Palestinian PM criticizes Israel's celebrations | May 13, 5:16 PM (ET) | By DALIA NAMMARI
RAMALLAH, West Bank (AP) - Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad reprimanded Israel on Tuesday for triumphantly celebrating its 60th birthday before having reached a peace deal with the Palestinians.
Such festivities are inappropriate and offensive as long as Israel rules over the Palestinians, the usually mild-mannered Fayyad said.
His comments during a speech marking the flip side of Israel's independence - the uprooting of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians during the 1948 war over Israel's creation. Palestinians call it their "nakba," or catastrophe.
"I direct my speech ... to the people of Israel, to say, 'How can you?'" Fayyad said. "How can you celebrate and the Palestinian people are suffering from your settlements and the crimes of your settlers and the siege of your state and the conduct of your occupying army?"
"There is no meaning to celebration if we don't celebrate together, with a fair peace," he added.
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During the 1948 Mideast war, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were uprooted and scattered across the region. Along with their descendants, they now total about 4.5 million, according to U.N. figures. ...
Hamas condemns the Holocaust | Bassem Naeem | May 12, 2008
We are not engaged in a religious conflict with Jews; this is a political struggle to free ourselves from occupation and oppression
As the Palestinian people prepare to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the Nakba ("catastrophe") - the dispossession and expulsion of most of our people from our land - those remaining in Palestine face escalating aggression, killings, imprisonment, ethnic cleansing and siege. But instead of support and solidarity from the western media, we face frequent attempts to defend the indefensible or turn fire on the Palestinians themselves.
One recent approach, which seems to be part of the wider attempt to isolate the elected Palestinian leadership, is to portray Hamas and the population of the Gaza strip as motivated by anti-Jewish sentiment, rather than a hostility to Zionist occupation and domination of our land. A recent front page article in the International Herald Tribune followed this line, as did an article for Cif about an item broadcast on the al-Aqsa satellite TV channnel about the Nazi Holocaust.
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It is rather surprising to us that so little attention, if any, is given by the western media to what is regularly broadcast or written in the Israeli media by politicians and writers demanding the total uprooting or "transfer" of the Palestinian people from their land.
The Israeli media and pro-Israel western press are full of views that deny or seek to excuse well-established facts of history including the Nakba of 1948 and the massacres perpetrated then by the Haganah, the Irgun and LEHI with the objective of forcing a mass dispossession of the Palestinians.
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And at the same time as we unreservedly condemn the crimes perpetrated by the Nazis against the Jews of Europe, we categorically reject the exploitation of the Holocaust by the Zionists to justify their crimes and harness international acceptance of the campaign of ethnic cleansing and subjection they have been waging against us - to the point where in February the Israeli deputy defence minister Matan Vilnai threatened the people of Gaza with a "holocaust".
Within 24 hours, 61 Palestinians - more than half of them civilians and a quarter children - were killed in a series of air raids. Meanwhile, a horrible crime against humanity continues to be perpetrated against the people of Gaza: the two-year-old siege imposed after Hamas won the legislative elections in January 2006, which is causing great suffering. Due to severe shortages of medicines and food, scores of Palestinians have lost their lives.
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After almost a century of Zionist colonial and racist oppression, some Palestinians find it hard to imagine that some of their oppressors are the sons and daughters of those who were themselves oppressed and massacred.
Palestinians had nothing to do with the Holocaust but find themselves punished for someone else's crime. But we are well aware and warmly welcome the outspoken support for Palestinian rights by Israeli and Jewish human rights activists in Palestine and around the world.
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The Europeans bear a direct responsibility for what is befalling the Palestinians today. Britain was the mandate authority that handed over Palestine to Israeli occupation. Nazi Germany perpetrated the most heinous crimes against Jews, forcing the survivors to migrate to Palestine in pursuit of safety. We, therefore, expect the Europeans to atone for their historic crimes by restoring some balance to the inhuman and one-sided international response to the tragedy of our people.
ISRAEL AND TOP ZIONIST LEADERS ATTACK INTELLIGENCE | By: atheo on: 09.12.2007 [23:44 ] (1507 reads) | by James Petras | December 8, 2007
During and immediately after the Annapolis meetings to discuss peace, Israel abducted
the student president of Beir Zeit University for dissent, launched over 50 attacks
on Gaza killing and wounding over 50 Palestinian civilians, police and militia,
set in motion a vast building project of 250 new apartments in Palestinian East
Jerusalem, projected permanent Israeli military posts in the West Bank, rejected
any time limits or specific goals in their negotiations with the PLO and launched
a virulent dismissal of the major US intelligence report (National Intelligence
Estimate) on the non-existence of an Iranian nuclear weapons program. Israel’s presence at Annapolis had absolutely nothing to do with peace or promises to negotiate in good faith: Their purpose was to deflect attention from their meat-grinder style genocidal policies in Gaza and their relentless drive to savagely dispossess all Palestinians of any territory or semblance of autonomy, literally turning off the lights (energy), gas and water to 1.4 million Palestinians residing in Gaza.
Since September 11, 2001 the Israeli state, Zionists inside the US government and
the entire leadership of the Major American Jewish Organizations have been entirely
devoted to pushing the US into Middle East wars on behalf of Israel. In the run-up
to the Iraq War, Zionists in top strategic decision-making positions in the Pentagon,
the Vice President’s Office, the White House and the National Security Council designed and executed war policy, fabricated evidence, wrote Presidential speeches, organized press conferences and presidential agendas, purged critics in the military and intelligence agencies and altered intelligence reports to suit their purposes. ...
