....it's just not so often that we get footage of such behaviour. thankfully because there's been a constant presence (when possible) of israeli's and internationals in ni'lin it was "only" a rubber coated steel bullet.

from what i can tell the non-violent resistance to the apartheid wall and the recently imposed curfew on ni'lin due to ongoing actions against the wall has lead to an intensity of actions, demo's and altercations in and around ni'lin.

keep yourself informed, by anarchists on the ground in palestine and israel - and note a new call out from anarchists against the wall for financial help with legal fees that is being extended to include funding legal support for palestinian organisers.
 http://www.awalls.org/

and almost daily uploadings of photo's of demo's and actions across the region...
 http://www.flickr.com/photos/activestills

An Israeli soldier detained after being filmed opening fire at a bound and blindfolded Palestinian from close range has been released from custody. The soldier was sent back to his unit after lawyers argued he did not pose a danger to anyone, Israeli reports said.

How can someone who shoots a blindfolded and bound person from point blank range, be deemed to 'not pose a danger to anyone'? I feel like I've followed Alice down the rabbit hole when I read that!

....to some people, and the israeli authorities, that palestinians aren't anyone.....

Welcome to Israel's great "democracy", as seen from the Palestinian perspective!

Of course, this kind of brutal sadism is routine for Palestinians; this time, Shin Bet got caught doing it, something they loathe to have happen.

And of course, the one thing Israel will understand, no country dares to do (for fear of being labeled "anti-Semitic") , and that is immediately, pull all funding from Israel, period, end of discussion, until it decides to act like the kind of mature, adult country which does not beat journalists senseless because they have had the courage to tell the truth.


Full account of Muhammed Omer’s hair-raising encounter with the Shin Beth

From Khalid Amayreh in the occupied Palestinian

From his hospital bed at the European Hospital in Gaza and with barely audible voice, award-winning Palestinian journalist Muhammed Omer has given a full account of the hair-raising encounter he had last week with Shin Beth agents at the Allenby Bridge border-crossing between Jordan and the West Bank.

Omer, a co-winner of the 2008 Martha Gelhorn Prize for Journalistic Excellence, said he was abused, assaulted , humiliated, ridiculed, kicked, and strip-searched at gunpoint by undisciplined Shin Beth officers until he had a nervous breakdown in which case he lost consciousness for at least 90 minutes.

A resident of Rafah at the southern edge of the Gaza Strip, Omer said he didn’t know for sure why the Shin Beth people treated him in such a barbaric matter apart from the characteristic sadism and savagery routinely meted out to Palestinians.

“They behaved with unimaginable hatefulness and vindictiveness. They couldn’t accept the very idea of a Palestinian journalist winning a renowned journalism prize. They wanted to punish me for being a successful journalist and especially for exposing Israeli barbarianism to the people of Europe.”

The following is Muhammed Omer’s story as intimated by him to this writer:

“On Thursday, 26 June, the Israeli authorities finally allowed me to return to Gaza after several days of waiting and uncertainty in Jordan. When I arrived at the Allenby Bridge Border Crossing, I was dragged away rather unceremoniously to a special room where I was made to wait for more than 90 minutes. This happened as Dutch diplomats who were accompanying me were waiting outside.

“When I arrived on the Israeli side of the Allenby Bridge, I encountered an Israeli female officer who started mocking me in a brazenly insulting manner.

“She asked me repeatedly where Gaza was. She then said I had no permit to return to Gaza via Israel.

“Then a Shin Beth officer who introduced himself as “Avi” showed up and took me to an isolated room where I was kept stranded for an hour and a half.

“He asked me “Oh, You are Muhammed Omer.

“Yes, I said.

“You know you are a fool,” said Avi, adding “how could you leave Europe and return to Gaza where there is no water, no electricity, nothing.

“I told him Gaza was my country, and I was a journalist and wanted to be a voice for the voiceless.

“A voice for the voiceless,” Avi spoke sarcastically.

“He then asked me if I was carrying any contrabands or guns or knives.

“I said no, I had none.

“Then he asked me to produce the money of the prize I won. I told him that the money would be transferred later to my bank account.”

“Then one Shin Beth agent demanded in a stern tone that I hand all the money I was carrying with me over to them. They didn’t believe I didn’t have the prize money with me.

