Thursday, June 08, 2006
Olmert hits the jackpot
May 27, 2006Ehud Olmert, the newly elected Prime Minister of Israel, arrived in the United States like a conqueror and he was received with more honors and pomp than bestowed upon royalties. His visit this past week was a continuation of the election campaign and he worked the media selling his ideas. The other side to the story was totally absent from the debate, and for all intents and purposes the Palestinian story has disappeared from the American political scene.
Olmert sought the mandate of the American people for his unilateral disengagement plan and he got it. He marketed the idea as a great sacrifice by Israel in the name of peace, and as the most humane solution for the Palestinians. He was “concerned” about the humanitarian crisis in the occupied territories and never once did he mention that he had ordered the blockade that is causing it. Throughout his three-day visit the much-dreaded ‘O’ word (Occupation) never came up in anybody’s jargon.
If your community commands enormous political influence in the United States, like the Jewish community, this is the perfect time to extract concessions from the beleaguered Bush. His weakness at home strengthened the negotiating hand of Israel; as if it needed any more strengthening. Olmert, in fact, got more than he had hoped for. Bush gave away the store, so to speak. He gave Olmert everything he had asked for in return for one lousy meeting with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. The irony of it all is that the future of Palestine is in the hands of Bush and he gives away so cheaply what does not belong to him. He blessed the Olmert plan that extends to 2010. Bush even sold the negotiating ability of the next US President.
Olmert spent six hours at the White House talking and dining privately with Bush. During those hours a major shift in US policy towards the Middle East took place. At their joint press conference Bush praised Olmert for his “bold ideas”. The same day the US Congress groveled to Olmert by passing a resolution that banned all US aid to the Palestinian Authority and barred its members from entering America. It was a sad day for America to see its leaders trampling over each other in a mad stampede to please Israel.
Olmert received the greatest privilege, only reserved for blood allies like Britain’s Tony Blair, in addressing the most powerful deliberative body in the world, the US Congress, on Wednesday. In his speech, he extended his hand out and urged the Palestinians not to “ignore our outstretched hand for peace”. At that very moment Palestinians were experiencing Olmert’s hand of “peace” and it came in the form of bullets. Israeli army units were raiding downtown Ramallah and Olmert’s “outstretched hand for peace” was shooting Palestinians indiscriminately. They killed 4, wounded 60 and arrested a resistance leader. Such incursions are commonplace and part of the every day life under occupation. And this is what Palestinians are resisting. They have no resistance towards peace.
In his speech to the Congress, Olmert emphasized the common values shared by the two nations. He said “the unbreakable ties between our two nations extend far beyond mutual interests. They are based on our shared goals and values stemming from the very essence of our mutual foundations.” He quoted three verses from the Bible to affirm Israel’s claim to the land of Palestine. In an election year, he was clearly directing these remarks to the all-powerful Christian voter group. He went on to remind everyone of the goal of defeating terrorism and called on Hamas to “renounce the culture and education of terror.”
Olmert’s motive to invoke the theme of common values and to talk about it for almost half an hour can be interpreted in two conflicting views. Is it because America is finding it increasingly hard to attack Muslim nations on behalf of Israel? Or is it because America and Israel have genuinely joined in a common destiny and vision for this world? I suspect it is more of the latter than the former. In 2002, Bush said: “fearful people live behind walls like the Berlin Wall.” Today, America’s eyes are focused on building a massive wall on its border with Mexico. Israel has been building its apartheid wall for the past three years. The common values of liberty, democracy and human rights have become so frail that they need massive walls to protect them.
Olmert described Iran as the “world’s leading sponsor of terror” and said that every generation is tested by “a moment of truth and trial.” In a clear bid for military action he urged the Congress “our moment is now. We will be judged by the actions we take now. Not by our resolve but by our results.”
He went back to list the impressive credentials of Israel and that it had more companies listed on the Nasdaq Stock market than any other foreign nation. He described the country he immigrated to, Israel, as “an oasis of hope and opportunity in a troubled region.” He addressed the Palestinian people as an entity separate from its leadership and asked them to be courageous in choosing “peace over terror.” He dangled the carrot of a modern prosperous democratic state living side by side with Israel and closed by saying: “we hope and pray that our Palestinian neighbors will also awaken”, referring to the promise of a bright future.
