Israel orders razing of Jerusalem 'terrorist' home

Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak on Friday ordered the demolition of the houses of two Palestinians behind recent deadly attacks against Jews after the attorney-general said the move was legally viable.

Israel wants to destroy the homes of a Palestinian who killed three Israelis in a bulldozer rampage in Jerusalem on Wednesday and another who shot dead eight pupils at a seminary in the city in March. Both lived in the vicinity of Arab East Jerusalem. "Barak has ordered the army to start a process for obtaining demolition orders for the terrorists' houses," said a defense official, who declined to be named.

Menachem Mazuz, the attorney-general, gave his legal response following a proposal by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Thursday that Israel should destroy the homes of "every terrorist from Jerusalem" after a Palestinian killed three Israelis in a bulldozer rampage. "The decision comes following the attorney-general's opinion, which said there was no legal obstacle to destroy the terrorists' houses," the defense official added.

Mazuz said in his opinion: "In light of repeated rulings over the years by the Supreme Court, it cannot be said that there is a legal objection ... to demolish houses in Jerusalem, but the move would create considerable legal difficulties."

Blue Israeli ID cards

Israeli authorities say Wednesday's attack and the fatal shootings of eight seminary students in March were carried out by Palestinians who held blue Israeli identity cards that give them wide freedom of movement.

Mazuz warned that apart from legal challenges in Israeli courts, a resumption of the practice of house demolitions could draw international condemnation. "The detailed inspection of the circumstances surrounding each case should be conducted by the Shin Bet and the army in coordination with the Justice Ministry," Mazuz said.

Olmert told an economic conference in the southern resort city of Eilat on Thursday that Israel should "be tougher in some of the means we use against perpetrators of terror.

If we have to destroy houses, then we must do so." Israel abandoned the demolitions of homes of Palestinians involved in attacks against its citizens after human rights groups challenged the practice in Israel's Supreme Court. Defense and legal officials met on Thursday to discuss the issue.

Some 20 people live in the home of the attacker who killed two women and a man in Wednesday's bulldozer rampage. They said they had no prior knowledge of his intentions.

Israel annexed East Jerusalem in a move not recognized internationally, after capturing the area in a 1967 war, and gave Palestinians there and in some adjacent villages the same blue identity cards issued to its citizens. Palestinians want parts of Jerusalem as the capital of a future state.

Don't take sides in Israeli-Palestinian conflict: poll

The first global public opinion poll about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict released Tuesday found that majorities in 14 out of 18 countries polled believe their government should not take sides in the decades-old Middle East conflict.
It also revealed that most people support a greater role for the United Nations, from guaranteeing security of the countries involved to sending peacekeepers to enforce an eventual peace agreement.According to the poll – which was conducted by WorldPublicOpinion.org and covered 18,792 people in 18 countries and the Palestinian Territories – 58 percent of respondents said they did not believe their country should take a side in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Twenty percent said their country should support the Palestinians, while only seven percent supported the Israelis. Egypt, Iran and Turkey were the only countries favoring the Palestinians.

American view

Even Americans overwhelmingly said their government should not take sides.
In a finding that goes against the common assumption that Americans overwhelmingly support Israel, seven out of ten Americans said they thought their country should not take sides in the conflict. Of the rest, 21 percent said it should take Israel's side compared to only 3 percent who supported taking the Palestinians side. “Israel is liked a lot more and if you force them (Americans) to choose, Israel gets more sympathy,” Steven Kull, director of WorldOpinion.org, told AlArabiya.net in an interview. “You ask them which side they blame more, and more blame Israel than the Palestinians, but if you look more closely there are huge numbers that refuse to answer or say they don’t know.” Americans, said Mr. Kull, are unequivocal that U.S. policy needs to be even handed in dealing with the situation. “There is a discrepancy in this sense between the public and government foreign policy,” he added.At 86 percent, Egypt was the only country to overwhelmingly support taking the Palestinian side and to say that Palestinians are doing their part to resolve the conflict.
A similarly large percentage said neither Israel (88%) nor the U.S. (86%) is doing their part well.

