palestinian terrorist activities.” Talk about an Orwellian formulation! The election of Hamas has nothing to do with the impossibility of negotiations. Sharon refused to negotiate with or even meet the pliable Abbas, and Israeli governments never negotiated seriously with Arafat. The truth is that Israel has nothing to negotiate. “Greater” Jerusalem is ours, the settlement blocs are ours, the borders are ours, the water is ours, even the sky is ours. What’s left to negotiate?

Make no mistake about it: Apartheid is at our door in Israel/Palestine. The Israeli plan of convergence/realignment conforms precisely to the concept of Apartheid. First, it is based on the principle of separating populations. Israel officially calls its policy towards the Palestinians “separation,” which is what apartheid means in Afrikaans; the official name of the wall Israel is building in the Occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem is the “Separation Barrier.” Second, separation is accompanied by domination and oppression. Israel will expand to about 85% of the country, take all its resources and elements of sovereignty (such as control of movement and borders), and leave the Palestinian majority to live in a truncated Bantustan-state with no meaningful sovereignty, no freedom and no economy. Whether separation-with-domination is based on race as in Apartheid South Africa or on religion and nationalism as in Israel/Palestine is irrelevant. The point is that Israel, like South Africa in the dark days of Apartheid, is establishing a permanent regime whose principles and effects are precisely those ascribed to Apartheid.

This cannot be permitted. “If apartheid ended, so can the occupation,” said Bishop Desmond Tutu, adding: “but the moral force and international pressure will have to be just as determined.” President Jimmy Carter has just published a book warning explicitly of Apartheid in Palestine. It is incumbent upon all of us – civil society, faith-based communities and governments alike – to take urgent actions to ensure that, less than two decades after the fall of the Apartheid regime in South Africa, another such system does not arise before our eyes, on the southern border of Europe, in the very land considered holy by the three great monotheistic faiths.

A Way Out Of The Israeli-Palestinian Mess: A Middle East Confederation

The task of defeating Apartheid is a difficult one because Israel has created massive “facts on the ground” that make it impossible to detach a viable Palestinian state – and we cannot accept Israel’s offer of a Palestinian Bantustan as a genuine “two-state” solution. But while Israel has foreclosed the two-state option and has created de facto one state in Israel/Palestine, the one-state solution is a political non-starter. Even though Israel itself considers the Land of Israel a single unit between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River and has worked assiduously for the past four decades to ensure Jewish control over the entire territory, few governments, and certainly none in Europe and North America, are willing to see Israel transformed from a Jewish state into a democratic one of all the country’s inhabitants. So where does that leave us? If both the one-state and two-state options have been eliminated, how can the Israeli-Palestinian conflict be resolved and a just and stable peace be achieved?

I set out here a third possibility, a regional approach that I call a “Two-State-Plus” solution or a “Two-Stage” solution based on the notion of a Middle East Confederation. Before we consider this and other proposals for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we must identify those elements essential for any just and sustainable peace. I would suggest five:

(1) National expression for the two peoples. The Israel-Palestine conflict concerns two peoples, two nations, each of which claims the collective right of self-determination. This is what gives such compelling logic to the two-state solution, but it is an essential element in the formulation of any other approach, including a bi-national one-state solution. Within this both the collective and individual rights of all the inhabitants of Palestine/Israel must be defined and guaranteed.

(2) Viability. Whatever form a Palestinian state takes, it must be viable as well as sovereign. It must control its borders and its basic resources (such as water). It must possess territorial contiguity and, above all, the ability to develop a viable economy. We must take into account two fundamental elements that cannot be dismissed or minimized. First, besides normal processes of development, the small Palestinian state will have to accept and integrate its refugees, perhaps in the hundreds of thousands, mainly unskilled, impoverished and completely unfamiliar with democratic institutions. Second, more than 60% of the Palestinian population in the Occupied Territories and in the refugee camps is under the age of 25, a young generation that has been brutalized, traumatized, impoverished, left with little education and few skills. The Palestinians’ demand for a viable state stems not from intractability but from a sober evaluation of the enormity of the national challenge facing them. The Rand Corporation recently issued a 500-page study of how a viable Palestinian state might look, but it assumes a far greater withdrawal of Israel from the Occupied Territories than appears likely. More than the possibility of establishing a Palestinian state, then, it is the concern for viability that has rendered the two-state option irrelevant.

(3) Refugees. Eighty percent of the Palestinians are refugees. A sustainable peace cannot emerge from technical arrangements alone. Beyond self-determination and viability lies the issue of justice. Any sustainable peace is dependent upon the just resolution of the refugee issue, which does not seem especially difficult to resolve, as even the refugees in the camps have indicated. It depends on a “package” of three elements: Israeli acknowledgement of the refugees’ right of return; Israeli acknowledgement of its responsibility in creating the refugee issue; and only then, technical solutions involving a mutually agreed-upon combination of repatriation, resettlement elsewhere and compensation.

(4) A regional dimension. The almost exclusive focus on Israel/Palestine has obfuscated another crucial dimension of the conflict: its regional context. Refugees, security, water, economic development, democratization – none of these key issues can be effectively addressed within the narrow confines of Israel/Palestine. Adopting a regional approach, as we shall see, also opens new possibilities of resolving the conflict lacking in the more narrow two-state (or even one-state) approach.

(5) Security. Israel, of course, has fundamental and legitimate security needs. Unlike Israeli governments, the Israeli peace camp believes that security cannot be addressed in isolation, that Israel will not find peace and security unless it enters into a viable peace with the Palestinians and achieves a measure of integration into the Middle East region. We certainly reject the notion that security can be achieved through military means. Israel’s assertion that the security issue be resolved before any political progress can be made is as illogical as it is self-serving. We know -- and the Israeli authorities know, and the Palestinians know -- that terrorism is a symptom that can only be addressed as part of a broader approach to the grievances underlying the conflict. Like the US, Israel uses security concerns to advance a political agenda; in our case, to justify repressive force intended to force the Palestinians to submit to an Israeli-controlled Bantustan.

Israel’s security concerns have been addressed by the Arab League and by the Palestinians. It has been offered peace and regional integration in return for relinquishing the Occupation. Israel has a formal strategic alliance with the US, could easily be brought into NATO if necessary to further allay Israeli security fears, and its relationship with the EU could be strengthened. What is left is to guarantee the Palestinians’ security, since far more Palestinian civilians have been killed by the Israeli military and settlers than Israelis who have died in terrorist attacks. The entire Palestinian society is traumatized after twenty years of intense repression and forty years of Israeli occupation (not to mention the previous nineteen years of repressive Jordanian occupation). Indeed, the peoples throughout the Middle East must enjoy security and peace if any sustainable stability in the region is to be achieved.

Eliminating One-State, Two-State Options

So where does all this lead us? The time has come to step back, survey the geographic and political landscape, critically evaluate the traditional “solutions,” start to think creatively “out of the box” and come up with other solutions that are both just and workable.

Given the parameters outlined above, we are left with four “solutions,” only one of which, the confederational, appears workable. The first three are:

The traditional two-state solution in which a Palestinian state emerges on all of the Occupied Territories (with minor adjustments). This, as we have seen, is the accepted position of the Palestinian National Authority and three out of the four members of the Road Map’s “Quartet” (Europe, Russia and the UN, the US having officially joined the “Israel Plus-Palestinian Minus” option advocated by Israeli governments). It is also the option pursued by progressive Zionists within Israel, especially those associated with the Geneva Initiative, and their liberal supporters within the Diaspora Jewish communities. Yet for reasons discussed earlier, Israel’s “facts on the ground,” coupled with American recognition of its major settlement blocs, have rendered this solution irrelevant.

An “Israel Plus-Palestine Minus” two-state solution, pursued by both Labor and Likud governments, and now advocated by the US as well. This option envisions a semi-sovereign, semi-viable Palestinian state arising in-between Israel’s major settlement blocs, with the Palestinians compensated by minor territorial swaps. Israeli leaders believe that faced with military defeat, impoverishment, transfer, political isolation and its “Iron Wall” of settlements and barriers, a carefully groomed post-Arafat Palestinian leadership can be coaxed to agree. The critical peace movement in Israel considers this option unworkable and unsustainable, a sophisticated form of apartheid.

A single state, either bi-national or democratic. On the surface this seems the most natural and just alternative. After all, Israel claims the entire country as one entity, the Land of Israel, and has de facto rendered it one entity through its settlement enterprise. By transforming a struggle for national independence into one for civil rights, akin to that of South Africa, the Palestinians could put Israel in a very difficult situation, highlighting the specter of Apartheid. Yet, compelling as it is, even just as it is, the one-state solution falls victim to the realpolitik of the day. The transformation of Israel from a Jewish state into a democratic one (with a Palestinian majority) would encounter total opposition from the Israeli Jewish population, Diaspora Jews, the US government and most, if not all the states of Europe. Moreover, although the one-state solution enjoys widespread popular support among Palestinians, the Palestinian leadership is loathe to shift to a new political program with such slight chance of success. Still, many Palestinians hope that a one democratic state in Israel-Palestine might eventually evolve.

