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Viewing all posts tagged "palestine"
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Blair: Gaza’s great betrayer
Fair enough, but the international consensus is still flawed. A two-state solution would isolate the Palestinians even more, economically, politically, physically. Instead, there should be a single state in Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, with citizenship and equal rights for all inhabitants of all three territories. It’s the only practicable solution considering the realities on the ground.
It’s more than a year since Israel launched its immoral attack on Gaza and Palestinians are still living on the verge of a humanitarian disaster. So what has Tony Blair done to further peace in the region? Virtually nothing, argues the historian Avi Shlaim.
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The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees, tending to the needs of four million Palestinian refugees, stated that Gaza had been “bombed back, not to the Stone Age, but to the mud age”; its inhabitants reduced to building homes from mud after the fierce 22-day offensive.
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Meanwhile, the so-called peace process cannot be revived because Israel refuses to freeze settlement expansion on the West Bank. Prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu recently agreed to a temporary freeze of 10 months, but this does not apply to the 3,000 pre-approved housing units to be built on the West Bank or to any part of Greater Jerusalem. It’s like two men negotiating the division of a pizza while one continues to gobble it up.
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Blair has totally failed to fulfil the official role of the envoy “to promote an end to the conflict in conformity with the Roadmap”, largely for reasons beyond his control. The most important of these is Israel’s determination to perpetuate the isolation and the de-development of Gaza and deny the Palestinian people a small piece of land – 22% of Mandate-era Palestine, to be precise – on which to live in freedom and dignity.
Partly, however, Blair’s failure is due to his own personal limitations; his inability to grasp that the fundamental issue in this tragic conflict is not Israeli security but Palestinian national rights, and that concerted and sustained international pressure is required to compel Israel to recognise these rights. The core issue cannot be avoided: there can be no settlement of the conflict without an end to the Israeli occupation. There is international consensus for a two-state solution, but Israel rejects it and Blair has been unable or unwilling to use the Quartet to enforce it.
Read the full article at the Guardian. Thanks Walt for the heads up!
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”The bloodletting in Gaza has roused the world’s conscience. The prospects have never been more propitious for galvanizing the public not just to mourn but to act. We have truth on our side, and we have justice on our side. These become mighty weapons once we have learned how to wield them effectively. The challenge now is two-fold: to master, and inform the public of, the unvarnished record of what happened in Gaza; and then to mobilize the public around a settlement of the conflict that all of enlightened opinion has embraced—but that Israel and the United States, standing in virtual isolation, have rejected.
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This shot from Ms. Utz’s new gallery makes me smile.
Beyond being a point of contention in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, the West Bank separation wall has also become a place where activists, street artists, tourists, and locals have come to express themselves.
Take a look at some of the art and political graffiti of the West Bank separation wall.
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What better way to get warmed up for the England-USA match than watch a play about a man and his wife who is stuck on the toilet during the Luftwaffe bombing of an ancient Basque town during the Spanish Civil War, the complete proceeds of which will go to Palestine? I can’t think of a better way, so come too! Click here to buy tickets
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Quick thoughts: US veto at the United Nations
Apartheid, meaning “apartness” Afrikaans, refers to the legally and physically enforced system of racial segregation and discrimination that existed in South Africa as official state policy for the large part of the second half of the 20th century, although the term can also refer generally to any similar policy of racial separation.
Israel must be the target of the same kind of global movement that finally ended apartheid in South Africa. The US veto yesterday at the UN Security Council signaled, if nothing else, the unwillingness of the US government to be part of, much less spearhead, such a global movement.
The idea that the Middle East situation is complicated, that there are moral ambiguities, is problematic. It’s not complicated. It’s not ambiguous. It’s a simple question of whether or not you agree with or tolerate oppression. This is not a political question, a matter of left versus right, but simply a question of why one would support or tolerate oppression.
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