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Jerusalem/PNN/

A senior Palestinian official says thousands of Palestinian-owned houses in occupied Jerusalem are facing the threat of demolition by Israeli authorities.

The Palestinian Authority’s deputy governor of Jerusalem, Abdullah Siam, told the Arabic-language Voice of Palestine radio station on Monday that Israeli courts are considering the demolition of some 18,000 Palestinian homes.

He added that the measure comes at a time when there is a need for 15,000 housing units in the occupied city.

Siam noted that the demolition of the Palestinian homes in Jerusalem is in line with the Israeli regime’s collective punishment, ethnic cleansing, and Judaization of the occupied city through forced displacement of Palestinians.

Israeli officials have issued nearly 650 demolition orders against Palestinian-owned structures in Jerusalem since the beginning of the current year.

Israel’s demolition of Palestinian homes and structures in occupied Jerusalem and elsewhere in the West Bank are part of a plan by the regime to expand settlements and force Palestinians from their homes and land.

Israeli officials say demolition orders are carried out because the Palestinian-owned structures have been built without the required construction permits.

Palestinians, on the other hand, argue such authorization is routinely denied, forcing unlicensed building.

According to Israeli rights group B’tselem, Israel has demolished hundreds of houses over the years as part of Israel’s “collective punishment” policy, leaving thousands of Palestinians homeless.

A report by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs released in January said the year 2019 saw a 45 percent increase in demolitions and confiscations of Palestinian homes in the occupied West Bank compared with the previous year.

The figures showed that a total of 393 Palestinian structures were destroyed or confiscated in Area C, which is under full Israeli control, compared with 271 structures in 2018, while the number of Palestinians displaced from their homes also increased to 507 in 2019, compared with 218 the previous year.

The demolitions of Palestinian homes come at the same time that Israel continues to expand settlements on occupied Palestinian land.

More than 600,000 Israelis live in over 230 settlements built since the 1967 Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

Israeli settlements in the West Bank are considered illegal under international law and are a major stumbling block to peace efforts as they are built on land Palestinians consider to be part of their future state.

24 August 2020

Source: english.pnn.ps

By Afro-Middle East Centre

Within days of the United Arab Emirates and Israel signing a deal to normalise relations, the UAE indefinitely postponed a ceremonial signing eventthat was to be held with the USA and Israel because of Israeli opposition to Abu Dhabi purchasing F-35 fighters from the USA. The UAE cancelled the trilateral meeting that was supposed to take place on 31 August. It is clear that the F-35 sale was an integral part of the agreement, and the Emiratis claim that the Israeli prime minister, Benyamin Netanyahu, had agreed to it. No wonder that Netanyahu’s rejection of the possibility of such a sale outraged the UAE. These developments also suggest, as some Palestinians have pointed out, that the deal had nothing to do with Israel agreeing to halt plans to annex Palestinian territory, as Abu Dhabi had claimed.

The normalisation agreement between the UAE and Israel, concluded on 13 August, is far from being the historical deal the protagonists make it out to be. Instead, it exposed an existing affair the two states have cultivated from the mid-2000s. Although the UAE has just joined Egypt and Jordan as the only Arab countries with peace agreements with Israel, UAE-Israel secret relations for more than a decade have included commerce, cyber technology, security and military hardware and energy; these will strengthen and become overt under the new agreement. Israel had, in fact, secretly established and strengthened relations with a number of Gulf States in recent years, and some of these have reached maturity under US president Donald Trump.

Even before this agreement was concluded, Emirati-Israeli cooperation had strengthened with the assistance of the Trump administration. The UAE was one of three Arab countries to attend the unveiling of Trump’s farcical ‘deal of the century’ in January, and was a critical part of the June 2019 economic package for Palestinians designed by Trump’s adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner, and announced in a conference for this purpose in Bahrain. Following the conference, Israeli ministers undertook several visits to the UAE, signalling progress towards normalisation. A series of cooperation agreements between the UAE and Israel to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic and an Emirati plane landing in Tel Aviv in July signalled increasing relations between the two countries, and the normalisation agreement was the logical next step. In July, in a move now seen as preparing the ground for the normalisation deal, the Emirati ambassador to the USA, Yousef Al-Otaiba, published an op-ed in an Israeli newspaper after Netanyahu had announced plans to annex parts of the West Bank, calling for these plans to be halted. Two other Gulf countries, Bahrain and Oman, as well Sudan could follow soon with normalisation plans.

Tracing UAE-Israel relations

Current relations between the UAE and Israel may be traced back to 2009, after the inauguration of Barack Obama as US president. The relationship blossomed via secret meetings held to pressure Washington into taking a stronger stance against Iran. However, UAE purchases of military intelligence software and arms deals suggest the relations started in the early 2000s. The two countries had already been communicating via intermediaries, mostly discussing their common opposition to Iran.

Mossad’s assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, Hamas leader and co-founder of the movement’s armed wing, Al-Qassam Brigades, in January 2010 threatened carefully-nurtured and ongoing secret links between the two states. Contact stalled over Mabhouh’s murder until 2012 when Netanyahu secretly met the Emirati foreign minister, Abdullah Bin Zayed, in New York during the UN General Assembly. Talks on Iranian activities in the region resumed, establishing mutual geopolitical concerns. Emirati cooperation with Israel accelerated as a response to the 2010/11 Arab uprisings and Iranian involvement in the Syrian conflict. In January 2014, then Israeli energy minister, Silvan Shalom, attended a renewable energy conference in Abu Dhabi, spurring on relations. In the following year, the UAE granted Israel permission to establish an office in Abu Dhabi for the International Renewable Energy Agency, which has served as platform for regular communication between the two countries.

To showcase the relationship and test responses, the UAE, in a break with a decades-old practice among Arab states, allowed the Israeli national anthem to be played for Israeli athletes at a judo tournament held in Abu Dhabi in October 2018. This was followed by visits to Abu Dhabi by Israel’s communications and culture ministers, Ayoub Kara and Miri Regev respectively, in the same week that Netanyahu made an unprecedented visit to Oman in which he met the country’s ruler, Sultan Qaboos. Gulf leaders reciprocated. For example, the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) was reported secretly to have visited Israel and met with Israeli officials; his visit was preceded by a July 2016 delegation led by former Saudi general, Anwar Eshki, who also met with Israeli officials.

In July 2019, the Israeli foreign minister, Israel Katz, attended the UN climate conference in Abu Dhabi, and, on the sidelines of the conference, discussed Iran with senior UAE officials as well as the Israeli ‘Tracks for Regional Peace’ initiative meant to open up travel and trade between Israel and Gulf countries. Katz’s visit came on the heels of the US economic conference in Bahrain. While such official visits between Israeli and certain Gulf states did not represent diplomatic relationships, they showed that Israel was making headway towards normalisation with Gulf countries – especially key players such as Saudi Arabia and the UAE. This was cemented in December 2019 when USA hosted Israel and the UAE in an anti-Iran meeting that discussed a non-aggression pact between the two states as a step towards full diplomatic ties.

Normalisation, weapons and strategic alliances

Until recently, the UAE and Saudi Arabia had shied away from overt relations with Israel for fear of backlash from their citizens. This changed with Trump’s attempts to build an anti-Iran coalition with Gulf states.

Emirati-Israeli relations have grown significantly in the fields of cyber-espionage and big data analysis since 2009. Acquiring Israeli technology and cybersecurity expertise has boosted the UAE’s domestic and regional surveillance capabilities – even against its own citizens. The UAE uses Israeli companies such as DarkMatter and NSO Group, staffed by Israeli cyber experts, to hack phones, gather intelligence and monitor Islamists, other dissidents and other Gulf leaders. Many Israeli military and security specialists also work for Emirati companies, and have often been hired as mercenaries since the Arab uprisings of 2010/2011.

Although the 13 August normalisation deal is a victory for Israel, which seeks legitimacy among Arab states in order to make the Palestinians irrelevant in international affairs, the Emiratis also scored big in the deal, or so they initially thought. The package included a US agreement to sell F-35 fighter jets to Abu Dhabi in a multi-million-dollar-sale. The UAE had been looking for ways to acquire F-35s as it seeks to present itself militarily as the region’s emerging hegemon. Netanyahu, however, quickly denied these Emirati claims that F-35 acquisition had been secured, emphasising that Israel remained opposed to the sale of advanced weapons to Arab countries. Israel’s opposition to the sale of the jets to the UAE created tensions in the new alliance. Abu Dhabi cancelled the meeting that was to mark the official and ceremonial signing of the normalisation agreement in protest against Netanyahu’s opposition to the F-35 sale. Meanwhile, conflicting sentiments have emerged from the White House.

Differences also quickly emerged about Emirati claims that the normalisation agreement included an end to Israeli plans for the annexation of the West Bank. Within hours of the deal’s announcement, Netanyahu confirmed his commitment to annexation, saying it only been delayed, not cancelled. Kushner supported the Israeli prime minister, clarifying that the annexation was only temporarily halted to allow Israel to focus on strengthening its relations with Gulf countries. Clearly, the Emiratis failed in their attempts to win Arab support by packaging normalisation with Israel as a move to support Palestinians.

