Tag: gaza

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Flashback to November 2007 – Condi’s Big Mistake

Committing a grave tactical error and displeasing Israeli shillseverywhere, Rice compared life in U.S. south to Palestinians’ plight:

U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told a closed meeting of Arab and Israeli envoys in Annapolis this week that her childhood in the segregated U.S. south helped her to understand the plight of Palestinians and the fear felt by Israelis, the Dutch representative to the summit, Franz Timmermans, told the Washington Post on Thursday.

“I know what its like to hear that you can’t use a certain road, or pass through a checkpoint because you are a Palestinian. I know what it is like to feel discriminated against and powerless,” Rice was reported as saying.

Rice described her childhood in Birmingham, Alabama during the era of segregation and the killing of four young girls in the bombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in 1963. Rice said the bombing, which killed one of her classmates, helps her understand the fear of terrorism felt by Israelis.

“Like Israelis, I understand what it’s like to go to sleep not knowing if you will be hurt in an explosion, the feeling of terror walking around your own neighborhood, or walking to your house of prayer,” Rice was quoted in the Washington Post as saying.

The Washington Post’s article dealt with events that took place behind closed doors at the Annapolis summit on Tuesday.

According to the Post, Rice reportedly closed her statements by saying that both sides in the conflict had endured great pain and for far too long.

Henceforth Condi was to be marginalised, leading to her embarrassment by Olmert as he jumped over her head to Bush when it came to the US vote on UN Sec Council Res 1860.

Condi and Bush’s previous mistakes with Palestine are legend.

According to Dahlan, it was Bush who had pushed legislative elections in the Palestinian territories in January 2006, despite warnings that Fatah was not ready. After Hamas—whose 1988 charter committed it to the goal of driving Israel into the sea—won control of the parliament, Bush made another, deadlier miscalculation.

Vanity Fair has obtained confidential documents, since corroborated by sources in the U.S. and Palestine, which lay bare a covert initiative, approved by Bush and implemented by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams, to provoke a Palestinian civil war. The plan was for forces led by Dahlan, and armed with new weapons supplied at America’s behest, to give Fatah the muscle it needed to remove the democratically elected Hamas-led government from power. (The State Department declined to comment.)

But the secret plan backfired, resulting in a further setback for American foreign policy under Bush. Instead of driving its enemies out of power, the U.S.-backed Fatah fighters inadvertently provoked Hamas to seize total control of Gaza.

Some sources call the scheme “Iran-contra 2.0,” recalling that Abrams was convicted (and later pardoned) for withholding information from Congress during the original Iran-contra scandal under President Reagan. There are echoes of other past misadventures as well: the C.I.A.’s 1953 ouster of an elected prime minister in Iran, which set the stage for the 1979 Islamic revolution there; the aborted 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, which gave Fidel Castro an excuse to solidify his hold on Cuba; and the contemporary tragedy in Iraq.

Within the Bush administration, the Palestinian policy set off a furious debate. One of its critics is David Wurmser, the avowed neoconservative, who resigned as Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief Middle East adviser in July 2007, a month after the Gaza coup.

Wurmser accuses the Bush administration of “engaging in a dirty war in an effort to provide a corrupt dictatorship [led by Abbas] with victory.” He believes that Hamas had no intention of taking Gaza until Fatah forced its hand. “It looks to me that what happened wasn’t so much a coup by Hamas but an attempted coup by Fatah that was pre-empted before it could happen,” Wurmser says.

The botched plan has rendered the dream of Middle East peace more remote than ever, but what really galls neocons such as Wurmser is the hypocrisy it exposed. “There is a stunning disconnect between the president’s call for Middle East democracy and this policy,” he says. “It directly contradicts it.”

…

In public, Rice tried to look on the bright side of the Hamas victory. “Unpredictability,” she said, is “the nature of big historic change.” Even as she spoke, however, the Bush administration was rapidly revising its attitude toward Palestinian democracy.

