The Disgrace of the Gaza Blockade

Reconstructing Gaza could take an entire century, if Israel doesn’t stop the siege, Oxfam warned. And that’s just the time frame for essential projects. The NGO’s regional director calls the situation “deplorable.”

“Only an end to the blockade of Gaza will ensure that people can rebuild their lives,” Regional Director Catherine Essoyan said. With it in place, the flow of construction materials in and agricultural produce out is having a crippling effect on the lives of Palestinians. According to the NGO, new figures reveal a drop last month in construction materials, which are vital to the efforts. "Less than 0.25 percent of the truckloads of essential construction materials needed have entered Gaza in the past three months," the statement also said. In pure figures, over 800,000 truckloads of such materials are still required to repair the infrastructure damaged in last summer’s operation alone.

About 100,000 of these people still live in shelters and other makeshift or temporary accommodation because of this lack of materials. Tens of thousands more are living in badly damaged homes.

“Families have been living in homes without roofs, walls or windows for the past six months. Many have just six hours of electricity a day and are without running water. Every day that people are unable to build is putting more lives at risk. It is utterly deplorable that the international community is once again failing the people of Gaza when they need it most,” Essoyan continues. A further problem concerns food. “Exports of agricultural produce from Gaza have fallen in the last year to just 2.7 percent of the level before the blockade was imposed. Fishermen are still restricted to an enforced fishing limit of 6 nautical miles – far short of where most fish are – farmers are restricted from accessing much of the most fertile farmland.”

FIFA and Zionism

“FIFA strongly condemns all forms of racism in football, and any form of discrimination will not be tolerated and will receive a strong response by the relevant FIFA authorities”


In June, Israel will host the European Under-20 football championship.

Israel's apartheid

Shimon Gapso, the mayor of Upper Nazareth, had banned Christmas trees from all public buildings in his northern Israeli city. “Upper Nazareth is a Jewish town and all its symbols are Jewish,” Gapso said. “As long as I hold office, no non-Jewish symbol will be presented in the city.” The city’s chief rabbi, Isaiah Herzl, has refused to countenance a single Christmas tree in Upper Nazareth, arguing that it would be “offensive to Jewish eyes”.

 A recent letter from Haifa’s rabbinate came to light in which the city’s hotels and events halls were reminded that they must not host New Year’s parties at the end of this month (the Jewish New Year happens at a different time of year). The hotels and halls were warned that they would be denied their kashrut (kosher) licences if they did so. “It is a seriously forbidden to hold any event at the end of the calendar year that is connected with or displays anything from the non-Jewish festivals,” the letter states.

Back from the brink

Iran has drawn back from its ambition to build a nuclear weapon Ehud Barak, the Israeli defence minister, said but added thatthe respite is only temporary and Tehran will still have to be confronted.  Iran chose to use over a third of its medium-enriched uranium for civilian purposes. Tehran has amassed 189kg of uranium enriched to 20 per cent purity, a vital step towards weapons-grade material. In August, the country’s experts took 38 per cent of this stockpile and converted it into fuel rods for a civilian research reactor, thus putting off the moment when they would be able to make uranium of sufficient purity for a nuclear bomb.






Mr Barak insisted that Iran was still resolved to build nuclear weapons, predicting that success would trigger an arms race in the Middle East and “make any non-proliferation regime impossible.Saudi Arabia will turn nuclear within weeks – according to them. Turkey will turn nuclear in several years. The new Egypt will have to follow”

bolton wants war

Former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and war monger, John Bolton, told Israel Radio today that there are only three days left for Israel to attack Iran if it wants to stop the Islamic Republic from manufacturing nuclear weapons. Earlier in the week, Bolton said, "If Israel wants to do something against the reactor in Bushehr, it must do so in the following eight days." Bolton has repeatedly stated that everything must be done to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon, including a military attack.

However, the uranium that will power the Bushehr reactor is imported from Russia, while the reactor's spent fuel - from which Iran could hypothetically extract plutonium if it had the technology to do so, and if it weren't under the scrutiny of IAEA inspectors - will be removed from Iran by the Russians.Paul Brannan, a senior analyst at the Institute for Science and International Security said the Bushehr site is not a proliferation threat since Iran does not have the ability to reprocess the spent fuel into nuclear weapons-grade material.

