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I would like to share some rather disturbing news regarding a friend of mine from Gaza. Mohammed Omer, an award winning journalist, was recently assaulted by the Israeli Occupation forces without justification as he attempted to return to Gaza via the Allenby Bridge crossing on the Jordanian-West Bank border. Mohammed, whom I came to know during my stay in Gaza, was returning from an award ceremony in London where he was presented with the prestigious 2008 Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism.

Of course, Israel controls Gaza’s borders and it took an immense effort for Mohammed even to leave Gaza to attend the London ceremony. And when he returned, Israel had a treat in store for him. How dare this presumptuous twenty-something earn an international prize for his reporting from Gaza! Needless to say, Israeli soldiers treated him in the most abhorrent, imperialistic fashion… His crime: to be Palestinian, to exist. (more…)

When Majid Ezzati thinks about declining life expectancy, he says, “I think of an epidemic like HIV, or I think of the collapse of a social system, like in the former Soviet Union.” But such a decline is happening right now in some parts of the United States. Between 1983 and 1999, men’s life expectancy decreased in more than 50 U.S. counties, according to a recent study by Ezzati, associate professor of international health at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), and colleagues. For women, the news was even worse: life expectancy decreased in more than 900 counties—more than a quarter of the total. This means 4 percent of American men and 19 percent of American women can expect their lives to be shorter than or, at best, the same length as those of people in their home counties two decades ago.

The United States no longer boasts anywhere near the world’s longest life expectancy. It doesn’t even make the top 40. In this and many other ways, the richest nation on earth is not the healthiest. Ezzati’s finding is unsettling on its face, but scholars find further cause for concern in the pattern of health disparities. Poor health is not distributed evenly across the population, but concentrated among the disadvantaged.

Disparities in health tend to fall along income lines everywhere: the poor generally get sicker and die sooner than the rich. But in the United States, the gap between the rich and the poor is far wider than in most other developed democracies, and it is getting wider. That is true both before and after taxes: the United States also does less than most other rich democracies to redistribute income from the rich to the poor. (more…)

On June 11, eight year old Hadeel Al-Sumairi was killed when her home in south eastern Gaza was shelled by the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF). Less than a week earlier, eight year old Aya Hamdan Al-Najjar was killed by a rocket fired from an IOF helicopter. These two young girls had been living just a few kilometers apart, in villages in south eastern Gaza, near the border with Israel. Their violent deaths highlight both the continual dangers facing families who live anywhere near the Israeli border – and the grim and rising child death toll in the Gaza Strip. Sixty two children have been killed by IOF in the Gaza Strip this year - almost double the number of children who were killed by the IOF in Gaza during the whole of last year.

The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights (PCHR) is still investigating the circumstances of Hadeel Al-Sumairi’s death. Her uncle, Amin Suleiman Ahmad Al-Sumairi, has given PCHR an eye-witness account of the IOF invasion of Al-Qarara village near Khan Yunis, where Hadeel was killed. “I was at home when I heard a huge explosion. I ran from my house and saw fire coming from the home of my brother, Abdul Karim” he told PCHR. “As I ran towards the house I could smell burning flesh.” The IOF had just fired two tank shells into Al-Qarara village, and both shells struck the house where Abdul Karim Al-Sumairi and his family lived. His daughter, Hadeel, was killed instantly, her small body dismembered. (more…)

Palestinians are being regularly and illegally barred from reaching Dead Sea beaches in the occupied West Bank, according to a Supreme Court petition filed by Israel’s leading civil rights organisation.

The Association of Civil Rights (Acri) in Israel is challenging what it says is the frequently imposed ban by the military on Palestinians seeking to swim or relax at beaches in the northern Dead Sea. The salt-saturated sea is the only open water accessible to Palestinians from the otherwise landlocked West Bank.

The petition says that the Israeli military is using the Beit Ha’arava checkpoint on Route 90 – the only open access route in the occupied West Bank for travel to the Dead Sea – to turn back Palestinians, mainly but not exclusively on weekends and Jewish holidays.

Acri says that the ban is to appease Israeli settlers operating concessions along the Dead Sea’s northern shore. They fear losing Jewish customers if there are large numbers of Arabs using the beaches in territory seized by Israel during the Six Day War in 1967. (more…)

In the Gaza Strip, there are a vast number of inspiring individuals prepared to put their personal reputation (and even their own physical well-being) on the line for matters of conviction. Dr. Eyad Sarraj is one of the more prominent of these figures and I was fortunate enough to speak with him on several occasions during my time in the Gaza Strip.