The attendance of Otaiba, the UAE ambassador to the USA, at the unveiling of Trump’s ‘deal of the century’ in January had already indicated the increasing Emirati disregard for Palestinians. In drafting Trump’s plan, Kushner had consulted widely with Gulf countries – especially the UAE and Saudi Arabia. These countries had formed part of the process despite the fact that no Palestinians had been consulted. The Palestinian Authority (PA) and other Palestinian groups had slammed Emirati support for the heavily pro-Israel plan as the ultimate betrayal. The same sense of betrayal was expressed when the UAE-Israel deal was announced this month.

The Dahlan effect

The Emirati attitude to and interference in Palestinian affairs can be seen in the role of exiled former Fatah strongman, Mohammed Dahlan, arch enemy of PA and PLO leader Mahmoud Abbas. After being expelled by Fatah, Dahlan found refuge and massive financial support in the UAE. Some of those financial resources have been dedicated to undermining Abbas to set the stage for Dahlan to capture the PA and PLO. Many Palestinians credit him for being behind the UAE-Israel deal. Dahlan, who used to be close to the CIA and the Israeli security establishment, was convicted for corruption by a Palestinian court in 2014. Since then, from exile, he has tried to to re-enter Palestinian politics and return to Palestine. The UAE, Egypt and Israel prefer him as a replacement or replacement for or successor to Abbas. He has built a support base among sections of Fatah youth in Gaza, some of the refugee camps in Lebanon, and in a few Palestinian diplomatic missions abroad.

The UAE also has a difficult relationship with Gaza-based Hamas, which it treats with hostility because of the group’s links to the Muslim Brotherhood. Although the UAE has not officially designated Hamas a terrorist group, Emirati officials refer to it as such in private, especially after the 2017 blockade on Qatar, imposed by the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Egypt. UAE ally Saudi Arabia has detained dozens of Hamas activists since February 2019, allegedly at Israel’s bidding.

Through Dahlan, the UAE has sponsored aid projects in Gaza. In May and June this year, the UAE also sent two planeloads of COVID-19 aid to Israel for Palestinians in the West Bank. The first plane landed in Tel Aviv in May, unmarked, while the second plane bore the Etihad airline logo and the UAE flag, marking significant strides in UAE-Israel relations. Despite being cash strapped and battling the pandemic, the PA rejected both planeloads, viewing Emirati coordination with Israel (and the lack of consultation with Palestinians) as a betrayal. The recent normalisation deal emphasised this sense of betrayal; protests against it erupted in both the West Bank and Gaza, with protesters burning pictures of the UAE crown prince, Mohammed Bin Zayed Al-Nahyan, Dahlan, Trump and Netanyahu.

Other Gulf states may follow

Oman and Bahrain, both of which immediately praised the UAE-Israel agreement, are expected to follow the Emiratis, allowing Israel to realise its long-time dream of normalisation with regional states while isolating the Palestinians. Israel’s foreign minister, Gabi Ashkenazi, and his Omani counterpart, Yusuf bin Alawi bin Abdullah, have already discussed strengthening bilateral ties. The USA hoped that plans to normalise might be announced soon, and the recent regional tour of Kushner and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was aimed to finalise these plans. Pompeo’s trip to Bahrain on 26 August did not yield the hoped-for results, however, as the Bahraini king emphasised the creation of a Palestinian state. Sudan’s transitional government also backtracked. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Morocco have reiterated their stance not to normalise relations with Israel until a peace deal with Palestinians is reached. However, this does not preclude relations taking place secretly.

Secret relations persist between Israel and certain Gulf countries, as well as some Arab states in Africa. Before Bahrain, Pompeo visited Khartoum and met the Sudanese prime minister, Abdullah Hamdok, who disputed claims that his country will normalise relations with Israel, despite Sudanese officials having secretly met Netanyahu in February to discuss normalisation. Despite Sudan’s transitional government issuing conflicting statements on the matter, an 18 August meeting between Mossad chief Yossi Cohen and member of Sudan’s Sovereignty Council, Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo (Hemeti), in Abu Dhabi suggests that that closed door relations will take place despite Hamdok’s statement.

AMEC insights is a series of publicly-accessible publications, providing trenchant analyses of topical issues related to the Middle East and North Africa.

31 August, 2020

Source: amec.org.za

By Mitali Chakravarty

The best introduction to Kathleen Burkinshaw is that she a humanitarian. She wrote a novel that has been taken up by The United Nations as a part of its peacekeeping effort. She has been actively participating in efforts to ban nuclear weapons, including presenting with Nobel Laureates. Kathleen Burkinshaw, the author of The Last Cherry Blossom, a book that is in the process of gathering further accolades, is a peace activist who talks of the effects of the nuclear war. She is the daughter of a hibakusha, a survivor of the Hiroshima blast that took place seventy-five years ago. Burkinshaw still suffers the impact of her mother’s exposure to the Hiroshima blast, where the protagonist of The Last Cherry Blossom, based on her own mother, sees her father die of the exposure and loses her best friend in the middle of a conversation. In this exclusive, Burkinshaw talks of the book, why and how it came about and the impact the bomb continues to have in our lives.

Why did you write your book? Tell us your story.

When my daughter was in seventh grade, she came home from school terribly upset. They were wrapping up World War II in their history class, and she had overheard some students talking about the ‘cool’ mushroom cloud picture. She asked me if I could visit her class and talk about the people under those famous mushroom clouds, people like her Grandma.

I had never discussed my mother’s life in Hiroshima during World War II. My mother was a very private person and she also didn’t want attention drawn to herself. But after my daughter’s request she gave me her consent. She bravely shared more memories of the most horrific day of her life. Memories that she had locked away in her heart because they had been too painful to discuss.

The main reason, my mother agreed (aside from the fact her granddaughter asked her), was that she knew students in seventh grade would be around the same age she was when the bomb dropped. She was 12 years old. She hoped that students could relate to her story and by sharing her experience, these future voters would realise that the use of nuclear weapons against any country or people, for any reason, should never be repeated.

I received requests to visit other schools the following year. I began to write about my mom and August 6th after teachers requested a book to complement their curriculum.

I told my mom about this request. Later that week, she sent me a copy of her most treasured photo from her childhood. It is the one of her and her Papa (which is in the back of the book). When I looked at the photo which I remembered from my childhood because it always had a place of honor in our home; I realised there was more to her life than just war and death, she had loving memories as well.

That’s when I knew I needed to start the book months before the bomb. I wanted to show the culture, the mindset, and the daily life in Japan during the war. I intended to give the reader the view of the last year of WWII and the atomic bombing through the eyes of a 12-year-old Japanese girl-something that has not been done before.

Your book explores colours of Japan. How different is it from US?

The Last Cherry Blossom (TLCB) discusses life in Japan during WWII. I wanted to show how the Japanese citizens viewed their political leaders — very different from the US. I also wanted to show that Japan had been at war for 14 years (they invaded Manchuria in 1931) by the time of the atomic bombing — they were out of so many natural resources, as well as the young soldiers. The majority of the Japanese soldiers were fighting out in the Pacific. So even though Hiroshima was once a strong military port, in 1945 it was mostly elderly, women, and children. In addition to that, the firebombs dropped on Tokyo decimated that city and other areas in Japan had endured Allied bombing. The US did have the horrific Japanese attack of Pearl Harbor, bringing the US into the war — but no other US cities with citizens endured bombing after that. However, what I really wanted to emphasise was the similarity between the two countries. The children in Japan like my mom, loved their families, worried might happen to them and wished for peace. Exactly the same as the children in the US.

When and why did your mother move to US? Did your mother find it difficult to adjust?

My mother met my dad (a white American serving in the Air Force at a base close to Tokyo) in Tokyo. They married at the US Embassy in Tokyo in 1959. His time serving ended shortly thereafter and they moved to the United States.

Yes, my mother found it difficult to adjust. My mother didn’t expect the prejudice and racial slurs against her. She figured it was 14 years after the end of the war and she was on the losing side. She didn’t tell them about the atomic bombing-she wanted to have the least amount of attention. She told everyone she was from Tokyo. I didn’t even know she was from Hiroshima until I was 11.

She wasn’t a shy person. She was intelligent and determined. She learned English and became a citizen within 5 years of arriving in the US. She had a job at an electronics company and made circuit boards that were on Apollo 11. Unfortunately, the town we lived in had very few Asian people and none of them were Japanese. When I was born, she “Americanised” (her word) our home. She wanted people to know that I was an American so I would not experience racist actions. However, being one of the few Asians in elementary school, I experienced quite a bit of prejudice and racial slurs, anyway.

My mother was the bravest person I will ever know. She lost so much on August 6th, 1945. Yet, she never lost her ability to love.

The UN has taken up your book as part of its peace process. Tell us a bit about that.

In December of 2018, John Ennis, the Chief of Information and Outreach at the United Nations Office of Disarmament Affairs (UNODA) contacted me after reading The Last Cherry Blossom. He felt very strongly that the book should be used in classrooms to future voters. Nothing like it has been written before from this point of view of a 12-year-old girl. He told me that it would be designated a UNODA Education Resource for Students and Teachers. I was beyond happy that a book honoring my mom and what she experienced would be on that list. Later in 2019 UNODA invited me to the United Nations in NYC to discuss my book at the UN Bookshop as well as to participate in a workshop for NYC teachers on how to add nuclear disarmament to their curriculum. It was a surreal honour to be a presenter with Noble Peace Prize winners Dr. Kathleen Sullivan and other members under the International Coalition Against Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) for the Treaty to Ban Nuclear Weapons!