“Disappointed, Avi, who was carrying a pistol in his hand, ordered me to take off all my clothes, which I did, leaving my underwear. At the same time, another officer was pointing an M-16 rifle in my face.

“Take the underwear as well,” he said. “I told him I wouldn’t. What do you want from me,” I protested in a suffocated voice.

“Then he ganged up on me and forcibly removed my underwear piece, leaving me completely naked.”

“Avi, training the pistol at me, told me to turn right and turn left, before telling me to get dressed again.

“At that point, I was nearly totally broken emotionally. I felt I was being raped. I cried and pleaded to them to leave me alone, but to no avail”

“Telling me I haven’t seen anything yet, they dragged me to another room where they interrogated me on my speaking tour in Britain, Sweden and Greece.

“Oh, you have not left a place in Europe without speaking at…You know these Europeans, they hate Israel.

“Then another Shin Bet officer began kicking me and pushing me. This lasted for more than ten minutes after which I fainted and lost consciousness. Eventually they began dragging me along the floor by my feet with my head banging on the floor.

“I don’t remember much of what happened to me during this period, but remember a Shin Beth officer piercing his finger right below my eyes and at the lower end of ears. Also, another Shin Beth officer was pressing his large boots against my neck as I was lying unconscious on the ground.

“I thought I was dying. I remained in a state of unconsciousness for up to 90 minutes until a medical doctor, who was carrying an M-16, performed an (electro-cardiogram) or ECG on me.

“Then I heard someone saying the word ‘ambulance.’

“However, before a Palestinian ambulance from Jericho arrived, a Shin Beth officer came to me and asked me to sign a form that I was not being maltreated by the Shin Beth.

“I was too distraught, too confused and too unconscious to say anything.

“Eventually, I was taken to the Jericho hospital where I was assured by doctors that I was fine.”

Muhammed Omer said the Israeli Shin Beth inserted a special electronic device into his mobile phone which would enable them to know his whereabouts.

He also called upon his colleagues around the world to condemn in the strongest words the “criminal and disgraceful Israeli behavior” which he said “only befits criminals and thugs, not states, let a lone states that claim to be civilized, western and democratic.”

The Dutch Foreign Ministry has protested the traumatic treatment meted out to Muhammed Omer and demanded and explanation.

Similarly, the Dutch Embassy in Israel reportedly has raised the issue with the Israeli Foreign Ministry.

The Shin Beth, Israel’s chief domestic security agency, controls all aspects of Palestinian lives and is widely believed to systematically and grossly violate the basic human rights of Palestinians.

 http://www.palestine-info.co.uk/en/default.aspx?xyz=U6Qq7k%2bcOd87MDI46m9rUxJEpMO%2bi1s7iGTfTYyQ5unHG0EoqDtY3ZwFewc6o8mVq43D84V4J0aJBiY1phXevYzNIWbaAQ4CGlk4iygLgxXgih4wRtWVzMmJhrLK4OVRQz2aNQLD5m4%3d

Do You Have Love in Your Culture?

Israel Flexes Its Muscles
By BRIAN CLOUGHLEY


“[The Israeli security man] took his gun out, pressing it to my head . . . Another man, who was laughing, said: “Why are you bringing perfumes?” I replied: “They are gifts for people I love.” He said: “Oh, do you have love in your culture?” ”

Palestinian journalist Mohammad Omar, June 26, 2008

That sums it up. It encapsulates the disrespect, the utter contempt for Palestinians – indeed for all Arabs – felt and displayed by vicious and spiteful Israeli buffoons. This tiny but significant cameo explains the entire ethos of the Israeli regime as concerns colonially-suppressed Arab serfs who have been for sixty horrible years without help or hope in their destitution and despair. This incident, which was not made known by the mainstream media (“Your search - Mohammad Omar - did not match any documents” – New York Times), became public only because non-mainstream editors, not subject to pressure or to energetically held personal beliefs, have nothing to fear from media moguls with financial or personal axes to grind.

