[NOTE: Over time, links to more essays by Noam Chomsky will be added here.]
Posted October 30, 2003
“Bush Needs Fear for Reelection”
Posted December 3, 2002
Why Not Let Iran Institute Democracy in Iraq
Posted October 2, 2002
Chomsky on Iraq
Posted April 12, 2002
US-Israel-Palestine - observations by Noam Chomsky (summary)
Posted April 2, 2002
Znet Interview With Chomsky
In Depth Discussion on Israel/Palestine
(Noam Chomsky, April 2, 2002)
The prominent Israeli scholar Ze'ev Sternhell writes that the government "is no longer ashamed to speak of war when what they are really engaged in is colonial policing, which recalls the takeover by the white police of the poor neighborhoods of the blacks in South Africa during the apartheid era." . . . Peres comes close to Sharon as a war criminal. Furthermore, the prime responsibility lies in Washington, and has for 30 years. . . . There are many factors entering into US policies. Chief among them in this region of the world is control over the world's major energy resources. The US-Israel alliance took shape in that context. . . . The alliance became firm in 1967, when Israel performed an important service for US power by destroying the main forces of secular Arab nationalism, considered a very serious threat to US domination of the Gulf region. . . . Israel is virtually a US military base, closely integrated with the militarized US high-tech economy. . . . Within that persistent framework, the US naturally supports Israeli repression of the Palestinians and integration of the occupied territories . . . Bush planners continue to block steps towards diplomatic settlement, or even reduction of violence . . . The Arab summit led to general acceptance of the Saudi Arabian plan, which reiterated the basic principles of the long-standing international consensus: Israel should withdraw from the occupied territories in the context of a general peace agreement that would guarantee the right of every state in the region, including Israel and a new Palestinian State, to peace and security within recognized borders (the basic wording of UN 242, amplified to include a Palestinian state). . . . These are the basic terms of the Security Council resolution of January 1976 backed by virtually the entire world, including the leading Arab states, the PLO, Europe, the Soviet bloc, the non-aligned countries -- in fact, everyone who mattered. It was opposed by Israel and vetoed by the US . . . Until such elementary facts as these are permitted to enter into discussion, displacing the standard misrepresentation and deceit, discussion is mostly beside the point.
Posted March 26, 2002
Chomsky's Dýyarbakir Speech
(Noam Chomsky, Znet, March 25, 2002)
With regard to the concept of terrorism there are really two notions: one is the notion "terror," another is the notion "counter-terror." If you look in, for example, US Army manuals, they define "terror" and they define "counter-terror." And the interesting thing about the definitions is they are virtually identical. Terrorism turns out to be about the same as counter-terrorism. The main difference is who is the agent of the terrorist violence. If it's someone we don't like, it is terrorism. If it's someone we do like, including ourselves, it is counter-terrorism. But apart from that the definitions of the actions are about the same. . . . Another important difference between terrorism and counter-terrorism is that what is called "counter-terrorism" is usually carried out by states. It's the terrorism carried out by states. And states have resources that enable them to be far more violent and destructive than private terrorists. So the end result is that the terrorism of states far outweighs that of any other entity in the world. We constantly read that terrorism is the weapon of the weak. That is totally false, the exact opposite of truth. Like any other weapon, terrorism is used much more effectively by the strong, and in particular by more powerful states which are the leaders in terrorism throughout the world, except that they call it "counter-terrorism." . . . Oil was the primary reason for the concern over the Middle East. There is now a secondary reason, which is quite important. That's water, which is enormously important, and will be even more so in the future as water resources are being depleted. Here the role of Turkey becomes even more essential, because Turkey, and particularly the southeast region of Turkey, is the major source of water for the region. And control over water also provides what US planners 50 years ago called "veto power," just like control over oil. If you can terminate the flow of water to other countries, that will bring them into line. That's presumably a significant purpose of the dams and other projects: to ensure that control over water will be in hands of US clients, which will ensure control over the region and probably a veto power over recalcitrant elements.
Posted January 8, 2002
The War in Afghanistan: Excerpted from Lakdawala lecture, New Delhi (Noam Chomsky, ZNET, December 30, 2001)
“A detailed year-end review found that the U.S. war ‘has returned to power nearly all the same warlords who had misruled the country in the days before the Taliban’; some Afghans see the resulting situation as even ‘worse than it was before the Taliban came to power.’ . . . The return of warlordism is a dangerous sign, as was the announcement by the new Justice Minister that the basic structure of sharia law as instituted by the Taliban would remain in force, though ‘there will be some changes from the time of the Taliban. For example, the Taliban used to hang the victim's body in public for four days. We will only hang the body for a short time, say 15 minutes.’ Judge Ahamat Ullha Zarif added that some new location would be found for the regular public executions, not the Sports Stadium. ‘Adulterers, both male and female, would still be stoned to death, Zarif said, `but we will use only small stones',’ so that those who confess might be able to run away; others will be ‘stoned to death,’ as before. . . . As the year ended, desperate peasants, mostly women, were returning to the miserable labor of growing opium poppies so that their families can survive, reversing the Taliban ban. The UN had reported in October that poppy production had already ‘increased threefold in areas controlled by the Northern Alliance,’ whose warlords ‘have long been reputed to control much of the processing and smuggling of opium’ to Russia and the West, an estimated 75% of the world's heroin. . . . U.S. and British intellectual opinion, across the political spectrum, assured us that only radical extremists can doubt that ‘this is basically a just war.’ Those who disagree can therefore be dismissed, among them, for example, the 1000 Afghan leaders who met in Peshawar in late October in a U.S.-backed effort to lay the groundwork for a post-Taliban regime led by the exiled King. They bitterly condemned the U.S. war, which is ‘beating the donkey rather than the rider,’ one speaker said to unanimous agreement. . . . The U.S., [Afghan opposition leader] Abdul Haq said, ‘is trying to show its muscle, score a victory and scare everyone in the world. They don't care about the suffering of the Afghans or how many people we will lose. And we don't like that. Because Afghans are now being made to suffer for these Arab fanatics, but we all know who brought these Arabs to Afghanistan in the 1980s, armed them and gave them a base. It was the Americans and the CIA. And the Americans who did this all got medals and good careers, while all these years Afghans suffered from these Arabs and their allies. Now, when America is attacked, instead of punishing the Americans who did this, it punishes the Afghans.’”
Posted December 25, 2001
Terrorism, weapon of the powerful, United States, Global Bully (Noam Chomsky, Le Monde Diplomatique, December 2001)
Let us start with Afghanistan, where seven or eight million people are on the verge of starvation, and surviving on international aid since way before 11 September. On 16 September the US demanded that Pakistan stop the truck convoys providing much of the food and supplies to Afghanistan's civilian population. As far as I can determine, there was no reaction to this in the US or Europe. . . . By October Western civilisation was resigned to the idea of the death of hundreds of thousands of Afghans. . . . To understand the origins of 11 September, we have to distinguish between the agents of the crime and the reservoir of sympathy, sometimes support, from which they draw, a reservoir that exists even among people who oppose both the criminals and their actions. Let us assume the crimes' perpetrators come from Bin Laden's network. Nobody knows about their origins better than the CIA, because it helped organise and nurture them. . . . These people are angry at the US because it supports authoritarian and brutal regimes (and is in its 35th year of supporting Israel's harsh military occupation), and because its policies devastate the civilian society of Iraq while strengthening Saddam Hussein. The New York Times asked "Why do they hate us?"; on the same day, the Wall Street Journal published a survey of bankers, professionals and international lawyers, who said they hate us because we are blocking democracy, preventing economic development, and supporting terrorist regimes. . . . To combat terrorism we must start by reducing the level of terror, rather than by escalating it. When the IRA detonates bombs in London, London does not destroy Boston, although it is the source of most of the IRA finance, nor does it wipe out West Belfast. The UK hunts the perpetrators, brings them to trial and looks for the reasons for the violence. . . . There is one easy way to reduce the level of terror: stop participating in it.”
Posted November 27, 2001
What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream (Noam Chomsky)
“There is another sector of the media, the elite media, sometimes called the agenda-setting media because they are the ones with the big resources, they set the framework in which everyone else operates. . . . The real mass media are basically trying to divert people. Let them do something else, but don’t bother us (us being the people who run the show). Let them get interested in professional sports, for example. Let everybody be crazed about professional sports or sex scandals or the personalities and their problems or something like that. Anything, as long as it isn’t serious. Of course, the serious stuff is for the big guys. ‘We’ take care of that. . . . If you go through a place like Harvard, most of what goes on there is teaching manners; how to behave like a member of the upper classes, how to think the right thoughts, and so on.”
Miscellaneous quotes from Noam Chomsky
A selection of short quotes, most with references.
Terrorism Works (Noam Chomsky, Al-Ahram Weekly and Media Monitors Network)
“By far the most important question that we must ask ourselves after 11 September is what is happening right now? Implicit in this question is the question of what we can do about it. . . . It looks like what is happening is some sort of silent genocide. It also gives a good deal of insight into the elite culture, the culture that we are part of. It indicates that whatever will happen, we do not know, but plans are being made and programmes implemented on the assumption that they may lead to the death of several million people in the next couple of weeks. Very casually, with no comment, no particular thought about it. That is just kind of normal, here and in a good part of Europe. Not in the rest of the world, though. In fact, not even in much of Europe. . . . What is the ‘war against terrorism’? The war against terrorism has been described in high places as a struggle against a plague, a cancer which is spread by barbarians, by ‘depraved opponents of civilisation itself.’ . . . I am quoting President Reagan and his secretary of state. . . . The Reagan administration responded to this ‘plague spread by depraved opponents of civilisation itself’ by creating an extraordinary international terrorist network, totally unprecedented in scale, which carried out massive atrocities all over the world. . . . It [the U.S.] now stands as the only state on record which has been condemned both by the World Court for international terrorism and has vetoed a Security Council resolution calling on states to observe international law. . . . The following year Nicaragua took its case again to the General Assembly. This time the US could only rally Israel to the cause, so two votes opposed observing international law. At that point, Nicaragua had exhausted all available legal measures, concluding that they do not work in a world that is ruled by force. . . . Terrorism, on the other hand does work, and is the weapon of the strong. It is a very serious analytic error to say, as is commonly done, that terrorism is the weapon of the weak. Like other means of violence, it is primarily a weapon of the strong -- overwhelmingly, in fact. It is held to be a weapon of the weak because the strong also control the doctrinal systems and their terror does not count as terror.”
Posted November 20, 2001
Deluded and manipulated by the system.
We're not analyzing the media on Mars or in the eighteenth century or something like that. We're dealing with real human beings now who are suffering and dying and being tortured and starving because of policies that we are involved in, we as citizens of democratic societies are directly involved in and are responsible for, and what the media are doing is ensuring that we do not act on our responsibilities, and that the interests of power are served, not the needs of the suffering people, and not even the needs of the American people who would be horrified if they realized the blood that's dripping from their hands because of the way they are allowing themselves to be deluded and manipulated by the system.
—Noam Chomsky
Posted October 30, 2001
An Evening With Noam Chomsky, “The New War Against Terror” (October 18, 2001 - Transcribed from audio recorded at The Technology & Culture Forum at MIT)
”After the first week of bombing, the New York Times reported on a back page inside a column on something else, that by the arithmetic of the United Nations there will soon be 7.5 million Afghans in acute need of even a loaf of bread and there are only a few weeks left before the harsh winter will make deliveries to many areas totally impossible. . . .Which tells us that Western civilization is anticipating the slaughter of, well do the arithmetic, 3-4 million people or something like that. . . .And if you look at the coalition that is being formed against terror it tells you a lot more. A leading member of the coalition is Russia which is delighted to have the United States support its murderous terrorist war in Chechnya instead of occasionally criticizing it in the background. China is joining enthusiastically. It’s delighted to have support for the atrocities it’s carrying out in western China against, what it called, Muslim secessionists. . . .Now we can run through the list, the list of the states that have joined the coalition against terror is quite impressive. They have a characteristic in common. They are certainly among the leading terrorist states in the world. And they happen to be led by the world champion. . . .We certainly want to reduce the level of terror, certainly not escalate it. There is one easy way to do that and therefore it is never discussed. Namely stop participating in it. That would automatically reduce the level of terror enormously. But that you can’t discuss.”
Posted October 16, 2001
Reaction to the War
”It is impossible to estimate how many miserable and innocent Afghans have already died as an immediate consequence of the threat of bombing and the closing of the Pakistan border that the US demanded at once (if we can believe the NY Times), and the failure to provide food, as could have been done from the first day, not only by air drops -- nothing has hindered that -- but also by truck convoy, as the international relief efforts demonstrated when they began.”
Posted October 9, 2001
Composite of interviews with Chomsky
“Such terrorist atrocities are a gift to the harshest and most repressive elements on all sides, and are sure to be exploited -- already have been in fact -- to accelerate the agenda of militarization, regimentation, reversal of social democratic programs, transfer of wealth to narrow sectors, and undermining democracy in any meaningful form. But that will not happen without resistance, and I doubt that it will succeed, except in the short term.” [FULL TEXT]
Chatting With Chomsky (from MSNBC)
“We should look very carefully at this anti-terrorism coalition and who is joining it and why. Russia is happily joining the international coalition because it is delighted to have U.S. support for the horrendous atrocities it is carrying out in its war against Chechnya. It describes that as an anti-terrorist war. In fact it is a murderous terrorist war itself. They'd love to have the United States support it. China is very happy to join because it wants U.S. support for its wars in western China against Muslim groups who, in fact, were part of the coalition in Afghanistan 20 years ago and are now fighting for their rights in China, and China wants to suppress them brutally and would love to have the United States supporting that. . . . And if you look around the world, those who are happily joining the coalition are doing it for reasons that should send shivers up their spine.” [FULL TEXT]
The following essays were posted on or before October 3, 2001.
Interview with Chomsky on ZNet
“The UN estimates that some 7-8 million [in Afghanistan] are at risk of imminent starvation. The NY Times reports in a small item (Sept. 25) that nearly six million Afghans depend on food aid from the UN, as well as 3.5 million in refugee camps outside, many of whom fled just before the borders were sealed. The item reported that some food is being sent, to the camps across the border. If people in Washington and the editorial offices have even a single gray cell functioning, they realize that they must present themselves as humanitarians seeking to avert the awesome tragedy that followed at once from the threat of bombing and military attack and the sealing of the borders they demanded.”
“The Reagan administration came into office 20 years ago declaring that its leading concern would be to eradicate the plague of international terrorism, a cancer that is destroying civilization. They cured the plague by establishing an international terrorist network of extraordinary scale, with consequences that are -- or should be -- well-known in Central America, the Middle East, Africa, Southeast Asia, and elsewhere -- while using the pretexts, as you say, to carry out programs that were of considerable harm to the domestic population, and that even threaten human survival.” [FULL TEXT]
Why Did This Happen?
The U.S. has already demanded that Pakistan terminate the food and other supplies that are keeping at least some of the starving and suffering people of Afghanistan alive. If that demand is implemented, unknown numbers of people who have not the remotest connection to terrorism will die, possibly millions. Let me repeat: the U.S. has demanded that Pakistan kill possibly millions of people who are themselves victims of the Taliban. This has nothing to do even with revenge. It is at a far lower moral level even than that. The significance is heightened by the fact that this is mentioned in passing, with no comment, and probably will hardly be noticed. We can learn a great deal about the moral level of the reigning intellectual culture of the West by observing the reaction to this demand. I think we can be reasonably confident that if the American population had the slightest idea of what is being done in their name, they would be utterly appalled. [FULL TEXT]
On the Bombings
The events reveal, dramatically, the foolishness of the project of "missile defense." As has been obvious all along, and pointed out repeatedly by strategic analysts, if anyone wants to cause immense damage in the US, including weapons of mass destruction, they are highly unlikely to launch a missile attack, thus guaranteeing their immediate destruction. There are innumerable easier ways that are basically unstoppable. [FULL TEXT]
Neocolonial Invitation to a Tribal War
Los Angeles Times, August 13, 2001
"What we feared has come true," Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling writes in Israel's leading newspaper. Jews and Palestinians are "regressing to superstitious tribalism.... War appears an unavoidable fate," an "evil colonial" war. This prospect is likely if the U.S. grants tacit authorization, with grim consequences that may reverberate far beyond. [FULL TEXT]
Prospects for Peace in the Middle East
The University of Toledo, March 4, 2001
The prevailing doctrine is that we should focus laser-like on the crimes of others and lament them, and we should ignore or deny our own. Or more accurately, we should structure the way we view things so as to dismiss the possibility of looking into the mirror-shape discourse so the question of our own responsibilities can't even arise, or more accurately, can arise only in one connection-namely the connection of how we should react to the crimes of others. [FULL TEXT]
Noam Chomsky on Intellectuals Speaking Out
It also seems beyond controversy that moral responsibilities are greater to the extent that people “have the resources, the training, the facilities and opportunities to speak and act effectively.”
Return to Opinions
Sunday, November 13, 2011
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
Reflections of a GOP Operative
Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult
Saturday 3 September 2011
by: Mike Lofgren, Truthout
Barbara Stanwyck: "We're both rotten!"
Fred MacMurray: "Yeah - only you're a little more rotten." -"Double Indemnity" (1944)
Those lines of dialogue from a classic film noir sum up the state of the two political parties in contemporary America. Both parties are rotten - how could they not be, given the complete infestation of the political system by corporate money on a scale that now requires a presidential candidate to raise upwards of a billion dollars to be competitive in the general election? Both parties are captives to corporate loot. The main reason the Democrats' health care bill will be a budget buster once it fully phases in is the Democrats' rank capitulation to corporate interests - no single-payer system, in order to mollify the insurers; and no negotiation of drug prices, a craven surrender to Big Pharma.
But both parties are not rotten in quite the same way. The Democrats have their share of machine politicians, careerists, corporate bagmen, egomaniacs and kooks. Nothing, however, quite matches the modern GOP.
To those millions of Americans who have finally begun paying attention to politics and watched with exasperation the tragicomedy of the debt ceiling extension, it may have come as a shock that the Republican Party is so full of lunatics. To be sure, the party, like any political party on earth, has always had its share of crackpots, like Robert K. Dornan or William E. Dannemeyer. But the crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital center today: Steve King, Michele Bachman (now a leading presidential candidate as well), Paul Broun, Patrick McHenry, Virginia Foxx, Louie Gohmert, Allen West. The Congressional directory now reads like a casebook of lunacy.
It was this cast of characters and the pernicious ideas they represent that impelled me to end a nearly 30-year career as a professional staff member on Capitol Hill. A couple of months ago, I retired; but I could see as early as last November that the Republican Party would use the debt limit vote, an otherwise routine legislative procedure that has been used 87 times since the end of World War II, in order to concoct an entirely artificial fiscal crisis. Then, they would use that fiscal crisis to get what they wanted, by literally holding the US and global economies as hostages.
The debt ceiling extension is not the only example of this sort of political terrorism. Republicans were willing to lay off 4,000 Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) employees, 70,000 private construction workers and let FAA safety inspectors work without pay, in fact, forcing them to pay for their own work-related travel - how prudent is that? - in order to strong arm some union-busting provisions into the FAA reauthorization.
Everyone knows that in a hostage situation, the reckless and amoral actor has the negotiating upper hand over the cautious and responsible actor because the latter is actually concerned about the life of the hostage, while the former does not care. This fact, which ought to be obvious, has nevertheless caused confusion among the professional pundit class, which is mostly still stuck in the Bob Dole era in terms of its orientation. For instance, Ezra Klein wrote of his puzzlement over the fact that while House Republicans essentially won the debt ceiling fight, enough of them were sufficiently dissatisfied that they might still scuttle the deal. Of course they might - the attitude of many freshman Republicans to national default was "bring it on!"
It should have been evident to clear-eyed observers that the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe. This trend has several implications, none of them pleasant.
In his "Manual of Parliamentary Practice," Thomas Jefferson wrote that it is less important that every rule and custom of a legislature be absolutely justifiable in a theoretical sense, than that they should be generally acknowledged and honored by all parties. These include unwritten rules, customs and courtesies that lubricate the legislative machinery and keep governance a relatively civilized procedure. The US Senate has more complex procedural rules than any other legislative body in the world; many of these rules are contradictory, and on any given day, the Senate parliamentarian may issue a ruling that contradicts earlier rulings on analogous cases.
The only thing that can keep the Senate functioning is collegiality and good faith. During periods of political consensus, for instance, the World War II and early post-war eras, the Senate was a "high functioning" institution: filibusters were rare and the body was legislatively productive. Now, one can no more picture the current Senate producing the original Medicare Act than the old Supreme Soviet having legislated the Bill of Rights.
Far from being a rarity, virtually every bill, every nominee for Senate confirmation and every routine procedural motion is now subject to a Republican filibuster. Under the circumstances, it is no wonder that Washington is gridlocked: legislating has now become war minus the shooting, something one could have observed 80 years ago in the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic. As Hannah Arendt observed, a disciplined minority of totalitarians can use the instruments of democratic government to undermine democracy itself.
John P. Judis sums up the modern GOP this way:
"Over the last four decades, the Republican Party has transformed from a loyal opposition into an insurrectionary party that flouts the law when it is in the majority and threatens disorder when it is the minority. It is the party of Watergate and Iran-Contra, but also of the government shutdown in 1995 and the impeachment trial of 1999. If there is an earlier American precedent for today's Republican Party, it is the antebellum Southern Democrats of John Calhoun who threatened to nullify, or disregard, federal legislation they objected to and who later led the fight to secede from the union over slavery."
A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress's generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.
A deeply cynical tactic, to be sure, but a psychologically insightful one that plays on the weaknesses both of the voting public and the news media. There are tens of millions of low-information voters who hardly know which party controls which branch of government, let alone which party is pursuing a particular legislative tactic. These voters' confusion over who did what allows them to form the conclusion that "they are all crooks," and that "government is no good," further leading them to think, "a plague on both your houses" and "the parties are like two kids in a school yard." This ill-informed public cynicism, in its turn, further intensifies the long-term decline in public trust in government that has been taking place since the early 1960s - a distrust that has been stoked by Republican rhetoric at every turn ("Government is the problem," declared Ronald Reagan in 1980).
The media are also complicit in this phenomenon. Ever since the bifurcation of electronic media into a more or less respectable "hard news" segment and a rabidly ideological talk radio and cable TV political propaganda arm, the "respectable" media have been terrified of any criticism for perceived bias. Hence, they hew to the practice of false evenhandedness. Paul Krugman has skewered this tactic as being the "centrist cop-out." "I joked long ago," he says, "that if one party declared that the earth was flat, the headlines would read 'Views Differ on Shape of Planet.'"
