Jimmy Carter / Times of India & Agence France-Presse & Donald Macintyre / The Independent – 2008-05-31 00:26:01
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/msid-3057635,prtpage-1.cms
It’s Such a Shame
Jimmy Carter / Times of India
Atlanta (May 21, 2008) — The world is witnessing a terrible human rights crime in Gaza, where a million and a half human beings are being imprisoned with almost no access to the outside world by sea, air or land. An entire population is being brutally punished.
This gross mistreatment of the Palestinians in Gaza was escalated dramatically by Israel, with United States backing, after political candidates representing Hamas won a majority of seats in the Palestinian Authority parliament in 2006. The election was unanimously judged to be honest and fair by all international observers.
Israel and the US refused to accept the right of Palestinians to form a unity government with Hamas and Fatah and now, after internal strife, Hamas alone controls Gaza. Forty-one of the 43 victorious Hamas candidates who lived in the West Bank are now imprisoned by Israel, plus an additional 10 who assumed positions in the short-lived coalition cabinet.
Regardless of one’s choice in the partisan struggle between Fatah and Hamas within occupied Palestine, we must remember that economic sanctions and restrictions in delivering water, food, electricity and fuel are causing extreme hardship among the innocent people in Gaza, about one million of whom are refugees. Israeli bombs and missiles periodically strike the encapsulated area, causing high casualties among both militants and innocent women and children.
I attempted to gain a better understanding of the crisis on a recent trip through the Middle East. One of my visits was to Sderot, a community of about 20,000 in southern Israel that is frequently struck by rudimentary rockets fired from nearby Gaza. I condemned these attacks as abominable and an act of terrorism, since most of the 13 victims during the past seven years have been non-combatants.
I subsequently met with leaders of Hamas, both a delegation from Gaza and the top officials in Damascus, Syria. I made the same condemnation to them, and urged that they declare a unilateral ceasefire or orchestrate with Israel a mutual agreement to terminate all military action in and around Gaza for an extended period.
They responded that such previous action by them had not been reciprocated, and they reminded me that Hamas had previously insisted on a ceasefire throughout Palestine including both Gaza and the West Bank, which Israel had refused. Hamas then made a public proposal of a mutual ceasefire restricted to Gaza, which the Israelis considered and also rejected.
There are fervent arguments heard on both sides concerning blame for a lack of peace in the Holy Land. Israel has occupied and colonised the Palestinian West Bank, which is approximately one-fourth (28.5 per cent) the size of the nation of Israel as recognised by the international community. Some Israeli religious factions claim a right to the land on both sides of the Jordan River, and others aver that their 205 settlements with some 500,000 people are necessary for “security”.
All Arab nations have agreed to full recognition of Israel if it will comply with key United Nations resolutions. Hamas has agreed to accept any negotiated peace settlement between Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert, provided it is approved in a referendum among the Palestinian people.
This holds promise of progress, but despite the brief fanfare and positive statements at the peace conference last November in Annapolis, Maryland, a retrogression has occurred in the process. Nine thousand new Israeli settlement housing units have been announced in Palestine, the number of roadblocks within the West bank has increased, and the stranglehold on Gaza has been tightened.
It is one thing for other leaders to defer to the US on the crucial peace negotiations, but the world must not stand idle while innocent people are treated cruelly. It is time for strong voices in Europe, the US, Israel, and elsewhere to speak out and condemn this human rights tragedy among the Palestinian people.
The writer is a former US president. Copyright: Project Syndicate.
Posted in accordance with Title 17, US Code, for noncommercial, educational purposes.
Carter: Israel Has ‘150 or More’ Nuclear Weapons
Agence France-Presse
LONDON (May 27, 2008) – Israel has “150 or more” nuclear weapons, former US president Jimmy Carter said at a press conference over the weekend, a spokesman for the literary festival at which he was speaking confirmed.
Asked how a future US president should deal with the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran, the 83-year-old said: “The US has more than 12,000 nuclear weapons, the Soviet Union (sic) has about the same; Great Britain and France have several hundred, and Israel has 150 or more.”
“We have a phalanx of enormous weaponry, not only of enormous weaponry, but of rockets to deliver those missiles on a pinpoint accuracy target,” he said at a press conference in Hay-on-Wye, in Wales, on Sunday, according to a spokesman for the Guardian Hay Festival.
Israel is widely believed to be the only nuclear power in the Middle East but has a policy of neither confirming nor denying its arsenal.
At the same press conference, Carter described Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip as “one of the greatest human rights crimes now existing on Earth” and the Nobel Peace Prize winner also said the European Union’s failure to support the Palestinian cause was “embarrassing”.
Tutu: Silence on Gaza Blockade Shames us All
Donald Macintyre / The Independent
LONDON (30 May 2008) — Archbishop Desmond Tutu has denounced the international community for its “silence and complicity” on what he called Israel’s “abominable” 11-month blockade of Gaza.
The South African Nobel Laureate, who ended a three-day visit to Gaza yesterday, strongly condemned the blockade imposed after Hamas’s enforced takeover of the Strip l
ast June that has reduced electricity, severely cut fuel supplies and brought industry to a halt.
The Archbishop, mainly here on a UN mission to investigate what he called the Beit Hanoun massacre of 21 civilians by Israeli tank shelling 18 months ago, said: “All we had heard about conditions in Gaza – deprivation, a sense of despair, the lack of economic activity – had not prepared us for the stark reality which we saw.”
He added: “The entire situation is abominable. I believe the ordinary Israeli citizens would not support this blockade if they knew what it really meant to ordinary people like themselves… My message to the international community is that our silence and complicity, especially on the situation in Gaza, shames us all. It is almost like the behaviour of the military junta in Burma.”
He said that he had urged Ismail Haniyeh, Gaza’s de facto Hamas prime minister, at a meeting to stop the firing of rockets into Israel, which he said were also a “gross violation of human rights”. And he said he would have liked to talk to victims of the rocket attacks in the Israeli border town of Sderot. The UN mission has been refused visas to enter Israel.
But he said that events in both South Africa and Northern Ireland had shown that peace would come through negotiations “not with your friends. Peace can only come when enemies sit down and talk”.
Yesterday, less than 24 hours after the Archbishop’s visit to Beit Hanoun, 60 Palestinians were arrested during a pre-dawn raid by the Israeli military on the northern Gaza town. Palestinian witnesses said that residents had been summoned to a local square before dozens were taken away for questioning, and that armed military bulldozers had destroyed some farmland in the area.
Posted in accordance with title 17, US Code, for noncommercial, educational purposes.
