The US will try to limit the number of one-sided, anti-Israel resolutions passed by the UN General Assembly during its 59th session, which opens on Tuesday in New York, State Department officials said. It will also try to win approval of a resolution condemning anti-Semitism, which failed to pass last year. Deputy assistant secretary of state Mark Lagon last week, in outlining Washington's priorities for the session, included the hope that the US would be able to block an inordinate number of resolutions by the 191-member body that bash Israel. "The United States seeks to bring balance to the number and content of Middle East resolutions," Lagon said at a forum hosted by the Hudson Institute. Lagon said the last General Assembly adopted 21 resolutions concerning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, many of which implied "that only Israel has obligations and responsibilities to make peace." The resolutions did not mention suicide attacks against Israel, he noted. And he said, "they pressed the case of the Palestinians, but failed to present a complete picture of the situation on the ground, condemn all acts of terrorism, and recognize the legitimate security concerns of the Israeli people." Lagon said too that the US would also advocate for the abolition of a special UN General Assembly committee directed to investigate Israeli practices and other bodies "that are biased against Israel." It is not clear, given the makeup of the 191-member body, including the powerful Arab bloc, how successful the US will be in its bid to block anti-Israel resolutions. The US and Israel are concerned that the General Assembly could, among other initiatives, support a Palestinian-initiated resolution calling on the more powerful Security Council to condemn Israel's construction of its security barrier and impose sanctions. Last week, the American Jewish Committee called on world leaders "to make a concerted effort to end the world body's chronic assault on Israel." It released a report entitled, "One-Sided: The Relentless Campaign Against Israel in the United Nations." "The UN General Assembly has an obsession with Israel that consistently poisons the climate for bilateral negotiations" between Israel and the Palestinians, said Jason Isaacson, AJC's director of government and international affairs and a principal author of the report. Read More...
By: Amira Hass
Date: 27/05/2013
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Slain Bedouin girls' mother, a victim of Israeli-Palestinian bureaucracy
Abir Dandis, the mother of the two girls who were murdered in the Negev town of Al-Fura’a last week, couldn't find a police officer to listen to her warnings, neither in Arad nor in Ma’ale Adumim. Both police stations operate in areas where Israel wants to gather the Bedouin into permanent communities, against their will, in order to clear more land for Jewish communities. The dismissive treatment Dandis received shows how the Bedouin are considered simply to be lawbreakers by their very nature. But as a resident of the West Bank asking for help for her daughters, whose father was Israeli, Dandis faced the legal-bureaucratic maze created by the Oslo Accords. The Palestinian police is not allowed to arrest Israeli civilians. It must hand suspects over to the Israel Police. The Palestinian police complain that in cases of Israelis suspected of committing crimes against Palestinian residents, the Israel Police tend not to investigate or prosecute them. In addition, the town of Al-Azaria, where Dandis lives, is in Area B, under Palestinian civilian authority and Israeli security authority. According to the testimony of Palestinian residents, neither the IDF nor the Israel Police has any interest in internal Palestinian crime even though they have both the authority and the obligation to act in Area B. The Palestinian police are limited in what it can do in Area B. Bringing in reinforcements or carrying weapons in emergency situations requires coordination with, and obtaining permission from, the IDF. If Dandis fears that the man who murdered her daughters is going to attack her as well, she has plenty of reason to fear that she will not receive appropriate, immediate police protection from either the Israelis or the Palestinians. Dandis told Jack Khoury of Haaretz that the Ma’ale Adumim police referred her to the Palestinian Civil Affairs Coordination and Liaison Committee. Theoretically, this committee (which is subordinate to the Civil Affairs Ministry) is the logical place to go for such matters. Its parallel agency in Israel is the Civilian Liaison Committee (which is part of the Coordination and Liaison Administration - a part of the Civil Administration under the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories). In their meetings, they are supposed to discuss matters such as settlers’ complaints about the high volume of the loudspeakers at mosques or Palestinians’ complaints about attacks by settlers. But the Palestinians see the Liaison Committee as a place to submit requests for permission to travel to Israel, and get the impression that its clerks do not have much power when faced with their Israeli counterparts. In any case, the coordination process is cumbersome and long. The Palestinian police has a family welfare unit, and activists in Palestinian women’s organizations say that in recent years, its performance has improved. But, as stated, it has no authority over Israeli civilians and residents. Several non-governmental women’s groups also operate in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem, and women in similar situations approach them for help. The manager of one such organization told Haaretz that Dandis also fell victim to this confusing duplication of procedures and laws. Had Dandis approached her, she said, she would have referred her to Adalah, the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, which has expertise in navigating Israel’s laws and authorities.