Inside-the-Beltway wise guy Chris Cillizza merely proves Krugman right in his Washington Post analysis of "winners and losers" in the debt ceiling impasse. He wrote that the institution of Congress was a big loser in the fracas, which is, of course, correct, but then he opined: "Lawmakers - bless their hearts - seem entirely unaware of just how bad they looked during this fight and will almost certainly spend the next few weeks (or months) congratulating themselves on their tremendous magnanimity." Note how the pundit's ironic deprecation falls like the rain on the just and unjust alike, on those who precipitated the needless crisis and those who despaired of it. He seems oblivious that one side - or a sizable faction of one side - has deliberately attempted to damage the reputation of Congress to achieve its political objectives.
This constant drizzle of "there the two parties go again!" stories out of the news bureaus, combined with the hazy confusion of low-information voters, means that the long-term Republican strategy of undermining confidence in our democratic institutions has reaped electoral dividends. The United States has nearly the lowest voter participation among Western democracies; this, again, is a consequence of the decline of trust in government institutions - if government is a racket and both parties are the same, why vote? And if the uninvolved middle declines to vote, it increases the electoral clout of a minority that is constantly being whipped into a lather by three hours daily of Rush Limbaugh or Fox News. There were only 44 million Republican voters in the 2010 mid-term elections, but they effectively canceled the political results of the election of President Obama by 69 million voters.
This tactic of inducing public distrust of government is not only cynical, it is schizophrenic. For people who profess to revere the Constitution, it is strange that they so caustically denigrate the very federal government that is the material expression of the principles embodied in that document. This is not to say that there is not some theoretical limit to the size or intrusiveness of government; I would be the first to say there are such limits, both fiscal and Constitutional. But most Republican officeholders seem strangely uninterested in the effective repeal of Fourth Amendment protections by the Patriot Act, the weakening of habeas corpus and self-incrimination protections in the public hysteria following 9/11 or the unpalatable fact that the United States has the largest incarcerated population of any country on earth. If anything, they would probably opt for more incarcerated persons, as imprisonment is a profit center for the prison privatization industry, which is itself a growth center for political contributions to these same politicians.[1] Instead, they prefer to rail against those government programs that actually help people. And when a program is too popular to attack directly, like Medicare or Social Security, they prefer to undermine it by feigning an agonized concern about the deficit. That concern, as we shall see, is largely fictitious.
Undermining Americans' belief in their own institutions of self-government remains a prime GOP electoral strategy. But if this technique falls short of producing Karl Rove's dream of 30 years of unchallengeable one-party rule (as all such techniques always fall short of achieving the angry and embittered true believer's New Jerusalem), there are other even less savory techniques upon which to fall back. Ever since Republicans captured the majority in a number of state legislatures last November, they have systematically attempted to make it more difficult to vote: by onerous voter ID requirements (in Wisconsin, Republicans have legislated photo IDs while simultaneously shutting Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) offices in Democratic constituencies while at the same time lengthening the hours of operation of DMV offices in GOP constituencies); by narrowing registration periods; and by residency requirements that may disenfranchise university students.
This legislative assault is moving in a diametrically opposed direction to 200 years of American history, when the arrow of progress pointed toward more political participation by more citizens. Republicans are among the most shrill in self-righteously lecturing other countries about the wonders of democracy; exporting democracy (albeit at the barrel of a gun) to the Middle East was a signature policy of the Bush administration. But domestically, they don't want those people voting.
You can probably guess who those people are. Above all, anyone not likely to vote Republican. As Sarah Palin would imply, the people who are not Real Americans. Racial minorities. Immigrants. Muslims. Gays. Intellectuals. Basically, anyone who doesn't look, think, or talk like the GOP base. This must account, at least to some degree, for their extraordinarily vitriolic hatred of President Obama. I have joked in the past that the main administration policy that Republicans object to is Obama's policy of being black.[2] Among the GOP base, there is constant harping about somebody else, some "other," who is deliberately, assiduously and with malice aforethought subverting the Good, the True and the Beautiful: Subversives. Commies. Socialists. Ragheads. Secular humanists. Blacks. Fags. Feminazis. The list may change with the political needs of the moment, but they always seem to need a scapegoat to hate and fear.
It is not clear to me how many GOP officeholders believe this reactionary and paranoid claptrap. I would bet that most do not. But they cynically feed the worst instincts of their fearful and angry low-information political base with a nod and a wink. During the disgraceful circus of the "birther" issue, Republican politicians subtly stoked the fires of paranoia by being suggestively equivocal - "I take the president at his word" - while never unambiguously slapping down the myth. John Huntsman was the first major GOP figure forthrightly to refute the birther calumny - albeit after release of the birth certificate.
I do not mean to place too much emphasis on racial animus in the GOP. While it surely exists, it is also a fact that Republicans think that no Democratic president could conceivably be legitimate. Republicans also regarded Bill Clinton as somehow, in some manner, twice fraudulently elected (well do I remember the elaborate conspiracy theories that Republicans traded among themselves). Had it been Hillary Clinton, rather than Barack Obama, who had been elected in 2008, I am certain we would now be hearing, in lieu of the birther myths, conspiracy theories about Vince Foster's alleged murder.
The reader may think that I am attributing Svengali-like powers to GOP operatives able to manipulate a zombie base to do their bidding. It is more complicated than that. Historical circumstances produced the raw material: the deindustrialization and financialization of America since about 1970 has spawned an increasingly downscale white middle class - without job security (or even without jobs), with pensions and health benefits evaporating and with their principal asset deflating in the collapse of the housing bubble. Their fears are not imaginary; their standard of living is shrinking.
What do the Democrats offer these people? Essentially nothing. Democratic Leadership Council-style "centrist" Democrats were among the biggest promoters of disastrous trade deals in the 1990s that outsourced jobs abroad: NAFTA, World Trade Organization, permanent most-favored-nation status for China. At the same time, the identity politics/lifestyle wing of the Democratic Party was seen as a too illegal immigrant-friendly by downscaled and outsourced whites.[3]
While Democrats temporized, or even dismissed the fears of the white working class as racist or nativist, Republicans went to work. To be sure, the business wing of the Republican Party consists of the most energetic outsourcers, wage cutters and hirers of sub-minimum wage immigrant labor to be found anywhere on the globe. But the faux-populist wing of the party, knowing the mental compartmentalization that occurs in most low-information voters, played on the fears of that same white working class to focus their anger on scapegoats that do no damage to corporations' bottom lines: instead of raising the minimum wage, let's build a wall on the Southern border (then hire a defense contractor to incompetently manage it). Instead of predatory bankers, it's evil Muslims. Or evil gays. Or evil abortionists.
How do they manage to do this? Because Democrats ceded the field. Above all, they do not understand language. Their initiatives are posed in impenetrable policy-speak: the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The what? - can anyone even remember it? No wonder the pejorative "Obamacare" won out. Contrast that with the Republicans' Patriot Act. You're a patriot, aren't you? Does anyone at the GED level have a clue what a Stimulus Bill is supposed to be? Why didn't the White House call it the Jobs Bill and keep pounding on that theme?
You know that Social Security and Medicare are in jeopardy when even Democrats refer to them as entitlements. "Entitlement" has a negative sound in colloquial English: somebody who is "entitled" selfishly claims something he doesn't really deserve. Why not call them "earned benefits," which is what they are because we all contribute payroll taxes to fund them? That would never occur to the Democrats. Republicans don't make that mistake; they are relentlessly on message: it is never the "estate tax," it is the "death tax." Heaven forbid that the Walton family should give up one penny of its $86-billion fortune. All of that lucre is necessary to ensure that unions be kept out of Wal-Mart, that women employees not be promoted and that politicians be kept on a short leash.
It was not always thus. It would have been hard to find an uneducated farmer during the depression of the 1890s who did not have a very accurate idea about exactly which economic interests were shafting him. An unemployed worker in a breadline in 1932 would have felt little gratitude to the Rockefellers or the Mellons. But that is not the case in the present economic crisis. After a riot of unbridled greed such as the world has not seen since the conquistadors' looting expeditions and after an unprecedented broad and rapid transfer of wealth upward by Wall Street and its corporate satellites, where is the popular anger directed, at least as depicted in the media? At "Washington spending" - which has increased primarily to provide unemployment compensation, food stamps and Medicaid to those economically damaged by the previous decade's corporate saturnalia. Or the popular rage is harmlessly diverted against pseudo-issues: death panels, birtherism, gay marriage, abortion, and so on, none of which stands to dent the corporate bottom line in the slightest.
Thus far, I have concentrated on Republican tactics, rather than Republican beliefs, but the tactics themselves are important indicators of an absolutist, authoritarian mindset that is increasingly hostile to the democratic values of reason, compromise and conciliation. Rather, this mindset seeks polarizing division (Karl Rove has been very explicit that this is his principal campaign strategy), conflict and the crushing of opposition.
As for what they really believe, the Republican Party of 2011 believes in three principal tenets I have laid out below. The rest of their platform one may safely dismiss as window dressing:
1. The GOP cares solely and exclusively about its rich contributors. The party has built a whole catechism on the protection and further enrichment of America's plutocracy. Their caterwauling about deficit and debt is so much eyewash to con the public. Whatever else President Obama has accomplished (and many of his purported accomplishments are highly suspect), his $4-trillion deficit reduction package did perform the useful service of smoking out Republican hypocrisy. The GOP refused, because it could not abide so much as a one-tenth of one percent increase on the tax rates of the Walton family or the Koch brothers, much less a repeal of the carried interest rule that permits billionaire hedge fund managers to pay income tax at a lower effective rate than cops or nurses. Republicans finally settled on a deal that had far less deficit reduction - and even less spending reduction! - than Obama's offer, because of their iron resolution to protect at all costs our society's overclass.
Republicans have attempted to camouflage their amorous solicitude for billionaires with a fog of misleading rhetoric. John Boehner is fond of saying, "we won't raise anyone's taxes," as if the take-home pay of an Olive Garden waitress were inextricably bound up with whether Warren Buffett pays his capital gains as ordinary income or at a lower rate. Another chestnut is that millionaires and billionaires are "job creators." US corporations have just had their most profitable quarters in history; Apple, for one, is sitting on $76 billion in cash, more than the GDP of most countries. So, where are the jobs?
Another smokescreen is the "small business" meme, since standing up for Mom's and Pop's corner store is politically more attractive than to be seen shilling for a megacorporation. Raising taxes on the wealthy will kill small business' ability to hire; that is the GOP dirge every time Bernie Sanders or some Democrat offers an amendment to increase taxes on incomes above $1 million. But the number of small businesses that have a net annual income over a million dollars is de minimis, if not by definition impossible (as they would no longer be small businesses). And as data from the Center for Economic and Policy Research have shown, small businesses account for only 7.2 percent of total US employment, a significantly smaller share of total employment than in most Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries.
Likewise, Republicans have assiduously spread the myth that Americans are conspicuously overtaxed. But compared to other OECD countries, the effective rates of US taxation are among the lowest. In particular, they point to the top corporate income rate of 35 percent as being confiscatory Bolshevism. But again, the effective rate is much lower. Did GE pay 35 percent on 2010 profits of $14 billion? No, it paid zero.
When pressed, Republicans make up misleading statistics to "prove" that the America's fiscal burden is being borne by the rich and the rest of us are just freeloaders who don't appreciate that fact. "Half of Americans don't pay taxes" is a perennial meme. But what they leave out is that that statement refers to federal income taxes. There are millions of people who don't pay income taxes, but do contribute payroll taxes - among the most regressive forms of taxation. But according to GOP fiscal theology, payroll taxes don't count. Somehow, they have convinced themselves that since payroll taxes go into trust funds, they're not real taxes. Likewise, state and local sales taxes apparently don't count, although their effect on a poor person buying necessities like foodstuffs is far more regressive than on a millionaire.
All of these half truths and outright lies have seeped into popular culture via the corporate-owned business press. Just listen to CNBC for a few hours and you will hear most of them in one form or another. More important politically, Republicans' myths about taxation have been internalized by millions of economically downscale "values voters," who may have been attracted to the GOP for other reasons (which I will explain later), but who now accept this misinformation as dogma.
And when misinformation isn't enough to sustain popular support for the GOP's agenda, concealment is needed. One fairly innocuous provision in the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill requires public companies to make a more transparent disclosure of CEO compensation, including bonuses. Note that it would not limit the compensation, only require full disclosure. Republicans are hell-bent on repealing this provision. Of course; it would not serve Wall Street interests if the public took an unhealthy interest in the disparity of their own incomes as against that of a bank CEO. As Spencer Bachus, the Republican chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, says, "In Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated and my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks."
2. They worship at the altar of Mars. While the me-too Democrats have set a horrible example of keeping up with the Joneses with respect to waging wars, they can never match GOP stalwarts such as John McCain or Lindsey Graham in their sheer, libidinous enthusiasm for invading other countries. McCain wanted to mix it up with Russia - a nuclear-armed state - during the latter's conflict with Georgia in 2008 (remember? - "we are all Georgians now," a slogan that did not, fortunately, catch on), while Graham has been persistently agitating for attacks on Iran and intervention in Syria. And these are not fringe elements of the party; they are the leading "defense experts," who always get tapped for the Sunday talk shows. About a month before Republicans began holding a gun to the head of the credit markets to get trillions of dollars of cuts, these same Republicans passed a defense appropriations bill that increased spending by $17 billion over the prior year's defense appropriation. To borrow Chris Hedges' formulation, war is the force that gives meaning to their lives.
A cynic might conclude that this militaristic enthusiasm is no more complicated than the fact that Pentagon contractors spread a lot of bribery money around Capitol Hill. That is true, but there is more to it than that. It is not necessarily even the fact that members of Congress feel they are protecting constituents' jobs. The wildly uneven concentration of defense contracts and military bases nationally means that some areas, like Washington, DC, and San Diego, are heavily dependent on Department of Defense (DOD) spending. But there are many more areas of the country whose net balance is negative: the citizenry pays more in taxes to support the Pentagon than it receives back in local contracts.
And the economic justification for Pentagon spending is even more fallacious when one considers that the $700 billion annual DOD budget creates comparatively few jobs. The days of Rosie the Riveter are long gone; most weapons projects now require very little touch labor. Instead, a disproportionate share is siphoned off into high-cost research and development (from which the civilian economy benefits little); exorbitant management expenditures, overhead and out-and-out padding; and, of course, the money that flows back into the coffers of political campaigns. A million dollars appropriated for highway construction would create two to three times as many jobs as a million dollars appropriated for Pentagon weapons procurement, so the jobs argument is ultimately specious.
Take away the cash nexus and there still remains a psychological predisposition toward war and militarism on the part of the GOP. This undoubtedly arises from a neurotic need to demonstrate toughness and dovetails perfectly with the belligerent tough-guy pose one constantly hears on right-wing talk radio. Militarism springs from the same psychological deficit that requires an endless series of enemies, both foreign and domestic.
The results of the last decade of unbridled militarism and the Democrats' cowardly refusal to reverse it[4], have been disastrous both strategically and fiscally. It has made the United States less prosperous, less secure and less free. Unfortunately, the militarism and the promiscuous intervention it gives rise to are only likely to abate when the Treasury is exhausted, just as it happened to the Dutch Republic and the British Empire.
3. Give me that old time religion. Pandering to fundamentalism is a full-time vocation in the GOP. Beginning in the 1970s, religious cranks ceased simply to be a minor public nuisance in this country and grew into the major element of the Republican rank and file. Pat Robertson's strong showing in the 1988 Iowa Caucus signaled the gradual merger of politics and religion in the party. The results are all around us: if the American people poll more like Iranians or Nigerians than Europeans or Canadians on questions of evolution versus creationism, scriptural inerrancy, the existence of angels and demons, and so forth, that result is due to the rise of the religious right, its insertion into the public sphere by the Republican Party and the consequent normalizing of formerly reactionary or quaint beliefs. Also around us is a prevailing anti-intellectualism and hostility to science; it is this group that defines "low-information voter" - or, perhaps, "misinformation voter."
The Constitution to the contrary notwithstanding, there is now a de facto religious test for the presidency: major candidates are encouraged (or coerced) to "share their feelings" about their "faith" in a revelatory speech; or, some televangelist like Rick Warren dragoons the candidates (as he did with Obama and McCain in 2008) to debate the finer points of Christology, with Warren himself, of course, as the arbiter. Politicized religion is also the sheet anchor of the culture wars. But how did the whole toxic stew of GOP beliefs - economic royalism, militarism and culture wars cum fundamentalism - come completely to displace an erstwhile civilized Eisenhower Republicanism?
It is my view that the rise of politicized religious fundamentalism (which is a subset of the decline of rational problem solving in America) may have been the key ingredient of the takeover of the Republican Party. For politicized religion provides a substrate of beliefs that rationalizes - at least in the minds of followers - all three of the GOP's main tenets.
Televangelists have long espoused the health-and-wealth/name-it-and-claim it gospel. If you are wealthy, it is a sign of God's favor. If not, too bad! But don't forget to tithe in any case. This rationale may explain why some economically downscale whites defend the prerogatives of billionaires.
The GOP's fascination with war is also connected with the fundamentalist mindset. The Old Testament abounds in tales of slaughter - God ordering the killing of the Midianite male infants and enslavement of the balance of the population, the divinely-inspired genocide of the Canaanites, the slaying of various miscreants with the jawbone of an ass - and since American religious fundamentalist seem to prefer the Old Testament to the New (particularly that portion of the New Testament known as the Sermon on the Mount), it is but a short step to approving war as a divinely inspired mission. This sort of thinking has led, inexorably, to such phenomena as Jerry Falwell once writing that God is Pro-War.
It is the apocalyptic frame of reference of fundamentalists, their belief in an imminent Armageddon, that psychologically conditions them to steer this country into conflict, not only on foreign fields (some evangelicals thought Saddam was the Antichrist and therefore a suitable target for cruise missiles), but also in the realm of domestic political controversy. It is hardly surprising that the most adamant proponent of the view that there was no debt ceiling problem was Michele Bachmann, the darling of the fundamentalist right. What does it matter, anyway, if the country defaults? - we shall presently abide in the bosom of the Lord.
Some liberal writers have opined that the different socio-economic perspectives separating the "business" wing of the GOP and the religious right make it an unstable coalition that could crack. I am not so sure. There is no fundamental disagreement on which direction the two factions want to take the country, merely how far in that direction they want to take it. The plutocrats would drag us back to the Gilded Age, the theocrats to the Salem witch trials. In any case, those consummate plutocrats, the Koch brothers, are pumping large sums of money into Michele Bachman's presidential campaign, so one ought not make too much of a potential plutocrat-theocrat split.
Thus, the modern GOP; it hardly seems conceivable that a Republican could have written the following:
"Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid." (That was President Eisenhower, writing to his brother Edgar in 1954.)
It is this broad and ever-widening gulf between the traditional Republicanism of an Eisenhower and the quasi-totalitarian cult of a Michele Bachmann that impelled my departure from Capitol Hill. It is not in my pragmatic nature to make a heroic gesture of self-immolation, or to make lurid revelations of personal martyrdom in the manner of David Brock. And I will leave a more detailed dissection of failed Republican economic policies to my fellow apostate Bruce Bartlett.
I left because I was appalled at the headlong rush of Republicans, like Gadarene swine, to embrace policies that are deeply damaging to this country's future; and contemptuous of the feckless, craven incompetence of Democrats in their half-hearted attempts to stop them. And, in truth, I left as an act of rational self-interest. Having gutted private-sector pensions and health benefits as a result of their embrace of outsourcing, union busting and "shareholder value," the GOP now thinks it is only fair that public-sector workers give up their pensions and benefits, too. Hence the intensification of the GOP's decades-long campaign of scorn against government workers. Under the circumstances, it is simply safer to be a current retiree rather than a prospective one.
If you think Paul Ryan and his Ayn Rand-worshipping colleagues aren't after your Social Security and Medicare, I am here to disabuse you of your naiveté.[5] They will move heaven and earth to force through tax cuts that will so starve the government of revenue that they will be "forced" to make "hard choices" - and that doesn't mean repealing those very same tax cuts, it means cutting the benefits for which you worked.
During the week that this piece was written, the debt ceiling fiasco reached its conclusion. The economy was already weak, but the GOP's disgraceful game of chicken roiled the markets even further. Foreigners could hardly believe it: Americans' own crazy political actions were destabilizing the safe-haven status of the dollar. Accordingly, during that same week, over one trillion dollars worth of assets evaporated on financial markets. Russia and China have stepped up their advocating that the dollar be replaced as the global reserve currency - a move as consequential and disastrous for US interests as any that can be imagined.
If Republicans have perfected a new form of politics that is successful electorally at the same time that it unleashes major policy disasters, it means twilight both for the democratic process and America's status as the world's leading power.
Footnotes:
[1] I am not exaggerating for effect. A law passed in 2010 by the Arizona legislature mandating arrest and incarceration of suspected illegal aliens was actually drafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative business front group that drafts "model" legislation on behalf of its corporate sponsors. The draft legislation in question was written for the private prison lobby, which sensed a growth opportunity in imprisoning more people.
[2] I am not a supporter of Obama and object to a number of his foreign and domestic policies. But when he took office amid the greatest financial collapse in 80 years, I wanted him to succeed, so that the country I served did not fail. But already in 2009, Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, declared that his greatest legislative priority was - jobs for Americans? Rescuing the financial system? Solving the housing collapse? - no, none of those things. His top priority was to ensure that Obama should be a one-term president. Evidently Senator McConnell hates Obama more than he loves his country. Note that the mainstream media have lately been hailing McConnell as "the adult in the room," presumably because he is less visibly unstable than the Tea Party freshmen
[3] This is not a venue for immigrant bashing. It remains a fact that outsourcing jobs overseas, while insourcing sub-minimum wage immigrant labor, will exert downward pressure on US wages. The consequence will be popular anger, and failure to address that anger will result in a downward wage spiral and a breech of the social compact, not to mention a rise in nativism and other reactionary impulses. It does no good to claim that these economic consequences are an inevitable result of globalization; Germany has somehow managed to maintain a high-wage economy and a vigorous industrial base.
[4] The cowardice is not merely political. During the past ten years, I have observed that Democrats are actually growing afraid of Republicans. In a quirky and flawed, but insightful, little book, "Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred," John Lukacs concludes that the left fears, the right hates.
[5] The GOP cult of Ayn Rand is both revealing and mystifying. On the one hand, Rand's tough guy, every-man-for-himself posturing is a natural fit because it puts a philosophical gloss on the latent sociopathy so prevalent among the hard right. On the other, Rand exclaimed at every opportunity that she was a militant atheist who felt nothing but contempt for Christianity. Apparently, the ignorance of most fundamentalist "values voters" means that GOP candidates who enthuse over Rand at the same time they thump their Bibles never have to explain this stark contradiction. And I imagine a Democratic officeholder would have a harder time explaining why he named his offspring "Marx" than a GOP incumbent would in rationalizing naming his kid "Rand."
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Mike Lofgren
Mike Lofgren retired on June 17 after 28 years as a Congressional staffer. He served 16 years as a professional staff member on the Republican side of both the House and Senate Budget Committees.
Saturday 3 September 2011
by: Mike Lofgren, Truthout
Barbara Stanwyck: "We're both rotten!"