Working Around the Occupation: The Two-Stage Approach

If a genuine two-state solution has been rendered impossible and a one-state solution is a non-starter, and if we eliminate the “Israel Plus-Palestine Minus” apartheid option as simply unacceptable, then only one other option remains: a regional confederation. A “Two-State Plus” solution, this approach envisions a two-stage process in which self-determination is disconnected from economic viability. Less elegant than the others, more complex, more difficult to present in a soundbyte, it is also far more workable. Like the European Union, it preserves a balance between national sovereignty and the freedom to live anywhere within the region. Rather than eliminating the Occupation, it neutralizes it by compensating the Palestinians’ readiness to compromise on territory with the economic, social and geographic depth afforded by a regional confederation. Not only is a confederational approach just and sustainable, it offers a win-win solution as well.

In contrast to the two-state solution which is limited in scope, technical in conception and unable to address many of the underlying issues of the conflict, the “two-stage” approach emphasizes processes -- of peace-making, trust-building, economic development, the establishment of strong civil societies, and reconciliation leading to a genuine resolution of the conflict. Its outlines are straightforward and transparent.

Stage 1: A Palestinian State Alongside Israel

Recognizing that Palestinian demands for self-determination represent a fundamental element of the conflict, the first stage of the confederational approach provides for the establishment of a Palestinian state. This meets the Palestinians’ requirements for national sovereignty, political identity and membership in the international community. Statehood, however, does not address the crucial issue of viability. If it were only a state the Palestinians needed, they could have one tomorrow – the mini-state “offered” by Barak and Sharon. But the issue is not simply a Palestinian state. Their greatest fear is being locked into that state, into a Bantustan, into a prison-state that cannot possibly address the needs of their people, now or in the future.

The “two-stage” approach offers a way out of this trap, even if the Israeli presence is reduced but not significantly eliminated. The Palestinians might be induced to accept a semi-viable state on something less than the entire Occupied Territories (with or without some territorial swaps) on condition that the international community guarantees the emergence of a regional confederation within a reasonable period of time (five to ten years). So while the first stage, the establishment of a Palestinian state on most of the Occupied Territories (including borders with Jordan, Syria and Egypt) addresses the issue of self-determination, the second stage, a regional confederation, would address that of viability. It would give the Palestinians a regional “depth” in which to meet their long-term social and economic needs.

Stage 2: A Regional Confederation

Following upon the emergence of a Palestinian state, the international community would broker a regional confederation, a loose economic association of Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Syria and Lebanon reminiscent of the European Community before it became a Union. Over time, Egypt and other countries of the region might join as well.

The key element of this approach is the ability of all members of the confederation to live and work anywhere within the confederation’s boundaries. That breaks the Palestinians out of their prison. Rather than burdening the small emergent state with responsibilities it cannot possibly fulfill, the confederational approach extends that burden across the entire region. It also addresses the core of the refugee issue, which is individual choice. Palestinians residing within the confederation would have the choice of becoming citizens of the Palestinian state, retaining citizenship in their current countries of residence or leaving the region entirely for a new life abroad. They could choose to return “home” to what is today Israel, but they would do so as Palestinian citizens or citizens of another member state. Israel would be under no obligation to grant them citizenship, just as Israelis living in Palestine (Jews who choose to remain in Ma’aleh Adumim or Hebron, for example, former “settlers”) would retain Israeli citizenship. This addresses Israeli concerns about the integrity of their state. In such a confederation, even a major influx of Palestinian refugees into Israel would pose no problem. It is not the presence of the refugees themselves that is threatening to Israel. After all, 350,000 foreign workers and an equal number of Russian Christians reside in Israel today. The threat to Israeli sovereignty comes from the possibility of refugees claiming Israeli citizenship. By disconnecting the Right of Return from citizenship, the refugees would realize their political identity through citizenship in a Palestinian state while posing no challenge to Israeli sovereignty, thus enjoying substantive individual justice by living in any part of Palestine/Israel or the wider region they choose. And since a confederational solution does not require the dismantlement of settlements – although they will be integrated – it is not dependent upon “ending the Occupation,” the main obstacle to the two-state solution. It will simply neutralize it, rendering all the walls, checkpoints, by-pass roads and segregated cities irrelevant.

A European Project

The two-stage regional confederation plan will encounter opposition. Israel, perceiving itself as a kind of Singapore, has no desire to integrate into the Middle East region, relinquish its control over the entire country or, to say the least, accommodate Palestinian refugees. It also does not want its Jewish population to have to live in an integrated society with Arabs, as the confederation would produce. Nevertheless, a confederational approach does offer the Israeli people a way to disengage from Occupation and to enjoy peace, security and economic prosperity. It also respects the integrity of Israel as a sovereign state and a member of the Middle East Confederation.

The autocratic regimes of the region might resist such a project out of fear of the democratization it would entail, but the advantages of an end to the conflict in the region are obvious. Creating open societies with new economic potentials of development in an expansive and peaceful Middle East can only be good for the peoples of the region. Arab states will also fear Israeli hegemony, but here Europe has extensive experience in forging a workable parity of weaker and stronger states within a regional framework. Indeed, for a Europe searching for its role in the Mediterranean and Middle East, mentoring a Middle East Confederation could be its most important contribution to regional and world peace and development.

As for the Palestinians, there are only advantages. The two-stage approach offers them much more than the two-state solution, and is far more achievable than a single state. Their great leverage, essential for the resolution of conflict not only in the Middle East but between the West and the Muslim world as a whole, is found in their role as gatekeepers. Once the Palestinians signal to the wider Arab and Muslim worlds that they have resolved their differences with Israel and that the time has come for normalization, true reconciliation among people and Israeli integration into the region can begin. The emergence of a Middle East Union thus becomes an eminently “do-able” project.

Although such a confederation may sound like a pipe-dream in the present context of intense conflict, the infrastructure already exists. Peace treaties already obtain (though limited to the governmental arena) among Israel, Egypt and Jordan, not to mention formal and semi-formal ties with most of the states in the Middle East, North Africa and the Muslim world. The 2002 Saudi Initiative in which the Arab League offered Israel regional integration in return for relinquishing its Occupation extends that base even further.

Governments and Peoples

We are at a critical crossroads in Middle Eastern and world history, poised between an impending apartheid regime of Israel over Palestine and perpetual conflict between Islam and the West or on the verge of a daring new project: the creation of a Middle East at peace, prosperous, open and making its contribution to global stability. But this is not the only crossroads we face. If Occupation becomes permanent and an entire people is literally imprisoned behind a super-Berlin Wall, if the Palestinians’ human rights are trampled with impunity and we all stand aside and simply watch, if a new Apartheid regime emerges in the light of day on the southern border of Europe, how will that impact on the efforts of all progressive peoples and governments to usher in a global reality based on human rights and international law? It would render hollow all our moral values of human dignity, inclusion, equality, care for one another, justice and peace.

This is the test. If we can replace the violence and oppression of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with a model for regional cooperation and progress, we will have proven that our vision for an inclusive global society is practical, not mere pipe-dreams. Imagine what a message of hope that would be for the down-trodden of this battered world – indeed, for our own peoples everywhere.

Let’s roll up our sleeves and get to work. Conflict, occupation, exclusivity, Apartheid – out! Human rights, inclusivity, cooperation, justice, peace, prosperity and sustainability – in! A worthy task for governments and peoples together.


(Jeff Halper, an anthropologist, is the Coordinator of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions . He was a nominee, together with the Palestinian activist and intellectual Ghassan Andoni, for the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. He can be reached at .)

Wednesday, November 22, 2006

Medecins du Monde Gaza Health Survey

CONTEXT
The election of Hamas – January 2006
28 June 2006 – operation “Summer Rain”

THE SURVEY
METHODOLOGY
1. Survey carried out 27 to 29 June 2006
2. Survey carried out 3 to 8 July 2006
RESULTS AND ANALYSIS

I – THE INTERVIEWEES’ LIVING CONDITIONS
1. Demography: overpopulation and young population
2. A worrying economic situation
3. Increasingly precarious living conditions
- Access to water
- Access to sanitation
- Access to electricity and fuel
4. Deterioration of households’ food situation
II – ACCESS TO THE PALESTINIAN HEALTH SERVICE
1. Patients’ increasing problems accessing medical facilities
2. A health service in a stranglehold
III – THE INTERVIEWEES’ HEALTH
1. Perception of their health status before operation “Summer Rain”
2. Main illnesses
3. Signs of psychological trauma

CONTENTS
Since February 2006, the Occupied Palestinian Territories have suffered the effects of the international economic embargo ordered by the main western donors after Hamas’s victory in the parliamentary elections of 25 January 2006. The suspension of aid causes extra problems for the Palestinian civilian population, whose living conditions have continued to deteriorate ever more sharply since 2000. In this context, operation “Summer Rain”, launched by the Israeli army on 28 June as a reaction to the kidnapping of a soldier by Palestinian militants, is an additional aggravating factor which increases the risk of destabilising the area and driving the Palestinian Territories into a major humanitarian crisis. 70% of the Palestinian population currently live below the poverty line, the recorded unemployment rate in the Gaza Strip stands at 40% and it is harder to access food and drinking water than before 2000. In addition, the destruction of infrastructure and main transport routes during operation “Summer Rain” launched on 28 June, greatly hinder electricity, drinking water and fuel distribution and restrict travel in the Gaza Strip. Therefore, beyond the immediate consequences on the population’s physical and mental health, the latest Israeli incursion into the Gaza Strip could have long -term effects and weaken still further an already unstable situation.

