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Concern rises regarding Gaza health care access

13 December 2007


JERUSALEM, 13 December (IRIN) - The isolation of the Gaza Strip is “intolerable” said a senior World Health Organization (WHO) official on 10 December, urging better access for Gazans to medical care outside the boxed-off enclave. Ambrogio Manenti, head of the WHO in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, urged medical professionals to take a stand against the current situation which, he said, was having a negative impact on the health of residents. Manenti was speaking at a WHO symposium with the Physicians for Human Rights-Israel organization and the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme. 

Audio: Crossing the Line focuses on Annapolis

13 December 2007


This week on Crossing The Line: The cameras are gone and the dignitaries have gone back home, but what if anything did Annapolis really accomplish for either Palestinians or Israelis? Host Christopher Brown speaks with Bill and Kathleen Christison, both formerly of the CIA. Bill was a senior official of the CIA and served as a National Intelligence Officer and as Director of the CIA’s Office of Regional and Political Analysis. Kathleen is a former CIA political analyst and has worked on Middle East issues for thirty years. The couple joins Brown to sort out the summit and its chances — if any — of advancing a peaceful solution to the conflict. 

More than 600 Palestinians killed in extrajudicial killings since 2000

13 December 2007


Between the eruption of the second Palestinian intifada on 28 September 2000 and June 2006, Israeli forces attempted 252 extrajudicial killing operations. According to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, Israeli forces killed 603 Palestinians during these crimes. Statistically, the victims of this policy constitute 20 percent of the entire intifada’s Palestinian fatalities. Of these, 212 were bystanders killed during such operations. 

Photostory: A pervasive occupation

12 December 2007


Occupation has a way of making its presence experienced beyond its immediate manifestations — war machines and walls and checkpoints — and wounding everything it comes in contact with. The Israeli occupation has left scars on nearly all aspects of Palestinian society — both literal, physical tears in the earth and edifice. Where a million olive trees used to be rooted or tens of thousands of homes that used to be places to live and now are little more than a painful memory. However, in the midst of occupation is the energy to resist, a veiled hope for peace and justice, even at impossible odds. Adam Beach’s photographs document life in occupied Palestine. 

US Jews tilt rightwards on Israel

Jim Lobe 13 December 2007


WASHINGTON, December 12 (IPS) - US Jews appear to have become more opposed both to Israel’s making key concessions in renewed peace talks with Palestinians and to the US carrying out a military attack against Iran’s nuclear facilities, according to the latest in an annual series of surveys of Jewish opinion released here this week by the American Jewish Committee (AJC). The poll, which was carried out during November before the formal resumption of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks in Annapolis late last month, also found continued skepticism in the Jewish community over both the war in Iraq and the “war on terror” as conducted by the administration of President George W. Bush. 

Israel's Palestinians speak out

Nadim Rouhana 12 December 2007


The Annapolis peace talks regard me as an interloper in my own land. Israel’s deputy prime minister, Avigdor Lieberman, argues that I should “take [my] bundles and get lost.” Henry Kissinger thinks I ought to be summarily swapped from inside Israel to the would-be Palestinian state. I am a Palestinian with Israeli citizenship — one of 1.4 million. We are Palestinian Arabs — Christian, Muslim and Druze — not Jewish. More than twenty Israeli laws explicitly privilege Jews over non-Jews. Nadim Rouhana comments. 

Report: Israeli military installations near Arab villages harmed civilians

12 December 2007


A new report from the Arab Association for Human Rights (HRA) focuses on one claim — one that was also raised during the war, particularly by Arab public figures in Israel, but which has not been the subject of detailed attention. This claim is that military installations were positioned by the Israeli army in proximity to Arab civilian locales. The report is based on the testimonies of 80 Arab residents interviewed by the HRA, documenting 20 Arab communities that were hit by an estimated total of some 660 rockets, killing 14 civilians directly. 

The first intifada 20 years later

Sonja Karkar 10 December 2007


The first Palestinian intifada (uprising or shaking off) erupted dramatically on 9 December 1987 after twenty long years of brutal Israeli military occupation. The Palestinians had had enough. Not only had they been dispossessed of their homeland and expelled from their homes in 1948 to make way for the boatloads of European Jewish immigrants flooding into Palestine on a promise of a Jewish state, they had been made to suffer the indignities of a people despised and rejected by the whole world. Sonja Karkar comments for EI on the anniversary of the beginning of the first intifada. 

Towards first-rate university instruction

Rima Merriman 10 December 2007


The Palestinian Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research produced a report in August 2002 with financial and technical assistance provided by the World Bank. The paper has two objectives. The first is to provide an analytic rationale for donors wishing to finance higher education in Palestine, and the other, thornier one, is to “build stakeholders consensus on the rationale and mechanism for financing reform.” Given the nature of the document, it is taken for granted that the answer to the challenges higher education faces in Palestine is “a compelling financial strategy” and that’s what the document provides. Rima Merriman comments. 

Dershowitz jewelry purchase booed by Leviev protesters

9 December 2007


Wealthy Madison Avenue holiday shoppers were greeted the afternoon of 8 December 2007 by boisterous music and dancing, as 60 New Yorkers protested in a growing campaign to boycott Israeli diamond magnate Lev Leviev over his settlement construction in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. Participants performed a joyous dabke, a traditional Palestinian dance, and chanted to music from the eight-piece Rude Mechanical Orchestra. During the protest, Harvard professor Alan Dershowitz entered LEVIEV New York and emerged to jeers as he displayed a LEVIEV shopping bag to the crowd.