<snip>

"A U.N. investigation into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Gaza has found evidence that both sides committed "war crimes."

The United Nations says the investigation led by former South African judge Richard Goldstone concluded that "Israel committed actions amounting to war crimes, possibly crimes against humanity," during its Dec. 27-Jan. 18 military operations in the Palestinian territories.

The global body said the report released Tuesday "concludes there is also evidence that Palestinian armed groups committed war crimes, as well as possibly crimes against humanity," by firing rockets into southern Israel.

Israel refused to cooperate with the investigation, saying the U.N. Human Rights Council that ordered it was biased against the Jewish state."

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/articl...



Full Report


Judge Goldstone and the pollution of argument

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/20...

Attacks on human rights groups that probe Israel's Gaza offensive are an insult to reasonable public debate

<snip>

"The despicable attacks on human rights organisations investigating Israel's Gaza offensive in January confirm Churchill's observation: "A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on." The mission led by the South African judge Richard Goldstone to investigate international human rights and international humanitarian law violations during Israel's offensive, established by the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC), is the latest victim. His findings are about to be made public. The knives have been out for the mission for months. Now they are being plunged into him and his colleagues. Until the report is out Goldstone can't defend it. So the smears and misrepresentation are left free to pollute public discourse.

The New York-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) has assiduously responded to a deluge of scurrilous attacks on its credibility and staff, yet totally unfounded allegations – for example, about accepting Saudi government funding and failing to give a critical report to the Israel Defence Forces before releasing it to the public – are constantly being recycled. HRW messed up by failing to see that the nerdy and, to most people, disturbing hobby of its weapons expert Marc Garlasco (he collects German and American second world war memorabilia) could be used to discredit his role as author of highly critical reports of Israel's military conduct in Gaza. But when this story broke last week, the equation implied in some allegations – "Nazi" object-collector plus "Israel-basher" equals "antisemite" – was baseless and defamatory. That he also worked on reports critical of Hamas and Hezbollah was ignored. As another excuse to attack HRW, and deflect attention from its reports' findings, the Garlasco affair was a gift.

The human rights world is not beyond reproach. UNHRC has hardly been impartial on Israel. Goldstone accepted his role only after the council president agreed to the alteration of the mission's mandate to cover all parties to the conflict, not just Israel. But mistrust alone does not explain the extraordinary scale of the attacks on human rights organisations, including all Israeli ones, for their reports on Israel.

In the 1970s, Jewish groups pressing the Soviets to allow Jews the right to leave the USSR worked with the human rights movement and based their arguments on human rights principles. But now the promoters of the concept of the "new antisemitism" – that Israel is the collective Jew persecuted by the international community – hold the international human rights movement largely responsible for it. Unable to face the fact that occupation and increasingly extreme rightwing governments turned Israel into the neighbourhood bully, and misreading the fallout for Jewish communities as abandonment by progressive forces and governments, many Jewish leaders and opinion-formers have become the human rights movement's fiercest critics. With antisemitism framing this attack, reasoned argument becomes nigh on impossible.

Does it then come down to a matter of whose reputation you trust? If so would it be critics of human rights agencies like Alan Dershowitz, the prominent American lawyer who thinks torture could be legalised, Melanie Phillips, a columnist who calls Jewish critics of Israel "Jews for genocide", and Gerald Steinberg, who runs NGO Watch and is an advisor to the Lieberman-led Israeli Foreign Ministry? Or Richard Goldstone, former chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, who is putting his considerable reputation on the line in taking the UNHRC assignment? Frankly, I don't think there is a contest.

By declaring the reports of human rights agencies biased, the attack dogs are reinforcing the damage Israel is doing to itself. They put Israel in the company of serial human rights abusers that make the same complaint. And by refusing to respond to letters from HRW, denying the Goldstone mission entry to Israel, rubbishing testimony from Gazans unless it supports Israel's version of the offensive, and allowing the army to investigate itself, Israel merely shows it cannot even tolerate reasonable criticism. This is a sign of weakness, not strength."