Médecins du Monde-France (MdM) is an international solidarity medical association which has been involved since 1980 in improving the living conditions of civil ian populations across the world, especially in terms of access to hygiene, medicines and health care.

In this report MdM is seeking to evaluate the Gazan population’s health care access and the problems health care teams have faced since the beginning of 2006 through an analysis of the health status of patients consulting medical facilities in the Gaza Strip.

The analysis is based on data collected directly on the ground during two surveys led by MdM-France and carried out by its local team based in Gaza. These surveys were carried out before and during operation “Summer Rain”, the first from 27 to 29 June 2006 and the second from 3 to 8 July 20064. They covered a total population of 1487 people who came for consultations at fifteen health facilities representative of all the Gazan health facilities and distributed across the Gaza Strip (north, centre and south). There were three parts to the surveys: living conditions (work, housing conditions, access to food and water), health care access (accessibility of health facilities and medicines for patients, accessibility of place of work for health care workers), and mental health.

The most revealing results about the overall situation before operation “Summer Rain”, and then about how the situation deteriorated, concern:
Access to health facilities: at the beginning of June, 23% of patients took over a week to seek a consultation. Since the beginning of July, it took them on average four times longer to reach health facilities.

General health status: in May 2006, premature births in hospitals increased by 60%. 52.6% of patients who consulted were suffering from chronic illnesses; 93% of them were receiving treatment. Psychological illnesses were continually increasing, especially among children. Since June 2006, 84.7% of the interviewees had witnessed a traumatic event in the days preceding the consultation. Employment: 35% of interviewees said they were unemployed or had no fixed income. 30% of those with a job were working in the informal sector.


http://www.medecinsdumonde.org/publications/rapports/Gaza_survey%20_2006_eng.pdf/download
________________________________________

Evaluation of Drinking Water in the Gaza Strip

Gaza Strip lies on the South-Western part of the Palestinian coastal plain. It is a semi-arid area, roughly estimated by 365 Km2 with its length approximately 45 km forming a long narrow rectangle. The annual average daily temperature ranges from 250C in the summer to 130C in the winter. The average annual rainfall varies from 450 mm/year in the North to 200 mm/year in the South. Most of the rainfall occurs in the period from October to March while the rest of the year is completely dry (PHG, 2002). About 1.38 million of the Palestinian people live and work in the narrow strip (PCBS 2005). Gaza Strip is characterized by scarcity of its natural water resources. The main source of water in the Gaza Strip is the groundwater aquifer. Over pumping and low rainfall have limited the quality of water available and have further contributed to the degradation of the water quality.

Water quality of the coastal aquifer underlying Gaza has deteriorated severely. This has been brought about a number of reasons, the most important of which is the Israeli occupation (destroy of infrastructure, hold surface and underground water) and the excessive use of fertilizers and pesticides. These malpractices with the uncontrolled discharge of sewage water and solid waste leach have increased the nitrate concentration in the ground water of Gaza Strip. Concentration of more than ten times the international accepted limits have been reported (WHO standard is 45 mg/L). The reason for drawing attention to nitrate pollution is its toxicity to humans, especially for babies and pregnant women by the so-called “blue babies” syndromes.

On the other hand, there is the salinity problem of the groundwater aquifer in Gaza Strip. The salinity content has show an obvious increase during the 5 past years. Chloride contents less than 200 mg/l has been found only in the northern and south-western parts of Gaza Strip. Very high chloride contents of over 1000 mg/L have been found in the central and the south-eastern parts of the area. This may be the result from over-pumping the aquifer, which induces an increasing groundwater flow from the east, and seawater intrusion from the west, thus raising chloride contents in the fresh water aquifer. The problem of fluoride, sulphate, alkalinity and hardness are well known in many parts of Gaza Strip.

The chemical quality of drinking water wells in Gaza Strip at the year 2006 comparing with WHO standards for TDS, nitrate, chloride, Hardness, Sodium and fluoride are 56%, 80%, 62%, 39%, 62 and 48% respectively.

The microbiological quality of drinking water in wells and networks in Gaza Strip at the year 2006 comparing with WHO standard for total coliform contamination percentage are 8% and 10% respectively. According to WHO limit, total coliform contamination percentage should not be exceeds than 5% of the total examined samples.

Khalid Tebi
Director of water control department
Ministry of health

For further information, you can see
Palestinian Hydrology group (PHG) reports
Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS)
Ministry of Health (MOH) annual reports

AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL: OUT OF ALL PROPORTION

Israel/Lebanon: Urgent need for UN inquiry
Out of all proportion - civilians bear the brunt of the war

"A full, impartial UN-led inquiry that includes provision for reparations to the victims is urgently needed. Anything less would not only be a gross betrayal of the civilian victims, more than one thousand of whom were killed, but also a recipe for further civilian bloodshed with impunity,"
--Malcolm Smart, Director of Amnesty International's Middle East and North Africa programme


Amnesty International has published its latest and concluding report into violations of international humanitarian law committed during this year's Israel-Hizbullah conflict. The report focuses on Israeli attacks in which civilians were killed as well as the impact on civilians of other attacks by Israeli forces. It also examines allegations that Hizbullah used civilians as "human shields".

"More than three months have now gone by since the ceasefire and to Amnesty International's knowledge neither side has even begun investigations into the grave violations committed during last summer's conflict," according to Malcolm Smart.



Based on field research conducted in Lebanon and Israel in July, August and September 2006, the report includes evidence from interviews with victims; meetings with Israeli and Lebanese military and government officials, as well as senior Hizbullah officials; information from non-governmental groups; and official statements and media reports.

Amnesty International is calling on the United Nations to set up an international commission empowered to investigate the evidence of violations of international law by both Hizbullah and Israel, and to make provision for reparations for the victims. The organization is also calling for an arms embargo on both sides, and an immediate moratorium on cluster weapons.

For further information, please see:
Press Release:
Israel/Lebanon: Further evidence of grave violations in Israel-Hizbullah conflict underlines urgent need for UN inquiry (Hebrew / Arabic)

Reports:
Israel/Lebanon, Out of all proportion – civilians bear the brunt of the war (21 November 2006)
Under fire - Hizbullah's attacks on northern Israel (14 September 2006)
Deliberate destruction or 'collateral damage'? Israeli attacks against civilian infrastructure (23 August 2006)


Amnesty International

© AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL

Visit the links:

http://web.amnesty.org/pages/isr-leb-211106-feature-eng
http://web.amnesty.org/library/index/engmde020332006
http://news.amnesty.org/index/ENGMDE020352006

Press release in Arabic: http://web.amnesty.org/library/Index/ARAMDE020352006 and in Hebrew: http://news.amnesty.org/404/404.html
Please note that the full version of the report will be available on our website in Arabic and Hebrew shortly.


-------------------------------------

East Mediterranean Team
Amnesty International, International Secretariat
Peter Benenson House, 1 Easton Street
London WC1X 0DW
United Kingdom
E-mail: Eastmed@amnesty.org
Tel: +44 (0)20 7413 5500
Fax: +44 (0)20 7413 5719

WHO Concerned about Further Deterioration in OPT Access to Medical Services

WORLD HEALTH ORGANIZATION CONCERNED ABOUT FURTHER DETERIORATION IN ACCESS TO MEDICAL SERVICES IN |THE OCCUPIED PALESTINIAN TERRITORY
16 November 2006

WHO is concerned about the rapid deterioration of Palestinians’ equitable access to adequate and effective medical services. This is mainly the result of the Palestinian Ministry of Health's financial crisis which has followed the Palestinian Legislative Council elections in January 2006. The Government of Israel has stopped handing over the tax and customs revenues it collects on behalf of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and international donors have suspended direct aid to the Ministry of Health.

As a consequence of these measures, the PA has been unable to pay regular salaries since March 2006. Health workers employed by the PA have since received provisional allowances through the Temporary International Mechanism established by the European Union. However, they joined a general open-ended strike on 23 August demanding full payment of long-overdue salaries and guarantees that salaries in the upcoming months will be paid.

According to media reports, unions representing health professionals in the West Bank have announced that as of 15 November public medical services will be further restricted. This will affect people requiring emergency care, chronic patients and deliveries of newborns as Primary Health Centers will be closed down and emergency rooms at public hospitals will stop operating.

"WHO is very concerned about the announced reduction of services and the deterioration of vital medical services. This will further exacerbate the already difficult humanitarian situation affecting Palestinian lives and their right to enjoy the highest possible level of physical and mental health, “said WHO’s Head of Office, Ambrogio Manenti.

WHO calls on the parties concerned to work to reach an agreement that will guarantee Palestinians’ access to essential medical services during the strike.

WHO also urges the international community to support the Palestinian public health sector in this critical phase. In its statement of 20 September 2006, the Quartet noted that the resumption of transfers of tax and customs revenues collected by Israel on behalf of the PA would have a significant impact on the Palestinian economy.




