[wvns] Israel blocking aid deliveries to Gaza

UN chief: Israel blocking aid deliveries to Gaza

Israeli policy has been hampering the
distribution of aid in Gaza [Ma'anImages]

Bethlehem – Ma'an – Israel's plan to cut electricity and fuel supplies
to the Gaza Strip will worsen an already dire humanitarian situation,
the United Nations Emergency Relief Coordinator said Saturday.

"The squeeze was tightening all the time," said John Holmes, who is
also Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs, noting that
while the UN had been able to get more than 3,000 truckloads of
humanitarian aid into Gaza in July, only 1,508 truckloads made it
through last month.

Israel has closed kept Gaza's main crossing point for goods, Karni,
since June, Holmes said, with only one conveyor belt available twice a
week. One of the two smaller crossing points for goods, Sufa, is also
expected to be closed by the end of this month. The major crossing
point for people, Rafah, has also been closed since June.

Holmes also said the number of Palestinian patients allowed to cross
into Israel for health care had fallen from 40 a day in July to less
than five a day in September.

"Denial of freedom of movement for medical reasons would appear to be
a breach of international humanitarian law," he said.

He called on Israel to lift its economic blockade on Gaza and relax
its restrictions on humanitarian aid, in part to improve the chances
of progress at Israeli-Palestinian talks scheduled to take place in
the United States next month.

Given the conditions inside both Gaza and the West Bank, the
population increasingly depends on outside aid to survive, he said.

"That is not a good situation for their livelihoods, their dignity and
the possibility of their participating in any kind of peace process."

===

Nablus invasion ends with the abduction of Al Qassam brigades leader
by Saed Bannoura - IMEMC

The Israeli army ended its military offensive into Al Ein refugee
camp, in Nablus, after kidnapping Nihad Shqeirat, 34, leader of the Al
Qasam Brigades, the armed wing of Hamas. During the three-day military
offensive, two Palestinians and one Israeli soldier were killed, and
at least 49 Palestinians, including two members of Al Aqsa Brigades,
the armed wing of Fateh, were kidnapped.

Eyewitnesses reported that Shqeirat exchanged fire with Israeli
soldiers for several hours and when he ran out of ammunition he
attempted to escape from a house he barricaded himself in, but the
soldiers managed to surround and kidnap him.

An Israeli military source stated that Shqeirat ran the infrastructure
of the Al Qassam brigades in Nablus area.

Hamas sources reported that Shqeirat was previously imprisoned by
Israel for several years, and that his brother Anad carried a suicide
bombing in Jenin area when he detonated an explosive belt strapped
around his waist as he approached an Israeli military roadblock in
2002; three soldiers were injured.

Israeli soldiers also demolished the house of Shqeirat three years ago.

===

Israeli military operation in Nablus ends; 49 Palestinians abducted
Ameen Abu Warda

The Israeli army on Friday declared an end to the military operation
in el-Ein refugee camp in Nablus after three consecutive days of attack.

The Israeli military reported that they kidnapped 49 Palestinians,
claiming each were on Israel's so-called "wanted list." Local
residents reported that military vehicles withdrew from the camp in
the early hours of Friday morning, leaving the area through the Beit
Iba and Huwara checkpoints.

The operation caused huge damage in the area, and led to the murder of
two Palestinian civilians, among them one disabled man.

A senior leader of the al-Qassam brigades, the armed wing of Hamas,
identified as Nihad Shqerat, was kidnapped during the three days of siege.

During three days of fighting, one Israeli soldier was killed by
Palestinian Resistance Fighters.

Elsewhere, the Israeli army kidnapped two senior leaders of the
al-Aqsa brigades, the armed wing of Fatah, both of whom had been on
Israel's so-called amnesty list. The two men were released several
hours later.

Translated by Nisreen Qumsieh - IMEMC News

===

Dehumanizing the Palestinians
Ali Abunimah
The Electronic Intifada

The Israeli cabinet has voted to declare the occupied
Gaza Strip a "hostile entity," thus in its own eyes
permitting itself to cut off the already meagre
supplies of food, water, electricity and fuel that it
allows the Strip's inmates to receive. The decision
was quickly given backing by US Secretary of State
Condoleezza Rice.