What exactly do you do to create an awareness about the nuclear issue?

In addition to interviews like yours I have spoken at teacher conferences, school librarian conferences throughout the United States. In addition to that TLCB has been on many school lists so I have had opportunity to speak with students, future voters all over the world! For example, I have had the joy to speak with students in Hiroshima who have chosen TLCB to be their 6th grade read for 4 years in a row. The students also made my first book trailer. The latest group of students I had the joy to speak with were in India!

I feel that the more I can discuss my mother’s experience so that students can relate and connect to the devastation, horror, and loss my mother and her family endured — they leave that classroom as future voters knowing that nuclear weapons should never be used again.

Do you think after the holocaust another nuclear war is likely? How do you see the role of your book propounding peace?

People have asked me 75 years later — why should these stories still be told? Well time passes, and technology changes but the need for human connection through emotions is timeless. So, I feel that while statistics and treaties are very important — if we can’t get people to understand/relate to the humanity under those now famous mushroom clouds, then none of the numbers or science is going to matter. And if it doesn’t matter because there is no connection, then yes, we are at risk of repeating the same deadly mistakes again.

I hope that TLCB relays the message and an emotional impact that two paragraphs in a textbook could never do. I want readers to understand that NO family should ever have to endure the hellish, horrific deadly destruction that MY family has.

I lived with the scars of the atomic bombing during my childhood watching/reacting to the post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) effects on my Mom and I still live with it each day with Reflex Sympathetic Dystrophy (chronic, progressive neuro pain disease that affects the sympathetic nervous system). Doctors have said that the damage to my immune system from the radiation my mom was exposed to from the atomic bomb, attributed to this.

This was an online interview conducted by Mitali Chakravarty

25 August 2020

Source: countercurrents.org

By Dr Ramzy Baroud

Palestinians are not going anywhere. This is the gist of seven decades of Palestinian struggle against Zionist colonialism. The proof? The story of Ahmed Amarneh.

Amarneh, a 30-year-old civil engineer from the northern West Bank village of Farasin, lives with his family in a cave. For many years, the Amarneh family has attempted to build a proper home, but their request has been denied by the Israeli military every time.

In many ways, the struggle of the Amarnehs is a microcosm of the collective struggle of Farasin; in fact, of most Palestinians.

Those who are unfortunate enough to be living in areas of the West Bank, designated by the Oslo II Accord of 1995 as Area C, were left in a perpetual limbo.

Area C constitutes nearly 60% of the overall size of the West Bank. It is rich with resources – mostly arable land, water and ample minerals – yet, relatively sparsely populated. It should not be surprising why right-wing Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, wants to annex this region. More land, with fewer Palestinians, has been the guiding principle for Zionist colonialism from the outset.

True, Netanyahu’s annexation plan, at least the de jure element of it, has been postponed. In practice, however, de facto annexation has been taking place for many years, and, lately, it has accelerated. Last June, for example, Israel demolished 30 Palestinian homes in the West Bank, mostly in Area C, rendering over 100 Palestinians homeless.

Additionally, according to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), Israeli army bulldozers destroyed 33 non-residential structures as well. This is “the same number (of homes) demolished throughout the entire first five months of 2020,” OCHA reported.

Unfortunately, Farasin, like numerous other Palestinian villages and communities across Area C, has been singled out for complete destruction. A small population of approximately 200 people has been subjected to Israeli army harassment for years. While Israel is keen on implanting Jewish communities in the heart of the occupied West Bank, it is equally keen on disrupting the natural growth of Palestinian communities, the indigenous people of the land, in Area C.

On July 29, Israeli forces invaded Farasin, terrorizing the residents, and handed over 36 demolition orders, according to the head of the Farasin village council. Namely, this is the onset of ethnic cleansing of the entire population of the village by Israel.

Ahmed Amarneh and his family also received a demolition order, although they do not live in a concrete house, but, rather, in a mountain cave. “I didn’t make the cave. It has existed since antiquity,” he told reporters. “I don’t understand how they can prevent me from living in a cave. Animals live in caves and are not thrown out. So let them treat me like an animal and let me live in the cave.”

Amarneh’s emotional outburst is not misleading. In a recent report, the Israeli rights group B’tselem, has listed some of Israel’s deceptive methods used to forcefully remove Palestinians from their homes in Area C or to block any development whatsoever within these Palestinian communities.

“Israel has blocked Palestinian development by designating large swathes of land as state land, survey land, firing zones, nature reserves and national parks,” according to B’tselem. Judging by the systematic destruction of the Palestinian environment in the West Bank, Israel is hardly interested in the preservation of animals, either. The ultimate goal is the allocation of “land to settlements and their regional councils,” B’tselem argues.

Therefore, it should not come as a surprise that, for example, as of November 2017, only 16 of the 180 Palestinian communities in Area C have been approved for development. The rest are strictly prohibited.

Between 2016 and 2018, of the 1,485 Palestinian applications for construction and development in these areas, only 21 permits have been approved.

These unrealistic and draconian measures leave Palestinian families with no option but to build without a permit, eventually making them targets for Israeli military bulldozers.

Hundreds of families, like that of Ahmed Amarneh, have opted for alternative solutions. Failing to obtain a permit and wary of the imminent demolition if they build without one, they simply move to mountain caves.

This phenomenon is particularly manifest in the Hebron and Nablus regions.

In the mountainous wasteland located on the outskirts of Nablus, the wreckage of abandoned homes – some demolished, some unfinished – is a testimony of an ongoing war between the Israeli military, on the one hand, and the Palestinian people, on the other. Once they lose the battle and are left with no other option, many Palestinian families take their belongings and head to the caves in search of a home.

Quite often, the fight does not end there, as Palestinian communities, especially in the Hebron hills region, find themselves target to more eviction orders. The war for Palestinian survival rages on.

The case of Ahmed Amarneh, however, is particularly unique, for rarely, if ever, Israel issues a military order to demolish a cave. When the cave is demolished, where else can the Amarneh family go?

This dilemma, symptomatic of the larger Palestinian quandary, reminds one of Mahmoud Darwish’s seminal poem, “The Earth is Closing on Us”:

“Where should we go after the last frontiers?

Where should the birds fly after the last sky?

Where should the plants sleep after the last breath of air?”

However depressing the reality may be, the metaphor is undeniably powerful, that of savage colonialism that knows no bounds and Palestinian steadfastness (sumoud) that is perennial.

Often buried within the technical details of oppression – Area C, home demolition, ethnic cleansing and so on – is the tenacity of the human spirit, that of the Amarneh family and hundreds of other Palestinian families, who have turned caves into loving homes. It is this unmatched perseverance that makes the quest for justice in Palestine, despite the innumerable odds, possible.

Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle.

24 August 2020

Source: countercurrents.org

By Roger Kotila

19 Aug 2020 – There is growing evidence that the attack on Beirut was conducted by Israel. Meanwhile, Beirut politicians are sending out confusing messages as to what happened, and why. Beirut officials may be afraid to admit that Israel is responsible for this (world) crime because Lebanon would lose desperately needed funds from the US and Israel to rebuild Beirut.

If it turns out that Israel was behind the deadly attack, there is little that the United Nations can do about it. Israel is protected by the U.S. government no matter what international crimes it commits. Just ask the Palestinians who keep having their lands and homes stolen by the Israeli regimes.

The popular narrative being promoted by the Western mainstream press is that the explosion was caused by fertilizer (ammonium nitrate). There is little mention of Israel in media reports — except to deny that Israel had anything to do with this horrendous attack.

But one cannot easily dismiss the arguments presented on the website of Veterans Today (www.veteranstoday.com) which debunks the narrative that fertilizer caused the blast, and offers eyewitness reports consistent with a missile attack.

In an Associated Press report (8/16/20, San Francisco Chronicle), we are told that U.S. undersecretary of state for political affairs, David Hale, calls for a “thorough and transparent” investigation. He said that the FBI, “at the invitation of the Lebanese authorities,” was being brought in to figure out what caused the August 4 explosion. President Trump stated on August 5 that his generals told him the blast was most likely caused by “a bomb of some kind.”

US blackmail without shame

Hale went on to explain how the U.S. intended to insist that Lebanon does the bidding of US/Israel. Hale didn’t call it blackmail, yet announces that “there can be no financial bailout for Lebanon” without a change in the government, — which he claims is suffering from “endemic corruption.” The change Hale wants is what Israel wants — to get rid of Hezbollah, whether or not the majority of people in Lebanon favor Hezbollah.

It is no secret that the US and Israel find Hezbollah annoying. While many see Hezbollah as “freedom fighters” to protect Palestinians from Israeli genocide and criminal expansionism, the US has declared Hezbollah to be a “terrorist” organization.

But what if it turns out that Israel did indeed bomb Beirut? If it used a tactical mini-nuke or some modified version, some new type of warhead? This would amount to a crime against humanity, a war crime. If the facts implicate Israel, should the US declare Israel to be a terrorist state?

Project Thor

The possibility that the Beirut bombing used a modified nuclear weapon is feasible. The US military and Israel have been known to work closely together on such weapons programs. The US military under Project Thor worked to develop a special warhead that “would have the effect of a nuclear bomb, but leave no residual radiation.” Who knows what secret projects are underway at the Lawrence Livermore Nuclear Lab in California?