Dr. Sarraj, a Harvard-trained psychiatrist, is the founder of the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme—a groundbreaking NGO in Gaza catering to the masses of Palestinians suffering from emotional trauma, especially victims of torture. Sarraj is well known for his outspoken criticism of the Israeli occupation and of corruption in the Palestinian Authority.

In the excerpts that follow, I discuss the state of Palestinian democracy with Dr. Sarraj. (more…)

Like a Moslem undertaking the Hajj, the once in a lifetime trip to Mecca, or a Catholic chancing to see the Pope speak from his Vatican window, presidential candidates seemingly long to trudge to the annual AIPAC conference to pay fealty to Israel and its Lobby.

This year we were fortunate enough to witness John McCain, Barack Obama, and Hillary Clinton taking turns losing their dignity before the AIPAC crowd. At one point in his parody on The Daily Show , Jon Stewart spoke of John McCain taking with him Senator Joe Lieberman on a visit to Israel, advising McCain that when you visit Israel “you don’t need to bring your own Jew.”

Hillary’s declaration of support for Israel was merely icing on the cake that she earlier baked during the campaign by promising to “obliterate” Iran if it ever attacked Israel. That, without even a declaration of war called for by the U.S. Constitution should we attack another nation. (But see George W. Bush’s attack on Iraq without such a declaration as precedent). (more…)

Control Room, directed by Egyptian-American filmmaker Jehane Noujaim, provides unique insights into the media dynamics on the eve of the 2003 US invasion of Iraq. It primarily portrays the interactions between Al Jazeera journalists on the one hand and US military spokespersons and Western journalists on the other hand. Al Jazeera is a TV station largely funded by the Arab Emirate of Qatar, which has the politically most open system in the Emirates. It was initially hailed by Western commentators and the US government as exceptionally critical of Arab governments and the region’s most prominent outlet for free speech. When it reported on atrocities by the Algerian military, for example, the Algerian government decided to disconnect the electricity in the capital city of Algier to avert that ordinary Algerians would observe the grim accounts. Al Jazeera fell into disfavor with many rulers, as a consequence of which its licenses to broadcast and report have been canceled or otherwise thwarted in dozen countries. Contrary to popular perception, Al Jazeera was not chiefly at odds with Western government before the Iraq invasion. (more…)

Two evenings ago, speaking before the American-Israeli Pubic Affairs Committee (AIPAC), Barack Obama desperately attempted to win back his floundering support among the American Jewish community by demonstrating his hawkish, pro-Israel stance. This is neither unusual nor suspect—especially in the United States where the Jewish demographic tends to be more fundamentally Zionist than the Israelis themselves and aspiring candidates are almost required to recite Theodor Herzl’s Der Judenstaat by heart.

Naturally, Obama made the typical platitudes: “Israel has the right to defend itself”, “I will always keep the threat of military action on the table to defend … Israel”, ad nauseam. But then he said something that could have caused Ariel Sharon to crack a smile through his coma:

“Any agreement with the Palestinian people must preserve Israel’s identity as a Jewish state, with secure, recognised, defensible borders. And Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel and must remain undivided,” he said to rapturous clapping and cheering.

What? East Jerusalem will remain part of Israel? Have U.S. politicians finally ceased pretending they support a negotiated settlement? (more…)

Αt what point does rhetoric stop and effective action begin? For Palestinians, decades of dialogue and supposed peace overtures have proved fruitless, only serving to protect the status quo: sixty years of continual dispossession, forty years of occupation, and a systematic repudiation of international and humanitarian law. The situation for Palestinians will not improve without constructive movement forward—which rejects collusion with the Israeli government by exercising boycott, divestment and sanctions (known as BDS).

During the 1980’s, BDS of South Africa included a cultural boycott whereby musicians and artists from around the world were prohibited from performing in the apartheid state. In addition to internationally supporting the subjugated black population, this policy was instituted to express that no real dialogue—economic, academic, or cultural—could take place in concert with the atrocities of apartheid. With regard to Israel, the implementation of international BDS is but one necessary measure to shift the balance away from the oppressor and help place it in the hands of the oppressed. (more…)

A letter recently appeared in the Washington Post that got me thinking about John Walker Lindh again. You remember him… The so-called “American Taliban” sentenced to 20 years in prison for “aiding the Taliban”. In reality, Lindh was more likely likely an unwitting victim of an emotionally fragile post-9/11 United States as well as a guinea pig for U.S. torture policy elsewhere.