Israel is the occupying power in the Gaza Strip,
despite having removed its settlers in 2005 and
transforming the area, home to 1.5 million mostly
refugee Palestinians, into the world's largest
open-air prison which it besieges and fires into from
the perimeter. Under international law Israel is
responsible for the well-being of the people whose
lives and land it rules.

There have been barely audible bleats of protest from
the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon ("Such a step
would be contrary to Israel's obligations towards the
civilian population under international humanitarian
and human rights law") and the European Union ("The
[European] Commission hopes that Israel will not find
it necessary to implement the measures for which the
[cabinet] decisions set the framework yesterday."

What? It hopes that Israel will not find it necessary
to cut off water supplies to 1.5 million people of
whom half are children?

These statements serve only to underline that Israel
operates in a context where the "international
community" has become inured to a discourse of
extermination of the Palestinian people -- political
and physical.

Yossi Alpher, for example, a former director of the
Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv
University and once a special adviser to former
Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, argued coolly this
week that Israel should murder the
democratically-elected leaders who won the Palestinian
legislative election in January 2006 -- calling for
"decapitating the Hamas leadership, both military and
'civilian.'" True, he admitted, there would be a
possible downside: "Israel would again undoubtedly pay
a price in terms of international condemnation,
particularly if innocent civilians were killed," and
because "Israel would presumably be targeting legally
elected Hamas officials who won a fair election."
Nevertheless, such condemnation would be quickly
forgotten and, he argued, "this is a mode of
retaliation and deterrence whose effectiveness has
been proven," and thus, this is "an option worth
reconsidering."

Alpher incited the murder of democratically-elected
politicians not in a fringe, right-wing journal, but
in the European Union-funded online newsletter
Bitterlemons, which he co-founded along with former
Palestinian Authority minister Ghassan Khatib. What
journal would publish a call by a Palestinian -- or
anyone else -- to murder the Israeli prime minister?
Alpher presumably does not worry that he will be
denied visas to travel to conferences in the European
Union, or will fail to receive invitations to American
universities. History tells us that he can feel
confident he will suffer no consequences. Indeed, in
the current political climate, any attempt to exclude
Alpher might even be cast as an attack on academic
freedom!

Declarations that reduce Palestinians to bare
biological life that can be extinguished without any
moral doubt are not isolated exceptions. In May, as
reported by The Jerusalem Post, Israel's former
Sephardic Chief Rabbi Mordechai Eliyahu issued a
religious ruling to the prime minister "that there was
absolutely no moral prohibition against the
indiscriminate killing of civilians during a potential
massive military offensive on Gaza aimed at stopping
the rocket launchings" (See "Top Israeli rabbis
advocate genocide," The Electronic Intifada, 31 May
2007). I could find no statement by any prominent
Israeli figure condemning Eliyahu's ruling.

And, in a September 6 blog posting, an advisor to
leading US Republican Presidential hopeful Rudolph
Giuliani argued for "shutting off utilities to the
Palestinian Authority as well as a host of other
measures, such as permitting no transportation in the
PA of people or goods beyond basic necessities,
implementing the death penalty against murderers, and
razing villages from which attacks are launched."
This, the advisor stated, would "impress Palestinians
with the Israeli will to survive, and so bring closer
their eventual acceptance of the Jewish state." (See:
"Giuliani Advisor: Raze Palestinian Villages," by Ken
Silverstein, Harper's Magazine, 14 September 2007)
Giuliani faced no calls from other candidates to
dismiss the advisor for advocating ethno-religiously
motivated war crimes. Indeed the presence of such a
person in his campaign might even be an electoral
asset.