Fred MacMurray: "Yeah - only you're a little more rotten." -"Double Indemnity" (1944)
Those lines of dialogue from a classic film noir sum up the state of the two political parties in contemporary America. Both parties are rotten - how could they not be, given the complete infestation of the political system by corporate money on a scale that now requires a presidential candidate to raise upwards of a billion dollars to be competitive in the general election? Both parties are captives to corporate loot. The main reason the Democrats' health care bill will be a budget buster once it fully phases in is the Democrats' rank capitulation to corporate interests - no single-payer system, in order to mollify the insurers; and no negotiation of drug prices, a craven surrender to Big Pharma.
But both parties are not rotten in quite the same way. The Democrats have their share of machine politicians, careerists, corporate bagmen, egomaniacs and kooks. Nothing, however, quite matches the modern GOP.
To those millions of Americans who have finally begun paying attention to politics and watched with exasperation the tragicomedy of the debt ceiling extension, it may have come as a shock that the Republican Party is so full of lunatics. To be sure, the party, like any political party on earth, has always had its share of crackpots, like Robert K. Dornan or William E. Dannemeyer. But the crackpot outliers of two decades ago have become the vital center today: Steve King, Michele Bachman (now a leading presidential candidate as well), Paul Broun, Patrick McHenry, Virginia Foxx, Louie Gohmert, Allen West. The Congressional directory now reads like a casebook of lunacy.
It was this cast of characters and the pernicious ideas they represent that impelled me to end a nearly 30-year career as a professional staff member on Capitol Hill. A couple of months ago, I retired; but I could see as early as last November that the Republican Party would use the debt limit vote, an otherwise routine legislative procedure that has been used 87 times since the end of World War II, in order to concoct an entirely artificial fiscal crisis. Then, they would use that fiscal crisis to get what they wanted, by literally holding the US and global economies as hostages.
The debt ceiling extension is not the only example of this sort of political terrorism. Republicans were willing to lay off 4,000 Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) employees, 70,000 private construction workers and let FAA safety inspectors work without pay, in fact, forcing them to pay for their own work-related travel - how prudent is that? - in order to strong arm some union-busting provisions into the FAA reauthorization.
Everyone knows that in a hostage situation, the reckless and amoral actor has the negotiating upper hand over the cautious and responsible actor because the latter is actually concerned about the life of the hostage, while the former does not care. This fact, which ought to be obvious, has nevertheless caused confusion among the professional pundit class, which is mostly still stuck in the Bob Dole era in terms of its orientation. For instance, Ezra Klein wrote of his puzzlement over the fact that while House Republicans essentially won the debt ceiling fight, enough of them were sufficiently dissatisfied that they might still scuttle the deal. Of course they might - the attitude of many freshman Republicans to national default was "bring it on!"
It should have been evident to clear-eyed observers that the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe. This trend has several implications, none of them pleasant.
In his "Manual of Parliamentary Practice," Thomas Jefferson wrote that it is less important that every rule and custom of a legislature be absolutely justifiable in a theoretical sense, than that they should be generally acknowledged and honored by all parties. These include unwritten rules, customs and courtesies that lubricate the legislative machinery and keep governance a relatively civilized procedure. The US Senate has more complex procedural rules than any other legislative body in the world; many of these rules are contradictory, and on any given day, the Senate parliamentarian may issue a ruling that contradicts earlier rulings on analogous cases.
The only thing that can keep the Senate functioning is collegiality and good faith. During periods of political consensus, for instance, the World War II and early post-war eras, the Senate was a "high functioning" institution: filibusters were rare and the body was legislatively productive. Now, one can no more picture the current Senate producing the original Medicare Act than the old Supreme Soviet having legislated the Bill of Rights.
Far from being a rarity, virtually every bill, every nominee for Senate confirmation and every routine procedural motion is now subject to a Republican filibuster. Under the circumstances, it is no wonder that Washington is gridlocked: legislating has now become war minus the shooting, something one could have observed 80 years ago in the Reichstag of the Weimar Republic. As Hannah Arendt observed, a disciplined minority of totalitarians can use the instruments of democratic government to undermine democracy itself.
John P. Judis sums up the modern GOP this way:
"Over the last four decades, the Republican Party has transformed from a loyal opposition into an insurrectionary party that flouts the law when it is in the majority and threatens disorder when it is the minority. It is the party of Watergate and Iran-Contra, but also of the government shutdown in 1995 and the impeachment trial of 1999. If there is an earlier American precedent for today's Republican Party, it is the antebellum Southern Democrats of John Calhoun who threatened to nullify, or disregard, federal legislation they objected to and who later led the fight to secede from the union over slavery."
A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress's generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.
A deeply cynical tactic, to be sure, but a psychologically insightful one that plays on the weaknesses both of the voting public and the news media. There are tens of millions of low-information voters who hardly know which party controls which branch of government, let alone which party is pursuing a particular legislative tactic. These voters' confusion over who did what allows them to form the conclusion that "they are all crooks," and that "government is no good," further leading them to think, "a plague on both your houses" and "the parties are like two kids in a school yard." This ill-informed public cynicism, in its turn, further intensifies the long-term decline in public trust in government that has been taking place since the early 1960s - a distrust that has been stoked by Republican rhetoric at every turn ("Government is the problem," declared Ronald Reagan in 1980).
The media are also complicit in this phenomenon. Ever since the bifurcation of electronic media into a more or less respectable "hard news" segment and a rabidly ideological talk radio and cable TV political propaganda arm, the "respectable" media have been terrified of any criticism for perceived bias. Hence, they hew to the practice of false evenhandedness. Paul Krugman has skewered this tactic as being the "centrist cop-out." "I joked long ago," he says, "that if one party declared that the earth was flat, the headlines would read 'Views Differ on Shape of Planet.'"
Inside-the-Beltway wise guy Chris Cillizza merely proves Krugman right in his Washington Post analysis of "winners and losers" in the debt ceiling impasse. He wrote that the institution of Congress was a big loser in the fracas, which is, of course, correct, but then he opined: "Lawmakers - bless their hearts - seem entirely unaware of just how bad they looked during this fight and will almost certainly spend the next few weeks (or months) congratulating themselves on their tremendous magnanimity." Note how the pundit's ironic deprecation falls like the rain on the just and unjust alike, on those who precipitated the needless crisis and those who despaired of it. He seems oblivious that one side - or a sizable faction of one side - has deliberately attempted to damage the reputation of Congress to achieve its political objectives.
This constant drizzle of "there the two parties go again!" stories out of the news bureaus, combined with the hazy confusion of low-information voters, means that the long-term Republican strategy of undermining confidence in our democratic institutions has reaped electoral dividends. The United States has nearly the lowest voter participation among Western democracies; this, again, is a consequence of the decline of trust in government institutions - if government is a racket and both parties are the same, why vote? And if the uninvolved middle declines to vote, it increases the electoral clout of a minority that is constantly being whipped into a lather by three hours daily of Rush Limbaugh or Fox News. There were only 44 million Republican voters in the 2010 mid-term elections, but they effectively canceled the political results of the election of President Obama by 69 million voters.
This tactic of inducing public distrust of government is not only cynical, it is schizophrenic. For people who profess to revere the Constitution, it is strange that they so caustically denigrate the very federal government that is the material expression of the principles embodied in that document. This is not to say that there is not some theoretical limit to the size or intrusiveness of government; I would be the first to say there are such limits, both fiscal and Constitutional. But most Republican officeholders seem strangely uninterested in the effective repeal of Fourth Amendment protections by the Patriot Act, the weakening of habeas corpus and self-incrimination protections in the public hysteria following 9/11 or the unpalatable fact that the United States has the largest incarcerated population of any country on earth. If anything, they would probably opt for more incarcerated persons, as imprisonment is a profit center for the prison privatization industry, which is itself a growth center for political contributions to these same politicians.[1] Instead, they prefer to rail against those government programs that actually help people. And when a program is too popular to attack directly, like Medicare or Social Security, they prefer to undermine it by feigning an agonized concern about the deficit. That concern, as we shall see, is largely fictitious.
Undermining Americans' belief in their own institutions of self-government remains a prime GOP electoral strategy. But if this technique falls short of producing Karl Rove's dream of 30 years of unchallengeable one-party rule (as all such techniques always fall short of achieving the angry and embittered true believer's New Jerusalem), there are other even less savory techniques upon which to fall back. Ever since Republicans captured the majority in a number of state legislatures last November, they have systematically attempted to make it more difficult to vote: by onerous voter ID requirements (in Wisconsin, Republicans have legislated photo IDs while simultaneously shutting Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) offices in Democratic constituencies while at the same time lengthening the hours of operation of DMV offices in GOP constituencies); by narrowing registration periods; and by residency requirements that may disenfranchise university students.
This legislative assault is moving in a diametrically opposed direction to 200 years of American history, when the arrow of progress pointed toward more political participation by more citizens. Republicans are among the most shrill in self-righteously lecturing other countries about the wonders of democracy; exporting democracy (albeit at the barrel of a gun) to the Middle East was a signature policy of the Bush administration. But domestically, they don't want those people voting.
You can probably guess who those people are. Above all, anyone not likely to vote Republican. As Sarah Palin would imply, the people who are not Real Americans. Racial minorities. Immigrants. Muslims. Gays. Intellectuals. Basically, anyone who doesn't look, think, or talk like the GOP base. This must account, at least to some degree, for their extraordinarily vitriolic hatred of President Obama. I have joked in the past that the main administration policy that Republicans object to is Obama's policy of being black.[2] Among the GOP base, there is constant harping about somebody else, some "other," who is deliberately, assiduously and with malice aforethought subverting the Good, the True and the Beautiful: Subversives. Commies. Socialists. Ragheads. Secular humanists. Blacks. Fags. Feminazis. The list may change with the political needs of the moment, but they always seem to need a scapegoat to hate and fear.
It is not clear to me how many GOP officeholders believe this reactionary and paranoid claptrap. I would bet that most do not. But they cynically feed the worst instincts of their fearful and angry low-information political base with a nod and a wink. During the disgraceful circus of the "birther" issue, Republican politicians subtly stoked the fires of paranoia by being suggestively equivocal - "I take the president at his word" - while never unambiguously slapping down the myth. John Huntsman was the first major GOP figure forthrightly to refute the birther calumny - albeit after release of the birth certificate.
I do not mean to place too much emphasis on racial animus in the GOP. While it surely exists, it is also a fact that Republicans think that no Democratic president could conceivably be legitimate. Republicans also regarded Bill Clinton as somehow, in some manner, twice fraudulently elected (well do I remember the elaborate conspiracy theories that Republicans traded among themselves). Had it been Hillary Clinton, rather than Barack Obama, who had been elected in 2008, I am certain we would now be hearing, in lieu of the birther myths, conspiracy theories about Vince Foster's alleged murder.
The reader may think that I am attributing Svengali-like powers to GOP operatives able to manipulate a zombie base to do their bidding. It is more complicated than that. Historical circumstances produced the raw material: the deindustrialization and financialization of America since about 1970 has spawned an increasingly downscale white middle class - without job security (or even without jobs), with pensions and health benefits evaporating and with their principal asset deflating in the collapse of the housing bubble. Their fears are not imaginary; their standard of living is shrinking.
What do the Democrats offer these people? Essentially nothing. Democratic Leadership Council-style "centrist" Democrats were among the biggest promoters of disastrous trade deals in the 1990s that outsourced jobs abroad: NAFTA, World Trade Organization, permanent most-favored-nation status for China. At the same time, the identity politics/lifestyle wing of the Democratic Party was seen as a too illegal immigrant-friendly by downscaled and outsourced whites.[3]
While Democrats temporized, or even dismissed the fears of the white working class as racist or nativist, Republicans went to work. To be sure, the business wing of the Republican Party consists of the most energetic outsourcers, wage cutters and hirers of sub-minimum wage immigrant labor to be found anywhere on the globe. But the faux-populist wing of the party, knowing the mental compartmentalization that occurs in most low-information voters, played on the fears of that same white working class to focus their anger on scapegoats that do no damage to corporations' bottom lines: instead of raising the minimum wage, let's build a wall on the Southern border (then hire a defense contractor to incompetently manage it). Instead of predatory bankers, it's evil Muslims. Or evil gays. Or evil abortionists.
How do they manage to do this? Because Democrats ceded the field. Above all, they do not understand language. Their initiatives are posed in impenetrable policy-speak: the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. The what? - can anyone even remember it? No wonder the pejorative "Obamacare" won out. Contrast that with the Republicans' Patriot Act. You're a patriot, aren't you? Does anyone at the GED level have a clue what a Stimulus Bill is supposed to be? Why didn't the White House call it the Jobs Bill and keep pounding on that theme?
You know that Social Security and Medicare are in jeopardy when even Democrats refer to them as entitlements. "Entitlement" has a negative sound in colloquial English: somebody who is "entitled" selfishly claims something he doesn't really deserve. Why not call them "earned benefits," which is what they are because we all contribute payroll taxes to fund them? That would never occur to the Democrats. Republicans don't make that mistake; they are relentlessly on message: it is never the "estate tax," it is the "death tax." Heaven forbid that the Walton family should give up one penny of its $86-billion fortune. All of that lucre is necessary to ensure that unions be kept out of Wal-Mart, that women employees not be promoted and that politicians be kept on a short leash.
It was not always thus. It would have been hard to find an uneducated farmer during the depression of the 1890s who did not have a very accurate idea about exactly which economic interests were shafting him. An unemployed worker in a breadline in 1932 would have felt little gratitude to the Rockefellers or the Mellons. But that is not the case in the present economic crisis. After a riot of unbridled greed such as the world has not seen since the conquistadors' looting expeditions and after an unprecedented broad and rapid transfer of wealth upward by Wall Street and its corporate satellites, where is the popular anger directed, at least as depicted in the media? At "Washington spending" - which has increased primarily to provide unemployment compensation, food stamps and Medicaid to those economically damaged by the previous decade's corporate saturnalia. Or the popular rage is harmlessly diverted against pseudo-issues: death panels, birtherism, gay marriage, abortion, and so on, none of which stands to dent the corporate bottom line in the slightest.
Thus far, I have concentrated on Republican tactics, rather than Republican beliefs, but the tactics themselves are important indicators of an absolutist, authoritarian mindset that is increasingly hostile to the democratic values of reason, compromise and conciliation. Rather, this mindset seeks polarizing division (Karl Rove has been very explicit that this is his principal campaign strategy), conflict and the crushing of opposition.
As for what they really believe, the Republican Party of 2011 believes in three principal tenets I have laid out below. The rest of their platform one may safely dismiss as window dressing:
1. The GOP cares solely and exclusively about its rich contributors. The party has built a whole catechism on the protection and further enrichment of America's plutocracy. Their caterwauling about deficit and debt is so much eyewash to con the public. Whatever else President Obama has accomplished (and many of his purported accomplishments are highly suspect), his $4-trillion deficit reduction package did perform the useful service of smoking out Republican hypocrisy. The GOP refused, because it could not abide so much as a one-tenth of one percent increase on the tax rates of the Walton family or the Koch brothers, much less a repeal of the carried interest rule that permits billionaire hedge fund managers to pay income tax at a lower effective rate than cops or nurses. Republicans finally settled on a deal that had far less deficit reduction - and even less spending reduction! - than Obama's offer, because of their iron resolution to protect at all costs our society's overclass.
Republicans have attempted to camouflage their amorous solicitude for billionaires with a fog of misleading rhetoric. John Boehner is fond of saying, "we won't raise anyone's taxes," as if the take-home pay of an Olive Garden waitress were inextricably bound up with whether Warren Buffett pays his capital gains as ordinary income or at a lower rate. Another chestnut is that millionaires and billionaires are "job creators." US corporations have just had their most profitable quarters in history; Apple, for one, is sitting on $76 billion in cash, more than the GDP of most countries. So, where are the jobs?
Another smokescreen is the "small business" meme, since standing up for Mom's and Pop's corner store is politically more attractive than to be seen shilling for a megacorporation. Raising taxes on the wealthy will kill small business' ability to hire; that is the GOP dirge every time Bernie Sanders or some Democrat offers an amendment to increase taxes on incomes above $1 million. But the number of small businesses that have a net annual income over a million dollars is de minimis, if not by definition impossible (as they would no longer be small businesses). And as data from the Center for Economic and Policy Research have shown, small businesses account for only 7.2 percent of total US employment, a significantly smaller share of total employment than in most Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries.
Likewise, Republicans have assiduously spread the myth that Americans are conspicuously overtaxed. But compared to other OECD countries, the effective rates of US taxation are among the lowest. In particular, they point to the top corporate income rate of 35 percent as being confiscatory Bolshevism. But again, the effective rate is much lower. Did GE pay 35 percent on 2010 profits of $14 billion? No, it paid zero.
When pressed, Republicans make up misleading statistics to "prove" that the America's fiscal burden is being borne by the rich and the rest of us are just freeloaders who don't appreciate that fact. "Half of Americans don't pay taxes" is a perennial meme. But what they leave out is that that statement refers to federal income taxes. There are millions of people who don't pay income taxes, but do contribute payroll taxes - among the most regressive forms of taxation. But according to GOP fiscal theology, payroll taxes don't count. Somehow, they have convinced themselves that since payroll taxes go into trust funds, they're not real taxes. Likewise, state and local sales taxes apparently don't count, although their effect on a poor person buying necessities like foodstuffs is far more regressive than on a millionaire.
All of these half truths and outright lies have seeped into popular culture via the corporate-owned business press. Just listen to CNBC for a few hours and you will hear most of them in one form or another. More important politically, Republicans' myths about taxation have been internalized by millions of economically downscale "values voters," who may have been attracted to the GOP for other reasons (which I will explain later), but who now accept this misinformation as dogma.
And when misinformation isn't enough to sustain popular support for the GOP's agenda, concealment is needed. One fairly innocuous provision in the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill requires public companies to make a more transparent disclosure of CEO compensation, including bonuses. Note that it would not limit the compensation, only require full disclosure. Republicans are hell-bent on repealing this provision. Of course; it would not serve Wall Street interests if the public took an unhealthy interest in the disparity of their own incomes as against that of a bank CEO. As Spencer Bachus, the Republican chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, says, "In Washington, the view is that the banks are to be regulated and my view is that Washington and the regulators are there to serve the banks."
2. They worship at the altar of Mars. While the me-too Democrats have set a horrible example of keeping up with the Joneses with respect to waging wars, they can never match GOP stalwarts such as John McCain or Lindsey Graham in their sheer, libidinous enthusiasm for invading other countries. McCain wanted to mix it up with Russia - a nuclear-armed state - during the latter's conflict with Georgia in 2008 (remember? - "we are all Georgians now," a slogan that did not, fortunately, catch on), while Graham has been persistently agitating for attacks on Iran and intervention in Syria. And these are not fringe elements of the party; they are the leading "defense experts," who always get tapped for the Sunday talk shows. About a month before Republicans began holding a gun to the head of the credit markets to get trillions of dollars of cuts, these same Republicans passed a defense appropriations bill that increased spending by $17 billion over the prior year's defense appropriation. To borrow Chris Hedges' formulation, war is the force that gives meaning to their lives.
A cynic might conclude that this militaristic enthusiasm is no more complicated than the fact that Pentagon contractors spread a lot of bribery money around Capitol Hill. That is true, but there is more to it than that. It is not necessarily even the fact that members of Congress feel they are protecting constituents' jobs. The wildly uneven concentration of defense contracts and military bases nationally means that some areas, like Washington, DC, and San Diego, are heavily dependent on Department of Defense (DOD) spending. But there are many more areas of the country whose net balance is negative: the citizenry pays more in taxes to support the Pentagon than it receives back in local contracts.
And the economic justification for Pentagon spending is even more fallacious when one considers that the $700 billion annual DOD budget creates comparatively few jobs. The days of Rosie the Riveter are long gone; most weapons projects now require very little touch labor. Instead, a disproportionate share is siphoned off into high-cost research and development (from which the civilian economy benefits little); exorbitant management expenditures, overhead and out-and-out padding; and, of course, the money that flows back into the coffers of political campaigns. A million dollars appropriated for highway construction would create two to three times as many jobs as a million dollars appropriated for Pentagon weapons procurement, so the jobs argument is ultimately specious.
Take away the cash nexus and there still remains a psychological predisposition toward war and militarism on the part of the GOP. This undoubtedly arises from a neurotic need to demonstrate toughness and dovetails perfectly with the belligerent tough-guy pose one constantly hears on right-wing talk radio. Militarism springs from the same psychological deficit that requires an endless series of enemies, both foreign and domestic.
The results of the last decade of unbridled militarism and the Democrats' cowardly refusal to reverse it[4], have been disastrous both strategically and fiscally. It has made the United States less prosperous, less secure and less free. Unfortunately, the militarism and the promiscuous intervention it gives rise to are only likely to abate when the Treasury is exhausted, just as it happened to the Dutch Republic and the British Empire.
3. Give me that old time religion. Pandering to fundamentalism is a full-time vocation in the GOP. Beginning in the 1970s, religious cranks ceased simply to be a minor public nuisance in this country and grew into the major element of the Republican rank and file. Pat Robertson's strong showing in the 1988 Iowa Caucus signaled the gradual merger of politics and religion in the party. The results are all around us: if the American people poll more like Iranians or Nigerians than Europeans or Canadians on questions of evolution versus creationism, scriptural inerrancy, the existence of angels and demons, and so forth, that result is due to the rise of the religious right, its insertion into the public sphere by the Republican Party and the consequent normalizing of formerly reactionary or quaint beliefs. Also around us is a prevailing anti-intellectualism and hostility to science; it is this group that defines "low-information voter" - or, perhaps, "misinformation voter."
The Constitution to the contrary notwithstanding, there is now a de facto religious test for the presidency: major candidates are encouraged (or coerced) to "share their feelings" about their "faith" in a revelatory speech; or, some televangelist like Rick Warren dragoons the candidates (as he did with Obama and McCain in 2008) to debate the finer points of Christology, with Warren himself, of course, as the arbiter. Politicized religion is also the sheet anchor of the culture wars. But how did the whole toxic stew of GOP beliefs - economic royalism, militarism and culture wars cum fundamentalism - come completely to displace an erstwhile civilized Eisenhower Republicanism?
It is my view that the rise of politicized religious fundamentalism (which is a subset of the decline of rational problem solving in America) may have been the key ingredient of the takeover of the Republican Party. For politicized religion provides a substrate of beliefs that rationalizes - at least in the minds of followers - all three of the GOP's main tenets.
Televangelists have long espoused the health-and-wealth/name-it-and-claim it gospel. If you are wealthy, it is a sign of God's favor. If not, too bad! But don't forget to tithe in any case. This rationale may explain why some economically downscale whites defend the prerogatives of billionaires.