By: Phoebe Greenwood
Date: 27/05/2013
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John Kerry unveils plan to boost Palestinian economy
John Kerry revealed his long-awaited plan for peace in the Middle East on Sunday, hinging on a $4bn (£2.6bn) investment in the Palestinian private sector. The US secretary of state, speaking at the World Economic Forum on the Jordanian shores of the Dead Sea, told an audience including Israeli president Shimon Peres and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas that an independent Palestinian economy is essential to achieving a sustainable peace. Speaking under the conference banner "Breaking the Impasse", Kerry announced a plan that he promised would be "bigger, bolder and more ambitious" than anything since the Oslo accords, more than 20 years ago. Tony Blair is to lead a group of private sector leaders in devising a plan to release the Palestinian economy from its dependence on international donors. The initial findings of Blair's taskforce, Kerry boasted, were "stunning", predicting a 50% increase in Palestinian GDP over three years, a cut of two-thirds in unemployment rates and almost double the Palestinian median wage. Currently, 40% of the Palestinian economy is supplied by donor aid. Kerry assured Abbas that the economic plan was not a substitute for a political solution, which remains the US's "top priority". Peres, who had taken the stage just minutes before, also issued a personal plea to his Palestinian counterpart to return to the negotiations. "Let me say to my dear friend President Abbas," Peres said, "Should we really dance around the table? Lets sit together. You'll be surprised how much can be achieved in open, direct and organised meetings."
By: Jillian Kestler-D'Amours
Date: 27/05/2013
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Isolation Devastates East Jerusalem Economy
Thick locks hug the front gates of shuttered shops, now covered in graffiti and dust from lack of use. Only a handful of customers pass along the dimly lit road, sometimes stopping to check the ripeness of fruits and vegetables, or ordering meat in near-empty butcher shops. “All the shops are closed. I’m the only one open. This used to be the best place,” said 64-year-old Mustafa Sunocret, selling vegetables out of a small storefront in the marketplace near his family’s home in the Muslim quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City. Amidst the brightly coloured scarves, clothes and carpets, ceramic pottery and religious souvenirs filling the shops of Jerusalem’s historic Old City, Palestinian merchants are struggling to keep their businesses alive. Faced with worsening health problems, Sunocret told IPS that he cannot work outside of the Old City, even as the cost of maintaining his shop, with high electricity, water and municipal tax bills to pay, weighs on him. “I only have this shop,” he said. “There is no other work. I’m tired.” Abed Ajloni, the owner of an antiques shop in the Old City, owes the Jerusalem municipality 250,000 Israeli shekels (68,300 U.S. dollars) in taxes. He told IPS that almost every day, the city’s tax collectors come into the Old City, accompanied by Israeli police and soldiers, to pressure people there to pay. “It feels like they’re coming again to occupy the city, with the soldiers and police,” Ajloni, who has owned the same shop for 35 years, told IPS. “But where can I go? What can I do? All my life I was in this place.” He added, “Does Jerusalem belong to us, or to someone else? Who’s responsible for Jerusalem? Who?” Illegal annexation Israel occupied East Jerusalem, including the Old City, in 1967. In July 1980, it passed a law stating that “Jerusalem, complete and united, is the capital of Israel”. But Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem and subsequent application of Israeli laws over the entire city remain unrecognised by the international community. Under international law, East Jerusalem is considered occupied territory – along with the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Syrian Golan Heights – and Palestinian residents of the city are protected under the Fourth Geneva Convention. Jerusalem has historically been the economic, political and cultural centre of life for the entire Palestinian population. But after decades languishing under destructive Israeli policies meant to isolate the city from the rest of the Occupied Territories and a lack of municipal services and investment, East Jerusalem has slipped into a state of poverty and