Madison Rafah Journal

With Only 0.4% of AIPAC's Budget

December 31, 2009

In 2008, the total revenues for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) — the leading organization in the United States supporting Israeli occupation and apartheid — amounted to $70,676,421.

In that same year, the total revenues for the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation — the leading coalition in the United States working to change U.S. policy toward Palestine/Israel to support human rights, international law, and equality — amounted to $276,747, or just 0.39% of AIPAC's revenues.

In some ways, this is a depressing statistic. In other ways though, it is inspiring as it shows how much we've been able to accomplish with less than 1/200th of AIPAC's budget.

Even Howard Kohr, AIPAC's Executive Director (whose salary alone, by the way, is nearly double our annual operating budget) agrees that the movement we are helping to lead is having a profound impact. Consider our accomplishments and his concerns about them delivered in remarks at AIPAC's last annual conference:

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Jeffrey Heller, Reuters, Dec 28, 2009

JERUSALEM – Israel announced plans on Monday to build nearly 700 new Jewish homes in areas of the occupied West Bank it considers part of Jerusalem, prompting strong U.S. criticism implying they could undermine peace talks.

The United States said it opposed Jewish settlement construction in occupied land and urged Israel and the Palestinians to resume negotiations now stalled for a year.

Israel has excluded Jerusalem from a limited moratorium on settlement construction.

A spokesman for Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas condemned the Israeli plan, saying new building on territory occupied by Israel since the 1967 Middle East war was illegal.

Under the new Israeli blueprint, Israel's Housing Ministry invited contractors to bid for the construction of 198 housing units in Pisgat Zeev, 377 homes in Neve Yaakov and 117 dwellings in Har Homa, settlements near Jerusalem.

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Portside, 26 Dec 2009

At 8:30pm tonight, December 24, 2009, the Egyptian Foreign Minister said on Egyptian TV Channel 2 that neither the Gaza Freedom March nor persons accompanying the Viva Palestina convoy would be allowed to enter Gaza.

The Foreign Minister's comments confirmed statements made to Ann Wright and Tighe Barry of the Gaza Freedom March steering committee during their meeting this afternoon with the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs Director of the Office of Palestinian Affairs Hisham Seif-Eldin and officer Ahmed Azzam. Barry and Wright went to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to discuss the December 20 rejection of entry into Gaza by the Gaza Freedom March.

Mr. Sief-Eldin said that Egyptian embassies in Europe and North America had received a large number of emails and phone calls since the announcement of the disapproval. He was visibly upset by what he described as the "tone" of some of the emails received and forwarded to him by Egyptian embassies in Europe and North America and said that emails contained threats to Egyptian interests by tourist boycotts and personal attacks and derogatory language toward staff members. He said the position of the security and intelligence services of Egypt in disapproving transiting the Rafah border crossing had "hardened." Sief-Eldin said that the permit we had requested to hold an orientation meeting on December 27 at 7pm at the Holy Family complex was canceled and that the permit for a press conference at the Pyramisa Hotel on December 27 would not be approved.

At the meeting we presented a written request to hold a conference on Gaza for delegates only on December 28 and 29 either at the American University Cairo or at hotel. Mr. Azzad said the Foreign Ministry would forward the request to the security agency but did not believe it would be acted on in a timely manner. The conference would be considered a "political" conference and would have to be approved by the Office of the Prime Minister.

Sief-Eldin in the strongest terms said security services would not permit gatherings with signs or banners. He said that no group would be permitted to travel to al Arish or Rafah. He said we should tell the 1360 delegates to "not come to Egypt" unless they were going to do only tourist things. He said that in a change from yesterday, the Viva Palestina convoy has not heeded the Government of Egypt's decision on where the convoy should enter Egypt and none of their delegates will be allowed to enter Gaza, but the vehicles will enter eventually through a checkpoint in Israel.

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Yasmine Saleh Yasmine Saleh, Reuters, Dec 28, 2009

CAIRO – About 80 foreign supporters of Palestinians protested outside the French Embassy in Cairo on Monday after Egypt refused to let them to march to Gaza, witnesses said.

Some 1,400 activists from 43 countries had gathered in Cairo on Sunday to mark the first anniversary of the Israeli offensive on Hamas-ruled Gaza.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is due to hold talks in Cairo on Tuesday with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

The activists, several hundred of whom were from France, had asked Egypt for permission to cross into Gaza but the Interior Ministry said the march was illegal and a threat to national security.

On Sunday, about 80 activists staged a protest outside the French Embassy, surrounded by a heavy police presence. Such demonstrations are rare in Egypt but no violence broke out and no arrests were made, witnesses said.

About 30 activists managed to make their way on Sunday by public transport to Arish in northern Sinai, where they were now under house arrest, said Yvonne Ridley, a member of the Gaza Freedom March.

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Illustration From "Footnotes in Gaza"

‘They Planted Hatred in Our Hearts’

PATRICK COCKBURN, The New York Times, December 27, 2009

FOOTNOTES IN GAZA
Written and illustrated by Joe Sacco
418 pp. Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt & Company. $29.95

Joe Sacco’s gripping, important book about two long-forgotten mass killings of Palestinians in Gaza stands out as one of the few contemporary works on the Israeli-Palestinian struggle likely to outlive the era in which they were written.

Sacco will find readers for “Footnotes in Gaza” far into the future because of the unique format and style of his comic-book narrative. He stands alone as a reporter-cartoonist because his ability to tell a story through his art is combined with investigative reporting of the highest quality.

His subject in this case is two massacres that happened more than half a century ago, stirred up little international attention and were forgotten outside the immediate circle of the victims. The killings took place during the Suez crisis of 1956, when the Israeli Army swept into the Gaza Strip, the great majority of whose inhabitants were Palestinian refugees. According to figures from the United Nations, 275 Palestinians were killed in the town of Khan Younis at the southern end of the strip on Nov. 3, and 111 died in Rafah, a few miles away on the Egyptian border, during a Nov. 12 operation by Israeli troops. Israel insisted that the Palestinians were killed when Israeli forces were still facing armed resistance. The Palestinians said all resistance had ceased by then.

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Palestinian girls in Rafah after Israel's 22-day offensive, July 2009. (AFP/File/Said Khatib)

Agence France Presse, Dec 23, 2009

GENEVA – A UN human rights expert on Wednesday condemned a "tragic failure" by major powers to end Israel's blockade of the Gaza Strip or probe alleged war crimes committed during a military offensive one year ago.

The UN Special Rapporteur for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Richard Falk, urged Israel's European and North American allies to press for the immediate end of the blockade "backed up by a credible threat of economic sanctions."

"There is no evidence of meaningful international pressure being brought to bear to end the blockade or to ensure that Israeli and Hamas officials are held accountable for alleged war crimes perpetrated during the Gaza attacks," he said in a statement.

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Reuters, Dec 21, 2009

LONDON – The international community has betrayed the people of Gaza by failing to end an Israeli blockade to allow the territory to be rebuilt, a group of 16 rights groups said in a report on Tuesday.

The report argued that Israel was in violation of international humanitarian law by enforcing a "collective punishment" with an indiscriminate blockade on Gaza — punishing all for the acts of a few.

The Israeli authorities have allowed only 41 truckloads of construction materials into Gaza since the end of its three-week offensive last January, the report said, adding that thousands of such deliveries would be needed to repair homes.

"World powers have … failed and even betrayed Gaza's ordinary citizens," said Jeremy Hobbs, Oxfam International's executive director.

"They have wrung hands and issued statements, but have taken little meaningful action to attempt to change the damaging policy that prevents reconstruction, personal recovery and economic recuperation," he added in a statement.

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