Daily Archives: 25 July 2009

Olmert: U.S. must stop focusing on settlements

“Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has called the United States’ focus on freezing construction in the West Bank an impediment to the Middle East peace process, in an article published in The Washington Post on Friday. . . .

He describes Israel’s partnership with the United States as ‘one of its greatest strategic assets’ and writes that both he and Sharon were successful in boosting this relationship ‘on all levels, based on deep and candid understandings, both written and oral.’ . . .

‘Yet today, instead of a political process, the issue of settlement construction commands the agenda between the United States and Israel,’ writes Olmert. . . .

He calls the current U.S. demands for a complete settlement freeze ‘impossible to completely enforce’ and a waste of time for valuable progress to be made in the peace process.” (Read more from haaretz.com)

There is no peace process. There is only the rhetoric which prolonges a long, slow, deliberate, bureaucratic destruction of Palestinian society.

I pay attention to this issue because my tax dollars subsidize Israel, and because, as even the 9/11 commission report acknowledged, our one-sided support for Israel is a major reason why the Muslim world hates us.

Israel rejects US call to halt Jerusalem project

“Israel on Sunday rejected a U.S. demand to suspend a planned housing project in east Jerusalem, threatening to further complicate an unusually tense standoff with its strongest ally over settlement construction.

Israeli officials said the country’s ambassador to Washington, Michael Oren, was summoned to the State Department over the weekend and told that a project made up of 20 apartments developed by an American millionaire should not go ahead.

Settlements built on captured lands claimed by the Palestinians have emerged as a major sticking point in relations between Israel and the Obama administration because of their potential to disrupt Mideast peacemaking. . . .

On Sunday, Netanyahu told his Cabinet there would be no limits on Jewish construction anywhere in ‘unified Jerusalem.'” (Read more from news.yahoo.com)

There is no peace movement. There is only endless rhetoric meant to create the illusion of one while Israel steal as much Palestinian land as they can.

Israel cuts 1948 ‘catastrophe’ from Arabic texts

“The Israeli government will remove references to what Palestinians call the ‘catastrophe’ of Israel’s creation from textbooks for Arab schoolchildren, the education minister said Wednesday.

The reference to ‘al-naqba,’ the Arabic word catastrophe, as Palestinians call their defeat and exile in the war over Israel’s 1948 creation, was inserted by a dovish Israeli education minister in 2007.

The phrase remains contentious six decades later, a symptom of the continuing divisions in Israel. Many Israeli Arabs identify politically with their Palestinian counterparts in the West Bank and Gaza. As a result, some Israeli Jews accuse Israeli Arabs of disloyalty to the country.

Israel’s current government, headed by Benjamin Netanyahu and his hard-line Likud Party, includes members who favor cracking down on Israeli Arabs by ordering loyalty oaths or even moving them out of Israel.” (Read more from news.yahoo.com)