In the center of the city of Hebron lies the "Tel Rumeida" neighborhood. In 1986, a new settlement was established at the heart of the neighborhood. The settlers of Tel Rumieda, who known as particularly extreme, live on one side of a dead-end street... The Abu Eisha family lives on the other side.
Commentary on recent video showing Hebron settler woman harassing Abu Aisha family
CPT, Wednesday January 24 2007
B'Tselem - Testimony of Taysir Abu 'Ayesha, January 2007
Daily attacks by settlers on the Abu 'Ayesha family, Tel Rumeida, Hebron
Yifat Alkobi leads colonist trespass on Tel Rumeida Hill
ISM Hebron, February 19th 2007
Today at 4 pm human rights workers (HRWs) decided to pass by local resident Issa Amro’s house on Tel Rumeida hill. In the past week colonists had occupied this Palestinian property several times.
When the HRWs arrived at the house, they noticed a group of colonists, 2 men, 5 women and 15 children, had entered the house and garden again. It was only yesterday that they were sent away by the police. The colonists took pictures of the HRWs and one of the women, Yifat Alkobi, videotaped them. Yifat Alkobi is notorious from the “Sharmouta video”.
===========================
International observers to open new office in Hebron's old city
Ma'an News, 17 / 09 / 2007
The Temporary International Presence in Hebron (TIPH) is opening another office in the old city of Hebron this week. The organization says the new office on Salah Al-Din Street, just next to the municipal square, will serve Palestinians in the Old City to reach TIPH more easily.
Head of Mission Karl-Henrik Sjursen says the new office demonstrates TIPH's commitment to Hebron's people to observe and report on the abuses committed by Israeli settlers and military forces.
Hebron's old city has been mainly abandoned by its former Palestinian residents due to settler violence. A tiny minority of residents continue to live there despite the ongoing harassment from the militant settler compounds nearby.
Created in the Oslo peace agreement, TIPH is a civilian observer mission in the West Bank city of Hebron. According to the group, TIPH "reports on breaches of regional agreements on Hebron and human rights law to the Israeli and Palestinian parties both on a local level and on a national level."
Diplomatic representatives of all the six member countries of TIPH - Norway, Italy, Sweden, Denmark, Turkey and Switzerland – will be present at an opening ceremony for the new office on the 18th of September.
---------------------------
"CPT: Dealing with threats on your life"
Nigel Parry, Hebron Diary, 23 January 1998
My e-mail in-box was busy this last week, with reports and updates from the violence reduction presence of the red-capped Christian Peacemaker Team (CPT) in Hebron, all relating to recent death threats against three of their members.
I've read CPT reports for some time now, and both these and the CPT archives represent an oasis of information coming out of a desert of silence. In Hebron we had endured both the "we work with the authorities and cannot comment" silence of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the "Our reports are passed on to committees [somewhere]" silence of the mostly Norweigen Temporary International Presence in Hebron (TIPH). TIPH unfortunately means "spit" in Arabic, and silence - which is what ultimately results from no-publish human rights mandates - is what keeps the violators happy and makes you want to make the same sound as the name.
Sunday, 30 September 2007
Report on the Educational System in East Jerusalem
Alternative Information Center Publishes Research on Dismal State of Education in East Jerusalem
Shir Hever, Alternative Information Center (AIC)
Tuesday, 04 September 2007
The report does not purport to cover the entire educational system in East Jerusalem. Rather, it presents, as much as possible, an up-to-date and extensive picture of education, and recommends several alternative actions to change and improve the current situation. It goes without saying that none of these recommendations can be realized without the help of the Israeli educational system, since Israel’s illegal annexation of East Jerusalem by military force created a responsibility for the Israeli government to provide for the civilian services to the local population.
This report is based on research that Niv Hachlili conducted and wrote between September 2005 and January 2006. For the purpose of the study, extensive bibliographical research, onsite tours, meetings and personal interviews were conducted. Shir Hever edited and expanded the report. Rima Essa helped in preparing the research.
==============================================
The Education System in East Jerusalem – Summary
Shir Hever, Alternative Information Center (AIC), 4.9.07
When Israel annexed East Jerusalem in 1967, it assumed responsibility for the well-being of East Jerusalem’s population and for fulfilling their rights, regardless of religion or ethnicity. The right to education is one of the most basic rights, and is an essential prerequisite for the plural democracy Israel claims to be.
Education is especially important because in the long term it determines a population’s ability to deal with the rest of society on a par. The education system in Israel maintains and expands gaps between the Jewish and the Palestinian Arab sectors. In East Jerusalem the differences and discrimination are especially stark and apparent.
The economic situation in East Jerusalem is a testament to years of inequity and neglect. Sixty-six percent of Palestinian families and 76% of Palestinian children live below the poverty line. While Palestinians make up 34% of the total population in Jerusalem, they make up 56% of the poor and about 58% of poor children, despite the fact that the percentage of Muslim men in Jerusalem employed in the civilian workforce is greater than that of Jews.
While Palestinian school pupils make nearly 42% percent of the pupils in the whole of the Jerusalem education system, they receive little more than 20% of the education budget (this figure is provided by the official statistics: the real amount of money that ends up in the hands of the Palestinian schools is even smaller than that). As a result, the infrastructure is hazardous and studying conditions are unbearable in many of the schools.
Classroom density and the ratio of pupils per teacher are alarming and the situation is worsening. Apartments are converted to classrooms, creating unsuitable conditions for teaching. The shortage in classrooms has also led to the adoption of a “double-shift” system, in which many pupils go to school in the afternoon instead of the morning, causing a decline in performance and cutting tuition hours for both shifts.
About 18,000 Palestinian children of school age have dropped out of the education system altogether because of these conditions and due to the lack of resources to supervise their studies and bring them back to school. On top of all this, the Separation Wall blocks the path of tens of thousands of Palestinian schoolchildren who live east of the city on their daily route to school.
About 14,500 pupils in East Jerusalem are unknown to the Israeli authorities, and as there is no place for them in the official schools, they must make do with private schools that are largely unsupervised and often fail to provide basic learning conditions. The situation is even more critical among children at kindergarten age. Ninety percent of children aged between three to five years receive no kind of preschool education at all.
Even those pupils who succeed in overcoming and pulling through the harsh conditions of the education system are taught a curriculum that is different from the Israeli schooling system and prevents integration of the Palestinian students in Israeli society, higher education and the job market. This policy goes hand in hand with the policy that prevents residents of East Jerusalem from obtaining Israeli citizenship.