neglect. “After some 45 years of occupation, Arab Jerusalemites suffer from political and cultural schizophrenia, simultaneously connected with and isolated from their two hinterlands: Ramallah and the West Bank to their east, West Jerusalem and Israel to the west,” the International Crisis Group recently wrote. Israeli restrictions on planning and building, home demolitions, lack of investment in education and jobs, construction of an eight-foot-high separation barrier between and around Palestinian neighbourhoods and the creation of a permit system to enter Jerusalem have all contributed to the city’s isolation. Formal Palestinian political groups have also been banned from the city, and between 2001-2009, Israel closed an estimated 26 organisations, including the former Palestinian Liberation Organisation headquarters in Jerusalem, the Orient House and the Jerusalem Chamber of Commerce. Extreme poverty Israel’s policies have also led to higher prices for basic goods and services and forced many Palestinian business owners to close shop and move to Ramallah or other Palestinian neighbourhoods on the other side of the wall. Many Palestinian Jerusalemites also prefer to do their shopping in the West Bank, or in West Jerusalem, where prices are lower. While Palestinians constitute 39 percent of the city’s population today, almost 80 percent of East Jerusalem residents, including 85 percent of children, live below the poverty line. “How could you develop [an] economy if you don’t control your resources? How could you develop [an] economy if you don’t have any control of your borders?” said Zakaria Odeh, director of the Civic Coalition for Palestinian Rights in Jerusalem, of “this kind of fragmentation, checkpoints, closure”. “Without freedom of movement of goods and human beings, how could you develop an economy?” he asked. “You can’t talk about independent economy in Jerusalem or the West Bank or in all of Palestine without a political solution. We don’t have a Palestinian economy; we have economic activities. That’s all we have,” Odeh told IPS. Israel’s separation barrier alone, according to a new report by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTD), has caused a direct loss of over one billion dollars to Palestinians in Jerusalem, and continues to incur 200 million dollars per year in lost opportunities. Israel’s severing and control over the Jerusalem-Jericho road – the historical trade route that connected Jerusalem to the rest of the West Bank and Middle East – has also contributed to the city’s economic downturn. Separation of Jerusalem from West Bank Before the First Intifada (Arabic for “uprising”) began in the late 1980s, East Jerusalem contributed approximately 14 to 15 percent of the gross domestic product (GDP) in the Occupied Palestinian territories (OPT). By 2000, that number had dropped to less than eight percent; in 2010, the East Jerusalem economy, compared to the rest of the OPT, was estimated at only seven percent. “Economic separation resulted in the contraction in the relative size of the East Jerusalem economy, its detachment from the remaining OPT and the gradual redirection of East Jerusalem employment towards the Israeli labour market,” the U.N. report found. Decades ago, Israel adopted a policy to maintain a so-called “demographic balance” in Jerusalem and attempt to limit Palestinian residents of the city to 26.5 percent or less of the total population. To maintain this composition, Israel built numerous Jewish-Israeli settlements inside and in a ring around Jerusalem and changed the municipal boundaries to encompass Jewish neighbourhoods while excluding Palestinian ones. It is now estimated that 90,000 Palestinians holding Jerusalem residency rights live on the other side of the separation barrier and must cross through Israeli checkpoints in order to reach Jerusalem for school, medical treatment, work, and other services. “Israel is using all kinds of tools to push the Palestinians to leave; sometimes they are visible, and sometimes invisible tools,” explained Ziad al-Hammouri, director of the Jerusalem Centre for Social and Economic Rights (JCSER). Al-Hammouri told IPS that at least 25 percent of the 1,000 Palestinian shops in the Old City were closed in recent years as a result of high municipal taxes and a lack of customers. “Taxation is an invisible tool…as dangerous as revoking ID cards and demolishing houses,” he said. “Israel will use this as pressure and as a tool in the future to confiscate these shops and properties.”
