Search

band annie's Weblog

I have a parallel blog in French at http://anniebannie.net

Open Search
Category

Gaza

Israel/Gaza: Easing Blockade of Imports a First Step

New Policy No Improvement on Exports, Freedom of Movement

(Jerusalem) – The Israeli Cabinet decision to ease the blockade of Gaza is a step toward ending a policy that amounts to unlawful collective punishment of Gaza’s civilians, but fails to address severe Israeli restrictions on exports and freedom of movement, Human Rights Watch said today.

Israel announced on June 20, 2010, that instead of permitting only a small number of items to enter Gaza, it would permit imports of all civilian items except “weapons and war materiel, including problematic dual-use” items, a move that could significantly increase the variety and quantity of civilian goods entering Gaza, Human Rights Watch said. While the announced policy change marks a step in the right direction, it would leave in place Israel’s near-total limitations on exports and on Gazans’ freedom of movement, Human Rights Watch said.

Although Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the decision would allow the “expansion of economic activity,” the Cabinet decision did not address Israel’s policy of restricting exports from Gaza, which has crippled Gaza’s economy and led to high rates of unemployment, poverty, and food insecurity. During the past three years, Israel has permitted the export of only a few truckloads of strawberries and cut flowers.

Under international humanitarian law governing military occupation, Israel has an obligation to ensure the safety and well-being of Gaza’s civilian population.

While the Cabinet decision promised to “streamline the policy” allowing residents to leave Gaza for “humanitarian and medical reasons,” it did not alter Israel’s other restrictions on their freedom of movement, which have prevented Gaza residents from studying and working abroad and have separated families. International human rights law permits restrictions on freedom of movement for security reasons, but the restrictions must have a clear legal basis, be limited to what is necessary, and be proportionate to the threat.

Human Rights Watch called on the international community to press Israel to meet its international obligations to remove unlawful restrictions on the flow of goods into Gaza, and to lift unnecessary restrictions on exports and the free movement of people.

Human Rights Watch said that Egypt’s formal relaxation of its closure of Gaza’s southern border crossing at Rafah to Gaza residents was also a step forward. But Egypt should ensure that its border officials do not arbitrarily delay or deny Gazans’ exit or entry, and open the border to the import and export of goods, Human Rights Watch said.

Human Rights Watch reiterated its call for Hamas to allow the captured Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit to communicate with his family and to allow the International Committee of the Red Cross access to him, and to maintain the de facto moratorium on indiscriminate rocket attacks into Israel it has imposed on its armed wing and other major political factions in Gaza.

source

0

Silencing Gaza flotilla activists in the United States

Posted on June 10 2010 by Cecilie Surasky under Gaza , IDF.

The Israeli government, with the aid of its many proxies- especially in the Jewish institutional world, is working overtime after the Mavi Mavera massacre to paint the Gaza flotilla participants as terrorists.

Apparently–jamming satellite communications, absconding with tens of thousands of dollars of equipment, confiscating every photo and video they could find, and releasing pathetically doctored “evidence” (thank you Ali Abunimah and Max Blumenthal and others) is not enough. Now groups are working to keep flotilla human rights activists out of the country.

Here’s the stunning petition the NY Jewish Community Relations Council has put together to keep activists out. Mondoweiss has audio of retired US Colonel Ann Wright, who was just in NYC, speaking about what happened. She must be the person they’re trying to keep out of the country. Good luck with that. So much for America-first.

source

0

Double Speak: Israel’s Gaza ‘Easing’ Announcement No Sure Thing

Jason Ditz
AntiWar
2010-06-18 08:02:00

English-Only Statement Announces Agreement Never Made

The Israeli government made an announcement today that they had agreed to a “significant” easing of the Gaza blockade, allowing items like food and toys into the region in larger amounts and even allowing some construction materials in. The announcement was met, predictably, with US State Department praise.

But is the announcement real, or was it done purely for PR purposes? While Israel released its announcement, in English, following the meeting, they also released a Hebrew version for local media consumption at the same time, and the two versions are starkly different.

While the English-only version, the version sent to all foreign diplomats, claims that the decision “was made,” the Hebrew version that the Israeli press got insisted that the meeting just included ministers voicing their opinions on a possible easing and that no vote ever took place on any particular draft.

source

0

Bloggers UNITE for Gaza

http://www.bloggersunite.org/event/bloggers-unite-for-gaza

July 09, 2010

Objective:
On 9 July, we are urging bloggers to make a simple promise: “Gaza, We Will Not Forget You”.

