Mar 19
I visited São Paulo for the first time two years ago, and I still remember that first drive from the airport to the city centre. Even now, the average visitor could be forgiven for thinking about asking the taxi driver to turn back. In the car window, a bleak landscape flashes by of boarded-up factories, dirty industrial zones and, most shockingly, huge expanses of shanty towns or favelas. Read more
Once again, we are learning that when it comes to the conflict in Palestine/Israel, some lives are worth more than others. Earlier today, dozens of Qassam rockets fired from the Gaza Strip fell on Sderot, the Israeli town that has borne the brunt of Palestinian rocket fire over the last few years. This time, an Israeli man, “father-of-four” Roni Yechiah, was killed in a car park by shrapnel. Others have suffered injuries.
Even as I write this, however, there is news that in the Gaza Strip, the Israeli military, in separate attacks, has killed a 6 month old baby and three Palestinian children age 10, 12 and 14. No names yet. In the case of the three children, the Israeli army claims that it was aiming at militants, and a spokesperson said it was “strange” that there should be children around the alleged vicinity of rocket launchers. Read more
A few days ago, the Associated Press reported that the small Israeli town of Kiryat Yam is suing Google for slander, after a Google Earth user “inserted a note on the map” saying that the town was built “on the location of Ghawarina”, a Palestinian village destroyed in 1948.
A town official said this was impossible, as Kiryat Yam was founded in 1945, while Google emphasised that their service “depends on user-generated content that reflects what people contribute, not what Google believes is accurate”. Read more
Recently, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert was reported to have suggested that the question of Jerusalem would be “left to last” in negotiations with the Palestinians. This was apparently on account of the issue being “too sensitive and complex,” as well as fears that talks on Jerusalem would cause the departure of religious right-wingers from Olmert’s ruling coalition.
Domestic political considerations will certainly have played a part in the prime minister’s thinking, but there is another possible motivation for leaving this “final status issue” for further down the road. In recent weeks, and indeed, going back to the December announcement of the expansion of West Bank settlement Har Homa, the Israeli government’s approach to Jerusalem has been at best contradictory, and at worst, deeply cynical. Read more
The differing responses to Bishop of Rochester Michael Nazir-Ali’s interview with the Daily Telegraph on 6 January 2008 tended to focus on his claim that across Britain, “Islamic extremists have created ‘no-go’ areas” for non-Muslims. However, there is a different approach to a constructively critical engagement of Nazir-Ali’s analysis, one that begins with the Bishop’s view that “it is now less possible for Christianity to be the public faith in Britain”.
While Nazir-Ali’s comments were primarily about British Muslims, there was a broader context reflected both in his own remarks, and the Telegraph’s reporting of a recent Synod survey. This survey revealed that “bishops, senior clergy and influential churchgoers” consider “an increasingly multi-faith society” to threaten “the country’s Christian heritage”, while a third of those questioned thought that “a mass influx of people of other faiths is diluting the Christian nature of Britain”. Read more
Last week, the Israeli attorney general ruled against reopening the investigation into how 13 Palestinians (all but one of them Israeli citizens) were shot dead by police during unrest in October 2000. The decision did not come as much of a surprise, given the seven-year long refusal to bring charges against either police or senior officials.
These deaths – and indeed, the subsequent lack of accountability – have served as a reminder of the difficult relationship between “Israeli Arabs” and the Jewish state. With the creation of Israel 60 years ago, four-fifths of the Palestinians inside the new state’s borders were expelled; the others remained (albeit with a quarter becoming “internally displaced“). Read more
Once more, there has been an upsurge of violence in the Gaza Strip. Israeli military attacks have killed over 30 Palestinians in the last few days, while in the neighbouring Israeli city of Sderot and across the Negev, Palestinian rockets have fallen in their dozens.
At the same time, however, there is also a renewed emphasis on negotiations – it was only Monday that Israelis and Palestinians began to discuss issues such as Jerusalem, Palestinian refugees, and the borders of the proposed Palestinian state. Most of the media coverage this week has dealt with these parallel stories by referring to the fresh bloodshed as coming “despite” the “renewed peace talks”, or as representing an ill-timed challenge to the successful continuation of the top-level meetings. Read more
Last year, I experienced at first hand Israel’s new-look occupation. Intending to cross into Israel from the northern West Bank, I arrived at the Jalama checkpoint expecting the usual token passport check. Instead, I was told that it was forbidden for me to use this particular crossing point. For six hours I sat under the watchful eye of two soldiers, making calls to the British consulate, which, in turn, called various Israeli military officials.
During my extended visit, I had plenty of time to observe my surroundings. One of the new “terminals” that Israel has built, Jalama is on the “Green Line”, but there are others that lie well inside the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). These new checkpoints are built like international borders, with metal detectors, turnstiles, winding passages and the disembodied voices of security personnel. Read more
This week US President George W. Bush embarks on a tour of some of the US’ Middle East allies, including his first visit while in office to Israel. The trip has been presaged by a lot of media guesswork about what exactly Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert will discuss, and one of the likely topics will apparently be the so-called “illegal outposts.” [1]
The New York Times last Saturday reported remarks made by Bush in an interview with Israeli newspaper Yediot Aharonot about the need for Israel to dismantle these outposts and the apparent “awkward” nature of the issue for both US and Israeli governments. [2] However, the issue of outposts — framed as Bush forcing a reticent Israeli administration to compromise for the sake of peace — risks clouding far more crucial issues that go to the heart of the conflict. Read more
In the second such incident since the 2006 war, two rockets fired from within Lebanon struck Israel Monday night. The news understandably made headlines in Israel, and was featured as a major story by all the major Western news outlets such as CNN and the BBC, coming just before President Bush starts his Middle East tour.
However, completely unreported, or at best featured as a small afterthought, was the fact that Lebanese-Israeli border tensions had been already raised Monday by the Israeli abduction of a Lebanese shepherd. Read more
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