Another brick in the wall
If I were an Israeli I would have built a wall, but not as a way of stealing land
by Robert Fisk

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.

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New U.S. Foreign Policy for Palestine; Starvation

The United States and Israel have finally agreed on a plan to resolve the decades-long Israel-Palestine conflict. Israel will continue lobbing missiles into civilian areas of Gaza and the West Bank while the US cuts off food and other vital aid to the territories. That way they can maximize the human suffering while preparing the people for a violent death. This is not what Palestinians bargained for when they accepted the western-model of democracy. The Road Map has become a cul de sac of aggression, subjugation and outright murder. I wonder how many Palestinians would have stayed home if they knew how they’d be treated for voting for the party of their choice? Presently, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza are experiencing what United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) John Ging calls, “the countdown to a humanitarian crisis”. In a wanton act of collective punishment, Palestinians are being deprived of food, money and access to the outside world. As Jimmy Carter says in his article, “Punishing the Innocent is a Crime” “Overwhelmingly (the victims) are school teachers, nurses, social workers, police officers, farm families, who are just hoping for a better life”. Their crime? They voted for the wrong party; the party that will not fulfill its primary obligation to act as Israel’s security apparatus in the territories.

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Starving Palestinians into Submission

The American alleged noble goal of spreading freedom and democracy in the Arab World has been scandalously exposed when the American administration, who encouraged Palestinian election (declared by international observers to be free, honest and fair), has rejected the people’s choice, and is attempting to starve the whole nation as a punishment for exercising their democratic right. The Bush administration is putting pressure on the international community to stop all financial aid to the Palestinians, to impose a type of a quasi economical embargo, and to politically isolate them in an attempt to overthrow the newly elected Palestinian Authority (PA).

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Kadima government helps break the boycott on Hamas?
by Helena Cobban

In my piece on Hamas for Boston Review, the dateline for which was May 1, I had written that the continuation of the harshly damaging boycott on allowing any material or financial aid to reach the PA-held areas was most probably a function of the continuing (as of then) absence of a new government in Israel... And that most likely once a Kadima-led government had been formed and started to stabilize itself it would quietly put out the word to the Bush administration and the pro-Israelis in Congress to ease up on the boycott....

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Hamas and Israel's "Right to Exist"
Making (Non) Sense of the Funding Cut-Off

A certain withered diplomatic logic does underlie this measure. The PA itself was invented in 1995 to administer Oslo's implicit two-state solution. Hamas's refusal to recognize Israel's "right to exist" would seem to negate the diplomatic agreement that established the terms of its own authority. Until it agrees to those terms, the international community might deem that Hamas has rendered the PA's legitimacy uncertain. Unfortunately for its proponents, this rationale has crashed on one glaring pitfall: the premise that Israel itself supports the terms of Oslo or the Road Map. Prime Minister Olmert has openly declared the "Road Map" a dead letter. His stated policy of "ingathering" settlers into the major West Bank settlement blocs is accepted by everyone as signaling Israel's intent permanently to annex major portions of the West Bank. The advancing Wall and settlement construction are ample material evidence that this plan is Israel's real program and is already half-achieved. No one disagrees that these developments signify permanent territorial dismemberment of any Palestinian "state." No one disagrees that the terms of Oslo have vanished like the morning mist.

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