FOR FURTHER INFORMATION, PLEASE CONTACT:
Dr Ambrogio Manenti, Head of Office, WHO West Bank and Gaza, mobile. 00972547668553
Dr Daniel Lopez Acuna, Director Recovery and Transition programme, Health Action in Crisis, WHO Headquarters Geneva, tel. 0041794755557

SETTLEMENTS 'VIOLATE ISRAELI LAW'

More than a third of the Jewish settlements in the West Bank are built on privately owned Palestinian land, an Israeli campaign group has reported.

Peace Now says nearly 40% of the land the settlements sit on is, according to official data, "effectively stolen" from Palestinian landowners.

This, the group says, is a violation of Israel's own laws.

Settlements in the occupied West Bank are illegal under international law, although Israel rejects this.

About 430,000 Jews live in these residential areas in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Leaked data

Peace Now called on the Israeli government to return the private land to its Palestinian owners.

In recent years the Israeli government has said repeatedly that it respects Palestinian property rights in the West Bank.

An Israeli official has said the government is reviewing the report.

REPORT FINDINGS
130 settlements were constructed either entirely or partially on private Palestinian land
19,800 acres of the land used by the settlements, nearly 40% of the total, is private Palestinian land
86.4% of Maale Adumim is built on privately-owned land

The data on which the findings are based comes from a 2004 survey by the Civil Administration, which manages the civilian aspects of Israel's occupation of the West Bank.

The data was leaked to Peace Now via an official in the Civil Administration. The group says the government had refused to give this information to it.

The group says that the data it has received has been "hidden by the State for many years, for fear that the revelation of these facts could damage its international relations".

According to the report, 86.4% of the Maale Adumim settlement block, the largest in the West Bank, is built on private Palestinian land, and not on what the Israeli government refers to as "state land".

The settlement is home to 32,372 people and lies due east of Jerusalem.

"The claim by the State and settlers that the settlements have been constructed on state land is misleading and false," Peace Now says.

JEWISH SETTLEMENTS
Illegal under international law according to Fourth Geneva Convention (article 49), which prohibits an occupying power transferring citizens from its own territory to occupied territory. Israel argues international conventions relating to occupied land do not apply to the West Bank because it was not under the legitimate sovereignty of any state before 1967

"The vast majority of settlement construction was done against the law of the land and the Supreme Court ruling and therefore unauthorised.

"[The data] indicates the direct violation of Israeli law carried out by the State itself, driven by the architects and leaders of the settlement movement."

In 1979 the Israeli High Court forbade the establishment of settlements on privately-owned Palestinian that has been seized by Israel for military purposes.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is at its core a conflict over land and in the West Bank property rights, BBC Jerusalem correspondent Crispin Thorold says.

This is the area which Palestinians want to be the basis of a future independent state.

If confirmed the findings could have major implications for any future peace deal.

Some of the settlements that the Israeli government wants to be included within its final borders are built on land overwhelmingly owned by Palestinian individuals. Peace Now is an Israeli group that monitors Israel settlements in the West Bank.

The oldest peace movement in Israel, it advocates the setting up of a Palestinian state on land occupied by Israel in 1967.

Story from BBC NEWS:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/2/hi/middle_east/6168752.stm
[Online the report is available as a pdf file]

Published: 2006/11/21 13:57:08 GMT

© BBC MMVI

Saturday, November 18, 2006

A Tale of Two Sisters: Witnessing an Undercover Israeli Operation in Ramallah


Annemarie Jacir writing from Ramallah, Occupied Palestine, Live from Palestine, 15 November 2006


This afternoon I thought we were going to die.

Four hours ago my sister Emily, her curator Carolyn and I were shot at by the Israeli army. My nerves are still shaky. We've been drinking ever since. My legs are weak. I feel I can't stand on them.

Today in downtown Ramallah at around 4:15pm, we were driving down Main Street. We were buying kanafa to eat after spending the day at 'Amari refugee camp.

A taxi driver cut me off. I rolled down the window and cursed at him. We pulled over and Emily and Mohammed jumped out to buy kanafa. Then we continued, dropping off Mohammed at his car, which he had left in the center of town. We agreed to meet at Mohammed's place down the street.

I was alone in the front seat. Emily and Carolyn were in the back. Suddenly, there was a van directly in front of our car. He veered a bit towards our car. I slowed down, wondering how I was going to pass him. And then he emerged from his window... pointing an M-16 across the street and spraying bullets.

The three of us hit the floor of the car. All around us... shooting, shooting, shooting. So close. So close.

And then on the other side of the street, another van - looking exactly like the first....men with guns spraying bullets everywhere.

Next to us, a man with his 5-year old daughter... Like us, stuck between all the shooting. He opened his door and tossed his daughter to the ground with him.

I lifted my head... the man shooting was around 6 feet from me. Shooting away. Israeli secret service... dressed up like an Arab. They do this all the time... so they come into town and no one notices. Then I saw tens of Israeli soldiers crawling the streets all around us. Did they come out of the vans? They were in full uniform, unlike the two van 'drivers' who had dressed as plain clothes Arab men. Mustarabeen...Israeli agents who dress like Arabs.

Shooting, shooting. I covered my head. All I could think about was Emily in the backseat and Carolyn. Emily... my precious sister... my beautiful sister... Kamran in Scotland... the man who escaped with his daughter. I braced myself as the shooting continued. Told myself calmly that if the windows of the car were hit. Which they surely were about to be. That it was nothing. To remember that all that meant was the window was broken and not necessarily that one of us had been hit.

Mohammed called...I picked up the phone...my voice broke. Crumbled. I hadn't realized my fear until that moment. Why couldn't I speak? Why? I didn't recognize my own voice. I knew I sounded hysterical. I didn't want to sound like that.

Took another peak. Army everywhere. The men shooting shooting shooting shooting....god, that sound.

Emily. Emily in the back. We made eye contact. What could we do? We were stuck in the middle of a shoot out...right in the middle of it...with nowhere to go.

We couldn't even get out of the car and make a run for it. We'd have been shot down.

I wondered if they'd kill us. I wondered if someone on the street might duck into our car for cover. But the streets were empty.

We stayed on the floor of the car for 20 minutes like that. I thought, really truly felt, I was going to die this way. And I didn't want to die like that. Totally helpless. Trapped in a car.

The more the shooting went on, the more I felt my nerves turn to jelly. And then...

Bam! Our car was hit. I heard glass break. I covered my head. My head was covered anyway, I think, for fear of the car windows being hit.

We were okay. Emily was okay. Carolyn was safe.

More time passed. How stupid to have my hands on my head. what would that do? Where is Emily? I think i will die today. I am going to die today.

I peeked out. I saw the Israelis grab a man off the street and shove him into the other van.

Then the undercover Israeli closest to us, in the van, decided to leave. Operation over. He pulled towards us. The criminal. I stared at his face, my head on the passenger seat... He didn't have enough room to get by us, so he smashed into our car and scraped his way by. The whole time I couldn't take my eyes off his face. He didn't even notice us I think. Three women so close to him, stuck to the floor of the car...

We are all ok. Nothing happened. There's a bullet in the car. It hit the back of the car. It didn't hit the gas tank. It didn't hit the gas tank. We are okay. But three young men tonight are not. And many, many more are not. This is nothing new, nothing out of the ordinary.

A man disappeared this afternoon. Two men were killed. It won't even make the news.


Annemarie Jacir is a Palestinian film-maker living in Ramallah.

Friday, November 17, 2006

Alice in Erez: The Gaza Crossing, by Jennifer Loewenstein

November 15, 2006

A clear and warm November evening; sun sets in a violence of color to the west over the sea and a full luminescent moon on the rise over Beit Hanoun in the northern Gaza Strip. As if on cue, the buzz of the pilot-less drones overhead begins as their nightly circling ritual gets underway. The taxi driver's hands grip the wheel of the car more intently as we speed along the winding road to Erez past the village huddled in the shadows a few hundred meters away to our right. At the Palestinian side, the driver gets out of the taxi, my passport in hand, and takes it into the shack of an office where a handful of scruffy, uniformed security figures are sitting. Darkness is creeping in from the East.

There is a problem, the driver explains to me in broken English. They won't let you through. On the other side of Erez where the gatekeepers sit in their park-rangers' office with the neon lights and the coffee-machine, my number isn't blinking approval on the computer. Or something like that. A furious volley of phone calls on my behalf commences ¬ between the driver, friends in Gaza, PA security and the masters in Israel. Sorry, not coordinated. Sorry, it will take a while; sorry, you can't leave. Sorry, no. An American citizen in the Gaza Strip will stay with the prisoners for now because the keepers are not ready to let her out of the cage. Revenge for your audacity, I think. Live with the others since you like it so well; eat their dust and shower in their sewers. You wanted to go to Gaza, no?

Darkness covers half the sky and the drones sound hungry. The driver shouts into the phone to my friend, Khamsa Daqa'iq! Khamsa Daqa'iq! (Five minutes! Five minutes!) He'll wait only 5 more minutes, he says, before returning me to Gaza City ¬ but I know better. He'll wait until his life is in danger trying to help me get out. And sure enough, it is 45 minutes later when he looks at me beseechingly and says we must return. The wardens are not cooperating. My number is not approved. Now it is night.