As it turns out, the FBI allowed Lindh to be abused in various ways, perhaps insignificant compared to incidents in Iraq and Guantánamo, but abuses nonetheless. In retrospect, the revelation that Lindh was subject to abuse should not be a surprise. In the foamy-mouthed ideological environment of Bush’s “War on Terror”, Lindh was just another tool to forward the administration’s propaganda machine. (more…)

By now the private security firm, Blackwater USA, has become a household name. The firm has been the subject of multiple investigations, lawsuits, and congressional inquiries—all leading to an obvious conclusion: Blackwater in Iraq has either acted in a manner of extreme disregard for civilian lives, or they are outright contemptuous murderers. Yet, as Democracy Now! reports, Blackwater continues to reap millions in profits from the government and was recently awarded a new contract from the State Department.

In the aftermath of the now-infamous Nisour Square Massacre of September 2007 in which 17 Iraqi civilians were mercilessly gunned down by Blackwater operatives, the puppet Iraqi Prime Minister, Nouri al-Maliki, demanded that Blackwater be held accountable under Iraqi law. Al-Maliki had apparently forgotten the directive in place since Paul Bremer’s tenure providing immunity to all private contractors in Iraq. The order to expel Blackwater from Iraq was rescinded by the Bush junta and Blackwater was already operating in the region again by last April. (more…)

It seems the U.S. State Department has reversed the decision to deny the seven Gaza students Fulbright Grants. And while this is good news in principle, it should not be praised out of context—or too early.

The spokesman for the Israeli Defense Ministry’s department of civilian affairs, Major Peter Lerner (whom I dealt with regularly when arranging coordination in and out of Gaza), says that each of the the Palestinian students will face security check before being allowed to leave Gaza.

Fine. This sounds very reasonable… but I am skeptical that these students will actually be granted permission to leave. Since June 2007, approximately 670 students have been unable to pursue higher education abroad due to the total closure of the territory by the Israeli military. (more…)

It could be called one of Africa’s tragic historic ironies. Centuries after the last slave had been put into bondage and sold to Latin and North America as well as the Caribbean on Africa’s infamous slave coast, which are nowadays the shores of Togo and Ghana; what has been called the twenty century equivalents of slavery victimize too many of the youngest and most vulnerable citizens of these countries: human trafficking, which often results in forced and monetarily uncompensated out-of-household labor.

Meet Karine Assilatanon, 15 years old, from the village of Davié outside of Lomé, located in a region in which malnourishment among children is widespread and poverty hinders most children from pursuing the three years of pre-school education, which the Togolese government officially provides. Countrywide, 39 percent of all girls are not enrolled in school, a condition that serves as a breeding ground for child exploitation, particularly of girls. Approximately 11 years ago, Karine’s mother, who is widowed, was informed about the possibility that her daughter could work in neighboring Ghana. Knowing that Ghanaian wages, although still beneath international standards, were higher than in Togo, her mother decided that she should work there. However, promises of a salary turned out to be empty, and Karine had to press fruits for juices without receiving any payment. According to estimates of CARE caseworker Rose Adjowoa Kpogli, working shifts for girls like Karine can last up to 22 hours, with as few as 2 hours off for sleeping in extreme cases. All too often, these girls become victims of rape or sexual harassment. (more…)

“They came at four in the morning, with two bulldozers, and they left before 8am. I own this chicken farm with my three brothers, and we worked day and night for eighteen years to build up our business. The Israelis destroyed everything in less than four hours.”

Nasser Jaber’s chicken farm was bulldozed by the Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) ten days ago, in the early morning hours of May 16, while he was sleeping at home in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip. He still looks stunned. Wearily he guides us round the ruins of his eighteen-year business. “This was a lifetime project for me and my brothers” he says as we clamber over rubble, wire, shattered sheets of metal and thousands of putrefying chickens. “I have never belonged to any political faction, and I have never been to jail. I don’t know why they did this.” The farm workers who are starting to clear some of the rubble are all wearing facemasks. Forty thousand dead chickens lie smashed amidst the rubble and the stench is sickening. (more…)

What better way to punish Hamas than by punishing Gazan students?

The American State Department recently withdrew the Fulbright Grants for Gazan students hoping to pursue higher education opportunities in the United States. And on what grounds?

Well, it seems that because Israel isn’t letting them out anyway, it’s better not to waste money on students condemned to a future of imprisonment. The politics of accomodation work yet again, but this time the hopes of seven talented students have been drastically crushed by this moral cowardice.

