6/10/08
Egyptian police have blocked an opposition convoy carrying medical supplies to the Rafah border crossing with the Gaza Strip.Abdel Fatah Rizq, who helped co-ordinate the convoy, said police had arrested 50 activists on Monday when they tried to gather at the Journalists’ Syndicate in downtown Cairo. The convoy was preparing for a 300km journey across the Sinai desert to reach the Palestinian border.
Ofra Edelman; 5/10/08
A resident of central Israel, was married for 25 years to M., a Palestinian man. All those years the couple lived in Israel, where they raised their five children. In 2000, as the Al-Aqsa Intifada broke out, M. was granted temporary residency under family reunification regulations. But the couple’s relationship deteriorated, and A. asked the Interior Ministry not to renew M.’s residency. A. said that when she asked the clerk what would happen if she later regretted the decision, she was told she would only have to write a letter to the ministry. In January 2007, the man was sent from Israel to the Gaza Strip. Since then, one of his children gave birth to his first grandchild - whom he has yet to meet - and his son is preparing to enlist in the Israel Defense Forces. Meanwhile, all of the couple’s requests to reunite in Israel have been ignored or rejected.
Nadav Shragai; 5/10/08
Daniela Weiss, a prominent settler leader detained for attacking police near her West Bank home, claimed on Saturday that she had been arrested as part of a Shin Bet Security Services anti-settler campaign. The former head of Kedumim council also claimed that last week’s pipe bomb attack against outspoken left-wing advocate Ze’ev Sternhell was masterminded by Shin Bet to turn public opinion against the settlers. “A settler would never have done a thing like that,” Weiss said. “It’s in Shin Bet’s best interest to create this provocation, in order to libel the settlers and thereby pave the way to settlement evacuation.”
4/10/08
The US government has announced plans to sell about $6.5bn of weaponry to Taiwan, a move likely to anger China, which claims sovereignty over the island. The sale, announced on Friday, includes 30 Apache attack helicopters, 330 Patriot missiles and 32 Harpoon submarine-launched missiles. The Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency told members of the congress that the sale, which still needs to be approved by the politicians, would support Taiwan’s efforts to modernise its military.
Shakier Hussein; 4/10/08; Shakira Hussein is the editor of interfaith online magazine Shalom, Pax, Salam; http://www.google.com.au/search?hl=en&q=Shalom%2C+Pax%2C+Salam&btnG=Google+Search&meta=
The Duet: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power; By Tariq Ali; Simon & Schuster
Pakistan is a nation in a permanent state of flux. As Tariq Ali observes in the preface of his new book The Duel: Pakistan on the Flight Path of American Power, “When I began to write this book a London friend asked, ‘Isn’t it reckless to start a book while the dice is still in the air?’ If I waited for the dice to fall, I would never have written anything about Pakistan.” Events have moved on even in the short time since those words were written. Former president Pervez Musharraf has finally been forced from power, Benazir Bhutto’s widower and designated political heir, Asif Ali Zardari, has become President, the US has increased its incursions into Pakistani territory in pursuit of Taliban fighters and I write this review not long after the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad has been reduced to a charred shell by a suicide bomber.
Karen Deyoung & Walter Pincus; 4/10/08
The Defence Department will pay private US contractors in Iraq up to $US300 million ($A385 million) over the next three years to produce news stories, entertainment programs and public service advertisements for the Iraqi media. The aim is to “engage and inspire” the local population to support US objectives and the Iraqi Government. The contracts — awarded last week to four companies — will expand and consolidate what the US military calls “information/psychological operations” in Iraq, even as violence appears to be abating and US troops have begun drawing down. The military’s role in the war of ideas has been transformed in recent years. Uniformed communications specialists and contractors are now an integral part of US military operations from Eastern Europe to Afghanistan and beyond.
Amin Saikal; 4/10/08
Until a fortnight ago, the Australian troops deployed in Afghanistan to provide security and reconstruction had had a reasonably clean run. They had managed to distinguish themselves from their American counterparts by operating in ways that avoided antagonising the local population. But this approach was dealt a severe blow on September 19, when Australian SAS soldiers reportedly killed in a firefight an influential figure in Oruzgan Province. This incident received limited coverage in the Australian media, yet its significance must not be underestimated. The man killed was Rozi Khan, a respected tribal leader and the district governor of Chora, in Oruzgan. An ally of the US-backed Afghan President, Hamid Karzai, he was elected as the district leader of Chora in the area’s first free election in June, by a healthy majority.
Abraham Rabinovich; 4/10/08
As a young member of the Israeli Knesset (parliament), Ehud Olmert voted against Israel’s peace agreement with Egypt in 1979, defying his party leader, prime minister Menahem Begin. As mayor of Jerusalem from 1993 to 2003, he provocatively pushed the construction of housing for right-wing Jewish settlers in the heart of Arab neighbourhoods. This week, as he prepared to step down as Israel’s Prime Minister, Olmert rejected the right-wing views he long championed and asserted that total, or near total, withdrawal from Palestinian and Syrian territory captured in the 1967 Six-Day War was the only rational choice for the nation. “We have to make a decision, one that goes against all our instincts, against our collective memory, against the prayers of the Jewish people for 2000 years,” he said in a farewell interview with the newspaper Yediot Achronot. Olmert formally submitted his resignation as prime minister last week in the wake of police investigations into corruption charges against him but continues in office until a successor is chosen.
Abraham Rabinovich; 4/10/08
With Palestinian violence against Israelis on the West Bank almost totally suppressed, an Israeli general warned this week that violence by Jewish settlers against Palestinians - and against Israeli soldiers trying to protect the Palestinians - has become “a very grave phenomenon”. Major General Gadi Shamni, the senior military commander on the West Bank, said hard-core extremists among the 300,000 Israeli settlers had begun escalating their attacks in recent weeks with the encouragement of some settler leaders and right-wing rabbis. “In the past, only a few dozen individuals took part in such activities,” he said in an interview with the newspaper Ha’aretz yesterday. “Today the number has grown to hundreds.” The Jewish militants have burned Palestinian olive groves, harassed local farmers, and closed roads. They have broken the hand of an Israeli army officer trying to stop them and set a dog loose against another.
Gideon Levy; 4/10/08
Take a quick look at the photo before you [shows young man blindfolded]. We took it last fall by chance. In the course of another interminable wait at the Hawara checkpoint, on our way to another story in Nablus, we saw this man being arrested. Bingo, the game of the checkpoint soldiers. We didn’t know his name, why he was arrested or when he’d be released, if ever. But we noticed his proud bearing - solitary, upright. His eyes were already covered by the IDF-issue flannel, the type meant for cleaning guns, and his wrists were about to be bound with plastic handcuffs. We seemed more upset by his sudden arrest than he was. After 41 years, the Palestinians are used to it, that on any ordinary day, on the way to or from work, everything might be abruptly turned upside down. This was a routine year, another year of the occupation of which no end is in sight. From Rosh Hashana 5768 to Rosh Hashana 5769 our forces killed 584 Palestinians, 95 of them minors. Many fewer than in 2002, when 989 were killed; many more than in 2005, with 190 killed. Eighteen Israelis were also killed in the past year, many more than in the previous year, when just five were killed, and much less than in 2002, when 184 Israelis were killed. All in all, an average year for bloodshed.