The latest Israeli government declaration comes as
Palestinians this week marked the 25th anniversary of
the massacres in Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in
Beirut, in which the Israeli occupation army and
political leadership were full participants. We can
reflect that Israel's dehumanization of Palestinians
and other Arabs, its near daily killing of children,
destruction of communities and racist apartheid
against millions of people has been so normalized that
if those massacres occurred today Israel would not
need to go through the elaborate exercise of denying
its culpability. Indeed, the "international community"
might barely notice.

===

The fruits of his efforts lie on the
wrong side of the separation fence
By Meron Rapoport
Haaretz
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/900949.html

Sharif Omar Khaled had a little bit of satisfaction last week. His
guava trees bore fruit for the first time. They had ripened relatively
early, he said, because of the hot weather.

Sharif Khaled, who is known to everyone as Abu Azzam, looks like a
moshavnik from days gone by. True, he doesn`t have a mustache, but he
has a little paunch, an old tractor with a wagon and he can talk about
his trees without end: olive trees, citrus trees, avocado, apricot
trees, almonds, guavas. His greatest pride is his loquat orchard: 14
dunams last year yielded 47 tons of fruit. A most impressive record.

In the past two months, Abu Azzam has seen his 3,600 trees only from a
distance, from the top of the hill where his village, Jayyous, lies.
When I visited this Palestinian village (not far from Qalqilyah) some
four years ago, I felt as if I were in a moshav - tractors with
drivers in mud-covered rubber boots filled its streets.

This feeling has dissipated. The number of Jayyous residents who
engage in agriculture has decreased for a simple reason: the
separation fence. In this area it was completed three years ago and it
cuts off the residents of Jayyous from their lands. To reach their
farm land, they require a permit from the Civil Administration, and
these are given out less and less often. Only 90 of the 4,000
residents of Jayyous are today permitted to work their lands. For
three years, Abu Azzam was one of the lucky ones who received a
permit. On June 23, he was informed that the permit would no longer be
renewed, `because of opposition on the part of security elements.`

Abu Azzam is not the only person whose permit was not renewed. In the
past few months, people in Jayyous say, 29 farmers have had their
permits canceled, all of them ostensibly for security reasons. In Abu
Azzam`s case, this refusal seems surprising, in the best-case
scenario, and evil in the worst case.

Abu Azzam goes abroad three or four times a year. He has been to
Sweden, Britain, India and Spain. Now he can chat a little in Italian
after studying for three months in Pisa. But he cannot go to his
loquat trees.

The word `coexistence` has all but disappeared from the lexicon of the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But not with Abu Azzam. He struck up
ties with Israelis who participated in the protests against building
the fence in the Jayyous area four years ago, and since then he has
taken pains to nurture those ties constantly. Every year hundreds of
Israelis come to help him and other farmers from Jayyous with their
harvesting in fields that have remained on the Israeli side of the
fence. `They don`t want money and even bring along their own food,`
Abu Azzam says with admiration. `They simply want to help us.`

Abu Azzam particularly remembers one of the Israeli acts of
assistance: In December 2004, Israeli bulldozers pulled up several
hundred olive trees in a private plot belonging to one of the
residents of Jayyous. `The Israelis came to replant the trees,` he
says. `They walked several kilometers on foot because the army did not
permit them to bring their vehicles to the fields. Even the elderly
among them went on foot. How old is Uri Avneri? He also walked. We
were altogether some 50 Palestinians, 200 Israelis and 100 policemen
and soldiers. Several hundred villagers from Jayyous watched us from
behind the fence. They were extremely moved. It was a very good
feeling to see the Israelis planting the trees with us.`

But let us not get confused. Abu Azzam is a thorn in Israel`s side,
albeit a small thorn. He travels a great deal abroad and on most of
his trips speaks out against the `apartheid fence.` He was part of the
Palestinian delegation to the International Court of Justice in The
Hague, as a `farmer from the area,` and he says things that are
unequivocal and scathing. He appears in international forums abroad,
and sometimes his confrontations with Israeli representatives end in
unpleasant tones. This year in February, for example, he participated
in a discussion at Cambridge University. `The Palestinian delegate in
Britain did not arrive, and I was the sole Palestinian in a forum with
about 10 Israelis,` he says. `They asked me whether suicide bombers
can be part of a peace process. I was impolite and asked them whether
attacks by an Apache helicopter on schools could be part of a peace
process. There was an unpleasant argument.` Did these scathing remarks
lead to the cancellation of Abu Azzam`s permit? It is possible.

