IIsrael may open Gaza crossings for Schalit release

This is an undated photo of Gilad Schalit, who was captured by Hamas in a cross-border operation.
Israel is reportedly willing to open Gaza crossings and free 1,000 prisoners for the release of captured Israeli soldier Gilad Schalit.

Ayman Taha, a Hamas member currently holding truce talks in Cairo, said Monday that Tel Aviv is considering the opening of the Gaza crossings as well as releasing 1,000 prisoners in exchange for captured Israeli soldier Gilad Schalit, the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram reported.

According to the report, Taha made the comments after a meeting with Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman.

A Hamas delegation is currently holding talks in Cairo with Egypt officials over an 18-months Israeli blockade of Gaza, ceasefire and exchange of prisoners with Israel.

An Israeli official was quoted by the Jerusalem Post as saying that Operation Cast Lead on Gaza had "created new understandings between us and Hamas."

Earlier Sunday, Hamas legislator Mushir al-Masri said the movement was prepared to reach a one-year truce with Israel if the border crossings into the Gaza Strip are opened. However, Masri said the truce would have nothing to do with Schalit.

"The Israeli soldier is not linked in any way to the issue of the truce or the border crossings," he said. "Rather, the case of the soldier is connected to a future prisoner exchange. No one should dream that Schalit will see his family if the border crossings aren't reopened."

Schalit was captured two years ago in a cross-border operation by Palestinian fighters. Hamas has requested the release of 1,400 Palestinians held in Israeli jails in return for his release.

http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=83748&sectionid=351020202

Fatah fears Gaza conflict has put Hamas in the ascendancy

Palestinian party created by Yasser Arafat suffers sharp decline in support

By Patrick Cockburn in Nablus

January 23, 2009 "The Independent" — 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.

"Hamas has been highly successful in portraying itself as the party of the resistance, and Fatah and Mahmoud Abbas as the opponents of resistance at a time when the public wants to resist," said Ghassan Khatib, a former Palestinian minister of planning. He adds that Mr Abbas was badly damaged in the eyes of Palestinians when he blamed Hamas for Israel's assault on Gaza in the conflict's first two days.

Mr Kadr, who says he was tortured by Israeli interrogators during detention, does not welcome Hamas's triumph. But he is convinced that, just as Fatah's long reign was launched by the battle of Karamah in March 1968, when Fatah fighters aided by the Jordanian army, repelled an Israeli attack on their HQ in the Jordan valley, so Hamas will gain from the Gaza war. "The Hamas era comes 40 years after Karamah began the Fatah period," he says.

Hamas is conscious of its political success even if it was able to do little against the Israeli army. Mr Khatib, in his office in Ramallah, the Palestinian capital on the West Bank, says the first priority must be the formation of a Palestinian unity government between Hamas and Fatah. But he adds gloomily that "the chances of this happening are slim" because the Gaza war has exacerbated hatred between the two sides as Fatah supporters are hunted down and sometimes executed in Gaza.

Aside from Gaza there is another reason why President Abbas and Fatah are weak. Long years of negotiations with Israel have achieved nothing while red-roofed Israeli settlements have sprouted on every West Bank hilltop. Driving into Nablus, a city of 250,000 people that was once the bustling heart of the West Bank, the streets are empty and row after row of shops are shut.

"We had eight years of complete closure when people could not get in or out of Nablus aside from the 3 per cent who had permits," complains the city's mayor Adly Yaish. "Most factories shut and 60 per cent of people live below the poverty line." The closure became a little looser three months ago, but yesterday there were long lines of vehicles at the Israeli checkpoints around the city.

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.

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article21826.htm

More than 200 dead as Israel hammers Hamas-run Gaza

GAZA CITY (AFP) – Israel hammered Hamas targets in Gaza on Saturday, killing at least 205 people in retaliation for ongoing rocket fire in one of the bloodiest days of the decades-long Middle East conflict.

Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak said "Operation Cast Lead," which has also left some 300 wounded, would continue "as long as necessary."

"The battle will be long and difficult, but the time has come to act and to fight," he said.

Following the mid-morning wave of attacks, which saw some 60 aircraft bomb the impoverished, overcrowded territory, Hamas swiftly responded by firing several dozen rockets into the Jewish state, killing one Israeli.

The Islamist movement, which seized control of Gaza from forces loyal to moderate Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas last year, warned Israelis living near Gaza to "prepare the funeral shrouds."

Air strikes continued sporadically throughout the day and into the evening, with no immediate reports of casualties.

The Palestinian leadership slammed the "massacre," and the European Union, Russia, Britain and France urged both sides to stop the violence .

The United States said Israel should avoid civilian casualties, while the Arab League and several Middle Eastern states slammed Israel for the strikes.

In Gaza, thick clouds of smoke billowed into the sky. Mangled, bloodied and often charred corpses littered the pavement around Hamas security compounds, and frantic relatives flooded hospitals.

Ambulances and private cars rushed the wounded and dead to Al-Shifa hospital, where staff used sheets as makeshift stretchers for some.

There was no space left in the morgue and bodies were piled up in the emergency room and in the corridors, as many of the wounded screamed in pain.

"My brother was still alive when he arrived here, and was talking to me but no one could help him. He died," said Ahmed al-Gharabli, his voice shaking and tears streaming down his cheeks. His brother Baha was a policeman.

Medics said civilians had been hit, but the majority of the victims appeared to be members of Hamas, branded a terror group by Israel and the West.

At least 205 Palestinians were killed and some 300 others wounded, said Dr Moawiya Hassanein, the head of Gaza emergency services.