Country assessments
Israel received the worst ratings about whether it is playing a positive role in the conflict, with majorities in thirteen out of fifteen countries asked this question saying that the Israelis are “not doing very well” or “not doing well at all.” Arab countries and the United States did not fare much better.
Fifty-nine percent of those polled view America’s role in the conflict negatively, as do 46 percent of Americans themselves.
A majority, 54 percent, of those polled also said that Israel is not playing a positive role while 47 percent say the same for the Palestinians. The United Nations Security Council, however, fared far better in terms of people’s perceptions about the role it should and could play. Respondents said they believed the United Nations should play a greater role in the conflict, especially if an agreement is eventually reached. All but one of the 17 countries asked had majorities or pluralities that supported sending U.N. peacekeepers were an agreement reached, with an average of 67 percent favoring and 20 percent opposing such an idea.
The predominantly Muslim countries of Egypt, Turkey, Indonesia and the Palestinian territories in particular supported U.N. involvement, from protecting Arab countries in case of an Israeli attack to sending peacekeepers.

Jerusalem bulldozer attack injures dozens

A bulldozer slammed into a commuter bus, other vehicles and pedestrians in Jerusalem on Wednesday, causing dozens of injuries in an apparent deliberate attack, police said.

Israel's Channel Two television said at least one person was killed and some 30 were wounded.

"A suspect driving a tractor ran over a number of vehicles and Israelis in the street, on Jaffa Road. Israeli police arrived at the scene. Many people were injured," police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said.

Emergency vehicles rushed to the scene, where a single-decker commuter bus, its side slashed by the tractor, stood on its side in one of Jewish West Jerusalem's main streets.

The Magen David Adom ambulance service said there were dozens of casualties.

At least three other vehicles appeared to sustain damage, including a van whose entire front section was crushed.

A radio reporter at the scene said after the tractor hit the vehicles, a man climbed onto its cab and shot at its driver several times. "I saw the tractor's shovel turn to the bus and deliberately hit it.

It hit other vehicles as well," another Israel Radio reporter said. The driver's condition was not immediately known

Israeli soldiers recount torturing Palestinians

One posed for a photo as she scrubbed a Palestinian corpse. Another stripped a man to his underwear and then beat him. A third helped cover up the abuse of a young boy.

The six Israeli women who feature in the documentary "To See If I'm Smiling" each wrestle with memories of their compulsory military service that they would rather erase. "To See If I'm Smiling", set to air this weekend, is expected to draw ire in the Jewish state for directing criticism at the military over the torture of Palestinians under occupation.
But after years of trying to bury the past, these women decided to speak out in a film that explores the dark side of Israel's 40-year-old occupation of the Palestinian territories."It's easy to finish your military service and push it to the back of your mind," said director Tamar Yarom. "But these girls are telling their personal stories -- which are not always very nice -- to show people what is going on."All but one of the women spent time as conscript soldiers in the Palestinian territories during the uprising that erupted in 2000.

In the film, they recount their memories from that period, describing how they coped with military machismo and with the residual guilt about what they witnessed.One girl who had wanted to save lives as a paramedic said she ended up scrubbing corpses to hide signs of abuse by Israeli soldiers.

Visibly distressed, she looks for the first time in years at a photo of her and a dead Palestinian man. "How in hell did I think I'd ever be able to forget?" she says, brushing away tears.
"Warped situation"
Yarom hopes the documentary will prompt soul-searching in the Jewish state, where military service is a core part of national identity, and encourage other traumatized ex-soldiers to talk about violence they may have inflicted or witnessed."This country (Israel) is in a coma.

With all the bombs and attacks, we are numb," Yarom said."People feel we are in a war of survival and it's better not to criticize soldiers, because they are the ones protecting us," she said.Israel's army said in a statement that soldiers adhere to a strict ethical code and that in exceptional cases, where the code is violated, an investigation is launched.

It said the number of ethical violations involving Palestinians had "consistently dropped" since the events described in the film.Yarom expects the film to provoke criticism both from the Israeli left -- because of her sympathetic portrayal of the soldiers -- and from the right -- which often balks at criticizing the army.Yarom said personal experience prompted her to make the film. As a support soldier during the earlier uprising of the 1980s, she was shown a Palestinian torture victim but failed to speak out.

Almost two decades later, she still cannot shake the image of the man, slumped over a generator, his neck bent to the side and his face covered in blood."It's the kind of picture that stays with you forever," she said. "During my service I detached myself. When you try to re-attach yourself afterwards it's painful."Although female soldiers are kept out of the front line, Israel is one of the only countries to enforce military service for women. Yarom aims to highlight the fragility of some girl soldiers -- many still in their teens when they start their two year army stint -- and the violence into which they are thrust. "You expect women to be more sensitive to suffering and more empathetic to the other side.

