(Photo: Reem Salahi from the National Lawyer's Guild delegation to Gaza, February 2009)
One of the headlines coming out of the Gaza donors conference currently being held in Egypt is the US's pledge of $900 million for the Palestinians. What is getting less attention is that only one third of that will actually go to Gaza and none of that can be used for rebuilding. The breakdown of the pledge is as follows:
[State Department spokesperson Robert A.] Wood said that the breakdown of the $900 million was: $300 million for
"urgent humanitarian needs" in Gaza; $200 million to help the
Palestinian Authority meet its budget; and $400 million for the
authority's programs to improve governance, security and economic
development.
Although Hillary Clinton's message at Sharm El-Sheikh is that aid to Gaza cannot be separated from the peace process and that aid must "foster conditions in which a Palestinian state can be fully realized," the US's own pledge is undermining that very goal. Instead of helping the people of Gaza, it seems the US's first priority is to prop up the Abbas government. In addition to sending two-thirds of their aid to the West Bank-based government, the US is withholding all aid for rebuilding Gaza out of political concerns about Hamas. The LA Times reports, "U.S. officials are opposed to spending any money on reconstruction aid
to Gaza that might fall into the hands of Hamas and help strengthen the
group's standing among the enclave's 1.5 million residents."
By refusing the fund rebuilding and by sidelining Hamas rather than engaging them, the US is supporting the devastating and illegal Israeli siege on Gaza and maintaining the conditions that led to conflict in the past. The aid the US is offering does just enough to keep Gazans alive, but not enough to actually change the situation. It looks like the Ariel Sharon policy towards Gaza, as articulated by adviser Dov Weissglas, is still in effect – "It's like an appointment with a dietitian.
The Palestinians will get a lot thinner, but won't die."
Clinton might want to to ignore this fact but Gaza is not a natural disaster, it's an ongoing political conflict. There needs to be a political solution. All the humanitarian aid in the world isn't going to change this, Gaza will only begin to recover when the siege is lifted and its borders are open. This is what the people of Gaza are saying:
Issam Abu Taha, a wholesaler in the Gaza town of Rafah, said Gazans don't want handouts.
"When the borders are open, and everyone can work freely, we don't
need aid," said Abu Taha, 48, whose flour imports from Israel dropped
from 200 tons a day to 80 tons a week. "The situation will improve
dramatically."
When will the world begin to listen?
Hamas boycotted the conference.
There is obviously more to the story than merely a petulant Hamas boycott. This article is dated 26FEB2009. If you have a more recent reference for your assertion please provide it.
Israel urges Gaza aid efforts not break Hamas boycott
Witty never gives context. He passes off superficial truths as uncontroversial. That's his dogma.
I was wrong. I thought that Hamas had boycotted the conference. They in fact weren't invited.
Its a fantasy that open borders are a right.
Americans paid for Israel to destroy Gaza, and although Americans should find a way to pay to rebuild it, the monies should come from suspending US military aid already pledged to Israel. Had America reduced military aid to Israel earlier, Gaza may not have needed rebuilding. Reducing US military aid to Israel now will reduce the need to rebuild some other Palestinian or Lebanese area destroyed by Israel in future.
Hamas boycotted the conference.
You are refering to the Cairo conference? But Phil's article is connected with the Sharm El Sheik conference. Were Hamas it seems wasn't invited. Am I confusing something? How can one boycott something, if one is not even invited?
link to haaretz.com: Gaza donations to go through UN and World Bank, Yoav Stern
Those 75 donor countries should insist the US stop funding the destruction of Gaza, Beirut, olive groves, Palestinian homes, etc., before any rebuilding begins. Israel will destroy anything with the military materiel supplied by the US, so it makes no sense to rebuild while Israel still has the capability to blow everything up. Only the US can stifle Israel's urge to destroy.
Witty: "Its a fantasy that open borders are a right."
Correct, up to a point. No sovereign country is obligated to open its borders to a hostile neighbor. So Israel — or Egypt — can refuse commerce with Gaza if they choose, just as Lebanon and Syria refuse passage to Israelis.
But — hello! — Gaza has a Mediterranean coastline and a port, which Israel blockades; likewise, the Gazans could, if Israel allowed, have access to the outside world through international airspace.
That this dual siege remains in place is the surest sign of the continued Zionist occupation of Gaza, despite the obfuscation that deludes credulous supporters of Israel.
'Its a fantasy that open borders are a right.' — Richard Witty
From the United Nations website:
Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state.
Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.
link to un.org
Don't lie to me, boy. I eat hasbara for breakfast, and spit it out like poison nails.
But — hello! — Gaza has a Mediterranean coastline and a port, which Israel blockades; likewise, the Gazans could, if Israel allowed, have access to the outside world through international airspace.
Not only that, but Israel also actively menaces anyone who attempts to reach Gaza by air or sea. The Israeli military rammed the USS Dignity, carrying humanitarian aid. And it did so in international waters The IDF also once sent two fighter jets to greet Tony Blair's private plane.
Israel's actions are untenable unless we're to accept that Israel owns the ocean and the sky.
@ witty
"Its a fantasy that open borders are a right."
At one time it was a fantasy that jews were entitled to equal protection and opportunity under the law
of any white Christian goy state. Ditto, of course for blacks. Given that history, witty, what did you mean to suggest by your comment quoted above? We can't wait to hear your answer–try to make it less vague and abstract than is your custom, OK? Thanks a lot.
Its a fantasy that open borders are a right.
—-
Are you familiar with a sovereignty that does not include control of the one's own borders?
That picture is a bit ironic for me. Our department sub-group is AIS. I imagine the rage I'd feel if someone trashed our offices (blew them to bits, actually), let alone if any of our personnel or family members were killed, maimed, or injured. And this is an effin' school for chrissakes.
They don't have sovereignty, Lancey. They are a terrorist group.
> INVESTIGATE MISUSE OF US WEAPONS IN GAZA AND STOP ARMS TRANSFERS TO ISRAEL
> From: Amnesty International USA (alerts@takeaction.amnestyusa.org)
“A new report … reveals that U.S.-made white phosphorus artillery shells among other U.S. weapons were found throughout Gaza. When white phosphorus munitions are used in densely-populated civilian areas as Israel has, it violates international humanitarian law’s prohibition on indiscriminate attacks and amounts to a war crime.
In light of this new finding, we are urging Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to immediately call for:
* an investigation into Israel’s use of U.S. arms in Gaza
* a suspension of U.S. military aid to Israel and
* to urge the United Nations to impose an arms embargo on all parties in the conflict…..
Urge Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to immediately call for an investigation into Israel’s use of U.S. arms in Gaza and a suspension of military aid.….”
> TO SEND AN E-MAIL –
link to takeaction.amnestyusa.org
Guys, I know this is a call for more than the established rules of conduct, but can we please keep the tone civil. It's easy to get angry when you have the stomach to look at other people's suffering, but we are adversaries or opponents, not enemies.
Richard Witty said one thing factually incorrect, and acknowledged it. Then he made a strictly correct statement about open borders. Israel is under no obligation to keep its border with Gaza open. This issue is complicated. He did not lie, nor was he vague. How much information can you pack into one sentence? If you feel there is more to the issue than what can be said in one sentence, then add to it. There is nothing here that calls for incivility.
Jaffr pointed out the main issue: the right of Gazans to air and marine access to international airspace and waters through their own border which opens onto them, and that Israel's blockade of this border absolutely does constitute a continuance of the occupation. Jim Haygood points out "the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each state", which is no longer impeded in Gaza, but is still in the West Bank, and "the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country", which is being impeded by Israel's blockade of Gaza's border onto international waters.
This issue is in my opinion a classic catch-22. Israel doesn't want Gazans to have weapons to fire into Israel, and hence continues the occupation. Gaza is under occupation so Hamas and other resistance groups want weapons to fight the occupation of their land in the only way they have left: firing rockets into Israel until the Israelis tire of it enough to negotiate an end to the occupation.
The demonization of Hamas is silly. The conflict is about resistance to colonization and occupation, not religious extremism. Hamas is now the dominant resistance group in Gaza, but if it didn't exist, then some other group, perhaps secular like Fatah, would have sprung up to fill the void.
I'm in favor of 1967 borders. I think the problem is to find a way to end the occupation of Gaza while ending the rocket fire into Israel, which is over 1967 borders. Israel has never engaged in good-faith negotiations with Palestinians, and they do not want to. A solution to the conflict in Gaza cannot be separated from a solution to the colonization of the West Bank. Indeed, the current form of Gazan resistance, the rockets, came about because the Israeli attempt to colonize Gaza failed.