The bombardment — which marked one of the bloodiest single days in the 60-year Israeli-Palestinian conflict — came after days of spiralling violence, with militants firing rockets and Israel vowing a fiery response.

Abbas told AFP from Saudi Arabia that he was in "urgent contact" with numerous countries to stop "the cowardly aggressions and massacres in the Gaza Strip."

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who brokered a six-month Israeli-Hamas truce that expired on December 19, slammed the "Israeli military aggression on the Gaza Strip and blames Israel, as an occupying force, for the victims and the wounded."

He ordered the Rafah crossing — the only one that bypasses Israel — to be opened to allow the evacuation of the wounded, dozens of whom had passed through by mid-afternoon, state news agency Mena reported.

Hamas militants warned Israelis living near the border to "prepare the funeral shrouds," vowing that the Islamists' response "was on its way."

One rocket hit the southern Israeli town of Netivot, killing a man and wounding four other people, Israeli medics said.

The air strikes come less than two months ahead of Israeli elections on February 10.

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, the head of the governing Kadima party and one of the front-runners for the premier's chair, said that "today there is no other option than a military operation."

"We need to protect our citizens from attack through a military response against the terror infrastructure in Gaza."

Violence in and around Gaza has flared since the truce ended, with militants firing rockets and Israel warning it would respond.

It escalated dramatically on Wednesday, when militants fired more than 80 rockets and mortar rounds in response to a deadly air strike on Gaza.

Hamas said bombs destroyed its security structures across Gaza and killed three senior officials — the Gaza police chief, the police commander for central Gaza and the head of the group's bodyguard unit.

The bombardment set off angry demonstrations in Israel's Arab towns and in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

Israel had responded to earlier attacks by tightening the blockade it imposed after Hamas seized Gaza from forces loyal to Abbas in June 2007. But dozens of truckloads of supplies were delivered to Gaza on Friday after Israel decided to temporarily allow in humanitarian aid.

Hamas is sworn to destruction of the Jewish state and has warned that it would retaliate to a major Gaza operation by resuming suicide bombings inside Israel. The last such attack claimed by Hamas was in January 2005.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20081227/wl_mideast_afp/mideastconflictgaza_081227163842

You Harvest What You Plant: Debunking the myth of “Palestinian Hate”

Last week a friend of mine told me that she’d been invited to a debate at her University about the “Palestinian Mickey Mouse” Farfour, which is a Hamas-created children’s show that was broadcast on the Al-Quds TV in Gaza. The show was accused of conveying messages of hate by Israel, the US and a number of European countries. I never saw the show, but I remember the storm that was created because of it on a number of American and European networks. I remember also reading that there was some sort of mistranslation of what was being said on the show, which in a way had lead to the misinterpretations, and that none of these networks attacking the show “bothered to get independent verification of the translation“(1). This reminded me of the several occasions where I was confronted with questions about the Palestinian textbooks, and that they were breeding and spreading hate and Anti-Semitism. When the second Intifada began in 2000, I was already in Germany to start my higher studies there. I remember one evening when a German friend of mine called and said she had a shocking article to show me. As far as I remember, the article was published by the New York Times. It talked about Palestinian children being pushed by their parents to go out to the streets and to the checkpoints and throw stones at the IOF, so that they get shot at and killed, and subsequently the family gets money for their dead child. I remember distinctly reading something about the parents giving their children a few Shekels to take the bus and reach the checkpoint. I was of course outraged, as was my German friend, who had lived a number of years in Palestine and saw the realities of Palestinian suffering by the hands of the “peace-loving” Israelis. It is a common enough thing to place the whole blame on the Palestinians for everything has gone wrong in the Middle East, and to ignore Israel’s State Terrorism. Zionist propaganda has been brain-washing American and European minds since so long, that even people with a bit of common sense would just take whatever lies and nonsense Israel is feeding them as undoubted facts. It only takes a click of a mouse to find an independent and honest website and read about the suffering of Palestinian children under the brutal Israeli military occupation.



Palestinian children don’t need “Farfour“ or any other show to tell them how to feel about the Zionists. I myself, someone who was born und grew up knowing nothing other than the brutal Israeli occupation, never heard one single word of hate or racism whether at home or at school. It was us children, seeing what was going on around us, the killing, the checkpoints, the nightly arrests, the beating of our relatives, the destruction of our neighbours’ houses, this all helped formulate our idea abut the Israeli occupier. Do the Israelis expect me to forget the night when they forced themselves into my grandparents’ house looking for one of my uncles? Do they expect me to forget how after turning the house upside down and finding no one there except my grandmother, my uncle’s wife, my sister and I, they started beating us, and then when my grandmother started shouting and calling for help, they started beating her brutally. When we tried to stop them, some of the soldiers held us back while the rest of the patrol continued beating her, an old woman, in front of us, right before us little kids. Do they expect us to forget her cries and the brutality in which these soldiers were beating an unarmed OLD Woman?!