Some analysts argued that Hamas had a substantial moderate wing that could be strengthened if America coaxed it into the peace process. Notable Israelis—such as Ephraim Halevy, the former head of the Mossad intelligence agency—shared this view. But if America paused to consider giving Hamas the benefit of the doubt, the moment was “milliseconds long,” says a senior State Department official. “The administration spoke with one voice: ‘We have to squeeze these guys.’ With Hamas’s election victory, the freedom agenda was dead.”

The first step, taken by the Middle East diplomatic “Quartet”—the U.S., the European Union, Russia, and the United Nations—was to demand that the new Hamas government renounce violence, recognize Israel’s right to exist, and accept the terms of all previous agreements. When Hamas refused, the Quartet shut off the faucet of aid to the Palestinian Authority, depriving it of the means to pay salaries and meet its annual budget of roughly $2 billion.

Israel clamped down on Palestinians’ freedom of movement, especially into and out of the Hamas-dominated Gaza Strip. Israel also detained 64 Hamas officials, including Legislative Council members and ministers, and even launched a military campaign into Gaza after one of its soldiers was kidnapped. Through it all, Hamas and its new government, led by Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh, proved surprisingly resilient.

Washington reacted with dismay when Abbas began holding talks with Hamas in the hope of establishing a “unity government.” On October 4, 2006, Rice traveled to Ramallah to see Abbas. They met at the Muqata, the new presidential headquarters that rose from the ruins of Arafat’s compound, which Israel had destroyed in 2002.

…

On June 7, there was another damaging leak, when the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that Abbas and Dayton had asked Israel to authorize the biggest Egyptian arms shipment yet—to include dozens of armored cars, hundreds of armor-piercing rockets, thousands of hand grenades, and millions of rounds of ammunition. A few days later, just before the next batch of Fatah recruits was due to leave for training in Egypt, the coup began in earnest.
Fatah’s Last Stand

The Hamas leadership in Gaza is adamant that the coup would not have happened if Fatah had not provoked it. Fawzi Barhoum, Hamas’s chief spokesman, says the leak in Al-Majd convinced the party that “there was a plan, approved by America, to destroy the political choice.” The arrival of the first Egyptian-trained fighters, he adds, was the “reason for the timing.” About 250 Hamas members had been killed in the first six months of 2007, Barhoum tells me. “Finally we decided to put an end to it. If we had let them stay loose in Gaza, there would have been more violence.”

“Everyone here recognizes that Dahlan was trying with American help to undermine the results of the elections,” says Mahmoud Zahar, the former foreign minister for the Haniyeh government, who now leads Hamas’s militant wing in Gaza. “He was the one planning a coup.”

Zahar and I speak inside his home in Gaza, which was rebuilt after a 2003 Israeli air strike destroyed it, killing one of his sons. He tells me that Hamas launched its operations in June with a limited objective: “The decision was only to get rid of the Preventive Security Service. They were the ones out on every crossroads, putting anyone suspected of Hamas involvement at risk of being tortured or killed.” But when Fatah fighters inside a surrounded Preventive Security office in Jabaliya began retreating from building to building, they set off a “domino effect” that emboldened Hamas to seek broader gains.

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Polls on Israel – an ongoing post

Poll flashbacks:

BBC poll: Israel has worst world image March 07 – Israel was viewed negatively by 56 percent of respondents and positively by 17 percent

2003 European Poll: Israel Biggest Threat To World Peace

Polls on Gaza in Jan 6-12/09 Poll, 36% of US citizens polled felt Israel used excessive force in Gaza, with 20% undecided.

Syd Walker poll commentary “The Invisible Gaza Opinion Polls”

Tipsy Livni ironically was ahead in the election polls in Israel before the advent of the Gaza massacre – now Netanyahoo leads.

While Israelis desperately try to minimise Gazan casualties

The latest opinion poll released gave Mr Netanyahu’s Likud 35 seats, up two and Miss Livni’s Kadima 25, down two and Mr Barak’s Labour 15, unchanged. It was the first double-digit lead for Mr Netanyahu over Kadima in the race for seats in the 120-member Knesset for weeks.