In the general picture of the economic aspects and mechanics of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the education system of the Palestinian population in East Jerusalem and its many serious problems is only one of many cases that must be addressed and researched, but it is a stark example of the discrimination and inequality that are a direct and intentional result of the Israeli policy towards the Palestinian population since 1967.
Shir Hever, Alternative Information Center (AIC)
Tuesday, 04 September 2007
The report does not purport to cover the entire educational system in East Jerusalem. Rather, it presents, as much as possible, an up-to-date and extensive picture of education, and recommends several alternative actions to change and improve the current situation. It goes without saying that none of these recommendations can be realized without the help of the Israeli educational system, since Israel’s illegal annexation of East Jerusalem by military force created a responsibility for the Israeli government to provide for the civilian services to the local population.
This report is based on research that Niv Hachlili conducted and wrote between September 2005 and January 2006. For the purpose of the study, extensive bibliographical research, onsite tours, meetings and personal interviews were conducted. Shir Hever edited and expanded the report. Rima Essa helped in preparing the research.
==============================================
The Education System in East Jerusalem – Summary
Shir Hever, Alternative Information Center (AIC), 4.9.07
When Israel annexed East Jerusalem in 1967, it assumed responsibility for the well-being of East Jerusalem’s population and for fulfilling their rights, regardless of religion or ethnicity. The right to education is one of the most basic rights, and is an essential prerequisite for the plural democracy Israel claims to be.
Education is especially important because in the long term it determines a population’s ability to deal with the rest of society on a par. The education system in Israel maintains and expands gaps between the Jewish and the Palestinian Arab sectors. In East Jerusalem the differences and discrimination are especially stark and apparent.
The economic situation in East Jerusalem is a testament to years of inequity and neglect. Sixty-six percent of Palestinian families and 76% of Palestinian children live below the poverty line. While Palestinians make up 34% of the total population in Jerusalem, they make up 56% of the poor and about 58% of poor children, despite the fact that the percentage of Muslim men in Jerusalem employed in the civilian workforce is greater than that of Jews.
While Palestinian school pupils make nearly 42% percent of the pupils in the whole of the Jerusalem education system, they receive little more than 20% of the education budget (this figure is provided by the official statistics: the real amount of money that ends up in the hands of the Palestinian schools is even smaller than that). As a result, the infrastructure is hazardous and studying conditions are unbearable in many of the schools.
Classroom density and the ratio of pupils per teacher are alarming and the situation is worsening. Apartments are converted to classrooms, creating unsuitable conditions for teaching. The shortage in classrooms has also led to the adoption of a “double-shift” system, in which many pupils go to school in the afternoon instead of the morning, causing a decline in performance and cutting tuition hours for both shifts.
About 18,000 Palestinian children of school age have dropped out of the education system altogether because of these conditions and due to the lack of resources to supervise their studies and bring them back to school. On top of all this, the Separation Wall blocks the path of tens of thousands of Palestinian schoolchildren who live east of the city on their daily route to school.
About 14,500 pupils in East Jerusalem are unknown to the Israeli authorities, and as there is no place for them in the official schools, they must make do with private schools that are largely unsupervised and often fail to provide basic learning conditions. The situation is even more critical among children at kindergarten age. Ninety percent of children aged between three to five years receive no kind of preschool education at all.
Even those pupils who succeed in overcoming and pulling through the harsh conditions of the education system are taught a curriculum that is different from the Israeli schooling system and prevents integration of the Palestinian students in Israeli society, higher education and the job market. This policy goes hand in hand with the policy that prevents residents of East Jerusalem from obtaining Israeli citizenship.
In the general picture of the economic aspects and mechanics of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the education system of the Palestinian population in East Jerusalem and its many serious problems is only one of many cases that must be addressed and researched, but it is a stark example of the discrimination and inequality that are a direct and intentional result of the Israeli policy towards the Palestinian population since 1967.
Joined-up solution
Martin Woollacott is impressed by Ghada Karmi's eloquent argument for a single Israeli-Palestinian state, Married to Another Man.
The Guardian Saturday September 15, 2007
This is an important book that demonstrates with relentless lucidity how terribly exhausted the diplomatic and political pursuit of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become. The title is taken from an 1897 report to the rabbis of Vienna on the prospects for a Jewish state in Palestine. The report concluded that "the bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man". Palestine's spouse was of course the Palestinian society rooted in its soil. The existence of any significant number of Palestinians within the Jewish state, or under its authority, Ghada Karmi argues, ultimately threatens a Zionist unravelling. Hence the Zionist dilemma: how to keep the territory without the people or to keep it while somehow negating the people.
The author's alternative is a return to the idea of a single state for both Arabs and Jews, bi-national or, preferably, integrated and non-sectarian. It is, she readily admits, an alternative canvassed only on the margins of both Israeli and Palestinian society, one widely dismissed as utopian, impractical, and, of course, subversive of Zionist intentions. Yet, operating on the same principle as Sherlock Holmes, that when you have eliminated every other possibility what remains must be the truth, Karmi steers the reader toward serious consideration of the idea, or at least of the vision it represents.
She does so not by any particularly convincing explanation of how a single state might come about but by showing how bankrupt are the policies that have so far shaped efforts to end the conflict. No other account of Israel's history and its impact on the Palestinians that I know of shreds with such efficiency the hypocrisies, cruelties and inanities of what amounts to a systematic international attempt over the decades to deny the obvious and delay the inevitable. The author's argument is that Israelis, Americans, Europeans and Arabs - including, although haplessly and unwillingly, many Palestinians - are sustaining a dangerous edifice of nonsense. Nonsense, because we can now see more clearly than most did in the more hopeful Oslo years that there is no logical way of reconciling Israel's purposes and its massive sense of entitlement with justice for the Palestinians.
Dangerous, because the edifice will one day crash down, and the chaos and bloodshed that will result could be on a cataclysmic scale. The American commentator Thomas Friedman, a man who generally leans well toward the Israeli side, once expressed the terrible possibilities of the future by envisaging a suicide bomber with a nuclear bomb in his backpack walking into Haifa or some other Israeli city. Would that, he asked his notional Israeli hardliner, be clear enough for you? It would be an answer of sorts, but not the sort of answer that anybody in Israel, Palestine and beyond could possibly want. Yet this is the Armageddon toward which they may be stumbling.
