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luke
Joined: 11 Feb 2007
Location: by the sea
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 Posted: Fri Jun 15, 2007 11:54 am Post subject: Palestinian tragedy that was authored in the West. |
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| Quote: | "THE ongoing internecine fighting in Gaza represents a Palestinian tragedy that was authored in the West.
It is the logical consequence of the refusal by the US and the European Union to recognise last year's Hamas electoral victory and the willingness of the Fatah leadership to conspire with the West to reverse that democratic expression of the Palestinian people's views.
After lecturing Palestinians on the need for democratic norms, including elections, even under conditions of Israeli occupation, the West imposed collective punishment on them for voting for the wrong party.
It encouraged Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to reject negotiations with elected Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh.
And both the EU and the US followed up Israel's confiscation of Palestinian tax revenues - estimated at present to be worth $700 million - by imposing trade and aid sanctions on the Palestinian people.
The imperialist states also supported President Mahmoud Abbas's decision to make Palestinian security forces answerable to him personally rather than, as previously, to the Ministry of the Interior.
The most likely catalyst to the heavy fighting in Gaza this week was President Abbas's request to the Israeli government to permit military forces loyal to him to import weaponry and armoured vehicles.
Given the Palestinian president's claim that some Hamas figures were "planning a coup against legitimate institutions," such an increase in armaments could only be seen as a means of seeing off his Islamist opponents.
If there has been any evidence of an attempted coup, it has been in the opposite direction - a bid to undermine the elected government by increasing unemployment, hunger and desperation to the extent that the Palestinians turn against it.
This should come as no surprise. It is a classic US tactic, which has previously been used successfully in, for example, Nicaragua.
And there is always the possibility/likelihood of the Israeli Defence Force taking advantage of the situation to trawl in troubled waters.
Earlier this week, Tel Aviv's Knesset foreign affairs and defence committee chairman Tzahi Hanegbi told Israeli army radio that it would be "insane" to arm Fatah, because the weapons would fall into Hamas hands, adding that the Israeli government was considering backing Fatah forces in the West Bank.
Israel is also calling for international forces to take up positions on Gaza's borders to prevent arms supplies reaching Hamas.
And, coincidentally, UN secretary-general Ban Ki Moon discussed the possible deployment of a multinational force in Gaza with the security council on Wednesday.
This reflects the international community's ongoing failure to identify the real source of instability and violence in the region - namely, Israel's 40-year illegal occupation and colonisation of Palestinian land.
This failure encourages those in Palestinian society who are cynical about democracy, negotiations and a two-state solution, based on the ceasefire borders prior to the 1967 six-day war.
The West must end its contempt for Palestinian democracy and its instigation of President Abbas's attempts to subvert it.
The international community must foster Palestinian unity by identifying the root problem as Israeli colonialism and proposing ways of bringing it to an end." |
from the morning star |
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luke
Joined: 11 Feb 2007
Location: by the sea
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| Posted: Fri Jun 15, 2007 12:07 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: | A new buzzword: Hamastan
The tragic events in Gaza are devastating to the Palestinian cause. The sight of Hamas gunmen dragging out a well-known Fatah hardman, shooting and stomping on his body is yet another disgraceful scene. No Palestinian should be fighting others while the zionist enemy chuckles at the success of its strategy. Both sides have disgraced the Palestinian cause. Chillingly, a new buzzword is already doing the rounds in zionist and US pro-zionist circles: Hamastan. Virtually every editorial mentions this word. Almost every editorial states that in Gaza now there is 'nobody to deal with'. One wonders if this is an indication of what they wanted all along. The zionists now have even more free reign to bomb, murder and kill people in Gaza using the simple pretext of 'destroying terrorist infrastructure'. The signs already look ominous. The US tactic of funding their own man Mohammed Dahlan has paid off. They provoked the power struggle that culminated in the sickening scenes on the streets of Gaza. Not only did they fund Dahlans security and intelligence apparatus but they allowed smuggling of weapons to Hamas as a dual strategy knowing that Hamas was a superior fighting unit. At the very least now they have an open excuse to keep the people of Gaza isolated, starving and sorrounded. The following article in the Washington Post illustrates the current thinking process in Washington:
The evolving U.S. strategy would let the Hamas-run Gaza Strip while attempting to bolster Abbas as a moderate leader who can actually govern and deliver peace with Israel. The senior administration official noted that fend for itself. Gaza has no territorial issues with Israel, since there are no Israelis in Gaza, so the Hamas entity there would have no stake in potential peace talks concerning the border on the West Bank.