Drones can't tell a taxi from a car full of 'militants.' In the darkness on the road they won't know who we are-or at least it will make matters easier when the explanations for two dead civilians come in the next day, one of them an 'international'. It was dark, you see, and they were 'suspicious.' The suitcase might have been full of explosives. Therefore no investigation will be necessary. Therefore it was OK. Therefore it was our fault for being out. Therefore you should not go to Gaza. Is the message clear?

The trip back is a roller coaster ride with the wrong kind of thrills. Friends meet us on the curbside outside their home and we all tip the driver better than he'll ever get again in his lifetime. He is breathing again; an old man with white hair, looking apologetically into my eyes.

In the tall apartment building teeming with prisoner families of Gaza, friends call back and forth to Israel for me ¬ in their Hebrew and English. The ghosts of Kafka and Lewis Carroll are hovering about us bemused and mocking: prisoners of the Gaza Strip trying to arrange the release of an American citizen. They all have to give the Israeli authorities their names. I finally take the phone to speak to the boss and, for the first time in the history of my excursions to this god-forsaken land, an Israeli apologizes.

Sorry. Forgot to give your number to Security at Erez. You can leave in the morning.

What a blessing: Six-thirty in the morning I am ready again, suitcases in tow, just in time for the explosion down the street; just in time to view the melted mess of a once-automobile and four once-human beings smoldering in the middle of Gaza City, boys picking at the wreckage and ambulance sirens closing in. State-of-the-art incineration tactics: a gleaming helicopter gunship straight off the defense industry's spankingly efficient assembly line and loaded with glimmering precision-guided missiles. Tourist attractions are never-ending. If they'd only let more people in who would need Hollywood?

This time on the Gaza side of Erez I am free to go, pulling my wheeled suitcase behind, concrete walls on either side of a cavernous tunnel covered by a canvas roof. My steps echo, there is nothing in sight but the tunnel and the first row of steel bars that segment the crossing into sections. Security cameras hide in the corners and a Voice from nowhere directs:

Please push open the gate.

I'm past the first jail doors and clacking on toward the second set. Here, a steel-barred revolving door interrupts the even, steel-barred gates. The Voice sounds again.

Go through the turnstile.

Monotone, passionless Voice.

Put your bags on the belt.

Don't even think about disobeying.

Step into the glass x-ray machine with your arms outstretched and your legs apart.

The glass doors spin closed, high-tech sound like the elevators in the Mall of America. I am x-rayed along with my bags as they inch through the baggage tunnel.

Please step back.

Please step in again.

Please step forward.

Please take your bags.

Please walk forward.

What a polite Voice. It says "please".

Don't touch the glass.

The Voice sees everything I'm doing. It sees through my clothing and my leather back-pack.

You dropped something, the Voice tells me. Hint of humanoid at the other end. I pick it up.

Go on.

The next set of steel bars appears. The final tunnel chamber is divided into three corrals: one for the sub-humans from Gaza currently not allowed out at all; one for the pain-in-the-ass-visitors they haven't figured out how to dispense with altogether like me; one ¬wider than the other two- for the VIPs with diplomatic status who still have to be treated like guests. Anyone who has passed through Erez will find no hint of exaggeration in this description. Anyone who has ever raised a question about this sprawling, grotesque steel and concrete military-industrial guards' complex will have been told it is for their security that this must exist. Anyone who has set foot in the Gaza Strip will know at once what a revolting load of crap that is.

This monstrosity is not for your security. This neo-fascist, Stalinist, gulag Guantanamo is there to keep you out, to keep you from even trying, from even wanting, to go in. It is there so you will not see the torn up streets, and ruined land; the bombed-out buildings and poisoned soil; the bull-dozed houses and bullet-holed refugee camps; the back-up generators chugging away; the destroyed central power transformer, the wrecked factories and shops; the caved-in mosques and unfinished clinics; the pressure-less water pumps; the lots full of rubble and trash; the wretched horse and donkey-carts and beggar-children; the worn out mothers, the humiliated fathers, the unemployed young men; the young girls holding whole families together; the exhausted teachers, the pay-less civil servants, the street vendo rs with last week's produce; the heaps of rust and stench of rot, the overcrowded book-and-desk-deprived schools full of troubled youth, bed-wetters, ptsd children; the travesties-of-hospitals; the wards of the sick and wounded; the morgues full of the dead; the merciful, silver-trayed freezers in the morgues where rest finally takes you unaware.

The prison compound of Gaza was built to push half a nation to the brink of death, to suck out its resistance, to squeeze out its breath. They want us to suffer, not to die. The words of the mayor of Rafah sound like a broken record in my head. And they are succeeding, he said without emotion.

Why? Because this blockade on human traffic into Gaza, this travesty of an experiment in collective human torture, is sanctioned, supported, condoned and blessed by the United States, the European Union, the United Nations, the Arab League, the G-8, the corporate masters, the "international community"; by heads of states, presidents, prime ministers, chancellors, kings; by foreign ministers and their trusty delegations; by politicians and diplomats, executives and organizations, academies and institutes, think tanks and centers for the study ofs; by departments of foreign affairs, interior, education and finance; by media lords, newspapers, radios, television stations, journalists, analysts, commentators and publics who don't dare open their mouths, write out their shock, register their objections, express their disgust, squeak out their "no's" lest they suggest that Israel's apparatus of inhumanity is an abomination on the face of the earth.

Servility to power, obsequiousness, righteous barbarism, elitist racism, cowardice, complicity and denial fuel the engine of this dreadful machine, and those with the power to stop it at once refuse to utter a sound.

So outside at the end of the tunnel the soldiers greet me. Standard procedure. All in day's work. Normalcy. Take your bags over there. Yet another series of x-ray machines and tables. Every item from toothpaste tubes and contact lens cases to dirty socks and tee-shirts, from blue jeans and turtlenecks to embroidered shawls and purses, is dumped onto the table and sifted through with meticulous care as the backpack and suitcase, the handbag and plastic sacks are sent through x-ray machines again. Three and a half hours after my journey began, I am dismissed to the Erez rangers' terminal where my passport is examined for the 5th time. I have two hours to get to the Allenby Bridge before it closes at ! noon. Good thing I didn't leave Gaza at 8.

The beauty of the Jordan valley is stunning. The desert hills are white and yellow and amber, swept by winds, patterned and dancing, palm trees at the bottom near the Jordan River. The warm autumn sun bakes out sorrow. Finally, the last security check of the day ¬my presence delays a van-load of VIPs hoping to return to Jordan on the early side. Here we go again. I guess it's because I was at Erez, I say to the Israeli attendant looking at me quizzically when they take my passport away.

Where? She asks.

Erez.

A blank stare.

EREZ. The entrance of Gaza, I say.

She doesn't know what I'm talking about.



Jennifer Loewenstein is a Visiting Research Fellow at Oxford University's Refugee Studies Centre. She has lived and worked in Gaza City, Beirut and Jerusalem and has traveled extensively throughout the Middle East, where she has worked as a free-lance journalist and a human rights activist. She can be reached at: amadea311@earthlink.net

GAZA: THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT VOTES FOR UN FORCE & INTNL. PEACE CONFERENCE

NEWS UPDATE 16.11.06

From Luisa Morgantini:
Strongly denouncing the Israeli military operations in Beit Hanun and Israel's war against Gaza and the West bank in general, the President of the Development Committee of the European Parliament, Luisa Morgantini MEP today said in reaction to the European Parliament's resolution on Gaza that Israel's indiscriminate attacks represent a serious breach of the principles of the Geneva Convention amounting to a war crime and called for an international UN force to protect civilians.

"We need an international UN observation and protection mission with peacekeeping troops to be sent to Gaza…Those under attack need protection and assistance. The international community has a duty to protect civilians, to stop the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories, put an end to house demolitions and the destruction of infrastructure”.

Morgantini stressed that mutual Israeli-Palestinian recognition is essential in this crisis. This means that "the international community should recognize the democratically elected government of Palestine and to support the efforts made by all Palestinian political forces and President Mahoumud Abbas to form a new unity government which should make all efforts to stop Palestinian militia groups firing rockets on Israeli towns and people."

On the issue of Israel's withholding of Palestinian customs duties, Morgantini argued that the EU and the Quartet must force Israel to return the funds confiscated from Palestine. "It is unacceptable that Israel is still withholding Palestinian tax and customs revenues and aggravating the Palestinian humanitarian crisis" she said. "The funds must be immediately transferred". Morgantini also welcomed the call in today's European Parliament resolution for an urgent meeting on the EU-Israel Association Agreement and the application of article two, according to which, in the case of violations of human rights the agreement should be suspended. She said there was "no doubt about the human rights violations committed by the Israeli government".

Morgantini concluded that the resolution should become action and the calling for an immediate international conference for a just peace in the Middle East should be immediate. "Any negotiations on an overall peace agreement should be based on the relevant UN Security Council resolutions and the certainty of a Palestinian State alongside the State of Israel with Jerusalem as a shared capital.”