The journalist Mohammad Omar was trying to return home from attending a function in London to mark his award of a journalistic distinction, the Martha Gellhorn Prize, for his reporting. His journey back to Gaza was assisted by the Dutch Embassy, which deserves great credit for trying – albeit unsuccessfully – to have his return free of harassment and the normal casual barbarity of Israeli officials. (The Dutch and the Scandinavian countries do a great deal, quietly and usually effectively, in support of decency and world-wide human rights. Official Washington laughs at them.) But the Israelis pay no attention to diplomatic custom and civilized traditions when these do not suit them, although they insist on them when it seems that someone might be so indelicate as to make it clear that Israel is behaving illegally and disgustingly, which it does a lot of the time.

Let me declare an interest : I was made aware of the arrogance of Israelis when one of my duties was to brief and debrief army officers going to the UN Mission in the Middle East. My briefings were straightforward and impartial, but I was interested in the fact that the young officers were without exception pro-Israeli. “There are the brave Israelis,” they exclaimed, “surrounded by evil Arabs intent on destroying their country!” (Or words to that effect.) “Gallant little Israel” was the theme, because it was standing alone against the massed might of the Arab nations. (And true enough, because Egypt and Syria had tried and failed to invade Israel to avenge the treatment of the Palestinians to whom the land belonged – and still belongs, in law.)

I debriefed three of these officers when they returned after their year in UN service. By that time they despised and loathed Israel and Israelis. They told me that without one exception, so far as they knew, their scores of colleagues of all nations represented in the UN Mission had equally forthright views. One of them, an old friend, told me in detail of his experiences, and of one in particular that to his mind demonstrated the jackboot approach.

One day he was in a UN jeep in an area forbidden to Israeli troops, and driving through a village street, when an Israeli tank blocked the way. He got out of his jeep to remonstrate, and the Israeli tank commander – “blond, blue-eyed, he was straight out of Rommel’s Afrika Corps or the bloody SS” – traversed the gun and depressed it to sight on the UN vehicle. He didn't say anything, but obviously was ready to fire. The UN officer was sensible, and got back into his jeep and reversed the hell out of there. His report, like all those detailing Israeli arrogance and non-cooperation, was sent to UN HQ in New York and filed and forgotten. The US does not permit any criticism of the country that its current secretary of state has described as “the key to security of the world.”

This was an astonishing statement by Dr Rice, and should be put in context. So here is the report from an Israeli newspaper:

“In an exclusive interview with Israel’s daily Yediot Aharonot . . . Dr Condoleezza Rice said that “the security of Israel is the key to security of the world.” Rice added that she feels “a deep bond to Israel.” Asked if her feelings toward Israel stem from her religious convictions, Dr. Rice said “That is a very deep question. I first visited Israel in 2000. I already then felt that I am returning home despite the fact that this was a place I never visited. I have a deep affinity with Israel. I have always admired the history of the State of Israel and the hardness and determination of the people that founded it . . . I think that we, Israel and the US, share common values. Israel is the only democracy in the region. That is also very important . . .”

Obviously she has love for Israeli culture, and she is not alone, for there are other lovers of Israel, some in high uniformed places.

Much publicity was given to a statement on 2 July by the US Chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mullen, when he was asked about a possible Israeli attack on Iran. He said “This is a very unstable part of the world and I don't need it to be more unstable . . . Opening up a third front right now would be extremely stressful on us.” How this could be interpreted, as it was by most US media, as a sign of “discouragement” to Israel is intriguing. (And use of the personal pronoun “I” says a great deal : who is this man who is grown so mighty?) Associated Press also recorded that Mullen “refused to say what Israeli leaders had told him during his meetings with them last week about any intentions to strike Iran.” But we might have some idea about that, if only because of what Mullen said on 4 May concerning US support for Israel. He declared that the US

“has been at Israel's side for all of 60 years, it will be for the next 60 years, 100 years and 1,000 years. With all its success, I am a tremendous admirer and have great respect for Israel.”
It is amazing that a military officer of any nation could make such a public declaration of unconditional support for a foreign country. It was a blatantly political statement by a uniformed officer following his leader, George W Bush, who is similarly committed to Israeli supremacy and has said that “Israel is a solid ally of the United States. We will rise to Israel’s defense, if need be. . . . You bet, we'll defend Israel.”