Israeli perceptions of US election candidates

Irish Times Poll Jan 23/09 – Do you think the West should lift its boycott on political contact with the Palestinian Hamas movement? 65% Yes 35% No

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History repeats – Israel steals more land under cover of war

From Kabobfest:

Just like it used Election Day in the U.S. as a chance to break the ceasefire, Israel used the Gaza invasion as a chance to confiscate even more West Bank land. Land confiscations in the West Bank are continuing, said Minister of Waqf and Religious Affairs Jamal Bawatneh, and soon “there will be no land to hold a Palestinian state.” In a Tuesday letter the minister expressed his concern over the continued confiscations while “whole world was preoccupied with Gaza,” and accused Israel of using the attacks as a free-ticket to act in the West Bank. Hundreds of dunnums of lands in Yatta village [south of] Hebron were confiscated” during the Gaza invasion, said Bawatneh. He called on Arab and Islamic leaders to pay attention to the land grabs, and speak out against them.

More here.

There’s excellent historical coverage of Israeli military and terrortorial domination of Palestine in an article by Avi Shlaim at the The American Conservative Magazine “Captive Nation – How Gaza Became a Palestinian Prison”.

In August 2005, a Likud government headed by Ariel Sharon staged a unilateral Israeli pullout, withdrawing settlers and destroying the houses they left behind. Sharon presented the withdrawal as a contribution to peace based on a two-state solution. But the year after, another 12,000 Israelis settled on the West Bank, further reducing the scope for an independent Palestinian state. Land-grabbing and peace-making are simply incompatible.

The real purpose behind the move was to redraw the borders of Greater Israel by incorporating the main settlement blocs on the West Bank to the state of Israel. Withdrawal from Gaza was thus not a prelude to peace but to further Zionist expansion on the West Bank. It was a unilateral move undertaken in what was seen as the Israeli national interest.

Israel’s settlers were withdrawn, but Israeli soldiers continued to control all access to the Gaza Strip. The Israeli air force enjoyed unrestricted freedom to drop bombs, make sonic booms by flying low and breaking the sound barrier, and terrorize the hapless inhabitants.

Israel portrays itself as an island of democracy in a sea of authoritarianism. Yet Israel has never done anything to promote democracy on the Arab side and has done a great deal to undermine it. Israel has a long history of secret collaboration with reactionary Arab regimes to suppress Palestinian nationalism. Despite all the handicaps, the Palestinian people succeeded in building the only democracy in the Arab world with the possible exception of Lebanon. In January 2006, free and fair elections brought to power a Hamas-led government. Israel, however, refused to recognize the democratically elected government, claiming that Hamas is purely a terrorist organization.

America and the EU joined Israel in demonizing the Hamas government and trying to bring it down. A surreal situation thus developed with a significant part of the international community imposing sanctions not against the occupier but against the occupied.

Israel’s propaganda machine purveys the notion that the Palestinians are terrorists, that they reject coexistence with the Jewish state, that their nationalism is little more than antiSemitism, that Hamas is just a bunch of religious fanatics. But the truth is that the Palestinians are a normal people with normal aspirations. They want a piece of land on which to live in freedom and dignity.

Oppression by Israel on the West Bank continues – IOF Arrests 31 Palestinians in West Bank –

Palestinian security sources reported that IOF arrested, Tuesday, twenty four Palestinians, ten of whom in Hebron, one in Rafat village near Ramallah, two in Bethlehem, and four from Nablus villages.

One the same day, seven children were arrested from Toura Al-Gharbeyya village, near Jenin. The seven children were between 13 and 17 years of age.

On Wednesday, IOF attacked several villages in the West Bank, and arrested eight Palestinians; seven of whom from Qaryout village near Nablus, and one from Qabatya town south of Jenin.