Luisa Morgantini, Bruxelles +32 2 2847151,
Strasbourg +33 388177151
Mobil +39 348 3921465
luisa.morgantini@europarl.europa.eu
David Lundy +32 485 50 58 12
david.lundy@europarl.europa.eu www.guengl.eu

Wednesday, November 15, 2006

Jewish Peace Group Disappointed by Lack of Progress in Bush-Olmert Meeting

Brit Tzedek released the following press release yesterday, November 13, 2006, in response to the meeting between President Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert.

CHICAGO--In a statement released today, Marcia Freedman, president of Brit Tzedek v'Shalom, the country's largest and most vibrant grassroots Jewish peace organization, expressed profound concern over the lack of progress made in the meeting today between President George Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Olmert.

"President Bush and Prime Minister Olmert sound as if nothing has happened to change their worldviews in recent months, despite the fact that Israelis are still reeling from their recent failed military policy in Lebanon, and U.S. voters have overwhelmingly rejected President George Bush's Middle East policy."

"If ever there was a moment for a daring U.S. diplomatic initiative to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it is now. President Bush, together with Prime Minister Olmert, can forge their legacies in the region with an historic contribution to regional stability, global security, and international peace."

Last week, Americans, including an overwhelming number of American Jews, demanded that their government chart a new course in the Middle East, and likewise, Israeli citizens are rejecting the isolationism of their government, with 67% believing that Israel should negotiate with a Palestinian unity government. Yet meeting today, even as their constituencies vehemently demand change, these two embattled leaders, President Bush and Prime Minister Olmert, appear perfectly satisfied with the status quo.

For the past six years, the Bush Administration has failed the people of the region and we who support their quest for peace with security. It is totally insufficient to address the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through occasional diplomatic gestures that produce no concrete results; Brit Tzedek calls on the U.S. Government to take action.

Both the need and the opportunity for action are urgent. The opportunity has been created by the anticipated formation of a Palestinian unity government and by President Bush's entry into the final years of his Administration, when he should be willing to take political initiative to carve out his presidential imprint. The need arises from daily increasing violence and loss of life in Gaza that enflames and threatens to engulf the entire region in war, the potential for disaster which we witnessed this summer in Lebanon. Brit Tzedek calls for vigorous U.S. diplomatic intervention to reach an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, as well as the release of kidnapped Israeli soldiers and the cessation of Qassam rockets fired into southern Israel by Palestinian militants. The conflict can only be resolved by immediate U.S. leadership to engage Israelis and Palestinians in ending this crisis and bringing back all parties to the negotiating table. This is what the American people are calling on President Bush to do.

Brit Tzedek v'Shalom, the Jewish Alliance for Justice and Peace, is a national grassroots movement more than 35,000 strong, that educates and mobilizes American Jews in support of a negotiated two-state resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Brit Tzedek v'Shalom, The Jewish Alliance for Justice and Peace
11 E. Adams Street, Suite 707
Chicago, IL 60603
Phone: (312) 341-1205
Fax: (312) 341-1206
info@btvshalom.org
www.btvshalom.org

Sunday, November 12, 2006

Demo outside Olmert's Office against the war crimes in Gaza



"The entire cabinet are war criminals!" "Now is the time to negotiate!"



"Israeli Government! Stop killing innocent people!"

No one is guilty in Israel (Gideon Levy on Gaza)

Nineteen inhabitants of Beit Hanun were killed with malice aforethought. There is no other way of describing the circumstances of their killing. Someone who throws burning matches into a forest can’t claim he didn’t mean to set it on fire, and anyone who bombards residential neighborhoods with artillery can’t claim he didn’t mean to kill innocent inhabitants.Therefore it takes considerable gall and cynicism to dare to claim that the Israel Defense Forces did not intend to kill inhabitants of Beit Hanun. Even if there was a glitch in the balancing of the aiming mechanism or in a component of the radar, a mistake in the input of the data or a human error, the overwhelming, crucial, shocking fact is that the IDF bombards helpless civilians. Even shells that are supposedly aimed 200 meters from houses, into “open areas,” are intended to kill, and they do kill. In this respect, nothing new happened on Wednesday morning in Gaza: The IDF has been behaving like this for months now.

But this isn’t just a matter of “the IDF,” “the government” or “Israel” bearing the responsibility. It must be said explicitly: The blame rests directly on people who hold official positions, flesh-and-blood human beings, and they must pay the price of their criminal responsibility for needless killing. Attorney Avigdor Klagsbald caused the death of a woman and her child without anyone imagining that he intended to hit them, but nevertheless he is sitting in prison. And what about the killers of women and children in Beit Hanun? Will they all be absolved? Will no one be tried? Will no one even be reprimanded and shunned?

GOC Southern Command Yoav Galant will say with exasperating coolness that apparently there was “a problem with the battery’s targeting apparatus,” without moving a facial muscle, and will that be enough? Deputy Defense Minister Ephraim Sneh will say, “The IDF is militarily responsible, but not morally responsible,” and will he thus exculpate himself?

And who will bear the responsibility for the renewal of the terror attacks? Only Hamas? Who will be accused of the tumble in Israel’s status and its depiction as a violent, leper state, and who will be judged for the danger that hovers over world Jewry in the wake of the IDF’s acts? The electronic component that went on the blink in the radar?

No one is guilty in Israel. There is never anyone guilty in Israel. The prime minister who is responsible for the brutal policy toward the Palestinians, the defense minister who knew about and approved the bombardments, the chief of staff, the chief of command and the commander of the division who gave the orders to bombard - not one of them is guilty. They will continue with the work of killing as though nothing has happened: The sun shone, the system flourished and the ritual slaughterer slaughtered. They will continue to pursue the routine of their daily lives, accepted in society like anyone else, and remain in their posts despite the blood on their hands.

A few hours after the disaster, while the Gaza Strip was still enveloped in sorrow and deep in shock, the air force was already hastening to carry out another targeted killing, an arrogant demonstration of just how much this disaster does not concern us.

Israel after the disaster was split: There were those who did their duty and “expressed sorrow,” like the prime minister and the defense minister, and there were those who hastened with appalling insensitivity to cast the responsibility onto the Palestinians, like the “moderate” foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, and the deputy defense minister from the Labor Party, Sneh. The silent majority did not bother to emerge from its yawning indifference. The entertainment shows on television continued to make people laugh, and one of the radio stations even broadcast, in a demonstrable lack of taste, Sarit Hadad’s song “You’re a Big Gun.” Mourning, of course, did not descend on Israel, and there was not even a single manifestation of genuine participation in the sorrow. It did not occur to Israel to promise compensation to the families and it did not provide help, apart from transferring some of the wounded to hospitals in Israel. We provided more aid to the victims of the earthquake in Mexico, even though there we didn’t have a hand in the disaster. For the most part, the media were not very disturbed by the killing and devoted less attention to it than to the Gay Pride parade.

A day or two after the disaster it was totally forgotten and other affairs are filling our lives. But it is impossible just to go on to the next item on the agenda. This disaster is not an act of God. There are people who are clearly responsible for it, and they must be brought to justice. The fact that the International Court of Justice in The Hague still looks very far from Israel, and the various “Halutzes” and “Galants” can still move around freely in the world, because in Israel they forgive nearly everything, does not mean that war crimes are not being committed here.

The IDF may well be a big gun, but an army that is responsible for needless killing in such large dimensions, as in recent months in Lebanon and in Gaza, is a failed and dangerous army that must urgently be repaired. The Defense Forces are not only killing Arabs for no reason, they are also directly endangering Israel’s security, disgracing it in the world and embroiling it again and again.

The heedless and arrogant reaction to such deeds contains a dangerous moral message. If it is possible to dismiss mass killing with a wealth of technical excuses, and not take any drastic measure against those who are truly guilty of it, then Israel is saying that, as far as it is concerned, nothing happened apart from the faulty component in the radar system or the glitch in balancing the sights. But what happened at Beit Hanun, what happened in Israel on the day after and what is continuing to happen in Gaza day after day is a far more frightening distortion than the calibrating of a gun sight.


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www.haaretz.com/hasen/objects/pages/PrintArticleEn.jhtml?itemNo=786549

Friday, November 10, 2006

NIGHTMARES How Gaza offends us all.

By Jennifer Loewenstein
Madison, Wisconsin
8 November 2006

An opened jaw with yellowed teeth gaped out of its bloodied shroud. The rest of the head parts were wrapped in a plastic bag placed atop the jaw and nostrils, as if to be close to the place to which it once belonged. The bag was red from the pieces that were stuffed inside it. Below the jaw was a human neck slit open midway down: a fleshy, wet wound smiling pink and oozing out from the browned skin around it, the neck that was still linked to the body below it. Above him, in the upper freezer of the morgue lay a dead woman, her red hennaed hair visible for the first time to strange men around her. More red plastic wrapped around an otherwise absent chin. She was dead for demonstrating outside a mosque in Beit Hanoun, northern Gaza where more than 60 men sheltered during the artillery onslaught by Israeli tanks and cannons.

Most of the others still had their faces intact. They lay on their silver morgue trays stiffly as frozen food. One man had a green Hamas band tied around his head; he looked like a shepherd from some forgotten, pastoral age. Another’s white eyes were partially opened, his face looking out in horror as if he’d died seeing it coming. Then a muddy, grizzled blob on the bottom left tray, black curls tangled and damped into its rounded head and blessedly shut eyes. A closer look revealed a child, a boy of 4: Majed, out playing his important childhood games when death came in like thunder and rolled him up in a million speckles of black mud. The other dead had already been taken away.