Humanitarian aid cannot address the hardship faced by Gaza’s 1.5 million people. The only sustainable solution is to lift the closure. The blockade imposed on Gaza is about to enter its fourth year, thwarting any real chance of economic development. As Gazans endure unemployment, poverty and warfare, the quality of their health care has reached an all-time low.

Israel’s raid on the Gaza aid flotilla brought the issue to international attention. We must act now to put an end to the humanitarian crisis once and for all.

On 9 July 2004, the International Court of Justice issued an advisory opinion condemning Israel’s infringement of the Palestinian right to self-determination and violations of the Fourth Geneva Convention. The ICJ explicitly affirmed the international community that the burden also falls on them not to recognise or assist the illegal situation.

This year, on 9 July 2010, remind your own government of its own obligations not to recognise or assist Israel’s violations of international law. Urge that there must be an independent and international inquiry into the attacks on the Gaza aid flotilla. And make a simple promise: “Gaza, We Will Not Forget You.”

http://www.humanrightsfund.org

0

Palestine/Gaza: The Siege

neverbeforecampaign — 10 juin 2010 — The three year old siege on the Gaza Strip and its 1.5 million inhabitants is a testament to the Israeli regime’s disregard of law, decency and morality. This siege amounts to collective punishment, an action outlawed by various conventions and humanitarian laws. This is not to mention the suffering and humanitarian crisis caused by this law. This siege has been disgracefully condoned by the “international community” and justified by the “free world” as a measure that safegurads the security of the Israeli regime.

The same position was applied to the various humanitarian aid ships that were attacked and abuducted in international waters, and the aid carried by those ships confiscated. The killing of 9 Turkish activists on the the Freedom Flotilla on 1 June brought an abrupt end to international silence regarding the siege. It is unfortunate that the world needed to see the blood of those brave men to realize the brutality of the siege and of the besieger.

Nevertheless, it is our duty to finish what the brave men and women of the Freedom Flotilla and the campaigns that preceded it. It is time to brieak the siege.

0

Abbas denies Haaretz report that he had asked Obama to prevent the lifting of the naval blockade on Gaza.

…a report in Haaretz that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas had told U.S. President Barack Obama during his recent visit to Washington that he opposed the lifting of the naval blockade because such a move would bolster Hamas, the rival of Abbas’ Fatah party.

However, Abbas’ spokesman issued a denial on Sunday in response to the morning’s report, explaining to the Palestinain Wafa news agency that the Palestinian president had told Obama that the lifting of the blockade on Gaza was like the peace process in the sense that “the president [Abbas] has raised the demand to lift the blockade in all his meetings with world leaders.”

“The world should take advantage of the events of the Gaza flotilla to push Israel to lift the blockade and end the suffering of Gaza’s inhabitants,” The spokesman, Nabil Abu Rudaina, added.

Meanwhile Sunday, Middle East envoy Tony Blair said he hoped to see movement in the next few days on easing the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip.

full article here

0

“I think this is the beginning of the end of the siege”

bandannie : I have my doubts about that when I read Abbas Quisling’s statement at the White House

I think a number of people are starting to feel that way in Gaza, although probably not a majority, yet. Hope is scarce, and people can’t stand to have it dashed too many times, or even to voice it publicly. The end of the siege will give the people living here in Gaza some freedom from overwhelming psychic pressure, the hardest thing to begin to understand as an outsider, and also to fix their infrastructure and begin to fix the economy. The recent ILO report gives a summary of the scale of the damage incurred by ongoing “closure,” the Israeli euphemism for imprisonment.

A leading Palestinian industrialist called Gaza a “graveyard of industries.” The tunnel economy provides consumer goods to fill the stores in the Rimal, enough fuel for private use for those families that can afford it, and low-quality building materials. Production plants are shuttered or destroyed. Most workers cannot earn a decent living. The average daily wage in 2009 was 71.5 shekelim in the public sector, 43.7 shekelim in the private sector. With unemployment as officially measured at 39.3 percent, most of the population is basically excluded from the cash economy. Many rely on credit to purchase basic food items—stores have books in which people pay their tab monthly, or when they can. That unemployment rate is probably an underestimate. Workers who haven’t been formally laid off but neither work nor receive wages are classifies as “temporarily absent employees,” rather than unemployed.