The GOP's fascination with war is also connected with the fundamentalist mindset. The Old Testament abounds in tales of slaughter - God ordering the killing of the Midianite male infants and enslavement of the balance of the population, the divinely-inspired genocide of the Canaanites, the slaying of various miscreants with the jawbone of an ass - and since American religious fundamentalist seem to prefer the Old Testament to the New (particularly that portion of the New Testament known as the Sermon on the Mount), it is but a short step to approving war as a divinely inspired mission. This sort of thinking has led, inexorably, to such phenomena as Jerry Falwell once writing that God is Pro-War.
It is the apocalyptic frame of reference of fundamentalists, their belief in an imminent Armageddon, that psychologically conditions them to steer this country into conflict, not only on foreign fields (some evangelicals thought Saddam was the Antichrist and therefore a suitable target for cruise missiles), but also in the realm of domestic political controversy. It is hardly surprising that the most adamant proponent of the view that there was no debt ceiling problem was Michele Bachmann, the darling of the fundamentalist right. What does it matter, anyway, if the country defaults? - we shall presently abide in the bosom of the Lord.
Some liberal writers have opined that the different socio-economic perspectives separating the "business" wing of the GOP and the religious right make it an unstable coalition that could crack. I am not so sure. There is no fundamental disagreement on which direction the two factions want to take the country, merely how far in that direction they want to take it. The plutocrats would drag us back to the Gilded Age, the theocrats to the Salem witch trials. In any case, those consummate plutocrats, the Koch brothers, are pumping large sums of money into Michele Bachman's presidential campaign, so one ought not make too much of a potential plutocrat-theocrat split.
Thus, the modern GOP; it hardly seems conceivable that a Republican could have written the following:
"Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes you can do these things. Among them are H. L. Hunt (you possibly know his background), a few other Texas oil millionaires and an occasional politician or business man from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid." (That was President Eisenhower, writing to his brother Edgar in 1954.)
It is this broad and ever-widening gulf between the traditional Republicanism of an Eisenhower and the quasi-totalitarian cult of a Michele Bachmann that impelled my departure from Capitol Hill. It is not in my pragmatic nature to make a heroic gesture of self-immolation, or to make lurid revelations of personal martyrdom in the manner of David Brock. And I will leave a more detailed dissection of failed Republican economic policies to my fellow apostate Bruce Bartlett.
I left because I was appalled at the headlong rush of Republicans, like Gadarene swine, to embrace policies that are deeply damaging to this country's future; and contemptuous of the feckless, craven incompetence of Democrats in their half-hearted attempts to stop them. And, in truth, I left as an act of rational self-interest. Having gutted private-sector pensions and health benefits as a result of their embrace of outsourcing, union busting and "shareholder value," the GOP now thinks it is only fair that public-sector workers give up their pensions and benefits, too. Hence the intensification of the GOP's decades-long campaign of scorn against government workers. Under the circumstances, it is simply safer to be a current retiree rather than a prospective one.
If you think Paul Ryan and his Ayn Rand-worshipping colleagues aren't after your Social Security and Medicare, I am here to disabuse you of your naiveté.[5] They will move heaven and earth to force through tax cuts that will so starve the government of revenue that they will be "forced" to make "hard choices" - and that doesn't mean repealing those very same tax cuts, it means cutting the benefits for which you worked.
During the week that this piece was written, the debt ceiling fiasco reached its conclusion. The economy was already weak, but the GOP's disgraceful game of chicken roiled the markets even further. Foreigners could hardly believe it: Americans' own crazy political actions were destabilizing the safe-haven status of the dollar. Accordingly, during that same week, over one trillion dollars worth of assets evaporated on financial markets. Russia and China have stepped up their advocating that the dollar be replaced as the global reserve currency - a move as consequential and disastrous for US interests as any that can be imagined.
If Republicans have perfected a new form of politics that is successful electorally at the same time that it unleashes major policy disasters, it means twilight both for the democratic process and America's status as the world's leading power.
Footnotes:
[1] I am not exaggerating for effect. A law passed in 2010 by the Arizona legislature mandating arrest and incarceration of suspected illegal aliens was actually drafted by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative business front group that drafts "model" legislation on behalf of its corporate sponsors. The draft legislation in question was written for the private prison lobby, which sensed a growth opportunity in imprisoning more people.
[2] I am not a supporter of Obama and object to a number of his foreign and domestic policies. But when he took office amid the greatest financial collapse in 80 years, I wanted him to succeed, so that the country I served did not fail. But already in 2009, Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, declared that his greatest legislative priority was - jobs for Americans? Rescuing the financial system? Solving the housing collapse? - no, none of those things. His top priority was to ensure that Obama should be a one-term president. Evidently Senator McConnell hates Obama more than he loves his country. Note that the mainstream media have lately been hailing McConnell as "the adult in the room," presumably because he is less visibly unstable than the Tea Party freshmen
[3] This is not a venue for immigrant bashing. It remains a fact that outsourcing jobs overseas, while insourcing sub-minimum wage immigrant labor, will exert downward pressure on US wages. The consequence will be popular anger, and failure to address that anger will result in a downward wage spiral and a breech of the social compact, not to mention a rise in nativism and other reactionary impulses. It does no good to claim that these economic consequences are an inevitable result of globalization; Germany has somehow managed to maintain a high-wage economy and a vigorous industrial base.
[4] The cowardice is not merely political. During the past ten years, I have observed that Democrats are actually growing afraid of Republicans. In a quirky and flawed, but insightful, little book, "Democracy and Populism: Fear and Hatred," John Lukacs concludes that the left fears, the right hates.
[5] The GOP cult of Ayn Rand is both revealing and mystifying. On the one hand, Rand's tough guy, every-man-for-himself posturing is a natural fit because it puts a philosophical gloss on the latent sociopathy so prevalent among the hard right. On the other, Rand exclaimed at every opportunity that she was a militant atheist who felt nothing but contempt for Christianity. Apparently, the ignorance of most fundamentalist "values voters" means that GOP candidates who enthuse over Rand at the same time they thump their Bibles never have to explain this stark contradiction. And I imagine a Democratic officeholder would have a harder time explaining why he named his offspring "Marx" than a GOP incumbent would in rationalizing naming his kid "Rand."
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Mike Lofgren
Mike Lofgren retired on June 17 after 28 years as a Congressional staffer. He served 16 years as a professional staff member on the Republican side of both the House and Senate Budget Committees.
Sunday, August 28, 2011
Presente! John Ross
John Ross dies at 72
by Tim Redmond
San Francisco Bay Guardian
http://www.sfbg.com/politics/2011/01/18/john-ross-dies-72
[GR interview with John Ross Aug. 4, 2008]
When John Ross left Terminal Island, the federal prison in Los Angeles, after serving a couple of years for refusing the Vietnam draft, the warden shook his head and said: "Ross, you never learned how to be a prisoner."
I'm not writing the epitaph for whatever gravestone he has or doesn't have, wherever it might be in the world, but that's what I'd put on it: "John Ross, 1938-2011. Never learned how to be a prisoner."
John, who died over the weekend, was a poet, author, activist, agitator and uncontrollable shit disturber, utterly and sometimes insanely fearless, pure of heart and devoted to the cause of social justice so deeply that he could never let up, even for a minute. He was also my friend.
John was a tenant organizer in San Francisco in the 1960s. He ran for supervisor once on a platform of rent control and ending the war; he was kicked off the ballot on the basis that he was a convicted felon. He never got his filing fee back.
After a while, he headed north for Arcata, back to the land, so to speak, and became something of a farmer. He wrote poetry, self-published maybe half a dozen books, most of which I have, some of which are probably lost forever. He wrote freelance for the Guardian, but he had no phone; you'd call him at a bar in Arcata (he swore later that Thomas Pynchon was one of his barmates), leave a message and he'd check in when he got it.
Then in 1984, he showed up at our office in San Francisco, fleeing the Campaign Against Marijuana Planting, which had raided his plot, trashed his house, thrown his typewriter out the window and missed capturing him by a few minutes. He sold the last of the crop in the city, found a room and started writing for us regularly.
He was one of the single most talented writers I've ever met -- and a reporter willing to go anywhere for a story. He was also an absolute pain in the ass to work with. Every John Ross story I ever edited was a nightmare. He hated editors, almost as a matter of religion; every single word was sacred, and anytime I tried to mess with what he'd created he'd threaten to quit. "Take my name off the masthead; I'm never working for you again" was almost a mantra with us. It got to the point where I had to say: No, John. You can't quit. You're part of this operation forever, like it or not. And he always came around.
But it's not a surprise that he never held down a real job for long.
Sandy Close at Pacific News Service sent him to Mexico City after the big earthquake in 1985, and he wound up at the Hotel Isabel, where he lived for the next 25 years. He took on stories nobody else would do or could do; he'd go places nobody else would dare. "Tim," he'd always tell me, "you have to go where the story is."
When the Zapatistas began their rebellion, he hitched a ride south from Mexico City, then hiked into the hills in Chiapas with a bag of granola and a couple of bottles of water, found the rebels in a little hamlet, met Subcommander Marcos and got interviews and information that left the rest of the media in the dust. In the first story he sent me, he described seeing a couple of reporters from the San Francisco Chronicle zipping by in a fancy rented jeep, with about $1,000 worth of camera gear, totally befuddled. They were out of their league; John was right at home.
He called me once, late at night, to ask if I knew any doctors in town. Turns out he'd been beaten pretty badly by the Mexican authorities just before getting on a plane to SF. I asked him how it happened, and he told me that he'd decided, on his own, to stand in the Mexico City airport and make a speech denouncing the government. The cops didn't respond kindly.
He went to Iraq before the war to serve as a human shield in Baghdad (his emails were all signed "John Ross, humanshield"), left after having some clashes (imagine that) with his Iraqi government minders, travelled all over the world writing and selling his books, sent me pieces from everywhere, lost his eye to an old injury from fighting with the SFPD (his email signature became "Juan Eye"), won and refused an award from the City of San Francisco, wrote a major investigative piece on the death of journalist Brad Will and kept writing until the very end. When he was diagnosed with terminal liver cancer, he started signing his emails "John Ross, not dead yet."
The last message I got was on Nov. 4. After complaining some more about the cops, he wrote:
"it appears ive written my last articles for the bay guardian -- the doctors have given me six months on the outside and then its goodbye this cruel world -- we raised some hell when i was here." It's signed: "in solidarity johnross enroute."
Yes, John: We raised some some hell when you were here. Good luck enroute. And I will miss you forever.
John Ross leaves a son, Dante A. Ross, a daughter, Carla Ross-Allen, and a granddaughter, Zoe Ross-Allen, as well as a stepdaughter, Dylan Melbourne and her daughther Honore, as well as a sister, Susan Gardner. Memorial info is pending; I'll keep you posted.
You can read some of John's recent articles here and here and a lot more here.
Sunday, August 21, 2011
CAIA's Middle East Week in Review
News: Like last week, only matters of longer term and greater importance will be deemed important, and the daily brutality propagated against the Palestinian people will be there to read, but not noted.
1) Israel's anti-boycott law.
http://www.haaretz.com/blogs/strenger-than-fiction/the-boycott-law-and-bullshit-1.373465"http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
http://www.haaretz.com/blogs/strenger-than-fiction/the-boycott-law-and-bullshit-1.373465
Update: How the anti-boycott law has led to greater attention to the boycott.
http://adam-keller2.blogspot.com/2011/07/balaams-curse-2011.html
2) New settlement construction, intended to cut off Jerusalem from the West Bank, will end chance of of peace.
http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/palestinians-ariel-construction-destroys-remnants-of-peace-efforts-1.378762">http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/palestinians-ariel-construction-destroys-remnants-of-phttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifeace-efforts-1.378762">http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/palestinians-ariel-construction-destroys-remnants-of-peace-efforts-1.378762
Update: US issues words to condemn Ariel construction, but no deeds.
http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/u-s-israeli-construction-in-ariel-deeply-troubling-1.378781"
http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
Update 2: Envoy: World must act against 'colonization campaign'
BETHLEHEM (Ma‘an) 12 Aug -- Palestinian Ambassador to the UN Riyad Mansour on Friday urged the international community to compel Israel to end its colonization campaign if it really believes in thhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gife two-state solution, reports said. In letters to the UN secretary-general and the presidents of the Security Council and the General Assembly, Mansour said "the international community must compel Israel to end its illegal occupation," a Kuwaiti news outlet reported. This includes Israel's "colonization campaign and must seriously begin to take further effective measures to end the Israeli occupation which began in 1967 to salvage the possibility of the two-state solution." The letter came in reaction to Israel's "arrogant" and "shameless" announcement to develop 1,600 settlement units in East Jerusalem
http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=412717&utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=e434f3a3c0-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
Update 3: Quartet condemns Israel's illegal building in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/mideast-quartet-greatly-concerned-by-israel-s-recent-settlement-plans-1.378948
3) In Israel, it you justify hitting Palestinians you control, you get promoted.
http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/idf-promotes-colonel-who-justified-hitting-palehttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifstinian-detainees-1.378749
4) Can Israelis have social justice and the Occupation of Palestine?
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/israel-s-social-protesters-mustn-t-forget-the-occupation-1.378512
5) Netanyahu plans to punish the Palestinians for declaring that they are a state.
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/israel-will-use-palestinian-un-bid-to-restore-status-quo-1.378664
6) Nabi Saleh consumed with raids while fasting http://palsolidarity.org/2011/08/19743/?utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=e434f3a3c0-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
ISM posted 11 Aug -- Following the unusually short demonstration on the first Friday of Ramadan, the Israeli army raided the village of Nabi Saleh just before Iftar, the Muslim time for breaking fast during Ramadan, resulting in the detaining of a 14 year old boy for approximately two hours and an excessive amount of tear gas in the village ...Manal Tamimi’s child was sleeping in the living room alone where he inhaled a large amount of tear gas for half an hour resulting in him vomiting for over an hour while the army was still in the village. Tamimi states in an interview with ISM that she was scared of the thought that she may have been outside of her home, visiting her mother, and no one would have heard the scream of her child. Without her presence at home, she says, this invasion might have ended with a fatality within her family.
Update: Videohttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif interview with Manal Tamimi: They try to steal our history, not just our land
ISM posted 11 Aug -- The demonstrations in Nabi Saleh started the 21 of November 2009, after the illegal settlement of Halamish expanded, costing locals in land and their source of water for home and agricultural use, a spring declared holy by the settlers ... More then 220 people have been injured since the beginning of their peaceful resistance to illegal Israeli occupation of their land. Some of the injured include an 11 year old boy who was shot with a rubber coated steel bullet in his head and is still paralyzed. http://palsolidarity.org/2011/08/19747/?utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=e434f3a3c0-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
Update 2: Throwing rocks at the occupation -- and Western prejudice too
By Linah Alsaafin, Nabi Saleh, 11 August 2011
I asked a few Nabi Saleh children why they throw rocks. Their responses were simple: We don't want the army here.
http://electronicintifada.net/content/throwing-rocks-occupation-and-western-prejudice-too/10263
7) Area C feels the effects of Israel's power
The Australian 13 Aug -- ONLY 5km separates the offices of two mayors on one of the planet's most contested pieces of land, but they may as well be at opposite ends of the earth. Next month, the 193 countries of the UN are set to vote on a Palestinian state. Any decision will not be binding on Israel but any pressure point that does arise will be here, in the heart of the West Bank's "Area C", which is deemed under the Oslo accords to be under full Israeli control ... David Elhaiini is a Jewish settler who is Mayor of the Jordan Valley Regional Council, which covers 21 settlements ... Area C amounts to 60 per cent of the West Bank. Israel has complete power over which Palestinian homes will be built or demolished in the area. Far more Palestinian homes are demolished than approved. Asked what he thinks about the demolitions, Elhaiini replies: "I believe in law." ... Palestinian Mayor Abed Kassab says when Israel took control of his village, Jiftlik, in 1967, the population was more than 25,000. It is now 5,000. He gives a range of reasons: lack of water and electricity; Israelis killing some of the villagers' animals; Israelis taking sheep from villagers, putting them into Jewish settlements and presenting the villagers with fees for feeding them.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/area-c-feels-the-effects-of-israels-power/story-e6frg6so-1226114006692?utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=e434f3a3c0-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
8) Racism in the Galilee Part 1: Caging in Palestinians / Sophie Crowe
PalMon 11 Aug -- Many Palestinians have been forced to leave Nazareth, the primary Palestinian city in Israel, and its satellite villages due to the absence of planning and lack of resources allotted by the government, which prohibits development and results in overcrowding. ... Upper Nazareth, the fastest growing town in the north of the country, illustrates clearly the disparity in development of Israeli and Palestinian towns. The largely Jewish city is home to fifty thousand people and was able to quadruple in size since its establishment in the late fifties by appropriating surrounding lands. According to a 2010 report by Middle East Monitor, a British-based news source, the number of Jews living in thehttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif Galilee tripled between the sixties and nineties. ‘The whole city is built on land confiscated from the Palestinians of Nazareth,’ explains Sawsan Zaher, a lawyer with Adalah, a Palestinian rights NGO. Nazareth has seventy thousand people living on half the area of land as the new city and is prevented from expanding. The new town flourishes and thrives at the expense of the original Palestinian one and its villages, which are in contraction.
http://www.palestinemonitor.org/?p=1415&utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=e434f3a3c0-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
Update: Racism rampant among Israeli youth. http://electronicintifada.net/content/video-survey-racism-rampant-among-israeli-youth/10286?utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=63d2de8e2e-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
9) On patrol in the streets of Hebron
PalMon 10 Aug -- A car stops in front of a house in Beit Hadassah, a part of the Israeli settlement inside the Old City of Hebron. Three settlers get out. Observers from Temporary International Presence in the City of Hebron (TIPH) stand nearby and watch closely. This is part of TIPH’s daily foot patrol of the city. In Hebron, settler violence could strike any time. Settlers are steadily expanding into new parts of Hebron, Per Enerud, an observer with TIPH says. Due to the Israeli occupation of the area, many Palestinian families have been forced out of their homes and shops and cannot return to their land. Settlers then move into their vacant property. Standing on the hillside with a good view of the Israeli settlement, Enerud points out a group of Israeli children playing on top of anhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif empty building. While seemingly harmless, Enerud explains, this is a new method of the same, aggressive settler expansion that’s been happening in Hebron since 1967. "Even though the deed to the house is Palestinian," Enerud says, "the settlers build their way into the empty houses."
http://www.palestinemonitor.org/?p=1393
10) Fanatic Jewish settlers regularly attack Palestinians at iftar time
AL-KHALIL/HEBRON (PIC) 12 Aug -- Fanatic Jewish settlers attacked Palestinian homes in the old city in al-Khalil on Wednesday evening for the second time in two days. The attacks take place when families gather at sunset to break their fast (Iftar) ...A Palestinian resident who lives at Jabal al-Rahma said that a group of settlers from the Yeshai settlement crossed lands belonging to local residents, threw stones at Palestinian homes in the vicinity and chanted anti-Arab slogans. Meanwhile, settlers in Tel al-Rumaida attacked the home of Muhammad Abu Eisheh with stones and destroyed a support wall belonging to the family of Sayyed Ahmad.
http://www.palestine-info.co.uk/En/default.aspx?xyz=U6Qq7k%2
Update: Increased Palestinian displacement as Israeli settler violence intensifies
AIC 15 Aug -- As dozens of Israeli MKs petition Netanyahu to endorse increased settlement construction in the West Bank to address the Israeli housing crisis and the surrounding tent protests, Israeli settlement policy continues to perpetuate a housing crisis of a very different sort in the Palestinian territory. Over the past seven months, nearly 900 Palestinians have been displaced from their homes, as opposed to 606 during the whole of 2010. 755 of those were displaced due to home demolitions, while the remaining 127 were forced from their homes due to settler violence ... While settlers are burning Palestinian crops, damaging property, and throwing rocks at shepherds and children, the Israeli government is using a system of permitting processes, military zones, and fines to prevent Palestinians from establishing any structural claim to their own land.
http://www.alternativenews.org/english/index.php/topics/settlers-violence/3744-increased-palestinian-displacement-as-israeli-settler-violence-intensifies?utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=6c411275a8-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
Update 2: Israeli settler violence report, May-June 2011
AIC 15 Aug -- By Ahmad Jaradat & Nikki Hodgson -- During the months of May and June, settler attacks against Palestinian civilians continued, with most of the attacks targeting agriculture land in the northern West Bank. The attacks, including damage to agriculture property, burning of olive trees and destruction of wheat crops, appear to be systematically targeting land near settlements, and many Palestinian farmers fear that the settlers are organizing attacks in order to confiscate land for the expansion of settlements in the West Bank. Numerous attacks also occurred in Hebron, resulting in at least three Palestinians needing medical attention, including a six-year-old boy. Details:
http://www.alternativenews.org/english/index.php/topics/settlers-violence/3745-israeli-settler-violence-report-may-june-2011-?utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=6c411275a8-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
11 PCHR weekly report : Israeli forces injure 3, abduct 35 Palestinians this week
IMEMC 12 Aug -- In its Weekly Report On Israeli Human Rights Violations in the Occupied Palestinian Territories for the week of 04-10 Aug. 2011, Israeli forces wounded three Palestinians with gunfire, and injured dozens more with tear gas at non-violent demonstrations. One of those injured was a Palestinian woman herding sheep in Gaza. The Israeli troops also killed some of her sheep. Two Palestinian resistance fighters were wounded by Israeli forces in the east of Gaza City. Israeli warplanes bombarded a number of civilian facilities in the Gaza Strip. Two bird farms were completely destroyed and a third one was damaged, 500 chickens were killed and a room was destroyed. Israeli attacks in the West Bank: Israeli forces conducted 31 incursions into Palestinian communities in the West Bank, during which they abducted 31 Palestinian civilians, including 5 children. 17 of the detainees were abducted in Hebron....[details follow]
http://www.imemc.org/article/61831?utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=e434f3a3c0-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
12) USAID halts aid to Gaza
AFP 12 Aug -- The US Agency for International Development is halting humanitarian assistance to the Gaza Strip over alleged meddling by the enclave's rulers, Hamas, a US official said Friday ... "We deeply regret that USAID-funded partner organisations operating in Gaza are forced by Hamas's actions to suspend their assistance work," the official said on condition of anonymity. "USAID assistance programs were put on hold effective August 12," he added ... Another official in Washington said he understood that Hamas has been demanding access to physically search files and records of NGOs, which would be unprecedented ... Hamas insisted on Friday that it should be able to verify the accounts of NGOs financed by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) in the Palestinian territories..It has since been restored.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/us-warns-hamas-could-pause-aid-official-141133718.html
13) Yearning for work in a Gaza under siege / Eva Bartlett
[photos] It’s a weekday morning, the beach is yet to fill with crowds seeking a break from the heat, but already the odd-jobbers are at work selling toys, clothes and food along the coast. Shariff Abu Kass, 27, walks the stretch of seaside in Sheik Rajleen every day from morning to evening with two armfuls of lightweight sports pants to sell. "I have two young children and no other work, so I do this every day. Usually I earn around 40 shekels (13 dollars) a day, but Fridays are better because so many come to the sea." ... In Gaza’s municipal park, Issa Ghoul, 19, sells chips and chocolates to park-goers to support his family. “I quit school and started working when I was 14. My father died when I was young and no one else works in my family,” says Ghoul. Many children younger than Ghoul zig-zag between cars at traffic stops selling one-shekel items like gum, cheap chocolates and fresh mint in order to add to their families’ incomes. "I can’t find any other jobs,” says Ghoul. "My mother is ill, my three-year-old sister is ill, what can I do but hope people will buy from me?" Most Palestinians take pride in their education, and Ghoul is no different, except that his impossible situation denied him the opportunity to study. "I would have liked to have finished school like everyone, I would have liked to have been a teacher." Update: Sources of fun dwindle for Gaza's children By Eva Bartlett, Gaza City, 10 August 2011
http://ingaza.wordpress.com/2011/08/12/yearning-for-work-in-gaza-under-siege/?utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=e434f3a3c0-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
Update:By Eva Bartlett, Gaza City, 15 August 2011 Throughout Gaza, children take on responsibilities of adults to help their families, and adults revert from skilled labor to doing nearly anything to bring in a salary.
http://electronicintifada.net/content/odd-jobs-help-gaza-families-scrape/10277
Update 2: Palestinian families in Gaza are keen for a change and some leisure activity in their lives encaged and under siege.
http://electronicintifada.net/content/sources-fun-dwindle-gazas-children/10253
14) Electricity crisis, heat disturb Ramadan atmosphere in Gaza
GAZA CITY (Xinhua) 12 Aug -- As soon as a hot summer day ends and the sun goes for sunset, dozens of Palestinian families set on the clean off-white sands of Gaza City's beach, not only for recuperation or enjoying a soft breeze, but also to break the fast of one of Ramadan month of fasting days. Going to Gaza seaside is like hitting two birds with one stone; first is to enjoy the beach and the less warm weather, and second is to avoid the daily ongoing electricity blackouts. The heat and the blackout had obliged the Gaza residents to temporarily flee their homes and go to Gaza beach.
