Netanyahu to Meet Obama as U.S. Priorities Shift

The last time Benjamin Netanyahu met an American president as Israel’s new leader, in 1996, it did not go well. Mr. Netanyahu lectured President Bill Clinton about Arab-Israeli relations, aides recalled, driving Mr. Clinton into a profane outburst after his guest left.

Mr. Netanyahu is likely to avoid a repeat of that when he meets President Obama at the White House on Monday. But the relationship between Israel and the United States has become more unsettled since Mr. Obama took office.

Israel has been rattled by signs that the Obama administration has sworn off the unstinting support of Israel that was a hallmark of the Bush years, as well as by the softer approach that Mr. Obama has taken to dealing with Iran.

Both countries regard Iran as the paramount threat in the region, but they have sharply different ways of responding: the Obama administration is asking for time to pursue its diplomatic overture to Tehran; the Israelis are warning that they will not stand by while the Iranians build a nuclear bomb.

Two weeks ago, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Leon E. Panetta, held a quiet meeting with Mr. Netanyahu in Jerusalem. Israel asked the United States to clarify benchmarks that would demonstrate that its diplomatic campaign was working.

The Israeli government, officials said, has assured the United States that it will not take military action against Iran without first consulting Washington. But it has also signaled that it will give the United States only a year or so to show that its good-will approach is getting results.

“They’re preoccupied by Iran, and no one more than the current prime minister,” said Martin S. Indyk, a former American ambassador to Israel and a Middle East peace negotiator. “But the prime minister understands full well that this is a time for American-led engagement.”

The question, Mr. Indyk said, is whether Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Obama can find common ground on Iran. Without that, he said, it would be hard to imagine the Israeli government’s making progress on negotiations with either the Palestinians or its Arab neighbors.

“There is potential for greater tensions than have existed for some time, certainly,” said Robert Malley, another veteran of Middle East peacemaking efforts. “But a collision is not inevitable.”

To try to keep the peace process alive while it reaches out to Iran, the Obama administration has been pushing for a series of more modest steps on the part of Israel and its Arab neighbors.

The special envoy for the Middle East, former Senator George J. Mitchell, has made three trips to the region since January, seeking pledges from Saudi Arabia and other countries to exchange diplomats and authorize direct flights to Tel Aviv — steps that inch toward normalized relations. In return, he is pressing Israel to freeze the construction of Jewish settlements on the West Bank.

“The notion is that you can somehow induce the Arabs to give the Israelis an incentive,” said Aaron David Miller, a former diplomat who negotiated on Arab-Israeli issues in the Clinton administration.

Drawing in the Arab states, he said, is a way to reshape a forbidding landscape. In addition to Iran, there is a fractured Palestinian leadership and an Israeli government led by Mr. Netanyahu, who refuses to endorse the two-state solution that underpins the American-led peace effort.

Some analysts play down Mr. Netanyahu’s hawkish stance as a negotiating tactic ahead of his meeting with Mr. Obama. “I suspect he knows these are untenable conditions,” Mr. Malley said. “Those are concessions he’s putting himself in a position to make later.”

Despite Mr. Netanyahu’s rough start with Mr. Clinton, the two leaders later formed a productive relationship.

The Obama administration has fired its own warning shots. It asked Congress to make minor changes in a bill to allow aid to flow to a Palestinian unity government that would include members backed by Hamas — a step away from a blanket refusal to deal with Hamas, which it labels a terrorist organization.

The changes ruffled lawmakers in Congress, who tweaked the wording to make it more restrictive. But the episode rattled Israeli officials, who recently waged a fierce military campaign against Hamas in Gaza to stem its rocket attacks.

Adding to Israel’s qualms, a senior State Department official, Rose Gottemoeller, said at a recent conference in New York that the United States favored having Israel sign the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, which would require it to declare and give up its nuclear arsenal.

While the administration said this was not a new policy, few American officials have publicly acknowledged that Israel possesses nuclear weapons, let alone raised the prospect of getting Israel to give them up. For the most part, though, the administration has moved gingerly. Mr. Mitchell, the president’s emissary to the Middle East, has yet to give an on-the-record interview about his diplomacy.

Diplomats are closely watching two other officials with long experience and strong views on Israel: the national security adviser, Gen. James L. Jones, and the White House chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel.

General Jones has made the case that if Israel believes that Iran is a threat to its existence, it should pursue talks with the Palestinians. Israeli officials, however, say they cannot do that unless they feel secure from the threat of an Iranian nuclear attack. And they fret that Iran is playing for time.

“They are making it too early to react until it is too late to react,” said a senior Israeli official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he did not want to interfere with Mr. Netanyahu’s visit.

Netanyahu Meets Jordan’s King

JERUSALEM — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel met on Thursday with King Abdullah II of Jordan, who urged him to commit to a two-state solution with the Palestinians, according to news reports.

Mr. Netanyahu made the unannounced trip to Jordan hours before he was to meet with Pope Benedict XVI. Mark Regev, a spokesman for the prime minister, said that Mr. Netanyahu and King Abdullah discussed bilateral issues and the peace effort with the Palestinians.

A statement issued by Jordan after the meeting and quoted by news organizations said that the king had also asked Mr. Netanyahu to accept the Arab peace initiative, which offers Israel normal ties with the Arab world in return for a full withdrawal to its pre-1967 boundaries and a solution for the Palestinian refugees of 1948.

By Mark Lander
Source: New York Times.

Jordan Tells Israel to Accept Two-State Solution

The prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, met on Thursday with King Abdullah II of Jordan, who urged the Israeli leader to commit to a two-state solution with the Palestinians, according to news reports.

Mr. Netanyahu made the unannounced trip to Jordan hours before he was to meet in Nazareth with Pope Benedict XVI, and days ahead of a pivotal meeting with President Obama, scheduled to take place in Washington on Monday. It will be the first meeting between the Israeli and American leaders since the conservative-leaning Mr. Netanyahu took office six weeks ago.

The Obama administration has pronounced the two-state solution — the establishment of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel — to be the only solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Mr. Netanyahu has so far refused to publicly endorse the notion of a sovereign Palestinian state, a point of possible friction with Washington.

Mark Regev, a spokesman for Mr. Netanyahu, said that the Israeli prime minister and the Jordanian monarch discussed bilateral issues and the peace process with the Palestinians. On the subject of Palestinian statehood, Mr. Regev said only that “the Prime Minister expressed his view that he is committed to moving forward and is committed to tangible steps that will benefit people on the ground.”

A statement issued by the royal palace after the meeting and quoted by news organizations said that the king had also asked Mr. Netanyahu to accept the Arab peace initiative, which offers Israel normal ties with the Arab world in return for a full withdrawal to its pre-1967 boundaries and a solution for the Palestinian refugees of 1948.

Mr. Netanyahu has emphasized the Palestinians’ need for rapid economic development. While stating his readiness for political talks, he has been less eager to define the desired outcome.

By meeting with King Abdullah, and earlier this week with the president of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el Sheik, Mr. Netanyahu seemed to want to pursue a regional approach that would pit moderate forces in the region against those that reject Israel outright, like Iran and its proxies.

Mr. Regev said that Mr. Netanyahu wanted to see Egypt and Jordan, countries that already signed peace treaties with Israel, playing an “enhanced role” in the Israeli-Palestinian process.

At a news conference in Egypt on Monday, the Israeli leader expressed appreciation for Egypt’s “assistance in the struggle with the extremists and the terrorists who threaten both the whole region and the peace which we all desire.”

Israel and Jordan have a history of cooperation on security issues. Relations were strained in 1997, during Mr. Netanyahu’s last term as prime minister, after a failed assassination attempt against a senior Hamas leader, Khaled Meshal, carried out by Israeli agents on Jordanian soil.

By ISABEL KERSHNER

Source: New York Times.

The Freedom Theatre

A sustainable peace

I was requested to officially greet His Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI, on 11th May at an interfaith meeting in Notre Dame, Jerusalem. This meeting was to celebrate the significant work that religious leaders of the Abrahamic faiths, and Israeli and Palestinian non-governmental organizations, are undertaking to achieve peace in the Holy Land.

I spoke on behalf of the Council of Religious Institutions of the Holy Land, which comprises representatives of the most senior institutions of the Jewish, Christian and Muslim faiths in Israel and the Palestinian Territories. The Council has been established because we want religion to contribute to peace, freedom and security for both peoples of this land. We are convinced that if religious leaders are not taken seriously in these efforts, religion will be exploited by the forces of extremism and violence on both sides. As convener of the Council, I therefore deeply regret the remarks made at the event by Sheikh Taisir Tamimi, head of the Muslim Sharia courts, who was not invited to speak and spoke in a manner which is not conducive to constructive dialogue.

Among ourselves, the religious leaders in the Council of Religious Institutions of the Holy Land, we have pledged to ensure that we are working to improve the atmosphere of dialogue between one another and to avoid any public statement that could endanger our ability to work together. This is not to say that religious leaders should seek agreement at the expense of honestly confronting problems and real tensions. From our experience we know that those who are loyal to the sources of their faith can have serious disagreements when they seek peace based on justice and security. Religious leaders live amongst their own people. They suffer when their own people suffer, they feel insecure and threatened when their own people feel insecure and threatened, and they share the hopes and dreams of their own people for peace and freedom.