In my opinion, every Palestinian yearns for peace and will gladly take that carrot over the fiery stick of steel that has been tormenting him for almost 60 years.
The problem is that Olmert has no mandate from his people to abide by UN resolutions or to respect the will of the International community. He wants Abbas to disarm all Palestinian militias, force Hamas to recognize Israel’s right to exist, and have the Hamas-led Palestinian government abide by all agreements signed between Israel and the PLO. Israel itself has not abided by a single agreement it had signed with the PLO. Israel declared the Oslo Accords dead in 2001 and not the Palestinians.
Olmert has no intentions of negotiating with the Palestinians. Let me translate what he is saying in layman’s language: we’ll go to a meeting with Abbas and if we don’t like what he’s saying we’ll just go ahead and do what suits us. He has already set the expectations of failure for negotiations. He will not sit down and talk to the Palestinians under a United Nations framework which abides by the will of the International community. That is the true test of negotiating in good faith. He says that “we can’t wait forever” and if Israel can’t find a Palestinian partner then it will draw its own borders unilaterally.
Olmert’s rhetoric about going the extra mile to achieve a negotiated settlement with the Palestinians is a smoke screen intended for US public opinion. It reminds me of the impossible conditions imposed by Ariel Sharon on Arafat in 2001. This rhetoric is a prelude to a massive Israeli military action probably planned for 2007. Abbas will undoubtedly fail in the eyes of the Israeli government and it won’t be long till they declare him, like they did Arafat, as an accomplice to terrorism.
In the Middle East, we have learned that it is far safer to place a bet on war, as the odds for peace are getting slimmer by the day.
posted by Neal AbuNab at 6:47 PM
1 Comments:
AMERICANS NOT EVIL JEWS ARE KILLING LEBANON WOMEN/CHILDREN
Sat Jul 22, 2006 7:06AM
A perilous excursion into the distant past,
starting seven whole weeks ago
Hezbollah, Hamas and Israel: Everything You Need To Know
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
JULY 21, 2006
As the tv networks give unlimited airtime to Israel’s apologists, the message rolls out that no nation, least of all Israel, can permit bombardment or armed incursion across its borders without retaliation.
The guiding rule in this tsunami of drivel is that the viewers should be denied the slightest access to any historical context, or indeed to anything that happened prior to June 28, which was when the capture of an Israeli soldier and the killing of two others by Hamas hit the headlines, followed soon thereafter by an attack by a unit of Hezbollah’s fighters.
Memory is supposed to stop in its tracks at June 28, 2006.
Let’s go on a brief excursion into pre-history. I’m talking about June 20, 2006, when Israeli aircraft fired at least one missile at a car in an attempted extrajudicial assassination attempt on a road between Jabalya and Gaza City. The missile missed the car. Instead it killed three Palestinian children and wounded 15.
Back we go again to June 13, 2006. Israeli aircraft fired missiles at a van in another attempted extrajudicial assassination. The successive barrages killed nine innocent Palestinians.
Now we’re really in the dark ages, reaching far, far back to June 9, 2006, when Israel shelled a beach in Beit Lahiya killing 8 civilians and injuring 32.
That’s just a brief trip down Memory Lane, and we trip over the bodies of twenty dead and forty-seven wounded, all of them Palestinians, most of them women and children.
Israel regrets… But no! Israel doesn’t regret in the least. Most of the time it doesn’t even bother to pretend to regret. It says, “We reserve the right to slaughter Palestinians whenever we want. We reserve the right to assassinate their leaders, crush their homes, steal their water, tear out their olive groves, and when they try to resist we call them terrorists intent on wrecking the ‘peace process’”.
Now Israel says it wants to wipe out Hezbollah. It wishes no harm to the people of Lebanon, just so long as they’re not supporters of Hezbollah, or standing anywhere in the neighborhood of a person or a house or a car or a truck or a road or a bus or a field, or a power station or a port that might, in the mind of an Israeli commander or pilot, have something to do with Hezbollah. In any of those eventualities all bets are off. You or your wife or your mother or your baby get fried.