[https://www.transcend.org/tms/2020/08/us-space-force-faults-russia-china-for-militarizing-space-which-pentagon-did-decades-ago/]

If Beirut can find only limited radiation readings, it may be because Israel used a special warhead with almost no residual radiation, a possibility documented by researchers for Veterans Today, and buttressed by a secret report they found from the International Atomic Energy Agency (Veterans Today, 11/2/19):

The “standard” SADM [Special Atomic Demolition Munition] that evolved would eventually have a core of Plutonium 239 encased in a thin shell of non-fissile Uranium 238 known as a “neutron reflector”. “The new Dimona micro nuke was the very first critical weapon that could be used in “stealth” mode. Gone was the dirty Uranium 238 reflector, and up went the purity of the smaller Plutonium 239 core.”

[https://www.veteranstoday.com/2020/08/16/israeli-drones-dropping-mini-nukes-2019-vt-exclusive-now-key-to-beirut-investigation]

The history of violent lawlessness by Israel (and others) demonstrates both the ineffectiveness of the current United Nations due to its defective Charter, and the urgent need for a new UN framework such as the EARTH CONSTITUTION provides for dealing with such international crises.

Roger Kotila, Ph.D. is a psychologist (ret.) with many years of clinical experience with the California Dept.

24 August 2020

Source: www.transcend.org

By Jean Shaoul

21 Aug 2020 – Israeli warplanes bombed the besieged Gaza Strip for an eighth successive night Tuesday in response to the launching of dozens of incendiary balloons and rockets into southern Israel by Palestinian militants.

The airstrikes and drone attacks came as Israel threatened Hamas, the Islamist group that rules the besieged Palestinian enclave, that it was risking “war” by failing to stop the balloons. The balloons have caused small fires, no casualties and almost no damage.

The Israeli airstrikes, which according to military sources, targeted “a military base, underground infrastructure and observation posts belonging to the Hamas terror group,” included Hamas observation posts near al-Maghazi and al-Bureij refugee camps and the southern town of Khan Younis.

They also hit a United Nations-run elementary school in al-Shati refugee camp in Gaza City, where around 1,000 children were present. There were no reports of casualties.

On August 18, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu insisted that his government would make no distinction between rockets and airborne arson attacks by balloons, warning that “There could be another major flareup.”

Benny Gantz, Israel’s defense minister and deputy prime minister, warned, “Hamas is playing with fire, and I will make sure it turns on them.”

On Tuesday, President Reuven Rivlin, on a visit to southern Israel to talk with firefighters, said, “Terrorism using incendiary kites and balloons is terrorism just like any other.” He added, “Hamas should know that this is not a game. The time will come when they have to decide… If they want war, they will get war.”

Israel’s politicians are preparing for war on the besieged Palestinian enclave, even as they up the ante against Hezbollah in Lebanon in the wake of the devastating Beirut port blast, and against its primary target, Iran, threatening a wider conflagration.

The continuous outbreaks of violence are the inevitable byproduct of the 13-year-long Israeli siege of Gaza that has turned the enclave into an open-air prison for its two million inhabitants.

The siege—aided and abetted by Egypt and the Palestinian Authority—has devastated Gaza’s economy, limiting the entry of food, pharmaceuticals and essential commodities as well as access to basic services. Also blocked is the flow of construction materials needed to rebuild Gaza’s infrastructure, much of which was damaged or destroyed in Israel’s murderous assaults in 2008-09, 2012 and 2014.

Living conditions in Gaza are atrocious. Half the population is unemployed, and poverty is endemic. A 2012 UN report predicted that Gaza would become uninhabitable by 2020, given the extreme overcrowding, collapsed infrastructure, lack of electricity and water, and the poor sanitary conditions. Gaza needed 1,000 more doctors. Conditions have further deteriorated after Washington cut off all US aid to the Palestinians through its funding of the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Agency (UNRRA).

In January, the Israeli rights group B’Tselem described the unprecedented health crisis in Gaza, as its barely functioning hospitals try to deal with the horrendous injuries and amputations inflicted on the Palestinians by Israel’s armed forces during the weekly “Great March of Return” that started two years ago.

As yet, Gaza has been spared the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic, having reported 81 cases and one death, with none due to community transmission, thanks to its isolation. But the lockdown has exacerbated the economic hardship and suffering.

Eighty percent of Gazans already rely on humanitarian aid, with the World Bank expecting poverty in Gaza to increase from 53 percent to 64 percent due to cuts in public sector wages across the Palestinian Territories and the impact of the lockdown restrictions.

Israel has rejected numerous international calls, including from Nickolay Mladenov, the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, a European Parliamentary delegation, and Israeli High Court Justice Elyakim Rubenstein, for it to ease the blockade in the light of the pandemic.

Michael Lynk, UN Special Rapporteur for human rights in the Palestinian territories, stressed, “The legal duty, anchored in Article 56 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, requires that Israel, the occupying power, must ensure that all the necessary preventive means available to it are utilized to ‘combat the spread of contagious diseases and epidemics.’”

With no future in Gaza, particularly for its young graduates, 32 percent of Palestinians said they want to emigrate because of the economic, political, and social situation, according to a recent poll.

The recent escalation in rocket and incendiary balloon attacks followed accusations by Hamas that Israel had failed to implement an agreement reached in October 2018. The deal was aimed at easing the blockade and stipulated the establishment of two industrial zones east of Gaza City to create jobs for tens of thousands of unemployed Palestinians. The agreement also included electricity and water projects, as well as projects aimed at increasing the volume of Gaza’s imports and exports.

On August 12, Gantz halted fuel transfers into Gaza, restricted its fishing zone to eight nautical miles from 15, and halted all transfer of goods through the Erez land crossing. This has forced Gaza’s only power station to stop producing electricity, reducing the Palestinians’ already meagre daily power supply of 8 to 12 hours to just 3 or 4 hours, amid the intense heat of summer. Gaza’s only remaining source of electricity is that supplied directly by Israel. Egypt stopped providing electricity in February.

The International Committee of the Red Cross warned that this would create problems for Gaza’s limited and ill-equipped hospitals and access to a clean water supply. The Gaza Neonatal Network said that the frequent electricity outages were threatening the lives of more than 100 newborn babies currently in intensive care incubators.

The latest attack on Gaza has been spurred on by the protracted political crisis in Israel, where the fractious coalition of Netanyahu’s far right Likud bloc and Gantz’s Blue and White party, formed after three inconclusive elections within a year, could blow apart. This could set the stage for fresh elections if the Knesset fails to agree a two-year budget by Monday.

There is increasing opposition within the country to the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic that has seen unemployment rise to 21 percent, the government’s failure to provide PPE for its nurses and medical and social workers—who have taken strike action in support of their demands—and the reopening of schools that has led to an increase in infections. Among the most economically unequal advanced economies in the world, Israel has one of the highest poverty rates within the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

For Netanyahu, who faces weekly protests calling for him to step down in the wake of his indictment on charges of bribery, corruption, and breach of trust in three separate cases, a war would provide a convenient mechanism for deflecting immense social tensions outward.

The air strikes come in the wake of the US-brokered deal between the United Arab Emirates and Israel, aimed at cementing an alliance with the Sunni Arab states against Iran. Hamas, along with Hezbollah in Lebanon, is routinely portrayed as part of Iran’s “destabilizing presence” in the region.

Amid the orchestrated demands for Hezbollah to be removed from its government role—based on blaming the Shia group for the explosion that devastated Beirut—Israel, backed by the US, is demanding that the mandate for UNIFIL, the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon, either be changed or ended at an upcoming UN Security Council vote on August 31. Washington maintains that it must stop Hezbollah from violating UN Resolution 1701 by attacking Israel or give way to another military policing force. Eugene Kontorovich, director of international law at the Jerusalem-based Kohelet Policy Forum, told Germany’s Algemeiner that UNIFIL “serves as Hezbollah’s de facto human shield, limiting the [Israel Defense Forces] freedom to manoeuvre in a potential conflict.”

Jean Shaoul is professor of public accountability at the University of Manchester, Uk. She has written on privatisation and the use of private finance in transport and healthcare.

24 August 2020

Source: www.transcend.org

By Dr Gideon Polya

3 engineering experts from the University of Alaska Fairbanks have produced a detailed report entitled “A structural reevaluation of the collapse of World Trade Center 7” that concludes that “the collapse of WTC 7 was a global failure involving the near-simultaneous failure of all columns in the building” i.e. by explosive demolition and not by fire as asserted by the lying US Government. However, lying Mainstream Media near-totally ignore this expert new 9/11 WTC7 demolition Report.

As Democratic Presidential candidate Joe Biden stated in his powerful and inspiring Nomination Acceptance Speech in referring to rotten Trump behaviour in relation to racists: “Silence is complicity” [1]. Indeed Joe Biden has repeated the “Silence is complicity” aphorism on many other occasions (e.g. see [2-4)]. The 9/11 WTC7 Demolition report was available in a preliminary form on 3 September 2019 [5-7] and in a final form from March 2020 [8, 9]. Indeed there has been considerable coverage of this expert and explosive (pun intended) Report in progressive Alternative Media (e.g. [5-7]) but near-total ignoring of this expert Report by Mainstream journalist, editor, politician , academic and commentariat presstitutes who have thus become complicit after the event in the 9/11 atrocity that killed 3,000 people, mostly Americans [10]. However through their silence these Mainstream presstitutes have also become deeply complicit in the US-imposed post-9/11 Muslim Holocaust and Muslim Genocide (aka the US War on Terror or the US War on Muslims) in which 32 million Muslims have died from violence, 5 million, or from deprivation, 27 million, in 20 countries invaded by the US Alliance since the US Government’s 9/11 false flag atrocity (2015 estimate; [11-14]).

