Philip's posts with tag: non-nation
April 16, '08  Arab man leaves Gaza.
by Gil Ronen
(IsraelNN.com) Four fifths (80 percent) of the residents of Gaza find it difficult to cope with the situation there and are considering emigration, a survey by the Gaza-based Institute of Development Studies has found. Gazans are finding it progressively more difficult to deal with the economic situation there, according to the institute, and 44 percent said explicitly that they want to leave Gaza. Blame Israel The institute presented the survey as part of a request to the international community to protect Gazans from Israel's wrath and to pressure Israel to enable economic development in Gaza. The research also shows that since Hamas took over Gaza in June 2007, economic conditions in Gaza have worsened considerably. According to the report this is primarily due to the closure of border crossings into and out of Gaza, including the crossing into Egypt at Rafiah. The Karni crossing was closed for 107 days and the total number of trucks which crossed into Gaza in 2007 was 8,397. The exports totaled 1,695 trucks. Hamas Responsible
Saudi newspaper Ukaz, meanwhile, interviewed Dr. Mahmoud al-Hebash, a "minister" in Salam Fayyad's government in Judea and Samaria, who said the Hamas government was responsible for the Gaza crisis. Hamas is making efforts to grab control of the aid sent to Gaza from "the legitimate government" in Ramallah, al-Hebash explained. He claimed Hamas is giving Israel excuses to continue "the policy of blockade," as he termed it. Al-Hebash called upon the Hamas government to recognize its responsibility for the crisis in Gaza following its military takeover. He accused it of trying to export the crisis to neighboring countries, meaning mostly Egypt. Economy 'Significantly Worse'
The findings of a Near East Consulting poll released Tuesday showed that some 94 percent of Gaza residents believe their economic situation under Hamas rule is significantly worse than it was before the terrorist organization took over the region. Hamas ousted the rival Fatah faction in what amounted to a civil war. Now Hamas controls Gaza; Fatah controls the PA areas of Judea and Samaria. In elections before the military coup a majority of the Arabs who live in those areas voted for Hamas. The survey, which polled 900 Gaza residents, found that 64 percents of respondents live under the poverty line. More than two out of every five, (41 percent) said they would leave Gaza immediately if they could. Half of those polled feel less security since Hamas took over the region in June 2007 and 18 percent feel no change in the level of security. Some 32 percent said they feel more security since Hamas took control of Gaza.
By Nissan Ratzlav-Katz January 15, '08 (IsraelNN.com) Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas was filmed this week at a PLO Central Committee meeting with an emblem that negates the existence of Israel as a backdrop. The PLO emblem includes the flag adopted by the PA above the map of Israel, including its pre- and post-1967 borders. Abbas at PLO meeting-Jan 2008
Palestinian Media Watch Directors Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook explained the symbolism of the emblem: "This symbolizes that all of Israel is, or will someday be, 'Palestine.'" As reported by PMW, the video from the PLO meeting, which took place in Ramallah, was broadcast on PA television on Sunday, January 13. The event took place just days after Abbas met with US President George W. Bush and reiterated his commitment to peaceful negotiations with Israel. The PA's Fatah terrorist faction, under the direct command of Abbas, also continues to promote the elimination of Israel through its maps and symbols. A map on a poster printed in December in honor of the group's 43rd anniversary shows all of Israel as "Palestine" draped in a colorful keffiyeh scarf. A rifle is pictured alongside the map. Fatah is generally seen as more moderate than rival terrorist groups, as its platform calls for an Arab Muslim state in Judea, Samaria, Gaza, and Jerusalem, but not within Israel’s 1948-1967 borders. However, throughout decades of negotiations the group has failed to change its maps or military symbols, and Fatah leaders refuse to recognize Israel as Jewish within any borders. On November 28, the day after the Annapolis Conference, official PA television broadcast a map of all of Israel, including its pre-1967 borders, covered with a Palestinian flag.
| Abbas' Newspaper: 'Allah, Kill Americans'A paper run by Mahmoud Abbas publishes cartoon with prayers to turn American soldiers' wives into widows. U.S. still believes Abbas is a moderate. |  | | | Al-Hayat al-Jadida, the daily newspaper of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and the Fatah terror group, featured a cartoon this week that illustrated a prayer for the killing of Americans. A Muslim is shown kneeling in prayer facing a U.S. B-2 stealth bomber, silhouetted in the sky. The words of the cartoon character's prayer adorn four missiles aimed at the American plane. These are his wishes: "Allah, scatter them!!"