Israel regrets… But no! As noted above, it doesn’t regret in the least. Neither does George Bush, nor Condoleezza Rice nor John Bolton who is the moral savage who brings shame on his country each day that he sits as America’s ambassador (unconfirmed) at the UN and who has just told the world that a dead Israel civilian is worth a whole more in terms of moral outrage than a Lebanese one.
None of them regrets. They say Hezbollah is a cancer in the body of Lebanon. Sometimes, to kill the cancer, you end up killing the body. Or bodies. Bodies of babies. Lots of them. Go to the website fromisraeltolebanon.info and take a look. Then sign the petition on the site calling on the governments of the world to stop this barbarity.
http://fromisraeltolebanon.info/
You can say that Israel brought Hezbollah into the world. You can prove it too, though this too involves another frightening excursion into history.
This time we have to go far, almost unimaginably far, back into history. Back to 1982, before the dinosaurs, before CNN, before Fox TV, before O’Reilly and Limbaugh. But not before the neo-cons who at that time had already crawled from the primal slime and were doing exactly what they are doing now: advising an American president to give Israel the green light to “solve its security problems” by destroying Lebanon.
In 1982 Israel had a problem. Yasir Arafat, headquartered in Beirut, was making ready to announce that the PLO was prepared to sit down with Israel and embark on peaceful, good faith negotiations towards a two-state solution.
Israel didn’t want a two-state solution, which meant -- if UN resolutions were to be taken seriously -- a Palestinian state right next door, with water, and contiguous territory. So Israel decided chase the PLO right out of Lebanon. It announced that the Palestinian fighters had broken the year-long cease-fire by lobbing some shells into northern Israel.
Palestinians had done nothing of the sort. I remember this very well, because Brian Urquhart, at that time assistant secretary general of the United Nations, in charge of UN observers on Israel’s northern border, invited me to his office on the 38th floor of the UN hq in mid-Manhattan and showed me all the current reports from the zone. For over a year there’d been no shelling from north of the border. Israel was lying.
With or without a pretext Israel wanted to invade Lebanon. So it did, and rolled up to Beirut. It shelled Lebanese towns and villages and bombed them from the air. Sharon’s forces killed maybe 20,000 people, and let Lebanese Christians slaughter hundreds of Palestinian refugees in the camps of Sabra and Chatilla.
The killing got so bad that even Ronald Reagan awoke from his slumbers and called Tel Aviv to tell Israel to stop. Sharon gave the White House the finger by bombing Beirut at the precise times -- 2.42 and 3.38 -- of two UN resolutions calling for a peaceful settlement on the matter of Palestine.
When the dust settled over the rubble, Israel bunkered down several miles inside Lebanese sovereign territory, which it illegally occupied, in defiance of all UN resolutions, for years, supervising a brutal local militia and running its own version of Abu Graibh, the torture center at the prison of Al-Khiam.
Occupy a country, torture its citizens and in the end you face resistance. In Israel’s case it was Hezbollah, and in the end Hezbollah ran Israel out of Lebanon, which is why a lot of Lebanese regard Hezbollah not as terrorists but as courageous liberators.
The years roll by and Israel does its successful best to destroy all possibility of a viable two-state solution. It builds illegal settlements. It chops up Palestine with Jews-only roads. It collars all the water. It cordons off Jerusalem. It steals even more land by bisecting Palestinian territory with its “fence”. Anyone trying to organize resistance gets jailed, tortured, or blown up.
Sick of their terrible trials, Palestinians elect Hamas, whose leaders make it perfectly clear that they are ready to deal on the basis of the old two-state solution, which of course is the one thing Israel cannot endure. Israel doesn’t want any “peaceful solution” that gives the Palestinians anything more than a few trashed out acres surrounded with barbed wire and tanks, between the Israeli settlements whose goons can murder them pretty much at will.
So here we are, 24 years after Sharon did his best to destroy Lebanon in 1982, and his heirs are doing it all over again. Since they can’t endure the idea of any just settlement for Palestinians, it’s the only thing they know how to do. Call Lebanon a terror-haven and bomb it back to the stone age. Call Gaza a terror-haven and bomb its power plant, first stop on the journey back to the stone age. Bomb Damascus. Bomb Teheran.