Middle East peace will come through recognizing injustice | By Eitan Bronstein and Muhammad Jaradat | For The Register-Guard | Published: May 25, 2008
In 1948 hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were exiled and replaced by new Jewish immigrants. This tragedy still shapes the conflict between our two peoples. Palestinians live without freedom and equal rights in the land of their ancestors, or as refugees scattered throughout the world. Israelis live as occupiers of another people — plagued with a sense of insecurity, though they possess one of the world’s strongest militaries. This side of Israel’s establishment and its inescapable connection to our current strife has been overlooked in the anniversary celebrations.
Some Israelis believe reconciliation with Palestinians is possible by forgetting this past. Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni recently asked that upon the establishment of a Palestinian state, “the word ‘Nakba’ (which refers to the expulsion of the Palestinians by Jewish militias in 1948) be deleted from the Arabic lexicon.” Imagine asking Americans to excise Sept. 11, 2001, from their collective memory, or Jewish people to forget the Holocaust. It is precisely “not forgetting” that allows us to build a just future.
That is why we — an Israeli Jew who as a child unwittingly played among the ruins of Qaqun, a destroyed Palestinian village in what is now Israel, and a Palestinian whose family in Hebron welcomed destitute Jewish refugees who had fled their homes in fear — choose to work together to raise awareness of the Nakba. We know that our two peoples are destined to live together, that our fates are intertwined. And we know that only by acknowledging injustice can we overcome it. ...
Carter urges 'supine' Europe to break with US over Gaza blockade | Ex-president says EU is colluding in a human rights crime | * Jonathan Steele and Jonathan Freedland | * The Guardian, | * Monday May 26 2008
Britain and other European governments should break from the US over the international embargo on Gaza, former US president Jimmy Carter told the Guardian yesterday. Carter, visiting the Welsh border town of Hay for the Guardian literary festival, described the EU's position on the Israeli-Palestinian dispute as "supine" and its failure to criticise the Israeli blockade of Gaza as "embarrassing".
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The blockade on Hamas-ruled Gaza, imposed by the US, EU, UN and Russia - the so-called Quartet - after the organisation's election victory in 2006, was "one of the greatest human rights crimes on Earth," since it meant the "imprisonment of 1.6 million people, 1 million of whom are refugees". "Most families in Gaza are eating only one meal per day. To see Europeans going along with this is embarrassing," Carter said.
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Carter said the Quartet's policy of not talking to Hamas unless it recognised Israel and fulfilled two other conditions had been drafted by Elliot Abrams, an official in the national security council at the White House. He called Abrams "a very militant supporter of Israel". ...
"The Quartet's final document had been drafted in Washington in advance, and not a line was changed," he said. ...
Middle East peace must include solution for Palestinian refugees, Ban Ki-moon says | 29 April 2008 –
A sustainable peace in the Middle East will have to factor in a viable and just solution to the Palestinian refugee issue, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon told a United Nations meeting convened in Paris to assess the condition of the refugees and examine the role of the world body in alleviating their plight.
“The Palestinian people’s desire or right to live a normal daily life in their own sovereign land remains undiminished, as do the individual and collective rights of Palestine refugees,” Mr. Ban said in a message to the conference, read out by Assistant Secretary-General for Political Affairs Angela Kane.
“This year marks the 60th year of Palestinian dispossession, an anniversary that underlines the importance and urgency of finding a solution to the question of Palestine and of addressing the plight of the Palestine refugees,” he noted. ...
Netanyahu Says Any Abbas-Olmert Agreement Will be Voided - Politicsby Ezra HaLevi | : 04/18/08
(IsraelNN.com) Likud Chairman and former Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu says any agreement reached between PM Ehud Olmert and Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas is null and void.
Widely expected to be the next prime minister, Netanyahu said he would not honor an agreement reached between Fatah chief Abbas and Olmert – who are currently engaged in frantic negotiations on final status issues. The nature of the hurried negotiations with the questionably-sovereign head of a fractured PA is to reach a US-imposed deadline of at least a theoretical deal for a Palestinian state by the end of 2008. ...
Abbas says no progress in talks with Bush | Associated Press | Published: Friday April 25, 2008
AP Interview: Abbas says he's leaving US disappointed after no progress in talks with Bush
By Mohammed Daraghmeh
WASHINGTON - Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said Friday he failed to achieve any progress in Middle East peace talks with President Bush and he was returning home with little to show for his visit.
In an interview with The Associated Press, the Palestinian leader sounded pessimistic about the prospects of achieving any deal with Israel this year despite a big U.S. push that began five months ago at a summit in Annapolis, Md.
"Frankly, so far nothing has been achieved. But we are still conducting direct work to have a solution," Abbas said.
Abbas said the biggest obstacle is Israel's continued expansion of Jewish settlements on Palestinian-occupied territories.
"We demanded the Americans implement the first phase of the road map that talks about the cessation of settlement expansion," Abbas said, expressing disappointment the U.S. hasn't exerted more pressure on Israel to stop. "This is the biggest blight that stands as a big rock in the path of negotiations." ...