Muslim burials take place quickly, a god-send to the doctors, nurses and undertakers who, at the hospitals and morgues, desperately need the space for next batch of casualties who would sleep on the same sheets, same steel-framed beds, in the same humid heat, in the same close, crowded, grief-stricken rooms, often on the floors, with the same tired, unpaid attendants doing their rounds without the proper supplies to help them if they were still alive. And some would die on the operating table like the young man gone now to the Kamal Adwan hospital morgue when his wounds became too much for his body to bear. Two young girls preceded him earlier the same day. Blessed are they who leave this human wasteland washed and shrouded for a quiet, earthy grave.

Today the hospitals will be filled beyond capacity again when the 18 civilian dead from a pre-dawn attack on Beit Hanoun -- women, men and children blasted out of their sleep into human chunks -- roll out of the ambulances and into the freezers of Shifa or Kamal Adwan hospitals in the northern Gaza Strip. How dare they sleep in their houses at night when the tanks are barking out commands.

Do you believe this was an accident? that an international investigation will ever take place? Like after Jenin? Like after Dan Halutz and his 2000 pound bomb which was dropped on an apartment building in Gaza City killing 15 people, 9 of them women and children? Like after the siege of Jabalya in the fall of 2004? Like after Operation Rainbow in Rafah? Like after Huda Ghalia’s family was blasted into nothingness during an outing on a Gaza beach? Will US eyes, glued to their glaucousy TV screens to find out which marketed candidate won the corporate-managed midterm elections, ever know that that another massacre of Palestinians took place?

At Shifa hospital, Gaza’s central hospital, where Dr. Juma’ Saqa and his staff cope with the daily shortages of supplies from kidney dialysis machines to fans and clean linens; where cancer medications are unavailable to the increasing rate of cancer patients and elective surgeries, such as for hernias or tonsils, are a thing of the past. This is where doctors and nurses witness how the water that Gazans drink causes innumerable ailments, rotting teeth, anemia in children and kidney dysfunction because of its brackish, poisonous quality. This is where children lie half naked in their beds, white tape across their noses holding tubes to their faces so that they may eat or breathe-- like Ahmad aged 3, also from Beit Hanoun, who took a bullet in the right side of his belly that exited on the left. His mother stands over him passively, grateful. Ahmad, at least, is going to live. But for what?

Each night in Gaza City that first week in November, explosions sounded in the northeastern corner of Gaza: a succession of bullets, booms, bombs, canon fire. On the first night of the onslaught we could still see lights from Beit Hanoun 10 miles from us blinking and twinkling as if nothing were really happening; it was all a dream—fireworks, a distant celebration perhaps. But then, by the second night only a swath of blacked out space lay in the place of Beit Hanoun, electricity-less and water-less as the booms continued unabated for an hour or more and the hum of the pilot-less drones circled round again and again above us, above Beit Hanoun, above Gaza, automated people-monitors taking stock of the activity below. Nobody from Beit Hanoun could leave by day to get to work without announcing to the tanks and the drones that he was prepared to sacrifice his life for a semblance of normalcy. All men between the ages of 16-35 were rounded up onto trucks and hauled away for “questioning”. What will happen to them and their families? Will anyone follow up? Will they add to the 10,000 Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons, left to rot while their wives and children, sisters, brothers, parents go on struggling to survive?

There lies Gaza stretched 28 miles long in a tumbledown graying, decaying heap, yawning, tired, wretched, full of garbage. Tape gauze over your nose to avoid the smell of sewage and burning trash. Try not to notice the metal-shuttered shop fronts, the empty stores, the proliferation of horse- and donkey-carts clopping along the streets for lack of fuel, the ribs of the tired beasts jutting out from their bellies as boys whip them along to keep going. The joke is the cerulean blue sky illuminating the rubbish tip, the palm trees and purple flowers beaming in the November sun – natural non-sequiturs, like the box of fresh chocolates offered to the journalists filming the woman’s wounded son as she yells out her frustrations and horror at the Americans and the Israelis who are killing her family. Why? She asks. Why, why, why?

Ask Mark Regev, Israel’s eager, hideously sincere government spokesperson. On CNN’s international news he tells us in earnest that this is Israeli self-defense. The Qassam fire into Sderot and Ashkelon must stop. Israelis have the right to defend themselves. The “operation” in Beit Hanoun will not stop until the Qassams stop. Each word drivels out of his mouth into a bubble of obscenity for everyone watching from the vantage point of Gaza. Verbal pornography, sado-masochistic jargon from the prince of Hasbara leaks onto the dust like poisonous bile bought, paid for and sought after by the lords of power and their occupying machinery.

The shoddy, home-made Qassams hiss like cornered alley cats when they are fired into the skies. Stupid and bestial, they zing across the border like crazed beasts not knowing where they are going. They’ll dash forever like this until the occupation of Palestine ends. The Gazans know this, Hamas knows it, Fatah knows it, the PFLP knows it; In Israel, Labor and Likkud know it, Meretz knows it, Yisrael Beiteinu knows it, Shas knows it; Peretz, Olmert and Lieberman know it, Sharon knew it, the Israeli people know it, official America know this, so 40 years after 1967 and 58 years after 1948, why is the occupation not yet over?

Because Israel does not want it to end. Because Israel wants the land and the resources without the people. Because you have to eviscerate a culture in order to maintain total control over it. Because the United States says that’s just fine with us, you serve our purpose well. You help make the war on terror convenient. You help fit Iraq into the scheme. You’ll help us with Iran as well. Who the hell cares about a million and a half poverty-stricken Gazans and their dust, their sand, their stinking, crumbling heap of a disaster area homeland?

What a terrible shame it is that Gazans have not yet attained the status of Human in the eyes of the Western powers, for the resistance there will continue to be an enigma until this changes. For now, however, the slaughter will continue unabated.

Leaving Gaza 6:30am Saturday morning, November 4th 2006, I hear a loud explosion. My cab driver picks me up and we drive down the main street in Gaza City toward Erez. Suddenly, unexpectedly, there is a smoldering mass of wreckage in front of me, a car surrounded by boys picking at its still-hot exterior. Inside are four blackened, seared human shapes, crispy at the touch, faceless from the burns, charcoal, shreds of steaming cloth, a smell of barbecued human flesh, sirens in the distance. Burnt and vaporized metal looks like what you see in a science fiction movie. Burnt humans look like singed paper mache monsters whose pieces fall off at the hint of a breeze.

Gaza is sorry for these indiscretions, this poor taste, this unseemly topic of conversation. You are right to express your indignation. How Dare Gaza Speak of These Things!? But it can no longer contain its secrets even with the blockade of visitors to its vile shores; its voice is shrill even when sublimated through the layers of media deceit. The smoke rises higher in the skies each time. The prison is imploding and the resistance will never end.

Sunday, November 05, 2006

Full Text of David Grossman's Speech at Yitzhak Rabin Memorial


w w w . h a a r e t z . c o m

The annual memorial ceremony for Yitzhak Rabin is the moment when we pause for a while to remember Rabin the man, the leader. And we also take a look at ourselves, at Israeli society, its leadership, the national mood, the state of the peace process, at ourselves as individuals in the face of national events.

It is not easy to take a look at ourselves this year. There was a war, and Israel flexed its massive military muscle, but also exposed Israel's fragility. We discovered that our military might ultimately cannot be the only guarantee of our existence. Primarily, we have found that the crisis Israel is experiencing is far deeper than we had feared, in almost every way.


I am speaking here tonight as a person whose love for the land is overwhelming and complex, and yet it is unequivocal, and as one whose continuous covenant with the land has turned his personal calamity into a covenant of blood.

I am totally secular, and yet in my eyes the establishment and the very existence of the State of Israel is a miracle of sorts that happened to us as a nation - a political, national, human miracle.

I do not forget this for a single moment. Even when many things in the reality of our lives enrage and depress me, even when the miracle is broken down to routine and wretchedness, to corruption and cynicism, even when reality seems like nothing but a poor parody of this miracle, I always remember. And with these feelings, I address you tonight.

"Behold land, for we hath squandered," wrote the poet Saul Tchernikovsky in Tel Aviv in 1938. He lamented the burial of our young again and again in the soil of the Land of Israel. The death of young people is a horrible, ghastly waste.


But no less dreadful is the sense that for many years, the State of Israel has been squandering, not only the lives of its sons, but also its miracle; that grand and rare opportunity that history bestowed upon it, the opportunity to establish here a state that is efficient, democratic, which abides by Jewish and universal values; a state that would be a national home and haven, but not only a haven, also a place that would offer a new meaning to Jewish existence; a state that holds as an integral and essential part of its Jewish identity and its Jewish ethos, the observance of full equality and respect for its non-Jewish citizens.

Look at what befell us. Look what befell the young, bold, passionate country we had here, and how, as if it had undergone a quickened ageing process, Israel lurched from infancy and youth to a perpetual state of gripe, weakness and sourness.

How did this happen? When did we lose even the hope that we would eventually be able to live a different, better life? Moreover, how do we continue to watch from the side as though hypnotized by the insanity, rudeness, violence and racism that has overtaken our home?