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/indepth/2011-08/12/c_131046380.htm?utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=e434f3a3c0-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
15) Frustration simmers over Egypt-Gaza border closure / Jared Malsin
[with video] EI 11 Aug -- In late April, Egypt’s acting foreign minister Nabil el-Arabi promised to ease the closure of his country’s sole border crossing with the Gaza Strip, reversing years of policy set by the regime of former president Hosni Mubarak. But Palestinians in Gaza are still waiting for that promise to materialize.
http://electronicintifada.net/content/frustration-simmers-over-egypt-gaza-border-closure/10265?utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=e434f3a3c0-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
16) Israeli troops attack West Bank anti-Wall protests; 3 children injured
Ramallah – PNN - On Friday three children were injured and many were treated for the effects of tear gas inhalation as Israeli troops attacked anti-wall protests organized in a number of West Bank communities. Protests took place in the central West Bank villages of al-Nabi Salleh, Bil‘in, and Ni‘lin in addition to al-Ma‘ssara in the southern West Bank. Three children were lightly wounded as Israeli troops attacked the weekly anti-wall protest at the village of al-Ma‘sara, southern West Bank. As soon as people marched to the land where Israel is building the wall troops attacked people with rifle butts and batons injuring Abada Brijiyah, 11, Osama Brijiyah,9, and Hareth Brijiyah,10, witnesses reported.
http://english.pnn.ps/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=10583&Itemid=56&utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=e434f3a3c0-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
Update: Demonstration in Kafr Qaddum
QALQILIYA (Ma‘an) 12 Aug -- Palestinians inhaled tear gas which the Israeli forces shot to disperse the weekly demonstration in Kafr Qaddum east of Qalqiliya on Friday, activists and witnesses said. The demonstration started after Friday prayer toward the eastern entrance of the village. Eyewitnesses told Ma‘an the Israeli forces who were on the entrance fired tear gas toward the demonstrators. The grenades started a fire in the lands of the villagers which caused damage, they said.
http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=412661&utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=e434f3a3c0-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
Update 2: September rallies to avoid confronting Israel army
BETHLEHEM (Ma‘an) 12 Aug -- All rallies in support of the Palestinian bid for UN membership in September will be confined to areas where the Palestinian Authority has security control, thus avoiding confrontation with the Israeli army, high-ranking Palestinian Authority sources told Ma'an Thursday. "Ramallah rallies will be carried out in Manara square, Bethlehem rallies will be carried out in yard of the Nativity Church and so on," the sources said, adding "we will not give the [Israeli] occupation any excuse to abuse our children or to kill our residents." The locations are in the heart of urban areas that were designated "Area A" under the 1993 Oslo agreement -- and thus formally under full Palestinian Authority civil and security control, making up 17.2 percent of the West Bank.
http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=412593&utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=e434f3a3c0-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
Update 3: Land stolen from Bil'lin and partly returned by Supreme Court to be reclaimed. http://www.bilin-village.org/english/videos/8697-Land-Reclamation-Project-in-Bilin-After-the-Resiting-of-the-Apartheid-Wall?utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=6c411275a8-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
17) Hamas: Reconciliation committees will start in September
GAZA CITY (Ma‘an) 12 Aug -- Hamas leader Ismail Radwan said Friday that committees established to progress the reconciliation deal between his party and Fatah would not begin work until September ... Radwan told a Ma‘an correspondent in Gaza that only the issue of freeing political prisoners, imprisoned during the years of rivalry by factions in their respective territories, is set for conclusion by the end of the month.
http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=412604&utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=e434f3a3c0-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
Update: Fatah holding up reconciliation with Hamas to keep Western money.
http://www.haaretz.com/news/middle-east/fatah-hamas-reconciliation-stalls-over-palestinian-statehood-bid-1.379153
18) Trying to put a price on Middle East peace / Elizabeth Dwoskin
Business Week 11 Aug -- Israeli and Palestinian economists look for solutions in hard numbers -- In July 2002 a small group of Israeli and Palestinian economists sat down for a rare meeting in the idyllic French village of Aix-en-Provence. It was the height of the violent Palestinian uprising known as the Second Intifada ...The economists believed they could help. They concluded that translating the conflict into the data-driven language of economics might enable the two sides to cut through the rhetoric and begin to think dispassionately about the details of what peace would look like and cost in actual shekels. The leaders of the Aix Group, as it came to be known, were two economists -- a Palestinian and a Jewish Israeli ... In the decade since, despite spotty economic data and a political environment that changes month to month, they have slowly set about trying to put a price tag on peace. Every two years, Bamya and Arnon select a new problem for the group to sort out. They meet at least twice a year to discuss their findings. The future of the 5 million Palestinian refugees recognized by the United Nations was among the most difficult issues the group tackled.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/trying-to-put-a-price-on-middle-east-peace-08112011.html
19) The greatest elected body that money can buy / Stephen Walt
Foreign Police 11 Aug -- Just when you think your contempt for Congress could not get any higher, our elected representatives manage to do something to ratchet it up another notch. After congressional shenanigans helped spark a major market sell-off and sparked fears of a double-dip recession, you'd think every single one of them would be heading back to their districts to figure out what their constituents wanted and to try to explain how they were going to help make things better. Or maybe a few of them would even spend the recess taking a crash course in macroeconomics and public finance, so that they could start exercising their public duties more responsibly. But what did 81 of them decide to do instead? You guessed it: they are off on junkets to Israel, paid for by the American Israel Education Foundation, an AIPAC spinoff that has been funding such trips for years. That's right: during the August recess nearly a fifth of the U.S. Congress will visit a single country whose entire population is less than that of New York City.
http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/08/11/the_greatest_elected_body_that_money_can_buy?utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=e434f3a3c0-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
20) Hundreds of international activists at Nablus peace rally
NABLUS (Ma‘an) 12 Aug -- Hundreds of international activists descended on the northern West Bank city of Nablus on Thursday to hold a peace rally. Around 1,200 people from over 22 countries gathered in the city center, wearing white with peace written in Arabic, English and Hebrew emblazoned on their clothes. They sang songs about freedom and peace, raised Palestinian flags and were joined by Nablus governor Jibril Al-Bakri, his deputy Anan Al-Ateera, heads of security and local organization directors.
http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=412501&utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=e434f3a3c0-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
21) Israeli intelligence tried to recruit Al-Jazeera journalist
OCCUPIED JERUSALEM (PIC) 12 Aug -- Samer Allawi, who is detained by the Israeli occupation authorities said that the Israeli intelligence tried to recruit him but he refused and that he was threatened with being accused of something serious. Allawi, a Palestinian journalist who works as al-Jazeera’s correspondent in Afghanistan, was visited by the lawyer of the Palestinian Prisoners’ Society in Betah Tekva detention centre where he is being detained. Allawi told the lawyer that his detention is to do with his work as a journalist in Afghanistan and called on human rights organisations and international journalist bodies to pressure the Israeli occupation to release him ... He was detained on Tuesday at the Allenby Bridge on his way to Jordan after the end of a visit he made to his family in the village of Sabastya near Nablus.
http://www.palestine-info.co.uk/En/default.aspx?xyz=U6Qq7k%2bcO
22) Families of [PA] political prisoners rally in Hebron
HEBRON (Ma‘an) 12 Aug -- Relatives of political prisoners organized a sit-in and rally in the West Bank city of Hebron on Thursday, protesting an escalation in arrests by Palestinian Authority security forces. Hamas officials said the rally demanded the release of prisoners and an end to arrests, particularly as Palestinian factions meet in Cairo to discuss ending the politically motivated harassment ... "With each session of conciliation, arrests and summonses increase in the West Bank," said another protester. "It’s shameful how security departments chase after the participants of peaceful sit-ins." Children of several prisoners chained themselves together during the rally, which was attended by Palestinian lawmaker Samira Halayqa and other representatives of the Palestinian Legislative Council.
http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=412543&utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=e434f3a3c0-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
23) UNRWA operations in Jenin suspended indefinitely
JENIN (Ma‘an) 12 Aug -- UNRWA announced on Thursday the suspension of its operations indefinitely in the West Bank city of Jenin and its refugee camp beginning Friday. The organization called the step "regrettable" and said it came in response to "continued threats to our employees and staff in the area" without elaborating on the nature of the threats. The statement added that suspension of its operations includes relief and social services. An employment assistance office and the office of its refugee camp manager will also close.
http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=412510&utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=e434f3a3c0-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
Update: UNRWA suspends services in Jenin
JENIN (WAFA) 12 Aug -- A decision by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) to suspend services in the northern West Bank city of Jenin on Friday had upset local activists. Adnan Hindi, head of the popular services committee in Jenin refugee camp, condemned UNRWA’s decision, saying it was unjustified. UNRWA suspended its operations in the Jenin area refugee camps following allegation of threats received by its staff. It said that while it was suspending services as of Friday in most of its offices, this will not affect the health services. Hindi denied allegations that UNRWA staff had been threatened, stressing that UNRWA had been serving Jenin refugee camp and its 16,000 registered refugees for many years and no one had attempted to attack or harm its staff. He said, however, that camp residents have been complaining that UNRWA stopped hiring them through a special work fund that provides temporary jobs to thousands of refugees.
http://english.wafa.ps/index.php?action=detail&id=16972&utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=e434f3a3c0-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
24) Abbas tells US lawmakers: NATO role in Palestinian state
RAMALLAH (Ma‘an) 12 Aug -- Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas told visiting US Congressmen on Thursday that the security of the future Palestinian state will be handed to NATO under US command, his adviser said Friday. The Palestinian state must also be "empty of [Israeli] settlements," the President said, according to official Palestinian Authority news agency WAFA. Members of the US Congress and Senate delegation, headed by Democratic Senator Steny Hoyer, met with the President in Ramallah on Thursday, and quizzed Abbas on Israel's designation as a Jewish state, the status of refugees, and reconciliation between the President's Fatah party and rival Hamas, Presidential adviser Nimir Hamad said.
http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=412599&utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=e434f3a3c0-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
Update: Hizb ut-Tahrir accuses PLO of betrayal
RAMALLAH (Ma‘an) 13 Aug -- The Islamist Hizb ut-Tahrir movement has slammed as "betrayal" President Mahmoud Abbas' remarks about a possible NATO presence in a future Palestinian state. The president's "call for international forces would bring a new crusader occupation," the movement said Friday in a statement saying the plan would lead to "colonizing Palestine and desecrating the Al-Aqsa Mosque."
http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=412772&utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=d7be7fc726-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
25) Leader of Gaza youth group said arrested by Hamas authorities on return from France
http://electronicintifada.net/blog/ali-abunimah/leader-gaza-youth-group-said-arrested-hamas-authorities-return-france
26) Unexplained Gaza communications "blackout" highlights Israeli control of networks
http://electronicintifada.net/blog/benjamin-doherty/unexplained-gaza-communications-blackout-highlights-israeli-control-networks
27) French journal of record peddles Zionist propaganda
http://electronicintifada.net/blog/david/french-journal-record-peddles-zionist-propaganda
28) BDS activists in Israel stand with Australian counterparts facing repression
http://electronicintifada.net/blog/maureen/bds-activists-israel-stand-australian-counterparts-facing-repression
29) Sweden, Israel and the banalization of evil
http://electronicintifada.net/blog/david/sweden-israel-and-banalization-evil
30) Netanyahu imposes harsher conditions on Palestinian political prisoners
http://electronicintifada.net/blog/adri-nieuwhof/netanyahu-imposes-harsher-conditions-palestinian-political-prisoners
Update: Israel uses "primitive, racist" policies against Palestinian prisoners By Mel Frykberg, Ramallah, 11 August 2011
The conditions for Palestinians held without charge under administrative detention are harsh, just as they are for all political prisoners.
http://electronicintifada.net/content/israel-uses-primitive-racist-policies-against-palestinian-prisoners/10256
Update 2: Gazans vent anger as Israel deprives prisoners of education By Mohammed Omer, Gaza City, 12 August 2011
Access to education for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails is getting worse. The 1,800 Palestinian prisoners who were supposed to complete their secondary school exams were not permitted to do so by the Israeli Prison Service.
http://electronicintifada.net/content/gazans-vent-anger-israel-deprives-prisoners-education/10268
31) Irish activists plan protest aimed at Riverdance's upcoming performances in Israel
http://electronicintifada.net/blog/nora/irish-activists-plan-protest-aimed-riverdances-upcoming-performances-israel
32) Palestinian issues shouldn't be excluded from J14
http://electronicintifada.net/blog/jalal-abukhater/palestinian-issues-shouldnt-be-excluded-j14
33) AIPAC's European cousin evades scrutiny
http://electronicintifada.net/blog/david/aipacs-european-cousin-evades-scrutiny
34) Preserving Palestinian heritage one stitch at a time By Emily Lawrence, Hebron, 15 August 2011
Palestinian women in Hebron have formed a traditional handicrafts cooperative to preserve cultural heritage and provide stable income for dozens of families hit hard by the economic effects of Israel's occupation.
http://electronicintifada.net/content/preserving-palestinian-heritage-one-stitch-time/10273
35) Film review: women footballers struggle to play (and win) By Michelle Gyeney, 12 August 2011
Sawsan Qaoud documents how the idea for a Palestinian women's football team was brought to life -- and recounts the difficulties the players face on a regular basis just to play -- in Women in the Stadium.
http://electronicintifada.net/content/film-review-women-footballers-struggle-play-and-win/
36) US Senator want to cut US financial support to 3 Israeli Army units in West Bank guilty of crimes against Palestinians.
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/u-s-senator-seeks-to-cut-aid-to-elite-idf-units-operating-in-west-bank-and-gaza-1.378800
37) IDF raids same West Bank town 5 times in last 2 weeks / Alex Kane
Residents of Beit Ommar have already gotten used to military incursions and prevention of access to land, but some residents believe the increase in recent raids is connected to the army’s effort at deterrence ahead of the anticipated popular unrest in September -- Beit Ommar, West Bank 14 Aug -- The Islamic holy month of Ramadan is meant to be a time for reflection and spirituality. But for the 16,000 residents of this rural, agricultural village near Hebron in the occupied West Bank, it has been an unusually tense one. A spate of Israeli army raids at night and arrests of young Palestinians have occurred since the beginning of August, shattering any hope for calm during Ramadan ... Witnesses to the raids and local activists say that the Israeli army has been shooting tear gas, sound bombs and flares into residential areas -- in some cases causing injuries -- and have arrested fifteen young Palestinians under the age of eighteen this month ... "It just looked like a training exercise. It just looked like they were practicing coming into town tear gassing people back and practicing flares," said one international activist with the Palestine Solidarity Project (PSP) ... The Israeli army’s repression in the village has not been limited to night raids, though....
http://972mag.com/idf-raided-same-west-bank-town-5-times-in-last-2-weeks/?utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=d7be7fc726-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
Update: Israeli forces arrest 4 youth in dawn raids
Silwan, Jerusalem (SILWANIC) 13 Aug -- Israeli forces arrested 4 minors at dawn on 10 August. They are reported to have been charged with participation in demonstrations against Israeli policy in the district. The 4 arrested are brothers Mohammed Abu Sanad, 17, Alla Abu Sanad, 15, from al-Bustan neighborhood, and Ahmed Abu Nab, 17, from al-Ein al-Fouqa and Ameer al-Qaraeen from Wadi Hilweh
http://silwanic.net/?p=19054&utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=d7be7fc726-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
Update 2: Israeli forces build up heavy presence in Silwan
Silwan, Jerusalem (SILWANIC) 13 Aug -- A build-up of Israeli forces in Silwan has been underway since early this morning. Soldiers, deployed to all districts, have been reported to be harassing residents and stirring unrest. Several youth confronted troops this morning, with confrontations now erupting on a daily basis between local youth and Israeli forces. Tensions continue to mount as authorities pursue their policy of home demolition and settlement expansion in the region.
http://silwanic.net/?p=19052&utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=d7be7fc726-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
Updae 3: Israeli police arrest 3 children in Silwan
BETHLEHEM (Ma‘an) 14 Aug -- An undercover unit of the Israeli forces arrested two Palestinian children and one teenager from the Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan on Sunday, a local committee member and Israeli police spokesman said. Abed Al-Karim, member of a local Silwan committee which protects land from annexation, said that Israeli forces arrested Musellem Mousa Auda, 11, Mohamad Auda, 13, and Kathem Abu Shafee, 17. Undercover units raided Silwan at 11.30 a.m. on Sunday morning, Al-Karim told Ma‘an radio, arresting the three boys without providing any justification.
http://silwanic.net/?p=19052&utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=d7be7fc726-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
38) Night Video: Army invades Beit Ommar for third time in a week
2:44 minutes PSP 12 Aug -- At around 10pm on the night of the 11th August, the Israeli army once more invaded the town of Beit Ommar. Around eight jeeps and more than twelve soldiers entered the town and advanced along the main road, closing off the entrance to the village behind them, preventing residents returning to their homes. The soldiers proceeded to fire dozens of rounds of teargas into highly residential areas, accompanied by concussion grenades and flares. Several families inside their homes suffered the effects of teargas inhalation and required medical treatment, some being taken by ambulance to hospital in Hebron. The soldiers remained in the town until 1am, during which time they continued to fire rounds of teargas regularly. No arrests were made, and there remains no apparent reason for the raid. The Abu Maria family were one such household affected by the raid. Their family home was struck by two teargas canisters, forcing the family to flee the building with their 1-year-old son and 3-year-old daughter. The ground floor of their house remained uninhabitable for the night due to the lingering gas.
http://palestinesolidarityproject.org/2011/08/12/army-invades-beit-ommar-for-third-time-in-one-week/?utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=d7be7fc726-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
Update: VIDEO: One Palestinian arrested and beaten at Beit Ommar demonstration
6:28 minutes PSP 13 Aug -- Around 40 demonstrators – comprising residents of the village of Beit Ommar, and Israeli and international activists – gathered for a demonstration against the illegal Karmei Tsur settlement. The demonstrators, carrying flags and banners commemorating the anniversary of the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were met by a large and heavily armed military presence. As the protesters marched through Beit Ommar fields, the soldiers reacted violently, pushing several protesters to the ground, and others down steep rocky drops. After a short speech, the protesters decided to end their demonstration. At this point, local resident Sakhar Abu Maria was arrested by the military, for no apparent reason. He was then blindfolded for 20 minutes, placed in the back of a jeep, and driven to the Karmei Tsur settlement. Once there, he was beaten by soldiers, who threatened to raid his family home, and taunted him by repeatedly offering him food and drink after learning he was fasting for Ramadan, pouring glasses of coca cola and pushing them towards him. He was released after 90 minutes.
http://palestinesolidarityproject.org/2011/08/13/one-palestinian-arrested-and-beaten-at-beit-ommar-demonstration/?utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=d7be7fc726-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
39) Israeli forces conduct military training in Jordan Valley, continue harassing its residents
JENIN (WAFA) 14 Aug -- Israeli forces are conducting large-scale military training on Palestinian lands adjacent to residents’ houses in the northern Jordan Valley areas, in Tubas Governorate, Sunday said Ahmad Asaad, in charge of settlements file in Tubas. Witnesses said that Israeli artillery enforcements raided al-Boke’a area and al-Aqaba, a village in the valley, and carried out surveillance and inspection campaigns in addition to repeated extensive military trainings, which lead to the destruction of the infrastructure and fields as well as prevent shepherds from herding their cattle
http://english.wafa.ps/index.php?action=detail&id=16984&utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=d7be7fc726-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
40) Israel army plants new mines along Syria border
JERUSALEM (AP) 13 Aug -- Israel's army is planting new land mines along its border with Syria in an attempt to dissuade protesters from rushing into the Golan Heights, according to a report in an Israeli military magazine. The preparations come as part of Israel's beefed-up measures ahead of rallies that Palestinians are planning to hold in September, the magazine Ba'mahaneh reported over the weekend ... The army decided to go ahead with the move after older mines failed to detonate when the Syrians crossed in June, the magazine reported ... The magazine reported that the military was taking other measures, including reinforcing fences along the Golan border, increasing infantry troop numbers, posting more snipers and digging trenches.
http://old.news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110813/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_israel_syria?utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=d7be7fc726-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
Update: VIDEO: Lebanon's female cluster bomb disposal team
6:09 minutes Guardian 12 Aug -- Five years after the Israel-Hezbollah war, southern Lebanon is still riddled with thousands of unexploded cluster bombs. A group of extraordinary women is helping to rid the countryside of this deadly legacy - formerly teachers, nurses and housewives, they have been trained by the NGO Norwegian People's Aid to clear unexploded ordnance from the fields
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2011/aug/12/lebanon-cluster-bomb-disposal-video?utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=d7be7fc726-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
41) Otherwise Occupied: I'm not a cop but I play one in Jerusalem / Amira Hass
Haaretz 14 Aug -- In Walajeh, officially part of the capital, the IDF arrested a number of protesters, even though it did not have jurisdiction to act within the city ... Col. Alalouf and his soldiers apparently committed a double violation: sealing an area inside Jerusalem where they do not have jurisdiction, and arresting citizens inside the capital. The IDF spokesman: "The claim is being reviewed."