Whereas Netanyahu likes to tell Western audiences that Iran is led by an irrational "messianic cult", that view is not shared by Israeli military and intelligence analysts, according to Yossi Alpher, a Mossad veteran and former adviser to Israel's Defense Minister, Ehud Barak. Alpher argues that in light of the potentially catastrophic consequences, Israel would only take military action if Iran was in a position to launch a nuclear attack on the Jewish State in an "extremely short" time frame - and that a strike could set back the Iranian program for a significant period of time. The fact is Iran is nowhere close to the ability to attack Israel with nuclear weapons. Israeli leaders tend to accept that even an Iran armed with nuclear weapons is unlikely to initiate a nuclear exchange that would be suicidal for Tehran given the size of Israel's own nuclear deterrent.Instead, they warn that an Iranian bomb's primary impact would be to end Israel's strategic dominance in the regional balance of power.

The U.S. intelligence consensus holds that while Iran is developing the infrastructure necessary to create a bomb and also doing theoretical research on bomb design, it is not currently developing nuclear weapons nor has it made the decision to do so. Its goal is generally viewed as "breakout" capacity, i.e. the ability to build a bomb relatively quickly if it chose to do so - and even that capacity still appears to be some way off.

Whats going on

All eyes are presently on Iran these days , or reporting the supposed conciliatory overtures of the Israeli government concerning the establishment of a Palestinian State but what of Gaza that not so long ago suffered the wrathful retribution of Israel .

Virtually all exports are blocked, which has devastated Gaza's economy, pushing unemployment to 40%. Some 80% of the population live in poverty, if aid is discounted, according to UN figures. Half Gaza's population depends on UN rations which cover only two-thirds of dietary requirements. Many families have little or no income with which to make up the shortfall.

Some basic foodstuffs and medicine are allowed into Gaza, but the UN says a whole host of other items have not been allowed in.Recently blocked items: light bulbs, candles, matches, books, musical instruments, crayons, clothing, shoes, mattresses, sheets, blankets, tea, coffee, chocolate, nuts . No petrol or diesel since Nov 2008 (except for the UN) . Half required cooking gas allowed . Virtually no building materials allowed in .

Mr Bailey of Oxfam said "it's a humanitarian crisis for the people that have no money or are living in tents because their homes were destroyed. And it's a human crisis for one and half million people who don't know where to look for hope."

From the BBC

the gaza tragedy

The BBC news headline called it "abuse" and "vandalism". Why the delicacy ? The reported words of an Israeli described what it was "cold blooded murder". The testimonies were published by the military academy at Oranim College.

"The testimonies conveyed an atmosphere in which one feels entitled to use unrestricted force against Palestinians," academy director Dany Zamir told public radio.
"The climate in general was that lives of Palestinians are much, much less important than the lives of our soldiers " A soldier's testimony.
The soldiers' testimonies also reportedly told of an unusually high intervention by military and non-military rabbis, who circulated pamphlets describing the war in religious terminology.
"All the articles had one clear message," one soldier said. "We are the people of Israel, we arrived in the country almost by miracle, now we need to fight to uproot the gentiles who interfere with re-conquering the Holy Land.Many soldiers' feelings were that this was a war of religion."

The soldiers’ testimonies include accounts of an unarmed old woman being shot at a distance of 100 yards, a woman and her two children being killed after Israeli soldiers ordered them from their house into the line of fire of a sniper and soldiers clearing houses by shooting anyone they encountered on sight.
“That’s the beauty of Gaza. You see a man walking, he doesn’t have to have a weapon, and you can shoot him,” one soldier told Danny Zamir, the head of the Rabin pre-military academy
"When we entered a house, we were supposed to bust down the door and start shooting inside and just go up storey by storey… I call that murder..." One non-commissioned officer told Mr Zamir

1,434 people dead, 960 of them civilians.

Israel's Defence Minister Ehud Barak told Israel Radio that "I still say we have the most moral army in the world. Of course there may be exceptions..."

Who rules Israel

From Gabriel Sheffer , professor at the Hebrew University's political science department and a senior research fellow at the Van Leer Institute .

The defense network is made up of senior military officers, both past and present, heads of the secret services and police, and business owners in the security sphere. The members of this network have determined the political and military moves en route to all our wars, and between them. They are both leftist and rightist (as of late, there are more rightist and religious ones) and also took part in important political moves and in the peace process.
In addition, they are also intimately involved in economic, political, and cultural developments that pertain to the defense establishment. It is no secret that most Israeli prime ministers, even if not all of them, were members of this network. There was not always agreement between them and between those serving in the defense establishment during their tenure, but ultimately they acted together – and this can be clearly seen when we examine the evacuation of southern Lebanon, the disengagement from Gaza, the security fence, etc.

