THOSE WHO CLAIM to PROTECT DEMOCRACY MUST READ The settlements within Hebron have been declared illegal by the Geneva conventions. The official city maps, which are the documents used by Israeli courts, are wildly inaccurate. They claim that ghost streets, long sealed off by concrete and metal, are functioning thoroughfares and marketplaces. Walking through the streets of Hebron, you find a city carved up by the violent military presence and constant threat of settler violence. Some roads have a concrete barrier running along the edge, leaving a few feet for Palestinians to walk along while two wide lanes are reserved for settlers. The souks, Old City markets, have wire screens or makeshift netting overhead: insufficient protection for attacks from settlers living on the floors above. The wire screens are heavy with trash, bricks, giant concrete chunks, and exploded plastic bags that contained sewage and urine when they burst onto the people and racks of goods below. Hisham told us one young man was in a coma after a sharpened metal rod came through the screen and penetrated his skull. Now, when you look up, you can see piles of objects that got caught in the screen: crowbars, bricks, stones, chairs. While walking through a market, we saw a settler woman throw sand from her third story apartment down at a crowded market where Palestinians were shopping.

An Israeli judge made an historic ruling last week when he decided that an Arab teenager needed "protection" from the justice system and ordered that he not be convicted despite being found guilty of throwing stones at a police car during a protest against Israel's attack last winter on Gaza. In the verdict, he wrote: "I will say that the state is not authorised to caress with one hand the Jewish ‘ideological' felons, and flog with its other hand the Arab ‘ideological' felons." He referred in particular to the lenient treatment by the police and courts both of Jewish settler youths who have attacked soldiers in the West Bank and who violently resisted the disengagement from the Gaza Strip in 2005, and of religious extremists who have spent many months battling police to prevent the opening of a car park on the Sabbath in Jerusalem.

Right-wing groups in Israel want to create a climate of fear among left-wing scholars at Israeli universities by emulating the 'witch-hunt' tactics of the US academic monitoring group Campus Watch, Israeli professors warn. “I have no hesitation in calling this a McCarthyite campaign,” said David Newman, a politics professor at Ben Gurion University, in Israel’s southern city of Beersheva. “What they are doing is very dangerous.”“The goal is to transform our students into spies in the classroom to gather information and intimidate us,” a senior Israeli lecturer said. “It’s a model of ‘policing’ faculty staff that has been very successful in stifling academic freedom in the US.” Both Israel Academia Monitor, established in 2004, and the later IsraCampus, model themselves on Campus Watch, a US organisation founded by Daniel Pipes, an academic closely identified with the US neoconservative movement. Campus Watch has been widely accused of intimidating US scholars who have expressed views critical of US and Israeli policies in the Middle East. The organisation’s goal, according to critics, is to pressure US universities to avoid hiring left-wing lecturers or awarding them tenure.

Mark Gardner from the Zionist ‘Community Security Trust’ is not happy either. He complained that Dispatches producers behaved as if they were investigating a “criminal gang rather than various Jewish community-linked organizations," Gardner is also correct. It is indeed tragic to admit that the Jewish lobby is far more worrying than a criminal gang. It is there to serve a murderous state with a devastating record of crimes against humanity. Thanks to the Jewish lobby, we are all complicit in the Zionist crime. Not only are those lobbyists heavily corrupted and removed from any ethical value system, they also corrupt everything they touch. They obviously contaminate every politician who is happy to take their shekels. Consequently they incriminate us all as a society.

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Israel triggered a fresh rift with Washington over settlement building on Tuesday by approving the building of 900 homes for Jews on West Bank land it occupied in a 1967 war and annexed to its Jerusalem municipality. The Israeli decision drew an unusually sharply worded rebuke from the White House, which said it was "dismayed" and accused Israel of undermining Obama's efforts to resume peace talks with Palestinians stalled since December. In his statement, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs also said the United States objected to continued evictions and demolitions of Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem.

Tens of thousands of Gazans living in tents and damaged homes face a wet, cold and miserable winter as Israel’s blockade of the coastal territory continues to prevent the importation of building and reconstruction material. During the last few weeks Gazans were given a brief reprieve from the oncoming winter as an unseasonal snap of warmish, sunny weather held off winter rain and plummeting temperatures. But, during a tour of northern Gaza last week, the U.N. Humanitarian Coordinator for the occupied Palestinian territory, Maxwell Gaylard, and the Association of International Development Agencies (AIDA) called on Israel to open its border crossings immediately to avert a further deterioration in the humanitarian situation on the ground. "With winter rains and cold weather now imminent, the people of Gaza are even more desperately in need of construction materials such as cement, roofing tiles and glass to build and repair homes destroyed and damaged during the Israeli military offensive of 2008/2009," said Gaylard.

The United States would veto a Palestinian declaration of statehood in the United Nations Security Council, U.S. senators visiting Israel said Monday.Senator Joseph Lieberman (CT), an independent, said "an essentially unilateral" declaration of statehood was the one thing that would not move the stalled peace process forward."I hope and presume that the United States would veto such a move if it ever came to the Security Council," Lieberman said. The only way to end the Middle East conflict was an agreement reached through bilateral negotiations, he added.The Palestinians should "give the new government of Israel an opportunity at the negotiating table," he said.