But, religious leaders also know they have the duty, according to their respective religions, to seek the shared values of justice, peace, forgiveness and reconciliation. In our own work we try to realise these values in a variety of ways: by creating lines of communication where conflicts with a religious component can be dealt with instantly and by people in positions of responsibility; by promoting education so that future generations can better understand each other and live in peace as good neighbours; by establishing mutual respect for the status of the holy sites of each religion; working for just solutions of tensions when holy sites are also common sites and securing access for all believers to their respective holy sites.

We also encourage discussion about the future of Jerusalem, a city dear to Palestinian Muslims and Christians, and to Israeli Jews, as well as to billions of believers around the world. As a facilitator of this work I constantly hear the yearning for Jerusalem to be a city of peace, where Palestinians and Israelis of all backgrounds are free to come, pray and celebrate their faith.

Changing political realities have deep implications for our work. We struggle with getting permits to enter Jerusalem for meetings, we hear statements from religious leaders which make our work more difficult, and we are mindful of believers who want their holy sites to be accessible and open to everyone. However, we move on step by step, building trust, trying to achieve tangible results that provide rays of hope.

I firmly believe that it is the task of religious leaders to sustain dreams of peace, security and reconciliation based on truth and justice. Inspired by good conversations in this land, I carry a dream that one day a sheikh, a rabbi and a bishop together will meet in Nablus and speak about the precious heritage of this land; that they together will walk along the beach of Haifa and share the riches of their own faith with one another. And that all three will be able to go to the Holy City of Jerusalem and wish each other well when they go to their respective places of worship.

I remain grateful to His Holiness for meeting with religious leaders, and thus giving his blessing to the work religious people are doing to build a lasting and sustainable peace in this Holy Land. We need this encouragement.

But we also know that only freedom, justice, security and respect for the political freedom of the two peoples can provide this Holy Land with a sustainable peace.

By Rev. Dr. & Canon Trond Bakkevig is the Convenor of the Council of Religious Institutions of the Holy Land.

Source: Common Ground News Service, www.commongroundnews.org.

Taking odds: Obama vs. Netanyahu?

Reporters are always asking me if I think President Barack Obama would prevail in the oft-predicted “knock down, drag out” fight with the Israeli government (and lobby) over the peace process.

That question is especially relevant following this week’s AIPAC conference. Vice President Joe Biden made it abundantly clear that the administration intends to push hard for a Palestinian state. (While Prime Minister Netanyahu is talking about everything except a Palestinian state.) The Israeli media is picking up the signals too. Writing in Yedioth Achronoth, Eitan Haber says that all the signs point in one direction and he’s worried. “When Obama roars, who will not tremble?” he asks.

The new president is committed to the two-state solution and intends to insist that the Israeli government not take actions that thwart that goal. That means moving against ever-expanding settlements (which the Israeli press today reports are about to be expanded even more by Netanyahu), easing the flow of goods in and out of Gaza, and removing checkpoints and other obstacles to Palestinian freedom of movement. The administration is also moving away from Israel’s ironclad opposition to dealing with Hamas.

For instance, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton noted that although we do not deal with Hizbullah, we do deal with a Lebanese government that includes Hizbullah. Why not apply that model to a Palestinian unity government?

Meanwhile Obama’s top White House adviser on foreign policy, National Security Adviser James Jones, told the Washington Post that Obama does not intend to wait for the Israelis and Palestinians to come up with a formula.

“The United States is at its best when it’s directly involved,” Jones said. He invoked the successful US efforts to end the fighting in the former Yugoslavia. “We didn’t tell the parties to go off and work this out. If we want to get momentum, we have to be involved directly.”

Then there is Iran. President Shimon Peres was in Washington for the AIPAC conference, pushing a hard line on Iran (when it comes to Iran, Peres is as hawkish as Netanyahu). He did not expressly oppose President Obama’s diplomatic overture to Tehran but did indicate that Israel was less than enthusiastic about it. The Israelis want us to set a firm expiration date on diplomacy. If Iran does not deliver by that date, then we, or they, will move to the next step (whatever that might be).

In short, the Israeli and American governments are far apart on most of the key issues.

So is a clash inevitable?

In my opinion, no. That is because I believe that no Israeli government can successfully oppose a popular American president who sets out to pursue Arab-Israeli peace.

Neither the Israeli government (nor the lobby) was happy with President Jimmy Carter’s aggressive efforts to promote the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty in the late 1970s. But Carter was undaunted and the peace deal was signed—by Prime Minister Menachem Begin, of all people. The same applies to the Reagan Plan of 1982 and Reagan’s recognition of the PLO in 1988. In neither of these cases was a challenge successfully mounted. The lobby loathes the idea of confronting any American president, especially a popular one.

There were, however, two occasions when challenges were launched, the first against Reagan’s sale of AWACS to Saudi Arabia and the second against President George H. W. Bush’s decision to withhold loan guarantees in protest of Israeli settlement policies. In both cases, it was the US president who won. In the latter case, Shamir’s government actually collapsed and was replaced by a government (led by Yitzhak Rabin) that Bush preferred.

Bush did not engineer Shamir’s downfall. He was brought down by an Israeli political establishment (and public) that did not want its government fighting against Israel’s only significant ally and weapons supplier. Few Israelis, or their US supporters, would be willing to jeopardize what AIPAC’s founder, I.L. Kenen, called “Israel’s lifeline” in order to retain West Bank settlements.

If Obama holds firm, it will not be Obama who blinks.

And not only because it is the United States that is the super power. It is also because President Obama will not be asking Israel to sacrifice any vital interest. On the contrary, in leading an effort to achieve peace, Obama will be advancing Israel’s security, along with our own.

That is also why American Jews will rally behind him. It is not because they are indifferent to Israel’s security but because they understand that maintaining the occupation undermines Israel’s long-term survival.

Proponents of the status quo believe that Israel can maintain the occupation and remain a democratic Jewish state. But that is impossible. In fact, on Israel’s Independence Day last month, the official Central Bureau of Statistics announced that territories under Israeli control are already 51 percent non-Jewish (5.6 million Jews vs. 5.8 million non-Jews).

Continuing the occupation means a significant Arab majority in a few years that would achieve power through the ballot box and terminate the Zionist enterprise. Or Israel could maintain the territories, deny the Arab population the vote and become an apartheid state like South Africa before Nelson Mandela.

The final possibility—the one the United States is working to achieve—is the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. Essentially, Israel would go back to being what it was before 1967—an overwhelmingly Jewish state. The difference would be that now it would have ironclad peace treaties with the Palestinians, Egyptians and Jordanians. In other words, Israel would achieve what every Israeli dreamed of before 5 June 1967: peace and security in a Jewish country. How terrible is that? (For those too young to remember, pre-1967 Israel was not terrible at all. In fact, it was pretty wonderful. It is forty years of occupation that has been terrible.)

It should be noted that despite what some may think, American Jews are Americans and, it must be said, overwhelmingly Democratic. They will back their president if he pushes hard for Middle East peace. 78% percent voted for Obama over John McCain, a figure unmatched by any other white group. They will not turn against Obama to protest his actions advancing peace. They voted for Obama, in large part, because he ran on his record opposing the Iraq war and favouring diplomacy with Iran.

As for the lobby, it will not go head-to-head against this president. It won’t because it doesn’t like losing any more than it likes losing access to the halls of power. As for the Democratic majority in Congress, with the exception of a few House members who are to the right of Likud, they will stick with the president who gave their party its first electoral landslide since 1964.

In short, Barack Obama is uniquely positioned to achieve two states for two peoples. It’s now or never. And if it’s never, we will see the “one state solution” instead. That one state won’t be called Israel.

By MJ Rosenberg, Director of Policy Analysis for Israel Policy Forum, was a long time Capitol Hill staffer and former editor of AIPAC's Near East Report.

Source: Common Ground News, www.commongroundnews.org

Palestinians Ask U.S. Envoy to Press Israel on ‘Two-State Solution’

JERUSALEM — Palestinian leaders asked the American envoy to the Middle East on Friday to press Israel’s new government to accept the notion of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, and other Palestinian officials met with the envoy, George J. Mitchell, at the Palestinian Authority's headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah a day after Mr. Mitchell held talks with Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s conservative-leaning prime minister, and other Israeli leaders.

Mr. Netanyahu, who took office last month, has refused to explicitly support Palestinian statehood, and says that the new government is still formulating its policies. He told Mr. Mitchell that it was time for “new approaches and fresh ideas,” and said thePalestinians must recognize Israel as a Jewish state, a condition Palestinian negotiators have long refused to meet.

But Mr. Mitchell said after the meeting in Ramallah that “a two-state solution is the only solution,” and that a comprehensive peace in the Middle East was “in the national interest of the United States,” as well as in the interests of Palestinians and Israelis.