<snip>

"When Israeli soldiers expelled Abir Hijeh, her five children and their neighbors from homes in a Gaza war zone, she said they warned her in broken Arabic: Go south or you might get shot.

The group went the wrong way and came under fire from Israeli soldiers. Hijeh was wounded and her 2-year-old daughter was killed.

Hijeh's account of a sniper firing on civilians, along with soldiers' graffiti and destruction seen by The Associated Press in homes they commandeered, lend support to allegations of Israeli army misconduct during the onslaught in Gaza.

In recent testimony, Israeli soldiers told of vandalizing homes they seized to use as army posts, as well as relaxed rules of engagement, including hasty shooting at civilians. The soldiers, who spoke to a military prep school in a closed-door session, described an incident with similarities to the shooting of the Hijeh family."

more

<snip>

"The Israeli army is at the centre of a second controversy over the moral conduct of its soldiers in as many days.

The revelations centre on t-shirt designs made for soldiers that make light of shooting pregnant Palestinian mothers and children and include images of dead babies and destroyed mosques.

The t-shirts were printed for Israeli soldiers at the end of periods of deployment or training courses and were discovered by Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

One, printed for a platoon of Israeli snipers depicts an armed Palestinian pregnant women caught in the crosshairs of a rifle, with the disturbing caption in English: "1 shot 2 kills".

Another depicts a child carrying a gun also in the centre of a target.

"The smaller, the harder," read the words on the t-shirt.

According to a soldier interviewed by the newspaper, the message has a double meaning: "It's a kid, so you've got a little more of a problem, morally and also the target is smaller."

Another shows an Israeli soldier blowing up a mosque and reads "Only God forgives."

<snip>

"The revelations, coming so soon after Israel's offensive in Gaza in which hundreds of civilians were killed - many of them women and children - are causing outrage.

Perhaps the most shocking design shows a Palestinian mother weeping next to her dead baby's grave, also in the crosshairs of a rifle.

It suggests it would have been better if the child had never been born, with the slogan "Better use Durex."

more

<snip>

"Initial testimonies given by Israel Defense Forces soldiers and officers who fought in Israel's offensive on the Gaza Strip earlier this year paints a grim picture of civilian deaths, deliberate destruction of Palestinian property and loose orders to open fire.

Dozens of combat soldiers, graduates of the Oranim pre-military institute, gathered at their alma mater last month relate their experiences during Operation Cast Lead.

Their on-the-ground testimonies are different from the army's official statements, in which the IDF insisted its forces paid heed to high moral conduct in every sector.

In one testimony, a soldier describes an incident in which an IDF sniper killed a Palestinian woman and her two children.

"There was one house with a family in it... we put them into some room. Afterward, we left the house and another company went in, and a few days after we went in there was an order to release the family. We took our positions upstairs."

"There was a sniper position on the roof and the company commander released the family and told them to take a right," said the soldier. "One mother and her two children didn't understand, and they took a left. Someone forgot to notify the sniper on the roof that the family had been released, and that it was okay, it was fine, to hold fire, and he... you can say he acted as necessary, as he was ordered to."

More soldier testimonies will be published in Haaretz over the coming days

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/107204...

<snip>

"I WAS reminded this week of the old tale about a Jewish mother taking leave of her son, who has been called up to serve in the Czar`s army against the Turks.

'Don`t exert yourself too much,' she admonishes him, 'Kill a Turk and rest. Kill another Turk and rest again…'

'But mother,' he exclaims, 'What if the Turk kills me?'

'Kill you?' she cries out, 'Why? What have you done to him?'

This is not a joke (and this is not a week for jokes). It is a lesson in psychology. I was reminded of it when I read Ehud Olmert`s statement that more than anything else he was furious about the outburst of joy in Gaza after the attack in Jerusalem, in which eight yeshiva students were killed.