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/features/idf-forces-arrest-12-people-protesting-for-social-justice-in-west-bank-1.378662?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=d7be7fc726-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_source=Mondoweiss%20List
42) Gaza's sole power plant at risk of closure
GAZA CITY (Ma‘an) 14 Aug -- Gaza's electricity company may have to turn off the sole power station in the coastal enclave, a company official warned Sunday. Chief Executive Officer Walid Sad Sayel said the company would delay switching off the station until Sunday even though it needed repairs and should have been shut down on Wednesday. The company had reached an agreement with power authority officials in Gaza to delay the closure after the Hamas officials agreed to transfer $4 million to pay for spare parts, Sayel said in a statement. A further $1 million was needed to pay Ashdod port authorities to release the parts, Sayel added. He warned that if the clearance money wasn't paid in the coming hours, the generators would be shut off individually and the plant would be closed until the end of August. The electricity company official added that the management of Ashdod port were threatening to auction off the spare parts at the end of August if the storage bill and port fees for the equipment remained unpaid.
http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=413073&utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=d7be7fc726-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
43) 'UNRWA Watch' looks to improve refugee agency
GAZA CITY (Ma‘an) 13 Aug -- Palestinian academics and others have announced the establishment of a watchdog group to observe UNRWA’s performance in the Gaza Strip, the head of the body said Saturday. At a news conference in Gaza City, Hossam Adwan said 'UNRWA Watch' would prioritize observing the performance of the Palestine refugee agency with the hope of guaranteeing refugee rights. The committees are specializing in education, healthcare, the environment, housing, projects, emergency operations, relief projects, and works, Adwan explained. They will staff six offices throughout the enclave ... UNRWA has defended itself against a series of complaints and accusations in recent months, as staff joined strikes and the heads of the West Bank and Gaza Strip divisions resigned early this year.
http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=412854&utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=d7be7fc726-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
44) Israeli gunboats target Palestinian fishermen in Gaza
PalTelegraph 11 Aug -- Gaza Strip, (Pal Telegraph)-Israeli gunboats opened fire on Thursday morning at Palestinian fishing boats off the coast of central Gaza Strip. No injuries were reported. Local sources said that Israeli gunboats targeted Palestinian fishermen despite being in a close area off Gaza shores, forcing them to leave the sea in order not to be hurt by Israeli intensive fire.
http://www.paltelegraph.com/palestine/gaza-strip/9812-israeli-gunboats-target-palestinian-fishermen-in-gaza.html?utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=d7be7fc726-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
Update: Palestinians: Fisherman injured by Navy fire off Gaza coast
Ynet 15 Aug -- Palestinian sources reported that the Navy opened fire on a fishing boat off the Gaza Strip coast. According to the sources, a Palestinian fisherman was moderately injured in the incident, and was transferred to a local hospital. The IDF stated in response that the Navy fired a warning shot in the air, in order to ward off the boat.
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4109088,00.html?utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=6c411275a8-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
Update 2: Why Gaza doesn't need Monsanto's Wonder Seeds
Mother Jones 15 Aug -- ...So what are Palestinian farmers doing? According to The Guardian, they're turning to a technology that has been proven to conserve water, recycle crop nutrients, and generate robust yields: diversified organic agriculture ...Already, concrete steps are being made. According to The Guardian, Palestinian farmers are barred by the blockade from buying synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, which could be used to make explosives. All they have access from the import market is "fertilisers made from Israeli waste water run-off," which is expensive—$200 per metric ton—and of "uncertain safety." But a local initiative called Palestinian Environmental Friends (PEF) is generating a homegrown fertilizer from manure and crop waste collected from local farms. It costs just $100 per metric ton to make, and profits from it stay within Gaza. Farms are also solving the fertilizer problem by setting up closed-loop aquaculture/crop systems that recycle nutrients and generate bounties of food
http://motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2011/08/gaza-monsanto-wonder-seeds?utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=6c411275a8-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
45) In photos: Boycott activists rally in Ramallah
Ma‘an 12 Aug -- Protesters in Ramallah's Manara square call on businesses and shoppers to boycott Israeli goods, holding signs reading "Don't pay for their bullets" and "Boycott their goods, boycott their terrorism." The campaign is part of a nationwide effort throughout the occupied territories during Ramadan to educate Palestinians about local efforts to boycott Israeli products and what they can do to help.
link to www.maannews.net
46) VIDEO: BDS brides boycott SodaStream and Ahava sales at Bed Bath & Beyond
12 Aug -- In August, 2011 a group of concerned brides held a mock wedding inside Bed Bath & Beyond in Los Angeles, CA to affirm their commitment to peace, justice, and avow to boycott SodaStream and Ahava, both illegally-made Israeli settlement products. Do you cherish human rights? Sign the pledge to boycott at: www.stolenbeauty.org
http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=412531&utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=d7be7fc726-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
47) Free to be human: visit to the Aida refugee camp / Alexandra Salomon
AIC 13 Aug -- The Aida refugee camp lies between Bethlehem and Beit Jala, in Area A of the West Bank. The entrance to the camp is marked by an arch with a model of a large key propped on top. While it is difficult in most ways to differentiate between the refugee camp and its surrounding residential area, numerous plaques on the camp walls detail the villages from which the refugees came, the Israeli army units that displaced them and the number of residents exiled. We started the day, driving through the main checkpoint into Bethlehem. I observed the yellow sign warning 'No entrance to Israelis' with apprehension, but flashed my European passport like a seasoned pro, attempting not to betray the nervousness I felt inside. And then it hit me. It was like someone had just punched me in the stomach. The Separation Wall with all its weight bears down, the impact of everything it stands for immediate and overwhelming ...We were then taken to meet Faizeer, a woman who was about 12 years old when Israeli soldiers entered her village in 1948 and who now lives not far from the local UNRWA office. Faizeer is a survivor from the Ajjur village. Ajjur is now the site of the Jewish National Fund (JNF-KKL) British National park. For me, this word, survivor always had connotations attached to those who survived the Nazi holocaust in Europe. This was a new reality I was experiencing
http://www.alternativenews.org/english/index.php/topics/news/3740-free-to-be-human-visit-to-the-aida-refugee-camp-?utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=d7be7fc726-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
48) BDS action at Palestinian-Israeli controlled Bethlehem checkpoint / Emma Mancini
AIC 14 Aug -- Checkpoint 300, separating Bethlehem from Jerusalem, worsens. On the second Friday of Ramadan, Palestinian police join the Israeli army in controlling the movement of Palestinian residents from the Bethlehem district who are allowed to reach an armored Jerusalem and the Al Aqsa Mosque. In a shocking atmosphere of normalisation and uncritical acceptance, Palestinian policemen monitor the queue and communicate easily with the Israeli soldiers on the other side of the checkpoint. During Ramadan, the Palestinian security forces are the watchdog and perform the job usually done by Israeli forces ... A man, about 40 years old, bursts into tears while facing the Palestinian policemen: "I just want to pray in Al-Aqsa, I just want to pray freely".
link to www.alternativenews.orgisraeli-controlled-bethlehem-checkpoint-
49) UN bid coincides with Lebanese presidency
RAMALLAH (Ma‘an) 13 Aug -- The leadership in Ramallah chose to submit their bid for statehood in September to coincide with Lebanon's presidency of the UN Security Council, the Palestinian Authority foreign minister said Saturday. "We chose to submit it in September because the Lebanese envoy will be president of the Security Council and plays a pivotal role," Foreign Minister Riyad Al-Malki said. The minister told reporters at his office in Ramallah that President Mahmoud Abbas would submit the bid personally, adding that he would visit Lebanon on Tuesday to discuss the campaign.
http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=412878&utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=d7be7fc726-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
Update: West Bank: Palestinians determined to get more recognition
LA Times 13 Aug -- The Palestinian Authority is doubling its efforts to get as many countries to recognize it before September, when it plans to officially ask the United Nations for recognition and membership. Palestinian Authority Foreign Minister Riyad Malki said on Saturday that “we have made very important breakthroughs, but we need to do more and build on what we have achieved so far.” Malki was talking about 19 countries in Central America and the Caribbean who still have not made up their mind regarding recognition. He had recently visited most of these countries, including Caribbean Sea islands with a population not exceeding 45,000 people but nevertheless sovereign U.N. member states, in an attempt to persuade them to recognize Palestine as a state. He has to wait until the Caribbean Common Market and Community (CARICOM) and the Central American SICA group convene their joint meeting Aug. 19 before he gets their final answer. So far, the situation does not look good since El Salvador, seat of SICA, has refused to place Palestine’s request on its agenda, nor invited the Palestinian Authority to attend the meeting.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/babylonbeyond/2011/08/west-bank-palestinians-determined-to-get-more-recognitions.html?utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=d7be7fc726-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
Update 2: Ambassador: Abbas to discuss UN bid in Beirut
BEIRUT (Ma‘an) -14 Aug -- President Mahmoud Abbas will coordinate efforts to seek membership of the UN during his upcoming visit to Lebanon, Palestinian ambassador in Beirut Abdullah Abdullah said ... Abbas' visit is important as Lebanon will take over presidency of the UN Security Council in September, when Palestinians will submit their bid for membership of the world body, the ambassador said. Abdullah said the issue of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon should also be discussed during the president's visit. "We respect Lebanese sovereignty […] The Palestinian presence in Lebanon is indeed temporary and we are determined to return back.
link to www.maannews.net http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=413074&utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=d7be7fc726-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
50) Israel refuses to apologize to Turkey for murdering its citizens on the Mavi Marmara.
http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/lieberman-israel-s-rejection-of-apology-to-turkey-came-too-late-1.379178
Update: Turkey says no improvement of ties to Israel if Israel refuses to apologize
http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/turkey-pm-israel-ties-won-t-improve-without-apology-for-gaza-flotilla-raid-1.379145
51) Hamas will not allow students to leave Gaza to study in the USA.
http://www.haaretz.com/news/middle-east/hamas-bans-gaza-students-from-studying-in-u-s-1.379169
52) Living hell in Tel Rumeida / Alessandra Bajec
[photos] PNN 15 Aug -- ...Guiding me along the path, Hashem stopped before the access to his house noting that, between 2000 and 2007, that passage was totally blocked by military order forcing him to go via a steep climb in order to reach his home. While his wife was pregnant, Hashem had to carry her from up down that climb and put her in an ambulance to make it to the hospital. Four years ago, the main path was opened under some interesting circumstances. At that time, Hashem’s father had passed away, and holding a funeral there or inviting relatives and friends was sadly out of question, given the obstructed access to his home. Hashem then called on internationals and media to join his family and help, some of the activists were prevented to go but others managed. After carrying the father’s body down the steep path to the main street, Hashem and his supporters proceeded to a checkpoint where Israeli troops detained him for an hour and a half, and scanned the dead body. When Hashem was then let through the checkpoint, an electronic device rang and the soldiers ordered him to turn back, so he was held up for another half an hour and his father’s body was scanned again. One of the soldiers finally noticed the father had a watch around his wrist so, with the back of his gun, he destroyed the watch and also broke the bones of the dead body. Following that incident the Israeli army, to stop Hashem from filing a complaint against the soldier, ‘awarded’ him by opening the regular access to his home.
[long article, much of it nearly unbelievable - in any sane place, that is.]
http://english.pnn.ps/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=10594&Itemid=56&utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=6c411275a8-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
53) Reading "Anne Frank" in Gaza
http://electronicintifada.net/blog/mohammed-suliman/reading-anne-frank-gaza
54) Why was the PA hosting American Kabbalah tourists in Nablus? By Michelle Gyeney, Nablus, 17 August 2011
The Palestinian Authority cooperated with Israeli forces to host a fabricated “Peace and Freedom Day” rally in Nablus, while prohibiting local Palestinian tour guides from discussing politics with Kabbalist tourists from the US.
http://electronicintifada.net/content/why-was-pa-hosting-american-kabbalah-tourists-nablus/10285
55) Donors help keep Palestinians in cages By Charlotte Silver, Ramallah, 16 August 2011
International aid donors are using Palestine as a laboratory for a neo-liberal economic experiment.
http://electronicintifada.net/content/donors-help-keep-palestinians-cages/10283
56) UK bans Israeli settler rabbi who called for killing of non-Jews By Asa Winstanley, London, 15 August 2011
The UK has banned Rabbi Yosef Elitzur, who has incited the murder of non-Jews, including civilians and children from coming to the country. But the timing is curious.
http://electronicintifada.net/content/uk-bans-israeli-settler-rabbi-who-called-killing-non-jews/10280
57) Adam Keller on how the terrorist atttack in the Sinai helps Netanyahu avoid the big issues.
http://adam-keller2.blogspot.com/2011/08/changed-agenda.html
Update: Egypt closes Rafah crossing
GAZA CITY (Ma‘an) 18 Aug 18:58 -- The interior ministry in the Gaza Strip said Thursday that Egyptian authorities have closed the Rafah crossing amid a sharp increase in violence in Gaza and southern Israel. [End]
lhttp://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=414226&utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=e0eab95958-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
Update 2: Army bombards Rafah killing six Palestinians; child killed in Gaza City
IMEMC 18 Aug 20:51 -- Palestinian medical sources in the Gaza Strip reported on Thursday evening that six Palestinians, including a senior resistance leader, and a child, were killed when the Israeli Air Force fired missiles into a home in Rafah, in the southern part of the Gaza Strip. A child was also killed and five residents were injured when the army bombarded Gaza City. The sources stated that the Israeli Air Force fired a missile at the house of one of the leaders of the Popular Resistance Committees in Al Sho’outh neighborhood in Rafah, killing six Palestinians. Three of them are leaders of the Popular Resistance committees, while one of the three was identified as Awad An-Nairab, the Secretary-General of the Committees. Adham Abu Salmiyya, spokesperson of the Emergency and Medical Services in Gaza, reported that the bodies of four of the slain residents were severely mutilated due to the blast, and that one of them is a 2-year-old child. Besides An-Nairab, the slain residents were identified as Imad Hammad, leader of the Salah Ed-Deen Brigades, Khaled Shaath, and his son Malak, 2 years old, Imad Nassr, and Khaled Al Masry. In another Israeli military escalation, a 13-year-old child was killed, and 18 other civilians were injured when the army bombarded several areas in northern Gaza and in Gaza City. The child was identified as Mahmoud Abu Samra. [Photo of Mahmoud in school] Children and women were among the wounded; they were all moved to the Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza.
http://www.imemc.org/article/61854?utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=e0eab95958-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
Update 3: Video of Gazans carrying victims to ambulances amid fire and wreckage from bombing 18 Aug
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdPLmjA3pL4&feature=channel_video_title&utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=e0eab95958-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
Update 4: Initial photos of the bombing in Gaza tonight
uploaded about 5am 19 Aug -- Muaz Khaled -- These photos of the Israeli bombing of civilian homes in the Gaza Strip -- 1 child was killed more than 15 injured
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.143940412361477.36940.100002365566031
Update 5: Victims of Israeli strike on Gaza - in pictures
[WARNING: graphic!] Uruknet 18 Aug -- Six Palestinians were killed and two injured on Thursday in an Israeli airstrike, targeting a house in Al- Shauth, a neighborhood in Rafah, south of the Gaza Strip, according to witnesses. Medical sources said that six Palestinians arrived to Abu Yousef al-Najjar hospital dead; bodies of four of them were torn into pieces.
http://www.uruknet.info/?new=80602&utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=e0eab95958-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
Update 6: More on Israel retaliation
http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/30-rockets-strike-israel-day-after-coordinated-terror-attacks-kill-8-1.379518
Update 7: Arab League condemns Israel's strikes on Gaza which killed 15 including children.
http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/arab-league-condemns-israel-air-strikes-on-gaza-1.379838
Update 8: Cease fire agreed by militant groups in Gaza and Israel.
http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/hamas-gaza-militant-groups-agree-to-cease-fire-with-israel-1.379852
Update 9: Israel must not escalate violence in Gaza. Hamas was not responsible for the terrorist attacks, but will fight back.
http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/netanyahu-must-not-escalate-the-situation-in-the-south-1.379818
Update 10: Uri Avnery on the significance of the terror attacks in the Sinai onIsraeli politics. Does it give netanyahu an out from the social problems of Israel?
http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1313774705/
58) Best analysis I have seen of Israeli protests, their origins, their goals, their failures, and their possible futures.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/4/Social-Origins-of-the-Tent-by-Max-Ajl-110819-999.html
59) One "social democratic" candidate for leadership of Labour is an Israeli Zionist with no conscience.
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/labor-s-shelly-yachimovich-represents-the-fake-left-1.379751
1) Israel's anti-boycott law.
http://www.haaretz.com/blogs/strenger-than-fiction/the-boycott-law-and-bullshit-1.373465"http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
http://www.haaretz.com/blogs/strenger-than-fiction/the-boycott-law-and-bullshit-1.373465
Update: How the anti-boycott law has led to greater attention to the boycott.
http://adam-keller2.blogspot.com/2011/07/balaams-curse-2011.html
2) New settlement construction, intended to cut off Jerusalem from the West Bank, will end chance of of peace.
http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/palestinians-ariel-construction-destroys-remnants-of-peace-efforts-1.378762">http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/palestinians-ariel-construction-destroys-remnants-of-phttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifeace-efforts-1.378762">http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/palestinians-ariel-construction-destroys-remnants-of-peace-efforts-1.378762
Update: US issues words to condemn Ariel construction, but no deeds.
http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/u-s-israeli-construction-in-ariel-deeply-troubling-1.378781"
http://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif
Update 2: Envoy: World must act against 'colonization campaign'
BETHLEHEM (Ma‘an) 12 Aug -- Palestinian Ambassador to the UN Riyad Mansour on Friday urged the international community to compel Israel to end its colonization campaign if it really believes in thhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gife two-state solution, reports said. In letters to the UN secretary-general and the presidents of the Security Council and the General Assembly, Mansour said "the international community must compel Israel to end its illegal occupation," a Kuwaiti news outlet reported. This includes Israel's "colonization campaign and must seriously begin to take further effective measures to end the Israeli occupation which began in 1967 to salvage the possibility of the two-state solution." The letter came in reaction to Israel's "arrogant" and "shameless" announcement to develop 1,600 settlement units in East Jerusalem
http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=412717&utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=e434f3a3c0-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
Update 3: Quartet condemns Israel's illegal building in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/mideast-quartet-greatly-concerned-by-israel-s-recent-settlement-plans-1.378948
3) In Israel, it you justify hitting Palestinians you control, you get promoted.
http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/idf-promotes-colonel-who-justified-hitting-palehttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gifstinian-detainees-1.378749
4) Can Israelis have social justice and the Occupation of Palestine?
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/israel-s-social-protesters-mustn-t-forget-the-occupation-1.378512
5) Netanyahu plans to punish the Palestinians for declaring that they are a state.
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/israel-will-use-palestinian-un-bid-to-restore-status-quo-1.378664
6) Nabi Saleh consumed with raids while fasting http://palsolidarity.org/2011/08/19743/?utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=e434f3a3c0-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
ISM posted 11 Aug -- Following the unusually short demonstration on the first Friday of Ramadan, the Israeli army raided the village of Nabi Saleh just before Iftar, the Muslim time for breaking fast during Ramadan, resulting in the detaining of a 14 year old boy for approximately two hours and an excessive amount of tear gas in the village ...Manal Tamimi’s child was sleeping in the living room alone where he inhaled a large amount of tear gas for half an hour resulting in him vomiting for over an hour while the army was still in the village. Tamimi states in an interview with ISM that she was scared of the thought that she may have been outside of her home, visiting her mother, and no one would have heard the scream of her child. Without her presence at home, she says, this invasion might have ended with a fatality within her family.