Karmi recalls Saad Hammami, the PLO's first representative in London, rebuking critics who attacked the organisation for its readiness to accept a "statelet" on a fraction of the original territory of Palestine. There would come a day, he said, when they would rend their clothes for failing to fight for it "because even this small thing will be denied to us, you will see". The years have shown his fears to be well grounded. The Palestinians have not even got the little state they were prepared, after agonised deliberations, to accept, because however much they have conceded it has always been less than enough for the Israelis.
On the face of it, Israel should have gratefully embraced a deal that would legitimise their hold over the bulk of historic Palestine, regularise their relations with all the Arab states, and at least limit any future claims on them by Palestinians. But, quoting the columnist Gideon Levy on the Israeli "national disease" of wanting to have their cake and eat it, Karmi shows how they wanted both to have peace and to keep almost everything of what they have in terms of power, territory and dominance. All too often they sabotaged Palestinian efforts at settlement because they positively wanted to say, in the Israeli phrase, that they "had no partner for peace".
There is no answer to the Zionist conundrum, Karmi believes, except expulsion or genocide. An unviable and truncated Palestinian state would satisfy no one, while political arrangements of the kind often canvassed in Israel and now being discussed anew, under which Gaza might be federated in some way to Egypt and a series of West Bank fragments somehow glued on to Jordan, would be short lived and fraught with trouble.
The single-state argument is not the essence of the problem. The essence is a change in the nature of Zionism. It was this change that the more hopeful proponents of a two-state solution thought would come with time as the two states cooperated, and their populations mingled on more equal terms. In other words, two states were not the end of the peace process but a stage in it, and even though Rabin's hafradah, or separation, was the Israeli starting point, it would not be their end point. One of the most appealing aspects of this book is the way it combines a hard eye on Israeli motives with empathy for their fears and for the contradictions in which the Zionist dream has entangled them. But it eloquently makes the point that those contradictions have got to be worked out, or they will bring disaster on Jews and gentiles alike.
The Guardian Saturday September 15, 2007
This is an important book that demonstrates with relentless lucidity how terribly exhausted the diplomatic and political pursuit of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become. The title is taken from an 1897 report to the rabbis of Vienna on the prospects for a Jewish state in Palestine. The report concluded that "the bride is beautiful, but she is married to another man". Palestine's spouse was of course the Palestinian society rooted in its soil. The existence of any significant number of Palestinians within the Jewish state, or under its authority, Ghada Karmi argues, ultimately threatens a Zionist unravelling. Hence the Zionist dilemma: how to keep the territory without the people or to keep it while somehow negating the people.
The author's alternative is a return to the idea of a single state for both Arabs and Jews, bi-national or, preferably, integrated and non-sectarian. It is, she readily admits, an alternative canvassed only on the margins of both Israeli and Palestinian society, one widely dismissed as utopian, impractical, and, of course, subversive of Zionist intentions. Yet, operating on the same principle as Sherlock Holmes, that when you have eliminated every other possibility what remains must be the truth, Karmi steers the reader toward serious consideration of the idea, or at least of the vision it represents.
She does so not by any particularly convincing explanation of how a single state might come about but by showing how bankrupt are the policies that have so far shaped efforts to end the conflict. No other account of Israel's history and its impact on the Palestinians that I know of shreds with such efficiency the hypocrisies, cruelties and inanities of what amounts to a systematic international attempt over the decades to deny the obvious and delay the inevitable. The author's argument is that Israelis, Americans, Europeans and Arabs - including, although haplessly and unwillingly, many Palestinians - are sustaining a dangerous edifice of nonsense. Nonsense, because we can now see more clearly than most did in the more hopeful Oslo years that there is no logical way of reconciling Israel's purposes and its massive sense of entitlement with justice for the Palestinians.
Dangerous, because the edifice will one day crash down, and the chaos and bloodshed that will result could be on a cataclysmic scale. The American commentator Thomas Friedman, a man who generally leans well toward the Israeli side, once expressed the terrible possibilities of the future by envisaging a suicide bomber with a nuclear bomb in his backpack walking into Haifa or some other Israeli city. Would that, he asked his notional Israeli hardliner, be clear enough for you? It would be an answer of sorts, but not the sort of answer that anybody in Israel, Palestine and beyond could possibly want. Yet this is the Armageddon toward which they may be stumbling.
Karmi recalls Saad Hammami, the PLO's first representative in London, rebuking critics who attacked the organisation for its readiness to accept a "statelet" on a fraction of the original territory of Palestine. There would come a day, he said, when they would rend their clothes for failing to fight for it "because even this small thing will be denied to us, you will see". The years have shown his fears to be well grounded. The Palestinians have not even got the little state they were prepared, after agonised deliberations, to accept, because however much they have conceded it has always been less than enough for the Israelis.
On the face of it, Israel should have gratefully embraced a deal that would legitimise their hold over the bulk of historic Palestine, regularise their relations with all the Arab states, and at least limit any future claims on them by Palestinians. But, quoting the columnist Gideon Levy on the Israeli "national disease" of wanting to have their cake and eat it, Karmi shows how they wanted both to have peace and to keep almost everything of what they have in terms of power, territory and dominance. All too often they sabotaged Palestinian efforts at settlement because they positively wanted to say, in the Israeli phrase, that they "had no partner for peace".
There is no answer to the Zionist conundrum, Karmi believes, except expulsion or genocide. An unviable and truncated Palestinian state would satisfy no one, while political arrangements of the kind often canvassed in Israel and now being discussed anew, under which Gaza might be federated in some way to Egypt and a series of West Bank fragments somehow glued on to Jordan, would be short lived and fraught with trouble.
The single-state argument is not the essence of the problem. The essence is a change in the nature of Zionism. It was this change that the more hopeful proponents of a two-state solution thought would come with time as the two states cooperated, and their populations mingled on more equal terms. In other words, two states were not the end of the peace process but a stage in it, and even though Rabin's hafradah, or separation, was the Israeli starting point, it would not be their end point. One of the most appealing aspects of this book is the way it combines a hard eye on Israeli motives with empathy for their fears and for the contradictions in which the Zionist dream has entangled them. But it eloquently makes the point that those contradictions have got to be worked out, or they will bring disaster on Jews and gentiles alike.
Abdel Bari Atwan at the Brisbane Writers Festival
Al-Qa'ida expert arrives at right time
Rosemary Sorensen, The Australian, September 17, 2007
ABDEL Bari-Atwan has fallen in love with the Australian people, following his highly publicised delayed arrival at the Brisbane Writers Festival on Saturday.
The Palestinian-born, London-based newspaper editor and author of The Secret Life of al-Qa'ida praised the Australian media for their support, and said he had been overwhelmed by the attention he had received when Immigration delayed his visa.