The rights that Jaffr and Jim Haygood have pointed out are those of citizens of states. That is why Israel has for decades attacked the physical infrastructure of any manifestation of Palestinian organization that could lead to the natural growth of civil institutions, and why Israel absolutely refuses to negotiate with Hamas. I think colonization planners would be delighted if they could end the rocket fire from Gaza in exchange for a lift of the blockade. However, they cannot come to an agreement to end the conflict in Gaza without changing the 'political battlespace' to the detriment of their goal of completely ethnically cleansing and colonizing the West Bank. Ariel Sharon has stated that the primary goal of the cessation of the colonization campaign in Gaza was to ensure that the campaign in the West Bank would succeed.
Why are some Israel Jews expropriating and colonizing Arab land, and killing and brutalizing its inhabitants in the first place, and why do some American Jews, to varying degrees, support them in this? Antisemites would paint them as evil. But there is no such thing as evil. It is like magic, a term we use when we don't understand something. The obvious answer is the Holocaust. I think that it is now a dominant aspect of political and social culture of many Jews. Consider that their people have lived as often persecuted minorities for two millennia, and that more than half of those living in Europe were murdered during the second world war. I suspect that trying to assess the level of hostility of local dominant cultural or ethnic groups has been a part of institutional Jewish life for a very long time. I also suspect that those efforts failed before the Holocaust. I think it is fair to say that everyone knew something awful was coming, but did anyone truly imagine or predict the scale before the war? Now some (many?)Jews have little confidence in their ability to assess hostility in Western countries, and want to ensure that there is a safe haven for them to flee if antisemitism again rises to an exterminatory boiling point. I imagine that if I were Jewish, I would feel the same. Wouldn't you?
I view this as a reason for Israeli crimes, not an excuse. How do we come to a solution where a state in what is now Israel can be preserved as a safe haven for Jews, Palestinian Arab rights are respected, and my nation, America, no longer has to subsidize and be blamed for foreign crimes? The reality is that it is ridiculous to think that the Israeli state, excluding the occupied territories, will be both Jewish and non-apartheid for very much longer without a second large scale violent Nakba. Indeed, I hypothesize that one of the objectives of neocon 'creative destruction' was to spread the Iraq war in the Middle East to create the necessary prerequisite chaos. The only other solution to retain dominant Jewish demography would be to withdraw the colonies from the West Bank and allow a Palestinian state to arise. But this would mean giving up the goal of an eastern border on the Jordan River. Zionists have few choices to retain a Jewish state: a second violent Nakba or abandonment of the West Bank colonies. Failure to act will result in a slide into chaotic apartheid which can only end, even if it takes decades, in the dissolution of Israel.
I doubt there is political will in Israel, either in leadership or the general populace, for a second Nakba in the face of the ongoing deterioration of Israeli standing among the governments and peoples of the world. If they did it now, the current incarnation of the Israeli government would not survive. The Israeli government appears too fractious and weak, rotted from within by religious extremists, to enforce a withdrawal of colonies from the West Bank. Either Israelis accept external, i.e., American, intervention to stiffen their collective backbone to make the hard choice to withdraw the colonies, or Jews must find a way to preserve a state from the Mediterranean to the Jordan as a safe-haven whilst living peaceably with Arab neighbors, e.g., building a bi-national state. Withdrawal of the colonies will require either the support or political defeat of current Jewish American institutions like AIPAC and CPMJO. Choosing not to act guarantees that soon there will be no safe haven.
"Its a fantasy that open borders are a right."
Israel has every right to close its own borders. The problem begins when it closes the borders of other people.
"Hamas boycotted the conference."
Is that what you call not showing up from something you have been excluded from? Or do you only call it that when Hamas does it?
"I think colonization planners would be delighted if they could end the rocket fire from Gaza in exchange for a lift of the blockade."
Israel effectively stopped the rocket fire for five months by agreeing to and maintaining a ceasefire. Off course, that did not fit with their plans, so they violated the ceasefire, as they have done in 78% of cases.
Colin,
De-facto re-partition is also an option, it would be no more disruptive than the 1949 border, which also cuts villages in two, separates farmers from their fields, and constituted a rigid line traversed mainly by bombs and bullets. The administrative history of decentralization by every government besides the British is also a precedent, as are the micro-partitions within the Jerusalem area, with the Mount Scopus enclave surrounded by Sheikh Jarrah, Jordan which in turn overlooked the Old City which adjoined Nôtre-Dame and Musrara in Jerusalem, Israel. The crucial aspect is free passage in an area at peace, which obtains today at least within municipal Jerusalem, and which was regulated by the UN as well as could be from '49-'67, insofar as the isolated Jews in Mount Scopus and Ramat Rachel and the isolated Arabs in Latrun actually suffered from the state of war rather than the partition. The fact that the urban history escapes you, and that therefore the Palestinians automatically get all the West Bank and all of Old Jerusalem, is an attempt by Palestinians and outsiders to fudge both reality and history by fiat.