Update: Videohttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif interview with Manal Tamimi: They try to steal our history, not just our land
ISM posted 11 Aug -- The demonstrations in Nabi Saleh started the 21 of November 2009, after the illegal settlement of Halamish expanded, costing locals in land and their source of water for home and agricultural use, a spring declared holy by the settlers ... More then 220 people have been injured since the beginning of their peaceful resistance to illegal Israeli occupation of their land. Some of the injured include an 11 year old boy who was shot with a rubber coated steel bullet in his head and is still paralyzed. http://palsolidarity.org/2011/08/19747/?utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=e434f3a3c0-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
Update 2: Throwing rocks at the occupation -- and Western prejudice too
By Linah Alsaafin, Nabi Saleh, 11 August 2011
I asked a few Nabi Saleh children why they throw rocks. Their responses were simple: We don't want the army here.
http://electronicintifada.net/content/throwing-rocks-occupation-and-western-prejudice-too/10263
7) Area C feels the effects of Israel's power
The Australian 13 Aug -- ONLY 5km separates the offices of two mayors on one of the planet's most contested pieces of land, but they may as well be at opposite ends of the earth. Next month, the 193 countries of the UN are set to vote on a Palestinian state. Any decision will not be binding on Israel but any pressure point that does arise will be here, in the heart of the West Bank's "Area C", which is deemed under the Oslo accords to be under full Israeli control ... David Elhaiini is a Jewish settler who is Mayor of the Jordan Valley Regional Council, which covers 21 settlements ... Area C amounts to 60 per cent of the West Bank. Israel has complete power over which Palestinian homes will be built or demolished in the area. Far more Palestinian homes are demolished than approved. Asked what he thinks about the demolitions, Elhaiini replies: "I believe in law." ... Palestinian Mayor Abed Kassab says when Israel took control of his village, Jiftlik, in 1967, the population was more than 25,000. It is now 5,000. He gives a range of reasons: lack of water and electricity; Israelis killing some of the villagers' animals; Israelis taking sheep from villagers, putting them into Jewish settlements and presenting the villagers with fees for feeding them.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/area-c-feels-the-effects-of-israels-power/story-e6frg6so-1226114006692?utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=e434f3a3c0-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
8) Racism in the Galilee Part 1: Caging in Palestinians / Sophie Crowe
PalMon 11 Aug -- Many Palestinians have been forced to leave Nazareth, the primary Palestinian city in Israel, and its satellite villages due to the absence of planning and lack of resources allotted by the government, which prohibits development and results in overcrowding. ... Upper Nazareth, the fastest growing town in the north of the country, illustrates clearly the disparity in development of Israeli and Palestinian towns. The largely Jewish city is home to fifty thousand people and was able to quadruple in size since its establishment in the late fifties by appropriating surrounding lands. According to a 2010 report by Middle East Monitor, a British-based news source, the number of Jews living in thehttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif Galilee tripled between the sixties and nineties. ‘The whole city is built on land confiscated from the Palestinians of Nazareth,’ explains Sawsan Zaher, a lawyer with Adalah, a Palestinian rights NGO. Nazareth has seventy thousand people living on half the area of land as the new city and is prevented from expanding. The new town flourishes and thrives at the expense of the original Palestinian one and its villages, which are in contraction.
http://www.palestinemonitor.org/?p=1415&utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=e434f3a3c0-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
Update: Racism rampant among Israeli youth. http://electronicintifada.net/content/video-survey-racism-rampant-among-israeli-youth/10286?utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=63d2de8e2e-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
9) On patrol in the streets of Hebron
PalMon 10 Aug -- A car stops in front of a house in Beit Hadassah, a part of the Israeli settlement inside the Old City of Hebron. Three settlers get out. Observers from Temporary International Presence in the City of Hebron (TIPH) stand nearby and watch closely. This is part of TIPH’s daily foot patrol of the city. In Hebron, settler violence could strike any time. Settlers are steadily expanding into new parts of Hebron, Per Enerud, an observer with TIPH says. Due to the Israeli occupation of the area, many Palestinian families have been forced out of their homes and shops and cannot return to their land. Settlers then move into their vacant property. Standing on the hillside with a good view of the Israeli settlement, Enerud points out a group of Israeli children playing on top of anhttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif empty building. While seemingly harmless, Enerud explains, this is a new method of the same, aggressive settler expansion that’s been happening in Hebron since 1967. "Even though the deed to the house is Palestinian," Enerud says, "the settlers build their way into the empty houses."
http://www.palestinemonitor.org/?p=1393
10) Fanatic Jewish settlers regularly attack Palestinians at iftar time
AL-KHALIL/HEBRON (PIC) 12 Aug -- Fanatic Jewish settlers attacked Palestinian homes in the old city in al-Khalil on Wednesday evening for the second time in two days. The attacks take place when families gather at sunset to break their fast (Iftar) ...A Palestinian resident who lives at Jabal al-Rahma said that a group of settlers from the Yeshai settlement crossed lands belonging to local residents, threw stones at Palestinian homes in the vicinity and chanted anti-Arab slogans. Meanwhile, settlers in Tel al-Rumaida attacked the home of Muhammad Abu Eisheh with stones and destroyed a support wall belonging to the family of Sayyed Ahmad.
http://www.palestine-info.co.uk/En/default.aspx?xyz=U6Qq7k%2
Update: Increased Palestinian displacement as Israeli settler violence intensifies
AIC 15 Aug -- As dozens of Israeli MKs petition Netanyahu to endorse increased settlement construction in the West Bank to address the Israeli housing crisis and the surrounding tent protests, Israeli settlement policy continues to perpetuate a housing crisis of a very different sort in the Palestinian territory. Over the past seven months, nearly 900 Palestinians have been displaced from their homes, as opposed to 606 during the whole of 2010. 755 of those were displaced due to home demolitions, while the remaining 127 were forced from their homes due to settler violence ... While settlers are burning Palestinian crops, damaging property, and throwing rocks at shepherds and children, the Israeli government is using a system of permitting processes, military zones, and fines to prevent Palestinians from establishing any structural claim to their own land.
http://www.alternativenews.org/english/index.php/topics/settlers-violence/3744-increased-palestinian-displacement-as-israeli-settler-violence-intensifies?utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=6c411275a8-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
Update 2: Israeli settler violence report, May-June 2011
AIC 15 Aug -- By Ahmad Jaradat & Nikki Hodgson -- During the months of May and June, settler attacks against Palestinian civilians continued, with most of the attacks targeting agriculture land in the northern West Bank. The attacks, including damage to agriculture property, burning of olive trees and destruction of wheat crops, appear to be systematically targeting land near settlements, and many Palestinian farmers fear that the settlers are organizing attacks in order to confiscate land for the expansion of settlements in the West Bank. Numerous attacks also occurred in Hebron, resulting in at least three Palestinians needing medical attention, including a six-year-old boy. Details:
http://www.alternativenews.org/english/index.php/topics/settlers-violence/3745-israeli-settler-violence-report-may-june-2011-?utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=6c411275a8-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
11 PCHR weekly report : Israeli forces injure 3, abduct 35 Palestinians this week
IMEMC 12 Aug -- In its Weekly Report On Israeli Human Rights Violations in the Occupied Palestinian Territories for the week of 04-10 Aug. 2011, Israeli forces wounded three Palestinians with gunfire, and injured dozens more with tear gas at non-violent demonstrations. One of those injured was a Palestinian woman herding sheep in Gaza. The Israeli troops also killed some of her sheep. Two Palestinian resistance fighters were wounded by Israeli forces in the east of Gaza City. Israeli warplanes bombarded a number of civilian facilities in the Gaza Strip. Two bird farms were completely destroyed and a third one was damaged, 500 chickens were killed and a room was destroyed. Israeli attacks in the West Bank: Israeli forces conducted 31 incursions into Palestinian communities in the West Bank, during which they abducted 31 Palestinian civilians, including 5 children. 17 of the detainees were abducted in Hebron....[details follow]
http://www.imemc.org/article/61831?utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=e434f3a3c0-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
12) USAID halts aid to Gaza
AFP 12 Aug -- The US Agency for International Development is halting humanitarian assistance to the Gaza Strip over alleged meddling by the enclave's rulers, Hamas, a US official said Friday ... "We deeply regret that USAID-funded partner organisations operating in Gaza are forced by Hamas's actions to suspend their assistance work," the official said on condition of anonymity. "USAID assistance programs were put on hold effective August 12," he added ... Another official in Washington said he understood that Hamas has been demanding access to physically search files and records of NGOs, which would be unprecedented ... Hamas insisted on Friday that it should be able to verify the accounts of NGOs financed by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) in the Palestinian territories..It has since been restored.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/us-warns-hamas-could-pause-aid-official-141133718.html
13) Yearning for work in a Gaza under siege / Eva Bartlett
[photos] It’s a weekday morning, the beach is yet to fill with crowds seeking a break from the heat, but already the odd-jobbers are at work selling toys, clothes and food along the coast. Shariff Abu Kass, 27, walks the stretch of seaside in Sheik Rajleen every day from morning to evening with two armfuls of lightweight sports pants to sell. "I have two young children and no other work, so I do this every day. Usually I earn around 40 shekels (13 dollars) a day, but Fridays are better because so many come to the sea." ... In Gaza’s municipal park, Issa Ghoul, 19, sells chips and chocolates to park-goers to support his family. “I quit school and started working when I was 14. My father died when I was young and no one else works in my family,” says Ghoul. Many children younger than Ghoul zig-zag between cars at traffic stops selling one-shekel items like gum, cheap chocolates and fresh mint in order to add to their families’ incomes. "I can’t find any other jobs,” says Ghoul. "My mother is ill, my three-year-old sister is ill, what can I do but hope people will buy from me?" Most Palestinians take pride in their education, and Ghoul is no different, except that his impossible situation denied him the opportunity to study. "I would have liked to have finished school like everyone, I would have liked to have been a teacher." Update: Sources of fun dwindle for Gaza's children By Eva Bartlett, Gaza City, 10 August 2011
http://ingaza.wordpress.com/2011/08/12/yearning-for-work-in-gaza-under-siege/?utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=e434f3a3c0-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
Update:By Eva Bartlett, Gaza City, 15 August 2011 Throughout Gaza, children take on responsibilities of adults to help their families, and adults revert from skilled labor to doing nearly anything to bring in a salary.
http://electronicintifada.net/content/odd-jobs-help-gaza-families-scrape/10277
Update 2: Palestinian families in Gaza are keen for a change and some leisure activity in their lives encaged and under siege.
http://electronicintifada.net/content/sources-fun-dwindle-gazas-children/10253
14) Electricity crisis, heat disturb Ramadan atmosphere in Gaza
GAZA CITY (Xinhua) 12 Aug -- As soon as a hot summer day ends and the sun goes for sunset, dozens of Palestinian families set on the clean off-white sands of Gaza City's beach, not only for recuperation or enjoying a soft breeze, but also to break the fast of one of Ramadan month of fasting days. Going to Gaza seaside is like hitting two birds with one stone; first is to enjoy the beach and the less warm weather, and second is to avoid the daily ongoing electricity blackouts. The heat and the blackout had obliged the Gaza residents to temporarily flee their homes and go to Gaza beach.
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english2010/indepth/2011-08/12/c_131046380.htm?utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=e434f3a3c0-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
15) Frustration simmers over Egypt-Gaza border closure / Jared Malsin
[with video] EI 11 Aug -- In late April, Egypt’s acting foreign minister Nabil el-Arabi promised to ease the closure of his country’s sole border crossing with the Gaza Strip, reversing years of policy set by the regime of former president Hosni Mubarak. But Palestinians in Gaza are still waiting for that promise to materialize.
http://electronicintifada.net/content/frustration-simmers-over-egypt-gaza-border-closure/10265?utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=e434f3a3c0-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
16) Israeli troops attack West Bank anti-Wall protests; 3 children injured
Ramallah – PNN - On Friday three children were injured and many were treated for the effects of tear gas inhalation as Israeli troops attacked anti-wall protests organized in a number of West Bank communities. Protests took place in the central West Bank villages of al-Nabi Salleh, Bil‘in, and Ni‘lin in addition to al-Ma‘ssara in the southern West Bank. Three children were lightly wounded as Israeli troops attacked the weekly anti-wall protest at the village of al-Ma‘sara, southern West Bank. As soon as people marched to the land where Israel is building the wall troops attacked people with rifle butts and batons injuring Abada Brijiyah, 11, Osama Brijiyah,9, and Hareth Brijiyah,10, witnesses reported.
http://english.pnn.ps/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=10583&Itemid=56&utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=e434f3a3c0-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
Update: Demonstration in Kafr Qaddum
QALQILIYA (Ma‘an) 12 Aug -- Palestinians inhaled tear gas which the Israeli forces shot to disperse the weekly demonstration in Kafr Qaddum east of Qalqiliya on Friday, activists and witnesses said. The demonstration started after Friday prayer toward the eastern entrance of the village. Eyewitnesses told Ma‘an the Israeli forces who were on the entrance fired tear gas toward the demonstrators. The grenades started a fire in the lands of the villagers which caused damage, they said.
http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=412661&utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=e434f3a3c0-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
Update 2: September rallies to avoid confronting Israel army
BETHLEHEM (Ma‘an) 12 Aug -- All rallies in support of the Palestinian bid for UN membership in September will be confined to areas where the Palestinian Authority has security control, thus avoiding confrontation with the Israeli army, high-ranking Palestinian Authority sources told Ma'an Thursday. "Ramallah rallies will be carried out in Manara square, Bethlehem rallies will be carried out in yard of the Nativity Church and so on," the sources said, adding "we will not give the [Israeli] occupation any excuse to abuse our children or to kill our residents." The locations are in the heart of urban areas that were designated "Area A" under the 1993 Oslo agreement -- and thus formally under full Palestinian Authority civil and security control, making up 17.2 percent of the West Bank.
http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=412593&utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=e434f3a3c0-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
Update 3: Land stolen from Bil'lin and partly returned by Supreme Court to be reclaimed. http://www.bilin-village.org/english/videos/8697-Land-Reclamation-Project-in-Bilin-After-the-Resiting-of-the-Apartheid-Wall?utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=6c411275a8-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
17) Hamas: Reconciliation committees will start in September
GAZA CITY (Ma‘an) 12 Aug -- Hamas leader Ismail Radwan said Friday that committees established to progress the reconciliation deal between his party and Fatah would not begin work until September ... Radwan told a Ma‘an correspondent in Gaza that only the issue of freeing political prisoners, imprisoned during the years of rivalry by factions in their respective territories, is set for conclusion by the end of the month.
http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=412604&utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=e434f3a3c0-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
Update: Fatah holding up reconciliation with Hamas to keep Western money.
http://www.haaretz.com/news/middle-east/fatah-hamas-reconciliation-stalls-over-palestinian-statehood-bid-1.379153
18) Trying to put a price on Middle East peace / Elizabeth Dwoskin
Business Week 11 Aug -- Israeli and Palestinian economists look for solutions in hard numbers -- In July 2002 a small group of Israeli and Palestinian economists sat down for a rare meeting in the idyllic French village of Aix-en-Provence. It was the height of the violent Palestinian uprising known as the Second Intifada ...The economists believed they could help. They concluded that translating the conflict into the data-driven language of economics might enable the two sides to cut through the rhetoric and begin to think dispassionately about the details of what peace would look like and cost in actual shekels. The leaders of the Aix Group, as it came to be known, were two economists -- a Palestinian and a Jewish Israeli ... In the decade since, despite spotty economic data and a political environment that changes month to month, they have slowly set about trying to put a price tag on peace. Every two years, Bamya and Arnon select a new problem for the group to sort out. They meet at least twice a year to discuss their findings. The future of the 5 million Palestinian refugees recognized by the United Nations was among the most difficult issues the group tackled.
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/trying-to-put-a-price-on-middle-east-peace-08112011.html
19) The greatest elected body that money can buy / Stephen Walt
Foreign Police 11 Aug -- Just when you think your contempt for Congress could not get any higher, our elected representatives manage to do something to ratchet it up another notch. After congressional shenanigans helped spark a major market sell-off and sparked fears of a double-dip recession, you'd think every single one of them would be heading back to their districts to figure out what their constituents wanted and to try to explain how they were going to help make things better. Or maybe a few of them would even spend the recess taking a crash course in macroeconomics and public finance, so that they could start exercising their public duties more responsibly. But what did 81 of them decide to do instead? You guessed it: they are off on junkets to Israel, paid for by the American Israel Education Foundation, an AIPAC spinoff that has been funding such trips for years. That's right: during the August recess nearly a fifth of the U.S. Congress will visit a single country whose entire population is less than that of New York City.
http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/08/11/the_greatest_elected_body_that_money_can_buy?utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=e434f3a3c0-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
20) Hundreds of international activists at Nablus peace rally
NABLUS (Ma‘an) 12 Aug -- Hundreds of international activists descended on the northern West Bank city of Nablus on Thursday to hold a peace rally. Around 1,200 people from over 22 countries gathered in the city center, wearing white with peace written in Arabic, English and Hebrew emblazoned on their clothes. They sang songs about freedom and peace, raised Palestinian flags and were joined by Nablus governor Jibril Al-Bakri, his deputy Anan Al-Ateera, heads of security and local organization directors.
http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=412501&utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=e434f3a3c0-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
21) Israeli intelligence tried to recruit Al-Jazeera journalist
OCCUPIED JERUSALEM (PIC) 12 Aug -- Samer Allawi, who is detained by the Israeli occupation authorities said that the Israeli intelligence tried to recruit him but he refused and that he was threatened with being accused of something serious. Allawi, a Palestinian journalist who works as al-Jazeera’s correspondent in Afghanistan, was visited by the lawyer of the Palestinian Prisoners’ Society in Betah Tekva detention centre where he is being detained. Allawi told the lawyer that his detention is to do with his work as a journalist in Afghanistan and called on human rights organisations and international journalist bodies to pressure the Israeli occupation to release him ... He was detained on Tuesday at the Allenby Bridge on his way to Jordan after the end of a visit he made to his family in the village of Sabastya near Nablus.
http://www.palestine-info.co.uk/En/default.aspx?xyz=U6Qq7k%2bcO
22) Families of [PA] political prisoners rally in Hebron
HEBRON (Ma‘an) 12 Aug -- Relatives of political prisoners organized a sit-in and rally in the West Bank city of Hebron on Thursday, protesting an escalation in arrests by Palestinian Authority security forces. Hamas officials said the rally demanded the release of prisoners and an end to arrests, particularly as Palestinian factions meet in Cairo to discuss ending the politically motivated harassment ... "With each session of conciliation, arrests and summonses increase in the West Bank," said another protester. "It’s shameful how security departments chase after the participants of peaceful sit-ins." Children of several prisoners chained themselves together during the rally, which was attended by Palestinian lawmaker Samira Halayqa and other representatives of the Palestinian Legislative Council.
http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=412543&utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=e434f3a3c0-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
23) UNRWA operations in Jenin suspended indefinitely
JENIN (Ma‘an) 12 Aug -- UNRWA announced on Thursday the suspension of its operations indefinitely in the West Bank city of Jenin and its refugee camp beginning Friday. The organization called the step "regrettable" and said it came in response to "continued threats to our employees and staff in the area" without elaborating on the nature of the threats. The statement added that suspension of its operations includes relief and social services. An employment assistance office and the office of its refugee camp manager will also close.
http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=412510&utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=e434f3a3c0-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
Update: UNRWA suspends services in Jenin
JENIN (WAFA) 12 Aug -- A decision by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) to suspend services in the northern West Bank city of Jenin on Friday had upset local activists. Adnan Hindi, head of the popular services committee in Jenin refugee camp, condemned UNRWA’s decision, saying it was unjustified. UNRWA suspended its operations in the Jenin area refugee camps following allegation of threats received by its staff. It said that while it was suspending services as of Friday in most of its offices, this will not affect the health services. Hindi denied allegations that UNRWA staff had been threatened, stressing that UNRWA had been serving Jenin refugee camp and its 16,000 registered refugees for many years and no one had attempted to attack or harm its staff. He said, however, that camp residents have been complaining that UNRWA stopped hiring them through a special work fund that provides temporary jobs to thousands of refugees.
http://english.wafa.ps/index.php?action=detail&id=16972&utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=e434f3a3c0-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
24) Abbas tells US lawmakers: NATO role in Palestinian state
RAMALLAH (Ma‘an) 12 Aug -- Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas told visiting US Congressmen on Thursday that the security of the future Palestinian state will be handed to NATO under US command, his adviser said Friday. The Palestinian state must also be "empty of [Israeli] settlements," the President said, according to official Palestinian Authority news agency WAFA. Members of the US Congress and Senate delegation, headed by Democratic Senator Steny Hoyer, met with the President in Ramallah on Thursday, and quizzed Abbas on Israel's designation as a Jewish state, the status of refugees, and reconciliation between the President's Fatah party and rival Hamas, Presidential adviser Nimir Hamad said.
http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=412599&utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=e434f3a3c0-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
Update: Hizb ut-Tahrir accuses PLO of betrayal
RAMALLAH (Ma‘an) 13 Aug -- The Islamist Hizb ut-Tahrir movement has slammed as "betrayal" President Mahmoud Abbas' remarks about a possible NATO presence in a future Palestinian state. The president's "call for international forces would bring a new crusader occupation," the movement said Friday in a statement saying the plan would lead to "colonizing Palestine and desecrating the Al-Aqsa Mosque."
http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=412772&utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=d7be7fc726-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
25) Leader of Gaza youth group said arrested by Hamas authorities on return from France
http://electronicintifada.net/blog/ali-abunimah/leader-gaza-youth-group-said-arrested-hamas-authorities-return-france
26) Unexplained Gaza communications "blackout" highlights Israeli control of networks
http://electronicintifada.net/blog/benjamin-doherty/unexplained-gaza-communications-blackout-highlights-israeli-control-networks
27) French journal of record peddles Zionist propaganda
http://electronicintifada.net/blog/david/french-journal-record-peddles-zionist-propaganda
28) BDS activists in Israel stand with Australian counterparts facing repression
http://electronicintifada.net/blog/maureen/bds-activists-israel-stand-australian-counterparts-facing-repression
29) Sweden, Israel and the banalization of evil
http://electronicintifada.net/blog/david/sweden-israel-and-banalization-evil
30) Netanyahu imposes harsher conditions on Palestinian political prisoners
http://electronicintifada.net/blog/adri-nieuwhof/netanyahu-imposes-harsher-conditions-palestinian-political-prisoners
Update: Israel uses "primitive, racist" policies against Palestinian prisoners By Mel Frykberg, Ramallah, 11 August 2011
The conditions for Palestinians held without charge under administrative detention are harsh, just as they are for all political prisoners.
http://electronicintifada.net/content/israel-uses-primitive-racist-policies-against-palestinian-prisoners/10256
Update 2: Gazans vent anger as Israel deprives prisoners of education By Mohammed Omer, Gaza City, 12 August 2011
Access to education for Palestinian prisoners in Israeli jails is getting worse. The 1,800 Palestinian prisoners who were supposed to complete their secondary school exams were not permitted to do so by the Israeli Prison Service.
http://electronicintifada.net/content/gazans-vent-anger-israel-deprives-prisoners-education/10268
31) Irish activists plan protest aimed at Riverdance's upcoming performances in Israel
http://electronicintifada.net/blog/nora/irish-activists-plan-protest-aimed-riverdances-upcoming-performances-israel
32) Palestinian issues shouldn't be excluded from J14
http://electronicintifada.net/blog/jalal-abukhater/palestinian-issues-shouldnt-be-excluded-j14
33) AIPAC's European cousin evades scrutiny
http://electronicintifada.net/blog/david/aipacs-european-cousin-evades-scrutiny
34) Preserving Palestinian heritage one stitch at a time By Emily Lawrence, Hebron, 15 August 2011
Palestinian women in Hebron have formed a traditional handicrafts cooperative to preserve cultural heritage and provide stable income for dozens of families hit hard by the economic effects of Israel's occupation.
http://electronicintifada.net/content/preserving-palestinian-heritage-one-stitch-time/10273
35) Film review: women footballers struggle to play (and win) By Michelle Gyeney, 12 August 2011
Sawsan Qaoud documents how the idea for a Palestinian women's football team was brought to life -- and recounts the difficulties the players face on a regular basis just to play -- in Women in the Stadium.
http://electronicintifada.net/content/film-review-women-footballers-struggle-play-and-win/
36) US Senator want to cut US financial support to 3 Israeli Army units in West Bank guilty of crimes against Palestinians.