Of course they won’t destroy Hezbollah. Every time they kill another Lebanese family, they multiply hatred of Israel and support for Hezbollah. They’ve even unified the parliament in Baghdad, which just voted unanimously -- Sunnis and Shi’ites and Kurds alike -- to deplore Israel’s conduct and to call for a ceasefire.
I hope you’ve enjoyed these little excursions into history, even though history is dangerous, which is why the US press gives it a wide birth. But even without the benefit of historical instruction, a majority of Americans in CNN’s instant poll –- about 55 per cent out of 800,000 as of midday, July 19 -- don’t like what Israel is up to.
Dislike is one thing, but at least in the short term it doesn’t help much. Israel’s 1982 attack on Lebanon grew unpopular in the US, after the first few days. But forcing the US to pressure Israel to settle the basic problem takes political courage, and virtually no US politician is prepared to buck the Israel lobby, however many families in Lebanon and Gaza may be sacrificed on the altar of such cowardice.
http://www.counterpunch.org/Cockburn07212006.html
AMERICA
My title for this posting is RIGHT ON TARGET!! SINCE IT IS OUR OWN TAX DOLLARS AND OUR OWN GOVERNMENT REPRESENTATIVES IN THE WHITE HOUSE, THE CONGRESS, AND THE SENATE WHO REFUSE TO STOP THIS GENOCIDE OF THE LEBONESE PEOPLE TODAY.
YOU AMERICA ARE TOTALLY RESPONSIBLE AND NO ONE ELSE!!
YOU ELECTED THIS MURDEROUS BASTARD WE HAVE AS PRESIDENT OF OUR COUNTRY AND YOU ELECTED HIS MINION OF JEW DEMONS UNDER HIM WHO ALL SERVE THE MOST EVIL RACE OF SCUM ON THE PLANET ZIONIST JEWS IN ISRAEL!!
YOU DESERVE WHAT YOU WILL GET FROM THIS EVIL IF YOU FAIL TO STOP IT NOW AND IMPEACH/IMPRISON/EXECUTE THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES FOR ALLOWING SUCH WAR CRIMES TO CONTINUE!
BUSH IS ALLOWING THE KILLING OF HUNDREDS OF WOMEN AND CHILDREN IN LEBANON RIGHT NOW AS WELL AS KILLING OUR OWN TROOPS IN IRAQ TO FIGHT FOR HIS WAR ON HIS TERROR!
These Will Be Our Babies SOON America!!
http://fromisraeltolebanon.info/
WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT AMERICA....NOTHING?
Help Me To
STOP THE WAR
http://www.stopthewar.co.uk/
Sign This Petition At The Very Least!!
http://epetition.net/julywar/index.php
Support Our Troops
http://disc.server.com/discussion.cgi?id=208779;article=796;show_parent=1
Cliff Lindquist
http://www.supportbordercontrols.com/patriot/page17.html
Sat Jul 22, 2006 7:06AM
A perilous excursion into the distant past,
starting seven whole weeks ago
Hezbollah, Hamas and Israel: Everything You Need To Know
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
JULY 21, 2006
As the tv networks give unlimited airtime to Israel’s apologists, the message rolls out that no nation, least of all Israel, can permit bombardment or armed incursion across its borders without retaliation.
The guiding rule in this tsunami of drivel is that the viewers should be denied the slightest access to any historical context, or indeed to anything that happened prior to June 28, which was when the capture of an Israeli soldier and the killing of two others by Hamas hit the headlines, followed soon thereafter by an attack by a unit of Hezbollah’s fighters.
Memory is supposed to stop in its tracks at June 28, 2006.
Let’s go on a brief excursion into pre-history. I’m talking about June 20, 2006, when Israeli aircraft fired at least one missile at a car in an attempted extrajudicial assassination attempt on a road between Jabalya and Gaza City. The missile missed the car. Instead it killed three Palestinian children and wounded 15.
Back we go again to June 13, 2006. Israeli aircraft fired missiles at a van in another attempted extrajudicial assassination. The successive barrages killed nine innocent Palestinians.
