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EAST JERUSALEM, Palestine (Haaretz) – The municipality of Jerusalem approved the construction of 600 new homes in Pisgat Zeev, east of the Green Line.
Jerusalem Mayor Uri Lupolianski approved the expansion in Pisgat Zeev – a Jewish settlement surrounded by Arab towns in the West Bank – as part of a plan to construct 40,000 more homes in the area as foreign interest drives property prices up.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert promised the spiritual leader of the Shas Party, Rabbi Ovadiah Yosef, that he would authorize construction on “Jerusalem envelope” lands which have been thus far frozen, sources from the ultra-Orthodox Party said.
Suspected of accepting illicit funds from U.S. businessman
TEL AVIV (Haaretz) – Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is suspected of illicitly receiving hundreds of thousands of dollars from Morris (Moshe) Talansky, according to the details of an investigation currently being carried out against him.
At the request of police and judicial officials, the Tel Aviv Magistrate’s Court relaxed a sweeping media gag order that has prevented the reporting of details on the probe. Olmert was questioned under caution last Friday and the gag order was initially meant to remain in place until early next week.
Channel 10 TV reported that Morris Talansky was a middleman for illegal campaign contributions, and that he readily told Israeli interrogators everything he knew about the case.
Hezbollah routs pro-government gunmen, controls Beirut
BEIRUT (Reuters) – Lebanon’s Iranian-backed Hezbollah took control of the Muslim part of Beirut, tightening its grip on the city in a major blow to the U.S.-backed government.
The European Union, Germany and France urged calm and a peaceful resolution. Syria said the issue was an internal Lebanese affair while Iran blamed “the adventurist interferences” of the United States and Israel for the violence.
The fighting, the worst internal strife since the 1975-90 civil war, was triggered this week after the government took decisions targeting Hezbollah’s military communications network. The group said the government had declared war.
(CSM) March 4, 2008 – Washington’s decision to deploy the USS Cole off Lebanon’s coast is kindling grim memories of a past conflict here – and fresh concerns over another war.
While the US State Department says the Cole and other warships are being sent to the eastern Mediterranean to support regional stability amid Lebanon’s political crisis, the move seems to have embarrassed the besieged Western-backed administration of Prime Minister Fouad Siniora and provided ammunition for the pro-Syrian opposition, led by the militant Shiite Hizbullah, to accuse the government of being a US pawn.
“It has done Hizbullah a huge favor,” says Amal Saad-Ghorayeb of the Carnegie Endowment’s Middle East Center in Beirut. “It’s a sign of political bankruptcy on the part of the US. They have failed to achieve anything in Lebanon; all they have left is military muscle-flexing.” Analysts here are divided over whether the USS Cole’s presence is intended as warning for Hizbullah or Syria.
In September 1983, midway through Lebanon’s 16-year civil war, US warships shelled the Druze-dominated Chouf mountains south of Beirut in support of the Lebanese Army, then battling pro-Syrian militias. The shelling further convinced those Lebanese who were opposed to the then US-backed Lebanese government that Washington was not a neutral peacekeeper in Lebanon.
1987 – U.S. Navy Bolsters Mideast Presence Off Lebanon and in Persian Gulf
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“I am shocked, without knowing the reason that it is happening, that none of the allegations with the respect of Wright, his former pastor, have had any impact on his polling,” said Koch. “I’m absolutely surprised because I think that all the things that Wright says — and nobody believes that Obama supports those statements — but he didn’t have the courage to stand up and object for twenty years. If you are running for president, you can’t be like some other poor guy in the pews who is afraid to stand up or even say something privately to the minister. You’re the guy who wants to lead the country and you have to have courage to stand up and lead your own pastor. He did not exhibit that. But the fact that the Democratic constituency doesn’t seem to care is a shock to me, but I’m certain that the overall constituency voting in November will care and that it will make the difference in the adverse way to his candidacy.”
