I.

Humanitarian implosion in Gaza.
Urge Secretary Rice to help end the civilian bloodshed!

 

Dear  ,

It may be a new year, but the bloodshed in Gaza this past week is a clear reminder that there's no time to wait to protect human rights in 2009.

Since December 27, these horrific attacks on Gaza have caused over 400 Palestinian deaths and 2000 injuries. Rocket fire by armed Palestinian groups, including Hamas, has taken the lives of 4 Israelis and caused several dozen injuries. Amnesty International condemns the violence on both sides and calls on both parties to abide by international law and policies.

The U.S. government cannot continue this lop-sided blame on Hamas for the crisis. Ask Secretary Rice to urgently express deep concern about Israel's disproportional response and its policies which have brought the Gaza Strip to the brink of humanitarian disaster.

Civilians in Gaza, already trapped in disgraceful humanitarian conditions, are victims of Israeli air strikes and intensified attacks. Israeli blockades of humanitarian supplies continue to deny Palestinians the food and medical supplies they desperately need.

Join Amnesty International in calling for Secretary Rice to:
Pressure Israel and Palestinian armed groups to cease attacks on civilians
Demand an end to Israel's disproportional response
Urge Israel to open the crossings to let humanitarian aid in
Together we can help lift Gaza out of this crisis.

 

Sincerely,

Curt Goering
Senior Deputy Executive Director
Amnesty International USA

 

II.

 

Israel's attacks in the Gaza Strip will have a crucial impact on the fortunes of political leaders ahead of national elections in February. Some Middle East analysts even believe the offensive is a cynical move to boost domestic popularity.

Jerusalem/Beirut, 2 Jan. (AKI) - As Israeli leaders showed no sign of ending the week-long air attacks in the Gaza Strip on Friday, the political impact of their action was already being assessed. Analysts told Adnkronos International (AKI) that attacks on the ruling Hamas movement were certain to boost the flagging popularity of Defense Minister and Labour Party leader, Ehud Barak, and the political fortunes of acting Prime Minister Tzipi Livni.

One poll published in the the daily, Haaretz, has already shown that Barak's domestic popularity has been boosted by Israel's action.

Michael Widlanski, a research fellow at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, said that support for the Labor Party leader had collapsed in the past six months and Barak needed to show Israelis he was decisive.

"The current warfare, which is justified, is an opportunity for him to solidify his base with the centre and the right," Widlanksi said.

As prime minister in 2000, Barak decided to withdraw Israeli forces from Lebanon. While the move was well received at the time, it was later questioned by many Israelis after the Lebanon war of 2006.

Widlanski said the Gaza offensive which has killed more than 400 people and injured more than 2000 others,would be a test of the Defense Minister's resolve.

"There is no question that the public was clamouring for a strong response to the situation in Gaza as it had in Lebanon," he said. "But the government of Olmert and Livni had not exactly shown forthrightness or decisiveness."

In the Haaretz poll published on Thursday, 53 percent of respondents said they were satisfied with Barak's performance - up from 34 percent six months ago.

The turnaround means that the current coalition between Barak and Livni may be renewed.

But Widlanski stressed that Hamas, far more than the Israeli leaders, had really "set the stage" for Israel's action in Gaza. He said Hamas had launched 223 rockets and 130 mortar shells at Israel during the six month truce that ended in December and most took place in the past six weeks.

He said Hamas militants had launched a total of 800 attacks throughout 2007.

"Hamas has been escalating (their attacks) since the middle of November. They have been the ones that set the agenda. If you look back at Prime Minister Olmert, Livni, (President Shimon) Peres and even Barak they have basically been reactive," Widlanski said.

Talal Nizameddin, political analyst at The American University, said despite denials by the Israeli leaders, domestic political considerations were the main reason for the attacks against Gaza.

He told AKI both Barak and Livni were using the air raids to foil hardline political rival Binyamin Netanyahu, from the right-wing Likud Party.

"This would leave Netanyahu with no options. What would Netanyahu do if he does win the elections? That would make him meaningless as an Israeli prime minister because he promised to come in as a tough leader who would clean up Gaza from what he calls Palestinian terrorism," he told AKI.

"In my opinion, there is a clear hint of political manoeuvering."

Livni is the newly elected head of the ruling conservative Kadima Party, while Barak leads the centre-left Labour Party. He was prime minister from 1999 to 2001.

