Mission & Justice

11/5/08

A power plant in Gaza City has shut down, affecting 500,000 local inhabitants and forcing local hospitals to run on reserve fuel. Large parts of the Gaza Strip, particularly Gaza City, were in darkness after the main power station shut down its generators on Saturday. The Hamas government’s energy department said that about 55 per cent of Gaza City and 35 per cent of the territory’s other areas had power outages as a result of the shutdown. With hospital generators running out of fuel, it is feared that medical equipment will stop functioning soon.

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Malcolm Fraser; 10/5/08

US President George Bush claims that it is possible for Israel and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to negotiate the establishment of a Palestinian state before the end of this year. That ignores the realities of the current situation, which Bush has done a good deal to exacerbate. It is a fact that Israel has persistently established more and more settlements on the West Bank and that it has ignored the US and the UN Security Council, which have continuously branded these settlements, together with settlements in East Jerusalem, as illegal. However, the US has not exerted real pressure to stop them and the process continues. Through most of my life I have believed that Israel was a beacon of hope. But somewhere Israel’s leadership lost its way.

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Nadav Shragai; 10/5/08

Some 100 settlers on late Thursday infiltrated the ruins of the evacuated West Bank settlement of Sa-Nur, in a stated attempt to rebuild it. Protesters were evacuated by security forces shortly after they entered. This was the first time that settlers have staged such a move at Sa-Nur since Israel’s 2005 pullout from the Gaza Strip and part of the northern West Bank, in which the settlement was evacuated. The Israel Defense Forces was preparing to evacuate the group, who belonged to an organization called “Homesh - the beginning.” Over the past year, Homesh - the beginning activists have mounted repeated bids to resettle Homesh, another settlement also evacuated in the 2005 pullout, which was titled the “Disengagement.”

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Michael Shaik & Antony Loewenstein  8/5/08 - 

Michael is the public advocate for Australians for Palestine; Antony is a journalist and co-founder of Independent Australian Jewish Voices.

If you will it,” wrote Theodore Herzl, the founding father of the Zionist movement, in 1902, “it is no dream.” The dream to which he referred was the establishment of a Jewish state in the Arab country of Palestine.To realise the dream, he insisted, the Jews must be willing to seize the reigns of history by renouncing the classical Jewish tradition of pacifism and collaborating with European anti-Semites who supported the Zionist movement as a means of ridding Europe of its “Jewish problem”.

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Alistair Lyon; 8/5/08

While Israel celebrates its 60th birthday, Palestinian refugees mourn the 1948 Nakbeh (catastrophe) when they lost their homeland. Often ignored in Middle East peace talks, they cling to a “right of return”. Alia Shabati was 12 when she fled Jewish attacks on her village of Kabri, occupied a few days after Israel’s creation. Now a matron of 72, wearing a flowery blue dress and white headscarf, her memories of Kabri in today’s northern Israel are vividly intact, unlike the village, which was wiped off the map. “We had houses and land,” Shabati said in the living room of her modest dwelling in the alleys of Beirut’s Burj Al Barajneh refugee camp. “We had olives, grapes, prickly pears and dates. We had orchards and fields. Now what do we have? Nothing.”

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Omar; 8/5/08

In two weeks, my wife will bring our child into the world. The unborn baby is happy now, nestled within its mother’s womb and somewhat protected from the violence and suffering that exists in Gaza. I am naturally worried for mother and child. When she delivered our last child, my wife developed several medical complications. Due to the blockade on Gaza, such complications can no longer be treated in local hospitals and medical facilities.If my wife were to have an acute problem during natural birth there would be no medication or treatment available, putting her and the unborn at considerable risk. In light of this, we decided a while back that she would have a Caesarean-section rather than natural child birth. C-sections, at least, are available in Gaza.

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Martin Chulov; 8/5/08

In the heart of a grey refugee camp surrounded by dog-eared photos of dead men, on the eve of Israel’s 60th Independence Day today, a crippled old Arab warlord sits reflecting on the future of his one-time sworn enemy. Mohammed Ghawanmeh with a framed picture of deceased Palestinian Authority and Fatah leader Yasser Arafat. Picture: Stewart Innes Mohammed Ghawanmeh is the type of Palestinian who Israelis hope holds the key to the next six decades and beyond. Like others in the Jalazone refugee camp, near the West Bank administrative capital of Ramallah, Ghawanmeh accepts that another, older key - that to the coveted family home in what is now Israel - is no longer of use to him. “We are not going back and we know it,” he says. “It is time to look to the future.”

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6/5/08

The UN agency that provides food for Palestinian refugees says it can continue to distribute aid in the Gaza Strip for another 20 days having announced that it was once again on the verge of having to suspend deliveries. The statement from the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) on Monday said a delivery of fuel would allow them to continue. The Israeli blockade of Gaza has caused low supplies of fuel and basic goods for the 1.5 million inhabitants. John Ging, the agency director, said: “Thankfully this afternoon there is a supply of fuel coming in for us, so we won’t now have to stop our operations for the second time in 10 days. “The amounts that are coming in will keep us going for about 20 days.”

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Tomer Zarchin; 6/5/08

The High Court of Justice issued an order Tuesday requiring the state to explain within 60 days why it refuses to overturn the citizenship law, which prevents Palestinians married to Israeli Arabs from gaining Israeli citizenship. The petition on the matter was submitted by the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, the Adalah Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, and several individuals who were personally penalized by the law. Among the petitioners was also Meretz MK Zahava Gal-On.

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As’ad Abdul Rahman; 5/5/08

If an ethnic minority is denied full citizenship rights, then striving for right of separation is quite natural. There are many such movements which are still fighting for their rights. However, in the case of Kosovo, it was a different issue. That is because the US and European nations were adamant on recognising its unilateral declaration of independence. It shows the West’s recklessness towards the UN and its Charter, as much as it exposes the double standard they follow, especially when it comes to Israel and the Palestinians.

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