Saeb Erekat, a senior Abbas aide and veteran Palestinian negotiator, said in a statement on Friday that the demand to recognize Israel as a Jewish state before negotiations was “an admission by Netanyahu that he cannot deliver on peace” and a stalling tactic. He noted that the Palestine Liberation Organization had already recognized the state of Israel while Mr. Netanyahu “refuses to even mention a Palestinian state.”

Palestinians contend that recognition of Israel’s Jewish character would negate Palestinian refugees’ demand for the right of return and would be detrimental to the status of Israel’s Arab citizens, who make up a fifth of the population.

In Gaza, two top leaders of Hamas, the Islamic group that holds power there, made their first public appearances since Israel’s military offensive that ended in mid-January. Ismail Haniya, who leads the Hamas government in Gaza, and Mahmoud Zahar, a senior official, preached at separate mosques.

Apparently in a challenge to the rival Palestinian Authority leaders as they met with Mr. Mitchell in the West Bank, Mr. Zahar said in his sermon, “We cannot, we will not, and we will never recognize the enemy in any way, shape or form,” Reuters reported.

A Palestinian man was killed Friday in the West Bank during a demonstration against Israel’s separation barrier after being struck in the chest by a tear gas canister fired by Israeli forces, according to other demonstrators. The dead man, killed during the protest in Bilin, a village near Ramallah, was identified by local residents as Basem Ibrahim Abu Rahma, 31. Nasir Samara, a member of a group in Bilin that helps organize the weekly demonstrations against the barrier, said in a statement that the high-velocity tear gas canister that hit Mr. Abu Rahma had been fired from a distance of about 20 yards.

An Israeli military spokeswoman said security forces had been trying to disperse a violent demonstration during which demonstrators threw stones and other objects. She said the army was checking the report about the Palestinian death and had asked to join Palestinian officials in investigating the cause of death.

A little more than a month ago, an American citizen, Tristan Anderson, was critically wounded when he was struck in the forehead by a similar high-velocity tear gas canister at a demonstration in a nearby village, Nilin.

Activists have accused the Israeli forces of shooting the tear gas canisters directly into crowds, turning the canisters into lethal weapons rather than a means of crowd dispersal. Mr. Anderson, 38, from Oakland, Calif., is still hospitalized in Tel Aviv.

Also on Friday, a Palestinian armed with a knife infiltrated a Jewish settlement, Beit Haggai, south of Hebron in the West Bank, and was shot dead by an Israeli whom he had tried to stab, the Israeli military said. Palestinian television identified the infiltrator as Rabah Sidr, 18.

Source: The New York Times

Afghan Women Protest New Law on Home Life

KABUL, Afghanistan — The young women stepped off the bus and moved toward the protest march just beginning on the other side of the street when they were spotted by a mob of men.

“Get out of here, you whores!” the men shouted. “Get out!”

The women scattered as the men moved in.

“We want our rights!” one of the women shouted, turning to face them. “We want equality!”

The women ran to the bus and dived inside as it rumbled away, with the men smashing the taillights and banging on the sides.

“Whores!”

But the march continued anyway. About 300 Afghan women, facing an angry throng three times larger than their own, walked the streets of the capital on Wednesday to demand that Parliament repeal a new law that introduces a range of Taliban-like restrictions on women, and permits, among other things, marital rape.

It was an extraordinary scene. Women are mostly illiterate in this impoverished country, and they do not, generally speaking, enjoy anything near the freedom accorded to men. But there they were, most of them young, many in jeans, defying a threatening crowd and calling out slogans heavy with meaning.

With the Afghan police keeping the mob at bay, the women walked two miles to Parliament, where they delivered a petition calling for the law’s repeal.

“Whenever a man wants sex, we cannot refuse,” said Fatima Husseini, 26, one of the marchers. “It means a woman is a kind of property, to be used by the man in any way that he wants.”

The law, approved by both houses of Parliament and signed by President Hamid Karzai, applies to the Shiite minority only. Women here and governments and rights groups abroad have protested three parts of the law especially.

One provision makes it illegal for a woman to resist her husband’s sexual advances. A second provision requires a husband’s permission for a woman to work outside the home or go to school. And a third makes it illegal for a woman to refuse to “make herself up” or “dress up” if that is what her husband wants.

The passage of the law has amounted to something of a historical irony. Afghan Shiites, who make up close to 20 percent of the population, suffered horrendously under the Taliban, who regarded them as apostates. Since 2001, the Shiites, particularly the Hazara minority, have been enjoying a renaissance.

President Karzai, who relies on vast support from the United States and other Western governments to stay in power, has come under intense international criticism for signing the bill into law. Many people here suspect that he did so to gain the favor of the Shiite clergy; Mr. Karzai is up for re-election this year. Previous Afghan governments, during the Soviet era and before the arrival of the Taliban, did not impose such restrictive laws, although in practice many rural women’s freedoms have long been curtailed. Rights advocates say the law for Shiites could influence a proposal for Sunnis and a draft law on violence against women.

Responding to the outcry, Mr. Karzai has begun looking for a way to remove the most controversial parts of the law. In an interview on Wednesday, his spokesman, Homayun Hamidzada, said that the legislation was not yet law because it had not been published in the government’s official register. That, Mr. Hamidzada said, means that it can still be changed. Mr. Karzai has asked his justice minister to look it over.

“We have no doubt that whatever comes out of this process will be consistent with the rights provided for in the Constitution — equality and the protection of women,” Mr. Hamidzada said.

The women who protested Wednesday began their demonstration with what appeared to be a deliberately provocative act. They gathered in front of the School of the Last Prophet, a madrasa run by Ayatollah Asif Mohseni, the country’s most powerful Shiite cleric. He and the scholars around him played an important role in drafting the new law.

“We are here to campaign for our rights,” one woman said into a megaphone. Then the women held their banners aloft and began to chant.

The reaction was immediate. Hundreds of students from the madrasa, most but not all of them men, poured into the streets to confront the demonstrators.

“Death to the enemies of Islam!” the counterdemonstrators cried, encircling the women. “We want Islamic law!”

The women stared ahead and marched.

A phalanx of police officers, some of them women, held the crowds apart.

Afterward, when the demonstrators had left, one of the madrasa’s senior clerics came outside. Asked about the dispute, he said it was between professionals and nonprofessionals; that is, between the clerics, who understood the Koran and Islamic law, and the women calling for the law’s repeal who did not.

“It’s like if you are sick, you go to a doctor, not some amateur,” said the cleric, Mohammed Hussein Jafaari. “This law was approved by the scholars. It was passed by both houses of Parliament. It was signed by the president.”

The religious scholars, Mr. Jafaari conceded, were all men.

Lingering a while, Mr. Jafaari said that what was really driving the dispute was the foreigners who loomed so large over the country.

Source: The New York Times

Cross-border medical practices series: Individuals must not be punished for the actions of their governments

If Operation Cast Lead proved to be the breaking point for Gaza’s healthcare system, it also illuminated where the responsibility for its collapse lies. The pressures that left it unable to cope with a sudden influx of patients were both internal and external.

In the days and months leading up to Operation Cast Lead, the Gaza Strip’s healthcare system was stretched to the breaking point. An ongoing Israeli blockade and a health workers’ strike in Gaza—due in part to the political tug-of-war between Fatah and Hamas—had placed immense strain on an already fragile institution. Hospitals and clinics in Gaza found themselves lacking almost a quarter of the drug items that comprise the World Health Organization’s essential drug list. Various other drug items stood at critical levels. A shortage of medical supplies endangered the long-term function of some equipment, such as dialysis machines, while other vital medical equipment was unavailable, had fallen into disrepair, or remained unused because health care workers lacked the training to operate it.

On the second day of the Israeli incursion, Dr. Zaki Zakzuk of the European Hospital in Khan Younis spoke with Physicians for Human Rights (PHR)-Israel, an organization that promotes the right to health for Palestinians and Israelis alike. He described the impact that the lack of supplies had made upon patient care: “As of today, we have 30 wounded individuals in very grave condition… All of them are in need of ICU [intensive care unit] beds for ventilation machines, but because of the lack of such equipment only half of them are able to receive the ventilation treatment while others are resuscitated manually. [T]here is an extreme need for additional blood units… [but] the lack of refrigeration equipment and emergency vehicles are making it impossible for us to transfer blood units from Shifa Hospital.”

Health care workers in Gaza were forced to turn some patients away. Dr. Halil Nahlah, an ICU physician at Shifa Hospital reported to PHR-Israel: “[W]e cannot accept patients with basic injuries. We accept the urgent cases for life-saving efforts, operations, etc., and if possible we transfer them to other hospitals.” But often it was not possible. Some of the injured found they were unable to reach hospitals, both within Gaza and beyond its borders.

Although Operation Cast Lead cast light on a health care system in crisis, this problem over lack of access to medical facilities is not particular to times of war. The chronically ill in Gaza routinely face obstacles that prevent them from accessing necessary medical care.

