Desperately seeking Obama
By Sunera Thobani, from Rabble, January 2, 2009

The New Year has begun with Muslims around the world being taught a lesson in the crudity of racial equations: 400 Palestinian lives equal six Israeli lives.

Reeling from having learnt that over a million Iraqi and Afghan lives equal 3,000 American lives, the logic of this racial mathematics is certainly no new thing. After all, the first U.S. Constitution engaged in just such calculations of human worth, and Katrina demonstrated their ongoing effects. But the lesson has the power to shock every time: the images of Palestinian bodies being pulled out of the rubble in Gaza that flood news reports are unbearable to witness.

Surely the lesson cannot be lost on President-elect Barack Obama. That such violence can be waged on so defenseless a population with the support of the Bush Administration is unconscionable. That Obama chooses to remain silent is nothing short of cowardice.

Adam Hanieh, The Bullet, Socialist Project

Neoliberalism, the 'New Middle East' and Palestine
In the late 1960s, with the definitive collapse of British and French colonialism in the Middle East, the US rose to become the dominant imperial power within the region. Because of the presence of oil, the Middle East became critically important to the overall construction of US hegemony in the global order. Control of the region's resources functioned simultaneously to secure a vital commodity, provide a source of profits, and as a cudgel with which to influence rival powers within the global marketplace. In the last 30 years, the region – particularly the states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) – has taken on an increasingly important role as a source of flows of surplus capital – and hence overall power – within the global financial order.

Part 1, Adam Hanieh, the Bullet, Socialist Project.

Over the last six months, the Palestinian economy has been radically transformed under a new plan drawn up by the Palestinian Authority (PA) called the Palestinian Reform and Development Plan (PRDP). Developed in close collaboration with institutions such as the World Bank and the British Department for International Development (DFID), the PRDP is currently being implemented in the West Bank where the Abu Mazen-led PA has effective control. It embraces the fundamental precepts of neoliberalism: a private sector-driven economic strategy in which the aim is to attract foreign investment and reduce public spending to a minimum.

"Even after fifty years of living the Palestinian exile I still find myself astonished at the lengths to which official Israel and its supporters will go to suppress the fact that a half century has gone by without Israeli restitution, recognition, or acknowledgment of Palestinian human rights and without, as the facts undoubtedly show, connecting that suspension of rights to Israel's official policies. . . . the Palestinian Nakba is characterized as a semi-fictional event . . . caused by no one in particular."
Edward Said, commenting on the "Israel at 50"
celebrations in the US in 1998

The creation of the state of Israel almost 60 years ago dispossessed and uprooted hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homes and lands. With their peaceful lives ruined, society fragmented, possessions pillaged and hope for freedom and nationhood dashed, Palestinian refugees held on to their dream of return, and Palestinians everywhere nourished their aspiration for freedom, dignified living, and becoming whole again.

By Rafeef Ziadah, April 09, 2008, Left Turn

At approximately 8pm on Sunday, January 20, the Gaza Strip power plant ran out of fuel and shut down, plunging the Gaza Strip into darkness. The closure of the Gaza power plant, in addition to Israel's continuing siege of the Gaza Strip, have had a catastrophic effect on the 1.5 million residents of Gaza, who are already suffering chronic shortages of fuel and medicine. "Gaza is a prison and Israel seems to have thrown away the key," said United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights, John Dugard.

The residents of Gaza had no choice left. As the international community aided Israel in the strangulation of the Gaza Strip, they took matters in their own hands and blew up the wall on the Egyptian border. With that, they both destroyed the Israeli siege and highlighted the Egyptian regimes complicity in the siege.

The story of the Gaza Strip is the story of the Palestinian Nakba-the Catastrophe that saw the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1947-48. The majority of those living in Gaza are refugees who can see their lands from inside the Gaza Bantustan. What we see in Gaza today is the model that Israel wants to implement in the West Bank. It reinforces the fact that the Israeli state is a settler-colonial project that closely resembles features of South African apartheid.

Right of return

http://jonelmer.ca/files/elmer_cd_jan2008.pdf
http://www.canadiandimension.com/issues/v42n1/
Published in Canadian Dimension:
VOL 42 No 1 | January/February 2008: pp. 28-30
Fighting in the Gaza ghetto
By Jon Elmer
When Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip in June 2007 after six months of
increasingly violent clashes with the security forces of its rival Fatah, it
was neither a coup nor a civil war.

To be sure, there were times when Gaza convulsed with a type of
street-by-street fighting that gave the air of civil war. Gunmen took up
positions on the rooftops and balconies of high-rise apartments in Gaza
City. Makeshift checkpoints became sand-bagged bunkers, and more than once
in the winter of 2007, life in the long-battered enclave ground to a halt.

Yet the fighting cannot so easily or broadly be characterized as Hamas
versus Fatah, much less civil war. Significant elements of both movements

January, 12 2008, By Bashir Abu-Manneh, Source: New Politics

New Politics: The year 2008 is the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of Israel and of the Nakba, the Palestinian catastrophe. What do you see as the Israeli goal and has it changed over the years?

The following article is an updated version of a talk given in Toronto on October 4, at the launch of the book Between the Lines: Readings on Israel, the Palestinians, and the U.S. "War on Terror" ( Haymarket Books, 2007) edited by Tikva Honig-Parnass and Toufic Haddad.

by Adam Hanieh

The launch of this book is an extremely timely and important contribution to understanding the current situation in Palestine. We all know from the daily reports that this situation is one of the most difficult ever faced by the Palestinian people. In the Gaza Strip, a truly unprecedented assault on the population is unfolding. Over 1.4 million Gazans are trapped in this 'open-air prison,' subject to daily bombardment by Israeli rockets and heavy artillery. Israel has announced plans to cut electricity and fuel supplies to the Strip. These supplies are absolutely necessary to maintaining basic services such as hospitals and sewage treatment plants. We now regularly hear stories of Gaza residents being killed in floods of sewage, as Israel prevents needed supplies and inspections of sewage lakes in the area.

Over the weekend of October 27-28th, 2007, 54 delegates from Palestinian community organizations across Canada participated in a two-day convention in Hamilton, entitled the Palestine National Voice Preparatory Conference. The convention was the third in a series of preparatory meetings toward the founding of a national organization representing the Palestinian community in Canada. Previous meetings have been held in Ottawa (March 2007) and Mississauga (January 2007).

http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2007/850/re3.htm
21 - 27 June 2007
Issue No. 850

Opinions from both sides of the fence
Palestinians across the sectarian divide and from opposing political
parties give their take on the crisis facing Gaza and the West Bank

Professor Ali Al-Jerbawi is a leading Palestinian intellectual who has
been critical of the Oslo process from its very inception. Considered