In West Bank : Welcome to the Occupation, Scott Harris has a look at life in Israel’s ‘other’ concentration camp, or rather series of concentration camps in the West Bank.

Opposition to the wall has meant years of legal challenges and protests by the residents of Jayyous, often resulting in clashes with the IDF. In recent weeks, the IDF has fired live ammunition during marches to the southern gate, where many of the protests take place, or during army incursions into the village. On January 9, Khalil Ryash, a photojournalist from the Ma’an News Agency, was shot in the leg with live ammunition while covering a demonstration, as were two residents of the village the following week after IDF soldiers entered the village.

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Israelis murder children in cold blood

As Tipsy Livni shifts the goal posts in traditional Israeli style by refusing to open Gaza’s borders until progress in made on the release of Gilad Shalit, more and more evidence is coming to light of Israel’s barbarity. Obama has said the borders should be open for aid and commerce as part of a lasting peace – expect Israel to serially invent new reasons to maintain its control of the world’s largest concentration camp in Gaza.

Israel has all but ruled out fully reopening border crossings with the Gaza Strip as long as Hamas rules the enclave or stands to benefit from easing of the restrictions, a top adviser to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said.

Hamas has made a shaky ceasefire, which ended Israel’s 22-day offensive in the Gaza Strip on Sunday, conditional on Israel lifting its blockade, which, the adviser made clear, would not happen anytime soon.

Collective punishment is of course a war crime – yet apparently Israel can continue its evil without censure, even-handedness of George Mitchell notwithstanding.

The adviser said Israel would allow the “maximum” flow of food, medicine, oil and gas to the Gaza Strip to help its 1.5 million residents recover from the offensive, which killed more than 1,300 Palestinians, but a wider range of goods, including steel and cement needed for rebuilding, would have to wait.

Israel believes the restrictions will give it leverage to pressure Hamas to free Gilad Shalit, a captured Israeli soldier. Diplomats and aid agencies say the restrictions will doom Gaza’s reconstruction, estimated to cost at least $2 billion.

My disgust could not be greater.

George Mitchell, who helped broker the Good Friday peace accord in Northern Ireland, has been named by Obama as US special envoy for the Middle East.

Syd Walker notes that Abe Foxman, ADL head honcho, is displeased, as George Mitchell is ‘too even-handed’.

In a pleasurably insightful analysis, Jim Lobe gives us some cause for hope that Mitchell will be able to tread the ME tight rope to bring peace.

The Task Force then helpfully goes on to quote from a 2007 article co-authored by Mitchell and Haass regarding lessons learned from the Northern Ireland process:

“Confidence needs to be built before more ambitious steps can be taken. Front-loading a negotiation with demanding conditions all but assures that negotiations will not get under way, much less succeed.

“Parties should be allowed to hold onto their dreams. No one demanded of Northern Ireland’s Catholics that they let go of their hope for a united Ireland; no one required of local Protestants that they let go of their insistence that they remain a part of the United Kingdom.

“They still have those goals, but they have agreed to pursue them exclusively through peaceful and democratic means. That is what matters.

“Including in the political process those previously associated with violent groups can actually help. Sometimes it’s hard to stop a war if you don’t talk with those who are involved in it.”

If that indeed is the vision that Mitchell is authorized to take to the Middle East as ambassador plenipotentiary, then there may be grounds for some hope.

A senior Likud official boasts that

“What matters is that Netanyahu has built up good relations with Obama. There was chemistry between them in their two meetings. Netanyahu’s ties with the Obama administration are so deep that nothing can get in the way.”

Netanyahu praised Obama on Monday, saying that there was symbolism in his election and that the United States “displayed its greatness” when it elected him president.

In other news an Israeli captain escapes conviction by Israeli courts for the murder of a Palestinian school girl a year ago. This accentuates the message that Israelis can kill Palestinian children with impunity within range of Israeli concentration camp outposts.