A Civil Administration spokesman responded that Abu Azzam had a
hearing before a committee that considered his request to renew his
permit. The request was considered `bearing in mind the security needs
of the State of Israel, and it was decided to turn it down.` Abu Azzam
says that the committee members asked him where he had gone the last
time he visited abroad. `I said that I was in Sweden in May, and then
they asked me `where were you in February?` I had the feeling they
were talking about the conference in Cambridge.`

Perhaps there is another reason. One of Abu Azzam`s friends once
warned him that eventually they would cancel his permit to work his
fields. `Your problem is that you have too many contacts with the
Israeli left,` his friend told him.

Either way, Abu Azzam is convinced that the Israeli authorities are
not in favor of ties between Israelis and Palestinians. He views the
lack of ties as one of the reasons that the number of Israelis who
participate in the activities he has organized has not grown. `It is
as if the Israelis are not interested in knowing what is happening on
the other side,` he says. Is Abu Azzam indeed a security menace?
Anything is possible, but on the face of it, at least, it appears that
this possibility would be strange. He is 65 years old, a former
Communist, and the distance between him and Hamas is very great. He
has been arrested only once, 20 years ago, for refusing to evacuate
part of his lands in favor of the nearby settlement of Tzofin. One of
his sons was detained for nine months under administrative detention,
but that was more than three years ago. Another of his sons always
gets permits to go to Haifa port to fetch goods for the company he
runs in Ramallah. This son, too, by the way, did not get a permit from
the Civil Administration to go to the family`s fields. He can travel
to Haifa but not to his father`s guavas and loquats.

Sources in the Civil Administration say that attempts were made on
their part to persuade the Shin Bet security service to give Abu Azzam
a permit, but the Shin Bet was adamant in its refusal.

Abu Azzam has a simple explanation for this persistent refusal: `They
want us to forget about our lands, for us to emigrate from here.`

===

Ban Ki Moon Pimps for the US & Israel in Lebanon
http://www.wakeupfromyourslumber.com/node/4709

One would imagine that when the Secretary General of the United
Nations visits Lebanon, he would be going there in order perhaps to
meet the UNIFIL troops or address maybe the daily Israeli violations
of Lebanese land and air sovereignty despite the cessation of
hostilities and UN resolutions.

There is a lot for Ban Ki Moon to do in Lebanon:

To start with, there are 400,000 registered Palestinian refugees in
hardship refugee camps waiting according UN resolutions for their
Right to Return to their homes in Palestinian territories that Israel
still refuses to withdraw from.

There are thousands of innocent injured Lebanese civilians due to last
summer's barbaric Israeli war on Lebanon.

There is the problem of 3 million of cluster bombs that Israel
literally sprayed over Lebanon, not to mention the illegality of the
use of the weapon itself and the effect it will have for decades to
come over the innocent Lebanese.

There is the problem of the Lebanese lands that are still occupied by
Israel, the Shebaa farms and the Ghajar.

There is the problem of Lebanese POW's that Israel refuses to release.

I could go on and on with Lebanon's case in the United Nations… but
Ban Ki Moon doesn't seem to give much of a damn about any of this. He
didn't go to the South of Lebanon; he didn't visit any of the cities
ravaged by Israel; he didn't speak of the problem of cluster bombs; he
didn't mention the POW's; he didn't even mention Israel's daily
violation of Lebanese air space. For God sake… the Israelis violated
Lebanese air space while Ban Ki Moon was in Lebanon!!! Israelis flew
over the UNIFIL while the Secretary General of the UN was in Lebanon!
It must be pretty obvious that Mr. Moon is not in Lebanon doing UN
work.. that is if the UN works at all!