It was reported on 4 June, following a Bush meeting with Israel’s Prime Minister Olmert, that the latter said “We reached agreement on the need to take care of the Iranian threat. I left with a lot less question marks [than] I had entered with regarding the means, the timetable restrictions, and American resoluteness to deal with the problem. George Bush understands the severity of the Iranian threat and the need to vanquish it, and intends to act on that matter before the end of his term in the White House.” It could not be more clear that the Bush administration is determined to help Israel attack Iran, not matter what might otherwise be stated in public.

The Israeli lobby in Washington has a stranglehold on US foreign policy. There is no US politician of any party who dare criticize Israel. Such impudence would lead to a campaign for their political extinction, funded by rich and vindictive zealots who are single-minded in their support of a foreign country to which they owe unconditional loyalty. So the stage is set for a strike on Iran, after which the world will reel from the effects of Israel’s lunacy.

There is not much love in their culture.

Brian Cloughley lives in France. His website is www.briancloughley.com
www.counterpunch.org/cloughley07062008.html
Israeli settlers bind Palestinian teacher to pole and club him in Samu'
Date: 05 / 07 / 2008 Time: 16:49

Hebron – Ma'an – A mob of Israeli settlers attacked 30-year-old Midhat Abu Karsh, a Palestinian teacher from the southern West Bank village of As-Samu' south of Hebron on Saturday.

Abu Karsh was hit in the head with sharp objects before he was dragged to a nearby settlement outpost where he was tied to an electricity pole.

Eyewitnesses affirmed that four Israeli settlers struck Abu Karsh with clubs until his head began to bleed. He remained tied to the pole until an Israeli patrol came and untied him in order to administer first aid. Shortly after, Palestinian Red Crescent ambulances evacuated the teacher to the 'Alya Hospital in Hebron.

According to Abdul-Majid Al-Badarin, member of the local committee for defending lands at As-Samu', Israeli soldiers prevented local residents from accessing the injured teacher, and the ambulance had tried to reach him for two hours before it was allowed through.

The assault against Abu Karsh coincided with a rally in the neighborhood organized by local farmers, foreign and Israeli activists demanding that farmers have access to their agricultural lands.

During that rally, Israeli forces arrested 21-year-old Mahran Abu Karsh (a relative of the beaten man) and another boy aged 13 who was released after protest.

Local residents accused settlers of setting fire to 15 dunums (15 square kilometers) of wheat in southern As Samu'. They mentioned that one Israeli settler is currently building a settlement outpost two kilometers from the Israeli settlement of Sham'a. The settler has been opening fire on Palestinian farmers when they came to tend their fields.

www.maannews.net/en/index.php?opr=ShowDetails&ID=30340

No Middle East Peace Without Tough Love
By Henry Siegman

25/04/08 "Al-Hayat" -- - We now have word that Tony Blair, envoy of the Middle East Quartet (the UN, the EU, Russia and the United States), and German Chancellor Angela Merkel intend to organize yet another peace conference, this time in Berlin in June. It is hard to believe that after the long string of failed peace initiatives, stretching back at least to the Madrid conference of 1991, statesmen and stateswomen are recycling these failures without seemingly having a clue as to why the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is even more hopeless today than before these peace exercises first got underway.

The scandal of the international community's impotence in resolving one of history's longest bloodlettings is that it knows what the problem is but does not have the courage to speak the truth, much less deal with it. The next peace conference in Germany (or in Moscow, where the Russians want to hold it) will suffer from the same gutlessness that has marked all previous efforts. It will deal with everything except the problem primarily responsible for this conflict's multi-generational impasse.

That problem is that for all of the sins attributable to the Palestinians - and they are legion, including inept and corrupt leadership, failed institution-building and the murderous violence of the rejectionist groups-there is no prospect for a viable, sovereign Palestinian state primarily because Israel's various governments, from 1967 until today, have never intended allowing such a state to come into being.

It is one thing if Israeli governments had insisted on delaying a Palestinian state until certain Israeli security concerns were dealt with. But no government that is serious about a two-state solution to the conflict would have pursued without let-up the theft and fragmentation of Palestinian lands that even a child understands makes Palestinian statehood impossible.

Given the overwhelming disproportion of power between the occupier and the occupied, it is hardly surprising that Israeli governments and their military and security establishments found it difficult to resist the acquisition of Palestinian land. What is astounding is that the international community, pretending to believe Israel's claim that it is the victim and its occupied subjects the aggressors, has allowed this devastating dispossession to continue and the law of the jungle to prevail.