After one horrific nightly attack of the Jewish fanatic settlers of Kiryat Arba near Hebron on Dheisheh refugee camp, I remember the next day when the refugee camp was full with journalists from all over the world, how one European-looking journalist approached me and asked me how I was feeling. She then told my aunt that she had a daughter my age. I just kept looking at her, wondering how this nice-looking person could be in any way related to the monstrous settlers of the night before, or to the brutal Israeli soldiers who helped the settlers, and instead of stopping them from shooting at an unarmed population, were assisting them in their attack. To me, and maybe to many others like me, the IOF, being the Israeli army, and the Jewish settlers, being the Israeli civilians, were one and the same: both armed to the teeth, brutal and with one goal: to kill Palestinians or throw them out of their lands. So to me, military or civilian, it was all the same, the same mentality for killing Palestinians. Palestinian children who only see the killing and the destruction carried out by the IOF and the fanatic settlers are not to be blamed for how they feel. In the end, we are humans, and it is a human trait to like those who respect you and treat you in a good way and hate those who treat you badly and injustly. So why are we attacked and criticized for the way we feel towards those who have taken everything from us and treat us as lesser-humans? I have read of many Israelis and Jews who refuse, 60 years after the Holocaust, to forget or forgive today’s Germany. So, what is a Palestinian child to think while hiding in a corner, covering his ears with his hands in a useless effort to keep the sounds of Israeli shelling away, and praying it would all end soon?



Wanting to know more, I asked my parents about their memories and their education, about how they first perceived the word “Israeli“. My mother, coming from a refugee family, was born in 1948. She didn’t personally know her original village Jrash which was completely despoiled and its inhabitants ethnically cleansed by the 6th Battalion of the Ha’el Brigade. She said: we didn’t need our parents to tell us what the Israelis were to us, i.e., a brutal military occupation. Even as little children we saw with our own eyes what they were doing in the surrounding areas. We lived in small rooms provided by the UNRWA, and we used to ask our parents why we didn’t have normal houses like other people outside the refugee camp. We used to get food portions from the UNRWA and we had to stand in lines to receive them, which was humiliating to say the least, because we felt like beggers. We used to ask ourselves and others around us: “why do we have to stand here? Why don’t we have homes like the other kids? Why don’t we have gardens with trees to play in them?” My father on the other hand, from Arab Il Sawahreh, a village at the outskirts of Jerusalem, said that during the Nakba of 1948 he was in first grade. He described how the IOF troops used to cross the truce line and attack Jabal Al Mukaber and the areas surrounding it. How one time the IOF launched an attack on Al Mukaber and fierce fighting began between the IOF and the Palestinians quartered at the UN High Commissioner’s House. The men of Sawahreh gathered themselves and went to assist the Palestinian fighters, and the old women prayed for their safe and victorious return and said that the “Al Khader Il Akhdar“ was seen fighting the Zionists. He remembered the various sounds of machinery being used during the clashes with the IOF and added that 3 or 4 men from Sawahreh died defending the Mukaber that day. They both agreed that as kids they had witnessed various Israeli raids on areas close to the truce-line.



My mother then related the incident of Husan and how one unforgettable night the Israelis attacked the police station there. She described how she as a third grader stood in fear with the rest of the children watching the fire, the shelling and hearing the gunshots. And how that evening my grandmother had prepaired tea for two Palestinian policemen who were passing by on their way to Husan, but upon hearing the gunfire, they hurried to help their comrades. My mother recalled that Husan police station was stationed on a high hill, with open and clear view of the truce line, the No-Man’s-Land and the areas behind it. IOF comandos had come under cover of the darkness and killed the Palestinian men stationed in the barricades surrounding the police station. She said that the story at the time was that the Israelis killed one Palestinian policeman and left the next and then killed the third and so on, so as not to draw attention to their presence. When the guard above in the two-story police station saw some suspicious movements, he tried contacting other stations and calling for assistance, but found that all communication lines had been cut. It was then that the policemen and the IOF engaged in a fierce armed clash. Soon after, the whole area was filled with Israeli helicopters and tanks that were shelling the whole area. The police station was brought to the ground on the heads of those inside it. My mother remembered that there was fear everywhere and that everyone was preparing to flee the area. She said that the streets of Dheisheh RC, which isn’t that far away from Husan, were filled with people who were fleeing Husan, Batir, Wad Foukin and Al-Khader. Whole families were taking with them what little of their possessions they could carry. The IOF had entered way beyond the truce line and reached the gate of Al-Khader. Resistance came from nearby areas. But the Israeli helicopters were observing the whole area underneath and whenever a Palestinian police vehicle came close, the helicopter would roam above it and the tanks would shell the Palestinian vehicles. My mother’s uncle and his comrades, who were in one of the vehicles going to resist the IOF, were only spared death that night when the vehicle before them was shelled by the tanks and they had time to turn around and take another route. The fighting continued the whole night and in the morning the Israelis had left the area after accomplishing their goal: spreading fear and destroying the Palestinian police station that was in such a strategic place which allowed the Palestinian policemen to notice the movements of the IOF and warn the people. The residents of these areas returned to their homes the next day and the police station was never rebuilt. Till today a pile of rubble stands as a reminder of that night.



My mother added that incidents such as these, i.e., attacks by the IOF on Palestinian towns and villages close to the truce line, were frequent, and took place long before the 1967 war. My father commented that they had witnessed the same in their area and it was a way of spreading fear so people would leave their homes and go to Jordan, thus making it easy for the IOF to take over abandoned towns and villags. He rememberd how his family and the other inhabitants of Sawahreh wanted to cross the Jordan after a number of such incidents, but some men prevented the families from leaving which actually saved them from becoming refugees. My mother then added that her uncle, whom I remember had one eye missing, had lost that eye during one such incident. Israeli soldiers would appear all of a sudden, shoot at Palestinians and then flee, and in one such incident her uncle was herding the goats and they came and shot at him, and he was lucky enough to lose only one eye and not his life. Another friend of hers lost her father who went herding his goats and never came back. They all thought he was kidnapped by the Israelis and hoped that he might be imprisoned by them. But after the 1967 war, they went looking for him everywhere and he was never found, which confirmed what they had feared from the beginning: that he had been killed by the IOF and buried somewhere in the hills.