“And turn their wives into widows!!"
“And turn their children into orphans!!"
“And give us victory over them!!" According to Palestinian Media Watch, which reported the story, this plea for the death and bereavement of Americans is a special prayer for Laylat Al-Qadr (the 27th day of Ramadan), as is noted in the corner of the cartoon. Publications in the PA and by Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah faction have a history of promoting support for those who fight and kill Americans. The most recently published 12th grade PA schoolbooks, for example, use the phrase "brave resistance" to describe the insurgents who fight American soldiers in Iraq. On Laylat al-Qadr, literally the Night of Decree, Muslims recite a large number of prayers. The Shi'a Muslims in particular stay awake all night, pray, and make wishes. As the PA calls for the death of Americans, the American government is making preparations for a summit meeting it will host next month between Israel's leadership and the PA's Mahmoud Abbas, whom it regards as a moderate.
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| DEIRAT, West Bank: As the truck unloads, the children pounce on the garbage like flies. Some swing aloft on the hydraulic pistons that open the back, then drop onto the mound of trash to grab a piece of metal, a crushed can, a soda bottle or a stinking T-shirt. | | | | One boy slips and disappears for a moment beneath the garbage as the truck lumbers forward to dump more of its load. He scrambles up again, losing his footing on a pile of animal intestines, grabbing onto a thicket of shrubbery cut from someone's garden. Another boy finds a small nylon Israeli flag and tries to tear it with his teeth; yet another unearths a small lilac umbrella, which he holds over his head and shows off to his friends. Most dig diligently for metal, which they dump into the ripped nylon sacks they carry. Nearby, on a hill of garbage twice his height, a young boy sat alone. He had found a plastic pack of crackers; he chewed them slowly, almost thoughtfully. The boys are part of a loose-knit colony of scavengers, nearly 250 people who scramble over fetid hills of other people's trash to eke out a living for their families and themselves. Most are under 16; some sleep here during the week to maximize the hours they can hunt for goods to sell. Many are related, from a few large clans, and they have a kind of organization, with a 23-year-old bulldozer driver who settles disputes, and a code of conduct, so that every digger's finds are respected. For all the agonizing about nearby Hebron - how far Israel should go to resolve competing Jewish and Palestinian claims to the city - this desolate spot is a symbol of the impact of Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank and of the dire economic state of the Palestinian territories, where about a third of adults are without work. Many of the adults working the site have been unable to get jobs in Israel since 2000 and the second intifada, when Israel instituted stronger security measures to try to prevent suicide bombings. This dump has become a lifeline, and informal workplace, for them and for the children helping to support poor families in the southern West Bank. The scene is reminiscent of the poverty of the Third World, of places like Manila's notorious garbage mountain, but this desperate place is next door to a country with the highest per capita income in the Middle East: Israel. For the moment, the diggers are disappointed: this truck carries Palestinian garbage, from Hebron. The real treasures, they say, come from the Israeli settlements in this area of the occupied West Bank. It is settler trash that keeps them alive and, in an odd way, entertained. Mahmoud Ibrahim, 10, found a pair of angel's wings, apparently from a costume party or a ballet performance. He wore them upside down but happily, flitting around the dump while the other boys applauded. His brother, Muhammad, 11, who fancies himself a model from the magazines he salvages, wore a discarded suit, several sizes too large, that appeared to have been from a bar mitzvah. If you wiped away the grime, from both the suit and the boy, he would make a mother proud. Youssef Rabai, 18, found a bright orange ribbon, the symbol of settler resistance to the Israeli pullout from Gaza, and wound it around his forehead; the ends flopped onto the grimy kaffiyeh around his neck. Asked if he knew what the orange meant, he shrugged. When told, he laughed. "I'm a settler here," he said. The dump, formally run by the Hebron municipality, is set in the rocky, dusty hills near the village of Deirat; it is used both by Palestinian cities like Hebron and Yatta and by the Israeli settlements that mark the area, from Kiryat Arba to Karmel and Maon. On a good day, working here from 5 a.m. until dusk, the boys make about $4.75. Muhammad Rabai, 23, in salvaged camouflage pants and a dirty baseball cap with the gothic "D" of the Detroit Tigers, is the unacknowledged boss of the dump. He drives the bulldozer here and gets a small city salary, but he and three relatives also salvage trash, trying to feed a family of 25. "It's a very difficult life," he said. "But don't call me the boss. We try to be friends here; we try to be equals." Rabah Rabai, from the same large clan, used to work in Israel as a builder, making more than $650 a month, but he can no longer get an entry permit. He is 48, with a grizzly gray beard, an asthma inhaler and thickly scarred arms. He sat in an old Ford tractor, once blue, pulling a small cart. | |
by Hillel Fendel Though the sudden and violent Hamas takeover of Gaza has come and gone relatively quietly in the international arena, at least one Arab observer says it symbolizes the advent of "Palestinian ruin."
