Archive for the 'Palestinian Politics' Category
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The following statement was issued on 3 October 2010 by 14 leading Palestinian human rights organisations regarding the Palestinian leadership’s decision to delay discussion of the Goldstone report to the UN Human Rights Council investigating the Israeli attacks on Gaza in December 2009-March 2010.
On 2 October 2009, the Palestinian leadership – under heavy international pressure lead by the United States – deferred the draft proposal at the Human Rights Council endorsing all the recommendations of the UN Fact Finding Mission (the Goldstone Report). This deferral denies the Palestinian peoples’ right to an effective judicial remedy and the equal protection of the law. It represents the triumph of politics over human rights. It is an insult to all victims and a rejection of their rights. Continue reading ‘Palestinian NGOs deplore decision to muzzle discussion on UN report on Gaza war crimes’
Zochrot (Remembering) is a group of Israeli citizens working to raise awareness of the Nakba, the Palestinian catastrophe of 1948. The following interview was conducted by the Alternative Information Centre and is with the Eitan Bronstein, the director of Zochrot.
By Uri Avnery, Gush-Shalom, 9 May 2009
First of all, I want to apologize to all the good women who are engaged in the world’s oldest profession.
I recently described Shimon Peres as a political prostitute. One of my female readers has protested vigorously. Prostitutes, she pointed out, earn their money honestly. They deliver what they promise.
Our president, on the other hand, only tells the truth by accident. He is a political impostor and a political sham. To him, too, apply Winston Churchill’s words about a former Prime Minister: “The Right Honorable gentleman sometimes stumbles upon the truth, but he always hurries on as if nothing has happened.” Or the words of former minister Amnon Rubinstein about Ariel Sharon: “He blushes when he tells the truth.”
The text below appeared as an editorial in the largest selling newspaper in Sydney, Australia, the Sydney Morning Herald on 13 March 2009. JAO-Sydney places the text here, not necessarily because we agree with it, but rather to demonstrate that actions attempting to stifle and censor debate on issues related to the Israel/Palestine conflict can only harm.
Israel is a democracy. It contains many political parties with a wide spectrum of views about how to approach the great issue of an eventual Palestinian settlement, as well as many more mundane policies. It has human rights groups which put the Israeli security forces under as intense and critical a scrutiny as any overseas counterpart. It has law professors who debate the legality of Israeli settlements and military operations in the West Bank and Gaza. But sometimes you wouldn’t suspect this from the actions and attitudes of its most prominent defenders abroad.
Here in Australia, we’ve just learnt that the respected Australian Jewish News has rejected advertisements that promote a speaking tour by Israeli professor Jeffrey Halper, who campaigns against the bulldozing of Palestinian homes. Sydney’s progressive Emanuel Synagogue has also cancelled a talk by the professor, because some people objected to what he would have said.
The newspaper’s publisher, Robert Magid, said he pulled the ads because he “doesn’t like” the promoters, three local groups called Jews Against the Occupation, Independent Australian Jewish Voices, and the Coalition for Justice and Peace in Palestine. According to Mr Magid, they “use their Judaism to bash other Jews and issues associated with the Jewish community”. Maybe it’s because criticism that can’t be easily shrugged off as ill-informed or even as anti-Semitic is harder to answer.
Continue reading ‘Sydney Morning Herald Editorial: With friends like these …’
Andrew West, 12 March 2009
Sydney Morning Herald
A leading Jewish publication stands accused of censorship after cancelling an advertisement for a series of lectures to be delivered by a visiting Israeli human rights campaigner.
The publisher of The Australian Jewish News, Robert Magid, confirmed that he had pulled an ad promoting the speaking tour of Jeffrey Halper, a Jewish Israeli professor who campaigns against the bulldozing of Palestinian homes.
by Rolf Verleger, University of Lübeck
Source: Occupation Magazine
What would you do – the Israeli historian Prof. Fania Oz-Salzberger wrote in the FAZ (Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung) – if your neighbor constantly threw stones and Molotov cocktails at your apartment? Wouldn’t you at some time pick up a gun and put an end to the doings? And if this neighbor surrounded himself with his children, so you couldn’t hit him, wouldn’t you then even take a gun with a telescopic sight? Indeed, did not Hamas behave in Gaza just like this neighbor when it shot at Israeli cities with their explosive rockets? Therefore, Prof. Oz-Salzberger wrote, Israel’s current war against Gaza was a just war.
With this beautiful example of the reader and his neighbor one can indeed get across a lot of things vividly. For simplicity let us call you and the family that is terrorized by the mean neighbor the landlord and let us now look at the curious circumstances in the apartment house. The neighbor’s apartment is Gaza.
The following is an interview with Nassar Ibrahim, Policy Director of the Alternative Information Center. The interview was conducted on 16 January 2009 by Enrico Bartolomei.
What is going on in the West Bank in relation to the Israeli attack on Gaza? Why is the reaction not so strong?
The reaction in the West Bank is strongly affected by the internal Palestinian split: the power in the West Bank is presently held by Fatah and the Palestinian Authority. Soon after the 2006 election in which Hamas won, the antagonism between the former Fatah-led PA and the new Hamas government became manifest. This opposition can be read as the difference between two strategic choices: the one represented by the Fatah leadership and supported by many Arab regimes loyal to the USA power, which sees the peace negotiations and the involvement of international institutions as the only way to solve the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The other strategy is the resistance movement, currently led by Hamas with the participation of the leftist groups (PFLP, DFLP), the Fatah al-Aqsa Brigades, the Islamic Jihad and so on. When Israel attacked Gaza 20 days ago, the political position of the PA in the West Bank was clear: “we are not part of the attack.” Therefore, they are using all their power to keep the West Bank as calm as possible, employing the Palestinian policemen in order to prevent any clashes between the Palestinian demonstrators and the Israeli soldiers. As a result of this policy, the reactions in the West Bank are not effective enough. Continued….