(1). The lying Bush Administration “official version of 9/11”.

The following bare-bones “official version of 9/11 is based on pertinent extracts from the Wikipedia account [10]: “At 8:46 a.m., five hijackers crashed American Airlines Flight 11 into the northern facade of the World Trade Center’s North Tower (1 WTC). At 9:03 a.m., another five hijackers crashed United Airlines Flight 175 into the southern facade of the South Tower (2 WTC). Five hijackers flew American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon at 9:37 a.m. A fourth flight, United Airlines Flight 93, crashed near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, southeast of Pittsburgh, at 10:03 a.m…

Three buildings in the World Trade Center collapsed due to fire-induced structural failure. The South Tower collapsed at 9:59 a.m. after burning for 56 minutes in a fire caused by the impact of United Airlines Flight 175 and the explosion of its fuel. The North Tower collapsed at 10:28 a.m. after burning for 102 minutes. When the North Tower collapsed, debris fell on the nearby 7 World Trade Center building (7 WTC), damaging it and starting fires. These fires burned for hours, compromising the building’s structural integrity, and 7 WTC collapsed at 5:21 p.m. The west side of the Pentagon sustained significant damage…

The U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) investigated the collapses of the Twin Towers and 7 WTC… The investigation into the collapse of 1 WTC and 2 WTC was concluded in October 2005 and that of 7 WTC was completed in August 2008. NIST found that the fireproofing on the Twin Towers’ steel infrastructures was blown off by the initial impact of the planes and that, had this not occurred, the towers likely would have remained standing… heat from a typical office fire would have softened and weakened the exposed girders and columns enough to initiate the collapse regardless of the number of columns cut or damaged by the impact… NIST concluded that uncontrolled fires in 7 WTC caused floor beams and girders to heat and subsequently “caused a critical support column to fail, initiating a fire-induced progressive collapse that brought the building down” [10].

(2). Numerous science, engineering, architecture, aviation, military and intelligence experts reject the lying Bush “official version of 9/11”.

Science involves the critical testing of potentially falsifiable hypotheses to obtain successively better models of reality, and scientists have zero tolerance for lying because it sabotages this fundamental process. The US Center for Public Integrity determined that the Bush Administration told 935 lies about Iraq alone between 9/11 and the illegal and war criminal invasion of Iraq [15, 16] . Eminent anti-racist Jewish American journalist I.F Stone (author of “The Hidden History of the Korean War, 1950-1951”) bluntly advised journalism students: “Among all the things I’m going to tell you today about being a journalist, all you have to remember is two words: governments lie” [17], and eminent US writer and historian Gore Vidal has declared: “Unlike most Americans who lie all the time, I hate lying. And here I am surrounded with these hills [in Hollywood] full of liars — some very talented… Americans are not interested in the truth about anything. They assume everybody is lying because they go out and lie everyday about the automobile they are trying to sell you… This is a country of hoax. P.T. Barnum is the god of this republic, which is no longer a republic alas. It is an oligarchy and a rather vicious one” [18].

In addition to sane rejection of bizarre, Hollywood movie-style assertions from successive, utterly mendacious US Administrations, as a half century career scientist I have continuing fundamental problems with the lying Bush “official version of 9/11”. From basic chemistry and physics I know that (a) the black smoke and orange flame from WTC1 and WTC2 now observed repeatedly by billions meant a low temperature fire rather than the metal-softening high temperatures critically claimed by NIST; (b) that near-free fall collapse of the 47 storey WTC7 in the first 2.5 seconds of its 7 second collapse implies massive removal of resistance by explosive demolition [19]; (c) that at a big passenger jet’s landing speed of about 60 metres per second gives a landing spot deviation of about 60 metres per second of pilot deviation, and a cruising speed of 270 metres per second gives a target spot deviation of 270 metres per second of pilot indecision – yet it is asserted by lying Bush that hijackers with limited flying experience on single-engine light aircraft could land huge passenger jets precisely “on a dime” Hollywood-style into the WTC Twin Towers or an outer door of the Pentagon (there is a popular spot next to Melbourne Airport where you can stand a few hundred feet below the flight path of incoming landing passenger jets and really appreciate what a 1 second deviation could mean when jets are landing just a few seconds later); and (d) that the pulverising of 3 circa 50-100 story skyscrapers in about 10 seconds into a pile of sheared steel, molten metal, concrete rubble and vast amounts of fine dust with relatively negligible energy input utterly defies thermodynamics – if as asserted by lying Bush and slavishly echoed by Western journalist, editor, politician, academic and commentariat presstitutes, then the hijackers (none from Iraq or Afghanistan despite subsequent 9/11-based US invasion of these countries) had discovered an astonishing new form of energy.

For a large number of reasons numerous science, engineering, architecture, aviation, military and intelligence experts reject the lying Bush “official version of 9/11” as variously inconsistent with chemistry and physics and with a wealth of other evidence (for details see [14, 19-26]). The discovery by Professor Niels Harrit and colleagues of active thermitic explosive material in dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center catastrophe provided chemical physics-based evidence for the destruction of the Twin Tower buildings by nanoparticle thermite-based explosive demolition [26]. Now 3 engineering experts from the Institute of Northern Engineering, University of Alaska Fairbanks have produced a detailed Report on the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7 that concludes that “the collapse of WTC 7 was a global failure involving the near-simultaneous failure of all columns in the building” i.e. by explosive demolition and not by fire as asserted by the lying US Government [8, 9].

(3). Professor Leroy Hulsey, Dr. Zhili Quan, and Professor Feng Xiao (Institute of Northern Engineering, University of Alaska Fairbanks), “A structural reevaluation of the collapse of World Trade Center 7”.

Professor Leroy Hulsey, Dr. Zhili Quan, and Professor Feng Xiao (Institute of Northern Engineering, University of Alaska Fairbanks) in their detailed Final Report into “A structural reevaluation of the collapse of World Trade Center 7” stated in the Executive Summary (2020): “This report presents the findings and conclusions of a four-year study of the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7 (WTC 7)—a 47-story building that suffered a total collapse at 5:20 PM on September 11, 2001, following the horrible events of that morning. Figure E.1 shows the layout of WTC7 in relation to the World Trade Center complex prior to September 11, 2001.Figure E.2 shows the structural layout of Floor 13.Figure E.3 shows the finite element model of WTC 7. This study was conducted by a three-person team of researchers at the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering with funding provided by Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, Inc., a 501(c)(3) non profit organization whose purpose is to conduct research and educate the public about the World Trade Center building collapses on 9/11. According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology(NIST)—an agency of the U.S. Department of Commerce that investigated the three building failures on 9/11—the collapse of WTC 7 was the first known instance of the total collapse of a tall building primarily due to fires. However, many independent researchers have studied the collapse of WTC 7and assembled a body of evidence that raises questions about the validity of NIST’s conclusions. The objective of this study, therefore, was threefold: (1) Examine the structural response of WTC 7 to fire loads that may have occurred on September 11,2001; (2)Rule out scenarios that could not have caused the observed collapse; and (3)Identify types of failures and their locations that may have caused the total collapse to occur as observed… It is our conclusion based upon these findings that the collapse of WTC 7 was a global failure involving the near-simultaneous failure of all columns in the building and not a progressive collapse involving the sequential failure of columns throughout the building” [8].

Feng Xiao (Associate Professor, Nanjing University of Science and Technology) and Zhili Quan (Bridge Engineer, South Carolina Department of Transportation) summarizing “in plain English” the expert report on the WTC Building 7 collapse (2020): “This is a study of the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7 (WTC 7) — a 47-story building that suffered a total collapse at 5:20 PM on September 11, 2001, following the horrible events of that morning. The objective of the study was threefold: (1) Examine the structural response of WTC 7 to fire loads that may have occurred on September 11, 2001; (2) Rule out scenarios that could not have caused the observed collapse; and (3) Identify types of failures and their locations that may have caused the total collapse to occur as observed. The UAF research team utilized three approaches for examining the structural response of WTC 7 to the conditions that may have occurred on September 11, 2001. First, we simulated the local structural response to fire loading that may have occurred below Floor 13, where most of the fires in WTC 7 are reported to have occurred. Second, we supplemented our own simulation by examining the collapse initiation hypothesis developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Third, we simulated a number of scenarios within the overall structural system in order to determine what types of local failures and their locations may have caused the total collapse to occur as observed. The principal conclusion of our study is that fire did not cause the collapse of WTC 7 on 9/11, contrary to the conclusions of NIST and private engineering firms that studied the collapse. The secondary conclusion of our study is that the collapse of WTC 7 was a global failure involving the near-simultaneous failure of every column in the building” [9].

Professor Feng Xiao and Dr Zhili also provided a video showing the perfectly symmetrical (i.e. “perfect” demolition) of WTC7: http://ine.uaf.edu/wtc7 [9] – it is the most “perfect” demolition of a large structure that I have ever seen by video, but you play it and you be the judge.