But the strength of the film is how it shows what happens to human beings in such a warped situation, and how women are not immune," Yarom said

Israeli website offers porn-for-peace

With the failure of peace plans and political processes, two Israeli entrepreneurs have come up with a novel way to unite Arabs and Jews
– an amateur Internet porn site – according to a recent press report.
The website, called Parpar 1, features only Israeli-born Arabs and Jews engaging in amateur porn, Jewish daily Forward reported earlier this month. The site
-- set up in 2000 by two Israeli IT engineers -- features such movies as Sex in the Army, The Rabbi’s Daughter, Kosher Lesbians, and Israeli Breakfast.
Despite an introductory video that proclaims “Make Love, Not War,” co-owner Avi Levy says his porn site is purely a commercial endeavor.
“I’m not a politician. I’m here to make money,” Levy, 42, said.Membership to the site costs roughly 10 dollars for three days, 15 dollars for one week and 25 dollars for 30 days.
Charges appear on billing statements as “fuel supplies”.
Levy's partner, a Web developer named Shay Malol, says the site has around 20,000 surfers per day, reaching up to 50,000 on weekends.Parpar is Hebrew for “butterfly,” but when used as a verb, it means “to sleep around,” according to Forward.An expert on Israeli-Palestinian affairs, Dr. Samir Qadih, told AlArabiya.net that such porn sites are usually based in areas inside Israel with large Arab populations, such as Haifa, Jaffa, and Nazareth.
"Arabs inside Israel have adapted to the Israeli way of life and no longer adhere to Arab traditions," he said.Qadih refuted the idea that these movies foster understanding between Arabs and Israelis.
He said most porn sites are supervised by the Mossad, adding that was the reason why Hamas has blocked this and other similar sites.

the 60's Memory of the Palestinian Catastrophe

Israel lifts blockade of fuel deliveries to Gaza

Israel on Wednesday resumed fuel shipments to the sole power plant in the Gaza Strip, the Israeli army said a day after officials said supplies would last for only 30 hours before it shut down.

"A million liters of fuel for the central power plant are being transferred today through Nahal Oz, which opened this morning," said an army spokeswoman, referring to the fuel terminal on the Israeli border with northern Gaza.Israel cut fuel supplies for Gaza's power plant by half and halted the supply of petrol and diesel after Palestinian militants attacked the terminal two weeks ago, killing two Israeli civilian employees.

It resumed shipments of fuel for the plant several days later, but stopped deliveries again last week after another attack killed three Israeli soldiers near Nahal Oz.On Tuesday Kanaan Obeid, vice president of Gaza's power authority, warned that the plant's fuel supply would last only another 30 hours, which would mean it would have to shut down on Wednesday night.

The Gisha Legal Centre for Freedom of Movement sent a request to Israel's attorney general warning that the cuts "violate the state's commitment to the Israeli supreme court to permit a minimum amount of fuel to enter Gaza."The plant provides around 30 percent of the territory's electricity, with most of the rest supplied from Israel and a small amount from Egypt.Israel slapped a punishing blockade on Gaza after the Islamist Hamas movement seized control of the territory in June

Palestinian tale of kindness plays in West Bank

For the first time, a documentary about a Palestinian boy whose tragic death saved the lives of five Israeli children

– thanks to his father – has been screened in the West Bank.

The documentary -- "The Heart of Jenin"

– tells the story of 12-year-old Palestinian boy, Ahmad al-Khatib, who was shot dead by Israeli troops when they mistook his toy gun for a real weapon.The shooting happened in the West Bank town of Jenin on Nov. 2, 2005.

At the time, Israeli soldiers had orders to "shoot anything that moved," one soldier said in the documentary.

The shot to Ahmad's head proved fatal, killing the boy from Jenin refugee camp. Ahmad's father Ismael al-Khatib later decided to donate his boy's organs to patients at the Haifa hospital where his son was pronounced dead."If I can't help my son to recover, then may be I can help other kids," he says in the documentary.

Five Israeli children received Ahmad's life-saving organs. The feature length documentary – directed by Marcus Vetter and Lior Geller –was screened at the German-French Cultural Center in Ramallah on March 27, the first time the film was shown in the Palestinian territories for a general audience.Palestinian cinemas refused the film because Geller is Israeli, said Farid Maajari, director of the cultural center.

Storyline

The Heart of Jenin follows Ahmad's father Ismael on his journey through Israel, visiting the children who found life through his son's death.Ahmad's kidneys went to the daughter of a Jewish settler in Occupied Jerusalem and a Bedouin boy from the Negev Desert region. His heart went to a Druze family in northern Israel. Two other beneficiaries chose not to participate in the documentary.