Throughout the Israeli blockade, over half of those who have applied for exit permits to leave Gaza through Israel for external health care facilities have been denied permission. Many of these patients then turn their hopes to the Rafah crossing with Egypt, only to find a political dam that allows no more than an irregular trickle of patients through the border. Appeals for Jordanian visas are often denied, as well.

PHR offers the case of Karima Abu Dalal, a 33-year-old Gazan woman who suffered from Hodgkin’s lymphoma. She received a variety of treatments in Egypt before this was stopped due to the Israeli closure of the Rafah crossing. In 2007 she began treatment in the West Bank, but later that same year it came to a sudden halt when Israeli authorities barred her from leaving Gaza. PHR-Israel applied for an exit permit on her behalf. Israeli authorities were silent in response.

PHR-Israel sought help in the Israeli High Court. They included in their petition a testimony from Professor Dina Ben Yehuda, an Israeli physician familiar with Karima’s case, who stated that Karima’s life was endangered by the disruption of medical treatment. But the court abstained from intervening on Karima’s behalf.

Karima again appealed to the Israeli authorities who control the Erez crossing, between Gaza and Israel. Her request for an exit permit was once more denied.

Her condition deteriorating, Karima next turned to a nearby Arab country, Jordan. Her subsequent visa application was denied not once but twice.
After almost a year had lapsed since her last treatment, Karima finally managed to enter Egypt via the Rafah crossing in June of 2008. But the hospital in Cairo turned her away because she lacked the means to pay for medical care.

After a long struggle against Hodgkin’s lymphoma and the political bodies that surrounded her, Karima died in Gaza in November of 2008.

Where a patient does or does not receive health care—whether it be for a chronic illness or injuries sustained as a result of military confrontation—depends on decisions made by political entities.

But Israel and the governments of Gaza, the West Bank, and the surrounding Arab countries, who are most immediately responsible for the people of Gaza, must put human rights before political struggle.

We mustn’t treat individuals merely as symbols or representatives of their governments. Punishing the people of Gaza—whether by means of an external blockade or an internal strike—so they, in turn, will exert pressure on their government, polarises opinions and is certain to prolong the conflict. To move the peace process forward we mustn’t lose sight of the humans in the political landscape.

We cannot afford to stand by while the injured and sick suffer in a snare of politics; ensuring access to medical care is a move towards health for the whole region.

By Mya Guarnieri
Source: Common Ground News Service, www.commongroundnews.org.

Lieberman and the peace process

Hours after his handover ceremony, the new Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman told the Ha’aretz newspaper that “Israel is not bound by the Annapolis process”, the US-backed declaration that initiated the final status talks on establishing a Palestinian state. Instead, Lieberman wants to revert to the situation in 2003, when the Middle East “Quartet” (the United States, European Union, United Nations and Russia) introduced the “road map” for peace, essentially eliminating progress made during year-long intensive talks with the Palestinians.

Lieberman’s renouncement of Annapolis and its associated negotiations on borders, Jerusalem, the future of the Palestinian refugees and the formation of a viable Palestinian state represents a major Israeli policy shift away from a two-state solution and the land-for-peace formula. The return to a political discourse that only includes the road map is a calculated step by the new Israeli government meant to lead to failure.

Many conflict resolution specialists have considered the road map an “obstacle to peace”. Instead of promoting mutual interests between the Israelis and the Palestinians, the road map refocused the two rivals’ attention on incompatible goals with an antiquated approach to resolving the conflict. The road map disregarded the fact that the physical infrastructure inside the Palestinian Territories had been completely destroyed under the leadership of then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in a series of intensive military operations. This rendered the Palestinian Authority incapable of meeting the road map’s demands. In fact, the frail and divided Palestinian Authority is still unable to do so, particularly in the aftermath of the Israeli war on Gaza.

Some analysts say Lieberman’s commitment to the road map indirectly implies his commitment to a two-state solution. But like Ariel Sharon, Lieberman places responsibility first on the Palestinians to stop terrorism, build strong institutions and improve security—and only then is he prepared to negotiate over Palestinian statehood. These demands, unattainable under the current circumstances, are intended to generate a situation where Israel can claim that it has “no partner for peace” on the Palestinian side, just as Sharon did with Yasser Arafat.

Without a doubt, Lieberman’s comments signal a bumpy road ahead for President Barack Obama’s Middle East policy, which embraces the two-state solution. But there is no better time than now for the Obama administration to show real commitment to the peace process. During his landmark visit to Turkey, President Obama pledged to pursue a two-state solution and reconfirmed his commitment to the Annapolis and road map processes. This is a positive step. Arabs—moderates and conservatives—are now encouraging the Obama administration to take tangible steps toward resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

If the Israeli government pushes forward its new policy, Palestinians will have two options: one is tactical, the other is radical.

The first option would be for the Palestinians to concentrate on resolving their internal differences instead of resisting the policies of the new Israeli government. Eventually, these steps of forming a viable government would win the support of the international community and would consequently lead them to put pressure on Israel.

The more radical option, which has been suggested by several academics and political analysts, is to dissolve the Palestinian Authority. Supporters of this alternative suggest that the Palestinian Authority is no longer serving the Palestinians’ national goals, and instead provides valuable assistance to Israel as it administers the land that Israel does not want to relinquish. This radical approach would put Israel, as an occupying force, back in the “hot seat”, holding the Jewish State responsible for its actions and forcing it to confront a stark but inevitable choice: The “one-state solution”—a future as a bi-national entity, which would essentially be the end of the Jewish state, or the two-state solution. Will it take implementing this radical alternative for the Israeli right-wing camp to realise that the two-state solution is the only viable option for a peaceful future?

By Rawhi Afaghani
Source: Common Ground News Service, www.commongroundnews.org.

IDF in Gaza: Killing civilians, vandalism, and lax rules of engagement

During Operation Cast Lead, Israeli forces killed Palestinian civilians under permissive rules of engagement and intentionally destroyed their property, say soldiers who fought in the offensive.

The soldiers are graduates of the Yitzhak Rabin pre-military preparatory course at Oranim Academic College in Tivon. Some of their statements made on Feb. 13 will appear Thursday and Friday in Haaretz. Dozens of graduates of the course who took part in the discussion fought in the Gaza operation.

The speakers included combat pilots and infantry soldiers. Their testimony runs counter to the Israel Defense Forces' claims that Israeli troops observed a high level of moral behavior during the operation. The session's transcript was published this week in the newsletter for the course's graduates.

The testimonies include a description by an infantry squad leader of an incident where an IDF sharpshooter mistakenly shot a Palestinian mother and her two children. "There was a house with a family inside .... We put them in a room. Later we left the house and another platoon entered it, and a few days after that there was an order to release the family. They had set up positions upstairs. There was a sniper position on the roof," the soldier said.

"The platoon commander let the family go and told them to go to the right. One mother and her two children didn't understand and went to the left, but they forgot to tell the sharpshooter on the roof they had let them go and it was okay, and he should hold his fire and he ... he did what he was supposed to, like he was following his orders."

According to the squad leader: "The sharpshooter saw a woman and children approaching him, closer than the lines he was told no one should pass. He shot them straight away. In any case, what happened is that in the end he killed them.

"I don't think he felt too bad about it, because after all, as far as he was concerned, he did his job according to the orders he was given. And the atmosphere in general, from what I understood from most of my men who I talked to ... I don't know how to describe it .... The lives of Palestinians, let's say, is something very, very less important than the lives of our soldiers. So as far as they are concerned they can justify it that way," he said.

Another squad leader from the same brigade told of an incident where the company commander ordered that an elderly Palestinian woman be shot and killed; she was walking on a road about 100 meters from a house the company had commandeered.

The squad leader said he argued with his commander over the permissive rules of engagement that allowed the clearing out of houses by shooting without warning the residents beforehand. After the orders were changed, the squad leader's soldiers complained that "we should kill everyone there [in the center of Gaza]. Everyone there is a terrorist."

The squad leader said: "You do not get the impression from the officers that there is any logic to it, but they won't say anything. To write 'death to the Arabs' on the walls, to take family pictures and spit on them, just because you can. I think this is the main thing: To understand how much the IDF has fallen in the realm of ethics, really. It's what I'll remember the most."

Source: Haartez.com

Open Letter to President Obama

Open Letter March 10, 2009


President Barack Hussein Obama

The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, NW
Washington, DC 20500

Dear Mr. President:

First of all, congratulations on your victory in November. Like so many others throughout the world, we find ourselves both hopeful and inspired. Your election is proof of America's continued promise as a land of opportunity, equality, and freedom. Your presidency presents a historic opportunity to chart a new course in foreign affairs, and particularly in the troubled relationship between the United States and the Muslim world.

We are heartened by your promise to listen to and understand the hopes and aspirations of Arabs and Muslims. By shutting down Guantanamo Bay and forbidding torture, your administration will inspire greater confidence between the United States and the Muslim world. Last month, in your first major interview, millions of Arabs heard your call for mutual respect on one of the Middle East's most watched television channels. They were encouraged to find that you hold a resolution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict as an urgent priority, as evidenced by the appointment of Senator George Mitchell as your envoy. Reaching out to the people of the region so early on in your presidency is a step of no small significance. But it is a step that must be followed by concrete policy changes.