As I further explained what I was writing about, my mother asked: “what do you expect from a child who grows up knowing his family lost everything because of the Israelis? That the reason for his misery and the terrible conditions in which he lives in are the Israelis? We were refugees who lost everything. You would sit and hear people talking about the house they left behind, or the land they had just harvested, or the fruit fields they so much loved and cherished, or worse, the stories of their beloved ones killed by the Jewish terrorist groups raiding Palestinian towns and villages. They used to sit and talk about their daily life there and we children would sit and listen to their stories and their pain. It was also our pain. They talked so often of their daily life there, what they did and what they had, and then you would look around you and see what had become of these proud people, where they had ended, and you knew who is responsible for it." She added that every now and then they used to hear talk about the fighting and the raids that were going on, and about people being killed. “What mostly affected us where the stories about civilians, women and children, some we knew, who had been killed by such IOF raids for no reason other than being Palestinians. Palestinian children see the Israeli occupier and what occupation is doing to them, they see a military occupation that has taken everything from them and gave them nothing but suffering and humiliation."



Palestinians have been accused, unjustly, of all sorts of incitement, whether through textbooks or media. These accusations were based on the lies and fabrications of the Israeli and US governments with the help of Centers and Organizations producing false documents and propaganda-style studies. An example is the Center for Monitoring the Impact of Peace (CMIP), which launched a war against the Palestinian textbooks. CMIP is a “Jewish organization with links to extremist and racist Israeli groups that advocate settlement activities in the Palestinian territories, expulsion (transfer) of Palestinians from their homeland, and claims that Palestinians are all “terrorists” and that peace with them is not possible.”(2) The European Union, whose members funded the new textbooks, asserted that “While many of the quotations attributed to the new textbooks by the most recent CMIP report of November 2001 could be confirmed, these have been found to be often badly translated or quoted out of context, thus suggesting an anti-Jewish incitement that the books do not contain… Therefore, allegations against the new textbooks funded by EU members have proven unfounded.”(3)



Education experts, Dr. Roger Avenstrup and Dr Patti Swarts concluded in “A Study of the Impact of the Palestinian Curriculum": "What is of great concern to students, teachers and parents alike is that although they wish it, students find it difficult to accept peace and conflict resolution as a solution to the conflict, and teachers find it difficult to teach, while soldiers and settlers are shooting in the streets and in schools and checkpoints have to be braved every day. It would seem that the occupation is the biggest constraint to the realization of these values in the Palestinian curriculum.” (4) Targeting Palestinian children is not new to the IOF. As a child, the first time I comprehended the meaning of occupation was when during clashes between the armed IOF and unarmed school children who were only chanting slogans against the occupation and throwing stones, a Palestinian school boy was shot in the back. During the First Intifada (1987-1993) 241 Palestinian children under the age of 17 were killed by the IOF, in addition to 13 other killed by Israeli civilians (5). In addition to thousands injured, disabled for life, imprisoned and not to forget those who got their bones broken for throwing stones. “In 1989, a bulletin from the Israeli League for Human and Civil Rights, entitled ‘Deliberate Murder’, reported the targeting of Palestinian children in leadership roles. Israeli army and snipers from “special units” had “carefully chosen” the children who were shot in the head or heart and died instantaneously. Other evidence, from Israeli human rights groups and the Israeli press, point to extensive use of torture, such as severe beating and electric shocks, against detainees including children ."(6) According to a study done by "Save the Children": "The average age of the victims was ten years old; the majority of those shot were not even participating in stone throwing. In 80% of the cases where children were shot, the Israeli army prevented the victims from receiving medical attention. The report concluded that more than 50,000 children required medical attention for injuries including gunshot wounds, tear gas inhalation and multiple fractures."(7)



While Palestinian textbooks are often under fire and wrongly accused of this and that, only few bothered to look into Israeli textbooks and investigate their contents as to their attitude towards Arabs and Palestinians. The Israeli culture of hate is to be found in school textbooks, children’s books and in Israeli literature. This culture is state-approved and state-funded. It is not an issue of one political party or one organization airing a program or printing a book with disputable content. These are school textbooks that are part of the Jewish school curricula, adopted by the Israeli government, as guidelines for Israeli children.



Racism, hate and lies are policy when it comes to describing Arabs and Palestinians. Journalist Maureen Meehan says in a report titled “Israeli Textbooks and Children’s Literature Promote Racism and Hatred toward Palestinians and Arabs” that “Israeli school textbooks as well as children’s storybooks, portray Palestinians and Arabs as ‘murderers,’ ‘rioters,’ ’suspicious’, and generally backward and unproductive. Direct delegitimization and negative stereotyping of Palestinians and Arabs are the rule rather than the exception in Israeli schoolbooks.”(8) In another study, Daniel Bar-Tal of Tel Aviv University, who reviewed 124 Israeli textbooks, concluded that “the majority of Israeli school books stereotype Arabs negatively.”(9) … “by the use of blatant negative stereotyping which featured Arabs as: `unenlightened, inferior, fatalistic, unproductive and apathetic.` Further, according to the textbooks, the Arabs were `tribal, vengeful, exotic, poor, sick, dirty, noisy, colored` and `they burn, murder, destroy, and are easily inflamed.`“(10) According to Egyptian researcher Safa Abdel-Aal, “Israel’s educational curricula incite the new generation for war and racism against the Arabs”. In her book “Racist Education in the Israeli Curricula” Abdel-Aal “thought that these books deliberately paint distorted pictures of the Arabs, giving them such derogatory descriptions as “Arab thieves” or “embezzlers”, and referring to Arabs as “bastards, thirsty for Jewish blood” or that they are “underdeveloped Bedouins” and “vagrant highway robbers,” and using phrases like “house of Arab reptiles”.(11)