The extraordinary donation was approved not only by the boy's grief-stricken mother and father, but religious and political scholars too.

In the movie, Jenin's mufti approves organ donations. The opinion is backed by the Jenin commander of Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade.

"We have no problem with Jews as Jews.

There's no problem as long as this will save lives," says Zakaria Zubeidi.In the movie, the father of the Jewish girl said he did not want to meet the donor family and would have preferred if they were Jewish.

He said Arabs only want to kill Israelis, apparently oblivious to the actions of Ahmad's father who donated his son's kidney to save the settler girl.After the screening in Ramallah, German director Vetter told the audience the film was banned from the Tel Aviv film festival allegedly for technical reasons.

"Some people said the film is biased towards the Palestinians because it tackles the death of the child and focuses on checkpoints, collective punishment, and the destruction of Jenin refugee camp," Vetter said.

Ismail al-Khatib now runs a music school for children in Jenin.

"Without peace, only killing will remain. Children from Palestine and Israel and all the world will die," Khatib said.

killing the civilian people by the israeli's forces

this documentarian movies shows the largest masscare and most dirty by the israeli's forces against the civilian people in palestine ( in jinin and nablus) in the year 2001

Tragedy of Israel and Palestine

Americans have grown so accustomed to the disastrous dynamics operating between Israelis and Palestinians today that the failure to reach a peace deal amid the soaring death tolls assumes an aura of normalcy in their minds.

This reflects a situation we imagine ourselves to be powerless to help change and only adds to the tragedy unfolding in the Occupied Territories and Israel as well.

Today the world's attention has turned to the aftermath of the murder of eight students of an ultra-Zionist Mercaz HaRav yeshiva, established by the founder of religious zionism, Rabbi Avraham Isaac Kook in 1924.

Last week the focus was the ongoing war in Gaza, which will likely be the centre of attention next week as well.

The attacks on religious students in the midst of study and prayer - coupled with the ongoing rocket attacks from Gaza on the Israeli towns of Sderot and Ashkelon - are already being offered as the latest examples of continued Palestinian unwillingness to make peace with Israel more than two years after its unprecedented withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.
World's largest prison

Shanbo Heinemann, a pro-Palestinian activist, is injured in a protest against the wall [GETTY] But there are many problems with this argument; firstly, most of the acts of Palestinian resistance to the occupation have always been non-violent.

Equally important is the fact that while Israeli civilians no longer live in Gaza, Israel's military presence has never ended.
Tel Aviv withdrew civilian settlers and then threw away the key to what has now become the world's largest prison.

Ariel Sharon, the former Israeli prime minister and the architect of the settlement movement, was willing to sacrifice Gaza in order to ensure Israel held onto the major settlement blocs of the West Bank, which today house more than 250,000 settlers (almost double that number if one includes the Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem).

The settler population of the West Bank also doubled during the years of the Oslo "peace" process - which began when Abu Dahim was about 12 and ended when he was 19 - without a whimper of complaint from the United States.

By the time Yitzhak Rabin, the former prime minister, was assassinated in 1995, Palestinian leaders were warning that the continued settlement expansion was "killing" the peace process and would sooner or later lead to a "revolution" from the street.

The presence of well over 100 settlements has necessitated a matrix of control in which 80 per cent of the West Bank be declared off limits to Palestinians.

It also meant the destruction of thousands of homes and olive and fruit trees (the backbone of an otherwise closed Palestinian economy), the confiscation of 35,000 acres of Palestinian land, and the creation of a network of bypass roads, military bases.

The 400-kilometre, 8-metre-high "separation wall" also pierces deep into Palestinian territory, cutting into at least three isolated cantons.

Together, the settlement system has made the idea of creating a territorially and economically viable Palestinian state impossible to implement.

With the eruption of the al-Aqsa intifada in September 2000 whatever infrastructure of peace had been created during Oslo was quickly dismantled by both sides.

By mid-2002 Israel began deploying a strategy of managed chaos, in which a near total closure of the Territories, coupled with a destruction of much of their economic and political infrastructure, turned the intifada into what Palestinians term an "intifawda," a neologism that brings the violence of the intifada together with the chaos, or "fawda" of a society living in a barely functioning state and economy.