(4). Lying, US-beholden Western Mainstream media almost totally ignore this explosive new WTC7 demolition report but lavishly denigrate critics of the lying Bush “official version of 9/11” as “conspiracy theorists” and “9/11 truthers”.

US-beholden Western Mainstream media have an appalling record of lying that occurs in 2 forms, lying by commission (notably by the Yellow Tabloid Press and the right-wing Murdoch Media Empire) and lying by omission (the cowardly stratagem of the so-called and self-assertedly “quality” Mainstream media like the New York Times and the Washington Post). Outstanding American humanitarian writer Barbara Kingsolver has described this perversion in her brilliant novel “The Lacuna” (lacuna meaning hiatus, blank, missing part, gap, cavity, or empty space) has Russian Communist revolutionary and theorist Leon Trotsky (Lev) and his assistant Van having the following discussion about media (2009): “”But newspapers have a duty to truth”, Van said. Lev [Trotsky] clicked his tongue. “They tell the truth only as the exception. Zola [French novelist of “J’accuse” fame] wrote that the mendacity of the press could be could be divided into two groups: the yellow press lies every day without hesitating. But others, like the Times, speak the truth on all inconsequential occasions, so they can deceive the public with the requisite authority when it becomes necessary.” Van got up from his chair to gather the cast-off newspapers. Lev took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “I don’t mean to offend the journalists; they aren’t any different from other people. They’re merely the megaphones of other people” … [Trotsky observes to his assistant Shepherd] “Soli, let me tell you. The most important thing about a person is always the thing you don’t know”” [27].

Of course lying by omission is far, far worse than lying by commission because the latter at least permits public refutation and public debate [28-31].

I have done Google Searches to determine the extent of Mainstream media ignoring (censorship, fake news through lying by omission) of the explosive WTC7 Report by Leroy Hulsey and colleagues entitled “A structural reevaluation of the collapse of World Trade Center 7”.

A Google Search for “A structural reevaluation of the collapse of World Trade Center 7” (21 August 2020) yielded 318 results but of these only 2 were from Mainstream media, namely Yahoo and Sputnik (Russia).

A Google Search for the lead author “Leroy Hulsey” (21 August 2020) yielded 328 results but of these only 2 were from Mainstream media, namely Yahoo and the UK Express.

In a remarkable and obscene converse, Mainstream media lavishly and offensively denigrate any critic of the lying Bush “official version of 9/11” as “conspiracy theorist” or “9/11 truther”.

Thus a Google Search for “conspiracy theorist” yields 3,910,000 results (22 August 2020) – inspection of the first 100 results reveal that they are overwhelmingly from Mainstream or right-wing media.

A Google Search for “9/11 truther” yields 140,000 results (22 August 2020) – inspection of the first 100 results reveal that they are overwhelmingly from Mainstream or right-wing media.

(5). Some thoughtful comments on the explosive new WTC7 demolition report.

Dr Paul Craig Roberts (eminent US economist, author and commentator) (2019): “A research team at the University of Alaska’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, led by Dr. Leroy Hulsey, Dr. Zhili Quan, and Professor Feng Xiao, Department of Civil Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, released on September 3, 2019, for public comment their findings from a four-year study of the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7 on September 11, 2001. This is the first scientific investigation of the collapse of the building. Here is the conclusion: “The principal conclusion of our study is that fire did not cause the collapse of WTC 7 on 9/11, contrary to the conclusions of NIST and private engineering firms that studied the collapse. The secondary conclusion of our study is that the collapse of WTC 7 was a global failure involving the near-simultaneous failure of every column in the building.” Notice three things: (1) it has taken 18 years to get a real investigation of the destruction of a building blamed on Muslim terrorists, (2) the only way “near-simultaneous failure of every column in the building” can occur is through controlled demolition, and (3) this remarkable finding is not reported in the presstitute media. In other words, the study is assigned to the Memory Hole. This is the way The Matrix operates. This is why you need this website. The only purpose of print and TV news is to program you so that you insouciantly go along with the agendas of those who rule you. Those who sit in front of TV news, listen to NPR, or read newspapers are programmed to be mindless automatons” [5].

Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth (2019): “University study finds fire did not bring down World Trade Center Building 7 on 9/11. On September 11, 2001, at 5:20 PM, the 47-story World Trade Center Building 7 collapsed into its footprint, falling more than 100 feet at the rate of gravity for 2.5 seconds of its seven-second destruction. Today, we at Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth are pleased to partner with the University of Alaska Fairbanks (UAF) in releasing the draft report of a four-year computer modeling study of WTC 7’s collapse conducted by researchers in the university’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. The release of the draft report begins a two-month period during which the public is invited to submit comments. The final report will be published later this year. We invite you to read the report and to watch Dr. Leroy Hulsey’s September 3rd presentation at the UAF campus, where he first announced his team’s findings” [6].

Australian Citizens Party (2019): “A research team at the University of Alaska Fairbanks engineering department has concluded that fire did not cause the collapse of World Trade Centre Building 7 (WTC 7) on 11 September 2001. Professor of Civil Engineering Dr J. Leroy Hulsey, who led the research team, has demonstrated that the official US government version of the WTC 7 collapse is a scientific fraud, which leaves us with some very troubling questions about the entire 9/11 attacks… The official US government analysis of WTC 7 from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) was released in August 2008. At a news conference, NIST lead investigator Shyam Sunder concluded: “WTC 7 collapsed because of fires fuelled by office furnishings. It did not collapse from explosives or from fuel oil fires.” This statement infuriated many engineers and architects. No skyscraper in the world had ever collapsed at freefall speed as a result of office fires. This only occurs in a controlled demolition. The official explanation defies the laws of physics! Dr Hulsey concluded: “We simulated every plausible scenario, and we found that the series of failures that NIST claimed triggered a progressive collapse of the entire structure could not have occurred. The only thing that could have brought this structure down in the manner observed on 9/11 is the near-simultaneous failure of every column in the building… With few exceptions, the mainstream media ignored what should have been major news” [7].

Final comments.

Dr Paul Craig Roberts has commented on a forthcoming Federal grand jury investigation of 9/11 (2019): “Although the United States is allegedly a democracy with a rule of law, it has taken 17 years for public pressure to bring about the first grand jury investigation of 9/11. Based on the work of Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth led by Richard Gage, first responder and pilots organizations, books by David Ray Griffin and others, and eyewitness testimony, the Lawyers’ Committee for 9/11 Inquiry has presented enough hard facts to the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York to force his compliance with the provisions of federal law that require the convening of a federal grand jury to investigate for the first time the attacks of September 11, 2001. This puts the US Justice (sic) Department in an extraordinary position. Every informed person is aware that elements of the US government were involved either in the perpetration of the 9/11 attacks or in a coverup of the attacks” [32]. Decent people can only hope that Dr Roberts is correct in his estimation, and that the truth can prevail over 2 decades of Mainstream media-complicit US Government lying over 9-11 – the social, political and global implications are immense.

References.

[1]. Daniel Marans and Tara Golshan, “Joe Biden’s most unifying message: human decency””, Huffington Post, 21 August 2020: https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/joe-biden-character-democratic-national-convention-2020_n_5f3f4d26c5b6305f3255b960?ri18n=true .

[2]. “Joe Biden and Kamala Harris speech transcript August 12: first campaign event as running mates”, Rev, 12 August 2020: https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/joe-biden-and-kamala-harris-speech-transcript-august-12-first-campaign-event-as-running-mates .

[3]. “Joe Biden quotes”, Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/614246.Joe_Biden?page=2 .

[4]. Shane Croucher, “Joe Biden on America under Trump: “Silence is complicity – our children are listening””, Newsweek, 13 July 2018: https://www.newsweek.com/joe-biden-america-under-trump-silence-complicity-our-children-are-listening-1022171 .

[5]. Paul Craig Roberts, “The official story of the collapse of WTC Building 7 lies in ruins”, Foreign Policy Journal, 6 September  2019: https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2019/09/06/the-official-story-of-the-collapse-of-wtc-building-7-lies-in-ruins/ .

[6]. Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth, “University study finds fire did not bring down World Trade Center Building 7 on 9/11”, 3 September 2019: https://www.ae911truth.org/news/561-university-study-finds-fire-did-not-bring-down-world-trade-center-building-7-on-9-11 .

[7]. Australian Citizens Party, “Engineering experts expose 9/11 lies”,  Australian Alert Service 18 September 2019: https://citizensparty.org.au/engineering-experts-expose-911-lies .

[8]. Dr. J. Leroy Hulsey, Dr. Zhili Quan, and Professor Feng Xiao (Institute of Northern Engineering, University of Alaska Fairbanks) , Final Report. “A structural reevaluation of the collapse of World Trade Center 7”, March 2020: https://files.wtc7report.org/file/public-download/A-Structural-Reevaluation-of-the-Collapse-of-World-Trade-Center-7-March2020.pdf .

[9]. Feng Xiao and Zhili Quan, “A structural reevaluation of the collapse of World Trade Center 7”, Institute of Northern Engineering, University of Alaska Fairbanks, March 2020: http://ine.uaf.edu/wtc7 .

[10]. “September 11 attacks”, Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_attacks .

[11]. Gideon Polya, “US-Imposed Post-9/11 Muslim Holocaust & Muslim Genocide” , Korsgaard Publishing, Germany, 4 June 2020: https://www.amazon.com/US-Imposed-Post-9-Muslim-Holocaust-Genocide/dp/8793987056  .