This culture of hate, distortion of facts and racism extends also to children’s extracurricular activities. In an educational event for second-grade students at an Israeli local elementary school in 2001 “The performance began; the children went up on stage as a group … representing the different nations, recreating the legend of how Israel received the Torah. The student who played the angel held a Torah and walked among the various nations, offering each one the Torah and the Ten Commandments. The only two groups of people wearing representative costumes were the group of Arabs, who were wearing keffiyehs, and the Jews, who were wearing yarmulkes. During the performance, the “angel” met the “Arab people” who asked, like all the other peoples: “What is written in the Torah?” The angel replied: “Thou shalt not kill.” The children answered in a chorus: “No, we don’t want it because we are used to killing,” and they made way for the next group, the “Jewish people.” The “Jewish people” asked no questions; they simply answered with a verse from the bible, “We will do, and we will listen”.(12)



In addition to that, Palestinians either don’t exist in Israeli textbooks or they are delegitimized, they are ‘robbers’ and the land isn’t theirs. History and geography are presented from the viewpoint of Zionism, where there is no place for a "Palestine" or "Palestinians" in the "Land of Israel". Dr. Nurit Elhanan of the Hebrew University, revealed in a study entitled “The attitude towards Palestinians in Israeli textbooks” that “the Palestinians are absent from all textbooks, The Occupation is never mentioned, and the area where Palestinians live is presented in the maps either as an empty space referred to as ‘an area without data’ (Man and Space maps) or it is incorporated into the state of Israel (The Geography of the land of Israel maps). In both cases use of the term ‘occupation’ is out of the question, since you cannot occupy illegally what is yours anyway and you cannot occupy illegally an empty space.”…. “In Israel today there is already a second generation of children who don’t know there is an occupation or illegal domination and illegal settlements.”(13) “Generally speaking, the land itself has no history of its own, and the history of the land is presented as the history of the Jewish myth about it. The whole period, between the second temple and the Zionist settlement is not taught at all. But more precisely, the Israeli student has no idea whatsoever about the settlement of the country before ‘48, that is to say, has no idea about the history of the expelled themselves and of their lives before the expulsion. And so the mythical image of the country was created as ‘the Promised Land of the Jews’ and not as a cultural-geographical entity in which the Jewish colonization took place.”(14) Nothing is mentioned in these textbooks about the suffering and the dispossession of the Palestinians “and instead attributed the motivating forces for Arab violence to their ‘anti-Semitism’ and hatred of Jews”(15).



Oren Ben-Dor, a former-Israeli academic, described his education as “one sided, treating the other as the enemy, the murderers, the rioters, the terrorists … without alluding, in any way, to their pains and longings. For my teachers and, as a result, for me also, for many years, Zionism was beyond reproach; it was a return to the promised land as a result of persecution, it was draining the swamps, it was building a state based on Jewish genius.”(16) Daniel Banvolegyi, a 17-year-old Israeli pupil comments: “Our books basically tell us that everything the Jews do is fine and legitimate and Arabs are wrong and violent and are trying to exterminate us,” then adding that “One kid told me he was angry because of something he read or discussed in school and that he felt like punching the first Arab he saw.“(17)In his book “An Ugly Face in the Mirror“, Israeli writer Adir Cohen investigated the results of a survey taken of a group of 4th to 6th grade Jewish students at a school in Haifa. “The pupils were asked five questions about their attitude toward Arabs, how they recognize them and how they relate to them“. The results being that “75% of the children described the `Arab` as a murderer, one who kidnaps children, a criminal, and a terrorist. 80% said they saw the Arab as someone dirty with a terrifying face. 90% of the students stated they believe that Palestinians have no rights whatsoever to the land in Israel or Palestine.“(18)



Israeli education is not only racist and full of hate, but encourages militarism. According to an Israeli report entitled “Child Recruitment” Israeli textbooks “reflect the militaristic attitudes inherent in the Israeli educational system, all the way from kindergarten to the last years of high school, where there is a mandatory programme for all Jewish state-run schools called “preparation for the IDF” that in most cases includes actual military training. Glorification of the military and military conquest, and negative or skewed representation of Palestinians, are to be found in many Israeli textbooks.” … “In a country where various kinds of weaponry are permanently displayed in public places and the status of the military is used to promote anything from cheese to political candidates, militarised education comes natural. One absorbs militarism at home and on the street. The military is physically present in schools and school activities. Soldiers in uniform are stationed in schools, many of them are actually teaching classes. Other teachers, and especially principals, are recently retired career officers, without proper teacher training”.(19)



The Israeli culture of hate and racism is also visible in Israeli literature, including children’s books, media and exhibitions. Israelis protest when Palestinians carry photos of their dead children, saying that Palestinians use their children as forms of propaganda. But brainwashing Israeli children, filling their heads with racist ideas and feeding them on hate is acceptable by Israeli standards. There are many examples, such the photos of Israeli children happily writing `greetings` on artillery shells fired into Lebanon, e.g. `May You Die`, `I`ve Waited So Long For This`.(20) More recent examples are a number of photos of Israeli children holding guns with the title: ‘Israelis take their children to an arms fair in Rishon leZion, Israel’. One photo shows a child examining a sniper rifle.(21) During the Israeli Invasion of the West Bank in 2002, Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronot published a letter by Israeli school children titled “Dear Soldiers, Please Kill a Lot of Arabs”, adding that dozens of such letters were sent to Israeli soldiers serving in the Tulkarm area. “The letters encouraged soldiers to disregard rules and regulations and to kill as many Arabs as possible.”(22)



