Madison Rafah Journal

Rory McCarthy in Jerusalem
Wednesday February 28, 2007
Guardian Unlimited

An Israeli soldier checks identity cards in the West Bank city of Hebron. Photograph: Abed al-Hafiz Hashlamoun/EPA

An Israeli human rights group today proposed a new national constitution that gives more rights to the country's Arab minority and says Israel should be defined not as a Jewish state but as a "democratic, bilingual and multicultural state".Although the paper – from Adalah, a legal organisation working for Arab rights – is unlikely ever to become law, it is part of a fresh effort by the Arab minority in Israel to argue for a stronger role in society.

Most striking was the proposal to scrap Israel's law of return, which gives automatic citizenship to anyone with at least one Jewish grandparent. The paper argues that citizenship of Israel should be for those born in Israel with a parent also born there; those with a parent who is a citizen; those married to a citizen; or those arriving for humanitarian reasons, including political persecution.

Adalah also proposed that a parliamentary committee, with half its members drawn from Arab parties, should have a veto on laws related to the constitution unless outvoted by a two-thirds majority of parliament.

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A group of Irish Roman Catholic bishops on Tuesday called into question Ireland's commercial ties with Israel, saying Israel has made the Gaza Strip "little more than a large prison" for Palestinians.

"Where there is evidence of systematic abuse of human rights on a large scale, as in the Occupied Territories, there are questions that must be asked concerning the appropriateness of maintaining close business, cultural and commercial links with Israel," said auxiliary Bishop of Dublin Raymond Field.

There is a long history of support for Palestinians in Ireland, particularly among nationalist parties such as Sinn Fein, which equate their own fight to end British rule in Ireland with the desire by Palestinians for their own state.

Field, chairman of the Irish Commission for Justice and Social Affairs (ICJSA), which advises Ireland's top Catholic clerics on social issues, described travel restrictions on Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza as an "injustice."

"We are calling for an end to restrictions on family reunification, and an end to humiliating treatment of people at checkpoints," Field said in an ICJSA statement ahead of a meeting with Irish Foreign Minister Dermot Ahern.

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Published on Tuesday, February 27, 2007 by CommonDreams.org
by Michael Winship

In the late spring of 2004, when I was in Jerusalem, a white Episcopalian minister who had grown up in the deep South told me that if he had the choice of being a black man in the 1950's Mississippi of his childhood or a Palestinian man in the West Bank today, he'd choose life in Mississippi.

That's how bad it is here, he said. Admittedly, he was showboating a bit for the benefit of my pad and pen, but the point survives his embroidery. His words came back to me in the midst of all the sturm und drang over former President Jimmy Carter's best-selling book, "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid."

President Carter has taken an enormous beating from many for using the provocative word "apartheid." Provocative because it conjures images of the cruelest, inhuman abuses of South Africa before the freedom of Nelson Mandela; of inflamed bigotry, violence and forced separation of the races. Yet anyone who has spent even a small amount of time traveling in the Palestinian villages and towns of the West Bank can attest that if it's not apartheid in the worst, old Afrikaner sense, it'll do until something more invidious this way comes.

Another man I met when I was in Israel was Jeff Halper, executive director of the Israeli Committee against House Demolitions (ICAHD). ICAHD was one of the first Israeli peace groups to work inside the occupied Palestinian territories — it tries to prevent the demolition of Palestinian homes and helps rebuild those already demolished to make room for Israeli settlements and the famous, tortuous security wall that divides the two peoples with concrete and razor wire.

Last year, Halper, a professor of anthropology as well as an activist, was nominated by the American Friends Service Committee for the Nobel Peace Prize. Last week, he was in New York, and we sat down in a neighborhood restaurant for a roaming conversation about Israel and the United States.

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CommonDreams.org
Published on Tuesday, February 27, 2007 by The Hill (Washington, DC)

by Elana Schor

Several Senate Democrats are renewing their push to curb the U.S. military’s use of weaponry responsible for civilian casualties in conflicts around the world — notably during the summer war between Israel and Lebanon — a proposal that has split the party’s presidential frontrunners.

Human rights groups long have lobbied to curtail the use of cluster bombs, which disperse “bomblets” over wide areas that can cause civilian deaths years after they are dropped. Democratic lawmakers joined the cause last fall amid growing controversy over Israel’s firing of older U.S.-supplied cluster bombs into Lebanon.

Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) offered a bill earlier this month that allows U.S. sales and transfers only of newer bombs with low error rates, expanding on a cluster-curbing amendment they offered last year.

Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) backed that plan while his rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination, Sens. Hillary Clinton (N.Y.), Joseph Biden (Del.) and Chris Dodd (Conn.), opposed it – a vote that looms as potential attack ad fodder in a 2008 campaign that is kicking off and going negative especially early.

“Perhaps unfortunately, the issue of cluster munitions came about so prominently by Israel’s use or misuse of cluster munitions in its conflict with Hezbollah,” Colby Goodman, a program manager at Amnesty International, said. “It was seen by some as a focus on criticizing Israel, but that wasn’t the intent.”

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Israel will ask the U.S. government to significantly increase its military assistance to the country as part of a new multi-year aid agreement.

A high-level Israeli economic delegation led by Bank of Israel Governor Stanley Fischer and Finance Ministry Director General Yarom Ariav will meet with an American team in Washington this week.

The present package, which ends this year, covers $2.4 billion in annual military aid.

Israel's request comes due to the military challenges and restraints it will have to face in the upcoming years and the weakening dollar.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, delegation members and others met at the Prime Minister's Office yesterday to discuss the requests Israel would present.

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Wednesday February 28, 12:43 AM

AFP Photo
The head of the militant Palestinian group Hamas on Tuesday evoked for the first time the possibility of resolving differences with Israel through negotiation.

Hamas political director Khaled Meshaal was speaking after Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov assured him that Moscow would press for the lifting of an economic embargo on the Palestinians.

"We have asked the international community to take rapid steps to lift the embargo imposed on the Palestinian people and the unity government and to deal with them without discrimination," Meshaal told an AFP journalist in the Palestinian territories by telephone after meeting Lavrov.

"This will create a political climate that could open a political prospect in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict," Meshaal said.

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The theft of private land and lawless construction, with the authorities' collaboration, have long been routine in the land of the settlers. The scope of these deeds and their seriousness are described extensively in the report on illegal outposts compiled by Talia Sasson, formerly a senior state prosecution attorney. The report was buried almost two years ago.

However, the decision of the Supreme Planning Council (SPC) for Judea and Samaria, which was revealed in Haaretz on Sunday, to legitimize the plan to build the Matityahu East neighborhood in Modi'in Ilit, beyond the Green Line, marks a nadir.

The plan is to legitimize 42 high-rises, which are in various stages of construction, some of them on land allegedly stolen from the villagers of Bil'in. All of the high-rises being built contravene the planning and construction laws. Peace Now and Bil'in's residents petitioned the High Court of Justice two years ago to have construction stopped. The legal counsel of Modi'in Ilit warned in writing of "construction offenses of such colossal proportions, ignoring the law and planning regulations, that words cannot describe [them]."

Following the petition, with the support of the State Prosecution, the High Court ordered a halt to construction and to the neighborhood's occupancy more than a year ago. At that time the prosecution instructed the police to open an investigation into those involved in the affair.

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