Referring to Abbas, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told reporters yesterday that "we fully support him in his decision to try and end this crisis for the Palestinian people and to give them an opportunity to return to peace and a better future."
But analysts said yesterday that this strategy of dividing the moderates from the extremists -- which was the core of Bush's 2002 speech -- proved ineffective and may have led to the dilemma facing the administration.
Note how they say Gaza has 'no territorial issues with Israel'. Well, there is the small matter of the territory being sorrounded, blockaded and the water, electricity being controlled by Israel. Plans to cut off the electricity are already being discussed, although they deny that water will be cut off as well. They envisage aid to the PA in the West Bank but make no mention of the expanding occupation, the wall nor the expulsion of people from their homes in Jerusalem, Hebron and elsewhere. The editorials are as blinkered as ever pointing to Fatah's acceptance of Israel whilst denying that Hamas has repeatedly accepted the two state solution based on the 1967 borders. Now they want the Israeli and US governments to throw a few scraps towards Abbas so that they can again pretend that they are interested in peace and to provide another fig-leaf for the occupation. Alvaro de Soto revealed in his leaked report the constant bullying of the UN, the US obsession with preventing criticism of Israel and for promoting the violence between Fatah and Hamas. Indeed the US envoy twice declared in meetings that "I like this violence." This is not civil war but the political equivalent of cock fighting sponsored by the US. This was not a failure of policy for them but a calculated and cynical success. |
http://j4p.blogspot.com/ |
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luke
Joined: 11 Feb 2007
Location: by the sea
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| Posted: Sat Jun 16, 2007 11:21 am Post subject: |
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brilliant article here, its long, but worth it
or a shorter one by robert fisk
| Quote: | Robert Fisk: Welcome to 'Palestine'
Published: 16 June 2007
How troublesome the Muslims of the Middle East are. First, we demand that the Palestinians embrace democracy and then they elect the wrong party - Hamas - and then Hamas wins a mini-civil war and presides over the Gaza Strip. And we Westerners still want to negotiate with the discredited President, Mahmoud Abbas. Today "Palestine" - and let's keep those quotation marks in place - has two prime ministers. Welcome to the Middle East.
Who can we negotiate with? To whom do we talk? Well of course, we should have talked to Hamas months ago. But we didn't like the democratically elected government of the Palestinian people. They were supposed to have voted for Fatah and its corrupt leadership. But they voted for Hamas, which declines to recognise Israel or abide by the totally discredited Oslo agreement.
No one asked - on our side - which particular Israel Hamas was supposed to recognise. The Israel of 1948? The Israel of the post-1967 borders? The Israel which builds - and goes on building - vast settlements for Jews and Jews only on Arab land, gobbling up even more of the 22 per cent of "Palestine" still left to negotiate over ?
And so today, we are supposed to talk to our faithful policeman, Mr Abbas, the "moderate" (as the BBC, CNN and Fox News refer to him) Palestinian leader, a man who wrote a 600-page book about Oslo without once mentioning the word "occupation", who always referred to Israeli "redeployment" rather than "withdrawal", a "leader" we can trust because he wears a tie and goes to the White House and says all the right things. The Palestinians didn't vote for Hamas because they wanted an Islamic republic - which is how Hamas's bloody victory will be represented - but because they were tired of the corruption of Mr Abbas's Fatah and the rotten nature of the "Palestinian Authority".
I recall years ago being summoned to the home of a PA official whose walls had just been punctured by an Israeli tank shell. All true. But what struck me were the gold-plated taps in his bathroom. Those taps - or variations of them - were what cost Fatah its election. Palestinians wanted an end to corruption - the cancer of the Arab world - and so they voted for Hamas and thus we, the all-wise, all-good West, decided to sanction them and starve them and bully them for exercising their free vote. Maybe we should offer "Palestine" EU membership if it would be gracious enough to vote for the right people?