Dividing Palestine

Israel's separation wall cuts a broad path through Palestinian olive groves [GALLO/GETTY]Israeli planners gambled that by splitting the West Bank from Gaza, deepening the occupation of the former while freeing itself of the settlements in the latter, and routinely deploying disproportionate violence (including tanks, helicopter gunships, F-16s, and heavily armed troops) against all signs of resistance, Palestinian society would begin turning on itself.

Indeed, Israel hoped for this when it clandestinely supported the emergence of Hamas two decades ago, with the goal of building up a rival to the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) that would have them fighting each other rather than figuring out more successful strategies of fighting the occupation.

But, even as Palestinians fight each other, resistance to the occupation has continued. Most of it is comprised of various forms of non-violence (marches, sit-ins, and attempts to stop home demolitions or replant uprooted fields or groves).

These are rarely covered by the international media, and are usually met with violence by the Israeli military or settlers.

Fairly or not, however, it has been Palestinian violence, and especially suicide bombings and now rocket attacks on civilians, that have defined their resistance to the ongoing occupation.

Suicidal suicide attacks

And in this regard the actions have been nothing short of suicidal - Palestinian "resistance" to the occupation seems to have been scripted by Israel as it has suited the interests of the Israeli governments in power since 2000. As Haaretz columnist Bradley Burston recently put it:

"The Palestinians have kept their ultimate doomsday weapon under tight wraps for 40 years ... Israeli senior commanders could only pray that the Palestinians would never take it out and put it to actual use ... non-violence. This is one reason why, for decades, Israel did its best to head off, harass, and crack down on expressions of Palestinian non-violence."

If Palestinians ever decided to just "get up and walk" en masse to the Erez Crossing separating Gaza from Israel and the major West Bank check points like Qalandiya and used hammers and picks to tear them down, there would be almost nothing Israel could do, short of a massacre in full view of the world's cameras.

But Palestinians have become so stuck in the ideology of summud, (which naturally become a national imperative after a million Palestinians were uprooted in the 1948 and 1967 wars), or defiantly staying put, that they have rarely taken the strategic or moral offensive.

When they applied the moral approach during the first intifada, Israel's harsh crackdown coupled with PLO dominance of Palestianian politics, ensured the de-politicisation and disempowerment of the first "intifada generation".

Two weeks ago, when a few brave Palestinians tried to organise a peaceful march to the Erez border crossing to build on the momentum gained by breaching the border fence between Gaza and Egypt, they were stopped far from the border by a line of heavily armed Hamas policemen.

Soon after, the day's ration of rockets was fired into the nearby Israeli town of Sderot, wounding two Israeli children.

Israel responded with a new rounds of attacks by Israel, killing and wounding more Palestinians.

How to stop?

A few years ago, in a particularly violent moment of the intifada, I interviewed a senior Hamas leader at his office in Gaza. After the usual boiler plate questions and answers, I finally grew exasperated and said to him, "Look, let's put aside the question of whether you have the right to use violence, particularly against civilians, to pursue your ends. The simple fact is that the strategy has not worked."

His response stunned me with its honesty: "We know the violence doesn't work, but we don't know how to stop."

In a mirror image of Israeli strategic thinking, Hamas has remained unable to break free of the dangerously outdated paradigm that says violence, particularly against civilians, can only be met by even more violence until the other side yields.

Aside from the moral turpitude of such thinking by both sides - not to mention blatant illegality according to international law - the reality, at least in the near term, is that the human and political cost of such a policy for Israel is far lower than for Palestinians, who have very little time left before their dreams of independence are crushed for good.

Ehud Olmert, Israel's prime minister, has himself admitted, the day Palestinians give up on the dream of an independent state will be the day Israel will "face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights, and as soon as that happens, the state of Israel is finished."

Dysfunctional dynamics

In 1987, Meron Benvenisti, the former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, concluded his well-known "West Bank Data Base Project" report by arguing that the West Bank settlements were too integrated into Israel to separate them as part of any future peace dealBut so dysfunctional are the current dynamics that neither side seems willing to take the first step away from the abyss.

In such a situation, only a strong outside party can force the warring sides to make the hard compromises necessary to achieve a just and lasting peace.

This was the job the US signed up for in 1993, when Bill Clinton, then president, witnessed the signing of the first Oslo agreement on the White House lawn. But we have failed miserably in our self-appointed role as "honest broker."

It's not just that US has unapologetically taken Israel's side on almost every major issue since then.

During the Oslo years the US worked hand in glove with the Israeli and Palestinian security services to stifle dissent within Palestinian civil society, or the Legislative Council, to a process that was moving away from rather than towards a just and lasting peace.