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/u-s-senator-seeks-to-cut-aid-to-elite-idf-units-operating-in-west-bank-and-gaza-1.378800
37) IDF raids same West Bank town 5 times in last 2 weeks / Alex Kane
Residents of Beit Ommar have already gotten used to military incursions and prevention of access to land, but some residents believe the increase in recent raids is connected to the army’s effort at deterrence ahead of the anticipated popular unrest in September -- Beit Ommar, West Bank 14 Aug -- The Islamic holy month of Ramadan is meant to be a time for reflection and spirituality. But for the 16,000 residents of this rural, agricultural village near Hebron in the occupied West Bank, it has been an unusually tense one. A spate of Israeli army raids at night and arrests of young Palestinians have occurred since the beginning of August, shattering any hope for calm during Ramadan ... Witnesses to the raids and local activists say that the Israeli army has been shooting tear gas, sound bombs and flares into residential areas -- in some cases causing injuries -- and have arrested fifteen young Palestinians under the age of eighteen this month ... "It just looked like a training exercise. It just looked like they were practicing coming into town tear gassing people back and practicing flares," said one international activist with the Palestine Solidarity Project (PSP) ... The Israeli army’s repression in the village has not been limited to night raids, though....
http://972mag.com/idf-raided-same-west-bank-town-5-times-in-last-2-weeks/?utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=d7be7fc726-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
Update: Israeli forces arrest 4 youth in dawn raids
Silwan, Jerusalem (SILWANIC) 13 Aug -- Israeli forces arrested 4 minors at dawn on 10 August. They are reported to have been charged with participation in demonstrations against Israeli policy in the district. The 4 arrested are brothers Mohammed Abu Sanad, 17, Alla Abu Sanad, 15, from al-Bustan neighborhood, and Ahmed Abu Nab, 17, from al-Ein al-Fouqa and Ameer al-Qaraeen from Wadi Hilweh
http://silwanic.net/?p=19054&utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=d7be7fc726-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
Update 2: Israeli forces build up heavy presence in Silwan
Silwan, Jerusalem (SILWANIC) 13 Aug -- A build-up of Israeli forces in Silwan has been underway since early this morning. Soldiers, deployed to all districts, have been reported to be harassing residents and stirring unrest. Several youth confronted troops this morning, with confrontations now erupting on a daily basis between local youth and Israeli forces. Tensions continue to mount as authorities pursue their policy of home demolition and settlement expansion in the region.
http://silwanic.net/?p=19052&utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=d7be7fc726-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
Updae 3: Israeli police arrest 3 children in Silwan
BETHLEHEM (Ma‘an) 14 Aug -- An undercover unit of the Israeli forces arrested two Palestinian children and one teenager from the Jerusalem neighborhood of Silwan on Sunday, a local committee member and Israeli police spokesman said. Abed Al-Karim, member of a local Silwan committee which protects land from annexation, said that Israeli forces arrested Musellem Mousa Auda, 11, Mohamad Auda, 13, and Kathem Abu Shafee, 17. Undercover units raided Silwan at 11.30 a.m. on Sunday morning, Al-Karim told Ma‘an radio, arresting the three boys without providing any justification.
http://silwanic.net/?p=19052&utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=d7be7fc726-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
38) Night Video: Army invades Beit Ommar for third time in a week
2:44 minutes PSP 12 Aug -- At around 10pm on the night of the 11th August, the Israeli army once more invaded the town of Beit Ommar. Around eight jeeps and more than twelve soldiers entered the town and advanced along the main road, closing off the entrance to the village behind them, preventing residents returning to their homes. The soldiers proceeded to fire dozens of rounds of teargas into highly residential areas, accompanied by concussion grenades and flares. Several families inside their homes suffered the effects of teargas inhalation and required medical treatment, some being taken by ambulance to hospital in Hebron. The soldiers remained in the town until 1am, during which time they continued to fire rounds of teargas regularly. No arrests were made, and there remains no apparent reason for the raid. The Abu Maria family were one such household affected by the raid. Their family home was struck by two teargas canisters, forcing the family to flee the building with their 1-year-old son and 3-year-old daughter. The ground floor of their house remained uninhabitable for the night due to the lingering gas.
http://palestinesolidarityproject.org/2011/08/12/army-invades-beit-ommar-for-third-time-in-one-week/?utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=d7be7fc726-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
Update: VIDEO: One Palestinian arrested and beaten at Beit Ommar demonstration
6:28 minutes PSP 13 Aug -- Around 40 demonstrators – comprising residents of the village of Beit Ommar, and Israeli and international activists – gathered for a demonstration against the illegal Karmei Tsur settlement. The demonstrators, carrying flags and banners commemorating the anniversary of the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, were met by a large and heavily armed military presence. As the protesters marched through Beit Ommar fields, the soldiers reacted violently, pushing several protesters to the ground, and others down steep rocky drops. After a short speech, the protesters decided to end their demonstration. At this point, local resident Sakhar Abu Maria was arrested by the military, for no apparent reason. He was then blindfolded for 20 minutes, placed in the back of a jeep, and driven to the Karmei Tsur settlement. Once there, he was beaten by soldiers, who threatened to raid his family home, and taunted him by repeatedly offering him food and drink after learning he was fasting for Ramadan, pouring glasses of coca cola and pushing them towards him. He was released after 90 minutes.
http://palestinesolidarityproject.org/2011/08/13/one-palestinian-arrested-and-beaten-at-beit-ommar-demonstration/?utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=d7be7fc726-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
39) Israeli forces conduct military training in Jordan Valley, continue harassing its residents
JENIN (WAFA) 14 Aug -- Israeli forces are conducting large-scale military training on Palestinian lands adjacent to residents’ houses in the northern Jordan Valley areas, in Tubas Governorate, Sunday said Ahmad Asaad, in charge of settlements file in Tubas. Witnesses said that Israeli artillery enforcements raided al-Boke’a area and al-Aqaba, a village in the valley, and carried out surveillance and inspection campaigns in addition to repeated extensive military trainings, which lead to the destruction of the infrastructure and fields as well as prevent shepherds from herding their cattle
http://english.wafa.ps/index.php?action=detail&id=16984&utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=d7be7fc726-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
40) Israel army plants new mines along Syria border
JERUSALEM (AP) 13 Aug -- Israel's army is planting new land mines along its border with Syria in an attempt to dissuade protesters from rushing into the Golan Heights, according to a report in an Israeli military magazine. The preparations come as part of Israel's beefed-up measures ahead of rallies that Palestinians are planning to hold in September, the magazine Ba'mahaneh reported over the weekend ... The army decided to go ahead with the move after older mines failed to detonate when the Syrians crossed in June, the magazine reported ... The magazine reported that the military was taking other measures, including reinforcing fences along the Golan border, increasing infantry troop numbers, posting more snipers and digging trenches.
http://old.news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20110813/ap_on_re_mi_ea/ml_israel_syria?utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=d7be7fc726-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
Update: VIDEO: Lebanon's female cluster bomb disposal team
6:09 minutes Guardian 12 Aug -- Five years after the Israel-Hezbollah war, southern Lebanon is still riddled with thousands of unexploded cluster bombs. A group of extraordinary women is helping to rid the countryside of this deadly legacy - formerly teachers, nurses and housewives, they have been trained by the NGO Norwegian People's Aid to clear unexploded ordnance from the fields
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/video/2011/aug/12/lebanon-cluster-bomb-disposal-video?utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=d7be7fc726-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
41) Otherwise Occupied: I'm not a cop but I play one in Jerusalem / Amira Hass
Haaretz 14 Aug -- In Walajeh, officially part of the capital, the IDF arrested a number of protesters, even though it did not have jurisdiction to act within the city ... Col. Alalouf and his soldiers apparently committed a double violation: sealing an area inside Jerusalem where they do not have jurisdiction, and arresting citizens inside the capital. The IDF spokesman: "The claim is being reviewed."
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/features/idf-forces-arrest-12-people-protesting-for-social-justice-in-west-bank-1.378662?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=d7be7fc726-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_source=Mondoweiss%20List
42) Gaza's sole power plant at risk of closure
GAZA CITY (Ma‘an) 14 Aug -- Gaza's electricity company may have to turn off the sole power station in the coastal enclave, a company official warned Sunday. Chief Executive Officer Walid Sad Sayel said the company would delay switching off the station until Sunday even though it needed repairs and should have been shut down on Wednesday. The company had reached an agreement with power authority officials in Gaza to delay the closure after the Hamas officials agreed to transfer $4 million to pay for spare parts, Sayel said in a statement. A further $1 million was needed to pay Ashdod port authorities to release the parts, Sayel added. He warned that if the clearance money wasn't paid in the coming hours, the generators would be shut off individually and the plant would be closed until the end of August. The electricity company official added that the management of Ashdod port were threatening to auction off the spare parts at the end of August if the storage bill and port fees for the equipment remained unpaid.
http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=413073&utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=d7be7fc726-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
43) 'UNRWA Watch' looks to improve refugee agency
GAZA CITY (Ma‘an) 13 Aug -- Palestinian academics and others have announced the establishment of a watchdog group to observe UNRWA’s performance in the Gaza Strip, the head of the body said Saturday. At a news conference in Gaza City, Hossam Adwan said 'UNRWA Watch' would prioritize observing the performance of the Palestine refugee agency with the hope of guaranteeing refugee rights. The committees are specializing in education, healthcare, the environment, housing, projects, emergency operations, relief projects, and works, Adwan explained. They will staff six offices throughout the enclave ... UNRWA has defended itself against a series of complaints and accusations in recent months, as staff joined strikes and the heads of the West Bank and Gaza Strip divisions resigned early this year.
http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=412854&utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=d7be7fc726-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
44) Israeli gunboats target Palestinian fishermen in Gaza
PalTelegraph 11 Aug -- Gaza Strip, (Pal Telegraph)-Israeli gunboats opened fire on Thursday morning at Palestinian fishing boats off the coast of central Gaza Strip. No injuries were reported. Local sources said that Israeli gunboats targeted Palestinian fishermen despite being in a close area off Gaza shores, forcing them to leave the sea in order not to be hurt by Israeli intensive fire.
http://www.paltelegraph.com/palestine/gaza-strip/9812-israeli-gunboats-target-palestinian-fishermen-in-gaza.html?utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=d7be7fc726-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
Update: Palestinians: Fisherman injured by Navy fire off Gaza coast
Ynet 15 Aug -- Palestinian sources reported that the Navy opened fire on a fishing boat off the Gaza Strip coast. According to the sources, a Palestinian fisherman was moderately injured in the incident, and was transferred to a local hospital. The IDF stated in response that the Navy fired a warning shot in the air, in order to ward off the boat.
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4109088,00.html?utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=6c411275a8-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
Update 2: Why Gaza doesn't need Monsanto's Wonder Seeds
Mother Jones 15 Aug -- ...So what are Palestinian farmers doing? According to The Guardian, they're turning to a technology that has been proven to conserve water, recycle crop nutrients, and generate robust yields: diversified organic agriculture ...Already, concrete steps are being made. According to The Guardian, Palestinian farmers are barred by the blockade from buying synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, which could be used to make explosives. All they have access from the import market is "fertilisers made from Israeli waste water run-off," which is expensive—$200 per metric ton—and of "uncertain safety." But a local initiative called Palestinian Environmental Friends (PEF) is generating a homegrown fertilizer from manure and crop waste collected from local farms. It costs just $100 per metric ton to make, and profits from it stay within Gaza. Farms are also solving the fertilizer problem by setting up closed-loop aquaculture/crop systems that recycle nutrients and generate bounties of food
http://motherjones.com/tom-philpott/2011/08/gaza-monsanto-wonder-seeds?utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=6c411275a8-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
45) In photos: Boycott activists rally in Ramallah
Ma‘an 12 Aug -- Protesters in Ramallah's Manara square call on businesses and shoppers to boycott Israeli goods, holding signs reading "Don't pay for their bullets" and "Boycott their goods, boycott their terrorism." The campaign is part of a nationwide effort throughout the occupied territories during Ramadan to educate Palestinians about local efforts to boycott Israeli products and what they can do to help.
link to www.maannews.net
46) VIDEO: BDS brides boycott SodaStream and Ahava sales at Bed Bath & Beyond
12 Aug -- In August, 2011 a group of concerned brides held a mock wedding inside Bed Bath & Beyond in Los Angeles, CA to affirm their commitment to peace, justice, and avow to boycott SodaStream and Ahava, both illegally-made Israeli settlement products. Do you cherish human rights? Sign the pledge to boycott at: www.stolenbeauty.org
http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=412531&utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=d7be7fc726-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
47) Free to be human: visit to the Aida refugee camp / Alexandra Salomon
AIC 13 Aug -- The Aida refugee camp lies between Bethlehem and Beit Jala, in Area A of the West Bank. The entrance to the camp is marked by an arch with a model of a large key propped on top. While it is difficult in most ways to differentiate between the refugee camp and its surrounding residential area, numerous plaques on the camp walls detail the villages from which the refugees came, the Israeli army units that displaced them and the number of residents exiled. We started the day, driving through the main checkpoint into Bethlehem. I observed the yellow sign warning 'No entrance to Israelis' with apprehension, but flashed my European passport like a seasoned pro, attempting not to betray the nervousness I felt inside. And then it hit me. It was like someone had just punched me in the stomach. The Separation Wall with all its weight bears down, the impact of everything it stands for immediate and overwhelming ...We were then taken to meet Faizeer, a woman who was about 12 years old when Israeli soldiers entered her village in 1948 and who now lives not far from the local UNRWA office. Faizeer is a survivor from the Ajjur village. Ajjur is now the site of the Jewish National Fund (JNF-KKL) British National park. For me, this word, survivor always had connotations attached to those who survived the Nazi holocaust in Europe. This was a new reality I was experiencing
http://www.alternativenews.org/english/index.php/topics/news/3740-free-to-be-human-visit-to-the-aida-refugee-camp-?utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=d7be7fc726-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
48) BDS action at Palestinian-Israeli controlled Bethlehem checkpoint / Emma Mancini
AIC 14 Aug -- Checkpoint 300, separating Bethlehem from Jerusalem, worsens. On the second Friday of Ramadan, Palestinian police join the Israeli army in controlling the movement of Palestinian residents from the Bethlehem district who are allowed to reach an armored Jerusalem and the Al Aqsa Mosque. In a shocking atmosphere of normalisation and uncritical acceptance, Palestinian policemen monitor the queue and communicate easily with the Israeli soldiers on the other side of the checkpoint. During Ramadan, the Palestinian security forces are the watchdog and perform the job usually done by Israeli forces ... A man, about 40 years old, bursts into tears while facing the Palestinian policemen: "I just want to pray in Al-Aqsa, I just want to pray freely".
link to www.alternativenews.orgisraeli-controlled-bethlehem-checkpoint-
49) UN bid coincides with Lebanese presidency
RAMALLAH (Ma‘an) 13 Aug -- The leadership in Ramallah chose to submit their bid for statehood in September to coincide with Lebanon's presidency of the UN Security Council, the Palestinian Authority foreign minister said Saturday. "We chose to submit it in September because the Lebanese envoy will be president of the Security Council and plays a pivotal role," Foreign Minister Riyad Al-Malki said. The minister told reporters at his office in Ramallah that President Mahmoud Abbas would submit the bid personally, adding that he would visit Lebanon on Tuesday to discuss the campaign.
http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=412878&utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=d7be7fc726-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
Update: West Bank: Palestinians determined to get more recognition
LA Times 13 Aug -- The Palestinian Authority is doubling its efforts to get as many countries to recognize it before September, when it plans to officially ask the United Nations for recognition and membership. Palestinian Authority Foreign Minister Riyad Malki said on Saturday that “we have made very important breakthroughs, but we need to do more and build on what we have achieved so far.” Malki was talking about 19 countries in Central America and the Caribbean who still have not made up their mind regarding recognition. He had recently visited most of these countries, including Caribbean Sea islands with a population not exceeding 45,000 people but nevertheless sovereign U.N. member states, in an attempt to persuade them to recognize Palestine as a state. He has to wait until the Caribbean Common Market and Community (CARICOM) and the Central American SICA group convene their joint meeting Aug. 19 before he gets their final answer. So far, the situation does not look good since El Salvador, seat of SICA, has refused to place Palestine’s request on its agenda, nor invited the Palestinian Authority to attend the meeting.
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/babylonbeyond/2011/08/west-bank-palestinians-determined-to-get-more-recognitions.html?utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=d7be7fc726-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
Update 2: Ambassador: Abbas to discuss UN bid in Beirut
BEIRUT (Ma‘an) -14 Aug -- President Mahmoud Abbas will coordinate efforts to seek membership of the UN during his upcoming visit to Lebanon, Palestinian ambassador in Beirut Abdullah Abdullah said ... Abbas' visit is important as Lebanon will take over presidency of the UN Security Council in September, when Palestinians will submit their bid for membership of the world body, the ambassador said. Abdullah said the issue of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon should also be discussed during the president's visit. "We respect Lebanese sovereignty […] The Palestinian presence in Lebanon is indeed temporary and we are determined to return back.
link to www.maannews.net http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=413074&utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=d7be7fc726-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
50) Israel refuses to apologize to Turkey for murdering its citizens on the Mavi Marmara.
http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/lieberman-israel-s-rejection-of-apology-to-turkey-came-too-late-1.379178
Update: Turkey says no improvement of ties to Israel if Israel refuses to apologize
http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/turkey-pm-israel-ties-won-t-improve-without-apology-for-gaza-flotilla-raid-1.379145
51) Hamas will not allow students to leave Gaza to study in the USA.
http://www.haaretz.com/news/middle-east/hamas-bans-gaza-students-from-studying-in-u-s-1.379169
52) Living hell in Tel Rumeida / Alessandra Bajec
[photos] PNN 15 Aug -- ...Guiding me along the path, Hashem stopped before the access to his house noting that, between 2000 and 2007, that passage was totally blocked by military order forcing him to go via a steep climb in order to reach his home. While his wife was pregnant, Hashem had to carry her from up down that climb and put her in an ambulance to make it to the hospital. Four years ago, the main path was opened under some interesting circumstances. At that time, Hashem’s father had passed away, and holding a funeral there or inviting relatives and friends was sadly out of question, given the obstructed access to his home. Hashem then called on internationals and media to join his family and help, some of the activists were prevented to go but others managed. After carrying the father’s body down the steep path to the main street, Hashem and his supporters proceeded to a checkpoint where Israeli troops detained him for an hour and a half, and scanned the dead body. When Hashem was then let through the checkpoint, an electronic device rang and the soldiers ordered him to turn back, so he was held up for another half an hour and his father’s body was scanned again. One of the soldiers finally noticed the father had a watch around his wrist so, with the back of his gun, he destroyed the watch and also broke the bones of the dead body. Following that incident the Israeli army, to stop Hashem from filing a complaint against the soldier, ‘awarded’ him by opening the regular access to his home.
[long article, much of it nearly unbelievable - in any sane place, that is.]
http://english.pnn.ps/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=10594&Itemid=56&utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=6c411275a8-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
53) Reading "Anne Frank" in Gaza
http://electronicintifada.net/blog/mohammed-suliman/reading-anne-frank-gaza
54) Why was the PA hosting American Kabbalah tourists in Nablus? By Michelle Gyeney, Nablus, 17 August 2011
The Palestinian Authority cooperated with Israeli forces to host a fabricated “Peace and Freedom Day” rally in Nablus, while prohibiting local Palestinian tour guides from discussing politics with Kabbalist tourists from the US.
http://electronicintifada.net/content/why-was-pa-hosting-american-kabbalah-tourists-nablus/10285
55) Donors help keep Palestinians in cages By Charlotte Silver, Ramallah, 16 August 2011
International aid donors are using Palestine as a laboratory for a neo-liberal economic experiment.
http://electronicintifada.net/content/donors-help-keep-palestinians-cages/10283
56) UK bans Israeli settler rabbi who called for killing of non-Jews By Asa Winstanley, London, 15 August 2011
The UK has banned Rabbi Yosef Elitzur, who has incited the murder of non-Jews, including civilians and children from coming to the country. But the timing is curious.
http://electronicintifada.net/content/uk-bans-israeli-settler-rabbi-who-called-killing-non-jews/10280
57) Adam Keller on how the terrorist atttack in the Sinai helps Netanyahu avoid the big issues.
http://adam-keller2.blogspot.com/2011/08/changed-agenda.html
Update: Egypt closes Rafah crossing
GAZA CITY (Ma‘an) 18 Aug 18:58 -- The interior ministry in the Gaza Strip said Thursday that Egyptian authorities have closed the Rafah crossing amid a sharp increase in violence in Gaza and southern Israel. [End]
lhttp://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=414226&utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=e0eab95958-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
Update 2: Army bombards Rafah killing six Palestinians; child killed in Gaza City
IMEMC 18 Aug 20:51 -- Palestinian medical sources in the Gaza Strip reported on Thursday evening that six Palestinians, including a senior resistance leader, and a child, were killed when the Israeli Air Force fired missiles into a home in Rafah, in the southern part of the Gaza Strip. A child was also killed and five residents were injured when the army bombarded Gaza City. The sources stated that the Israeli Air Force fired a missile at the house of one of the leaders of the Popular Resistance Committees in Al Sho’outh neighborhood in Rafah, killing six Palestinians. Three of them are leaders of the Popular Resistance committees, while one of the three was identified as Awad An-Nairab, the Secretary-General of the Committees. Adham Abu Salmiyya, spokesperson of the Emergency and Medical Services in Gaza, reported that the bodies of four of the slain residents were severely mutilated due to the blast, and that one of them is a 2-year-old child. Besides An-Nairab, the slain residents were identified as Imad Hammad, leader of the Salah Ed-Deen Brigades, Khaled Shaath, and his son Malak, 2 years old, Imad Nassr, and Khaled Al Masry. In another Israeli military escalation, a 13-year-old child was killed, and 18 other civilians were injured when the army bombarded several areas in northern Gaza and in Gaza City. The child was identified as Mahmoud Abu Samra. [Photo of Mahmoud in school] Children and women were among the wounded; they were all moved to the Al Shifa Hospital in Gaza.
http://www.imemc.org/article/61854?utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=e0eab95958-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
Update 3: Video of Gazans carrying victims to ambulances amid fire and wreckage from bombing 18 Aug
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdPLmjA3pL4&feature=channel_video_title&utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=e0eab95958-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
Update 4: Initial photos of the bombing in Gaza tonight
uploaded about 5am 19 Aug -- Muaz Khaled -- These photos of the Israeli bombing of civilian homes in the Gaza Strip -- 1 child was killed more than 15 injured
https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.143940412361477.36940.100002365566031
Update 5: Victims of Israeli strike on Gaza - in pictures
[WARNING: graphic!] Uruknet 18 Aug -- Six Palestinians were killed and two injured on Thursday in an Israeli airstrike, targeting a house in Al- Shauth, a neighborhood in Rafah, south of the Gaza Strip, according to witnesses. Medical sources said that six Palestinians arrived to Abu Yousef al-Najjar hospital dead; bodies of four of them were torn into pieces.
http://www.uruknet.info/?new=80602&utm_source=Mondoweiss+List&utm_campaign=e0eab95958-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email
Update 6: More on Israel retaliation
http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/30-rockets-strike-israel-day-after-coordinated-terror-attacks-kill-8-1.379518
Update 7: Arab League condemns Israel's strikes on Gaza which killed 15 including children.
http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/arab-league-condemns-israel-air-strikes-on-gaza-1.379838
Update 8: Cease fire agreed by militant groups in Gaza and Israel.
http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/hamas-gaza-militant-groups-agree-to-cease-fire-with-israel-1.379852
Update 9: Israel must not escalate violence in Gaza. Hamas was not responsible for the terrorist attacks, but will fight back.
http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/netanyahu-must-not-escalate-the-situation-in-the-south-1.379818
Update 10: Uri Avnery on the significance of the terror attacks in the Sinai onIsraeli politics. Does it give netanyahu an out from the social problems of Israel?
http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery/1313774705/
58) Best analysis I have seen of Israeli protests, their origins, their goals, their failures, and their possible futures.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/4/Social-Origins-of-the-Tent-by-Max-Ajl-110819-999.html
59) One "social democratic" candidate for leadership of Labour is an Israeli Zionist with no conscience.
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/labor-s-shelly-yachimovich-represents-the-fake-left-1.379751
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