By the Same Author
Date: 10/03/2010
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Biden Visits Middle East; Israel and Palestinians Agree to Indirect Talks
Vice President Biden arrived in Israel on Monday to boost U.S. efforts to mediate talks between Israelis and Palestinians amid criticism that the Obama administration has set back the peace process. Biden's four-day visit -- in addition to reassuring Israeli leaders about the U.S. commitment to curb Iran's nuclear program -- is designed to prod Israel and the Palestinians to get talks moving again. With a speech in Tel Aviv on Thursday, he will also try to court the Israeli public, some of whom felt snubbed in the past year by President Obama, who has visited Egypt, Turkey and Saudi Arabia but has yet to come to Israel. In a major speech in Cairo last June, Obama raised expectations in the region that he would make Middle East peacemaking a top priority by promising to personally pursue Palestinian statehood "with all the patience and dedication that the task requires." Instead, Obama is viewed here as having relegated the issue to special envoy George J. Mitchell, who announced Monday that Israel and the Palestinians had agreed to indirect talks. In a sign of how fragile the peace process has become, he acknowledged that the structure and scope of the talks had not yet been agreed upon. After so many years of direct talks that wrestled with the core issues of the future of Jerusalem, borders, security and Palestinian refugees, Mitchell's announcement felt to some observers more like a setback than a success. "It's hardly a cause for celebration that after 17 years of direct official talks we are regressing to proximity talks," said Yossi Alpher, co-editor of a Middle East blog and a former director of the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel Aviv University. Saeb Erekat, the longtime Palestinian negotiator, told Israel's Army Radio that the indirect talks were a last attempt "to save the peace process." Mitchell, who in January boasted that a peace deal could be done within two years, said he hoped the indirect talks would lead to direct negotiations as soon as possible and encouraged the parties "to refrain from any statements or actions which may inflame tensions or prejudice the outcome of these talks." Just such a thing happened Monday when Israel announced construction of 112 new housing units in the West Bank settlement of Beitar Ilit. The administration had pushed hard -- but unsuccessfully -- last year for a complete freeze on settlements, and Israel's new announcement came as Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas was meeting with Mitchell. The Israeli Defense Ministry released a statement saying the units were approved before Israel agreed to a 10-month moratorium on most new settlement construction in November, a move the United States had hoped would give Abbas enough political cover to return to negotiations toward Palestinian statehood. "Israelis and Palestinians aren't ready for direct talks; their positions are too far apart," said Aaron David Miller, a former Middle East negotiator in Republican and Democratic administrations who is now at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Indirect talks "could legitimize the U.S. role as a broker and maybe even make some headway on borders. Fact is, the Obama administration now owns these negotiations, and sooner or later they will have to get more deeply involved if they want them to succeed." Daniel Kurtzer, a former U.S. mediator and ambassador to Israel and Egypt who served both Democrat and Republican presidents, took a more skeptical view. He said it's "not understandable why we would now have them sit in separate rooms and move between them." "I have been disappointed this past year with the lack of boldness and the lack of creativity and the lack of strength in our diplomacy with respect to this peace process. We have not articulated a policy, and we don't have a strategy," Kurtzer, who advised Obama's presidential campaign, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week. Some analysts speculated that Biden's trip was a recognition that the administration's hands-off approach had gone on too long. "The administration finally did understand that one of the mistakes in the course of the past year was not engaging Israel at a high enough level," Alpher said. "If the Obama administration wants to have some influence here on the Palestinian issue, it can't ignore us." Biden's trip may not be enough to satisfy the critics. "While we welcome Vice President Biden, a longtime friend and supporter of Israel," said Danny Danon, the deputy speaker of the Knesset, Israel's parliament, "we see it as nothing short of an insult that President Obama himself is not coming."
Date: 20/10/2004
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Conference At Duke Equates Zionism And Apartheid
A weekend conference urging divestment from Israel got underway at Duke University on Friday and continued into Saturday with speakers equating Zionism with South African apartheid and some calling for an end to an exclusively Jewish state. The gathering, the fourth organized by the Palestine Solidarity Movement, stirred up emotions in the Duke community, with many Jews outraged by the PSM's refusal to condemn Palestinian violence. As a result, some Jewish professors on campus refused to take part in the PSM's panels. The Duke administration allowed the conference to take place because it said it was committed to free speech. "We felt without a renunciation of violence, it's hard to have a conversation," said Eric Meyers, director of Judaic studies on campus. As of late Saturday, the heavily guarded events were peaceful. Only a handful of local protesters gathered outside the main venue of the PSM conference, a campus gym, to demonstrate. But at least one busload of Jewish demonstrators was expected to arrive early Sunday morning and some PSM representatives warned of possibly violent confrontations. On Friday evening, Dianna Buttu, legal advisor in the PLO's Negotiations Affairs Department, applauded the International Court of Justice's ruling that determined the West Bank barrier is illegal and ought to be torn down. She told an audience of a few hundred, many dressed in "Free Palestine" tee-shirts and keffiyehs, that South African apartheid was no different than Israeli occupation. "Israel is attempting to rid itself of the Palestinians as much as possible while taking as much land as they can," she said. She