And with the militarisation of US foreign policy after September 11 and the sullied occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, Israel has had even greater carte blanche to inflict precisely the kind of damage upon Palestinian society we are witnessing now in Gaza.

Blood of children

By refusing to press Israel - as many Israeli commentators, and an increasing number of US policy-makers as well, urge - to negotiate with Hamas we have not just enabled the current violence, but are directly responsible for it.

Hamas has declared its willingness to negotiate a two-state solution, albeit under conditions to which Israel has little incentive to accept.

The blood of Israeli and Palestinian children that appears on TV is on our hands too.

It would be nice if we could imagine that the next US president will have the courage to "change" this dynamic. But there is little chance of that.

The only hope is that Israeli and Palestinian societies come together to stop the violence their leaders keep inflicting on them before the delusions of victory on both sides cross the line into psychosis.

Mark LeVine is professor of history at UCI Irvine and author or editor of half a dozen books dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and globalisation in the Middle East, including Overthrowing Geography: Jaffa, Tel Aviv and the Struggle for Palestine, Reapproaching Borders: New Perspectives on the Study of Israel and Palestine, Why They Don't Hate Us: Lifting the Veil on the Axis of Evil, and the forthcoming An Impossible Peace: Oslo and the Burdens of History.

Negotiating peace

Dr. James J Zogby

This month the US Institute for Peace released Negotiating Arab-Israeli Peace: American Leadership in the Middle East, the report of a study group which examined US peacemaking efforts over the past four decades.

Headed by Daniel Kurtzer (former US Ambassador to Egypt and Israel), the group met during 2006-2007 and interviewed over 100 officials and experts from seven countries and three international organisations.

The main body of the report is a look at successes and failures, and strengths and weaknesses of the past three administrations' efforts at Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking.

It concludes by detailing 10 lessons learned, and then outlining recommendations based on those lessons to guide the next administration.

The examination of Washington's peace making efforts during the past three administrations begins with a largely positive assessment of "Bush 41", crediting President George H.W. Bush for "having the clearest sense of strategy", which he pursued "in a highly disciplined, effective and committed manner.

" On the other hand, the major weakness of "Bush 41," pointed to in the report, was his "failure to build a strong coalition at home to support [his] strategy.

" It was the combination of this failure, and the distraction of his reelection effort in 1992, that caused the Bush Administration to lose focus in its peacemaking efforts.In spite of this, the report notes that the Clinton administration "inherited an ideal strategic environment for peacemaking.

" Noting that Clinton more effectively built a domestic support base for his peacemaking efforts, he was, however, "less disciplined and less strategic than his predecessor".

Specifically, the report noted that the Clinton team "failed to understand and deal with key asymmetries in the Palestinian-Israeli negotiations.

While the US paid attention to Israeli security requirements, less attention was devoted to Palestinian political requirements. The US did not find a way to compensate for Palestinian political weakness.

This was the first time in history a people under occupation was expected to negotiate its own way out of occupation while at the same time creating a viable, democratic and independent state".

The report notes that Clinton did not personally become directly involved in negotiations until late in his second term, and did not put forward his own peace plan until his last month in office. This was, of course, too late to make a difference.

It is George W. Bush's approach that receives the greatest criticism, the authors noting that "his approach to the conflict lacked both commitment and a sense of strategic purpose".

This, they suggest, was due to the fact that too many of the president's advisers dismissed the importance of Middle East peace, placing greater emphasis on their "regime change" and democratisation agendas.

No follow through
When Bush did become involved, however, it was mostly on the rhetorical level, with little or no follow through.

Plans were announced, and mediators were dispatched in succession, ignored and undercut, and then dropped.

To some degree, this contributed to a widespread belief that the Administration's efforts lacked seriousness.

The result of this mismanagement and/or neglect has negatively affected not only Israelis and Palestinians, but US diplomacy in the broader region, and public attitudes towards the US itself. The report goes on to list a number of important lessons that must be heeded by any future administration.

Here are three:"Arab-Israeli peacemaking is in our national interest: September 11, Iraq and increasing instability in the Middle East have made US leadership in the peace process more, not less, important.

The president needs to indicate that the peace process is a priority and ensure that the administration acts accordingly.

"US policy must never be defined anywhere but in Washington. Consultations with the parties must take place and policy revisions based on these consultations are inevitable, but our policy must be seen as our own.""The peace process has moved beyond incrementalism and must aim for endgame solutions. This not only requires US leadership to help the parties make the necessary trade-offs on core issues, but also a commitment to an expanded diplomatic approach that involves key international and regional actors."The report provides both a useful history and thoughtful analysis, with which one can find little disagreement.

