NewsTrust - Gaza - Most Recent Stories: Opinion (Mainstream)

The coming U.N. debacle

Tue, 20 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0700

Los Angeles Times - By Yossi Klein Halevi, Los Angeles Times - Sep. 20 - The coming U.N. debacle

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Jimmy Carter: 'We never dropped a bomb. We never fired a bullet. We never went to war'

Sun, 11 Sep 2011 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Carole Cadwalladr - Sep. 11 - He may live a modest life in a one-horse town, but Jimmy Carter, now 86, retains his global vision. And 30 years after leaving the White House, the peanut farmer turned president is still a man on mission. In Plains, Georgia, we found the 39th US president full of energy… and determined to make a difference Where does Jimmy Carter live? Well, close your eyes and imagine the kind of house an ex-president of the United States might live in. The sort of residence befitting the former leader of the most powerful nation on earth. Got it? Right, now scrub that clean from your mind and instead imagine the sort of house where a moderately successful junior accountant and his family might live. It's what in America is called a "ranch house", or, as we'd say, "a bungalow". There are no porticoes. No columns. No sweeping lawns. There's just a small brick single-storey structure that Jimmy and his wife, Rosalynn, built on Woodland Drive back in 1961 when he was a peanut farmer and she was a peanut ...

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Israeli minister warns of new offensive against Gaza

Wed, 15 Sep 2010 13:54:42 -0700

Daily Telegraph - Sep. 15 - Cabinet minister given warning after Palestinian militants launch the most sustained barrage of rocket and mortar fire in 18 months.

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The skewed Middle East peace talks | Hussein Agha and Robert Malley

Fri, 03 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Hussein Agha, Robert Malley - Sep. 03 (Opinion) - Whether there?s a deal or not, the Palestinians can?t really win, while the Israelis have little to lose Israelis and Palestinians who have started peace negotiations in Washington are separated by much more than the gulf between their substantive positions. Staggering asymmetries between the two sides could seriously imperil the talks. Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu is the head of a stable state with the ability to deliver on his commitments. Celebrations of supposed institution-building notwithstanding, Palestinians have no robust central authority. Their territory is divided between the West Bank and Gaza. On their own, Palestinians would find it difficult to implement an agreement, however much they might wish to. Israel ...

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Hamas, the I.R.A. and Us

Sun, 29 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Ali Abunimah - Aug. 29 (Opinion) - George J. Mitchell, the United States Middle East envoy, tried to counter low expectations for renewed Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations by harking back to his experience as a mediator in Northern Ireland. At an Aug. 20 news conference with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, announcing the talks that will begin this week, Mr. Mitchell reminded journalists that during difficult negotiations in Northern Ireland, “We had about 700 days of failure and one day of success” — the day in 1998 that the Belfast Agreement instituting power-sharing between pro-British unionists and Irish nationalists was signed. Mr. Mitchell’s comparison is misleading at best. Success in the Irish talks was the result not just of determination and time, but also a very different United States approach to diplomacy. The conflict in Northern Ireland had been intractable for decades. Unionists backed by the British government saw any political compromise with Irish nationalists as a danger, one that would lead to a united Ireland in which a Catholic majority would dominate minority Protestant unionists. The British government also refused to deal with the Irish nationalist party Sinn Fein, despite its significant electoral mandate, because of its close ties to the Irish Republican Army, which had carried out violent acts in the United Kingdom.

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Besieging Israel's siege

Thu, 12 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Omar Barghouti - Aug. 12 (Opinion) - In just a few years the Palestinian campaign to boycott Israeli goods has become truly global Despite Israel?s siege of Gaza, and the escalating displacement in the Negev and East Jerusalem, Palestinians have some reason to celebrate. In Washington a food co-op has passed a resolution calling for a boycott of Israeli products , confirming that the boycott movement – five years old last month – has finally crossed the Atlantic. Support for the move came from prominent figures including Nobel peace laureates Desmond Tutu and Máiread Maguire , and Richard Falk, the UN?s special rapporteur on the Palestinian territories. The movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israel was launched in 2005, a year after the international ...

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Good Deal for Gaza

Mon, 21 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Foreign Policy - By Marc Lynch - Jun. 21 (Opinion) - No investigation was ever going to produce anything of any particular value, but easing the blockade of Gaza could have significant positive effects for the people of Gaza, the prospects of Palestinian reconciliation, the peace process, and American credibility in the region. None of those will happen on their own, of course. And nobody is likely to be fully satisfied with the new measures. I've been quite critical of how the Obama team has handled the Israeli-Palestinian track, and particularly the Gaza situation -- and if they had moved strongly to resolve the Gaza blockade a year ago, the issue wouldn't have been there now to exploit. But now, I think they deserve some real credit for nudging Israel towards finally making a move which could over time open up some real new possibilities for progress.