"I am very moved by the reception, and it makes me more in love with this country," Atwan said yesterday.
"I don't want to be a hero, I don't pick a fight. I think letting someone like me, who has a very critical attitude towards the war (in Iraq), works to the Government's advantage to let me speak my mind."
Speaking publicly on Saturday and Sunday, Atwan told jokes about how scared he had been meeting Osama bin Laden in 1996, and warned the audience that the failure to capture or kill the leader of al-Qa'ida had meant the organisation was spreading "like a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise".
"There used to be just one address, like the first cave on the left, but now there are six or seven addresses.
"It's very clear that al-Qa'ida is a Hydra-headed monster."
He said both he and Mohamed Haneef, the Indian doctor working on the Gold Coast whose work visa was cancelled during an investigation into terror-link claims, were victims of Islamophobia. "His case and mine are known because they are publicised but imagine how many cases are not publicised," Atwan said.
His "visa saga" had now become "something to laugh about", and he praised the members of the ABC television satire team, the Chaser, for inviting him to take part in the festival.
We need groups like the Chaser," Atwan said. "We need to laugh at our politicians, and to highlight these kinds of mistakes."
During a panel session on Saturday, chaired by ABC radio's Rachel Kohn, Atwan had defused a situation that had threatened to become unpleasant, when audience members began shouting at Kohn's defence of the Iraq war.
"I was surprised that she entered into the argument when she was supposed to be a neutral moderator," Atwan said.
Instead, she was defending the undefendable."
Festival director Michael Campbell said Atwan's al-Qa'ida book was the best-selling title at the festival. "We had anticipated that there would be questions posed to him by audiences but I hadn't expected it from the Government," Mr Campbell said.
=========================================
AUDIO: Abdel Bari Atwan and the history of al-Qa'ida
Paul Barclay, ABC Radio National, 18 September 2007
Palestinian-born journalist and author Abdel Bari Atwan has finally made it to Australia following a delay with the issuing of his visa. He will be on the program discussing his book The Secret History of al-Qa'ida.
VIDEO: "A Case for War" Iran Debate PBS
Richard Perle and Abdel Bari Atwan discuss the consequences and realities of the U.S. presence in Iraq from the upcoming PBS special, A Case for War.
Rosemary Sorensen, The Australian, September 17, 2007
ABDEL Bari-Atwan has fallen in love with the Australian people, following his highly publicised delayed arrival at the Brisbane Writers Festival on Saturday.
The Palestinian-born, London-based newspaper editor and author of The Secret Life of al-Qa'ida praised the Australian media for their support, and said he had been overwhelmed by the attention he had received when Immigration delayed his visa.
"I am very moved by the reception, and it makes me more in love with this country," Atwan said yesterday.
"I don't want to be a hero, I don't pick a fight. I think letting someone like me, who has a very critical attitude towards the war (in Iraq), works to the Government's advantage to let me speak my mind."
Speaking publicly on Saturday and Sunday, Atwan told jokes about how scared he had been meeting Osama bin Laden in 1996, and warned the audience that the failure to capture or kill the leader of al-Qa'ida had meant the organisation was spreading "like a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise".
"There used to be just one address, like the first cave on the left, but now there are six or seven addresses.
"It's very clear that al-Qa'ida is a Hydra-headed monster."
He said both he and Mohamed Haneef, the Indian doctor working on the Gold Coast whose work visa was cancelled during an investigation into terror-link claims, were victims of Islamophobia. "His case and mine are known because they are publicised but imagine how many cases are not publicised," Atwan said.
His "visa saga" had now become "something to laugh about", and he praised the members of the ABC television satire team, the Chaser, for inviting him to take part in the festival.
We need groups like the Chaser," Atwan said. "We need to laugh at our politicians, and to highlight these kinds of mistakes."
During a panel session on Saturday, chaired by ABC radio's Rachel Kohn, Atwan had defused a situation that had threatened to become unpleasant, when audience members began shouting at Kohn's defence of the Iraq war.
"I was surprised that she entered into the argument when she was supposed to be a neutral moderator," Atwan said.
Instead, she was defending the undefendable."
Festival director Michael Campbell said Atwan's al-Qa'ida book was the best-selling title at the festival. "We had anticipated that there would be questions posed to him by audiences but I hadn't expected it from the Government," Mr Campbell said.
=========================================
AUDIO: Abdel Bari Atwan and the history of al-Qa'ida
Paul Barclay, ABC Radio National, 18 September 2007
Palestinian-born journalist and author Abdel Bari Atwan has finally made it to Australia following a delay with the issuing of his visa. He will be on the program discussing his book The Secret History of al-Qa'ida.
VIDEO: "A Case for War" Iran Debate PBS
Richard Perle and Abdel Bari Atwan discuss the consequences and realities of the U.S. presence in Iraq from the upcoming PBS special, A Case for War.
Saturday, 29 September 2007
Why Did Israel Attack Syria?
An Opening Shot for War on Iran?
Jonathan Cook, September 27, 2007
Israel's air strike on northern Syria earlier this month should be understood in the context of events unfolding since its assault last summer on neighboring Lebanon.
From the leaks so far, it seems that more than half a dozen Israeli warplanes violated Syrian airspace to drop munitions on a site close to the border with Turkey. We also know from the US media that the raid occurred in close coordination with the White House. But what was the purpose and significance of the attack?
It is worth recalling that, in the wake of Israel's month-long war against Lebanon a year ago, a prominent American neoconservative, Meyrav Wurmser, wife of Vice-President Dick Cheney's recently departed Middle East adviser, explained that the war had dragged on because the White House delayed in imposing a ceasefire. The neocons, she said, wanted to give Israel the time and space to expand the attack to Damascus.
The reasoning was simple: before an attack on Iran could be countenanced, Hizbullah in Lebanon had to be destroyed and Syria at the very least cowed. The plan was to isolate Tehran on these two other hostile fronts before going in for the kill.
But faced with constant rocket fire from Hizbullah last summer, Israel's public and military nerves frayed at the first hurdle. Instead Israel and the US were forced to settle for a Security Council resolution rather than a decisive military victory.
The immediate fallout of the failed attack was an apparent waning of neocon influence. The group's program of "creative destruction" in the Middle East -- the encouragement of regional civil war and the partition of large states that threaten Israel -- was at risk of being shunted aside.