As long as Israel knows that by delaying the peace process it buys time to create facts on the ground that will prove irreversible, and that the international community will continue to indulge Israel's pretense that its desire for a two-state solution is being frustrated by the Palestinians, no new peace initiative can succeed, and the dispossession of the Palestinian people will indeed become irreversible.

There can be no greater delusion on the part of Western countries weighed down by guilt about the Holocaust than the belief that accommodating such an outcome would be an act of friendship to the Jewish people. The abandonment of the Palestinians now is surely not an atonement for the abandonment of European Jewry seventy years ago, nor will it serve the security of the State of Israel and its people.

John Vinocur of the New York Times recently suggested that the virtually unqualified declarations of support for Israel by Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy are "at a minimum an attempt to seek Israeli moderation by means of public assurances with this tacit subtext: these days, the European Union is not, or is no longer, its reflexive antagonist." But the expectation that uncritical Western support of Israel would lead to greater Israeli moderation and greater willingness to take risks for peace is blatantly contradicted by the conflict's history.

Time and again, this history has shown that the less opposition Israel encounters from its friends in the West for its dispossession of the Palestinians, the more uncompromising its behavior. Indeed, Olmert's reaction to Sarkozy's and Merkel's expressions of eternal solidarity and friendship have had exactly that result: Olmert approved massive new construction in East Jerusalem- authorizing housing projects that were frozen for years by previous governments because of their destructive impact on the possibility of a peace agreement-as well as continued expansion of Israel's settlements. And Olmert's defense minister, Ehud Barak, declared shortly after Merkel's departure that he will remove only a token number of the more than 500 checkpoints and roadblocks that Israel has repeatedly promised, and just as repeatedly failed, to dismantle.

That announcement shattered whatever hope Palestinians may have had for recovery of their economy as a consequence of the seven billion dollars in new aid promised by the international donor community in Paris last December. In these circumstances, the donor countries, not to speak of the private sector, will not pour good money after bad, as they so often have in the past.

So what is required of statesmen is not more peace conferences or clever adjustments to previous peace formulations, but the moral and political courage to end their collaboration with the massive hoax the
peace process has been turned into. Of course, Palestinian violence must be condemned and stopped, particularly when it targets civilians. But is it not utterly disingenuous to pretend that Israel's occupation-maintained by IDF-manned checkpoints and barricades, helicopter gunships, jet fighter planes, targeted assassinations and military incursions, not to speak of the massive theft of Palestinian lands-is not itself an exercise in continuous and unrelenting violence against more than 3 million Palestinian civilians? If Israel were to renounce violence, could the occupation last even one day?

Israel's designs on the West Bank are not much different than the designs of the Arab forces that attacked the Jewish state in 1948 - the nullification of the international community's partition resolution of 1947. Short of addressing the problem by its right name-something that is of an entirely different order than hollow statements that "settlements do not advance peace"-and taking effective collective action to end a colonial enterprise that disgraces what began as a noble Jewish national liberation struggle, further peace conferences, no matter how well intentioned, make their participants accessories to one of the longest and cruelest deceptions in the annals of international diplomacy.


Henry Siegman, director of the US/Middle East Project in New York, is research professor at the Sir Joseph Hotung Middle East Program, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Siegman is a former national director of the American Jewish Congress and of the Synagogue Council of America.


When You Shoot the Messenger: Israel Brutalizes Palestinian Journalist www.publish.indymedia.org.uk/en/2008/07/402564.html

Award-Winning Palestinian Journalist Brutalized by Israeli Shin Bet www.publish.indymedia.org.uk/en/2008/07/402401.html

Israel shaken by troops' tales of brutality against Palestinians www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/oct/21/israel

10-year-old subjected to torture by Israeli soldiers
www.uruknet.de/?p=m45397&hd=&size=1&l=e

Israel shaken by troops' tales of brutality against Palestinians
 http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/oct/21/israel

The point of this episode, of course, was to draw attention away from the film showing a settler-Extremist attack on elderly Palestinian farmers, and provoke the war on Gaza these Extremists think the Israeli Govenrment have abandoned.