Now we’re really in the dark ages, reaching far, far back to June 9, 2006, when Israel shelled a beach in Beit Lahiya killing 8 civilians and injuring 32.
That’s just a brief trip down Memory Lane, and we trip over the bodies of twenty dead and forty-seven wounded, all of them Palestinians, most of them women and children.
Israel regrets… But no! Israel doesn’t regret in the least. Most of the time it doesn’t even bother to pretend to regret. It says, “We reserve the right to slaughter Palestinians whenever we want. We reserve the right to assassinate their leaders, crush their homes, steal their water, tear out their olive groves, and when they try to resist we call them terrorists intent on wrecking the ‘peace process’”.
Now Israel says it wants to wipe out Hezbollah. It wishes no harm to the people of Lebanon, just so long as they’re not supporters of Hezbollah, or standing anywhere in the neighborhood of a person or a house or a car or a truck or a road or a bus or a field, or a power station or a port that might, in the mind of an Israeli commander or pilot, have something to do with Hezbollah. In any of those eventualities all bets are off. You or your wife or your mother or your baby get fried.
Israel regrets… But no! As noted above, it doesn’t regret in the least. Neither does George Bush, nor Condoleezza Rice nor John Bolton who is the moral savage who brings shame on his country each day that he sits as America’s ambassador (unconfirmed) at the UN and who has just told the world that a dead Israel civilian is worth a whole more in terms of moral outrage than a Lebanese one.
None of them regrets. They say Hezbollah is a cancer in the body of Lebanon. Sometimes, to kill the cancer, you end up killing the body. Or bodies. Bodies of babies. Lots of them. Go to the website fromisraeltolebanon.info and take a look. Then sign the petition on the site calling on the governments of the world to stop this barbarity.
http://fromisraeltolebanon.info/
You can say that Israel brought Hezbollah into the world. You can prove it too, though this too involves another frightening excursion into history.
This time we have to go far, almost unimaginably far, back into history. Back to 1982, before the dinosaurs, before CNN, before Fox TV, before O’Reilly and Limbaugh. But not before the neo-cons who at that time had already crawled from the primal slime and were doing exactly what they are doing now: advising an American president to give Israel the green light to “solve its security problems” by destroying Lebanon.
In 1982 Israel had a problem. Yasir Arafat, headquartered in Beirut, was making ready to announce that the PLO was prepared to sit down with Israel and embark on peaceful, good faith negotiations towards a two-state solution.
Israel didn’t want a two-state solution, which meant -- if UN resolutions were to be taken seriously -- a Palestinian state right next door, with water, and contiguous territory. So Israel decided chase the PLO right out of Lebanon. It announced that the Palestinian fighters had broken the year-long cease-fire by lobbing some shells into northern Israel.
Palestinians had done nothing of the sort. I remember this very well, because Brian Urquhart, at that time assistant secretary general of the United Nations, in charge of UN observers on Israel’s northern border, invited me to his office on the 38th floor of the UN hq in mid-Manhattan and showed me all the current reports from the zone. For over a year there’d been no shelling from north of the border. Israel was lying.
With or without a pretext Israel wanted to invade Lebanon. So it did, and rolled up to Beirut. It shelled Lebanese towns and villages and bombed them from the air. Sharon’s forces killed maybe 20,000 people, and let Lebanese Christians slaughter hundreds of Palestinian refugees in the camps of Sabra and Chatilla.
The killing got so bad that even Ronald Reagan awoke from his slumbers and called Tel Aviv to tell Israel to stop. Sharon gave the White House the finger by bombing Beirut at the precise times -- 2.42 and 3.38 -- of two UN resolutions calling for a peaceful settlement on the matter of Palestine.
When the dust settled over the rubble, Israel bunkered down several miles inside Lebanese sovereign territory, which it illegally occupied, in defiance of all UN resolutions, for years, supervising a brutal local militia and running its own version of Abu Graibh, the torture center at the prison of Al-Khiam.
Occupy a country, torture its citizens and in the end you face resistance. In Israel’s case it was Hezbollah, and in the end Hezbollah ran Israel out of Lebanon, which is why a lot of Lebanese regard Hezbollah not as terrorists but as courageous liberators.