And I ask you: How could it be that a people with such powers of creativity, renewal and vivacity as ours, a people that knew how to rise from the ashes time and again, finds itself today, despite its great military might, at such a state of laxity and inanity, a state where it is the victim once more, but this time its own victim, of its anxieties, its short-sightedness.

One of the most difficult outcomes of the recent war is the heightened realization that at this time there is no king in Israel, that our leadership is hollow. Our military and political leadership is hollow. I am not even talking about the obvious blunders in running the war, of the collapse of the home front, nor of the large-scale and small-time corruption.

I am talking about the fact that the people leading Israel today are unable to contact Israelis to their identity. Certainly not with the healthy, vitalizing and productive areas of this identity, with those areas of identity and memory and fundamental values that would give us hope and strength, that would be the antidote to the waning of mutual trust, of the bonds to the land, that would give some meaning to the exhausting and despairing struggle for existence.

The fundamental characteristics of the current Israeli leadership are primarily anxiety and intimidation, of the charade of power, the wink of the dirty deal, of selling out our most prized possessions. In this sense they are not true leaders, certainly they are not the leaders of a people in such a complicated position that has lost the way it so desperately needs. Sometimes it seems that the sound box of their self-importance, of their memories of history, of their vision, of what they really care for, exist only in the miniscule space between two headlines of a newspaper or between two investigations by the attorney general.

Look at those who lead us. Not all of them, of course, but many among them. Behold their petrified, suspicious, sweaty conduct. The conduct of advocates and scoundrels. It is preposterous to expect to hear wisdom emerge from them, that some vision or even just an original, truly creative, bold and ingenuous idea would emanate from them.

When was the last time a prime minister formulated or took a step that could open up a new horizon for Israelis, for a better future? When did he initiate a social or cultural or ideological move, instead of merely reacting feverishly to moves forced upon him by others?

Mister Prime Minister, I am not saying these words out of feelings of rage or revenge. I have waited long enough to avoid responding on impulse. You will not be able to dismiss my words tonight by saying a grieving man cannot be judged. Certainly I am grieving, but I am more pained than angry. This country and what you and your friends are doing to it pains me.

Trust me, your success is important to me, because the future of all of us depends on our ability to act. Yitzhak Rabin took the road of peace with the Palestinians, not because he possessed great affection for them or their leaders. Even then, as you recall, common belief was that we had no partner and we had nothing to discuss with them.

Rabin decided to act, because he discerned very wisely that Israeli society would not be able to sustain itself endlessly in a state of an unresolved conflict. He realized long before many others that life in a climate of violence, occupation, terror, anxiety and hopelessness, extracts a price Israel cannot afford. This is all relevant today, even more so. We will soon talk about the partner that we do or do not have, but before that, let us take a look at ourselves.

We have been living in this struggle for more than 100 years. We, the citizens of this conflict, have been born into war and raised in it, and in a certain sense indoctrinated by it. Maybe this is why we sometimes think that this madness in which we live for over 100 years is the only real thing, the only life for us, and that we do not have the option or even the right to aspire for a different life.

By our sword we shall live and by our sword we shall die and the sword shall devour forever. Maybe this would explain the indifference with which we accept the utter failure of the peace process, a failure that has lasted for years and claims more and more victims.

This could explain also the lack of reaction by most of us to the harsh blow to democracy caused by the appointment of Avigdor Lieberman as a senior minister with the support of the Labor Party - the appointment of a habitual pyromaniac as director of the nation's firefighters.


And these are partly the cause of Israel's quick descent into the heartless, essentially brutal treatment of its poor and suffering. This indifference to the fate of the hungry, the elderly, the sick and the disabled, all those who are weak, this equanimity of the State of Israel in the face of human trafficking or the appalling employment conditions of our foreign workers, which border on slavery, to the deeply ingrained institutionalized racism against the Arab minority.

When this takes place here so naturally, without shock, without protest, as though it were obvious, that we would never be able to get the wheel back on track, when all of this takes place, I begin to fear that even if peace were to arrive tomorrow, and even if we ever regained some normalcy, we may have lost our chance for full recovery.

The calamity that struck my family and myself with the falling of our son, Uri, does not grant me any additional rights in the public discourse, but I believe that the experience of facing death and the loss brings with it a sobriety and lucidity, at least regarding the distinction between the important and the unimportant, between the attainable and the unattainable.

Any reasonable person in Israel, and I will say in Palestine too, knows exactly the outline of a possible solution to the conflict between the two peoples. Any reasonable person here and over there knows deep in their heart the difference between dreams and the heart's desire, between what is possible and what is not possible by the conclusion of negotiations. Anyone who does not know, who refuses to acknowledge this, is already not a partner, be he Jew or Arab, is entrapped in his hermetic fanaticism, and is therefore not a partner.

Let us take a look at those who are meant to be our partners. The Palestinians have elected Hamas to lead them, Hamas who refuses to negotiate with us, refuses even to recognize us. What can be done in such a position? Keep strangling them more and more, keep mowing down hundreds of Palestinians in Gaza, most of whom are innocent civilians like us? Kill them and get killed for all eternity?

Turn to the Palestinians, Mr. Olmert, address them over the heads of Hamas, appeal to their moderates, those who like you and I oppose Hamas and its ways, turn to the Palestinian people, speak to their deep grief and wounds, acknowledge their ongoing suffering.

Nothing would be taken away from you or Israel's standing in future negotiations. Our hearts will only open up to one another slightly, and this has a tremendous power, the power of a force majeur. The power of simple human compassion, particularly in this a state of deadlock and dread. Just once, look at them not through the sights of a gun, and not behind a closed roadblock. You will see there a people that is tortured no less than us. An oppressed, occupied people bereft of hope.


Certainly, the Palestinians are also to blame for the impasse, certainly they played their role in the failure of the peace process. But take a look at them from a different perspective, not only at the radicals in their midst, not only at those who share interests with our own radicals. Take a look at the overwhelming majority of this miserable people, whose fate is entangled with our own, whether we like it or not.

Go to the Palestinians, Mr. Olmert, do not search all the time for reasons for not to talk to them. You backed down on the unilateral convergence, and that's a good thing, but do not leave a vacuum. It will be occupied instantly with violence, destruction. Talk to them, make them an offer their moderates can accept. They argue far more than we are shown in the media. Make them an offer so that they are forced to choose whether they accept it, or whether they prefer to remain hostage to fanatical Islam.

Approach them with the bravest and most serious plan Israel can offer. With the offer than any reasonable Palestinian and Israeli knows is the boundary of their refusal and our concession. There is no time. Should you delay, in a short while we will look back with longing at the amateur Palestinian terror. We will hit our heads and yell at our failure to exercise all of our mental flexibility, all of the Israeli ingenuity to uproot our enemies from their self-entrapment. We have no choice and they have no choice. And a peace of no choice should be approached with the same determination and creativity as one approaches a war of no choice. And those who believe we do have a choice, or that time is on our side do not comprehend the deeply dangerous processes already in motion.

Maybe, Mr. Prime Minister, you need to be reminded, that if an Arab leader is sending a peace signal, be it the slightest and most hesitant, you must accept it, you must test immediately its sincerity and seriousness. You do not have the moral right not to respond.

You owe it to those whom you would ask to sacrifice their lives should another war break out. Therefore, if President Assad says that Syria wants peace, even if you don't believe him, and we are all suspicious of him, you must offer to meet him that same day.

Don't wait a single day. When you launched the last war you did not even wait one hour. You charged with full force, with the complete arsenal, with the full power of destruction. Why, when a glimmer of peace surfaces, must you reject it immediately, dissolve it? What have you got to lose? Are you suspicious of it? Go and offer him such terms that would expose his schemes. Offer him a peace process that would last over several years, and only at its conclusion, and provided he meets all the conditions and restrictions, will he get back the Golan. Commit him to a prolonged process, act so that his people also become aware of this possibility. Help the moderates, who must exist there as well. Try to shape reality. Not only serve as its collaborator. This is what you were elected to do.

Certainly, not all depends on our actions. There are major powers active in our region and in the world. Some, like Iran, like radical Islam, seek our doom and despite that, so much depends on what we do, on what we become.

Disagreements today between right and left are not that significant. The vast majority of Israel's citizens understand this already, and know what the outline for the resolution of the conflict would look like. Most of us understand, therefore, that the land would be divided, that a Palestinian state would be established.

Why, then, do we keep exhausting ourselves with the internal bickering that has gone on for 40 years? Why does our political leadership continue to reflect the position of the radicals and not that held by the majority of the public? It is better to reach national consensus before circumstances or God forbid another war force us to reach it. If we do it, we would save ourselves years of decline and error, years when we will cry time and again: "Behold land, for we hath squandered."

From where I stand right now, I beseech, I call on all those who listen, the young who came back from the war, who know they are the ones to be called upon to pay the price of the next war, on citizens, Jew and Arab, people on the right and the left, the secular, the religious, stop for a moment, take a look into the abyss. Think of how close we are to losing all that we have created here. Ask yourselves if this is not the time to get a grip, to break free of this paralysis, to finally claim the lives we deserve to live.