IDF furious after settlers fabricate kidnapping

IDF, police, Shin Bet forces launch massive search for two settlers who reported their own kidnapping. After being found, settlers change story to say a third friend was abducted. Only 90 minutes later did they confess to lying
Efrat Weiss

Two settlers are suspected of having given a false report of their own kidnapping, resulting in the launching of a large-scale manhunt that included the participation of IDF, police and Shin Bet forces.

The two men began by entering the village of Ein Abus near Nablus. At around 4:00 am they called in a report and alleged that they were bound and trapped inside a car.

IDF troops carrying out an arrest operating in Nablus were dispatched to the neighboring village and located the two settlers, though they were found to be unrestrained.

When confronted by the soldiers, the settlers fabricated yet another story – they reported that there had been a third member of their party and that he had been abducted by the Palestinians. At this point reinforcement troops were summoned. An hour and a half into the search, the two finally confessed to have made up the claims.

The IDF handed the two over to the Ariel police and filed a formal complaint against them.

The army views the incident with grave severity, particularly in light of the efforts and funds invested in the launching the search.

"This is a very serious incident," military officials told Ynet. "By entering a Palestinian village in such an irresponsible manner and falsifying that report – they not only risked their own lives but also put the troops in harm's way, troopers that would otherwise have been operating against terrorists."

 http://www.ynetnews.com/Ext/Comp/ArticleLayout/CdaArticlePrintPreview/1,2506,L-3554658,00.html

Israel's own Extremists are desperate to provoke another round of attacks on the Palestinians.

Palestinians: Settlers fire mortar shells at West Bank village

By Avi Issacharoff, Haaretz Correspondent and Haaretz Service

Palestinian sources reported Tuesday that two makeshift mortar shells were fired from the Bracha settlement toward the Burin Village near Nablus. No injuries were reported.

According to the Palestinians, Israel Defense Forces and police officers arrived at the scene to investigate the incident.

The Palestinian news agency Ma'an reported Tuesday that the makeshift bombs had the words "Sharon-1" and "Sharon-2" inscribed on them. One of the Palestinian policemen in the village said that the bombs were locally manufactured, and that they struck near the school.

About a month ago, a similar incident occurred near Nablus in which settlers fired a makeshift shell into a Palestinian village. No one was hurt.

Meanwhile Tuesday, a police representative said during a meeting of the Knesset Constitution, Law and Justice Committee that the police force had set up special teams to field Palestinian complaints of settler violence in Hebron.

One of the leaders of the Zionist settlement in Hebron, Orit Struk, said at the meeting that the police habitually use harsher measures against the settlers than the Palestinians.

MK Zahava Gal-On (Meretz) called the Hebron settlers "bad" and added that they create an atmosphere of terror for the Palestinians, but for the IDF soldiers stationed in the area as well as left-wing activists.

 http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/998007.html

Olmert: Israeli patience in face of truce violations limited

PM Olmert says Israel has shown some patience in face of truce violations, but will respond forcefully should ceasefire not be maintained; Palestinian leader Abbas: We want to keep this truce going

Yonat Atlas Latest Update: 07.01.08, 18:39 / Israel News

(Olmert's Regime agreed to this cease-fire - even though it has not been forced to end its illegal Collective Punishment of Gaza, which provoked the violence in the first place - because it believed it would allow it to create the illusion that its long-planned reinvasion of Gaza wouls be 'justified' should violence occur.)

A day after the latest ceasefire violation, a Qassam rocket fired at southern Israel, Olmert delivered a speech at the Negev Conference, saying that "nobody will shy away from the need to retaliate harshly" should the Gaza truce not be maintained.

(If Olmert considers Settler-Terrorist violence isolated acts of violence by Extremists, and therefore, aren't official violations of the cease-fire, then he must give isolated acts by Palestinian militants - reacting to the Collective Punishment which is still in effect - the same benefit of the doubt. But of course, immorality breeds contradiction ...)

"We agreed on a ceasefire that puts an end to the military buildup, Qassam fire, mortar shell fire, and any kind of terrorist activity directed at southern communities," he said.

(Israel's part of the bargain was supposed to be an end to the illegal Collective Punishment of Gaza, but Israel's Extremist politicos rejected an agreement for so long, that this was lost in time.)

