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Donald Macintyre: To be in favour of peace is not anti-Israeli - Donald Macintyre, Commentators - Independent.co.uk

Tags: middleeast, palestine on 2008-03-10 -All Annotations (0) -About

in list: Middle East

more fromwww.independent.co.uk

By defending Malley, those who knew his work best have drawn attention to a fact US aspirants to high office usually feel it is essential to ignore – Hillary Clinton's lavish praise for the West Bank separation barrier as currently routed springs to mind – namely that it is not necessarily "anti-Israel" to criticise Israeli policy from time to time.
You are pro-Israeli or pro-Palestinian but you cannot be both. This of course conveniently buries a key argument – one heard far more in Israel than in US debate – that an urgent end to the occupation is in Israel's as well as the Palestinians' interest.
This is all the more perverse, now that the Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, has suggested publicly that the failure to negotiate a peace with the Palestinians may imperil Israel's very existence as a Jewish state. Yet it remains hard to imagine a US politician bold enough to say the same thing without risking his own electability.
Yet is it really "anti-Israel" to do so when a growing clutch of Israeli ex-generals, academics, and Israel's most celebrated novelist Amos Oz – all serious Zionists who unlike AIPAC's most hawkish members actually live there – also want talks with Hamas on one issue or another?

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Killed while they played football, the child victims of Israel's revenge on Gaza - Middle East, World - Independent.co.uk

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in list: Middle East

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Israeli-Palestinian clashes kill 45 - Yahoo! News

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The Gaza Bombshell: Politics & Power: vanityfair.com

Tags: middleeast, palestine on 2008-03-10 and saved by3 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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more fromwww.vanityfair.com

He believes that Hamas had no intention of taking Gaza until Fatah forced its hand. “It looks to me that what happened wasn’t so much a coup by Hamas but an attempted coup by Fatah that was pre-empted before it could happen,” Wurmser says.
For many years Hamas has said that Dahlan’s forces routinely tortured detainees. One alleged method was to sodomize prisoners with soda bottles.
Afterward, according to the official, Rice underlined her position: “So we’re agreed? You’ll dissolve the government within two weeks?”
The irony of the blockade on foreign aid after Hamas’s legislative victory, meanwhile, was that it prevented only Fatah from paying its soldiers.
It is unclear whether, as president, Abbas had the constitutional authority to dissolve an elected government led by a rival party, but the Americans swept that concern aside.
From Hamas’s perspective, the Action Plan could amount to only one thing: a blueprint for a U.S.-backed Fatah coup.
Fawzi Barhoum, Hamas’s chief spokesman, says the leak in Al-Majd convinced the party that “there was a plan, approved by America, to destroy the political choice.”
Israel, meanwhile, is no safer.
In Gaza, the exact thing both Israel and the U.S. Congress warned against came to pass when Hamas captured most of Fatah’s arms and ammunition—including the new Egyptian guns supplied under the covert U.S.-Arab aid program.
“They say they won’t talk to Hamas,” says one such expert, “but in the end they’re going to have to. It’s inevitable.”

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Institute for Policy Studies: The Gaza Wall Comes Tumbling Down

Tags: middleeast, palestine on 2008-02-10 -All Annotations (0) -About

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more fromwww.ips-dc.org

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Israel Policy Forum

Tags: east, middle, palestine on 2008-02-10 -All Annotations (0) -About

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more fromwww.ipforum.org

The Israeli government, sad to say, seems oblivious to history and apparently its library of CNN game tapes is empty.
It is not about the shelling of Sderot. Israel began applying sanctions on the Palestinians immediately following the Hamas legislative elections of June 2006.
In the past two years 45 Israelis were killed in terror attacks while 810 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed by the IDF in response.
In other words, the Israelis produced precisely the situation they did not want. They kept out home heating oil and sugar while ultimately allowing Hamas to smuggle in God only knows what!
Israel cannot divest itself of responsibility for Gaza simply by declaring it. Is Israel prepared to let Gaza control all its borders, its air space, and its sea lanes? Is it prepared to rule out military intervention in Gaza in response to continued attacks? Of course not. Israel wants to divest itself of all humanitarian responsibility for Gaza while maintaining control.
As it was, Israel just picked up and left, handing Hamas the opportunity to increase its support by claiming that it drove Israel out, weakening Abbas and setting the stage for the shelling of Sderot and the ultimate Hamas takeover of Gaza.
That state will not be a gift to the Palestinians, nor will it be a reward for good behavior. What it will be is a solution to a problem that plagues Israelis and Palestinians alike (while seriously damaging America’s interests worldwide).