The Illusion of Victory

If Hamas is destroyed, a more radical group will replace it. Israel's security depends on wiser action

Daniel Barenboim

The Guardian

Thursday 1 January 2009

 

I have just three wishes for the coming year. The first is for the Israeli government to realise once and for all that the Middle East cannot be solved by military means. The second is for Hamas to realise that its interests are not served by violence, and Israel is here to stay. And the third is for the world to acknowledge that this conflict is unlike any other in history. It is uniquely intricate and sensitive - a conflict between two peoples who are both deeply convinced of their right to live on the same very small piece of land. This is why neither diplomacy nor military action can resolve this conflict.

READ the rest here:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jan/01/israel-gaza-bombings-hamas

• Daniel Barenboim is a pianist and conductor, and a UN messenger of peace danielbarenboim.com

 

May We No Longer Be Silent

December 30, 2008

America's Crimes "Never Happened"

May We No Longer Be Silent

By PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

The title of my article comes from the sermon of the Episcopal Bishop of Washington DC, John Bryson Chane, delivered on October 5, 2008, at St. Columba Church.  The bishop’s eyes were opened to Israel’s persecution of Palestinians by his recent trip to Palestine.  In his sermon he called on “politicians seeking the highest office in [our] land” to find the courage to “speak out and condemn violations of human rights and religious freedom denied to Palestinian Christians and Muslims” by the state of Israel.

Bishop Chane’s courage was to no avail.  When America’s new leader of “change” was informed of Israel’s massive air attack on the Gaza Ghetto, an area of 139 square miles where Israel confines 1.4 million Arabs and tightly controls the inflow of all resources--food, medicine, water, energy--America’s president-elect Obama had “no comment.”

READ the rest here: http://www.counterpunch.org/roberts12302008.html

 

Robert Fisk on Gaza

 

Why bombing Ashkelon is the most tragic irony

By Robert Fisk

Tuesday, 30 December 2008

The Independent (UK)

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.

READ the rest here:   http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-why-bombing-ashkelon-is-the-most-tragic-irony-1216228.html