Improving relations between the United States and Middle Eastern nations is not simply a matter of changing some policies here and there. For too long, U.S. policy toward the Middle East has been fundamentally misguided. The United States, for half a century, has frequently supported repressive regimes that routinely violate human rights, and that torture and imprison those who dare criticize them and prevent their citizens from participation in peaceful civic and political activities. U.S. support for Arab autocrats was supposed to serve U.S. national interests and regional stability. In reality, it produced a region increasingly tormented by rampant corruption, extremism, and instability.

In his second inaugural address, President Bush pledged that the United States would no longer support tyrants and would stand with those activists and reformers fighting for democratic change. The Bush administration, however, quickly turned its back on Middle East democracy after Islamist parties performed well in elections throughout the region. This not only hurt the credibility of the United States, dismayed democrats and emboldened extremists in the region, but also sent a powerful message to autocrats that they could reassert their power and crush the opposition with impunity.

In order to rebuild relations of mutual respect, it is critical that the United States be on the right side of history regarding the human, civil, and political rights of the peoples of the Middle East. There is no doubt that the people of the Middle East long for greater freedom and democracy; they have proven themselves willing to fight for it. What they need from your administration is a commitment to encourage political reform not through wars, threats, or imposition, but through peaceful policies that reward governments that take active and measurable steps towards genuine democratic reforms. Moreover, the US should not hesitate to speak out in condemnation when opposition activists are unjustly imprisoned in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, or elsewhere. When necessary, the United States should use its considerable economic and diplomatic leverage to put pressure on its allies in the region when they fail to meet basic standards of human rights.

We recognize that taking these steps will present both difficulties and dilemmas. Accordingly, bold action is needed today more than ever. For too long, American policy in the Middle East has been paralyzed by fear of Islamist parties coming to power. Some of these fears are both legitimate and understandable; many Islamists advocate illiberal policies. They need to do more to demonstrate their commitment to the rights of women and religious minorities, and their willingness to tolerate dissent. However, most mainstream Islamist groups in the region are nonviolent and respect the democratic process.

In many countries, including Turkey, Indonesia, and Morocco, the right to participate in reasonably credible and open elections has moderated Islamist parties and enhanced their commitment to democratic norms. We may not agree with what they have to say, but if we wish to both preach and practice democracy, it is simply impossible to exclude the largest opposition groups in the region from the democratic process. At the same time, to reduce the future of the region to a contest between Islamists and authoritarian regimes would be a mistake. Promoting democratic openings in the region will give liberal and secular parties a chance to establish themselves and communicate their ideas to the populace after decades of repression which left them weak and marginalized. More competition between parties of diverse ideological backgrounds would be healthy for political development in the region.

In short, we have an unprecedented opportunity to send a clear message to the Arab and Muslim world: the United States will support all those who strive for freedom, democracy, and human rights. You, Mr. President, have recently relayed such a message in your inaugural address when you said: "To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history, but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist."

We are fully aware that, with a worsening global economic crisis, and continuing challenges in Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, political reform and progress toward democratic reform in the Middle East will need to compete with a whole host of other priorities on your agenda. Policy is often about making difficult choices. However, as you work on other Middle East priorities, we urge you to elevate democratic reform and respect for human rights as key considerations in your engagement with both Arab regimes and Arab publics.

In conclusion, we are writing this letter to raise our profound belief that supporting democrats and democracy in the Middle East is not only in the region's interests, but in the United States' as well. Perhaps more importantly, what we choose to do with this critical issue will reveal a great deal about the strength of American democratic ideals in this new era - and whether or not we will decide to respect and apply them in the Middle East.

Signatures: 144 (97 from the US, 47 from overseas)

Fight like in Gaza

In another moment, this column will break through the censor's barrier and reveal a military secret: Israel is going to war, and zero hour is 9 P.M. tomorrow. And if Al Jazeera and the BBC want to rely on this information and broadcast it to the whole world, I am prepared to accept the consequences of having violated national security.

On Wednesday, a military affairs correspondent for the daily Yedioth Ahronoth - yes, he, not a sports reporter - published an exclusive item on the news pages: The commander of the Givati Brigade will be giving pep talks to Israel's national soccer team before the game against Greece. In recent weeks, coaches have been looking for a senior commander who fought in the Gaza Strip. In the wake of recommendations they received from the Israel Defense Forces, national team coach Dror Kashtan and his assistant, Moshe Sinai, contacted Col. Ilan Malka.

"Malka intends to speak with the players about the significance of the crucial game and about how the eyes of the nation of Israel are upon them," the reporter said, citing what Malka had told him. "He will demand of the players that they correct the mistakes of the past, just as he demanded of his soldiers that they correct the shortcomings of the Second Lebanon War - because just like in the battles in Gaza, they will not get a second chance. Fight like lions. You are representing something far greater than just a soccer match."

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"It should be noted," the reporter then added on his own behalf, "that Malka sees a similarity between the role of a combat officer and the role of a team coach when it comes to preparations for a game or a battle."

This, in a nutshell, was the briefing by the colonel-golem who sees a soccer match as war and war as a soccer match. In both of these tests, "the eyes of the nation of Israel are upon them," and so forth.

And why should the coaches - two Olympic Village idiots - content themselves with pep talks from the acclaimed commander? Why not get help from the chief military rabbi, who has a reputation as a serious force multiplier? He will equate the match to the war between the Maccabees and the Greeks, giving it a religious, faith-based dimension and historic depth, and thereby transform it into a divinely ordained war, a jihad. The rabbi will explain to the players, just as he explained to the fighters, that anyone who is compassionate toward the cruel will end up being cruel to the compassionate. And then the team will burst into the stadium, strengthened and reinforced, and make mincemeat of the bitter enemy, as though they were cursed Arabs. At long last, they will have an opportunity to put their physical fitness to use and join an elite unit.

The IDF and the coaches have taken a calculated risk here: They no doubt thought in advance about the destructive results of a loss (heaven forbid) in this important battle: Israel's deterrence would once again be crushed, and in order to rehabilitate it, there would be no alternative but to wage another, even bigger war - perhaps against England or Spain.

And it is already possible to wait with bated breath for the tearful and revealing confessions of our player-warriors immediately after the game: how we wrote derisive slogans on the walls of the gentiles' dressing rooms and how we broke their bones with an iron foot and cast lead. And even if we lose this battle, we will win the war: Those wicked Greeks will not forget us - neither us nor the God of vengeance who saves us. Maybe they will score more goals, but we will derive more satisfaction from being the most moral soccer team in the world.

Now it is official: The country has gone crazy.

By Yossi Sarid.

Forger un autre avenir pour les Israéliens et les Palestiniens

“Je me raisonne pour ne pas péter les plombs”. “J’exprime ma colère de façon sensée”. “Je pense”. Tels sont les mots que nos enseignants de l’école de Qurtuba à Hébron, cette ville de Cisjordanie occupée par Israël, répètent à l’envi à nos élèves palestiniens.

Depuis la guerre qui vient de frapper Gaza, tout ce qui est interaction non violente en direct est particulièrement ardu. Mais en travaillant avec les élèves de l’école de Qurtuba, je suis convaincue que je peux apporter quelque chose à l’établissement d’un avenir pacifique et sécurisé pour la prochaine génération, Palestiniens et Israéliens confondus, en partant de la base.

Quand on circule dans Hébron, surtout dans la rue Al-Shuhada, où se trouve la colonie israélienne de Beït Hadassah, c’est comme si on se promenait dans un champ de mines.

Quand les enfants arabes se rendent à l’école, est-ce qu’ils savent vraiment comment se comporter dans ces quartiers où les colons risquent de leur jeter des pierres s’ils se fourvoient là où ils ne devraient pas être ? Pas forcément. C’est pourquoi, nous apprenons à nos élèves que répondre par la violence ne fera qu’ajouter à la violence. C’est un cycle sans fin.

Et c’est ainsi que j’ai instauré dans mon école les principes de la non violence.

Premier principe. Les enfants apprennent à connaître leurs droits civiques. Ils savent désormais que si les colons les attaquent, ils doivent appeler la police israélienne à la rescousse. Notre établissement se trouve dans le quartier H2, sous contrôle israélien, alors que le quartier H1 est sous la juridiction de l’Autorité Palestinienne. À H2, c’est à l’administration israélienne qu’il incombe d’assurer la sécurité des civils.

Lorsqu’un incident se produit dans l’enceinte scolaire, nous appelons la police israélienne, démontrant ainsi aux enfants qu’il vaut mieux faire appel aux autorités que de répondre par la violence. En principe, la police intervient rapidement. En cas de retard, nous appelons des organisations comme le CICR (Comité International de la Croix Rouge), ou le TIPH (Présence internationale temporaire à Hébron), ou enfin les médias. Les enfants, qui n’en perdent pas une, apprennent, retiennent.

