By Matthew Wagner Two soldiers made their way through the winding streets of Gaza City, carefully watching for booby traps. Their objective was to hunt down Hamas terrorists and locate caches of Kassam and Grad rockets and other arms. As they deliberated whether to turn left or right at an intersection, a woman dressed from head to foot in black appeared from out of nowhere. “Go this way,” she said, pointing to the right. For some reason, the two soldiers
By Matthew Wagner Qatar and Mauritania have severed economic and political ties with Israel in protest against the war in Gaza, Al Jazeera has learned. The move announced on Friday followed calls by Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president, and Khaled Meshaal, the exiled leader of Hamas, for all Arab nations to cut ties with Israel. Addressing leaders at an emergency Arab summit in Doha, the Qatari capital, al-Assad declared that the Arab initiative for peace with Israel was now “dead”.
By As the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians has once again flared up following Israel’s ongoing air and ground assault on the Gaza Strip, the IMEU presents a comparison of Israeli and Palestinian military capabilities. 1. The Institute for International Security Studies at Tel Aviv University. http://www.inss.org.il/upload/(FILE?1206270841.pdf 2. Ibid. 3. Ibid. 4. Source for Israel: Ibid.; Source for the Palestinians: The Associated Press. “Israel approves armored vehicles, rifles, bullets for West Bank security forces.” November 20, 2007. http://www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/11/21/africa/ME-GEN-Israel-Palestinians.php 5.
By Glenn Greenwald The New York Times war cheerleader urges that Hamas be “educated” by “inflicting heavy pain on the Gaza population”. Jan. 14, 2009 | (Updated below – Update II – Update III – Update IV) Tom Friedman, one of the nation’s leading propagandists for the Iraq War and a vigorous supporter of all of Israel’s wars, has a column today in The New York Times explaining and praising the Israeli attack on Gaza. For the sake of robust and diverse
By AP LA PAZ, Bolivia – President Evo Morales announced Wednesday he was breaking relations with Israel over its invasion of the Gaza Strip and said he will ask the International Criminal Court to bring genocide charges against top Israeli officials. Morales’ ally Hugo Chavez of Venezuela broke ties with Israel last week. Morales told the country’s diplomatic corps that the Israeli attack “seriously threatened world peace” and he called for Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his Cabinet to face
By Max Kantar Israel’s operative military policy in the Gaza Strip has been fairly consistent with its stated definition of what it considers to be legitimate military targets, which in practice has amounted to mass killings of innocent Palestinian civilians. Based on the overwhelming evidence available, one conclusion can be drawn regarding the nature of the US-backed Israeli attacks on Gaza: a genuine massacre of ordinary, unarmed people has been taking place for over two weeks. Here is just a
Editor’s note: Norman G. Finkelstein is currently writing a political memoir, which will serve as the introduction to a new edition of his book, The Rise and Fall of Palestine, to be published by New Press next year. Below is an excerpt from the memoir on the subject of political apostasy. The title refers to how ex-leftist Christopher Hitchens used to sign off his correspondence. "Fraternally yours, Chris" I’m occasionally asked whether I still consider myself a Marxist. Even if
Ben-Ami’s Scars of War juxtaposed with Finkelstien’s Image and Reality(56 pages; 1.6 MB) * Ben-Ami / Finkelstein(HTML-text rush transcript) Image and Reality recalls that like many other states that displaced the indigenous population one of the founding myths of Israel was that the land was empty prior to foreign settlement. For supporting evidence it quoted among others Israel Zngwill, Moshe Smilansky, David Ben-Gurion, Izhak Ben-Zvi and Abba Eban: Here’s what Ben-Ami writes: Image and Reality argued that the Zionist movement