Amidst this devastation, children cannot enjoy schooling, and there are few leisure activities. Gaza has long been marked by a bifurcated social structure—those with cash employment and those without meaningful employment—and that bifurcation is becoming starker, as some profit from the recent processes, especially tunnel operators and those catering to the NGOs and journalists who jet in, and those whose economic and thus social lives remained “crushed.” One observer points out, “If this state of affairs goes on, the long-term effects on the social fabric, and hence on the peace process, will be disastrous.” 60 percent of the population is food insecure. Gazan families are “exhausting coping mechanisms.”

Gaza is a worst-case example of ongoing trends within the broader Palestinian economy. As the Palestinian Authority’s Minister of National Economy comments, the “Palestinian private sector is caged.” Israeli military occupation has underdeveloped the territories, and in Gaza prevented even dependent capitalist development from taking place through denial of access to the raw inputs needed for materiel improvement and production—water and land. Sara Roy has called this “de-development.” The multifaceted closure policy has fragmented the West Bank, cut off East Jerusalem, and placed a barrier between Gaza and the West Bank. Economies of scale are impossible, and so Palestinian industry is basically uncompetitive.

The West Bank cannot effectively trade with the population of Gaza, and faces further constraints from the Apartheid Wall and the impossibly difficult Allenby Bridge, to Jordan. Paltrade, which monitors commercial crossings into ’48, lists a range of high transaction costs: the expense and inconvenience of being forced to “palletize” goods according to absurdly strict limitations, and (I think deliberately) lengthy waiting, transfer, and inspection times associated with the “prevailing back-to-back trucking system, as well as the higher risk of damage to products.”

The struggle to break the siege on Gaza is unfortunately a defensive action against the ongoing Israeli strategy of territorial and political, and, it hopes, ideological and national fragmentation and splintering of the Palestinian people, something that began at the physical level with the Nakba, qualitatively shifted with Oslo, through a legal sleight-of-hand reducing the Palestinian population by two-thirds, and walling off the West Bank from Gaza, and then accelerated further, first, at the beginning of the 2nd Intifada as movement restrictions mounted between the West Bank and Gaza and then in 2005-2007, when the siege began.

Lifting the siege partially frees the people living in Gaza. It does not stop cantonization of the Palestinian population into population centers separated from one another by Israeli territory and Israeli roads. And amidst political fragmentation, the prospect of a Bangladesh-Pakistan “solution” looms.

source

0

Abbas to Obama: I’m against lifting the Gaza naval blockade

The Palestinian president reportedly told Obama that lifting the naval blockade of Gaza would bolster Hamas, a move that shouldn’t be done at this stage.

By Barak Ravid

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is opposed to lifting the naval blockade of the Gaza Strip because this would bolster Hamas, according to what he told United States President Barack Obama during their meeting at the White House Wednesday. Egypt also supports this position.

Meanwhile, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu once more put off announcing the creation of a committee of inquiry into the naval commando raid on the Gaza Strip flotilla, and the matter will not be brought before the cabinet for a vote this morning.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and U.S. President Barack Obama

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and U.S. President Barack Obama
Photo by: Archive

Netanyahu and his advisers had hoped to announce the establishment of a committee of inquiry as early as yesterday evening for a vote in the cabinet today. Nonetheless, the Prime Minister’s Bureau said yesterday evening that the conditions have not matured for such an announcement “due to political reasons.”

Talks have been held with the U.S. administration and several European countries to rally support for the mandate of the committee of inquiry and approval of its makeup. The Americans have rejected – a number of times – Israel’s proposals and asked that a retired Supreme Court justice head the probe. The issue was resolved when Justice Yaakov Tirkel was proposed for the post.

The Americans have also been busy with the issue of sanctions against Iran at the United Nations Security Council and also with the visit to the U.S. capital by Abbas and so exchanges with Netanyahu’s bureau on the committee of inquiry were delayed.

Apparently, there is another cause for delay involving exchanges between the Americans, Israel and European countries concerning the proposed foreign observers on the committee of inquiry and their authority. One of the foreign observers on the committee will be a senior American jurist. Washington has made it clear that the administration would like at least two European observers to be involved in order to strengthen the legitimacy of the Israeli panel.

The issue of the Gaza flotilla and lifting the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip was the main topic of discussion between Obama and Abbas last Wednesday night.

European diplomats updated by the White House on the talks said that Abbas had stressed to Obama the need of opening the border crossings into the Gaza Strip and the easing of the siege, but only in ways that do not bolster Hamas.