Before that, last weekend, the Israeli army killed 120 Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, half of them civilians, among them dozens of children. That was not 'kill a Turk and rest.' That was 'kill a hundred Turks and rest.' But Olmert does not understand."

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Full Title: She was a girl from small-town America with dreams of being a poet or a dancer. So how, at just 23, did Rachel Corrie become a Palestinian martyr?

<snip>

"It is impossible to underestimate quite how much life for Rachel Corrie's family has changed since she was killed by an Israeli army Caterpillar D9 bulldozer in the Gaza Strip on 16 March 2003. As Rachel's elder sister Sarah puts it: 'What was normal doesn't exist for us now.'

'After Rachel was killed.' When I meet the Corries, it swiftly becomes clear that there is a great deal they want to speak out about, but it is these four words, heavy with loss, that they have repeated most over the past five years.

Before Rachel was killed trying to prevent a Palestinian home in Rafah from being demolished, they were a pretty ordinary West Coast American family. It has been said in the past that she came from a left-leaning, alternative background, but this is not strictly accurate. Craig Corrie is an insurance executive, who has spent 24 years of his career working for the same firm. Cindy Corrie is a musician and teacher. Since the mid-Seventies they have mostly lived in the same slate-grey house in Olympia, a small town with many coffee shops an hour's drive out of Seattle, and it was here that they raised their three children, Chris, Sarah and Rachel. True, the Corries liked to debate politics around the kitchen table. They also liked to talk about the cats and the chickens, going skiing at the weekend, the vegetable plot, the family holiday cottage in Minnesota. Whenever the conversation did turn towards the Palestinian issue, Craig and Cindy's sympathies would instinctively fall on the Israeli side.

After Rachel was killed, life changed abruptly. Over the past five years they've had to deal with the loss of their youngest daughter, at the age of 23. Cindy, a quietly spoken woman not given to over-statement or, indeed, self-pity, describes a period of mourning that will never really end."

much more

<snip>

"A national Muslim civil rights organization has asked the FBI to investigate what it considers threats made on the Internet against a Bosnian mosque in St. Louis.

One blog post cited by the group made reference to vandalism and another to the use of dynamite.

Zachary Lowe, a special agent in the St. Louis office of the FBI, said Tuesday that while he could not confirm an investigation, the bureau "takes all threats against people very seriously, especially religious and ethnic groups."

The comments were made on at least two blogs and related to a posting about a minaret being built at the mosque. The mosque is the Islamic Community Center, or Madina Masjid, at 4666 Lansdowne Avenue. A minaret is a tower from which the Muslim call to prayer is traditionally sounded."

<snip>

"On the "Gateway Pundit," a blogger who identified herself as Kathi, wrote: "It is really hard on us white, non-muslims to have to live with these folks taking over our neighborhood and community. Our government helping these people relocate into America's heartland is like inviting the enemy into your camp. It's totally disgusting."

On "Little Green Footballs," blogger Amer1can wrote, "Would be a shame if it were to be vandalized or destroyed. Just a shame I tell you....wink wink STL youth."

Blogger Arthur E. Hippler added: "I suppose dynamite would be considered an extreme response."

http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stor...


Hate Site Comments Suggest Violence Against Missouri Mosque

<snip>

"The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) today asked the St. Louis, Mo., office of
the FBI to investigate apparent threats against a local mosque posted on an
anti-Muslim Internet hate site.

Threatening comments on the Little Green Footballs hate site about a
new minaret being built near that mosque included:

SEE: An Islamic Prayer Tower in St. Louis

1. "I suppose dynamite would be considered an extreme response."

2. "The tower would make a nice target for lots of things... Perhaps
one could start by bombing the thing with pig s**t from a light plane."

3. "Anyone got some RPGs to coat in pig fat?"

4. "Would be a shame if it were to be vandalized or destroyed. Just a
shame I tell you....wink wink STL youth."

"These types of violent comments should not be taken lightly and should
be investigated by state and federal law enforcement authorities," said
CAIR Civil Rights Manager Khadija Athman."

http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories....