Deuxième principe. Nous donnons à nos ados la possibilité d’exprimer leur colère et leur humiliation sur le papier ou par le jeu, ces précieux supports grâce auxquels nous les aidons à raisonner leurs émotions et à les canaliser.

Troisième principe. Nous veillons rigoureusement à ne jamais instrumentaliser nos élèves dans ce conflit. Dans notre école, nous estimons que les enfants ne doivent pas participer aux manifestations contre l’occupant parce qu’ils sont des cibles trop faciles. Il faut qu’ils puissent profiter de leur enfance et choisir eux-mêmes leurs options politiques quand le temps sera venu.

Je fais le voeu que ces quelques grands principes puissent apprendre à la prochaine génération de dirigeants palestiniens à se servir de leur tête et à défendre leurs droits par la non violence, créant ainsi un avenir pacifique pour eux-mêmes et pour leurs voisins.


… et ils transformeront leur crainte en confiance par Nira Lamay

Jérusalem – “Les générations présentes devraient préserver les générations futures du fléau de la guerre. A cette fin, elles devraient éviter d'exposer les générations futures aux conséquences dommageables des conflits armés ainsi que de toutes autres formes d'agression et d'usage des armes qui sont contraires aux principes humanitaires.”

Ce passage de la déclaration de l’UNESCO de 1997, relative aux responsabilités que nous avons envers les générations futures, est simple et clair. Il a constitué le fondement de la commission parlementaire israélienne pour les générations futures, organe professionnel et apolitique de la KNESSET qui conseillait le Parlement sur les incidences de la législation sur les générations futures.

J’ai travaillé moi-même au sein de cette commission, qui a vécu de 2001 à 2006. Le temps que j’y ai passé inspire aujourd’hui ma conduite, et ces mots configurent ma propre activité pour l’avènement d’une paix pour les Israéliens et pour les Palestiniens.

La mission de la commission ne portait ni sur la politique, ni sur les affaires étrangères, ni sur les questions militaires ou de défense. Notre objectif était de préserver nos ressources pour les générations futures. Selon notre devise, tandis que le monde politique s’occupait de la défense et de la guerre, nous préparions, nous, la “paix du lendemain”, pour le jour où les générations futures pourraient boire de l’eau propre et respirer un air pur.

Je me demande parfois s’il y aura un “lendemain”. La guerre de Gaza que nous venons de traverser m’a fait comprendre que nous ne jouissons pas encore des luxes dont disposent la plupart des autres pays, là où la conservation des ressources et la préservation de l’environnement peuvent être prioritaires. Nous en sommes encore à un état presque primitif de survie.

J’ai aussi compris que les professionnels que nous sommes et qui avons l’expérience de notre système politique devraient tirer parti de leurs connaissances pour changer le système. Par conséquent, même si le travail de terrain nous appelle, nous ne pouvons nous désintéresser du politique. La mission politique qu’est la recherche de la paix est trop précieuse pour qu’on la laisse aux politiques.

Ensemble, Israéliens et Palestiniens, nous devons revendiquer notre droit à changer et à créer notre propre avenir. Tout récemment, j’ai ainsi eu l’occasion de participer à une activité de construction de la paix sur le terrain, dans le cadre d’un livre magique intitulé 60 Years, 60 Voices “, organisé par l’association à but non lucratif Peace x Peace, qui rassemble des femmes du monde entier pour faire avancer le dialogue, l’entente et la collaboration. Cette action a ainsi réuni 30 femmes israéliennes et 30 femmes palestiniennes afin de faire fructifier leur foi en un avenir meilleur pour les Israéliens et pour les Palestiniens. J’ai eu la chance d’être une de ces femmes.

Au niveau du terrain, le chemin est encore long. Mais nous devons poursuivre nos efforts pour transformer la peur, et la peur de la peur, en confiance, non seulement entre les deux gouvernements, mais plus encore entre les deux peuples.

Par Reem Al-Shareef et Nira Lamay et Nira Lamay.
Source: Service de Presse de Common Ground (CGNews), www.commongroundnews.org

It's now or nothing for Palestine peace

The recent Israeli attack on Gaza made little strategic difference, leaving Hamas still in charge of the strip, diminished militarily but arguably strengthened politically. Israel's use of disproportionate military force yielded political and public relations setbacks, with the captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit still in captivity and occasional rockets still being fired from Gaza.

A politically weakened Palestinian Authority (PA) continues to be in charge of the West Bank, and the independent government of Prime Minister Salam Fayyad has resigned. There is no sign that the misery of the people of Gaza will be relieved, or that serious reconstruction will begin anytime soon. The territory's crossings are closed and the siege continues.

The PA, despite years of diplomacy, has yet to secure any meaningful concessions from Israel, which is veering to the political right—away from accommodation. Hamas offers only bloody resistance that appeals to the Palestinian and Arab sense of dignity, while also piling up a record of deaths, injuries and destruction.

Israeli leaders cannot find the minimal political courage needed to halt the settlement expansion that undercuts their stated age-old goal of securing a Jewish state. Despite strenuous Egyptian and Arab efforts, direct negotiations between the Palestinian factions to establish a national-unity government, as well as indirect ones between Hamas and Israel on prisoners and crossings, have yielded no agreements.

The prospects of a negotiated agreement over a new Palestinian unity government are minimal, the optimistic rhetoric notwithstanding. It flies in the face of Palestinian and regional power realities and ideological divides. This impasse cannot even be resolved by force because both the PA and Hamas are entrenched in their separate geographic areas.

The rest of the world – including the Arabs, Muslims, Israel and the West – cannot resolve this impasse. It is up to the Palestinian people to do so by an act of choice. The world can help by seeing to it that the Palestinians have an opportunity to exercise that choice by holding open, fair and transparent elections.

Of five Palestinian negotiations committees designed to discuss the outstanding issues between the PA and Hamas in Cairo, the only one that seemed to reach an agreement was the committee on elections, which recommended a vote in January 2010. Nothing could be more appropriate, or legitimate, than having the Palestinian people cast their ballots, with their eyes wide open, to make their choices and live with the results. The world now seems to have a Palestinian target date and a mechanism for elections.

Protracted Palestinian negotiations to square the political circle must not be allowed to delay dealing with the reality of irreconcilable factional differences. Barring another Israeli attack, for the remainder of this year, Hamas will in all likelihood maintain its hold over Gaza while the PA will be in charge of the West Bank. Decisions dealing with these realities have to be taken without delay. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas should proceed forthwith to form a new PA government acceptable to the international community.

Even if the present reality precludes the PA government's ability to govern Gaza, the PA should not abandon its mandate but pursue its private aid program of reconstruction as it works diligently to lift the siege on Gaza. The new PA government must continue building on the solid foundation laid down by the Fayyad government to erect the infrastructure of the future Palestinian state. It should work diligently and methodically to hold elections on time and prevent others from derailing it.

The de facto Hamas government in Gaza will have to deal with all internal, regional and international political and economic realities and demands. It has to bear the consequences of its decisions and actions, knowing that the Palestinian people will vote come January and that elections cannot be avoided or postponed.

Through the policies that it pursues in the occupied West Bank, Israel will have a powerful role in determining who will govern its future neighbour, the state of Palestine. It has to decide, and to demonstrate, whether it can work with a Palestinian partner in order to bring the conflict to an end. It can, of course, opt to block the emergence of this Palestinian state and allow those who prefer to continue the conflict indefinitely to prevail.

By Ziad Asali
Source: The Daily Star, http://www.dailystar.com.lb.

After the assault on Gaza

Perhaps the greatest moral philosopher to arise from European Jewish culture was the Austrian-born Martin Buber, later a citizen of Israel. Buber was a Zionist. His seminal theological text I And Thou remains relevant today, a powerful work in its devotion to encounter, to the recognition of the Stranger, to dialogue. Buber’s political writings – over a 44 year period – are also very instructive. In a 1929 piece “The National Home and The National Riots in Palestine”, delivered as a speech in Berlin two months after the Palestine Riots resulted in the deaths of over 125 Jews, Buber wrote:

Every responsible relationship between an individual and his fellow begins through the power of genuine imagination, as if we were the residents of Palestine and the others were the immigrants who were coming into the country in increasing numbers, year by year, taking it away from us. How would we react to events? Only if we know this will it be possible to minimize the injustice we must do in order to survive and to live the life which we are not only entitled but obliged to live, since we live for the eternal mission, which has been imbedded within us since our creation.

The passage is suggestive of Buber’s “I-Thou” conception in that it calls for one group to imagine itself in the position of the other. At the same time, it is very clear in this passage that Buber, as a Zionist, does not shrink from describing Jewish emigration to the Holy Land in 1929 as an eschatological and moral calling, a historical coming-to-pass in the name of which injustices may have to be committed.

