Congressman Brian Baird Views Destruction in Gaza – Calls for Immediate Relief and Change in Policy
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- Written by Brian Baird (D-WA-03) Brian Baird (D-WA-03)
- Published: 20 February 2009 20 February 2009
- Hits: 4132 4132
For Immediate Release
February 19th 2009
Brian Views Destruction in Gaza – Calls for Immediate Relief and Change in Policy
Washington, D.C. – Two members of Congress, Brian Baird (D-WA-03), and Keith Ellison, (D-MN-05), visited Gaza on Thursday to view firsthand the destruction from recent Israeli air and ground attacks and to meet with international and local relief agencies. This visit, which did not have the official sanction of the Obama Administration, is the first time anyone from the U.S. government has entered Gaza in more than three years.
Prior to Gaza, both Congressmen met with the chief negotiator of the Palestinian Authority, Dr. Saeb Erekat, as well as with Dr. Riad Malki Foreign Minister of the Palestinian Authority. On Friday, Baird and Ellison will tour the Israeli towns of Sderot and Ashkelon, which have been the target of numerous rockets before and throughout the recent attacks launched from within the Gaza strip.
“Staff from the U.S. State Department advised us of security concerns for our own safety, and we are well aware of the sensitive political issues involved in this visit,” said both Congressmen in an official release.
“We believe it is important to be here to see what happened for ourselves, to meet with people who have been affected, and to express our concern and support,” said Congressman Baird.
“We also want to better understand what can and must be done to recover from the destruction, address the underlying issues, and work toward a lasting, just and peaceful resolution,” added Congressman Ellison.
After spending the day visiting various locations within Gaza and meeting with civilians and relief workers, Baird and Ellison were deeply affected by what they had seen and heard.
“The stories about the children affected me the most,” said Ellison. “No parent, or anyone who cares for kids, can remain unmoved by what Brian and I saw here.”
“The amount of physical destruction and the depth of human suffering here is staggering” said Baird, “Entire neighborhoods have been destroyed, schools completely leveled, fundamental water, sewer, and electricity facilities hit and relief agencies heavily damaged. The personal stories of children being killed in their homes or schools, entire families wiped out, and relief workers prevented from evacuating the wounded are heart wrenching – what went on here, and what is continuing to go on, is shocking and troubling beyond words.”
Inquiring about the status of relief efforts, the Congressmen learned that some aid material has been allowed in since the intensity of the attacks lessened a month ago, but much is still being blocked by the Israeli defense forces. Examples of aid that has been banned by the Israeli Government include: lentils, macaroni, tomato paste, lentils and other food. Basic building materials, generator fuel and parts to repair damaged water treatment equipment have also been kept out.
“If this had happened in our own country, there would be national outrage and an appeal for urgent assistance. We are glad that the Obama administration acted quickly to send much needed funding for this effort but the arbitrary and unreasonable Israeli limitations on food and repair essentials is unacceptable and indefensible. People, innocent children, women and non-combatants, are going without water, food and sanitation, while the things they so desperately need are sitting in trucks at the border, being denied permission to go in” said Baird and Ellison.
The Congressmen’s concerns about treatment of Palestinians were not limited to Gaza. They also visited Palestinian hospitals that treat patients from East Jerusalem and the West Bank. There they met with doctors, nurses and hospital directors who described how official Israeli policies and restricted border checkpoints make it exceedingly difficult and expensive for patients, nurses, medical technicians, and other essential personnel to reach the hospital to receive or provide care.
“It’s hard for anyone in our country to imagine how it must feel to have a sick child who needs urgent care or is receiving chemotherapy or dialysis, then be forced to take a needlessly lengthy route, walk rather than drive, and wait in lines as long as two hours simply to get to the hospital. As a health care professional myself, I found this profoundly troubling, no, actually it’s beyond that, it is outrageous,” said Baird.
Responding to this and other issues the Congressman emphasized that fundamental changes and solutions are needed beyond the immediate challenges in Gaza.