Instead the "pragmatists" in the Bush Administration, led by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the new Defense Secretary Robert Gates, demanded a change of tack. The standoff reached a head in late 2006 when oilman James Baker and his Iraq Study Group began lobbying for a gradual withdrawal from Iraq -- presumably only after a dictator, this one more reliable, had again been installed in Baghdad. It looked as if the neocons' day in the sun had finally passed.
Israel's leadership understood the gravity of the moment. In January 2007 the Herzliya conference, an annual festival of strategy-making, invited no less than 40 Washington opinion-formers to join the usual throng of Israeli politicians, generals, journalists and academics. For a week the Israeli and American delegates spoke as one: Iran and its presumed proxy, Hizbullah, were bent on the genocidal destruction of Israel. Tehran's development of a nuclear program -- whether for civilian use, as Iran argues, or for military use, as the US and Israel claim -- had to be stopped at all costs.
While the White House turned uncharacteristically quiet all spring and summer about what it planned to do next, rumors that Israel was pondering a go-it-alone strike against Iran grew noisier by the day. Ex-Mossad officers warned of an inevitable third world war, Israeli military intelligence advised that Iran was only months away from the point of no return on developing a nuclear warhead, prominent leaks in sympathetic media revealed bombing runs to Gibraltar, and Israel started upping the pressure on several tens of thousands of Jews in Tehran to flee their homes and come to Israel.
While Western analysts opined that an attack on Iran was growing unlikely, Israel's neighbors watched nervously through the first half of the year as the vague impression of a regional war came ever more sharply into focus. In particular Syria, after witnessing the whirlwind of savagery unleashed against Lebanon last summer, feared it was next in line in the US-Israeli campaign to break Tehran's network of regional alliances. It deduced, probably correctly, that neither the US nor Israel would dare attack Iran without first clobbering Hizbullah and Damascus.
For some time Syria had been left in no doubt of the mood in Washington. It failed to end its pariah status in the post-9/11 period, despite helping the CIA with intelligence on al-Qaeda and secretly trying to make peace with Israel over the running sore of the occupied Golan Heights. It was rebuffed at every turn.
So as the clouds of war grew darker in the spring, Syria responded as might be expected. It went to the arms market in Moscow and bought up the displays of anti-aircraft missiles as well as anti-tank weapons of the kind Hizbullah demonstrated last summer were so effective at repelling Israel's planned ground invasion of south Lebanon.
As the Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld reluctantly conceded earlier this year, US policy was forcing Damascus to remain within Iran's uncomfortable embrace: "Syrian President Bashar al-Assad finds himself more dependent on his Iranian counterpart, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, than perhaps he would like."
Israel, never missing an opportunity to wilfully misrepresent the behavior of an enemy, called the Syrian military build-up proof of Damascus' appetite for war. Apparently fearful that Syria might initiate a war by mistaking the signals from Israel as evidence of aggressive intentions, the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, urged Syria to avoid a "miscalculation". The Israeli public spent the summer braced for a far more dangerous repeat of last summer's war along the northern border.
It was at this point -- with tensions simmeringly hot -- that Israel launched its strike, sending several fighter planes into Syria on a lightning mission to hit a site near Dayr a-Zawr. As Syria itself broke the news of the attack, Israeli generals were shown on TV toasting in the Jewish new year but refusing to comment.
Details have remained thin on the ground ever since: Israel imposed a news blackout that has been strictly enforced by the country's military censor. Instead it has been left to the Western media to speculate on what occurred.
One point that none of the pundits and analysts have noted was that, in attacking Syria, Israel committed a blatant act of aggression against its northern neighbor of the kind denounced as the "supreme international crime" by the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal.
Also, no one pointed out the obvious double standard applied to Israel's attack on Syria compared to the far less significant violation of Israeli sovereignty by Hizbullah a year earlier, when the Shia militia captured two Israel soldiers at a border post and killed three more. Hizbullah's act was widely accepted as justification for the bombardment and destruction of much of Lebanon, even if a few sensitive souls agonized over whether Israel's response was "disproportionate". Would these commentators now approve of similar retaliation by Syria?
The question was doubtless considered unimportant because it was clear from Western coverage that no one -- including the Israeli leadership -- believed Syria was in a position to respond militarily to Israel's attack. Olmert's fear of a Syrian "miscalculation" evaporated the moment Israel did the maths for Damascus.
So what did Israel hope to achieve with its aerial strike?
The stories emerging from the less gagged American media suggest two scenarios. The first is that Israel targeted Iranian supplies passing through Syria on their way to Hizbullah; the second that Israel struck at a fledgling Syrian nuclear plant where materials from North Korea were being offloaded, possibly as part of a joint nuclear effort by Damascus and Tehran.
(Speculation that Israel was testing Syria's anti-aircraft defences in preparation for an attack on Iran ignores the fact that the Israeli air force would almost certainly choose a flightpath through friendlier Jordanian airspace.)
How credible are these two scenarios?
The nuclear claims against Damascus were discounted so quickly by experts of the region that Washington was soon downgrading the accusation to claims that Syria was only hiding the material on North Korea's behalf. But why would Syria, already hounded by Israel and the US, provide such a readymade pretext for still harsher treatment? Why, equally, would North Korea undermine its hard-won disarmament deal with the US? And why, if Syria were covertly engaging in nuclear mischief, did it alert the world to the fact by revealing the Israeli air strike?
The other justification for the attack was at least based in a more credible reality: Damascus, Hizbullah and Iran undoubtedly do share some military resources. But their alliance should be seen as the kind of defensive pact needed by vulnerable actors in a Sunni-dominated region where the US wants unlimited control of Gulf oil and supports only those repressive regimes that cooperate on its terms. All three are keenly aware that it is Israel's job to threaten and punish any regimes that fail to toe the line.
Contrary to the impression being created in the West, genocidal hatred of Israel and Jews, however often Ahmadinejad's speeches are mistranslated, is not the engine of these countries' alliance.
Nonetheless, the political significance of the justifications for the Israeli air strike is that both neatly tie together various strands of an argument needed by the neocons and Israel in making their case for an attack on Iran before Bush leaves office in early 2009. Each scenario suggests a Shia "axis of evil", coordinated by Iran, that is actively plotting Israel's destruction. And each story offers the pretext for an attack on Syria as a prelude to a pre-emptive strike against Tehran -- launched either by Washington or Tel Aviv -- to save Israel.
That these stories appear to have been planted in the American media by neocon fanatics like John Bolton is warning enough -- as is the admission that the only evidence for Syrian malfeasance is Israeli "intelligence", the basis of which cannot be questioned as Israel is not officially admitting the attack.