<snip>

"No matter what was promised in Annapolis, a Two State Solution for Israel and Palestine now seems utterly impossible, judging from what I have just seen during a 3-week visit to the West Bank.

Its hills, terraced with olive groves, are now totally dissected by fortified highways and crowned by luxurious illegal housing developments – the latter occupied by nearly a half a million Israelis. Seized Arab land has clearly provided a bonanza for investors who think their money secure. What remains is a shredded West Bank from which it will be near impossible, in my view, to construct anything truly independent of Israel.

I went to the West Bank at the invitation of a Fair Trade Palestinian olive oil company, Zaytoun. I expected a healthy break from chilly English weather; to pick olives, eat with farmers and learn from them how 60 years of military occupation has affected their lives. But it turned out to be far more dramatic a visit than ever I had envisioned.

One morning I went with three olive pickers to help Omar, a Palestinian who farms in the northern part of the West Bank. Leaving our car on what was then a quiet main road, we met him on the farm on which he had 250 olive trees. The police just evicted the Israeli settlers who had illegally occupied it. They had done so at the behest of a judge who ruled in favour of the Palestinian owners of this farm of fig, olive and almond trees. It is managed for her family by the 61-year-old Dadriya Amar who lives, as does Omar, in the local Palestinian village of Kafr Qaddum. She had filed her complaint when the settlers first occupied the farm in October. This led to the eviction of the settlers by the army – not once but three times. But every time they were expelled, the army did not stop them from returning hours later. When she came to pick the olives, the settlers had chased her away with stones.

We had not yet started picking the olives when suddenly a large armoured army truck arrived and soldiers massed by the farmhouse. They clearly had foreknowledge of something about to happen - and sure enough, a bus load of Israeli settlers minutes later disembarked and charged to the farmhouse. However it was a gentle, almost ritual, clash. No tear gas, no arrests. The settlers retired after some pushing and chatting with the soldiers. The army then declared the farm a ‘closed military zone’ and we had to leave."

more

<snip>

"The public discourse in Israel has momentarily awoken from its slumber. `To give or not to give,` that is the Shakespearean question - `to make concessions` or `not to make concessions.` It is good that initial signs of life in the Israeli public have emerged. It was worth going to Annapolis if only for this reason - but this discourse is baseless and distorted. Israel is not being asked `to give` anything to the Palestinians; it is only being asked to return - to return their stolen land and restore their trampled self-respect, along with their fundamental human rights and humanity. This is the primary core issue, the only one worthy of the title, and no one talks about it anymore.

No one is talking about morality anymore. Justice is also an archaic concept, a taboo that has deliberately been erased from all negotiations. Two and a half million people - farmers, merchants, lawyers, drivers, daydreaming teenage girls, love-smitten men, old people, women, children and combatants using violent means for a just cause - have all been living under a brutal boot for 40 years. Meanwhile, in our cafes and living rooms the conversation is over giving or not giving.

Lawyers, philosophers, writers, lecturers, intellectuals and rabbis, who are looked upon for basic knowledge about moral precepts, participate in this distorted discourse. What will they tell their children - after the occupation finally becomes a nightmare of the past - about the period in which they wielded influence? What will they say about their role in this? Israeli students stand at checkpoints as part of their army reserve duty, brutally deciding the fate of people, and then some rush off to lectures on ethics at university, forgetting what they did the previous day and what is being done in their names every single day. Intellectuals publish petitions, `to make concessions` or `not to make concessions,` diverting attention from the core issue. There are stormy debates about corruption - whether Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is corrupt and how the Supreme Court is being undermined. But there is no discussion of the ultimate question: Isn`t the occupation the greatest and most terrible corruption to have taken root here, overshadowing everything else?