[12]. Gideon Polya, “Racist Mainstream ignores “US-Imposed Post-9/11 Muslim Holocaust & Muslim Genocide””, Countercurrents, 17 July 2020: https://countercurrents.org/2020/07/racist-mainstream-ignores-us-imposed-post-9-11-muslim-holocaust-muslim-genocide/  .

[13]. Gideon Polya, “Paris Atrocity Context: 27 Million Muslim Avoidable  Deaths From Imposed Deprivation In 20 Countries Violated By US Alliance Since 9-11”, Countercurrents, 22 November, 2015: http://www.countercurrents.org/polya221115.htm ) ;

[14]. “Experts: US did 9-11”: https://sites.google.com/site/expertsusdid911/ .

[15]. Charles Lewis, “25 years, countless investigations and 935 lies”, Center for Public Integrity, 25 June 2014: https://publicintegrity.org/inside-publici/25-years-countless-investigations-and-935-lies/ .

[16]. Charles Lewis, “935 Lies: the future of truth and the decline of America’s moral integrity”, Public Affairs, 24 June 2014.

[17]. I.F. Stone, quoted in “Two words – governments lie. Iraqi oil, climate change and Tony Blair”, Media Lens, 22 January 2003: http://www.medialens.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=239:two-words-governments-lie-iraq-oil-climate-change-and-tony-blair&catid=17:alerts-2003&Itemid=42 .

[18]. Gore Vidal interviewed by Melvyn Bragg on the South Bank Show”, 2008: http://warincontext.org/2012/08/01/remembering-gore-vidal-change-is-the-nature-of-life-and-its-hope/ .

[19]. Steven Jones, Robert Korol, Anthony Szamboti, and Ted Walter, “15 years later: on the physics  of high-rise building collapses”, Euro Physics News, 2016: https://www.europhysicsnews.org/articles/epn/pdf/2016/04/epn2016474p21.pdf .

[20]. John Kaminsky, “9/11 was a hoax. The American Government killed its own people”, Serendipity: https://www.serendipity.li/wot/911_a_hoax.htm .

[21]. Gideon Polya, “Exposure Of  Neocon American And Zionist Imperialist 9-11 Deception”, Countercurrents,  8 September, 2012: https://countercurrents.org/polya080912.htm .

[22]. Elias Davidsson, “There is no evidence that Muslims committed the crime of 9-11”,  Op Ed News, 10 January 2008: http://www.opednews.com/articles/1/There-is-no-evidence-that-by-Elias-Davidsson-100811-366.html .

[23].  Elias Davidsson, “Hijacking America ‘s Mind on 9/11. Counterfeiting Evidence”, Algora, New York 2013, 328 pp: http://www.amazon.com/Hijacking-Americas-Mind-11-Counterfeiting/dp/0875869734 .

[24]. David Ray Griffin, “The Mysterious Collapse of World Trade Center 7: Why the Final Official Report about 9/11 is Unscientific and False”, Olive Branch Press, 2012: https://www.amazon.com.au/Mysterious-Collapse-World-Trade-Center-ebook/dp/B00APDAZZ2 .

[25]. 911Truth.org, “The 40 top reasons to doubt the official story”, 911Truth.org, 16 May 2006: http://www.911truth.org/the-top-40-reasons-to-doubt-the-offical-story/ .

[26]. Niels H. Harrit, Jeffrey Farrer, Steven E. Jones, Kevin R. Ryan, Frank M. Legge, Daniel Farnsworth, Gregg Roberts, James R. Gourley, Bradley R. Larsen, “Active Thermitic Material Discovered in Dust from the 9/11 World Trade Center Catastrophe, The Open Chemical Physics Journals, vol.2,    pp.7-31 (25), 2009: http://www.bentham-open.org/pages/content.php?TOCPJ/2009/00000002/00000001/7TOCPJ.SGM .

[27]. Barbara Kingsolver, “The Lacuna”, Faber & Faber, London, 2009, part 3, p159.

[28]. “Mainstream media lying”: https://sites.google.com/site/mainstreammedialying/home .

[29]. “Lying by omission”, Mainstream media lying: https://sites.google.com/site/mainstreammedialying/lying-by-omission .

[30]. Gideon Polya, “Mainstream media: fake news through lying by omission”, MWC News, 1 April 2017: https://sites.google.com/site/mainstreammedialying/2017-04-01 .

[31]. “Mainstream media censorship”: https://sites.google.com/site/mainstreammediacensorship/home .

[32]. Paul Craig Roberts, “9/11: finally the truth comes out?”, Foreign Policy Journal, 4 January 2019: https://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2019/01/04/9-11-finally-the-truth-comes-out/ .

Dr Gideon Polya taught science students at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia for 4 decades.

22 August 2020

Source: countercurrents.org

Co-Written by Ramzy Baroud & Romana Rubeo

The notion that ‘Canada is better’, especially when compared with US foreign policy, has persisted for many years. Recent events at the United Nations have, however, exposed the true nature of Canada’s global position, particularly in the matter of its blind and unconditional support for Israel.

On June 17, Canada lost its second bid for the coveted UN Security Council seat, which, had it won, would have allowed Ottawa the opportunity to become a world leader, pushing its own agenda – and those of its allies – on the global stage.

However, this, too, was a wasted opportunity. Only 108 countries voted for Canada while 130 and 128 voted for Norway and Ireland respectively. Both these countries will be admitted to the Security Council, starting January 1, 2021.

What is striking about Canada’s missed opportunity is that it was in retribution for Canada’s bias towards Israel, at the expense of Palestine, international and humanitarian laws. Over the last twenty years alone, for example, Canada has voted against 166 resolutions supporting Palestinian rights, says Canadian author and human rights advocate, Yves Engler.

Moreover, Canada has lobbied – and continues to lobby – against the International Criminal Court (ICC) investigation of war crimes in Palestine. Along with Germany, Austria and others, Canada has challenged the ICC’s jurisdiction on the matter, erroneously alleging that Palestine is not a State.

Shortly before the June vote on new Security Council members was held, a group of human rights activists circulated a letter to all UN members, detailing Canada’s poor record on Palestine. “Despite its peaceful reputation, Canada is not acting as a benevolent player on the international stage,” the letter read.

It added, “Since coming to power, the Justin Trudeau government has voted against more than 50 UN resolutions upholding Palestinian rights, even though they have been backed by the overwhelming majority of member states.”

Among the signatories of the letter were renowned American intellectual, Noam Chomsky, famed rock star, Roger Waters and former Quebec National Assembly member, Amir Khadir.

The vote against Canada at the UN was understood to be a stance against Ottawa’s position on Israel and Palestine, despite Canada’s Ambassador to the UN, Marc-Andre Blanchard, going on the defensive in a desperate attempt to dissuade member states from voting against his country.

In a letter sent to all member states, Blanchard argued that an earlier document written by “a group of Canadians regarding Canada’s position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict … contains significant inaccuracies and characterizes Canada’s longstanding policy positions”.

This succession of actions is unprecedented in recent years, where a country like Canada loses the respect and support of other UN member states largely due to its failure to respect the rights of the Palestinian people. To better understand the significance of this event, we spoke to Yves Engler, who played a direct role in championing the Palestinian cause and pushing for Canadian accountability at the United Nations.

Engler has also authored several books, among them “Canada and Israel: Building Apartheid” and “Left, Right: Marching to the Beat of Imperial Canada”.

“It is important for people to realize that this anti-Palestinian position that Canada pursues today is not new. It is grounded in at least a century of Zionist policy in this country,” Engler said.

The UN Vote

Explaining the context of the June UN vote, Engler said that “the current Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, who is a liberal politician, expended a lot of energy into winning that seat; he undertook a huge campaign, called dozens of leaders around the world, lobbied very hard for that seat but, on the first round of voting, Canada was defeated resoundingly by Ireland and Norway.”

Engler added, “In my mind, there was no issue that contributed more to Canada’s loss in its bid for a Security Council seat than its anti-Palestinian record. And, more specifically, its voting against UN General Assembly resolutions that almost the entire world supports, isolated Canada with the US, Israel, Micronesia, and maybe one or two other countries.”

The Canadian setback at the UN should be directly attributed to grassroots activists and intellectuals like Engler.

“Activists’ groups – that I was part of – exposed records spanning the past two decades of the Canadian government voting consistently against the UN General Assembly resolutions. It voted against 166 UN General Assembly resolutions over the past twenty years. In comparison, Ireland and Norway did not vote against a single one of those UN General Assembly resolutions.”

The Media Lobby

“But how did Canada become pro-Israel?” we asked Engler.

“There is a very well-organized, pro-Israel lobby in Canada that is able to exert its influence over the media,” Engler said. “For instance, the pro-Israel group, ‘Honest Reporting Canada’, concentrates on criticizing every media source that expresses even a hint of solidarity with the Palestinian cause.”

However, compared with the dynamics of Israeli influence over Washington, Canada is quite different. Unlike the US, Engler continues, “Canada has much clearer restrictions on the funding of politicians, so there is nobody like Sheldon Adelson who gives a couple of hundred million dollars to Donald Trump which, then, sway Trump to adopt even more extreme anti-Palestinian positions. This dynamic does not exist in Canada, but the dominant media has always been sympathetic to the Zionist movement.”