Cohen and El-Asmar investigated 1,700 Israeli children`s books. There was a similar pattern found in almost all of the stories: “the violent, dirty, cruel, and ignorant Arabs wanting to harm the Jews.”(23) 520 of the books contained humiliating and negative descriptions of the Palestinians and there was widespread delegitimization and dehumanization of Arabs. Arabs were “thieves, murderers, robbers, spies, arsonists, violent mobsters, terrorists, kidnappers, and the “cruel enemy”. They were also “characterized with labels related to violence, primitivism, inferiority and backwardness”. “66% of the 520 books refer to Arabs as violent; 52% as evil; 37% as liars; 31% as greedy; 28% as two-faced; 27% as traitors.“ … “Cohen points out that the authors of these children`s books effectively instill hatred toward Arabs by means of stripping them of their human nature and classifying them in another category. In a sampling of 86 books, Cohen counted the following descriptions used to dehumanize Arabs: Murderer was used 21 times; snake, 6 times; dirty, 9 times; vicious animal, 17 times; bloodthirsty, 21 times; warmonger, 17 times; killer, 13 times; believer in myths, 9 times; and a camel`s hump, 2 times.“ Other de-legitimizing labels included “inhuman, war lovers, monsters, dogs, wolves of prey, and vipers.”(24)



While the international community is busy listening to Israeli propaganda and accusing Palestinians of teaching their children hate, Palestinian children continue to be targeted by the IOF. The Palestinian Council for Human Rights (PCHR) in its report entitled “Blood on their Hands, Child killings by the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) in the Gaza Strip“ states that between June 2007 and June 2008 80 Palestinian children have been killed by the IOF, 68 in the Gaza Strip and 12 in the West Bank. According to the same report, the IOF have killed 859 Palestinian children in the period from September 2000 until 30 June 2008. The causes of death being either shot dead by the IOF, or killed by tank shells, missiles, or other IOF infliced injuries. According to the report, Israel has “consistently bombed either inside or extremely close to densely populated residential areas, including schools and areas in close proximity to schools.” And that its investigations have shown that the IOF “deliberately target unarmed civilians, including children, as part of their policy of collective punishment of the entire Palestinian civilian population.”(25)

We Palestinians are a generous, peaceful and loving people. We welcome those whom we know and those whom we don’t know into our homes, we share with them our food and shelter and protect them as we protect our families. But above all, we are a people with dignity, and we cherish our land and our freedom, so don’t expect us to sit still while our land and our freedom is taken away from us, and don’t expect us to love our murderers.

Palestinians Face Home Demolitions Spree by Israel

By JONATHAN COOK

In the first hours of dawn, Nader Elayan was woken by a call from a neighbor warning him to hurry to the house he had almost finished building. By the time he arrived, it was too late: a bulldozer was tearing down the walls. More than 100 Israeli security guards held back local residents.

The demolition, carried out four years ago, has left Mr Elayan, his wife, Fidaa, who is now pregnant, and their two young children with nowhere to live but a single room in his brother’s cramped home. It is the only land he owns and he had invested all his savings in building the now destroyed house.

Over the past few years, the Elayans’ fate has been shared by two dozen other families in the Palestinian village of Anata, on the outskirts of East Jerusalem. Hundreds more families have demolition orders hanging over their homes. “Not one person in my neighbourhood has a building permit,” Mr Elayan, 37, said.

The problem of house demolitions affects Palestinians throughout the occupied territories. But according to Hatem Abdelkader, an adviser to Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian prime minister, the situation is particularly acute in the East Jerusalem area.

He noted that Israel’s policy of refusing building permits to many of the 250,000 Palestinians in East Jerusalem has resulted in the classification of 20,000 city homes as illegal since the occupation began in 1967. Last year alone, the Jerusalem municipality issued more than 1,000 demolition orders for “illegal dwellings”. It is believed that three out of every four Palestinian homes in the city are now built without a permit.

“Illegal building is simply a pretext for destroying Palestinian families’ homes and lives,” says Jeff Halper, head of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD).

“The demolitions are part of a policy to stop the natural expansion of Palestinian communities in and around Jerusalem, freeing up the maximum amount of land for use by Israeli settlers,” Halper continues. “The demolitions increase the pressure on Palestinians to move into the West Bank, so that they will lose their residency rights in the city.”

In an act of defiance, Halper’s organization and 40 international volunteers helped the Elayans to rebuild their home this week in an attempt to highlight what the committee calls the “quiet ethnic cleansing” of East Jerusalem. The work was carried out during a two-week summer camp funded by the Spanish government. Madrid also paid for 18 Spanish volunteers to participate.

“This is the first time a government has supported the rebuilding of an ‘illegal’ Palestinian home demolished by the Israeli authorities,” Halper says.

The issue of house demolitions is back in the spotlight now after two separate incidents in July in which Palestinians, both of whom were residents of Jerusalem, rampaged through the city in bulldozers, killing three Israelis and injuring many more. Although the two Palestinians were shot dead at the scene, Israeli officials, including Ehud Barak, the defence minister, are calling for their homes to be destroyed, making their families homeless, to deter others from following in their path.

Such punitive destruction of homes was stopped in 2005, under the threat of legal challenge, but not before some 270 homes were razed on security grounds in the first years of the intifada.

According to Halper, however, the use of demolitions against Palestinians accused of illegal building is a far more significant problem. “We estimate that there have been at least 18,000 homes destroyed during the four decades of occupation.”