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Israel naval raid a folly foretold

Wed, 02 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Los Angeles Times - By David Grossman - Jun. 02 (Opinion) - How insecure, confused and panicky a country must be to act as Israel acted. With a combination of excessive military force and a fatal failure to anticipate the intensity of the reaction of those aboard the ship, it killed and wounded civilians, and did so — as if it were a band of pirates — outside Israel's territorial waters. Clearly, this assessment does not imply agreement with the motives — overt or hidden, and often malicious — of some participants in the Gaza flotilla. Not all are peace-loving humanitarians, and the declarations of some of them regarding the destruction of the state of Israel are criminal. But these facts are simply not relevant at the moment; such opinions, so far as we know, do not deserve the death penalty.

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Israeli Force, Adrift on the Sea

Wed, 02 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Amos Oz - Jun. 02 (Opinion) - Hamas is an idea, a desperate and fanatical idea that grew out of the desolation and frustration of many Palestinians. No idea has ever been defeated by force — not by siege, not by bombardment, not by being flattened with tank treads and not by marine commandos. To defeat an idea, you have to offer a better idea, a more attractive and acceptable one.

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The price of flawed policy

Tue, 01 Jun 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Haaretz - Jun. 01 (Editorial) - The grave political damage caused by the confrontation is all too clear. Relations with Turkey will probably deteriorate further, and there may even be serious damage on the official level. The proximity talks with the Palestinians, which started lamely and with low expectations, will have trouble proceeding, now that Israel has attacked a ship intended to aid Gazans languishing under a four-year siege. Hamas claimed an outstanding victory without firing a single rocket, Egypt is under redoubled pressure to undermine the siege by opening the Rafah crossing, and it's reasonable to assume Europe and the United States will not be able to let Israel get away with a mere reprimand.

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Israel defending the indefensible | Al Jazeera Blogs

Mon, 31 May 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Aljazeera - By Marwan Bishara - May. 31 (Opinion) - The Israeli military's justification that its soldiers were lynched and hence were defending themselves adds insult to death. Israeli spokespeople and officials have used the same military strategy in the battle for public opinion: offence is the best defence. Israel had no other option, say the Israeli officials, but to attack!

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Even picnics in Israel are political | Neve Gordon

Tue, 25 May 2010 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Neve Gordon - May. 25 (Comment) - Our farewell picnic to Ezra Nawi before his prison term for peaceful protest carried a new message to most Israeli picnics Picnics, like almost everything else in Israel, are often political. Oz Shelach underscores this point in his collection of short stories, Picnic Grounds , where he describes how a history professor takes his family on a picnic in the pine forest near Givat Shaul, a Jerusalem neighbourhood. The professor teaches his son some of the camping skills he learned while serving in the Israeli military, using old stones to block the wind and to protect the newly lit fire. The stones, we are told, are the remains of a village known as Deir Yassin . Although Shelach does not say as much, Deir Yassin was a Palestinian village ...

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Non-fiction: "Footnotes in Gaza," by Joe Sacco.

Tue, 06 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette - By Carlo Wolff - Apr. 06 (Review) - Mr. Sacco, who specializes in covering wars that mainstream media underplay, outdoes himself in this balanced, sad account of 1956 incidents in which the Israeli military massacred hundreds of Palestinians in Khan Younis and Rafah, impoverished towns in the Gaza Strip, then governed by Egypt.

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IQ Squared Debate: America and Israel

Sat, 13 Feb 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Reuters - By Itamar Rabinovich, Stuart Eizenstat, Rashid Khalidi, Roger Cohen - Feb. 13 (Interview) - Reassessing America?s special relationship with Israel. ...

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GAZA: ONE YEAR ON - 'Israel resembles a failed state'

Sun, 27 Dec 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Aljazeera - By Ali Abunimah - Dec. 27 (Opinion) - Since Palestinians in Gaza buried their loved ones -- more than 1,400 people, almost 400 of them children -- there has been little healing and virtually no reconstruction. According to international aid agencies, only 41 trucks of building supplies have been allowed into Gaza during the year. Promises of billions made at a donors' conference in Egypt last March attended by luminaries of the so-called "international community" and the Middle East peace process industry are unfulfilled, and the Israeli siege, supported by the US, the European Union, Arab states, and tacitly by the Palestinian Authority (PA) in Ramallah, continues.