Encouragingly, pro-Palestinian sentiment in Canada has grown over the last twenty years or so, to become a large network, an organized movement in its own right, which has, according to Engler, to “some extent, countered the dominance of the Zionist narrative.”

Canadian media, however, is still unwilling to challenge Israel’s power in the country, leaving the stage open to “pro-Israel groups … to attack pro-Palestinian activists.” “There is an incredible amount of trepidation, even in the pro-Palestinian movement, of being labeled as anti-Jewish,” Engler said.

Grassroots Activism

Similar to the trend in other western countries, pro-Palestine groups in Canada are small, diverse and organized at grassroots levels. These groups “tend not to be particularly well-founded or institutionally strong, while the pro-Israel side is far better organized.”

Yet, despite the pro-Israeli influence in government and media, “polls show, repeatedly, that the public is increasingly sympathetic to the Palestinian cause than what appears in the dominant media or in the official protocol. A recent poll has revealed that Canadians are very sympathetic towards boycotting Israel for violating international law.”

A March 2017 poll indicated that 78% of all Canadians believe that “BDS is reasonable”. Engler sees much hope in these numbers, referring to them and to the vote at the UN as “small victories.”

The growing pro-Palestinian sentiment is now also seeping into politics. Following Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent decision to annex nearly a third of the occupied Palestinian West Bank, 57 members of parliament strongly protested this decision, demanding action from their government should Tel Aviv proceed with its illegal measures.

The change is far more rewarding within labor unions in the country than in politics. “Forty years, ago… unions were aggressive in their support of Zionism; today, this is no longer the case, as many unions have passed resolutions supporting BDS campaigns.”

While Canada’s support for Israel is, to a certain extent, consistent with Canada’s own colonial past and present interventionist foreign policy, the Canadian people and the international community remain major obstacles, challenging the toxic affinity between Ottawa and Tel Aviv.

The hope is that the growing pro-Palestinian tide, predicated on respect for international law and human rights, will eventually prevail in order to sever the Canada-Israel rapport permanently, and allow Canada to earn its place as a global leader.

Ramzy Baroud is a journalist and the Editor of The Palestine Chronicle.

Romana Rubeo is an Italian writer and the managing editor of The Palestine Chronicle.

21 August 2020

Source: countercurrents.org

By Jonathan Cook

Nazareth: When the Palestinian actor Mohammed Bakri made a documentary about Jenin in 2002 – filming immediately after the Israeli army had completed rampaging through the West Bank city, leaving death and destruction in its wake – he chose an unusual narrator for the opening scene: a mute Palestinian youth.

Jenin had been sealed off from the world for nearly three weeks as the Israeli army razed the neighbouring refugee camp and terrorised its population.

Bakri’s film Jenin, Jenin shows the young man hurrying silently between wrecked buildings, using his nervous body to illustrate where Israeli soldiers shot Palestinians and where bulldozers collapsed homes, sometimes on their inhabitants.

It was not hard to infer Bakri’s larger meaning: when it comes to their own story, Palestinians are denied a voice. They are silent witnesses to their own and their people’s suffering and abuse.

The irony is that Bakri has faced just such a fate himself since Jenin, Jenin was released 18 years ago. Today, little is remembered of his film, or the shocking crimes it recorded, except for the endless legal battles to keep it off screens.

Bakri has been tied up in Israel’s courts ever since, accused of defaming the soldiers who carried out the attack. He has paid a high personal price. Deaths threats, loss of work and endless legal bills that have near-bankrupted him. A verdict in the latest suit against him – this time backed by the Israeli attorney general – is expected in the next few weeks.

Bakri is a particularly prominent victim of Israel’s long-running war on Palestinian history. But there are innumerable other examples.

For decades many hundreds of Palestinian residents in the southern West Bank have been fighting their expulsion as Israeli officials characterise them as “squatters”. According to Israel, the Palestinians are nomads who recklessly built homes on land they seized inside an army firing zone.

The villagers’ counter-claims were ignored until the truth was unearthed recently in Israel’s archives.

These Palestinian communities are, in fact, marked on maps predating Israel. Official Israeli documents presented in court last month show that Ariel Sharon, a general-turned-politician, devised a policy of establishing firing zones in the occupied territories to justify mass evictions of Palestinians like these communities in the Hebron Hills.

The residents are fortunate that their claims have been officially verified, even if they still depend on uncertain justice from an Israeli occupiers’ court.

Israel’s archives are being hurriedly sealed up precisely to prevent any danger that records might confirm long-sidelined and discounted Palestinian history.

Last month Israel’s state comptroller, a watchdog body, revealed that more than one million archived documents were still inaccessible, even though they had passed their declassification date. Nonetheless, some have slipped through the net.

The archives have, for example, confirmed some of the large-scale massacres of Palestinian civilians carried out in 1948 – the year Israel was established by dispossessing Palestinians of their homeland.

In one such massacre at Dawaymeh, near where Palestinians are today fighting against their expulsion from the firing zone, hundreds were executed, even as they offered no resistance, to encourage the wider population to flee.

Other files have corroborated Palestinian claims that Israel destroyed more than 500 Palestinian villages during a wave of mass expulsions that same year to dissuade the refugees from trying to return.

Official documents have disproved, too, Israel’s claim that it pleaded with the 750,000 Palestinian refugees to return home. In fact, as the archives reveal, Israel obscured its role in the ethnic cleansing of 1948 by inventing a cover story that it was Arab leaders who commanded Palestinians to leave.

The battle to eradicate Palestinian history does not just take place in the courts and archives. It begins in Israeli schools.

A new study by Avner Ben-Amos, a history professor at Tel Aviv University, shows that Israeli pupils learn almost nothing truthful about the occupation, even though many will soon enforce it as soldiers in a supposedly “moral” army that rules over Palestinians.

Maps in geography textbooks strip out the so-called “Green Line” – the borders demarcating the occupied territories – to present a Greater Israel long desired by the settlers. History and civics classes evade all discussion of the occupation, human rights violations, the role of international law, or apartheid-like local laws that treat Palestinians differently from Jewish settlers living illegally next door.

Instead, the West Bank is known by the Biblical names of “Judea and Samaria”, and its occupation in 1967 is referred to as a “liberation”.

Sadly, Israel’s erasure of Palestinians and their history is echoed outside by digital behemoths such as Google and Apple.

Palestinian solidarity activists have spent years battling to get both platforms to include hundreds of Palestinian communities in the West Bank missed off their maps, under the hashtag #HeresMyVillage. Illegal Jewish settlements, meanwhile, are prioritised on these digital maps.

Another campaign, #ShowTheWall, has lobbied the tech giants to mark on their maps the path of Israel’s 700-kilometre-long steel and concrete barrier, effectively used by Israel to annex occupied Palestinian territory in violation of international law.

And last month Palestinian groups launched yet another campaign, #GoogleMapsPalestine, demanding that the occupied territories be labelled “Palestine”, not just the West Bank and Gaza. The UN recognised the state of Palestine back in 2012, but Google and Apple refused to follow suit.

Palestinians rightly argue that these firms are replicating the kind of disappearance of Palestinians familiar from Israeli textbooks, and that they uphold “mapping segregation” that mirrors Israel’s apartheid laws in the occupied territories.

Today’s crimes of occupation – house demolitions, arrests of activists and children, violence from soldiers, and settlement expansion – are being documented by Israel, just as its earlier crimes were.

Future historians may one day unearth those papers from the Israeli archives and learn the truth. That Israeli policies were not driven, as Israel claims now, by security concerns, but by a colonial desire to destroy Palestinian society and pressure Palestinians to leave their homeland, to be replaced by Jews.

The lessons for future researchers will be no different from the lessons learnt by their predecessors, who discovered the 1948 documents.

But in truth, we do not need to wait all those years hence. We can understand what is happening to Palestinians right now – simply by refusing to conspire in their silencing. It is time to listen.

A version of this article first appeared in the National, Abu Dhabi.

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism.

21 August 2020

Source: countercurrents.org

Aug. 13, 2020 will be remembered by Palestinians as another Naksa, or “setback.” This is the term used by Arabs to refer to Israel’s stunning military victory in 1967, in which it took control of the Palestinian-inhabited West Bank and Gaza Strip, along with Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula and Syria’s Golan Heights. Much like the Arab defeat of 1967, the agreement signed yesterday by Israel and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), in which the two countries agreed to a “full normalization of relations” in return for Israel suspending moves to formally annex parts of the West Bank, has reminded the Palestinians that they cannot count on the Arab states to deliver their freedom or safeguard their rights.

The UAE is not the first Arab state to use the Palestinians as a fig leaf for its dealings with Israel, and in reality the de facto annexation of West Bank territory has been happening for many decades and could have been avoided easily with a decision in Washington or Jerusalem.

The agreement put a halt on Israel’s plans to annex parts of the Israeli occupied West Bank, but instead of increasing stability and peace in the region, Palestinian officials say the deal has further undermined them. “I never expected this poison dagger to come from an Arab country,” veteran negotiator, Saeb Erekat said. “You are rewarding aggression…You have destroyed, with this move, any possibility of peace between Palestinians and Israelis,” he added, speaking to the UAE.

Friedman thinks that the Israel-UAE consular agreement is a “geopolitical earthquake that just hit the Mideast” whose effects should be felt throughout the region.

Ranjan Solomon

18 August 2020

Source: palestineupdates.com