Capt R then “clarifies” why he killed Iman

“This is commander. Anything that’s mobile, that moves in the zone, even if it’s a three-year-old, needs to be killed. Over.”

Henry Siegelman, in an excellent article in this month’s London Review of Books, outlines the history of Israel’s oppression and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people and points to the collective Western blindness and double standards inculcated by Israeli propaganda.

… when Jews target and kill innocent civilians to advance their national struggle, they are patriots. When their adversaries do so, they are terrorists.

Siegelman highlights the counterproductivity of Israel’s current strategies:

Anthony Cordesman, one of the most reliable military analysts of the Middle East, and a friend of Israel, argued in a 9 January report for the Center for Strategic and International Studies that the tactical advantages of continuing the operation in Gaza were outweighed by the strategic cost – and were probably no greater than any gains Israel may have made early in the war in selective strikes on key Hamas facilities. ‘Has Israel somehow blundered into a steadily escalating war without a clear strategic goal, or at least one it can credibly achieve?’ he asks. ‘Will Israel end in empowering an enemy in political terms that it defeated in tactical terms? Will Israel’s actions seriously damage the US position in the region, any hope of peace, as well as moderate Arab regimes and voices in the process? To be blunt, the answer so far seems to be yes.’ Cordesman concludes that ‘any leader can take a tough stand and claim that tactical gains are a meaningful victory. If this is all that Olmert, Livni and Barak have for an answer, then they have disgraced themselves and damaged their country and their friends.’

Mondoweiss makes a wry observation – that the spreading of jokes about Israel may signal the end of Israel’s victimhood:

The 60 years of pulling the wool over Americans’ eyes and saying it’s equitable to the indigenous population and it makes sense when we drop white phosphorus on their children–it’s over. The politicians will be the last to turn, but when they do, katy bar the door. So my advice is you better get out of the way of the wave right now and join J Street if you want to try and grab the two-state solution. Or try.

Why do I say this? I’ve gotten two Israel jokes in my email in the last couple days. Americans are making Israel jokes. More important: they get the joke.

Joke 1:
An Israeli landed at Kennedy Airport in New York

At the control the officer asked:
– ” Occupation ? ”

The Israeli answers:
– ” No, just for visit. ”

Joke 2. This is from The Onion:
Vacation To Israel Canceled Due To History Of Israel

HOBOKEN, NJ—With only three weeks to go before embarking on a much-anticipated vacation to Israel, 34-year-old Jeff Kaufmann made the difficult decision to cancel his trip yesterday, citing unfavorable exchange rates and the entirety of the Jewish nation’s 60-year existence. “I’d been looking forward to this for months, but hotel prices started going up, things got kind of crazy at work, and also Israel’s whole history is basically a decades-long horror show of ethnic violence, harsh reprisals, and geopolitical madness.” Kaufmann said. “The Negev Desert is supposed to be amazing, but on the other hand, ever since its founding in 1948, Israel has been spinning downward in a chaotic spiral of fear, hatred, and death. So it’s a tough call.” Kaufmann added that he hopes the Arab and Jewish peoples will be able to put aside a century of bloodshed before his travel voucher expires in June.

Also from the London Review of Books, which this month offers a compendium of views on Israel’s pogrom against the Gazan people, are the thoughts of Tariq Ali –

The war on Gaza has killed the two-state solution by making it clear to Palestinians that the only acceptable Palestine would have fewer rights than the Bantustans created by apartheid South Africa. The alternative, clearly, is a single state for Jews and Palestinians with equal rights for all. Certainly it seems utopian at the moment with the two Palestinian parties in Israel – Balad and the United Arab List – both barred from contesting the February elections. Avigdor Lieberman, the chairman of Yisrael Beiteinu, has breathed a sigh of satisfaction: ‘Now that it has been decided that the Balad terrorist organisation will not be able to run, the first battle is over.’ But even victory has its drawbacks. After the Six-Day War in 1967, Isaac Deutscher warned his one-time friend Ben Gurion: ‘The Germans have summed up their own experience in the bitter phrase “Mann kann sich totseigen!” — you can triumph yourself to death. This is what the Israelis have been doing. They have bitten off much more than they can swallow.’