'Syria talks to continue'

Turning his attention to indirect negotiations with Syria, the prime minister said that the indirect talks will continue until the process matures into negotiations that lead to a comprehensive peace deal.

"At the same time, we shall continue our talks with the Palestinians. I will be meeting with (Palestinian leader) Mahmoud Abbas and continue the indirect meetings with Syria," the prime minister said.

Before his speech, PM Olmert toured the nuclear reactor in Dimona and met with senior officials at the site.

'Sea of peace'

Meanwhile, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas expressed hope that a lasting peace deal with Israel could be reached before the end of the year, ahead of a meeting with Defense Minister Ehud Barak on Tuesday.

Abbas, who joined Barak and Iraqi President Jalal Talabani at a Socialist International conference in Greece, said his government would work to keep alive the truce between Israel and Hamas.

"Israel will live in an island and sea of peace if Israel withdraws from Arab and Palestinian territories," Abbas told the conference. "We witness some steps in this direction which may stop this violence and bloodshed... Now there has been an agreement and we hope it will be kept. We want to keep this truce going.

"We hope that before the end of this year, and this is a hope, we can reach a true agreement for the end of the occupation and violence ...between Israel and Palestine," Abbas said, qualifying his statements by adding that "the painful truth is that we still have a long way to go to achieve success."

 http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3562718,00.html

Israeli settlers bind Palestinian teacher to pole and club him in Samu'
Date: 05 / 07 / 2008 Time: 16:49

Hebron – Ma'an – A mob of Israeli settlers attacked 30-year-old Midhat Abu Karsh, a Palestinian teacher from the southern West Bank village of As-Samu' south of Hebron on Saturday.

Abu Karsh was hit in the head with sharp objects before he was dragged to a nearby settlement outpost where he was tied to an electricity pole.

Eyewitnesses affirmed that four Israeli settlers struck Abu Karsh with clubs until his head began to bleed. He remained tied to the pole until an Israeli patrol came and untied him in order to administer first aid. Shortly after, Palestinian Red Crescent ambulances evacuated the teacher to the 'Alya Hospital in Hebron.

According to Abdul-Majid Al-Badarin, member of the local committee for defending lands at As-Samu', Israeli soldiers prevented local residents from accessing the injured teacher, and the ambulance had tried to reach him for two hours before it was allowed through.

The assault against Abu Karsh coincided with a rally in the neighborhood organized by local farmers, foreign and Israeli activists demanding that farmers have access to their agricultural lands.

During that rally, Israeli forces arrested 21-year-old Mahran Abu Karsh (a relative of the beaten man) and another boy aged 13 who was released after protest.

Local residents accused settlers of setting fire to 15 dunums (15 square kilometers) of wheat in southern As Samu'. They mentioned that one Israeli settler is currently building a settlement outpost two kilometers from the Israeli settlement of Sham'a. The settler has been opening fire on Palestinian farmers when they came to tend their fields.

 http://www.maannews.net/en/index.php?opr=ShowDetails&ID=30340

No Middle East Peace Without Tough Love
By Henry Siegman

25/04/08 "Al-Hayat" -- - We now have word that Tony Blair, envoy of the Middle East Quartet (the UN, the EU, Russia and the United States), and German Chancellor Angela Merkel intend to organize yet another peace conference, this time in Berlin in June. It is hard to believe that after the long string of failed peace initiatives, stretching back at least to the Madrid conference of 1991, statesmen and stateswomen are recycling these failures without seemingly having a clue as to why the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is even more hopeless today than before these peace exercises first got underway.

The scandal of the international community's impotence in resolving one of history's longest bloodlettings is that it knows what the problem is but does not have the courage to speak the truth, much less deal with it. The next peace conference in Germany (or in Moscow, where the Russians want to hold it) will suffer from the same gutlessness that has marked all previous efforts. It will deal with everything except the problem primarily responsible for this conflict's multi-generational impasse.

That problem is that for all of the sins attributable to the Palestinians - and they are legion, including inept and corrupt leadership, failed institution-building and the murderous violence of the rejectionist groups-there is no prospect for a viable, sovereign Palestinian state primarily because Israel's various governments, from 1967 until today, have never intended allowing such a state to come into being.

