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| Palastine Facing Fecal Flooding; Israel doesnt see the problem? | |
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| Tweet Topic Started: Apr 29 2008, 03:16 AM (238 Views) | |
| freebeesting | Apr 29 2008, 03:16 AM Post #1 |
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http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/comme...ace-816661.html Johann Hari: Israel is suppressing a secret it must face How did a Jewish state founded 60 years ago end up throwing filth at cowering Palestinians? Monday, 28 April 2008 When you hit your 60th birthday, most of you will guzzle down your hormone replacement therapy with a glass of champagne and wonder if you have become everything you dreamed of in your youth. In a few weeks, the state of Israel is going to have that hangover. She will look in the mirror and think – I have a sore back, rickety knees and a gun at my waist, but I'm still standing. Yet somewhere, she will know she is suppressing an old secret she has to face. I would love to be able to crash the birthday party with words of reassurance. Israel has given us great novelists like Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua, great film-makers like Joseph Cedar, great scientific research into Alzheimer's, and great dissident journalists like Amira Hass, Tom Segev and Gideon Levy to expose her own crimes. She has provided the one lonely spot in the Middle East where gay people are not hounded and hanged, and where women can approach equality. But I can't do it. Whenever I try to mouth these words, a remembered smell fills my nostrils. It is the smell of shit. Across the occupied West Bank, raw untreated sewage is pumped every day out of the Jewish settlements, along large metal pipes, straight onto Palestinian land. From there, it can enter the groundwater and the reservoirs, and become a poison. Standing near one of these long, stinking brown-and-yellow rivers of waste recently, the local chief medical officer, Dr Bassam Said Nadi, explained to me: "Recently there were very heavy rains, and the shit started to flow into the reservoir that provides water for this whole area. I knew that if we didn't act, people would die. We had to alert everyone not to drink the water for over a week, and distribute bottles. We were lucky it was spotted. Next time..." He shook his head in fear. This is no freak: a 2004 report by Friends of the Earth found that only six per cent of Israeli settlements adequately treat their sewage. Meanwhile, in order to punish the population of Gaza for voting "the wrong way", the Israeli army are not allowing past the checkpoints any replacements for the pipes and cement needed to keep the sewage system working. The result? Vast stagnant pools of waste are being held within fragile dykes across the strip, and rotting. Last March, one of them burst, drowning a nine-month-old baby and his elderly grandmother in a tsunami of human waste. The Centre on Housing Rights warns that one heavy rainfall could send 1.5m cubic metres of faeces flowing all over Gaza, causing "a humanitarian and environmental disaster of epic proportions". So how did it come to this? How did a Jewish state founded 60 years ago with a promise to be "a light unto the nations" end up flinging its filth at a cowering Palestinian population? The beginnings of an answer lie in the secret Israel has known, and suppressed, all these years. Even now, can we describe what happened 60 years ago honestly and unhysterically? The Jews who arrived in Palestine throughout the twentieth century did not come because they were cruel people who wanted to snuffle out Arabs to persecute. No: they came because they were running for their lives from a genocidal European anti-Semitism that was soon to slaughter six million of their sisters and their sons. They convinced themselves that Palestine was "a land without people for a people without land". I desperately wish this dream had been true. You can see traces of what might have been in Tel Aviv, a city that really was built on empty sand dunes. But most of Palestine was not empty. It was already inhabited by people who loved the land, and saw it as theirs. They were completely innocent of the long, hellish crimes against the Jews. When it became clear these Palestinians would not welcome becoming a minority in somebody else's country, darker plans were drawn up. Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, wrote in 1937: "The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making it happen, such as a war." So, for when the moment arrived, he helped draw up Plan Dalit. It was – as Israeli historian Ilan Pappe puts it – "a detailed description of the methods to be used to forcibly evict the people: large-scale intimidation; and laying siege to and bombarding population centres". In 1948, before the Arab armies invaded, this began to be implemented: some 800,000 people were ethnically cleansed, and Israel was built on the ruins. The people who ask angrily why the Palestinians keep longing for their old land should imagine an English version of this story. How would we react if the 30m stateless, persecuted Kurds in the world sent armies and settlers into this country to seize everything in England below Leeds, and swiftly established a free Kurdistan from which we were expelled? Wouldn't we long forever for our children to return to Cornwall and Devon and London? Would it take us only 40 years to compromise and offer to settle for just 22 per cent of what we had? If we are not going to be endlessly banging our heads against history, the Middle East needs to excavate 1948, and seek a solution. Any peace deal – even one where Israel dismantled the wall and agreed to return to the 1967 borders – tends to crumple on this issue. The Israelis say: if we let all three million come back, we will be outnumbered by Palestinians even within the 1967 borders, so Israel would be voted out of existence. But the Palestinians reply: if we don't have an acknowledgement of the Naqba (catastrophe), and our right under international law to the land our grandfathers fled, how can we move on? It seemed like an intractable problem – until, two years ago, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research conducted the first study of the Palestinian Diaspora's desires. They found that only 10 per cent – around 300,000 people – want to return to Israel proper. Israel can accept that many (and compensate the rest) without even enduring much pain. But there has always been a strain of Israeli society that preferred violently setting its own borders, on its own terms, to talk and compromise. This weekend, the elected Hamas government offered a six-month truce that could have led to talks. The Israeli government responded within hours by blowing up a senior Hamas leader and killing a 14-year-old girl. Perhaps Hamas' proposals are a con; perhaps all the Arab states are lying too when they offer Israel full recognition in exchange for a roll-back to the 1967 borders; but isn't it a good idea to find out? Israel, as she gazes at her grey hairs and discreetly ignores the smell of her own stale shit pumped across Palestine, needs to ask what kind of country she wants to be in the next 60 years. http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/comme...ace-816661.html |
