Top Ten Middle East Crises, 2009

[ProgressiveMuslim]

(snip to the good stuff)....

4. Israel elected its most rightwing government in history, including Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, widely considered a racialist nationalist and loose canon, which promptly obstructed President Obama's renewed peace process

3. Mahmoud Abbas, moderate president of the Palestine Authority, announced his intention to resign because there was no progress on peace negotiations with Israel, which refuses to cease colonizing Palestinian land in the West Bank and Jerusalem.

2. Israel's Gaza War failed and discredited it, leading to the issuance of Goldstone report to the UN on Israeli war crimes. The outcome is major roadblock in the face of further peace negotiations.

1. Meantime, Gazans live under Israeli blockade, lacking enough food, electricity and other services for a decent life, and there is no end in sight. A major recent Oxfam report concludes that the world has failed Gaza and that a year later, Gaza's deliberately-destroyed infrastructure and buildings are mostly still in rubble and innocent Gazans continue to suffer. An international aid convoy is being blocked from entering Gaza by Israel, and Egypt insists it must come in through El Areesh. The Muslim world seethes at the news of Palestinian suffering in Gaza every night as the West ignores its plight.

http://www.juancole.com/

[ConsAreLiars]

1. The Oxfam, Amnesty International, Mercy Corps, etc. report is at this link -->

http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/RWB.NSF/retrieveattachments?openagent&shortid=SKEA-7YYDWN&file=Full_Report.pdf

Of course, there are some who will just claim that these orgs, like Mandela, Tutu, Carter, UNHCR, Goldstone, Sweden,France, the EU, and everyone who suggests that the Palestinians are no less human than those of their tribe and the killing of one is as vile as the killing of the other (even the poser Oberliner will say that), are just a bunch of Nazis in less deletable words. I notice that one of those has, after being called out for over a hundred "go back to Stormfront" was finally instructed to by a supportive Mod to drop that obvious display of irrationality.

Whatever. A few paragraphs
------------------------------------------------------------
Construction materials

Indeed, since Operation Cast Lead, only 41
truckloads of construction materials for all purposes
have been permitted into Gaza.2 Thousands of
truckloads are required to rebuild all the houses
destroyed. And this is to say nothing of all the
remaining reconstruction desperately needed to
put right damage to all the schools, hospitals, other
buildings and water network because of previous
military action or serious dilapidation caused by lack
of repair materials due to the blockade. The rest of
this paper sets out other evidence of the blockade’s
continuing and devastating impact, based on the
experience of the authoring agencies and data from
the UN.
...

Before the blockade just over half of the imports
going into Gaza were made up of construction
materials.14 In the five months running up to its
imposition 7,400 truckloads a month containing
construction materials were entering Gaza;15 in
the six months after, this shrunk to a trickle of 31 a challenge.
month on average.16 The cement lane at Karni was
shut down altogether.

...

In addition, the cement promised to help rebuild
Gaza’s bombed flour mill was also not in the
end allowed in – part of a pattern of reversing or
into Gaza from Egypt via the tunnels – at inflated
prices and in insufficient amounts to make any
delaying decisions to permit even limited amounts of
materials in. Small quantities of cement are coming
into Gaza through tunnels.
------------------------------------------------------------


and much more that shows that the policies of Israel regarding those will not submit fall in the same column as those of the US, Serbia, Burma and SA under Botha and before and many more failed or soon-to-decline systems.

There is no question that the dominant belief in Israel and among those who defend its atrocities is that the Palestinians are at best sub-human and more likely evil beasts. That sickness is a cancer and those who promote it do far more to destroy the prospects for a peaceful and humane future than anything done by those they now torment.

Try to get one to regard one injustice committed against a Palestinian as equally objectionable if the same one committed against an Israeli, Targeted assassinations, detention without trial, land seizures, denial of medicines? Good luck with that. If the rightists who post here had any interest in improving the odds for survival, rather than just butchering those who resist theft and massacres, they would support the Israeli peace movements instead of denouncing them as anti-semites or whatever.

But, being rightists and supremacists, for whom kill-em-all is the bottom line (whether all at once or by slow starvation is the debate among them), regarding "them" as EQUALLY human is, of course, impossible

[bemildred]

2. Abu Mazen threatens to resign all the time.

It doesn't seem to mean much.