It is one thing if Israeli governments had insisted on delaying a Palestinian state until certain Israeli security concerns were dealt with. But no government that is serious about a two-state solution to the conflict would have pursued without let-up the theft and fragmentation of Palestinian lands that even a child understands makes Palestinian statehood impossible.

Given the overwhelming disproportion of power between the occupier and the occupied, it is hardly surprising that Israeli governments and their military and security establishments found it difficult to resist the acquisition of Palestinian land. What is astounding is that the international community, pretending to believe Israel's claim that it is the victim and its occupied subjects the aggressors, has allowed this devastating dispossession to continue and the law of the jungle to prevail.

As long as Israel knows that by delaying the peace process it buys time to create facts on the ground that will prove irreversible, and that the international community will continue to indulge Israel's pretense that its desire for a two-state solution is being frustrated by the Palestinians, no new peace initiative can succeed, and the dispossession of the Palestinian people will indeed become irreversible.

There can be no greater delusion on the part of Western countries weighed down by guilt about the Holocaust than the belief that accommodating such an outcome would be an act of friendship to the Jewish people. The abandonment of the Palestinians now is surely not an atonement for the abandonment of European Jewry seventy years ago, nor will it serve the security of the State of Israel and its people.

John Vinocur of the New York Times recently suggested that the virtually unqualified declarations of support for Israel by Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy are "at a minimum an attempt to seek Israeli moderation by means of public assurances with this tacit subtext: these days, the European Union is not, or is no longer, its reflexive antagonist." But the expectation that uncritical Western support of Israel would lead to greater Israeli moderation and greater willingness to take risks for peace is blatantly contradicted by the conflict's history.

Time and again, this history has shown that the less opposition Israel encounters from its friends in the West for its dispossession of the Palestinians, the more uncompromising its behavior. Indeed, Olmert's reaction to Sarkozy's and Merkel's expressions of eternal solidarity and friendship have had exactly that result: Olmert approved massive new construction in East Jerusalem- authorizing housing projects that were frozen for years by previous governments because of their destructive impact on the possibility of a peace agreement-as well as continued expansion of Israel's settlements. And Olmert's defense minister, Ehud Barak, declared shortly after Merkel's departure that he will remove only a token number of the more than 500 checkpoints and roadblocks that Israel has repeatedly promised, and just as repeatedly failed, to dismantle.

That announcement shattered whatever hope Palestinians may have had for recovery of their economy as a consequence of the seven billion dollars in new aid promised by the international donor community in Paris last December. In these circumstances, the donor countries, not to speak of the private sector, will not pour good money after bad, as they so often have in the past.

So what is required of statesmen is not more peace conferences or clever adjustments to previous peace formulations, but the moral and political courage to end their collaboration with the massive hoax the
peace process has been turned into. Of course, Palestinian violence must be condemned and stopped, particularly when it targets civilians. But is it not utterly disingenuous to pretend that Israel's occupation-maintained by IDF-manned checkpoints and barricades, helicopter gunships, jet fighter planes, targeted assassinations and military incursions, not to speak of the massive theft of Palestinian lands-is not itself an exercise in continuous and unrelenting violence against more than 3 million Palestinian civilians? If Israel were to renounce violence, could the occupation last even one day?

Israel's designs on the West Bank are not much different than the designs of the Arab forces that attacked the Jewish state in 1948 - the nullification of the international community's partition resolution of 1947. Short of addressing the problem by its right name-something that is of an entirely different order than hollow statements that "settlements do not advance peace"-and taking effective collective action to end a colonial enterprise that disgraces what began as a noble Jewish national liberation struggle, further peace conferences, no matter how well intentioned, make their participants accessories to one of the longest and cruelest deceptions in the annals of international diplomacy.


Henry Siegman, director of the US/Middle East Project in New York, is research professor at the Sir Joseph Hotung Middle East Program, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Siegman is a former national director of the American Jewish Congress and of the Synagogue Council of America.


Palestinians Catch Settler-Extremist Attack on Camera
 https://publish.indymedia.org.uk/en/2008/06/400996.html

Cross Your Fingers: Israel Says It's 'Decided Against' Gaza Strip Invasion
 http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2008/06/400894.html