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What Would Jesus Do in Gaza? Obama's Test

Fri, 25 Dec 2009 00:00:00 -0800

Newsweek - By Christopher Dickey - Dec. 25 (Opinion) - Maybe it seems beside the point, even on the eve of Christmas, to ask ourselves what would Jesus do in the Holy Land today. The narrow confines of Gaza, Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria are places where God's love was long ago supplanted by war for land and ill will among men. It has been a year now since the bloody and fruitless Israeli effort to crush Hamas in what amounts to a massive prison for a million people. Peacemakers in the Middle East are rarely blessed, and often reviled; just ask special envoy George Mitchell. And the truth rarely sets anyone free, as proved most recently by the fact-filled United Nations report by South African Judge Richard Goldstone, which was dissed by Washington and dismissed by Israel.

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Which Way for Hamas?

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The New York Review of Books - By Nicolas Pelham, Max Rodenbeck - Oct. 22 (Opinion) - Amid the wreckage of Gaza, Hamas's officials struggle to sound upbeat. The burly interior minister, Fathi Hamad, whose predecessor was killed by an Israeli bomb, defiantly shuns security precautions at his makeshift office in Gaza City's main police station. "Claims that we are trying to establish an Islamic state are false," says the minister, who says his preference would be pursuing a degree in media studies. "Hamas is not the Taliban. It is not al-Qaeda. It is an enlightened, moderate Islamic movement."

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Rights Watchdog, Lost in the Mideast

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Robert L. Bernstein - Oct. 20 (Opinion) - Human Rights Watch had as its original mission to pry open closed societies, advocate basic freedoms and support dissenters. But recently it has been issuing reports on the Israeli-Arab conflict that are helping those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state.

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My mission - and motivation

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Jerusalem Post - By Richard Goldstone - Oct. 20 (Opinion) - I begin with my own motivation, as a Jew who has supported Israel and its people all my life, for having agreed to head the Gaza mission. Over the past 20 years, I have investigated serious violations of international law in my own country, South Africa, in the former Yugoslavia, in Rwanda and the alleged fraud and theft by governments and political leaders in a number of countries in connection with the United Nations Iraq Oil for Food program. In all of these, allegations reached the highest political echelons. In every instance, I spoke out strongly in favor of full investigations and, where appropriate, criminal prosecutions. I have spoken out over the years on behalf of the International Bar Association against human rights violations in many countries, including Sri Lanka, China, Russia, Iran, Zimbabwe and Pakistan.

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Goldstone report: Israel's failings

Sat, 19 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Los Angeles Times - By George Bisharat - Sep. 19 (Opinion) - Will Israel's decades-long impunity from international law finally come to an end? That is the question facing the international community in the aftermath of the just-released Goldstone report.

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The Settlements Issue

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - Jul. 31 (Editorial) - The last American president to openly challenge Israel on settlements was George H.W. Bush and we commend President Obama for demanding that Israel halt all new construction. The controversy must not obscure Mr. Obama’s real goal: nudging Israel and

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Sizing Up President Obama's Foreign Policy After 6 Months

Sun, 19 Jul 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By David Ignatius - Jul. 19 (Opinion) - Six months on, how is Barack Obama doing in foreign policy? Some leading experts give the new president high marks for improving America's battered image abroad, but they warn that the hard work is still ahead. Obama's first priority was boosting America's standing in a world angered by the Bush administration's arrogance and unilateralism. Obama rightly saw this as a major national security threat, and he used his charisma to change that image in a hurry.

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Caught in the Middle

Sat, 02 May 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Foreign Policy - By David Ignatius - May. 02 (Opinion) - Gaza is simply one of those problems for which there isn’t much middle ground. Israelis and Palestinians are both convinced not only that they are right, but that the other side is morally bankrupt.

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A brave man who stood alone. If only the world had listened to him

Mon, 30 Mar 2009 00:00:00 -0700

The Independent - By Robert Fisk - Mar. 30 (Opinion) - Tom Hurndall had stayed in Rafah. He was only 21 where – in his mother's words – he lost his life through a single, selfless, human act. "Tom was shot in the head as he carried a single Palestinian child out of the range of an Israeli army sniper." Mrs Hurndall asked me to write a preface to Tom's book and this article is his preface, for a brave man who stood alone and showed more courage than most if us dreamed of. Forget tree huggers. Hurndall was one good man and true.

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Obama's Interview On Al Arabiya

Tue, 27 Jan 2009 00:00:00 -0800

CBS News - Jan. 27 (Interview) - "I think the most important thing is for the United States to get engaged right away, and George Mitchell is somebody of enormous stature. He is one of the few people who have international experience brokering peace deals. "

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