One of the points that Abbas raised is that the naval blockade imposed by Israel on the Strip should not be lifted at this stage. The European diplomats said Egypt has made it clear to Israel, the U.S and the European Union that it is also opposes the lifting of the naval blockade because of the difficulty in inspecting the ships that would enter and leave the Gaza port.

Abbas told Obama that actions easing the blockage should be done with care and undertaken gradually so it will not be construed as a victory for Hamas. The Palestinian leader also stressed that the population in the Gaza Strip must be supported, and that pressure should be brought to bear on Israel to allow more goods, humanitarian assistance and building materials for reconstruction. Abbas, however, said this added aid can be done by opening land crossings and other steps that do not include the lifting of the naval blockade.

On Friday, Netanyahu met with Quartet representative Tony Blair in his office. This was the third meeting between the two during the last eight days, and centered on ways of easing the blockade on the Strip.

Senior Israeli officials and European diplomats say there is agreement that policy on the blockade should be altered, but this should be done carefully and discretely.

“There is agreement that no major declarations should be made so Hamas will not to be allowed to score points,” a source familiar with the talks with Blair said.

source

0

Not by cement alone

The flotilla, like its predecessors and the ones still to come, serves the Israeli goal, which is to complete the process of separating the Gaza Strip from the West Bank.
By Amira Hass

The achievement of the failed flotilla to Gaza – mainly, it must be conceded, by its dead – is that the demand is being heard from everywhere that Israel halt its policy of siege. The government of Israel was not willing to listen to the desperate supplications of John Ging, the head of UNRWA in Gaza. Now it must heed French President Nicolas Sarkozy and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. But unknowingly, this flotilla, like its predecessors and the ones still to come, serves the Israeli goal, which is to complete the process of separating the Gaza Strip from the West Bank. The process, it will be said here for the millionth time, started in 1991 and not after the rise of Hamas rule. It’s purpose was to thwart the two-state solution, which the world understood at that time as based on all of Gaza and the West Bank, and the link between them.

Since the method of sailing to Gaza started about two years ago, none of its initiators purported to meet the need for this or that product. Israel is attempting by signs and wonders to prove there is no hunger in Gaza. The initiators are actually thinking about hunger of a different kind: a very human hunger for a direct link to the world, to freedom of movement of people, not just goods. The seaborne method was later switched to overland breaches to the Strip via Rafah, to Egypt’s displeasure and Israel’s joy.

Israel brought the closure to grotesque and petty proportions, attracting attention with its prohibition on macaroni and permission for cinnamon, the counting of calories and delaying cement even for a sewage treatment plant. Israel expanded the closure to the extent of prohibiting Gazans from working, creating, manufacturing and earning a living, with the declared goal of bringing down Hamas. But it achieved the opposite. That rule only grew stronger, proving its resourcefulness, its ability to suppress internal opposition and engender support by international activists who are ideologically opposed to its methods and philosophy. The siege strengthened Hamas to such an extent that Palestinian conspiracy theorists are convinced this was Israel’s intention from the outset.

Most Israelis, who have given up on real information, find it difficult to absorb that some people in the world are shocked at the existence of a huge prison whose warden is the Jewish state. But those who are shocked have become partners in the pressure campaign – supported, if not instigated by Hamas – against Egypt to unilaterally open the Rafah crossing, as if it is the occupier and not Israel.

And what serves the goal of separating Gaza from the West Bank better than forgetting the sealed the Erez crossing between Gaza and Israel, and focusing on Rafah and cement? Unintentionally, the runners of the maritime and media blockade focused attention on aspects that do not undermine the essence of Israel’s closure of Gaza. And that essence is denying the right and thwarting the will of Gazans to be an active, permanent and natural part of Palestinian society.

Long before Israel prohibited the entry of cement into the Strip, it prohibited Gazans from studying in the West Bank. While it still permitted guavas to be exported from Khan Yunis to Jordan, it forbade Gazans to enter the West Bank even via the Allenby Bridge or to meet relatives and friends. Step by step, Israel developed draconian restrictions on Palestinians’ freedom of movement, until it declared every Gazan in the West Bank, now and especially in the future, an illegal alien and an infiltrator. These are the essential prohibitions that must be breached. These are the prohibitions about whose existence Erdogan and U.S. President Barack Obama must be taught, and their abolition demanded.

source

0

Blog at WordPress.com.

Up ↑