Indeed, Ban Ki Moon is in Lebanon pimping for the United States and
Israel. Ban Ki Moon is in Lebanon in order to try and give some kind
of "UN umbrella of world legitimacy" to a possible Lebanese government
or president that the US is hoping to install once President Emile
Lahoud's term ends on the 24th of November 2007. Instead of standing
by the majority of the Lebanese people and respecting their right to
represent themselves and be subjected to the laws of their own
constitution, the Secretary General of the United Nations has become
no more than a petty well paid lobbyist on a mission for his masters
Shame on you Ban Ki Moon!

The people of the world deplore Ban Ki Moon's brutal Massacre of what
was left of the United Nation's Charter with this last visit to Lebanon!

===

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/336015_insivible19.html

Palestinians' lives invisible to Israelis
By EDWARD MAST
GUEST COLUNIST

On a visit to Tel Aviv last month, I asked some Israeli friends what
people in Israel were saying about the Palestinian situation. Not
much, they told me. Israelis are more concerned about the corruption
charges against Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, coming on the heels of
corruption charges against previous governments. Palestinians and
their issues, my friends told me, are becoming more and more invisible
to the Israeli people.

Palestinian lives are kept invisible in David Brumer's Oct. 10 guest
column, "Despite concerns, Israel a vibrant country." Also invisible
are Israel's military occupation and the ongoing takeover of
Palestinian land. If Brumer had traveled to the other side of the
wall, as I did, he could have witnessed the many ways that the Israeli
occupation crushes people with poverty, violence and injustice.

Before visiting Tel Aviv, I spent two weeks working with a theater in
the Palestinian city of Ramallah in the West Bank. During that short
time, the Israeli army killed at least 15 Palestinians in the occupied
territories; several killed were children. For Palestinians, these are
regular occurrences. Over the past seven years, the Israeli army has
killed more than 4,000 Palestinians. The majority of these, even
according to Israeli statistics, have been unarmed civilians. Many
thousands more have been wounded or kidnapped. The severe
underreporting of Palestinian casualties in the U.S. and Israel can
leave the impression that Palestinian lives have less value.

While I was there, Brian Avery came from the United States to testify
in Jerusalem against the Israeli army. Avery is a peace activist who
was shot in the face by the Israeli army in 2003. At first the Israeli
army denied that the shooting took place, but has been forced to
launch an investigation now that Avery is bringing a suit.

In Ramallah, I learned that, though there is plenty of water near the
city, the several hundred thousand residents had spent the summer with
running water available only three or four days each week. That sort
of fact tends to be invisible to Israelis, along with the reasons.

Ramallah is near the cluster of West Bank aquifers, which are the main
sources of water for both the West Bank and Israel, but 80 percent of
the West Bank's water goes to Israel and Israeli settlements. For
decades, Israel has used its military occupation of the West Bank to
build an illegal network of settlements around the water sources.
Palestinians have been beaten, killed and driven away to make space
for these settlements, and Israel has built a continuous wall, not on
the border of Israel but inside Palestinian territory, which
effectively annexes the settlements and water resources into Israel.

Israelis are told the wall is for their security. Palestinians call it
the annexation wall, and it is difficult for them to believe Israel
can be a partner for peace while the Israeli government continues
taking Palestinian land for settlements, building the wall to annex
them and maintaining the system of checkpoints that paralyze movement
and life in the West Bank.

With some colleagues, I spent one day traveling from Ramallah to
Jerusalem. The eight-mile trip took 2 1/2 hours. In Ramallah, the wall
is 25 feet high, and the Israeli checkpoint is like an airport
security station. We lined up for more than half an hour with
Palestinians at a remote-controlled 8-foot turnstile where people had
to crowd like cattle and wait for a green light to get as many through
as possible before the light turned red.

Once past X-ray security and more turnstiles, we boarded shared taxis
for what should have been a short ride to Jerusalem. However, the
Israeli military had set up an additional temporary "flying
checkpoint" some 1,640 feet down the road, forcing several lanes of
traffic down to a single lane for stopping and searching. That took
almost an hour.