In fact, if they care about Israel at all (and quite a few of them do not anymore), under-50 Jews would like to see a change in tone from the White House. Something less along the “war of civilization” line, or even the “Labor good, Likud bad” line of Bill Clinton – and more along the “talk to your enemies” line promoted by Carter; and, yes, Obama.
New York Politics and Murdoch
No one should be surprised Ed Koch is in Hillary’s Corner: 4 more years … invade Iraq and bomb Iran for the sake of …?
≈ Cross-posted from BooMan’s diary — Obama Visits the House ≈
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence.".
Jimmy Carter Meets Hamas Leader Mashaal
The Republican National Committee has amassed a 1,000-page dossier on Mr Obama, with researchers spending weeks in Chicago seeking fresh material. He is already being criticised for his links with Rashid Khalidi, a Columbia University professor who has branded Israel an “apartheid system in creation”.
Mr Malley, a respected commentator on Middle Eastern issues and part of President Clinton’s negotiating team at the Camp David talks , has come under attack in recent months from right-wing bloggers. Yesterday, asked if Obama campaign was aware of his contact with Hamas, he said: “They know who I am but I don’t think they vet everyone in a group of informal advisers.”
Robert Malley and International Crisis Group
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."So Koch is shocked, eh? I wonder if he would be even more discombobulated to find that many Obama supporters might just agree with the Rev. Wright’s assessments.
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Now the Israeli feminist organization Isha L’isha (Woman to Woman) reports that a sharp increase in the rate of deadly domestic violence against women within Israeli households must also be seen as an indirect result of the military conflict. Nearly half of the women killed in domestic violence in Israel during the past four years were murdered by soldiers and security guards who carried licensed weapons that they turned on family members and partners.
“In militarized societies, the full and equal membership and rights of women are consistently undermined and weakened. Such societies almost unfailingly construct women as vulnerable — needing the protection of powerful, armed masculine (or masculinized) fighters, and invest a great deal of cultural labor in holding women in powerless positions. Implicitly sanctioned violence against women (tacitly upheld by the allocation of budgets and the attitudes of courts, police, media, etc.) is one of the social mechanisms perpetuating relative powerlessness. Widespread indifference to violence against women in Israel, both at the institutional and social-cultural levels, is clearly discernible in the fact that the distinct phenomenon of Israeli women’s murders by Israeli security forces remains largely invisible.”
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Lebanon’s Iranian-backed Hezbollah took control of the Muslim part of Beirut, tightening its grip on the city in a major blow to the U.S.-backed government.
The Bush era: a story of unintended consequences. Not only is that seen in Iraq and Afganistan and Gaza, but now in Lebanon with the ill fated preplanned Bush-Olmert war when 1200 southern Shiite civilians including many children were slaughtered by Israeli delivered American armaments. And American cluster bombs continue to kill and maim.
America is no closer to gaining Middle East oil reserves by force than it is to “making Israel safer,” as Bush once contended when he took up the cause of the Neocons.
What a mess the Democrats will be left with next year as only McCain and Clinton, the projected losers, are committed to continuing the Cheney-Bush agenda.
more war. Looks like Clean Break is alive and well.
Gary Sick on Iran Policy from Bill to Dubya to Hillary
How we screw Iran:
http://www.ips.org/blog/jimlobe/?p=138
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The government of Dubai recently allowed a major bankroller of Jewish settlement expansion in the West Bank to open at least two Jewelry stores in the Gulf emirate.
According to reliable sources in the United Arab Emirates, of which Dubai is a key member-state, Israeli billionaire and diamond magnate Lev Leviev is preparing to open two large jewelry stores in Dubai, a world’s hub of Jewelry trading.
The first store will be opened soon at the Burj Dubai Mall (Dubai Mall Tower) while a second store is slated to be opened later this year in the new Atlantis Hotel on the Jumeirah Palm Island.
Leviev has already opened one store in Dubai in March, 2008, in the lobby of al-Qasr Hotel on Madinat Jumeirah.
The Dubai authorities were initially reluctant to grant the Israeli billionaire a license to do business in the oil-rich emirate. However, Leviev reportedly successfully lobbied “North American and European connections” to convince Dubai officials to reconsider their objections.