The years roll by and Israel does its successful best to destroy all possibility of a viable two-state solution. It builds illegal settlements. It chops up Palestine with Jews-only roads. It collars all the water. It cordons off Jerusalem. It steals even more land by bisecting Palestinian territory with its “fence”. Anyone trying to organize resistance gets jailed, tortured, or blown up.
Sick of their terrible trials, Palestinians elect Hamas, whose leaders make it perfectly clear that they are ready to deal on the basis of the old two-state solution, which of course is the one thing Israel cannot endure. Israel doesn’t want any “peaceful solution” that gives the Palestinians anything more than a few trashed out acres surrounded with barbed wire and tanks, between the Israeli settlements whose goons can murder them pretty much at will.
So here we are, 24 years after Sharon did his best to destroy Lebanon in 1982, and his heirs are doing it all over again. Since they can’t endure the idea of any just settlement for Palestinians, it’s the only thing they know how to do. Call Lebanon a terror-haven and bomb it back to the stone age. Call Gaza a terror-haven and bomb its power plant, first stop on the journey back to the stone age. Bomb Damascus. Bomb Teheran.
Of course they won’t destroy Hezbollah. Every time they kill another Lebanese family, they multiply hatred of Israel and support for Hezbollah. They’ve even unified the parliament in Baghdad, which just voted unanimously -- Sunnis and Shi’ites and Kurds alike -- to deplore Israel’s conduct and to call for a ceasefire.
I hope you’ve enjoyed these little excursions into history, even though history is dangerous, which is why the US press gives it a wide birth. But even without the benefit of historical instruction, a majority of Americans in CNN’s instant poll –- about 55 per cent out of 800,000 as of midday, July 19 -- don’t like what Israel is up to.
Dislike is one thing, but at least in the short term it doesn’t help much. Israel’s 1982 attack on Lebanon grew unpopular in the US, after the first few days. But forcing the US to pressure Israel to settle the basic problem takes political courage, and virtually no US politician is prepared to buck the Israel lobby, however many families in Lebanon and Gaza may be sacrificed on the altar of such cowardice.
http://www.counterpunch.org/Cockburn07212006.html
AMERICA
My title for this posting is RIGHT ON TARGET!! SINCE IT IS OUR OWN TAX DOLLARS AND OUR OWN GOVERNMENT REPRESENTATIVES IN THE WHITE HOUSE, THE CONGRESS, AND THE SENATE WHO REFUSE TO STOP THIS GENOCIDE OF THE LEBONESE PEOPLE TODAY.
YOU AMERICA ARE TOTALLY RESPONSIBLE AND NO ONE ELSE!!
YOU ELECTED THIS MURDEROUS BASTARD WE HAVE AS PRESIDENT OF OUR COUNTRY AND YOU ELECTED HIS MINION OF JEW DEMONS UNDER HIM WHO ALL SERVE THE MOST EVIL RACE OF SCUM ON THE PLANET ZIONIST JEWS IN ISRAEL!!
YOU DESERVE WHAT YOU WILL GET FROM THIS EVIL IF YOU FAIL TO STOP IT NOW AND IMPEACH/IMPRISON/EXECUTE THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES FOR ALLOWING SUCH WAR CRIMES TO CONTINUE!
BUSH IS ALLOWING THE KILLING OF HUNDREDS OF WOMEN AND CHILDREN IN LEBANON RIGHT NOW AS WELL AS KILLING OUR OWN TROOPS IN IRAQ TO FIGHT FOR HIS WAR ON HIS TERROR!
These Will Be Our Babies SOON America!!
http://fromisraeltolebanon.info/
WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT AMERICA....NOTHING?
Help Me To
STOP THE WAR
http://www.stopthewar.co.uk/
Sign This Petition At The Very Least!!
http://epetition.net/julywar/index.php
Support Our Troops
http://disc.server.com/discussion.cgi?id=208779;article=796;show_parent=1
Cliff Lindquist
http://www.supportbordercontrols.com/patriot/page17.html
Neal AbuNab
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