The capitalist network is made up of the 12 or 18 wealthiest families in Israel, as well as the large business owners. Its members are interested in the continuation of privatization processes, low taxation levels, low salary levels, etc. The members of this network are connected to senior politicians who enjoy their assistance and are willing to maintain neo-liberal policies, which led to great destruction of the Israeli welfare state and huge gaps between the highest and lowest echelons.

The strictly Orthodox rabbinical network is relatively small, and its members share common interests in all matters pertaining to the relationship between religion and state. They influence, and in fact determine, matters of personal status, yeshiva students' exemption from military service, conversion policy, attitude to foreign workers, and to a growing extent our policy in the territories.

The network of senior bureaucratic officials is particularly important. Its most prominent members include senior Treasury, Bank of Israel, Defense Ministry and Education Ministry officials. On the one hand, they are the ones who determine and formulate most of the important decisions and laws passed by the Knesset, and on the other hand they have the power to torpedo decisions and laws, particularly through inaction.

All Israeli prime ministers and senior ministers in recent decades were connected to or members of these networks. The three candidates for the next premiership are also connected to these networks: Benjamin Netanyahu is affiliated with the capitalist and Orthodox networks. Ehud Olmert is also affiliated with the capitalist and Orthodox networks. Meanwhile, Ehud Barak is associated with the defense and capitalist networks.

The Water Wars

The bottom line of the socialist case against war is that it is about ownership and contrrol of natural resources , and that religion or race are just the pretext for this competition .

Many came to their own conclusion when they ignored the politicians propaganda and recognised that the Iraq War was not about WMDs or bringing democracy but was a war for the oil .

Less would accept that the Middle East conflict between Israel and its neighbours was about the struggle to acquire natural sources . Yet this article from the BBC confirms much of the socialist argument .

The Six-Day War in 1967 arguably had its origins in a water dispute - moves to divert the River Jordan, Israel's main source of drinking water.Years of skirmishes and sabre rattling culminated in all-out war, with Israel quadrupling the territory it controlled and gaining complete control of double the resources of fresh water. A country needs water to survive and develop. In Israel's history, it has needed water to make feasible the influx of huge numbers of Jewish immigrants. In addition to their sheer numbers, citizens of the new state were intent on conducting water-intensive commercial agricultural such as growing bananas and citrus fruits.

As far back as 1919, the Zionist delegation at the Paris Peace Conference said the Golan Heights, Jordan valley, what is now the West Bank, as well as Lebanon's river Litani were "essential for the necessary economic foundation of the country. Palestine must have... the control of its rivers and their headwaters".

Those resources - the West Bank's mountain aquifer and the Sea of Galilee - give Israel about 60% of its fresh water, a million cubic metres per year. Israel, and Israeli settlements, take about 80% of the aquifer's flow, leaving the Palestinians with 20%. But the Palestinians say they are prevented from using their own water resources by a belligerent military power, forcing hundreds of thousands of people to buy water from their occupiers at inflated prices. Moreover, Israel allocates its citizens, including those living in settlements in the West Bank deemed illegal under international law, with between three and five times more water than the Palestinians.

Stalled negotiations on Syria's dispute with Israel over the Golan Heights - occupied by Israel in 1967 and annexed in 1980 - also foundered on water-related issues. Syria wants an Israeli withdrawal to 5 June 1967 borders, allowing Syria access to the Jordan and Yarmouk rivers. Israel wants to use boundaries dating back to 1923 and the British Mandate, which give the areas to Israel.

Former UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali said in the 1990s that the next war in the Middle East would not be about water not politics . In 2000 former UN general secretary , Kofi Annan warned that national rivaries over water could harbour the "seeds of violent conflict" and there were those who linked the recent attempted invasion of Lebanon by Israel on the water issue to gain access to the Litani .


Nor is the potential for future wars confined to the Israeli-Arab situation but involves all the Middle Eastern countries and water scarcity is indeed a world-wide problem .

Yet another urgent reason to discard Capitalism which has now out-lived its usefulness and only blocks any further progress of humanity .