“The first and most urgent priority must be helping the people in Gaza. At the same time, the rocket attacks against Israeli cities must stop immediately. Just as the people of Gaza should not be subject to what they have experienced the Israeli civilians should not have to live in fear of constant and indiscriminate rocketing. The entire region and the international community must recommit itself to making the difficult but necessary changes to bring about lasting and just peace and security for the region. President Obama has made important and encouraging initiatives, now it is up to leaders and citizens here to move forward toward that shared goal”
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ACTION: Friday Noon-2pm, Feb. 20th, Downtown Portland
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- Written by AUPHR AUPHR
- Published: 19 February 2009 19 February 2009
- Hits: 4480 4480
Gaza Still Under Siege
* 50% of Children are anemic
* 90% of the Population depends on food assistance
* 80% of Water is not safe
* 27% of Children suffer stunted growth
Please Join Us Friday Feb 20th
Anytime Between 12-2 pm
Take 15 min to deliver a message in person to Senator Wyden at the Federal
Building at SW 3rd & SW Madison, Downtown Portland, Oregon
A post card with a picture of a child from Gaza will be provided with a plea
to end the inhumane siege and a space to write a personal appeal to
Senator Wyden
Wael Elasady
Co-founder of SUPER
Owner <http://www.liberalarab.com> www.liberalarab.com
Students United for Palestinian Equal Rights - SUPER
114 Smith Memorial Student Union
1825 SW Broadway St.
Phone: 602-446-9444
Fresh violence shakes Gaza Strip, More Settlements in West Bank
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- Written by BB BB
- Published: 16 February 2009 16 February 2009
- Hits: 4324 4324
[PHOTO: Mushroom cloud over Rafah (13/02/2009)]
Israel has continued to target tunnels in the smuggling hotspot of Rafah
Israeli jets have bombed tunnels on Gaza's border with Egypt, after two rockets were fired at southern Israel.
The Israeli military said the air attack targeted a tunnel used for smuggling arms into Gaza.
A little-known militant group called Hezbollah Brigades Palestine claimed responsibility for the rocket attacks, which caused no casualties.
The violence came amid moves to turn ceasefires that ended Israel's 22-day offensive in Gaza into a lasting truce.
Two rockets fired from Gaza landed in Israel on Monday morning, the Israeli military said.
Several hours later, Israeli jets bombed a border area in the southern Gaza town of Rafah.
Unexploded munitions
Palestinian officials said a 25-year-old Gaza man was killed and five people were injured in an explosion in northern Gaza near the border with Israel.
The explosion was apparently caused when an unexploded munition was thrown into a fire being used to melt down scrap metal.
Sporadic violence has continued between Israel and Gaza since Israel ended its offensive on 18 January and the Hamas movement declared a ceasefire.
Egypt has been trying to mediate a long-term truce. About 1,300 Palestinians and 13 Israelis were killed in the 22 days of violence.
Hamas wants Israel to open Gaza's blockaded border crossings, but Israel said on Saturday that it would only do so if Hamas released an Israeli soldier it helped capture in 2006.
Hamas wants Israel to release hundreds of top-level Palestinian militant prisoners in return for Cpl Gilad Shalit's freedom.
Settlement move
Separately, a leading Israeli newspaper says the Israeli civil administration in the West Bank has designated an area of 172 hectares (425 acres) as state land.
Haaretz says the decision could pave the way for some 2,500 new settlement homes to be built.
However, several steps of government approval are required for building work to begin, which the newspaper says means construction is still a long way off.
Israeli has pledged to freeze settlement activity on occupied land, but it has continued to expand existing settlements, built in defiance of international law since 1967.
Right-wing parties which fared well in Israeli elections on 10 February are strong supporters of the settlement movement, which is seen as a major obstacle to the two-state solution supported by the US.
The settlement of Efrat, south of Jerusalem, is at the centre of the latest expansion plans. The mayor says he wants the 1,600-family settlement to grow to 30,000 residents.
More than 400,000 Israeli settlers live in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, which Israel captured in the 1967 war.
Israel lurches into fascism
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- Written by Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada
- Published: 14 February 2009 14 February 2009
- Hits: 4081 4081
This has never been true, and makes even less sense as Israeli parties begin coalition talks after Tuesday's election. Yes, the "peace camp" helped launch the "peace process," but it did much more to undermine the chances for a just settlement.
In 1993, Labor prime minister Yitzhak Rabin signed the Oslo accords. Ambiguities in the agreement -- which included no mention of "self-determination" or "independence" for Palestinians, or even "occupation" -- made it easier to clinch a short-term deal. But confrontation over irreconcilable expectations was inevitable. While Palestinians hoped the Palestinian Authority, created by the accord, would be the nucleus of an independent state, Israel viewed it as little more than a native police force to suppress resistance to continued occupation and colonial settlement in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Collaboration with Israel has always been the measure by which any Palestinian leader is judged to be a "peace partner." Rabin, according to Shlomo Ben-Ami, a former Israeli foreign minister, "never thought this [Oslo] will end in a full-fledged Palestinian state." He was right.
Throughout the "peace process," Israeli governments, regardless of who led them, expanded Jewish-only settlements in the heart of the West Bank, the territory supposed to form the bulk of the Palestinian state. In the 1990s, Ehud Barak's Labor-led government actually approved more settlement expansion than the Likud-led government that preceded it headed by Benjamin Netanyahu.