My concern, however, is that it comes too late.

If Negotiating Arab-Israeli Peace: American Leadership in the Middle East is to be followed, it must be followed by a very determined president willing to use pressure and politics not only to bring Israelis and Palestinians together, but also to work to transform US, Israeli and Palestinian attitudes.

palestine..... where to ???

added by : gandy y abo sharar

More Money for Israel? They're richer than ever, and they don't need it – so why are we giving it?

by:http://www.antiwar.com

American military aid to Israel has been increased yet again, which leads us to ask the inevitable question: What are we getting for our money?
Well, we're getting this, as well as this, and this – not to mention this.
The regularly quoted figure is $3.5 billion per year. John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt go with the figure of $3 billion in their new book, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, averring that this is "generous, but it is hardly the whole story." This "canonical" figure, they say, "omits a substantial number of other benefits." The authors cite former congressman Lee Hamilton as saying that Israel is one of three countries whose aid total "substantially exceeds the popularly quoted figures." The actual figure, said Hamilton, is more than $4.5 billion.
As Mearsheimer and Walt have pointed out, neither the practical nor the moral case for this extraordinary amount of material support is justified: our Israel-centered foreign policy has been a burden to us in our dealings with the other nations of the Middle East, and it is increasingly clear that U.S. and Israeli interests have diverged since the end of the Cold War. Contrary to the Lobby's assertion that 9/11 made their fight our fight, the exact opposite is the case. Anti-Americanism in the Muslim world is a deadly danger to our national security and a great boon to Osama bin Laden and his many imitators around the globe. This arming of the Israeli Sparta is a strategic and diplomatic liability that grows with each passing year.
This post by Matt Yglesias over at The Atlantic makes a lot of sense, as far as it goes. An argument made by the Amen Corner is that the Israelis are performing a valuable service by refining the technical expertise of the military-industrial complex: they're doing the research and development that is giving America the weapons of tomorrow. But "this doesn't really make sense," Yglesias writes, "since defense contractors – American, Israeli, French, whatever – get paid for their work as is, so it's not clear why the Israeli government would need extra payment."
It's hard to differentiate between private and public industry in socialist Israel, especially when it comes to the military-industrial complex, where no clear line of demarcation exists. Indeed, in the United States, and throughout the world, such companies are virtual arms of the government, which is their primary and often only customer.
The point to be made is this: Just as America's policy of military intervention in the Middle East benefits Israel strategically, serving as an ever expanding protective shield against the hostility of its neighbors, so American subsidies in the form of military aid are designed to bolster the burgeoning Israeli arms industry, so that government-supported Israeli companies can sell us new weaponry developed on our dime.
The system works a little differently in Eastern Europe, where the installation of missile defense-systems purportedly defending against a very unlikely Iranian attack is a direct subsidy to the American companies that developed it. Again, aid to the Israelis is given on unusually favorable terms, and this underscores once more the central point made by Professors Mearsheimer and Walt, which is that the existence of the Lobby – as the single most powerful influence on the conduct of American foreign policy – explains the discrepancy.
Israel is a rich country. They don't need this enormous outpouring of free cash to shore up their military machine, which amounts to around one-sixth of our total foreign aid outlay and about 2 percent of the Israeli gross domestic product. It is the equivalent of roughly $500 per year to each and every citizen of Israel. So why this incredible amount of military aid?
After all, the Israelis are unofficial members of the nuclear club. They could turn Tehran into a molten puddle of glass at a moment's notice, and maybe someday they will. Which is precisely the point. Israel is one of the most warlike countries on earth, given that it has been, since its inception, perpetually at war with its neighbors. Israel's partisans claim this is no fault of the Israelis, yet that question is not only highly debatable, it is utterly irrelevant as far as determining what the American interest is in all this.
This new aid package will accelerate a process that was begun some time ago and help make Israel America's confidante and primary ally, a post once occupied by the British, ensconcing the Jewish state as the primary armaments-producer to the American empire. Israel will profit from the rise of the American empire not only monetarily, but also geopolitically.
This strengthening of the Israeli military-industrial complex fills the coffers of the War Party to overflowing and helps keep the political and economic dynamics of this uniquely binational war economy flowing and politically viable. As regards the latter, as we have seen, the Lobby and allied groups and individuals take a leading role in plumbing for an aggressive policy in the Middle East, pushing for policies that increase war profits. It's the economics of that famous "cycle of violence" that everyone is always talking about breaking, yet it won't be broken until the power of the military-industrial complex is successfully curtailed, and, with it, the decisive influence of the Lobby.
One effect of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy will be to reopen discussion of the Foreign Agents Registration Act and how it's not being enforced in the case of AIPAC. As the arrest, trial, and conviction of Pentagon analyst Larry Franklin makes all too clear, Israel's top lobbying organization in the U.S. is an agent of a foreign government: the upcoming trial of top AIPAC officials Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman on charges of passing classified information gleaned from Franklin to Israeli government officials threatens to uncover what it means to really function as a foreign agent – including engaging in espionage, in addition to routine cheerleading for the Israeli government talking point of the moment.
Many people have written me – given that I have covered the implications of the AIPAC spy trial in detail but haven't published anything on the subject recently – asking whatever happened to Rosen, Weissman, and the case, and darkly implying that since the supposedly all-powerful "Jewish cabal" that (in their view) runs the world couldn't possibly allow this to come to trial, it won't ever see the light of a courtroom. Ah, not so: the trial, though delayed – through the successful legal tactics of the defense – has not been derailed. A trial date of Jan. 14, 2008, has been set – although this, too, is tentative, given the outcome of several pending legal maneuvers. Another reason for the successful delaying tactics by the defense: the media hasn't paid any attention to this case, apart from a brief flurry of interest when the story first broke.
For the reasons why that is so, you'll just have to read The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. I'm just finishing it up now and hope to have a report for you soon. In the meantime, the Lobby marches on, devastating all opposition with its virulent smear campaigns, and pulling in a good chunk of change for the mother country in the process. So, what are we getting for our involuntary "contribution" to the IDF?
Well, nothing. But our politicians, and the corrupt corporate interests whose sock-puppets they are, are getting plenty – of that you can be sure. The former are getting reelected, thanks to huge campaign contributions by the special interests, including the armaments industry, and the latter are getting rich off the backs of the American taxpayers.
And the beat goes on…