Security officials are terrified about what would happen if we removed a checkpoint or released prisoners, like the whites in South Africa who whipped up a frenzy of fear about the `great slaughter` that would ensue if blacks were granted their rights. But these are not legitimate questions: The incarceration must be ended and the myriad of political prisoners should be released unconditionally. Just as a thief cannot present demands - neither preconditions nor any other terms - to the owner of the property he has robbed, Israel cannot present demands to the other side as long as the situation remains as it is."

more

<snip>

"There are two Israels: one inside the Green Line, the 1967 border, the other an occupying power extending beyond it. The first is a vibrant democracy, with Arab members of Parliament, university professors and lawyers, beauty queens and soldiers, and even a Muslim cabinet minister. There are no separate roads for Arabs and Jews in the name of that all-purpose explanation "security," no villages made inaccessible because their roads have been dug up by army bulldozers, no checkpoints and no security fence cleaving farmers from their land and schoolchildren from their playgrounds.

Across the Green Line, the West Bank, captured in 1967, is another country, neither Israel nor Palestine, but a lawless place, where the Jewish settler, rifle in one hand and prayer book in the other, is undisputed king. The settlers have their own roads, guarded by the Israeli Army, water, electricity, supplies and — occasional if well-publicized crackdowns aside — substantial impunity from the law. Much of the land on which their settlements stand, was, as Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar detail in this important book, simply stolen. The settlements are illegal, in contravention of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which forbids an occupying power from transferring its civilian population to occupied territories. But for those who claim a divine mandate, the Geneva Conventions count for nothing. According to the United Nations, more than a third of the West Bank is now off limits to Palestinians. A web of Israeli Army checkpoints and obstacles further atomizes what is left of Palestinian society.

"Lords of the Land" is the first complete history of the settlement project. It provides a detailed narrative of injustice, and is profoundly depressing for anyone still hoping for a fair resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or even hoping that Jews and Arabs will be seen as equal in the eyes of Israeli law. In a chapter entitled "Everything Is Legal in the Land of Israel" Zertal and Eldar chronicle the paltry punishments given to settlers who kill Arabs, like the settlement leader Pinchas Wallerstein, who in 1988 shot two young Arabs in the back after he saw them burning a tire on the road. One died. Wallerstein was sentenced to four months community service.

If Palestinian lives are cheap, much Palestinian land is even cheaper — that is, free, at least to the settlers and Israeli authorities. The security fence that snakes through the West Bank is, according to Zertal and Eldar, an unparalleled land grab. They write that it was "constructed with no reckoning and no logic other than the purpose of enclosing as many settlements as possible on the western, Israeli, side and dividing up and seizing Palestinian lands."

more


Lords of the Land: The War for Israel's Settlements in the Occupied Territories

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Lords-Land-Settlem...

 
Celebrate Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week (October 22-29) with blogger Pamela Geller (aka Atlas Shrugs):

Sung to the tune of My Sharona:

On My little infidel
Go to hell!
Cover up, convert or die - Sharia!
Muslim foot baths in the schools - airports too!
Public school madrassas are taking over.
Never gonna stop, give it up
We're such girliemen
Always give it up to the call of the Prophet Moe.
Allah Akbar!

When you gonna cut my va?
va jay jay!
Gotta live in dhimmitude,
Honor Killings!
Gonna call you racist and Islamophobe!
If you dare to use the word Islamofascist

Refrain:
Never gonna stop
Give it up
We're such girliemen
Always give it up to the call of the Prophet Moe

My My My My Sharia!
My My My My sharia!

http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com /

Nice boots!

Israel critic Norman Finkelstein made national headlines after his tenure was denied by DePaul University . Finkelstein, an author of five books, had received outstanding reviews from his students and peers. His dismissal sparked student protests and sit-ins, and led top academics to rally to his defence. Many questioned whether campuses had fallen victim to powerful pressure groups.

In this interview with George McLeod, Norman Finkelstein discusses the Israel lobby, his writings and what makes the Israel issue unusually sensitive in the US.


<snip>

McLeod: What is unique about the Israel/Palestine issue that makes it so controversial and sensitive?