Five hundred courageous Israelis have sent a letter to Western embassies calling for sanctions and other measures to be applied against their country, echoing the 2005 call by numerous Palestinian organisations for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) on the South African model. This will not happen overnight but it is the only non-violent way to help the struggle for freedom and equality in Israel-Palestine.

Eric Hobsbawm comments on the negative effect on Jews of Israel’s horrific behaviour:

For three weeks barbarism has been on show before a universal public, which has watched, judged and with few exceptions rejected Israel’s use of armed terror against the one and a half million inhabitants blockaded since 2006 in the Gaza Strip. Never have the official justifications for invasion been more patently refuted by the combination of camera and arithmetic; or the newspeak of ‘military targets’ by the images of bloodstained children and burning schools. Thirteen dead on one side, 1360 on the other: it isn’t hard to work out which side is the victim. There is not much more to be said about Israel’s appalling operation in Gaza.

Except for those of us who are Jews. In a long and insecure history as a people in diaspora, our natural reaction to public events has inevitably included the question: ‘Is it good or bad for the Jews?’ In this instance the answer is unequivocally: ‘Bad for the Jews’.

Yitzhak Laor delivers the meta view:

Israel is engaged in a long war of annihilation against Palestinian society. The objective is to destroy the Palestinian nation and drive it back into pre-modern groupings based on the tribe, the clan and the enclave. This is the last phase of the Zionist colonial mission, culminating in inaccessible townships, camps, villages, districts, all of them to be walled or fenced off, and patrolled by a powerful army which, in the absence of a proper military objective, is really an over-equipped police force, with F16s, Apaches, tanks, artillery, commando units and hi-tech surveillance at its disposal.

John Mearsheimer may have it right:

The Gaza war is not going to change relations between Israel and the Palestinians in any meaningful way. Instead, the conflict is likely to get worse in the years ahead. Israel will build more settlements and roads in the West Bank and the Palestinians will remain locked up in a handful of impoverished enclaves in Gaza and the West Bank. The two-state solution is probably dead.

‘Greater Israel’ will be an apartheid state. Ehud Olmert has sounded a warning note on this score, but he has done nothing to stop the settlements and by starting the Gaza war he doomed what little hope there was for creating a viable Palestinian state.

The Palestinians will continue to resist the occupation, and Hamas will still be able to strike Israel with rockets and mortars, whose range and effectiveness are likely to improve. Palestinians will increasingly make the case that Greater Israel should become a democratic binational state in which Palestinians and Jews enjoy equal political rights. They know that they will eventually outnumber the Jews, which would mean the end of Israel as a Jewish state. This proposal is already gaining ground among Israel’s Palestinian citizens, striking fear into the hearts of many Israelis, who see them as a dangerous fifth column. This fear accounts in part for the recent Israeli decision to ban the major Arab political parties from participating in next month’s parliamentary elections.

There is no reason to think that Israel’s Jewish citizens would accept a binational state, and it’s safe to assume that Israel’s supporters in the diaspora would have no interest in it. Apartheid is not a solution either, because it is repugnant and because the Palestinians will continue to resist, forcing Israel to escalate the repressive policies that have already cost it significant blood and treasure, encouraged political corruption, and badly tarnished its global image.

Israel may try to avoid the apartheid problem by expelling or ‘transferring’ the Palestinians. A substantial number of Israeli Jews – 40 per cent or more – think that the government should ‘encourage’ their fellow Palestinian citizens to leave. Indeed, Tzipi Livni recently said that if there is a two-state solution, she expects the Palestinians inside Israel to move to the new Palestinian state.

Why would American and European leaders intervene? The Bush administration, after all, backed Israel’s creation of a major humanitarian crisis in Gaza, first with a devastating blockade and then with a brutal war. European leaders reacted to this collective punishment, which violates international law, not to mention basic decency, by upgrading Israel’s relationship with the European Union.