It should hardly need pointing out that we are again in a hall of mirrors, as we were during the period leading up to America's invasion of Iraq and have been during its subsequent occupation.
Bush's "war on terror" was originally justified with the convenient and manufactured links between Iraq and al-Qaeda, as well as, of course, those WMDs that, it later turned out, had been destroyed years earlier. But ever since Tehran has invariably been the ultimate target of these improbable confections.
There were the forged documents proving both that Iraq had imported enriched uranium from Niger to manufacture nuclear warheads and that it was sharing its nuclear know-how with Iran. And as Iraq fell apart, neocon operatives like Michael Ledeen lost no time in spreading rumors that the missing nuclear arsenal could still be accounted for: Iranian agents had simply smuggled it out of Iraq during the chaos of the US invasion.
Since then our media have proved that they have no less of an appetite for such preposterous tales. If Iran's involvement in stirring up its fellow Shia in Iraq against the US occupation is at least possible, the same cannot be said of the regular White House claims that Tehran is behind the Sunni-led insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. A few months ago the news media served up "revelations" that Iran was secretly conspiring with al-Qaeda and Iraq's Sunni militias to oust the US occupiers.
So what purpose does the constant innuendo against Tehran serve?
The latest accusations should be seen as an example of Israel and the neocons "creating their own reality", as one Bush adviser famously observed of the neocon philosophy of power. The more that Hizbullah, Syria and Iran are menaced by Israel, the more they are forced to huddle together and behave in ways to protect themselves -- such as arming -- that can be portrayed as a "genocidal" threat to Israel and world order.
Van Creveld once observed that Tehran would be "crazy" not to develop nuclear weapons given the clear trajectory of Israeli and US machinations to overthrow the regime. So equally Syria cannot afford to jettison its alliance with Iran or its involvement with Hizbullah. In the current reality, these connections are the only power it has to deter an attack or force the US and Israel to negotiate.
But they are also the evidence needed by Israel and the neocons to convict Syria and Iran in the court of Washington opinion. The attack on Syria is part of a clever hustle, one designed to vanquish or bypass the doubters in the Bush Administration, both by proving Syria's culpability and by provoking it to respond.
Condoleezza Rice, it emerged at the weekend, wants to invite Syria to attend the regional peace conference that has been called by President Bush for November. There can be no doubt that such an act of détente is deeply opposed by both Israel and the neocons. It reverses their strategy of implicating Damascus in the "Shia arc of extremism" and of paving the way to an attack on the real target: Iran.
Syria, meanwhile, is fighting back, as it has been for some time, with the only means available: the diplomatic offensive. For two years Bashar al-Assad has been offering a generous peace deal to Israel on the Golan Heights that Tel Aviv has refused to consider. This week, Syria made a further gesture towards peace with an offer on another piece of territory occupied by Israel, the Shebaa Farms. Under the plan, the Farms -- which the United Nations now agrees belongs to Lebanon, but which Israel still claims is Syrian and cannot be returned until there is a deal on the Golan Heights -- would be transferred to UN custody until the dispute over its sovereignty can be resolved.
Were either of Damascus' initiatives to be pursued, the region might be looking forward to a period of relative calm and security. Which is reason enough why Israel and the neocons are so bitterly opposed. Instead they must establish a new reality -- one in which the forces of "creative destruction" so beloved of the neocons engulf yet more of the region. For the rest of us, a simpler vocabulary suffices. What is being sold is catastrophe.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. He is the author of the forthcoming "Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State" published by Pluto Press, and available in the United States from the University of Michigan Press. His website is www.jkcook.net
Jonathan Cook, September 27, 2007
Israel's air strike on northern Syria earlier this month should be understood in the context of events unfolding since its assault last summer on neighboring Lebanon.
From the leaks so far, it seems that more than half a dozen Israeli warplanes violated Syrian airspace to drop munitions on a site close to the border with Turkey. We also know from the US media that the raid occurred in close coordination with the White House. But what was the purpose and significance of the attack?
It is worth recalling that, in the wake of Israel's month-long war against Lebanon a year ago, a prominent American neoconservative, Meyrav Wurmser, wife of Vice-President Dick Cheney's recently departed Middle East adviser, explained that the war had dragged on because the White House delayed in imposing a ceasefire. The neocons, she said, wanted to give Israel the time and space to expand the attack to Damascus.
The reasoning was simple: before an attack on Iran could be countenanced, Hizbullah in Lebanon had to be destroyed and Syria at the very least cowed. The plan was to isolate Tehran on these two other hostile fronts before going in for the kill.
But faced with constant rocket fire from Hizbullah last summer, Israel's public and military nerves frayed at the first hurdle. Instead Israel and the US were forced to settle for a Security Council resolution rather than a decisive military victory.
The immediate fallout of the failed attack was an apparent waning of neocon influence. The group's program of "creative destruction" in the Middle East -- the encouragement of regional civil war and the partition of large states that threaten Israel -- was at risk of being shunted aside.
Instead the "pragmatists" in the Bush Administration, led by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and the new Defense Secretary Robert Gates, demanded a change of tack. The standoff reached a head in late 2006 when oilman James Baker and his Iraq Study Group began lobbying for a gradual withdrawal from Iraq -- presumably only after a dictator, this one more reliable, had again been installed in Baghdad. It looked as if the neocons' day in the sun had finally passed.
Israel's leadership understood the gravity of the moment. In January 2007 the Herzliya conference, an annual festival of strategy-making, invited no less than 40 Washington opinion-formers to join the usual throng of Israeli politicians, generals, journalists and academics. For a week the Israeli and American delegates spoke as one: Iran and its presumed proxy, Hizbullah, were bent on the genocidal destruction of Israel. Tehran's development of a nuclear program -- whether for civilian use, as Iran argues, or for military use, as the US and Israel claim -- had to be stopped at all costs.
While the White House turned uncharacteristically quiet all spring and summer about what it planned to do next, rumors that Israel was pondering a go-it-alone strike against Iran grew noisier by the day. Ex-Mossad officers warned of an inevitable third world war, Israeli military intelligence advised that Iran was only months away from the point of no return on developing a nuclear warhead, prominent leaks in sympathetic media revealed bombing runs to Gibraltar, and Israel started upping the pressure on several tens of thousands of Jews in Tehran to flee their homes and come to Israel.
