Posts Tagged ‘Intifada
How Israel bought off UN’s war crimes probe
Jonathan Cook
[EI] Israel celebrated at the weekend its success at the United Nations in forcing the Palestinians to defer demands that the International Criminal Court investigate allegations of war crimes committed by Israel during its winter assault on the Gaza Strip.
The about-turn, following vigorous lobbying from Israel and the United States, appears to have buried [...]
Bring on The Third Intifada!
On many occasions, we that are born free (all is relative) find it hard to understand Palestinian mentality. Just this week, I’ve had exhausting debates about the safety of children, during the Bil’in weekly protest. Though I can’t defend or agree with allowing your children to be near the fence, when the army is 101% likely to fire gas grenades, I firmly believe that mindsets under occupation are something we don’t fully understand. Maybe when I’m a mother to a child that’s been snatched from his bed at night, arrested, beaten and interrogated, I’ll have a different perspective on danger.
Israel´s Lies, London Review of Books special
WRITTEN BY Henry Siegman
Western governments and most of the Western media have accepted a number of Israeli claims justifying the military assault on Gaza: that Hamas consistently violated the six-month truce that Israel observed and then refused to extend it; that Israel therefore had no choice but to destroy Hamas’s capacity to launch missiles into Israeli towns; that Hamas is a terrorist organisation, part of a global jihadi network; and that Israel has acted not only in its own defence but on behalf of an international struggle by Western democracies against this network.
I am not aware of a single major American newspaper, radio station or TV channel whose coverage of the assault on Gaza questions this version of events. Criticism of Israel’s actions, if any (and there has been none from the Bush administration), has focused instead on whether the IDF’s carnage is proportional to the threat it sought to counter, and whether it is taking adequate measures to prevent civilian casualties.
Ramzy Baroud – Gaza, A New Middle East Indeed
As Israel unleashed its military fury against Lebanon for several weeks in July-August 2006, it had one major objective: to permanently ‘extract’ Hezbollah from the South as a fighting force, and to undermine it as a rising political movement, capable of disrupting, if not overshadowing the ‘friendly’ and ‘moderate’ political regime in Beirut.
As Israeli bombs fell, and with them hundreds of Lebanese civilians, and much of the country’s infrastructure, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice sprung into action. She too had one major objective: to delay a ceasefire, which the rest of the international community, save the US and Britain, desperately demanded. Rice, who is merely, but faithfully reiterating the Bush Administration’s policy, hoped that the Israeli bombs would succeed in achieving what her government’s grand policies failed to achieve, namely a New Middle East.
Dima Hamdan – The Third Intifada… Is it time to fight back with stones?
On the first Friday of the Israeli onslaught on Gaza, I was watching rushes coming in from Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, waiting for something to happen…
Hamas had called for a “day of anger” to protest Israel’s atrocities, and we were expecting clashes to break out between Palestinians and Israeli soldiers after Friday prayers.
Sure enough, there were clashes, and demonstrators have taken to the streets in several Palestinian cities, as well as Arab cities in the 1948-occupied territories. I thought it would gradually culminate into a mass-uprising… the third Intifada… but so far, it hasn’t.