From Occupied Palestine

Talking to Hamas
ALASTAIR CROOKE
Prospect issue 123, June 2006

Almost no one believes that putting Palestinians on a "diet" will make them more moderate or help to restart a political process with Israel. The diet

Hamas PM Haniyeh: Retreat to 1967 borders will bring peace
DANNY RUBINSTEIN
Ha'aretz, 23 May 2006

Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh told Haaretz Monday that the Hamas government is prepared to agree to an extended cease-fire if Israel withdraws to the 1967 lines.

"If Israel withdraws to the 1967 borders, peace will prevail and we will implement a cease-fire [hudna] for many years," Haniyeh said during an interview in his south Gaza office. "Our government is prepared to maintain a long-term cease-fire with Israel."

The great catastrophe
KARMA NABULSI
Guardian, 12 May 2006

In the last week of April 1948, combined Irgun-Haganah forces launched an offensive to drive the Palestinian people out of the beautiful port city of Jaffa, forcing the remaining inhabitants to flee by sea; many drowned in the process. My aunt Rose, a teenager at that time, survived the trip to begin her life in exile on the Lebanese coast. Each Palestinian refugee family grows up hearing again and again the stories of those final moments in Palestine, the decisions, the panic, as we live in the midst of their terrible consequences. Throughout 1948, Jewish forces expelled many thousands of Palestinians from their villages, towns and cities into Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt and Iraq. Hundreds of thousands of others fled in fear. The purpose was to create a pure Jewish state, ethnically cleansed of the original inhabitants who had lived there for centuries. The creation of the state of Israel was the heart of this cataclysmic historical event for the Palestinians - the mass forced expulsion of a people; the more than 50 massacres carried out over the summer of 1948 by various armed Jewish forces; the demolition of villages to ensure the refugees could not return - all this is summed up in a single word for Palestinians: nakba, the catastophe.

Funds cut, Gaza faces a plague of health woes
STEVEN ERLANGER
New York Times, 8 May 2006

Gaza -- Hanin al-Hilo was screaming at the nurses at the main Gaza hospital, Al Shifa: "If I called and said I was the son of Mr. Somebody, some big shot, I'd have a place!"

Living by the sword, for all time
AMIR OREN
Ha'aretz, 2 May 2006

Another Qassam rocket fired at Ashkelon, another volley of shells on Beit Lahia, another suicide bombing foiled and one that wasn't. That's the headline in the newspaper, on the evening newscast, on Internet bulletins. But the message that the Israel Defense Forces is digging up beneath the ruins and between the craters is far more important than any passing report. It is not about to end. Not this week, not this year, not this decade, maybe not even this century. This is our life (and our death), as far as the eye can see. Endless bloodletting, until the end of time.

Bil'in: The ongoing protests against the wall
JON ELMER and KAREN MACKINTOSH
CFRO Red Eye, 11 March 2006

In a thirteen-minute in-studio interview, Jon Elmer and Karen Mackintosh discuss the ongoing protests against Israel's barrier in the West Bank village of Bil'in and the politics of the occupation on Co-op Radio 102.7 FM in Vancouver.

The last conquest of Jerusalem
Economist, 15 April 2006 [cover]

Jerusalem -- In the twilight of a Bethlehem evening, Jerusalem shimmers on a distant hilltop like the Wizard of Oz's Emerald City, its floodlit walls giving it a surrealist glow. Except that these are not the fortifications of ancient Jerusalem as seen above, but the appropriately named Har Homa (Wall Mountain), one of the new Israeli settlements that now ring the city.

There is no hunger in Gaza
GIDEON LEVY
Ha'aretz, 9 April 2006

For the information of all the anxious: There is no hunger in the territories. No baby has died of malnutrition; no child is walking around with a swollen belly. There is no lack of flour, and from Rafah to Jenin rice is available. Let the tongue-cluckers relax: The talk about a "humanitarian disaster" is exaggerated. The international relief and aid organizations are trying in despair to cry "wolf," to alert the Israelis and the world and enlist them in the cause to save the Palestinian people, knowing that only exaggerated talk might move anyone. They might be right, but their calls are coming too soon, and also much too late.

Back to 1967
ALASTAIR CROOKE
Prospect , 23 March 2006

On the face of it, the Hamas refusal to recognise Israel seems perverse: plainly Israel 'exists.' Tel Aviv is a large modern city that shows no sign of sliding into the sea. To us in the west, this posture has the taint of ideological backwardness. Hamas, however, is neither stuck in the past nor unable 'to do politics.' What it is doing is identifying a key failure of the Israeli-Palestinian political process since the Oslo accords were signed in 1993 which is the omission of any clear outline of Palestinian rights.

Another brick in the wall
ROBERT FISK
Independent, 2 April 2006

We have been conned again. The Israeli elections, we are told, mean that the dream of "Greater Israel" has finally been abandoned. West Bank settlements will be closed down, just as the Jewish colonies were uprooted in Gaza last year. The Zionist claim to all of Biblical Israel has withered away. Likud, the nightmare party of Menachem Begin and Benjamin Netanyahu, has been smashed by the Gaullist figure of the dying Ariel Sharon, whose Kadima party now embraces Ehud Olmert and that decaying symbol of the Israeli left, Nobel prizewinner Shimon Peres. This, at least, is the narrative laid down by so many of our journalists, "analysts" and "commentators". But it is a lie.