While Western analysts opined that an attack on Iran was growing unlikely, Israel's neighbors watched nervously through the first half of the year as the vague impression of a regional war came ever more sharply into focus. In particular Syria, after witnessing the whirlwind of savagery unleashed against Lebanon last summer, feared it was next in line in the US-Israeli campaign to break Tehran's network of regional alliances. It deduced, probably correctly, that neither the US nor Israel would dare attack Iran without first clobbering Hizbullah and Damascus.
For some time Syria had been left in no doubt of the mood in Washington. It failed to end its pariah status in the post-9/11 period, despite helping the CIA with intelligence on al-Qaeda and secretly trying to make peace with Israel over the running sore of the occupied Golan Heights. It was rebuffed at every turn.
So as the clouds of war grew darker in the spring, Syria responded as might be expected. It went to the arms market in Moscow and bought up the displays of anti-aircraft missiles as well as anti-tank weapons of the kind Hizbullah demonstrated last summer were so effective at repelling Israel's planned ground invasion of south Lebanon.
As the Israeli military historian Martin van Creveld reluctantly conceded earlier this year, US policy was forcing Damascus to remain within Iran's uncomfortable embrace: "Syrian President Bashar al-Assad finds himself more dependent on his Iranian counterpart, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, than perhaps he would like."
Israel, never missing an opportunity to wilfully misrepresent the behavior of an enemy, called the Syrian military build-up proof of Damascus' appetite for war. Apparently fearful that Syria might initiate a war by mistaking the signals from Israel as evidence of aggressive intentions, the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, urged Syria to avoid a "miscalculation". The Israeli public spent the summer braced for a far more dangerous repeat of last summer's war along the northern border.
It was at this point -- with tensions simmeringly hot -- that Israel launched its strike, sending several fighter planes into Syria on a lightning mission to hit a site near Dayr a-Zawr. As Syria itself broke the news of the attack, Israeli generals were shown on TV toasting in the Jewish new year but refusing to comment.
Details have remained thin on the ground ever since: Israel imposed a news blackout that has been strictly enforced by the country's military censor. Instead it has been left to the Western media to speculate on what occurred.
One point that none of the pundits and analysts have noted was that, in attacking Syria, Israel committed a blatant act of aggression against its northern neighbor of the kind denounced as the "supreme international crime" by the Nuremberg war crimes tribunal.
Also, no one pointed out the obvious double standard applied to Israel's attack on Syria compared to the far less significant violation of Israeli sovereignty by Hizbullah a year earlier, when the Shia militia captured two Israel soldiers at a border post and killed three more. Hizbullah's act was widely accepted as justification for the bombardment and destruction of much of Lebanon, even if a few sensitive souls agonized over whether Israel's response was "disproportionate". Would these commentators now approve of similar retaliation by Syria?
The question was doubtless considered unimportant because it was clear from Western coverage that no one -- including the Israeli leadership -- believed Syria was in a position to respond militarily to Israel's attack. Olmert's fear of a Syrian "miscalculation" evaporated the moment Israel did the maths for Damascus.
So what did Israel hope to achieve with its aerial strike?
The stories emerging from the less gagged American media suggest two scenarios. The first is that Israel targeted Iranian supplies passing through Syria on their way to Hizbullah; the second that Israel struck at a fledgling Syrian nuclear plant where materials from North Korea were being offloaded, possibly as part of a joint nuclear effort by Damascus and Tehran.
(Speculation that Israel was testing Syria's anti-aircraft defences in preparation for an attack on Iran ignores the fact that the Israeli air force would almost certainly choose a flightpath through friendlier Jordanian airspace.)
How credible are these two scenarios?
The nuclear claims against Damascus were discounted so quickly by experts of the region that Washington was soon downgrading the accusation to claims that Syria was only hiding the material on North Korea's behalf. But why would Syria, already hounded by Israel and the US, provide such a readymade pretext for still harsher treatment? Why, equally, would North Korea undermine its hard-won disarmament deal with the US? And why, if Syria were covertly engaging in nuclear mischief, did it alert the world to the fact by revealing the Israeli air strike?
The other justification for the attack was at least based in a more credible reality: Damascus, Hizbullah and Iran undoubtedly do share some military resources. But their alliance should be seen as the kind of defensive pact needed by vulnerable actors in a Sunni-dominated region where the US wants unlimited control of Gulf oil and supports only those repressive regimes that cooperate on its terms. All three are keenly aware that it is Israel's job to threaten and punish any regimes that fail to toe the line.
Contrary to the impression being created in the West, genocidal hatred of Israel and Jews, however often Ahmadinejad's speeches are mistranslated, is not the engine of these countries' alliance.
Nonetheless, the political significance of the justifications for the Israeli air strike is that both neatly tie together various strands of an argument needed by the neocons and Israel in making their case for an attack on Iran before Bush leaves office in early 2009. Each scenario suggests a Shia "axis of evil", coordinated by Iran, that is actively plotting Israel's destruction. And each story offers the pretext for an attack on Syria as a prelude to a pre-emptive strike against Tehran -- launched either by Washington or Tel Aviv -- to save Israel.
That these stories appear to have been planted in the American media by neocon fanatics like John Bolton is warning enough -- as is the admission that the only evidence for Syrian malfeasance is Israeli "intelligence", the basis of which cannot be questioned as Israel is not officially admitting the attack.
It should hardly need pointing out that we are again in a hall of mirrors, as we were during the period leading up to America's invasion of Iraq and have been during its subsequent occupation.
Bush's "war on terror" was originally justified with the convenient and manufactured links between Iraq and al-Qaeda, as well as, of course, those WMDs that, it later turned out, had been destroyed years earlier. But ever since Tehran has invariably been the ultimate target of these improbable confections.
There were the forged documents proving both that Iraq had imported enriched uranium from Niger to manufacture nuclear warheads and that it was sharing its nuclear know-how with Iran. And as Iraq fell apart, neocon operatives like Michael Ledeen lost no time in spreading rumors that the missing nuclear arsenal could still be accounted for: Iranian agents had simply smuggled it out of Iraq during the chaos of the US invasion.
Since then our media have proved that they have no less of an appetite for such preposterous tales. If Iran's involvement in stirring up its fellow Shia in Iraq against the US occupation is at least possible, the same cannot be said of the regular White House claims that Tehran is behind the Sunni-led insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. A few months ago the news media served up "revelations" that Iran was secretly conspiring with al-Qaeda and Iraq's Sunni militias to oust the US occupiers.
So what purpose does the constant innuendo against Tehran serve?