With this quote in mind, it becomes doubly instructive, in view of the contemporary situation, to remind ourselves of a text Buber wrote in 1947, “The Bi-National Approach to Zionism”. In this extraordinary essay Buber offers the following:

We describe our program as that of a bi-national state—that is, we aim at a social structure based on the reality of two peoples living together. The foundations of this structure cannot be the traditional ones of majority and minority, but must be different. We do not mean just any bi-national state, but this particular one, with its particular conditions, i.e. a bi-national state which embodies in its basic principle a Magna Charta Reservationum, the indispensable postulate of the rescue of the Jewish people. This is what we need and not a “Jewish State”.

What a prescient statement to have made in 1947! Although Buber’s was not the vision of Zionism that triumphed in 1948, we can on its basis assert there was no consensus within Zionism itself in 1947 that a Jewish majority state was a necessary outcome for Zionism and speculate about how a nation in which Buber’s view had triumphed might have instead functioned.

What is incontestable is that Buber, a Zionist, calls for a bi-national state. Only this guarantees Jewish survival and justice for the indigenous Arab population of Palestine. As we watch the two ultra-nationalisms of the current moment battle it out with more than 1350 Gazans and 13 Israeli dead in the aftermath of the fighting, allegations of war crimes and deaths multiplying, isn’t it possible we should take up again Buber’s call for a single bi-national state? I ask this in the spirit of questioning oneself first, an imperative of self-critique that has been a principle of Jewish survival for millennia. If ultra-nationalisms depend on one another to justify their own deadliness, then it is also true that Buber knew that in Palestine/Israel only bi-nationalism could prevent these events. If such violence as we have seen in Gaza is necessary to preserve the Jewish State as we know it, then Israel’s actions in and of themselves have proven that only Buber’s vision of a bi-national state can save all parties.

The German-language Jewish poet Paul Celan, the great poet of the Holocaust and a fervent admirer of Buber’s, wrote of the "Breathturn", that figure in which one breathes in air and breathes out language. Celan spoke of "Breathturn" on his return to Germany in the late 40s, where it could be said he was literally breathing in the molecules of his incinerated people and breathing out poetry, an act fraught with responsibility to the very air he was surviving on and transforming.

The great Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish died on 9 August 2008, a little more than four and a half months before the latest tragedy of his people, the attack on Gaza. Both Celan and Darwish’s writings bear a similar kind of existential urgency, a related kind of presence in air. Darwish’s poems, given his importance to his people and his translatability into other languages, breathe witness to the catastrophe of a particular history.

In "The Death of the Phoenix" Darwish wrote:

In the hymns that we sing, there's a
flute
In the flute that shelters us
fire
In the fire that we feed
a green phoenix
In its elegy I couldn't tell
my ashes from your dust

So Darwish affirms the intermingling of our very molecules, even as elsewhere in the poem he can evoke two figures like Achilles and Priam briefly taking pause from the carnage to admire one another's nobility. For those who read Darwish’s poems, language is breath, in the sense rooted in the etymology of the word "spirit". “Phoenix” is a green oasis in burned out times. In its elegy I can’t at first tell my ashes from your dust. But then I must: 1350 Palestinian and 13 Israeli dead—these are numbers that should horrify us if one believes, as we do, that every individual matters. In the names of the poets, let us once again keep in mind Buber’s very precise call to our imaginations.

By Leonard Schwartz.
Source: Common Ground News Service, www.commongroundnews.org.

Seul le prononcé fait foi
Embargo au prononcé


Discours de Monsieur Jacques CHIRAC

Conférence de lancement du projet Aladin
***
Maison de l'Unesco
Vendredi 27 mars 2009 à 14 H 30


Monsieur le Directeur Général de l'Unesco,
Monsieur le Président de la République du Sénégal,
Mesdames et Messieurs les Présidents,
Mesdames et Messieurs les Parlementaires,
Mesdames et Messieurs les Ministres,
Mesdames et Messieurs les Ambassadeurs,
Chère Simone Veil, Cher David de Rothschild,
Chers amis,

Votre présence ici, à Paris, dans cette grande maison de l’UNESCO, est un témoignage rare. Et un acte de foi. La foi, que nous partageons, des bienfaits de la connaissance.

Aladin, en français, « Aladine » en arabe, « Aladine » en hébreu, c’est la lumière, le symbole de cette connaissance à laquelle nous croyons ensemble.

Je félicite les initiateurs du projet Aladin.
Je félicite ceux qui, du monde entier, ont accepté de le parrainer.
Je suis honoré de me trouver parmi eux.
Je les félicite pour leur ténacité, leur audace et leur vision.

Je veux vous dire que je me reconnais dans votre combat pour rétablir la mémoire de la SHOAH là où elle est niée, là où elle est effacée, là où elle est déformée.

Votre choix est légitime :

Faire connaître la SHOAH en présentant les faits, tels qu’ils ont été, dans leur brutalité. Sans culpabiliser les vivants. Sans vouloir faire porter aux pays musulmans une culpabilité qui n’est pas la leur.

Faire connaître la SHOAH, pour la sortir du silence que l’on a fabriqué autour d’elle, dans beaucoup de pays.

Evoquer la SHOAH risquait de susciter dans ces pays un sentiment de sympathie pour les Juifs et l'existence d’Israël. Alors on l’a cachée.

Faire connaître la SHOAH à chacun, dans sa langue, pour que chacun lise et comprenne dans sa langue maternelle ce qui s’est réellement passé, et forme sa conviction intime. Aujourd’hui l’arabe, le persan, demain l’ourdou, le bengali, le malais... La mémoire de la SHOAH c'est faire vivre les livres et non les brûler. Elle ne doit pas seulement parler à l’intellect. Elle doit toucher le cœur.

C’est, vous le savez, dans le même esprit que je me bats, avec la Fondation que je préside, pour le dialogue et le respect de toutes les cultures.

Le drame de la SHOAH interdit l’oubli. Il impose la pudeur. Il fait exploser la colère au cœur de chaque homme de bonne volonté, lorsque la SHOAH est contestée.

Nous n’en avons pas fini avec la barbarie qui a conduit à la SHOAH.
Voilà la vraie raison d’en garder la mémoire à jour. Une mémoire constamment en alerte.
Transmettre aux pays qui ne l’ont pas connue la mémoire de la SHOAH c’est allumer chez eux l’esprit de résistance qui nous a fait défaut face au Mal.
Car nul pays, nulle culture, ne sont immunisés contre la tentation du génocide.
Le négationnisme est un crime contre la mémoire. Mais plus grave encore, il émousse la vigilance.

Je suis très inquiet aujourd’hui, que certains puissent dire, chez nous, en Europe, que cette histoire, la SHOAH, n’était pas la leur, que c’était l’histoire des Juifs, le problème des Juifs.
Nous devons combattre cet apartheid insupportable de la mémoire.
Nos Etats, et notamment l'Etat français, ont été mêlés à ce crime.
Nous avons composé par peur avec la barbarie nazie. Nous avons laissé nos concitoyens juifs, enfants ou non de notre terre, être arrachés de nous comme s’ils étaient un corps étranger. Nous avons assisté, pétrifiés, à leur humiliation et à leur anéantissement.

Après la SHOAH, rien, pour nous, ne peut être comme avant.
Rien ne peut faire que nous ne nous sentions pas responsables.
Rien ne peut faire que nous ne nous sentions pas orphelins.
Rien ne peut faire éluder la question : et moi, qu’aurais-je fait ?

Après la SHOAH, nous savons que le courage politique, le vrai, c’est d’abord de résister, quoiqu’il en coûte, à la xénophobie qui déshumanise.
Nous ne devons jamais accepter comme démocratiques, les partis qui propagent la haine.

L’accord trouvé entre libéraux, démocrates chrétiens, socialistes et communistes dans l’après guerre pour rejeter les partis de la haine doit être considéré comme un acquis définitif de la démocratie européenne.
Nous avons fait l’Europe pour la paix, mais pas n’importe laquelle. Rien ne doit remettre en question cette vision.

J’ai un autre sujet d’inquiétude.
Je vous le confie avec la franchise d’un homme qui s’est battu pour le respect du droit au Proche-Orient, pour un Etat palestinien viable, pour l’indépendance de chaque Etat dans la région, dans la sécurité et le respect de ses frontières…
J’ai dit aux Israéliens que la colonisation était une faute. On ne construit pas la paix avec son voisin en expropriant ses terres, en arrachant ses arbres, en bouclant ses routes…
Il n’en est pas moins vrai que les conflits incessants du Proche-Orient servent aujourd’hui de prétexte à une nouvelle haine d’Israël ; elle est en train de devenir une nouvelle haine des Juifs ; cette haine se répand.
Elle est le contraire d’une solution. Elle peut être le début d’un nouveau cauchemar.
Au débat exigeant avec les dirigeants d’Israël, cette haine substitue un soupçon à l’encontre de tous les Juifs.
Au respect du droit, respect qu’il faut exiger d’Israël comme de tous les autres Etats, cette haine prétend substituer la vengeance et le terrorisme.