Many in the West expect Barack Obama to ride into town and fix the situation. Don’t bet on it. As his campaign showed, Obama is no match for the Israel lobby. His silence during the Gaza war speaks volumes about how tough he is likely to be with the Israelis. His chief Middle East adviser is likely to be Dennis Ross, whose deep attachment to Israel helped squander opportunities for peace during the Clinton administration.

In a recent op-ed about the Gaza war, Benny Morris said that ‘it would not be surprising if more powerful explosions were to follow.’ I rarely agree with Morris these days, but I think he has it right in this case. Even bigger trouble is in the offing for Israel – and above all for the Palestinians.

Fatah is losing support in the West Bank. Husam Kadr points to the realities on the ground:

The Islamic movement Hamas is taking over from Fatah, the party created by Yasser Arafat, as the main Palestinian national organisation as a result of the war in Gaza, says a leading Fatah militant. “We have moved into the era of Hamas which is now much stronger than it was,” said Husam Kadr, a veteran Fatah leader in the West Bank city of Nablus, recently released after five-and-a-half years in Israeli prisons.

“Its era started when Israel attacked Gaza on 27 December.”

The sharp decline in support for Fatah and the discrediting of Mahmoud Abbas, President of the Palestinian Authority, because of his inertia during the 22-day Gaza war, will make it very difficult for the US and the EU to pretend that Fatah are the true representatives of the Palestinian community. The international community is likely to find it impossible to marginalise Hamas in reconstructing Gaza.

The rise of Hamas and the demise of Fatah is best explained by the failure of President Abbas to achieve anything through negotiations for ordinary Palestinians. “We in Fatah have failed to remove a single Israeli checkpoint,” admits Mr Kadr. “It takes me as long to reach Ramallah 50 kilometres away as it would to fly from Jordan to Ankara.”

He believes the Gaza war has spread the seeds for another Palestinian uprising. “The coming uprising will be very hard for both the Palestinians and the Israelis,” he warns, though he does not forecast when it will occur. He points to a television in his office on which a young Palestinian girl called Dalal is shown picking through the ruins of her house in Gaza where all her family had died and only her cat had survived. “Can you imagine how Palestinians feel when they see this?” he asks.

Iran states the obvious – that people resisting colonialist movements such as the Zionists’ have a right to arms.

USEFUL LINKS

Change Gaza can believe in

It is fanciful, today, to believe that, left to their own devices, Israel and the Palestinians will agree on where to set the border between them, on how to share Jerusalem, or on the fate of Palestinian refugees and Israeli settlements. A two-state solution, if one is to be achieved, will have to be imposed by the international community, based on a consensus that already exists in international law (UN Resolutions 242 and 338), the Arab League peace proposals, and the Taba non-paper that documented the last formal final-status talks between the two sides in January 2001.

Robert Fisk thinks Obama has missed the point on Gaza so far despite George Mitchell’s appointment.

Hanan Ashrawi got it right. The changes in the Middle East – justice for the Palestinians, security for the Palestinians as well as for the Israelis, an end to the illegal building of settlements for Jews and Jews only on Arab land, an end to all violence, not just the Arab variety – had to be “immediate” she said, at once. But if the gentle George Mitchell’s appointment was meant to answer this demand, the inaugural speech, a real “B-minus” in the Middle East, did not.

Disgracefully, Israel has shelled UK and Australian war graves in Gaza.

UPDATE FEB 6

Slow to react, Veterans Affairs Minister Alan Griffin says “he is deeply distressed by the news and is seeking more information from the Commonwealth War Graves Commission.”

The Federal Government says the war graves of about 10 Australian soldiers have been damaged by the recent surge of fighting in the Gaza strip.

The story fails to mention the graves were clearly damaged by Israeli mortar fire. This is a further example of the bias in the Australian media toward Israel.