Barak, once considered "dovish," promoted a bloodthirsty image in the campaign, bolstered by the massacres of Gaza civilians he directed as defense minister. "Who has he ever shot?" Barak quipped derisively about Avigdor Lieberman, the leader of the proto-fascist Yisrael Beitenu party, in an attempt to paint the latter as a lightweight.
Today, Lieberman's party, which beat Labor into third place, will play a decisive role in a government. An immigrant who came to Israel from the former Soviet republic of Moldova, Lieberman was once a member of the outlawed racist party Kach that calls for expelling all Palestinians.
Yisrael Beitenu's manifesto was that 1.5 million Arab Palestinian citizens of Israel (indigenous survivors or descendants of the Palestinian majority ethnically cleansed in 1948) be subjected to a loyalty oath. If they don't swear allegiance to the "Jewish state" they would lose their citizenship and be forced from the land of their birth, joining millions of already stateless Palestinians in exile or in Israeli-controlled ghettos. In a move instigated by Lieberman but supported by Livni's allegedly "centrist" Kadima, the Knesset recently voted to ban Arab parties from participating in elections. Although the high court overturned it in time for the vote, it is an ominous sign of what may follow.
Lieberman, who previously served as deputy prime minister, has a long history of racist and violent incitement. Prior to Israel's recent attack, for example, he demanded Israel subject Palestinians to the brutal and indiscriminate violence Russia used in Chechyna. He also called for Arab Knesset members who met with officials from Hamas to be executed.
But it's too easy to make him the bogeyman. Israel's narrow political spectrum now consists at one end of the former "peace camp" that never halted the violent expropriation of Palestinian land for Jewish settlements and boasts with pride of the war crimes in Gaza, and at the other, a surging far-right whose "solutions" vary from apartheid to outright ethnic cleansing.
What does not help is brazen western hypocrisy. Already the US State Department spokesman affirmed that the Obama administration would work with whatever coalition emerged from Israel's "thriving democracy" and promised that the US would not interfere in Israel's "internal politics." Despite US President Barack Obama's sweet talk about a new relationship with the Arab world, few will fail to notice the double standard. In 2006, Hamas won a democratic election in the occupied territories, observed numerous unilateral or agreed truces that were violated by Israel, offered Israel a generation-long truce to set the stage for peace, and yet it is still boycotted by the US and European Union.
Worse, the US sponsored a failed coup against Hamas and continues to arm and train the anti-Hamas militias of Mahmoud Abbas, whose term as Palestinian Authority president expired on 9 January. As soon as he took office, Obama reaffirmed this boycott of Palestinian democracy.
The clearest message from Israel's election is that no Zionist party can solve Israel's basic conundrum and no negotiations will lead to a two-state solution. Israel could only be created as a "Jewish state" by the forced removal of the non-Jewish majority Palestinian population. As Palestinians once again become the majority in a country that has defied all attempts at partition, the only way to maintain Jewish control is through ever more brazen violence and repression of resistance (see Gaza). Whatever government emerges is certain to preside over more settlement-building, racial discrimination and escalating violence.
There are alternatives that have helped end what once seemed like equally intractable and bloody conflicts: a South African-style one-person one-vote democracy, or Northern Ireland-style power-sharing. Only under a democratic system according rights to all the people of the country will elections have the power to transform people's futures.
But Israel today is lurching into open fascism. It is utterly disingenuous to continue to pretend -- as so many do -- that its failed and criminal leaders hold the key to getting out of the morass. Instead of waiting for them to form a coalition, we must escalate the international civil society campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions to force Israelis to choose a saner path.
Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah is author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse (Metropolitan Books, 2006). A version of this article first appeared on the Guardian's Comment is Free website with the headline "No peace for Israel."
Prospects for Middle East Peace
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- Written by Harry Shaw, CNI Harry Shaw, CNI
- Published: 14 February 2009 14 February 2009
- Hits: 4263 4263
Prospects for Middle East Peace
Part I: Gaza Realities
By Harry Shaw
In a recent op-ed piece in the New York Times, Rashid Khalidi, Professor of Arab studies at Columbia University, stated: "Nearly everything you have been led to believe about Gaza is wrong." Indeed! There is no more appropriate launching pad for an examination of the prospects for peace in the Middle East than Khalidi's charge. Israel has avoided deserved condemnation for its conduct of the Gaza War by hiding behind a screen of misinformation and falsifications of the true story and denying access to journalists who could witness and report the truth about Israel's brutal assault on the people of Gaza.