All over the Middle East, it is the same. We support Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan, even though he keeps warlords and drug barons in his government (and, by the way, we really are sorry about all those innocent Afghan civilians we are killing in our "war on terror" in the wastelands of Helmand province).
We love Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, whose torturers have not yet finished with the Muslim Brotherhood politicians recently arrested outside Cairo, whose presidency received the warm support of Mrs - yes Mrs - George W Bush - and whose succession will almost certainly pass to his son, Gamal.
We adore Muammar Gaddafi, the crazed dictator of Libya whose werewolves have murdered his opponents abroad, whose plot to murder King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia preceded Tony Blair's recent visit to Tripoli - Colonel Gaddafi, it should be remembered, was called a "statesman" by Jack Straw for abandoning his non-existent nuclear ambitions - and whose "democracy" is perfectly acceptable to us because he is on our side in the "war on terror".
Yes, and we love King Abdullah's unconstitutional monarchy in Jordan, and all the princes and emirs of the Gulf, especially those who are paid such vast bribes by our arms companies that even Scotland Yard has to close down its investigations on the orders of our prime minister - and yes, I can indeed see why he doesn't like The Independent's coverage of what he quaintly calls "the Middle East". If only the Arabs - and the Iranians - would support our kings and shahs and princes whose sons and daughters are educated at Oxford and Harvard, how much easier the "Middle East" would be to control.
For that is what it is about - control - and that is why we hold out, and withdraw, favours from their leaders. Now Gaza belongs to Hamas, what will our own elected leaders do? Will our pontificators in the EU, the UN, Washington and Moscow now have to talk to these wretched, ungrateful people (fear not, for they will not be able to shake hands) or will they have to acknowledge the West Bank version of Palestine (Abbas, the safe pair of hands) while ignoring the elected, militarily successful Hamas in Gaza?
It's easy, of course, to call down a curse on both their houses. But that's what we say about the whole Middle East. If only Bashar al-Assad wasn't President of Syria (heaven knows what the alternative would be) or if the cracked President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad wasn't in control of Iran (even if he doesn't actually know one end of a nuclear missile from the other).
If only Lebanon was a home-grown democracy like our own little back-lawn countries - Belgium, for example, or Luxembourg. But no, those pesky Middle Easterners vote for the wrong people, support the wrong people, love the wrong people, don't behave like us civilised Westerners.
So what will we do? Support the reoccupation of Gaza perhaps? Certainly we will not criticise Israel. And we shall go on giving our affection to the kings and princes and unlovely presidents of the Middle East until the whole place blows up in our faces and then we shall say - as we are already saying of the Iraqis - that they don't deserve our sacrifice and our love.
How do we deal with a coup d'état by an elected government? |
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major.tom
Macho Business Donkey Wrestler
Joined: 21 Jan 2007
Location: BC, Canada
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| Posted: Sat Jun 16, 2007 9:38 pm Post subject: |
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Fisk is wonderful pointing out the flaws of western (so-called) "diplomacy."
I can't help remembering how when Arafat was in charge, the west (read the U.S. and GBR) insisted he not control the Palestinian Security Services. But as soon as Hamas was elected, the rightful place for the head of the security services was the Presidency.
And now we have talk of a coup by the elected gov't, as Fisk rightly points out.
It makes one dizzy. |
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luke
Joined: 11 Feb 2007
Location: by the sea
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| Posted: Sun Jun 17, 2007 2:27 pm Post subject: |
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luke
Joined: 11 Feb 2007
Location: by the sea
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| Posted: Tue Jun 19, 2007 12:20 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: | Hamas official: Dahlan was planning Gaza takeover, large-scale massacres in Gaza
Khalid Amayreh
June 18, 2007
From Khalid Amayreh in E. Jerusalem
A leading Hamas politician in Gaza on Monday accused former Gaza strongman Muhammed Dahlan of having planned to "liquidate Hamas in the Gaza Strip and carry out large-scale massacres."
"The Dahlan group, in concert with the United States, Israel and PA leader Mahmoud Abbas, was planning a bloody campaign against Hamas in the Gaza Strip, involving the murder of hundreds of its leaders and activists," said Yahya Mousa, Deputy-head of Hamas’s bloc at the Legislative Council.