called Israel's barrier a "means of entrenching a system of discrimination," and said the route of the fence was designed to accommodate future settlement expansion. Rev. Mark Davidson, a Presbyterian pastor from Chapel Hill, said the Church leadership's recent decision to explore ways of divesting its holdings from certain businesses that have operations in Israel, was a way of "prodding Israel to live up to its highest ideals." When asked by one audience member whether she would support a divestment campaign that targeted far worse human rights offenders than Israel, such as China or Sudan, Buttu said other divestment campaigns would be legitimate but that Israel deserved to be singled out. "I think that right now the greatest abuser of human rights is not, as you put it, China. The greatest abuser of human rights and the greatest threat to international security is Israel," she said. When another questioner asked if divestment could gain more popularity if the PSM agreed to condemn violence as a form of resistance, Buttu said it was not her place to dictate policy of local activists. "I think it's up to the organizers," she said. On Saturday, Mazin Qumsiyeh, a Yale University professor and the co- founder of Al-Awda, the Palestine Right of Return Coalition, referred to Zionism as a "disease" and said the media only reported on "resistance to colonization" not on the violence of "repression and ethnic cleansing" by Israel. He also rejected a two-state solution. "We ought to stop talking about these vague concepts about a two-state solution," he said. Nasser Aburfarha, a doctoral candidate at the University of Wisconsin, also rejected a two-state solution and called for some federation of Israel and Palestine in the future, but noted that Palestinians would not abandon their right to return to their historic homes, inside Israel proper. Palestinians remain "connected to historic Palestine," he said. Outside the conference, a small group of Jewish students called on participants to condemn Palestinian violence. "Tell the PSM to condemn terrorism. Put it in your guidelines," one yelled. Later in the afternoon, PSM attendees participated in workshops. One featured representatives of the International Solidarity Movement, which sends Americans to the West Bank and Gaza to protest Israel's construction of its barrier and the demolition of Palestinian homes and olive trees. The organizer of the workshop, Huwaida Arraf, said the group only engages in non-violent tactics, but acknowledged, "We don't refuse to work with anyone." The ISM has been accused of cooperation with Hamas and other violent Palestinian groups. Across campus, at the Freeman Center for Jewish Life, Jewish students gathered for an "Israel Teach-In," with lectures on Zionism, US- Israel relations and how to confront anti-Semitism. Some expressed concern about the PSM conference. "Many Jews suspect they are trying to take advantage of naive college students who want to right injustices," said David Breau, a Duke University law student who helped bring the bombed-out shell of Egged Bus No. 19 to display on campus last week. They want to say, "hey, these Palestinians are suffering. Let's paint Israel as the bad guy." Former Knesset speaker Avraham Burg, at an afternoon panel on America's role in the Middle East, gave a blistering assessment of the Bush administration's policies in the region, charging that the war in Iraq had made Israel less, not more secure, and challenging the notion that President George W. Bush's support for Prime Minister Ariel Sharon had benefited Israel. "A parent who does everything that his kid asked for is not necessarily a good parent," Burg said. He urged American Jewish voters not to vote solely based on which president they believed was best for Israel. "If there is one thing that I pray to God won't happen, is that American Jewry will become a single-issue community," he said. Burg also questioned the effectiveness of Israel's military tactics vis-a-vis the Palestinians. Date: 20/09/2004
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US Seeks to Limit UN Bias Against Israel
The US will try to limit the number of one-sided, anti-Israel resolutions passed by the UN General Assembly during its 59th session, which opens on Tuesday in New York, State Department officials said. It will also try to win approval of a resolution condemning anti-Semitism, which failed to pass last year. Deputy assistant secretary of state Mark Lagon last week, in outlining Washington's priorities for the session, included the hope that the US would be able to block an inordinate number of resolutions by the 191-member body that bash Israel. "The United States seeks to bring balance to the number and content of Middle East resolutions," Lagon said at a forum hosted by the Hudson Institute. Lagon said the last General Assembly adopted 21 resolutions concerning the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, many of which implied "that only Israel has obligations and responsibilities to make peace." The resolutions did not mention suicide attacks against Israel, he noted. And he said, "they pressed the case of the Palestinians, but failed to present a complete picture of the situation on the ground, condemn all acts of terrorism, and recognize the legitimate security concerns of the Israeli people." Lagon said too that the US would also advocate for the abolition of a special UN General Assembly committee directed to investigate Israeli practices and other bodies "that are biased against Israel." It is not clear, given the makeup of the 191-member body, including the powerful Arab bloc, how successful the US will be in its bid to block anti-Israel resolutions. The US and Israel are concerned that the General Assembly could, among other initiatives, support a Palestinian-initiated resolution calling on the more powerful Security Council to condemn Israel's construction of its security barrier and impose sanctions. Last week, the American Jewish Committee called on world leaders "to make a concerted effort to end the world body's chronic assault on Israel." It released a report entitled, "One-Sided: The Relentless Campaign Against Israel in the United Nations." "The UN General Assembly has an obsession with Israel that consistently poisons the climate for bilateral negotiations" between Israel and the Palestinians, said Jason Isaacson, AJC's director of government and international affairs and a principal author of the report. Contact us
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