Israel's elections are due to take place on 10 February after Livni, currently Foreign Minister, failed to form a government in October to replace outgoing prime minister, Ehud Olmert, who is now facing corruption charges.

However the election date may be postponed until 17 February due to a Jewish holiday.

 

III.

Robert Fisk: Why bombing Ashkelon is the most tragic irony
Tuesday, 30 December 2008

 

How easy it is to snap off the history of the Palestinians, to delete the narrative of their tragedy, to avoid a grotesque irony about Gaza which – in any other conflict – journalists would be writing about in their first reports: that the original, legal owners of the Israeli land on which Hamas rockets are detonating live in Gaza.
That is why Gaza exists: because the Palestinians who lived in Ashkelon and the fields around it – Askalaan in Arabic – were dispossessed from their lands in 1948 when Israel was created and ended up on the beaches of Gaza. They – or their children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren – are among the one and a half million Palestinian refugees crammed into the cesspool of Gaza, 80 per cent of whose families once lived in what is now Israel. This, historically, is the real story: most of the people of Gaza don't come from Gaza.
But watching the news shows, you'd think that history began yesterday, that a bunch of bearded anti-Semitic Islamist lunatics suddenly popped up in the slums of Gaza – a rubbish dump of destitute people of no origin – and began firing missiles into peace-loving, democratic Israel, only to meet with the righteous vengeance of the Israeli air force. The fact that the five sisters killed in Jabalya camp had grandparents who came from the very land whose more recent owners have now bombed them to death simply does not appear in the story.
Both Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres said back in the 1990s that they wished Gaza would just go away, drop into the sea, and you can see why. The existence of Gaza is a permanent reminder of those hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who lost their homes to Israel, who fled or were driven out through fear or Israeli ethnic cleansing 60 years ago, when tidal waves of refugees had washed over Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War and when a bunch of Arabs kicked out of their property didn't worry the world.
Well, the world should worry now. Crammed into the most overpopulated few square miles in the whole world are a dispossessed people who have been living in refuse and sewage and, for the past six months, in hunger and darkness, and who have been sanctioned by us, the West. Gaza was always an insurrectionary place. It took two years for Ariel Sharon's bloody "pacification", starting in 1971, to be completed, and Gaza is not going to be tamed now.
Alas for the Palestinians, their most powerful political voice – I'm talking about the late Edward Said, not the corrupt Yassir Arafat (and how the Israelis must miss him now) – is silent and their predicament largely unexplained by their deplorable, foolish spokesmen. "It's the most terrifying place I've ever been in," Said once said of Gaza. "It's a horrifyingly sad place because of the desperation and misery of the way people live. I was unprepared for camps that are much worse than anything I saw in South Africa."
Of course, it was left to Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni to admit that "sometimes also civilians pay the price," an argument she would not make, of course, if the fatality statistics were reversed. Indeed, it was instructive yesterday to hear a member of the American Enterprise Institute – faithfully parroting Israel's arguments – defending the outrageous Palestinian death toll by saying that it was "pointless to play the numbers game". Yet if more than 300 Israelis had been killed – against two dead Palestinians – be sure that the "numbers game" and the disproportionate violence would be all too relevant. The simple fact is that Palestinian deaths matter far less than Israeli deaths. True, we know that 180 of the dead were Hamas members. But what of the rest? If the UN's conservative figure of 57 civilian fatalities is correct, the death toll is still a disgrace.
To find both the US and Britain failing to condemn the Israeli onslaught while blaming Hamas is not surprising. US Middle East policy and Israeli policy are now indistinguishable and Gordon Brown is following the same dog-like devotion to the Bush administration as his predecessor.
As usual, the Arab satraps – largely paid and armed by the West – are silent, preposterously calling for an Arab summit on the crisis which will (if it even takes place), appoint an "action committee" to draw up a report which will never be written. For that is the way with the Arab world and its corrupt rulers. As for Hamas, they will, of course, enjoy the discomfiture of the Arab potentates while cynically waiting for Israel to talk to them. Which they will. Indeed, within a few months, we'll be hearing that Israel and Hamas have been having "secret talks" – just as we once did about Israel and the even more corrupt PLO. But by then, the dead will be long buried and we will be facing the next crisis since the last crisis.