Part I: Gaza Realities, of this three part series, reviews the background to events in Gaza and the consequences of a war of grossly disproportionate casualties: over 1,300 Gazans dead, many women and children, and some 5,500 injured and wounded, along with several billions in damage to homes and public structures, at the cost of 13 Israeli lives, a few injured and wounded, and minor damage to buildings.
Israel justifies its war on Gaza as a response to rocket attacks and on the false claim that the Islamic Palestinian movement, Hamas, is primarily a terrorist organization, beyond the law, that seized power from the legitimate Palestinian Authority (PA) when Israel withdrew its settlers and occupying troops in 2005. It is not commonly known that after
the Israeli withdrawal but before the 2006 elections, James Wolfensohn, former World Bank president, was engaged to draw up plans to bolster the Gaza Strip's isolated economy. But his plan foundered, in part because it was sabotaged by the Bush administration official in charge. Concurrently, Secretary of State Rice and her staff schemed to manipulate the 2006 election to ensure a victory for the rival Fatah movement at a time of growing Hamas popularity.
When these American schemes backfired and Hamas won the democratic elections
to the Palestinian Legislative Council, taking control of the Gaza government,
Secretary of State Rice responded by banning all contact with "terrorist" Hamas and supported Israel's economic blockade of Gaza, which clearly violates Israel's Geneva
Convention responsibilities as an occupying power for the welfare of the civil population. Israel's siege of the 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza was, and continues to be, a serious violation of international law.
Although Hamas is widely represented by the press [as] a terrorist organization, Tom Segev of the Israeli daily, Ha'aretz, considers it "a genuine national and religious movement" that "cannot be bombed away." Israel and its supporters have long traded on Hamas rhetoric about destroying the Zionist state, as if a Palestine under Hamas control would be an existential threat to the strongest military power in the Middle East. As for Hamas's refusal to recognize Israel as a precondition to negotiations, it reflects a shrewd
understanding that "recognition" implies acceptance of borders which Israel declines to define while it continues to "create facts" on the West Bank that prejudice future
negotiations. Hamas insists on Israel's return to the 1967 borders and has offered to extend an Egyptian arranged truce for up to ten years if Israel accepts the 1967 borders.
Clearly, events in Gaza, including Israel's recent military assault there, are intimately
linked to the broader Palestinian-Israeli conflict over the division of land and the terms of a two-state solution of that conflict. The ultimate purposes of the bombing and attempt to break Hamas's hold there are sensed by Gazans, like the Fatah member who character-
ized the Israeli attack as "War on the Palestinian state, not against a Party." Israel's Gaza War was not about Hamas rockets but about larger issues.
Israel has blamed Hamas for breaking a six-month ceasefire agreed to last June. But
Israel failed to honor its own commitment to ease the blockade it had imposed on Gaza since Hamas's 2006 election victory, a regime that has inflicted grievous harm on the people of Gaza: denial of electricity, fuel, medical supplies; serious sanitation problems, such as pollution of the water supply; economic collapse accompanied by widespread unemployment, malnutrition, and depression. The result: a humanitarian crisis of serious proportions.
When, in November, 2008, Israel violated the truce with an attack across the border that killed six Hamas people, Hamas resumed rocket attacks which Israel used as the pretext for a long-planned massive assault on Gaza, carefully timed to take place during the last days of the feckless Bush Administration and before the January 20 Inauguration. But it
might have been a different story if Israel had not been so determined to teach Hamas and the Palestinian people a lesson, instead following a different script as described by Brigadier General Shmuel Zakai, former commander of the IDF's Gaza Division, in a column by Roger Cohen in the January 15 New York Review:
We could have eased the siege over the Gaza Strip, in such a way that the Palestinians,
Hamas, would understand that holding fire served their interests. But when you create
a tahadiyeh [truce]. and the economic pressure on the Strip continues, it's obvious that
Hamas will try to reach an improved tahadiyeh, and their way to achieve this is re-
sumed Qassam fire.
We now know from Robert Pastor, who accompanied former president Jimmy Carter in a Dec, 14, 2008, meeting in Damascus with Hamas political leader Khaled Meshal that Hamas offered to resume the ceasefire in return for Israel's lifting the siege of Gaza and that Pastor promptly conveyed that offer to the Israeli military. There was no answer from the Israelis who launched the Gaza War two weeks later.
Part II of this series will examine how the situation in the West Bank is likely to affect prospects for Middle East peace.
Harry Shaw, PhD., has taught international law at the University of Virginia and George
Washington University. He lives near Easton.
Published February 11, 2009, by The Star Democrat, Easton, Maryland