Finkelstein: There is nothing unusual about the Israel/Palestine issue, apart from the fact that there is a lobby here that prevents any kind of rational debate and discussion about what goes on there.

The conflict itself is not particularly unusual. And its main features are fairly well-known, especially outside the US.

There is no other field where a gang of hoodlums use their money and their brass knuckles to prevent tenure appointments, and that’s very odd. There are other politicised fields like Cuba studies or China studies – but these kinds of jihads and witch hunts – they just don’t go on in other fields.

In Israel/Palestine academia, in the past few years, you have the Juan Cole case at Yale, you have the Joseph Massad case, you have the Nadi Abuel-El-Haj case, you have my case, and you have the Rashid Khalidi case.

But you take other fields that are politicised, like China studies and Cuba studies where there is a lobby at work, they just don`t engage in these sorts of mafia tactics.

more

<snip>

"When Ehud Olmert and George W. Bush met at the White House in June, they concluded that Hamas’s violent ousting of Fatah from Gaza – which brought down the Palestinian national unity government brokered by the Saudis in Mecca in March – had presented the world with a new ‘window of opportunity’.<*> (Never has a failed peace process enjoyed so many windows of opportunity.) Hamas’s isolation in Gaza, Olmert and Bush agreed, would allow them to grant generous concessions to the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, giving him the credibility he needed with the Palestinian people in order to prevail over Hamas.

Both Bush and Olmert have spoken endlessly of their commitment to a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, but it is their determination to bring down Hamas rather than to build up a Palestinian state that animates their new-found enthusiasm for making Abbas look good. That is why their expectation that Hamas will be defeated is illusory. Palestinian moderates will never prevail over those considered extremists, since what defines moderation for Olmert is Palestinian acquiescence in Israel’s dismemberment of Palestinian territory. In the end, what Olmert and his government are prepared to offer Palestinians will be rejected by Abbas no less than by Hamas, and will only confirm to Palestinians the futility of Abbas’s moderation and justify its rejection by Hamas. Equally illusory are Bush’s expectations of what will be achieved by the conference he recently announced would be held in the autumn (it has now been downgraded to a ‘meeting’). In his view, all previous peace initiatives have failed largely, if not exclusively, because Palestinians were not ready for a state of their own. The meeting will therefore focus narrowly on Palestinian institution-building and reform, under the tutelage of Tony Blair, the Quartet’s newly appointed envoy.

In fact, all previous peace initiatives have got nowhere for a reason that neither Bush nor the EU has had the political courage to acknowledge. That reason is the consensus reached long ago by Israel’s decision-making elites that Israel will never allow the emergence of a Palestinian state which denies it effective military and economic control of the West Bank. To be sure, Israel would allow – indeed, it would insist on – the creation of a number of isolated enclaves that Palestinians could call a state, but only in order to prevent the creation of a binational state in which Palestinians would be the majority.

The Middle East peace process may well be the most spectacular deception in modern diplomatic history. Since the failed Camp David summit of 2000, and actually well before it, Israel’s interest in a peace process – other than for the purpose of obtaining Palestinian and international acceptance of the status quo – has been a fiction that has served primarily to provide cover for its systematic confiscation of Palestinian land and an occupation whose goal, according to the former IDF chief of staff Moshe Ya’alon, is ‘to sear deep into the consciousness of Palestinians that they are a defeated people’. In his reluctant embrace of the Oslo Accords, and his distaste for the settlers, Yitzhak Rabin may have been the exception to this, but even he did not entertain a return of Palestinian territory beyond the so-called Allon Plan, which allowed Israel to retain the Jordan Valley and other parts of the West Bank."

more

<snip>

"Even on a steaming hot day such as descended on New York last Monday, the Middle East looks very far away from the office of James D. Wolfensohn, 29 stories above Sixth Avenue in Manhattan. Construction staff in work boots, wearing hip- hugging tool belts, are still working industriously to complete the renovations - Wolfensohn is renting the entire floor. That will happen very soon, at which time Wolfensohn, 73, who was president of the World Bank for 10 years (1995-2005) and then spent 11 months as the Middle East envoy of the Quartet (the United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations), will launch his new adventure. His sons are now working to raise $500 million to develop alternative fuel sources, and he will head up the vast new fund.