Mousa said Dahlan was preparing to turn Gaza into a big mass grave for Hamas and its supporters, all in the service of Israel and President Bush’s war on Islam.
"The eradicationists had planned to decapitate Hamas . This is what forced Hamas to act."
Mousa described the "emergency government," headed by Salam Fayyadh, as "a blatant coup against Palestinian democracy."
"It is obvious that (President Mahmoud) Abbas is flying in the face of the law, the legislative council and constitution. His act (formation of the Fayyad government) has no constitutional, or legal or national legitimacy."
Asked what he thought was the way out of this crisis, Mousa said the only way to overcome the current predicament was by upholding the Palestinian Law and stopping being at America’s and Israel’s beck and call.
The Islamic lawmaker said "the moral and political bankruptcy of the new government in Ramallah was expressing itself in the rampageous acts of arson and vandalism and abductions all over the West Bank ."
"Abbas is the last person who can lecture us on the rule of law. A leader who allows masked and armed thugs to attack innocent civilians, vandalize their property and set their businesses and homes on fire, is not a legitimate leader. He is rather a head of a gang."
Mousa’s remarks came a few hours after Fatah militiamen burned down the Ramallah home of Dr. Aziz Deweik, the Speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council
Deweik was abducted by the Israeli army last year and held captive for taking part in last year’s election.
Fatah and PA officials in Ramallah refused to comment on Mousa’s charges. |
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Sandino
Joined: 05 Jan 2007
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Mandy
Joined: 07 Feb 2007
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| Posted: Fri Jun 22, 2007 6:22 pm Post subject: |
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luke
Joined: 11 Feb 2007
Location: by the sea
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| Posted: Fri Jun 22, 2007 7:32 pm Post subject: |
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i've read about this video, i've not watched it though ...
the coverage of this is like most of the mainstream reporting recently of whats been going on - you have to reverse everything! |
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luke
Joined: 11 Feb 2007
Location: by the sea
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| Posted: Fri Jun 22, 2007 9:10 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: | Decoding the media's Palestinian "civil war"
Ben White,
The Electronic Intifada,
19 June 2007
Major news stories from Palestine/Israel are often accompanied by what becomes a self-reinforcing "vocabulary," typically generated by Israeli government ministries or other propaganda outlets, and then picked up by the Western media. A classic example was the redeployment of Israeli settlers and military from the Gaza Strip in 2005, which was successfully packaged as a "disengagement" that pitted "Israeli against Israeli," in a "painful compromise." This kind of marketing exercise often works even when there are widely available contradictory reports, such as how "disengagement" was openly trumpeted by Sharon and his advisors as a strategy for destroying the peace process.
This phenomenon went into overdrive recently, as dramatic events across the Occupied Palestinian Territories, but especially in Gaza, presented the evening news with a problem of how to reduce the conflict in the internal Palestinian political arena into an easily digestible sound bite. The solution was, as usual, lazy journalism and an almost total blackout on Israeli/US collusion in the dark events unfolding. Here then, is a guide to decoding the Palestinian "civil war," presented as a series of oft-repeated, yet entirely misleading, clichés.
The Palestinian Authority actually has any authority
The Palestinian Authority (PA) is regularly presented in the mainstream media as having the authority, independence, and jurisdiction of a state, equivalent to Israel. Yet despite the misleading name, the PA's writ does not extend beyond the civic affairs of several dozen isolated cantons in the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. Its law and order officials cannot travel from one canton to the other without the permission of the Israeli occupation forces. Look a bit deeper, and in fact, one discovers that the PA was designed specifically to thwart genuine Palestinian "authority," to keep Palestinian sovereignty solely rhetorical, while Israel continues its colonization. The Angry Arab website quoted Palestinian writer Rashad Abu Shawir as saying of Hamas and Fatah that they are "fighting over an illusory authority." Read between the lines even in the mainstream media, and this picture emerges. Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert greeted Abbas' formation of a new cabinet by saying that "a Palestinian government which is not a Hamas government is a partner and we will co-operate with it." It is Israel that decides who represents the Palestinian people, and even what authority these representatives will enjoy.