In fact, Halper believes the true number of demolitions is likely to be double the official figure. Many razings are unrecorded, carried out by Palestinians themselves fearing a heavy fine if the Israeli army enforces the demolition order.

“Most demolitions are of multi-storey buildings that are home to several families, meaning that well in excess of 100,000 Palestinians may have been made homeless by Israeli administrative policies,” he said.

Since its founding a decade ago, the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions has rebuilt 150 Palestinian homes as part of its campaign to bring the issue of demolitions to the attention of Israeli Jews and the international community. It has been an uphill struggle, Mr Halper said. The European Union, which recently upgraded its relations with Israel, announced this month that it was withdrawing ICAHD’s funding.

But this year’s work camp may make the continuing demolition of homes in Anata a little harder, Halper reckons “it’s one thing to destroy a home supposedly built illegally by a Palestinian, but another to destroy one built with money provided by the Spanish government.”

Halper also believes that, by exposing such groups as the summer camp volunteers to the Palestinians’ plight, public perceptions may begin to change.

Alonso Santos, a 21-year-old architecture student from Madrid, said he learnt much from seeing at close hand Palestinian life under occupation.

“It was an eye-opener to realise that the principles of urban planning we are taught at the university are being used by the Israelis, but for exactly the opposite purpose from the one usually intended. The planning rules here are designed not to improve the Palestinians’ lives but to make them more miserable.”

The volunteers were hosted at a peace centre in Anata erected on the site of Salim Shawamreh’s home, which was demolished four times by Israeli authorities. Known as Arabiya House, after Shawamreh’s wife, the building is decorated on one side with a mural depicting the death of Rachel Corrie, the US peace activist, by an Israeli bulldozer that had been demolishing homes in Gaza.

“Imagine your children leaving in the morning for school and returning later in the day to find their home, their whole world, has disappeared while they were gone,” Shawamreh said. “It’s happened to my children four times. It’s cruelty beyond words.”

Shawamreh, whose family were refugees from the northern Negev in 1948, said he and ICAHD established the peace centre to highlight the plight of the Palestinians in Anata. Today the house is overlooked by an Israeli police station across the valley, part of the advance growth of a large Jewish settlement, Maale Adumum, that Palestinians and Israeli human rights groups believe is cutting the West Bank in two.

The peace centre is also close both to the snaking route of Israel’s separation wall and to a new bypass road – part of what critics call an apartheid road system – being built to ensure that Jewish settlers can drive separately from Palestinians across the West Bank.

Arabiya House is under a temporary reprieve from demolition while Israeli courts determine its status.

Halper says the judges have been reluctant to confirm the destruction order because his group has threatened to take the case to the International Court of Justice if the ruling goes against it.

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.

This article originally appeared in The National (http://www.thenational.ae), published in Abu Dhabi.

The Big Lie

By Francis A. Boyle

I am not Arab. I am not Jewish. I am not Palestinian. I am not Israeli. I am Irish American. Our People have no proverbial "horse in this race." What follows is to the best of my immediate recollection:

The Big Lie

Growing up in the United States during the late 1950s and early 1960s while strongly supporting the just struggle of African Americans for civil rights, I was brainwashed at school as well as by the mainstream news media and popular culture to be just as pro-Israel as everyone else in America. Then came the 1967 Middle East War. At that time, my assessment of the situation was that Israel had attacked these Arab countries first, stolen their lands, and then driven out their respective peoples from their homes. I then realized that everything I had been told about Israel was "The Big Lie." Israel was Goliath, not David.

I resolved to study the Middle East in more detail in order to figure out what the Truth really was.

Of course by then I had already figured out that everything I was being told about the Vietnam War also constituted The Big Lie. The same was true for U.S. military intervention into Latin America after the Johnson administrations gratuitous invasion of the Dominican Republic. The same for the pie-in-the-sky "Camelot" peddled by the Kennedy administration after the Bay of Pigs invasion/fiasco and its self-induced Cuban Missile Crisis that was a near-miss for nuclear Armageddon. So I just added the Middle East to the list of international subjects that I needed to pay more attention to in my life.

Chicago

... By the end of Professor Binders course in the Winter of 1970, I had become convinced of three basic propositions: (1) that the world had inflicted a terrible injustice upon the Palestinian People in 1947-1948; (2) that there will be no peace in the Middle East until this injustice was somehow rectified; and (3) that the Palestinian People were entitled to an independent nation state of their own. I have publicly maintained these positions for the past three decades at great cost to myself.

In particular, I have been accused of being everything but a child molester because of my public support for the Palestinian People. I have seen every known principle of Academic Integrity and Academic Freedom violated in order to suppress the basic rights of the Palestinian People. In fact, there is no such thing as Academic Integrity and Academic Freedom in the United States of America when it comes to asserting the rights of the Palestinian People under international law.

... By comparison, Harvards Center for Middle East Studies was then basically operating as a front organization for the . and probably the Mossad as well. No point anyone wasting their time studying Middle East Politics at Harvard.

Nevertheless, I entered Harvard in September of 1971 in order to pursue a J.D. at the Harvard Law School and a . in Political Science at the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, Department of Government. The latter was the same doctoral program that had produced Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Samuel Huntington, and numerous other Machiavellian war-mongers trained by Harvard to "manage" the U.S. global empire. In other words, Harvard trained me to be one of these American Imperial Managers: "There but for the Grace of God go I!"

For the next seven years at Harvard I was quite vocal in my support for the Palestinian People, including and especially their basic human rights, their right to self-determination, and their right to an independent nation state of their own. ...