In an op-ed in Tuesday's New York Times, Lebanese-born university professor Fouad Ajami bitterly attacks the Palestinian leadership of the past 40 years, and rules out any form of normalcy or peace in both Gaza and the Fatah-controlled areas in the near future.
Known as a vocal supporter of Palestinian self-determination, Ajami is today the Director of the Middle East Studies Program at Johns Hopkins University. Excerpts from his stinging piece, entitled "Brothers to the Bitter End," follow:
"So the masked men of Fatah have the run of the West Bank while the masked men of Hamas have their dominion in Gaza. Some see this as a tolerable situation... It’s always tempting to look for salvation in disaster, but in this case it’s sheer fantasy. The Palestinian ruin was a long time in coming. No other national movement has had the indulgence granted the Palestinians over the last half-century, and the results can be seen in the bravado and the senseless violence, in the inability of a people to come to terms with their condition and their needs.
The life of a Palestinian is one of squalor and misery, yet his leaders play the international game as though they were powers. An accommodation with Israel is imperative — if only out of economic self-interest and political necessity — but the Palestinians, in a democratic experiment some 18 months ago, tipped power to a Hamas movement whose very charter is pledged to the destruction of the Jewish state and the imposition of Islamist rule.
... Before Hamas, for four decades, the vainglorious Yasir Arafat refused to tell his people the basic truths of their political life... Ehud Barak [offered] the Palestinians all that Israeli political traffic could bear and then some. But it was too much to ask of Mr. Arafat to return to his people with a decent and generous compromise, to bid farewell to the legend that the Palestinians could have it all “from the river to the sea.” It was safer for him to stay with the political myths of his people than to settle down for the more difficult work of statehood and political rescue.
...It has long been a cherished legend of the Palestinians, and a proud claim, that they would not kill their own, that there would be no fratricide in their world. The cruelty we now see — in both Gaza and the West Bank — bears witness that the Palestinians have run through the consolations that had been there for them in a history of adversity.
It isn’t a pretty choice, that between Hamas and Fatah. Indeed, it was the reign of plunder and arrogance that Fatah imposed during its years of primacy that gave Hamas its power and room for maneuver... It is idle to think that Gaza could be written off as a Hamas dominion while Fatah held its own in the towns of the West Bank. The abdication and the anarchy have damaged both Palestinian realms. Nablus in the West Bank is no more amenable to reason than is Gaza; the writ of the pitiless preachers and gunmen is the norm in both places.
...There is no magic wand with which this Palestinian world could be healed and taught the virtues of realism and sobriety. No international peacekeeping force can bring order to the deadly streets and alleyways of Gaza. A population armed to the teeth and long in the throes of disorder can’t be pacified by outsiders.
For decades, Arab society granted the Palestinians everything and nothing at the same time. The Arab states built worlds of their own, had their own priorities, dreaded and loathed the Palestinians as outsiders and agitators, but left them to the illusion that Palestine was an all-consuming Arab concern...  Palestinian society has now gone where no 'peace processors' dare tread.
Except among the most bigoted and willful of Arabs, there is growing acknowledgment of the depth of the Palestinian crisis. And aside from a handful of the most romantic of Israelis, there is a recognition in that society, as well, of the malignancy of the national movement a stone’s throw away. The mainstream in Israel had made its way to a broad acceptance of Palestinian statehood... There was even a current in Israel possessed of a deep curiosity about the Palestinians, a romance of sorts about their ways and folk culture and their connection to the sacred land. All this is stilled. Palestinian society has now gone where no 'peace processors' or romantic poets dare tread."
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