The latest accusations should be seen as an example of Israel and the neocons "creating their own reality", as one Bush adviser famously observed of the neocon philosophy of power. The more that Hizbullah, Syria and Iran are menaced by Israel, the more they are forced to huddle together and behave in ways to protect themselves -- such as arming -- that can be portrayed as a "genocidal" threat to Israel and world order.
Van Creveld once observed that Tehran would be "crazy" not to develop nuclear weapons given the clear trajectory of Israeli and US machinations to overthrow the regime. So equally Syria cannot afford to jettison its alliance with Iran or its involvement with Hizbullah. In the current reality, these connections are the only power it has to deter an attack or force the US and Israel to negotiate.
But they are also the evidence needed by Israel and the neocons to convict Syria and Iran in the court of Washington opinion. The attack on Syria is part of a clever hustle, one designed to vanquish or bypass the doubters in the Bush Administration, both by proving Syria's culpability and by provoking it to respond.
Condoleezza Rice, it emerged at the weekend, wants to invite Syria to attend the regional peace conference that has been called by President Bush for November. There can be no doubt that such an act of détente is deeply opposed by both Israel and the neocons. It reverses their strategy of implicating Damascus in the "Shia arc of extremism" and of paving the way to an attack on the real target: Iran.
Syria, meanwhile, is fighting back, as it has been for some time, with the only means available: the diplomatic offensive. For two years Bashar al-Assad has been offering a generous peace deal to Israel on the Golan Heights that Tel Aviv has refused to consider. This week, Syria made a further gesture towards peace with an offer on another piece of territory occupied by Israel, the Shebaa Farms. Under the plan, the Farms -- which the United Nations now agrees belongs to Lebanon, but which Israel still claims is Syrian and cannot be returned until there is a deal on the Golan Heights -- would be transferred to UN custody until the dispute over its sovereignty can be resolved.
Were either of Damascus' initiatives to be pursued, the region might be looking forward to a period of relative calm and security. Which is reason enough why Israel and the neocons are so bitterly opposed. Instead they must establish a new reality -- one in which the forces of "creative destruction" so beloved of the neocons engulf yet more of the region. For the rest of us, a simpler vocabulary suffices. What is being sold is catastrophe.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. He is the author of the forthcoming "Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State" published by Pluto Press, and available in the United States from the University of Michigan Press. His website is www.jkcook.net
B'Tselem: Settlers harrassing Palestinians in Hebron
Videos from B'Tselem - September 2007
New settlement in Hebron - settler kids throwing stones
Settler kids throwing stones from road.
Hebron - Settlers at the door of a Palestinian house
Settlers stand in front of a Palestinian house opposite the new settlement, annoying the inhabitants.
Hebron - Children throwing stones from a window
Children throwing stones from a window of the new settlement.
Hebron - Palestinians attacked by settler kids
Palestinians on their way home attacked by settler kids in Tel Rumeida.
==========================
Nigel Parry's Hebron diary
17-18 January 1997
"A closer look at Hebron's 'Jewish community' "
--------------------------------
VIDEO: Settlers attack the Abu Eisha family in Tel Rumeida, Hebron
In the center of the city of Hebron lies the "Tel Rumeida" neighborhood. In 1986, a new settlement was established at the heart of the neighborhood. The settlers of Tel Rumieda, who known as particularly extreme, live on one side of a dead-end street... The Abu Eisha family lives on the other side.
New settlement in Hebron - settler kids throwing stones
Settler kids throwing stones from road.
Hebron - Settlers at the door of a Palestinian house
Settlers stand in front of a Palestinian house opposite the new settlement, annoying the inhabitants.
Hebron - Children throwing stones from a window
Children throwing stones from a window of the new settlement.
Hebron - Palestinians attacked by settler kids
Palestinians on their way home attacked by settler kids in Tel Rumeida.
==========================
Nigel Parry's Hebron diary
17-18 January 1997
"A closer look at Hebron's 'Jewish community' "
--------------------------------
VIDEO: Settlers attack the Abu Eisha family in Tel Rumeida, Hebron
In the center of the city of Hebron lies the "Tel Rumeida" neighborhood. In 1986, a new settlement was established at the heart of the neighborhood. The settlers of Tel Rumieda, who known as particularly extreme, live on one side of a dead-end street... The Abu Eisha family lives on the other side.
The Israel-Palestine Conflict: Causes and Consequences
The Israel-Palestine Conflict: Causes and Consequences
Sonja Karkar, 20 September 2007
The Citizenship and Gloablisation Research Priority Area at Deakin University hosted a forum in which advocates representing both sides of the Israel-Palestine conflict debated the causes and consequences. The Israeli perspective was presented by Dr Danny Lamm, President of the State Zionist Council of Victoria and Mr Michael Shaik, Public Advocate for Australians for Palestine presented the Palestinian perspective.
----------------------
Apartheid in the Holy Land - The Struggle for Peace in Israel and Palestine
with Mr Michael Shaik Public Advocate for Australians for Palestine
and Rev. Helen Cox Uniting Church Minister, Deep Creek - Victoria
Uniting Church Synod Annual Meeting
LaTrobe University
Moammar Mashni, 25 September 2007
On Tuesday, as part of the Uniting Church’s Synod meeting, Mr Michael Shaik and the Rev. Helen Cox delivered an extremely informative, and sometimes quite moving, depiction of the current state of affairs in the Holy Land. Synod 2007, Victoria and Tasmania was held from September 23 to 26 at La Trobe University’s Bundoora campus.
Sonja Karkar, 20 September 2007
The Citizenship and Gloablisation Research Priority Area at Deakin University hosted a forum in which advocates representing both sides of the Israel-Palestine conflict debated the causes and consequences. The Israeli perspective was presented by Dr Danny Lamm, President of the State Zionist Council of Victoria and Mr Michael Shaik, Public Advocate for Australians for Palestine presented the Palestinian perspective.
----------------------
Apartheid in the Holy Land - The Struggle for Peace in Israel and Palestine
with Mr Michael Shaik Public Advocate for Australians for Palestine
and Rev. Helen Cox Uniting Church Minister, Deep Creek - Victoria
Uniting Church Synod Annual Meeting
LaTrobe University
Moammar Mashni, 25 September 2007
On Tuesday, as part of the Uniting Church’s Synod meeting, Mr Michael Shaik and the Rev. Helen Cox delivered an extremely informative, and sometimes quite moving, depiction of the current state of affairs in the Holy Land. Synod 2007, Victoria and Tasmania was held from September 23 to 26 at La Trobe University’s Bundoora campus.
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