Business in Ramallah is at a standstill. Poverty is everywhere; jobs
are not to be found. The people at the checkpoint said to us, "Take
pictures. Tell people what is happening here."

Some Israelis, such as my Tel Aviv friends, no longer accept the
excuse that the virtual imprisonment and killing of Palestinians are
justified by the need for security.

The Israeli government has recently confiscated more Palestinian land
near Jerusalem to build a segregated road, literally underground, for
Palestinians. Israeli settlers will be able to commute back and forth
from the territories without having so much as to see a Palestinian.
Invisibility here is no accident.

Edward Mast is a Seattle playwright who volunteers with the Palestine
Information Project; palestineinformation.org .

===

Palestinians live as "ghosts" in Gaza
Fri Oct 19, 2007
By Nidal al-Mughrabi
http://in.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idINIndia-30069820071019?sp=true

JABALYA, Gaza Strip (Reuters) - Officially, Mahmoud Jnaid does not
exist. The 25-year-old Palestinian almost made that a reality earlier
this month when he doused himself with petrol and tried to set himself
alight.

Jnaid is one of about 54,000 displaced Palestinians who returned to
Gaza and the West Bank from abroad after an interim peace accord in
1993, but still have no identity cards because Israel refuses to
approve them.

Following years of silence, they recently started holding weekly
protests in Hamas-run Gaza to demand the documents, which they need to
travel as well as for daily basics like opening a bank account or
getting a driving licence.

"I am Mr Nobody," said Jnaid, who, at one of the protests, doused
himself in petrol and tried to set himself alight before onlookers
overpowered him.

"When I poured the petrol on my body I felt life was the same as
death," he said as he sat next to his wife and children.

Jnaid was born in Jordan after his family fled their home in the
coastal strip after the 1967 war with Israel. He returned to Gaza in
1995 at the age of 13 but still has no ID card.

In a stroke of bitter irony, Jnaid's brother was finally granted
identity papers two weeks after he was killed in a protest against
Israeli soldiers in Gaza.

"It was worthless, they recognised him only when he died," Jnaid said.

Israel has closed Gaza's borders to everything but humanitarian
supplies since Islamist group Hamas seized control of the territory,
home to 1.5 million people, in June and ousted its secular Fatah
rivals. The economy is in meltdown.

"I have to take care of six children now and I am out of a job for
three months," said Jnaid, an unemployed carpenter.

"GHOSTS"

Israel granted identity cards to some 3,500 Palestinians in the West
Bank earlier this month as part of efforts to bolster Palestinian
President Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah ahead of an Israeli-Palestinian
conference on statehood.

But there is little hope the goodwill will extend to Gaza, which
Israel recently branded an "enemy entity" because militants in the
territory regularly fire rockets into the Jewish state.

Under the 1993 peace accords, Israel must approve all Palestinian
personal documents, including ID cards.

Jnaid says living in Gaza is like being in jail. His uncle and a
younger brother died a few months ago in neighbouring Egypt, but Jnaid
could not attend their funerals.

When he asked for permission to travel to Israel or Egypt for eye
surgery, his request was rejected.

"Those in Israeli jails live in small cells, I am too a prisoner but
in a large room called Gaza," Jnaid said.

Hussein al-Sheikh, head of the Palestinian Civil Affairs government
office in Ramallah, which negotiates with Israel over the issue of ID
cards and travel permits, said there was no sign Israel would soften
their position on documents for Gazans.

Jnaid said he feels like a ghost.

"Not only a ghost, I do not exist. Everywhere I go people ask for an
identification card and I do not have one.

===

The government must acknowledge the present catastrophe in Palestine
is a direct consequence of Israeli intransigence, writes Karma
Nabulsi, Arab Media Watch adviser and fellow in politics and
international relations at St Edmund Hall, Oxford University.