La paix, les partisans de la haine prétendent l’établir par le harcèlement, l’humiliation, l’éviction, la destruction des Juifs…
Il n'y aura pas de paix au Proche-Orient tant qu'il n'y aura pas reconnaissance et acceptation de l'Etat d’Israël. C’est le sens de toutes les résolutions des Nations unies. C’est le sens de la déclaration d’Oslo. C’est le sens de tous les efforts que nous encourageons.

Mais il n'y aura pas reconnaissance mutuelle réelle sans un assentiment des peuples eux mêmes.
Cet assentiment ne se fera pas sans une compréhension plus intime, de part et d'autre, sans que soit retrouvé le sentiment d’appartenir à la même fraternité humaine.

Voici pourquoi votre projet est si urgent. Si important.

Seul le rappel de la mémoire de la SHOAH permet de comprendre comment l’on passe de la frustration à la haine, de la haine à la négation de l’autre, et de cette négation au génocide.

Il n’est pas trop tard. Il n’y a aucune fatalité à la haine.

Dans les deux traditions, juive et musulmane, la tolérance et le respect de l'autre sont des préceptes fondateurs. "La loi du pays, c'est la loi", dit le Talmud. La communauté juive respecte les lois du pays où elle vit. Elle respecte les autres communautés. "Si Dieu avait voulu créer une seule communauté, il l'aurait fait." dit quant à lui le Coran.
Vous avez raison de vouloir rappeler la ressemblance qui existe entre deux traditions qui ont coexisté pendant plus de mille ans.

Oui, j'adhère avec enthousiasme au projet Aladin parce qu'il fait le pari de la connaissance et de la capacité des deux communautés à se retrouver, à se comprendre et à s'accepter. Aladin c'est un appel au dialogue, à la compréhension mutuelle. L'incompréhension entre les juifs et les musulmans n'est pas inscrite dans leur histoire, ni dans leur religion, ni dans leur culture.
Quand on demandera demain à un enfant musulman ce qu’est un Juif il ne pourra plus répondre par des caricatures et des stéréotypes.
Quand on demandera demain à un enfant juif ce qu’est un Musulman, il ne pourra plus répondre par des caricatures et des stéréotypes.

Je crois au dialogue des civilisations.

Avec mes amis, le Prince Hassan bin Talal, avec Gerhard Schröder, avec Ely Ould Mohamed Vall, avec Abdurrahman Wahid, je crois qu'il faut faire vite.

Je vous remercie.

Closed Zone

Gisha - Legal Center for Freedom of Movement calls on the State of Israel to fully open Gaza's crossings and to allow the real victims of the closure - 1.5 million human beings - the freedom of movement necessary to realize their dreams and aspirations.


Source: www.closedzone.com

An Empire for Poor Working Women, Guided by a Gandhian Approach

THIRTY-FIVE years ago in this once thriving textile town, Ela Bhatt fought for higher wages for women who ferried bolts of cloth on their heads. Next, she created India’s first women’s bank.

Since then, her Self-Employed Women’s Association, or SEWA, has offered retirement accounts and health insurance to women who never had a safety net, lent working capital to entrepreneurs to open beauty salons in the slums, helped artisans sell their handiwork to new urban department stores and boldly trained its members to become gas station attendants — an unusual job for women on the bottom of India’s social ladder.

Small, slight and usually dressed in a hand-spun cotton sari, Mrs. Bhatt is a Gandhian pragmatist for the New India.

At 76, she is a critic of some of India’s embrace of market reforms, but nevertheless keen to see the poorest of Indian workers get a stake in the country’s swelling and swiftly globalizing economy. She has built a formidable empire of women-run, Gandhian-style cooperatives — 100 at last count — some providing child care for working mothers, others selling sesame seeds to Indian food-processing firms — all modeled after the Gandhian ideal of self-sufficiency but also advancing modern ambitions.

She calls it the quest for economic freedom in a democratic India.

Her own quest offers a glimpse into the changing desires of Indian mothers and daughters, along with their vulnerabilities. Tinsmiths or pickle makers, embroiderers or vendors of onions, SEWA’s members are mostly employed in the informal sector. They get no regular paychecks, sick leave or holidays. Calamities are always just around the corner, whether traffic accidents or crippling droughts. Without SEWA, they would be hard pressed to have health benefits or access to credit.

SEWA’s innovations bear lessons for the majority of workers in the new Indian economy. Since economic reforms kicked off in 1991, the share of Indians employed in the informal sector — where they are not covered by stringent, socialist-era labor laws from the time of the cold war — has grown steadily to more than 90 percent, according to a recent government-commissioned report.

Among them, the report found, nearly three-fourths lived on less than 20 cents a day and had virtually no safety net. “Why should there be a difference between worker and worker,” Mrs. Bhatt wondered aloud, “whether they are working in a factory, or at home or on the footpath?”

WITH 500,000 members in western Gujarat State alone, the SEWA empire also includes two profit-making firms that stitch and embroider women’s clothing. More than 100,000 women are enrolled in the organization’s health and life insurance plans. Its bank has 350,000 depositors and, like most microfinance organizations, a repayment rate as high as 97 percent. Loans range from around $100 to $1,100, with a steep interest rate of 15 percent. “We don’t have a liquidity problem,” its manager, Jayshree Vyas, pointed out merrily. “Women save.”

A SEWA loan of roughly $250 allowed Namrata Rajhari to start a beauty salon 15 years ago from her one-room shack in a working-class enclave called Behrampura. At first, the neighborhood women knew little about beauty treatments. They only wanted their hair trimmed.

Then Mrs. Rajhari began threading their eyebrows to resemble perfect half-moons, waxing the hair off their forearms and offering facials. During the wedding season, business blossomed. Mrs. Rajhari, who only has a 10th-grade education, expanded to a small room in the next lane.

With money from her business, Mrs. Rajhari installed a toilet at home, added a loft and bought a washing machine. “Before, I felt blank. I didn’t know anything about the world,” she said the other day. “Now, with my earnings, my children are studying.”

Mrs. Rajhari then motioned to an object of pride in the living room. “The computer is also from my parlor money,” she beamed. A daughter, Srishti, is now enrolled in a private English school. She wants to be an astronomer.

Behrampura buzzed with work and hustle on this morning. Men disassembled old television sets and put together new sofas. A woman pushed a cart loaded with used suitcases. Another herded a half-dozen donkeys loaded with construction debris.

Nearby, in another slum, shortly after dawn, Naina Chauhan rode a motorized rickshaw across town to start her shift as a gas station attendant. Her mother, Hira, now 65, had spent a lifetime ferrying coal, cleaning hospitals and going house to house to collect old newspapers. Naina said she resolved never to slog as her mother had.

Today, she contributes about $1 a month to her own SEWA-run pension plan. A SEWA loan has allowed her to clear a debt from relatives. She easily makes three times what her mother made collecting newspapers and as she shyly admitted this afternoon, almost as much as her husband, a hospital cleaner. She just recently married, and plans to move into her husband’s family home soon. She said she hoped he would let her manage at least some of her own money.

Mrs. Bhatt’s Gandhian approach is most evident in the way she lives. Her two-bedroom bungalow is small and spare. The one bit of whimsy is a white swing that hangs from the ceiling in the center of the living room. She uses her bed as a desk chair. Her grandson has painted a child’s pastoral mural on the bedroom wall. She is known for having no indulgences.

“Above all you should emphasize her simplicity,” said Anil Gupta, a professor at the Indian Institute of Management here who has followed SEWA’s work for over a decade, sometimes critically. “In her personal life, there is not the slightest tinge of hypocrisy.”

Mrs. Bhatt is not without detractors. The chief minister of Gujarat, Narendra Modi, accused her group of financial irregularities three years ago in the management of a rehabilitation program for earthquake victims. SEWA denied the charges and pulled out of the government-run program. Mrs. Bhatt accused Mr. Modi of trying to discredit the organization. Their war of words has since cooled down.

BORN to a privileged Brahmin family, Mrs. Bhatt charted an unusual path for a woman of her time. She earned a law degree and chose the man she would marry. She began her career as a lawyer for the city’s main union for textile workers, the vast majority of them men, and broke away in 1981 to create a new kind of union for women.

Early on, she won higher rates for women porters, then a landmark legal victory that allowed women to sell fruits and vegetables on the street without harassment from the police. The fishmongers and quilt-makers who were SEWA Bank’s earliest customers sometimes stashed their checkbooks in the bank’s steel cabinets, she recalled, lest their husbands discover they had money of their own.

At first, the women’s ambitions were limited, she said. They wanted toilets, hair shears or sewing machines for work and money to pay for their children’s school fees. Slowly, she noticed, they began to dream big. Mothers now want their daughters to learn to ride a scooter and work on a computer.

“They didn’t see the future at that time,” she said. “Expectations have gone very high.”

Not long ago, Mrs. Bhatt recalled, she asked SEWA members what “freedom” meant to them. Some said it was the ability to step out of the house. Others said it was having a door to the bathroom. Some said it meant having their own money, a cellphone, or “fresh clothes every day.”

Then she told of her favorite. Freedom, one woman said, was “looking a policeman in the eye.”

Source: New York Times.