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| freebeesting | May 1 2008, 01:23 PM Post #2 |
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http://news.sbs.com.au/worldnewsaustralia/...y_israel_545776 Source: Reuters Palestinian aid 'blocked' by Israel Sunday, 27 April, 2008 A young boy looks longingly into Egypt from Gaza (AAP) WATCH A VIDEOHAMAS OFFERS GAZA TRUCE WITH ISRAEL Billions of aid dollars pledged to the Palestinians to bolster peace talks with Israel are having a muted economic impact because of Israeli restrictions on travel and trade, the World Bank says. The lending agency told donor nations in a report that per capita income in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 2008 would be static, if not lower, despite the $US7.7 billion ($A8.1 billion) in aid pledged to the Palestinians in December. The World Bank says modest gains in economic growth in the occupied West Bank, where Western-backed President Mahmoud Abbas's government holds sway, were not sufficient to offset the "severe contraction" seen in Hamas-controlled Gaza. Israel tightened its blockade of the Gaza Strip after the Islamist group's takeover in June from more secular Fatah forces loyal to Mr Abbas. 'Little progress' "While the PA (Palestinian Authority) has moved ahead with its economic reforms, albeit slowly, there has been little progress on relaxing movement and access constraints," the bank said in the report, a copy of which was obtained by Reuters. The World Bank says the impact of these restrictions, including hundreds of checkpoints and roadblocks in the West Bank, "cannot be overestimated". Mr Abbas responded to Gaza's takeover by sacking a Hamas-led unity government and by appointing his own administration in the West Bank. Western aid, frozen after Hamas won control of the Palestinian Authority in January 2006 elections, has since resumed to Mr Abbas's government to bolster final-status peace talks launched with Israel in November. But those talks have shown little sign of progress and Israel has balked at removing major West Bank checkpoints and roadblocks, arguing that they are necessary to stop suicide bombers from reaching its cities. 'Collective punishment' Palestinians call the obstacles collective punishment. While the International Monetary Fund has projected growth of 3.0 per cent in 2008, the World Bank says: "Taking into account population growth, it can be concluded that under the current movement and access restrictions, per capita incomes will drop or remain the same." The World Bank says Israel's tightened cordon of the Gaza Strip has "considerably eroded whatever private sector backbone remained in the economy, and in a manner that is progressively more difficult to reverse". The bank, citing business associations in Gaza, said the current restrictions have led to the suspension of 96 per cent of Gaza's industrial operations. Following a recent visit by US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Israel announced plans to remove 61 barriers in the West Bank. But a UN survey subsequently found that only 44 of the 61 obstacles had been removed and that most of them were of little to no significance. Source: Reuters http://news.sbs.com.au/worldnewsaustralia/...y_israel_545776 |
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| freebeesting | May 1 2008, 02:01 PM Post #3 |
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http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9497.shtml UN facing increased delays at Israeli checkpoints Report, The Electronic Intifada, 30 April 2008 JERUSALEM, 30 April (IRIN) - Increased Israeli restrictions on the checkpoints around East Jerusalem have caused more delays and more lost man hours for UN staff in March 2008 than in all of 2007, the UN's Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) has reported. In the Humanitarian Monitor for March, released on 24 April, OCHA said "operations were significantly affected" and almost daily UN vehicles were delayed and even turned back by Israeli soldiers at checkpoints south of Jerusalem. Israeli soldiers have increasingly insisted on searching UN vehicles at the checkpoints as a condition for being allowed through, despite the fact that Israel signed the 1946 Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the UN which normally prohibits such searches. "Movement of UN staff between the West Bank and East Jerusalem has been increasingly restricted over the years, starting with the erection of checkpoints, the requirement that national staff carry permits, and the building of the wall," Allegra Pacheco, the acting-head of UN OCHA in occupied Palestinian territory, told IRIN. "Beyond challenging its own commitments under the convention, it is also challenging the neutrality of the UN by demanding a search," Pacheco said, adding that on 29 April she herself was delayed for over one hour after soldiers demanded a search of her UN vehicle. Most of the delays take place as staff try to enter East Jerusalem, where nearly all UN agencies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have their headquarters or secondary offices. Israel occupied East Jerusalem in 1967 and subsequently annexed it under Basic Law passed by the Knesset when Begin was premier, in violation of international law. The goal was to create one unified capital, no longer divided (as the city was from 1948 to 1967). Palestinians see East Jerusalem as their future capital, and the UN recognizes it as part of occupied Palestinian territory. "It is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain large-scale, long-term humanitarian operations given the closures," Christopher Gunness, a spokesman for UNRWA, the UN agency for Palestinian refugees, told IRIN, adding that "aid is becoming more expensive and work is becoming less effective." In the Nablus and Hebron districts, as well, UN agencies and NGOs said they have suffered from delays and other problems at the checkpoints. Gaza blockade affecting UN staff The crossing points to the Gaza Strip remained problematic. National UN staff members in Gaza are generally unable to leave the enclave, even on official UN duty. "Getting our [Palestinian] staff out of Gaza is next to impossible," a UN medical aid worker told IRIN. Also, when permits are issued for these workers they tend to be valid for short periods of time or may be granted only as single entry passes. International UN staff members have also been having a more difficult time obtaining documentation from the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, resulting in their inability to access the Gaza Strip and carry out their duties. "Everyone who deserves a card gets one, and we would be happy to look into any specific cases of people who did not get one," Aryeh Mekel, spokesman for the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, told IRIN. This item comes to you via IRIN, a UN humanitarian news and information service, but may not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations or its agencies. All IRIN material may be reposted or reprinted free-of-charge; refer to the copyright page for conditions of use. IRIN is a project of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article9497.shtml |
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