Israelis and Jordanians were still intertwined on the edge of the West Bank even after the removal of Jewish settlements in Atarot, Navi Shmuel, the Jewish Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem, and the crucial factor was not the intermingling or the partition but the fact that the inhabitants were still in a declared state of war. Peace can come with French Hill still perched above Issawiya and the Jewish Quarter above Silwan, as long as adequate water flows to everyone and Mount Scopus no longer expands at Issawiya's expense. (And in turn the neighbors are expected to stop bombing Hebrew University on Mount Scopus.)
However, there is likely to be nothing but more war, with the West Bank eventually becoming a replay of Serbia's Military Frontier in Croatia. The one that's now in Croatia, but without Serbs. The US, you see, does allow its allies to act to save themselves in extremis, however repugnant the survival of Israel as a Jewish state may be to some here.
Croatia didn't starve the people into submission and carry out ethnic cleansing for its own ends.
Israel's right of return should be to return to the 1967 borders it came from, before any of this empire building ever started.
To do so is going to require an end to the AIPAC dual loyalties, and a mighty push back against AIPAC like it or not. They have to be pushed into it. And it's the USA who has to do the lifting work.
No matter how repugnant that may be to some imperialists.
The 1967 lines are just the lines the warring parties rested behind before resumption of hostilities. Israeli empire building? Nice joke.
The ethnic cleansing of the Balkans occured several times. That is one reason why Kosovo is now independant.
True, chris, Israel made a preemptive attack in 1967, after the USSR misled Egypt into thinking Israel
was about to attack Jordan proper so that Egypt put out a display of force without any intent to attack Israel. And Israel's eternal war to grab more land goes on, with Uncle Sam paying its bills. Jordan border incidents due to Israelis trying to take over the no-man's land at its borders let the Israeli imperialist genie out of the bottle. Ike would have pulled Israel's chain.
Don't kid yourselves. Israel's expansionism/imperialism did not begin in 1967.
Oh – and history buff, it was Syria, not Jordan. Egypt and Jordan had a mutual defense pact. Israel had committed aggressions against Syria, including a recent bombing deep inside Syria, not far from Damascus, and nearly constant incursions into the DMZ intended to provoke the Syrians into firing (described by Moshe Dayan among others). Therefore there was good reason to believe the Russians when they reported that Israel was preparing a major assault on Syria.
You are correct that Nasser found it necessary to make a show of force, and that he had no intention of attacking Israel. Israeli officials knew this, and some admitted it later.
Israel pre-emptively attacked Syria back then and not just then as they also attacked Lebanon.
But everyone else would have you believe otherwise and think some christain zionist war in the balkans was more important.
Fact of the matter is in the balkan states none of the religious factions could agree, which led to them expelling the people. So that excuse just went out the window.
Israel and Palestine are closer ideologically and they even share the same background. There should be no reason for them not to simply accept Palestine for what they are instead of empire building.
The reason Israel doesn't and the world knows this, is because its a backwards state based on 'race' not religion and if you aren't jewish enough aka zionist you are discarded like the blacks, the sephardi & palestinians/ethiopians. The only one who doesn't want to admit this is Israel because then they'd have to admit they all lied.
"Israel pre-emptively attacked Syria back then"
Israel's attack on Syria was an act of aggression, and does not really qualify as preemptive. In order to legitimately be considered preemptive at attack must be intended to prevent a specific, existing threat from the party attacked.
That's what I meant, Israel and its Globalists are the ultimate liars and managers of double speak.
Obviously not Jews but just simply Israel.
Fact is and this is FACT, not fantasy Egypt was doing nothing to Israel and neither was Lebanon except deterring their aggression.
Instead of admit that this is all which happened, Israel used it to blame both Syria AND Lebanon for seeking to start a war on their 'society' and then waged war as a matter of empire building.
Its obvious to anyone with two eyes in their head that Israel is a two faced liar, wants to continue building empires, and with its Globalist conspirators complete a global government.
To sway the public from this more than illustrated conclusion, Israel blames religon and labels everyone anti-semites.
Typical bait and switch of the guilty….
The state has made itself into an ethnocracy and all on purpose.
Is the secret out in the public now?
link to infowars.com
Israel and its corporations are out to institute a New World Order!!
Israel and its corporations have gone mad, its largest technology firms run by the Rockefeller Club of Rome clique.
Who do they think they are to try to force a Global order on everyone?