Give Us a Moment please

do u know read arabic..? if u can please see how this fucker shiekh hamad ben khalifa

help the israeli army .. while more than 65% of israeli people help us to get our independent

We want the freedom

we want the independence

want life and we want to live in our homeland

we became a refugees in around the world

helped us to build our life

we want to live peacefully

the holocoust

by:123 helm me

For twelve years following 1933 the Jews were persecuted by the Nazi's. Jewish businesses were boycotted and vandalized. By 1939, Jews were no longer citizens,could not attend public schools,engage in practically any business or profession, own any land, associate with any non-Jew or visit public places such as parks and museums. The victories of the German armies in the early years of World War II brought the majority of European Jewry under the Nazis. The Jews were deprived of human rights. The Jewish people were forced to live in Ghetto's which were separated from the main city. Hitler's plan of genocide was carried out with efficiency. The total number of Jews exterminated has been calculated at around 5,750,000. In Warsaw ,where approximately 400,000 Jews had once been concentrated,was reduced to a population of 60,000. They,virtually unarmed, resisted the German deportation order and had held back the regular German troops equipped with flame throwers,armoured cards, and tanks for nearly a month. This heroism was similar to the revolt which took place around 165BC. This uprising was led by the Maccabees, a provincial priestly family (also called Hasmoneans). They recaptured the Temple and rededicated it to the God of Israel. The Maccabees made there last stand on a mountain and was able to hold back the syrians for more then a month. There is a distinct similarity between the two stories and that is possibly why they are both recognised as holidays in the Jewish faith. These horrific events of the holocaust have let to some consequences which are beneficial and some are unfortunate to the Jewish people. The population of the followers has greatly declined. Also the Jewish people after the war still had problems finding jobs. They had to essentially start there life over. Most of them lost a close relative or at least knew someone who died in the gas chambers of the Nazi concentration camps. This has put a psychological strain on Jewish survivors or no longer having family and friends with them for support. This event has awaken the world up to the needs of the Jewish people. It has given them political power and a justification for some of their actions. On May recognised,1945 ,the end of World War II was seen. Organized Jewry in the European continent was damaged beyond repair. The Jews concentrated on the preservation of Israel and on the bringing of Nazi war criminals to trial. There is a day of commemoration, Holocaust Day, observed in Israel and elsewhere on Nisan (April) 19 and 20. The date is considered the anniversary of the beginning of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising

human rights abuses every where.. palestine ..iraq ..