Leviev’s companies, including Africa-Israel and Leader Management & Development as well as several other subsidiaries, have been quite active in displacing Palestinian villagers from their homes and land in several parts of the West Bank.
The two firms have built hundreds of settler units in at least five Jewish settlements constructed on land illegally seized from its Arab proprietors.
Israeli Settlers Uproot PalestinianOlive Trees For Settlement Expansion
In recent years, a company called Leader belonging to Leviev built the settlement of Zufim on private Arab land seized from the village of Jayyous. Danya Cebus, a subsidiary of the Leviev-owned company Africa-Israel has built hundreds of settler units on land stolen from the village of Bilin. Numerous additional settler units were built in the two large settlements of Ma’ali Adomim, a few kilometers east of Jerusalem, and Har Homa, near the predominantly Christian Arab town of Beit Sahur.
Israel hopes that these settlements will cut off East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank, thus making the Palestinian dream of making the city the future capital of a prospective Palestinian state utterly unrealistic and outright impossible.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Dubai, I understood, was having second thoughts about Leviev and just what he stands for, the Likud project to undermine Palestinian self-determination.
Bubai prevented Leviev from establishing a store in its country. But it is not likely that many knew about the March 2008 opening of a store in Dubai. This deserves further scrutiny.
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TEL AVIV (Haaretz) – Bush is an accomplice to an offense far worse than all of the criminal offenses of which Olmert is suspected combined. Every speech made by the president is one more bit of exposure of the nakedness of the Palestinian circles who tied their collective fate to the Annapolis declaration, which pledged to “make every effort to conclude an agreement before the end of 2008.” In light of the stasis in the negotiations, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) seems likely to resign even before Olmert does.
The failed gamble of the United States also undermines the standing of leaders in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan. Every fruitless visit by Bush to Israeli Jerusalem pushes the Arab League further and further away from its own peace initiative of March 2002, and provides more ammunition to Iran and Syria in their struggle for hegemony in the Middle East, over and above the moderate Sunni axis. Gaza and Lebanon are just the beginning.
If Bush cared about Israel remaining a Jewish country, he would not have let Abbas leave the White House last month bruised and battered. The Palestinian president told him that when the Palestinian delegates to the talks saw the Israeli positions, they thought Olmert and Tzipi Livni were playing a joke on them. In addition to all of the “settlement clusters,” including, of course, the territorial “fingers” of Ariel, Ma’aleh Adumin and Givat Ze’ev, the Israelis demanded to remain in control of the entire Jordan Valley, almost to the outskirts of Nablus, while leaving intact all of the Jewish settlements in that area – all in all, some 600 square kilometers, amounting to about 10 percent of the territories. Israel also demanded that all of Jerusalem, including the Holy Basin surrounding the Old City and the Old City itself, would remain under Israeli sovereignty; Palestine would be given control only over the Temple Mount, which is held by the Muslim Waqf authorities in any case.
Abu Mazen’s close circle is pushing him to end the talks and abandon the two-state solution. Moreover, he is being urged to dissolve the Palestinian Authority immediately, which would wipe what remains of the Oslo makeup off Israel’s face. At the last convention of the PLO’s executive committee and in a meeting with reporters, Abu Mazen handed out copies of an article by Adnan Abu Ouda, born in Nablus and formerly a minister in the Jordanian government, calling for the unilateral dismantling of the Palestinian Authority.
A paper recently released by the Reut Institute, in Tel Aviv, presents a compilation of evidence that the foundations are being laid for a Palestinian demand for a single state and for a return to the armed struggle against Israel. The paper also suggests that even among the leaders of Israel’s Arab population, there is dwindling support for the two-state solution and a turn instead toward embracing the idea of a bi-national state.
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."And let’s not forget Pakistan. Sharif’s party quit – as PPP leader Asif Ali Zadari reneged on a pledge to restore judges that Musharraf had sacked. Reinstating the judges was a condition for Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League joining the coalition:
Does Bush have a plan C?