True, the money can be used elsewhere, but why not take a moral stand against the collective punishment of Gaza? First, there is no guarantee of Israel policy regarding Gaza and simply assuming that Israel will never allow these students to leave the Strip is tantamount to supporting Israeli oppression in the first place. (more…)

More than five years have passed since the invasion of Iraq, since President Bush stood under the “Mission Accomplished” banner on that aircraft carrier. While these fifth anniversaries got some notice, another did not: the shelling of the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad by a U.S. Army tank on April 8, 2003. The tank attack killed two unembedded journalists, Reuters cameraman Taras Protsyuk and José Couso, a cameraman for the Spanish television network Telecinco. Couso recorded his own death. He was filming from the balcony and caught on tape the distant tank as it rotated its turret and fired on the hotel. A Spanish court has charged three U.S. servicemen with murder, but the U.S. government refuses to hand over the accused soldiers. The story might have ended there, just another day of violence and death in Iraq, were it not for a young U.S. military intelligence veteran who has just decided to blow the whistle.

Adrienne Kinne is a former Army sergeant who worked in military intelligence for 10 years, from 1994 to 2004. Trained in Arabic, she worked in the Army translating intercepted communications. She told me in an interview this week that she saw a target list that included the Palestine Hotel. She knew that it housed journalists, since she had intercepted calls from the Palestine Hotel between journalists there and their families and friends back home (illegally and unconstitutionally, she thought). (more…)

When I reflect upon the upcoming U.S. Presidential election, I tend not to place so much faith in the rhetoric of change. Despite prevailing, popular attitudes here in Europe, I find it difficult to imagine anything but the most marginal change in domestic policy should Obama become President (and virtually zero change elsewhere).

We may count ourselves lucky, however, that whether it is McCain or Obama that takes the reins in November, our eight-year affair with Bush is almost at an end. No matter which “wing” from the corporatist cesspool of American government becomes President, at least we will be spared the inane remarks, the cheesy laughter, the genuine stupidity and brass arrogance of the Bush years. Perhaps I am alone, but I always felt the crimes prosecuted by the Bush junta were always compounded by the profound ignorance expressed by some of its more senior members. (more…)

May 15, 2008 marks the 60th anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba, when Palestinians were forced from their homes and ethnically cleansed en masse in a premeditated and organized campaign carried out by armed Zionist militia. Historical accounts indicate that the forced migration of Palestinians from their homeland had been planned well in advance. The establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 was built on the violations of the rights of the Palestinian people. After widespread massacres and killings, more than 700,000 Palestinian civilians were brutally uprooted from their homes, villages and towns, and forced to become refugees in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and surrounding Arab countries. In addition, thousands of other Palestinians were internally displaced within the land subsequently occupied by Israel.

Since the establishment of the State of Israel, and after its expansion in 1967 when it forcibly occupied the remainder of Palestinian West Bank land (including occupied East Jerusalem) and the Gaza Strip, Israel has relentlessly confiscated Palestinian land in order to build illegal Jewish settlements, erasing the history of Palestine in the process. Israel’s campaign of “Establishing facts on the ground” has consistently forced more Palestinians into exile, and the Israeli authorities continue to seek to rid the land of its original inhabitants. (more…)

A lack of obvious accomplishments in talks US President George Bush began with lofty ideals six months ago could change as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visits the region yet again. She has visited the region nearly every month since the formal launch of peace talks last year, but nothing has yielded breakthroughs so far, at least not in public view. However, Rice might get something done with regards to Israeli roadblocks. A review of the ones that were supposedly removed will reveal that Israel has been removing just tiny dirt barriers which it calls roadblocks and is only partially dismantling the real big ones after pledging to pull them down. The UN is a witness to this charade. In March, the Israeli government announced the removal of 61 checkpoints or roadblocks in the West Bank, but the United Nations said at the time that only 44 had actually been removed and these were of little or no significance. If anything, the UN report said that as of March, the overall number of obstacles had increased. (more…)

In a nation as coiled and embroiled as this, with a language fraught and zip-filed as the bible, it’s only fitting that a single daily newspaper headline will often say more than the thousands of words that follow.

So it was, that on the day before Israel was to celebrate its independence, Maariv’s banner read, simply, “60 Years of Bereavement.”

In a narrow sense, the headline, stark white on a field of black, marked Israel’s memorial day for its war dead and its victims of terrorism. At the same time, the brief headline may have said more about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - and about Israelis themselves, and Palestinians as well - than all of this week’s floodtide of 60th anniversary punditry put together. (more…)