While in residence as an Associate at the Harvard Center for International Affairs (CFIA) from 1976-1978, I also came into contact with Walid Khalidi. I was present for the dramatic off-the-record confrontation between him and Shimon Peres at the standing CFIA Seminar on "American Foreign Policy" then conducted by Stanley Hoffmann at their old headquarters on 6 Divinity Avenue. Peres refused to budge even one inch no matter how flexible Khalidi was. A harbinger for the Middle East Peace Negotiations over a decade later.

As a most loyal and grateful Harvard alumnus (J.D. magna cum laude, A.M., Ph.D.), I must nevertheless state that it is shameful and shameless that Harvard never granted a tenured full professorship to Walid Khalidi because he is a Palestinian despite the fact that he is universally recognized as one of the worlds foremost experts on the Middle East. This gets back to my previous observation that there is no point studying Middle East Politics at Harvard. ...

more here:
http://www.counterpunch.org/boylebiglie.html

UN suspends Gaza food deliveries

The UN has suspended food aid deliveries in the besieged Gaza Strip due to fuel shortages.

The United Nations Works and Relief Agency (UNRWA), which distributes food and essential commodities to nearly two-thirds of Gaza's population, had earlier warned it expected to run out of fuel for its lorries by Thursday afternoon.

The last shipment of fuel to Gaza by Israel - the sole distributor of it to the territory - came before Palestinian fighters attacked an Israeli fuel depot on April 9.

An emergency shipment of fuel for UNRWA lorries from within Gaza was reportedly intercepted on Thursday by angry strawberry farmers who needed the supplies for irrigation and refrigeration.

"Its something that we've been warning about since early April, and that is what is so tragic," John Ging, head of UNRWA in the Gaza Strip, told Al Jazeera.

"Now we're at a stand still - we just don't have the fuel to operate the trucks.

"We have the food, and we certainly have hundreds of thousands of desperate people who need it. But this is the situation tonight."

'Gaza first'

Israel has besieged Gaza since fighters from Hamas's armed wing routed Palestinian Authority forces loyal to rival Fatah there in June.

Hamas, however, says "big progress" has been made in indirect negotiations with Israel towards a temporary ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, and the easing of the blockade.

Ghazi Hamad, a Hamas spokesman, told Al Jazeera that a month-long deal would aim to begin improving the situation in Gaza first, and then expand to the West Bank as well.

He said: "I think the key condition for this ceasefire is that Israel should re-open all the crossings into Gaza, especially the Rafah crossing, in order to allow people and goods to move in and out and to lift the embargo on the Palestinian people.

"Without opening the crossings, there will be no means for the ceasefire."

In exchange, Hamas would agree to stop firing rockets into southern Israel and attacking crossing points.

David Chater, Al Jazeera's correspondent in Gaza, said while Hamas and other Palestinian resistance groups in the Strip may agree to the deal, it remains to be seen what action Israel will take.

He said: "There are many difficulties involved on the Israeli side, such as who exactly will control the crossing points, especially at Rafah.

"There is a lot of talking still to do on the Israeli side before they accept these conditions."

The preliminary deal aims to secure a one-month ceasefire, although reports from Cairo have said it might be extended to a year-long agreement.

'Collective punishment'

Speaking a day earlier of the deteriorating humanitarian situation in Gaza, Robert Serry, UN special co-ordinator for the Middle East peace process, said it was "wrong for Israel to punish a civilian population for attacks" carried out by Palestinian fighters.

Twenty per cent of ambulances in the Strip are completely out of fuel, according to the UN, while another 60 per cent are due to run out of supplies in less than a week.

Fuel reserves at hospitals have, meanwhile, dropped below critical level and the central pharmacy has run out of fuel for refrigeration.

Serry said: "I call on Israel to restore fuel supplies to Gaza, and to allow the passage of humanitarian assistance and commercial supplies, sufficient to allow the functioning of all basic services and for Palestinians to live their daily lives."

But he also called on Hamas "to immediately end attacks against the crossings, whether by it or any other faction or group", to encourage the resumption of fuel deliveries.

"These attacks endanger both international and Israeli civilians, and cannot possibly contribute to Palestinian efforts to ease the blockade of Gaza," he said.

UNRWA delivers aid to about 860,000 of Gaza's 1.4 million population, with the UN World Food Programme delivering food and essential items to an additional 270,000.

http://www.uruknet.de/?p=m43375&hd=&size=1&l=e

EU slams Israel over Gaza massacre

EU has condemned Israel's disproportionate use of force in the Gaza Strip, urging restraint by all parties in the escalating violence.

The European Union has criticized what it called "disproportionate use of force'' by the Israeli military in Gaza after nearly 100 Palestinians were killed in just four days.

In a statement, the EU urged Israel to halt activities that endanger civilians saying they were "contrary to international law".

It also called for an immediate end to Palestinian rocket attacks on Israeli territory and insisted that the peace process should not be interrupted.

"The (EU) presidency condemns the recent disproportionate use of force by the Israeli forces against (the) Palestinian population in Gaza and urges Israel to exercise maximum restraint and refrain from all activities that endanger civilians. Such activities are contrary to international law," said the statement.

The condemnation came a day after Israeli forces killed 64 people including children and other civilians, in a land and air blitz in the Gaza Strip.

Meanwhile, in a statement the UN Security Council similarly condemned the Zionist regime for the killings and urged it to halt its attacks against Palestinians.

But Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert said the Zionist regime had no intention of stopping its assault on Gaza and rejected criticism that it was using excessive force in the Hamas-run strip.

MSH/BGH

http://www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=45546&sectionid=351020605