Wolfensohn's period in the Middle East has left its mark on him. He may have left Israel and the Palestinian territories at the end of April 2006, but Israel and the territories have not yet left him. Which is understandable.

An Australian-born American Jew, Wolfensohn arrived in the region three months before the Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, brimming with good intentions. His decade as head of the World Bank, his relaxed temperament and his intimate acquaintance with the leaders of the Quartet made him an ideal candidate for the post of special envoy. His father, who served with the Jewish Battalions in World War I, planted emotional ties to Zionism and the region in his heart.

Wolfensohn landed in the Middle East in May 2005 in order to monitor the Israeli disengagement from Gaza and to help heal the badly ailing Palestinian economy. In the beginning he was full of hope: He was able to raise $9 billion ($3 billion a year for three years) to bolster the Palestinian economy, and in November 2005, three months after the disengagement, he served as the mediator between Israel and the Palestinian Authority in negotiations on transit routes and on access to and from the Gaza Strip. He also donated money of his own to help the Palestinians buy Israeli-owned greenhouses in Gaza.

However, the departure of Ariel Sharon from the political arena in January 2006, the fact that Wolfensohn's efforts were constantly undermined by none other than the U.S. administration, and the rise of Hamas to power combined to derail his mission. At the end of April 2006, fed up with both the Israelis and the Palestinians, and after understanding that he would not get backing from the Quartet, he decided to pack it in. He returned to the United States, where he divides his time between Manhattan and Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and tried to leave the failed mission behind him."

more

<snip>

"At the end of the week, 256 families will celebrate the release from prison of their dear ones, and mothers are already relieved that the manhunt for their wanted sons has ended. In the cities where the wanted men live, there is also a sense of relief: The armed men - particularly those from Fatah - prided themselves on their weapons in the context of internal power games. They endangered their own surroundings rather than the Israeli occupation. We can gauge the extent to which the gestures will strengthen Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas not by the praise that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is getting from U.S. President George W. Bush, but by how the gestures are received in Palestinian society.

The intensive public relations campaign regarding the "gestures" reinforces the Palestinians' understanding that Israel is buying its ability to continue with the policy of occupation at a bargain price. After all, it is not planning to return the land it robbed from every Palestinian. The network of roadblocks and separate roads - which is destroying the fabric of Palestinian society - will not be removed, and the angry soldier at the roadblock will not stop turning every simple trip into torture.

The Palestinians are sufficiently experienced to know that all the smiles being exchanged by Abbas and Olmert are not stopping the bulldozers, which continue to imprison them in enclaves among the growing settlement blocs. The declarations by Saeb Erekat about adhering to "a state within the 1967 borders" do not convince the public that a government led by the Palestinian Liberation Organization and Fatah will manage to do what it has not done since 1994: to fight against the Israeli project of occupation and colonization.

The concept of "amnesty" that is being used to describe the agreement to stop chasing wanted men demonstrates to what extent Israel is entrenched in its position of domination. According to the law, the president is allowed to pardon "criminals." According to the law, a "criminal" is someone who was tried and convicted. It's true that the late president Chaim Herzog pardoned leading members of the Shin Bet security service before they were tried for the murder of the hijackers of bus no. 300, after the majority opinion in the High Court of Justice ruled that the president of Israel has the same power to pardon as the king of England and the president of the United States.

But here it is a "pardon" of the Shin Bet and the army in the field. The ease with which the concept "pardon" was accepted in the media is additional proof of the sweeping approval that Israelis grant the Israel Defense Forces and its soldiers to act as prosecutor, judge and executioner. Is it any wonder that they are given the power of a king of England, to pardon before a trial?"

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