It is unjust and absurd to apply economics to this hell
The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/comment/0,,2171420,00.html

No people, territory or issue on earth have had more international
attention devoted to them than Palestine and its people. Yet no
conflict looks further from resolution, and no people further from
achieving the freedom promised them. More Palestinians lack more basic
freedoms today than they did 60 years ago. While an expensive and
extensive peace process was in full swing, Israel managed to illegally
expropriate most of the occupied West Bank and Arab East Jerusalem,
install hundreds of thousands of illegal settlers, kill more
Palestinian families, arrest more young men, destroy more crops, homes
and businesses, build a monstrous wall deemed illegal by the
international court of justice, and set forth, unchecked, a policy of
aggressive expansionism in Palestine that continues until this moment.

Citizens of this country may wish to ask why this is so, and what on
earth their government has been doing all this time with their money.
Yesterday the government attempted to answer this question with the
launch of a report on the Economic Aspects of the Peace Process. What
the report doesn't explain is the direct link between throwing
economics at this conflict and the repeated failures to solve it.

The symbiotic relationship between the illegal "facts on the ground"
created by Israel in occupied Palestine; the simultaneous loss of
nerve by almost all international leaders and institutions to reverse
those facts; the subsequent flurry of international activities
designed to avoid challenging illegal Israeli actions - this triangle
of desolation has been masterfully described in a remarkable
publication by Chatham House, entitled Aid, Diplomacy, and Facts on
the Ground: the Case of Palestine. Its authors - World Bank
representatives, UN officials, humanitarian agencies - detail the
economic, political and diplomatic strategies by which international
donors have (by deafault or by design) encouraged illegal Israeli
practices that have made peace impossible. Without polemics or
partisanship, these expert contributors coolly demonstrate the
calamity of this approach, and suggest practical solutions to redirect
attention towards doing good.

Two of the most treacherous mechanisms of avoidance need highlighting:
diplomacy through international negotiations, and the type of economic
assistance given to an increasingly impoverished Palestinian people.
Since the Oslo agreement in 1993, every subject Israeli governments
refused to discuss was removed from the negotiating table.
Unfortunately this required excluding the people and issues essential
to resolving the conflict: the Palestinians and their right to their
land.

First it was the refugees, the majority of the Palestinian people;
absurdly, the main victims of the conflict were denied respect,
involvement, and participation in peace. Next came the elimination of
an entire sector of Palestinian representation under occupation: some
assassinated, others now languishing in Israeli jails in their
thousands, most of whom want peace - just not one entirely on Israel's
terms. And finally an international boycott of any elected party whose
political views unsurprisingly run counter to its enemy's. An
inevitable outcome of these exclusions is that all civic-minded,
active and representative Palestinians have quit, in revulsion, the
corrupted public space and secret backrooms of such negotiations.

As well as entire sectors of people, political issues Israelis deemed
unacceptable have also been pushed off the agenda. This is the ugly
shape of the international conference President Bush is seeking to
convene in November. Its purpose is to legitimise the intolerable
status quo, especially Israel's recent military conquests. Worse, it
will endeavour to demonstrate, through a PR campaign by paid-up
pro-Israel lobbyists, that the deal is authentic and supported by
ordinary people uniting for peace. Everyone who disagrees will face
being smeared as marginal, anti-peace, or dangerously extremist.

The "problem" of Palestine is now restricted to a discussion in purely
economic terms. It is not the military occupation, the enforced exile
and statelessness of millions of Palestinians, or the daylight robbery
of Palestinian land that needs confronting, but the lack of economic
stability in occupied Palestine for jobs and development.

The latest initiative from the government suggests improvements driven
by private investment. The absurdity of proposing to stimulate
investment in this hell - where because of Israeli closures and
checkpoints Palestinians cannot trade between their own towns much
less with the outside world - or the fact that the present economic
catastrophe is a direct consequence of the military occupation, gets
no acknowledgement here. By avoiding the real issue of Israeli
intransigence, and with no plan on tackling it, neither jobs nor
justice are on offer to Palestinians. They expect international
support to help them win their freedom - or at least not assistance in
their oppression. As Mary Anderson, a contributor to the Chatham House
book, explains: if you can do no good in Palestine, at least do no
harm.

*********************************************************************

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