The Hamas victory in Gaza risks creating a "two state Palestine"
Quickly after Hamas had completed their victory in Gaza, talk became of a "two state Palestine." This rhetorical device, apart from simplifying a more complicated political reality, also conceals the fact that Israel has already severed the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, not to mention East Jerusalem. It even eludes the still bigger picture, that the Gaza Strip is not even two percent of historic Palestine, and that the Palestinian people have been fragmented into the refugees (themselves split geographically, socially, etc.), those living in Israel, and those under occupation in the post-'67 territories. The West Bank itself has been fragmented by incessant Israeli colonization into a thousand territorial shards. Never mind the alleged Hamas/Fatah "two states" -- Israel has been busy implementing its plan for a 100 "state" solution.
The conflict is a fight between the secular moderates of Fatah, and the extremist Islamists of Hamas
This is sometimes trimmed even further to simply become, in the words of BBC correspondent Paul Reynolds, "the wider struggle between moderation and extremism in the Arab and Muslim world." Suddenly, the fact that groups within Fatah have been prominent in the resistance of the intifada (the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades for example), is forgotten. Moreover, what is also ignored is the fact that Hamas have openly stated that their fight is not against Fatah per se, but against element within Fatah, notably Dahlan and his associates, who continue to work with the US and Israel. Numerous examples have born this out, including: an amnesty for Fatah commanders in the Gaza Strip, calls for dialogue by the Hamas leadership, apparent pre-operation coordination between Hamas and sympathetic Fatah officials, and the fact that several high-profile Fatah officials have remained untouched in Gaza. The struggle, then, is between a Palestinian leadership eager for approval from Israel and the US, and those who prioritize resistance.
Hamas' actions in Gaza was a coup
Q. When an elected government is boycotted, its ministers kidnapped, and its defeated rival armed by hostile powers, what do you call it when this same government defends itself? A. A coup.
What sounds like a bad joke is in fact exactly how some -- from newspaper editorials to the UK Foreign Secretary Margaret Beckett -- have chosen to describe what happened in Gaza. By contrast, this report from Reuters clarifies matters somewhat:
The US government began to lay the ground for President Mahmoud Abbas to dismiss the Hamas-led Palestinian government at least a year before the Islamist group's violent takeover of the Gaza Strip last week.
Western, Israeli and Palestinian official sources said over the weekend that, far from being an ad hoc response to Hamas's offensive, Abbas's declaration of a state of emergency and his replacement of a Hamas prime minister with Western favorite Salam Fayyad marked the culmination of months of backroom deliberations, planning and US prodding ...
... Many Western officials and analysts see the offensive as a pre-emptive strike by Hamas before Washington could build up Fatah. Hamas says it made its move against a US-backed coup.
Virginia Tilley, on The Electronic Intifada, described how Abbas' response to the Hamas show of strength was a series of entirely illegal and dubious moves, all of which were greeted with praise and congratulations by Israel, the EU and the US. It seems that in Palestine, as elsewhere in the Middle East, it is not democracy that is required, but subservience.
The new Prime Minister Salam Fayyad is an "independent"
When Abbas appointed Fayyad as the new Prime Minister, you rarely saw the man's name reported without an accompanying reference to his apparent lack of affiliation or bias. Strange then, that a neutral should be so popular with Washington. Here, "independent" means that Fayyad has previously worked for the World Bank and IMF, enjoys a good relationship with Condoleezza Rice, is the favourite of EU and American diplomats -- and whose electoral list won a mere 2.4 percent in the same parliamentary vote that Hamas won.
If one picks up a newspaper, or logs on to a standard mainstream news site, one might well find all five of these cliches trotted out in the same report. Ignorance, a reluctance to expose US and Israeli disregard for Palestinian self-determination (or inability to conceive that this is possible), and lazy reporting that repeats what everyone else seems to be saying, combine to make a dangerous cocktail. Once again, events from Palestine are being distorted and misrepresented by a compliant media.
Ben White is a freelance journalist specializing in Palestine/Israel. His website is at www.benwhite.org.uk and he can be contacted directly at ben at benwhite.org.uk.
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article7042.shtml |
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