"The collapse of the Palestinian Authority, the result of Israel’s 42-year refusal to implement a two-state solution, leaves the Palestinians no option but to unilaterally declare an independent state. Israel acted unilaterally when it announced independence in 1948. It is the Palestinians’ turn. It worked in Kosovo. It worked in Georgia. And it will work in Palestine. There are 192 member states in the United Nations and as many as 150 would recognize the state of Palestine, creating a diplomatic nightmare for Israel and its lonely ally the United States. Israel will face worldwide censure if it attempts to crush the independent state by force and very likely be subjected to the kind of divestment campaigns and boycotts that brought down the apartheid government of South Africa."

"Palestinian leaders from President Mahmoud Abbas down have alarmed Israeli ministers by swinging their weight behind a planned effort to secure UN backing for a unilaterally declared independent state in the West Bank and Gaza. In an innovative strategy which would not depend on the success of currently stalled negotiations with Israel, the leaders are preparing a push to secure formal UN Security Council support for a Palestinian state based on 1967 borders as a crucial first step towards the formation of a state."

The Jewish Israeli body politic is diseased, that one man writes, because it has not adjusted to the Jews' reentry into history with a state of their own. Too many Jews are still stuck in the ancient feeling of powerlessness and victimhood. Former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin told Israelis that their country is militarily powerful, and neither friendless nor at risk. They should therefore stop thinking and acting like victims. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, on the other hand, says that the whole world is against Israel and that Israelis are at risk of another Holocaust. That message of Jewish weakness and victimhood appeals to enough voters to keep him in power. Gripped by such unrealistic fears, Israelis refuse Obama's call to stop expanding settlements and start compromising for peace. Israel's resistance to Obama's serious peace effort has been called "nothing less than pathological." Pathological? Who would print such scurrilous anti-Israel charges - some anti-Semitic rag? Nope. This opinion comes straight from the op-ed page of The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/02/opinion/02iht-edsiegman.html.---

Iran has always resented the double standard involved: that Israel can develop nuclear weapons and flout the world’s anti-proliferation measures with impunity, while Iran is being threatened with war if it goes down the same path. To have Obama now publicly abandon any pressure on Israel to deal in good faith with the Palestinians would have made the hardliners in Teheran more likely to baulk at allowing their sovereignty to be abridged in the fashion proposed. Especially now the IAEA has investigated the ‘secret site’ at Qom – touted by Obama and Britain’s Foreign Secretary David Milliband a few months ago as a grave cause of concern – and found it to pose no danger whatsoever.

The United Nations' top human rights official has called for taking punitive measures against Israel over committing war crimes in the Gaza Strip. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay told the Security Council on Wednesday that Israel was responsible for the killing of more than 1,000 civilians in Gaza and attacks on schools, mosques and UN facilities, Ynet reported. She has also criticized the regime's confiscation of Palestinian lands and the forceful evacuation of Palestinians from their homes in east Jerusalem (Al-Quds).

Obama's upcoming meeting with Netanyahu. Should the US recommend that Israel gives up the Golan Heights?

For so long, it's been an unchallengeable given that we are required to continue to lavish Israel with aid and diplomatic protection even if they do things that our own government believes (or at least claims to believe) is directly harming the United States. Perhaps Friedman's implicit (if unintended) call for that to change -- and Klein's explicit call that it change -- signals a long-overdue erosion of that taboo.

Seven United States senators have sponsored a bill that would abolish the “security” waiver that American presidents have used to prevent implementing a 1995 law declaring that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. Kansas Republican Senator Sam Brownback, a long-time supporter of Israel, introduced the bill and said, "It is long overdue for America to recognize the sovereign right of Israel to choose Jerusalem as its capital city.” The proposed Jerusalem Embassy Relocation Act law, number S. 2737, is "a bill to relocate to Jerusalem the United States Embassy in Israel" and has six co-sponsors--five Republicans, from Kentucky, Texas, Arizona, and Louisiana and Independent Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut. It would remove the current waiver, which gives the president authority to delay recognition of Jerusalem as the capital on the premise that doing so would endanger the security of the United States. Previous presidents, including George W. Bush, vowed during their election campaigns they would recognize Jerusalem as the Jewish State’s capital but they have failed out to carry out their election promise. [Note: Past Presidents did not have Rahm as the advisor. This is called a "taking".]

Once again, the Zionist entity seemed to be “depressed” after another attempt to hit the Lebanese and Palestinian Resistance was found to be useless. On Wednesday, Israeli Navy commando force, that reached the deep sea in small boats, boarded the Francop, a cargo ship owned by charter company UFS traveling under an Antiguan flag. According to Israeli media, the crew of sailors did not resist the commando and said that they did not know what was in the large container on board. The commando force opened the container and revealed missiles, rockets, shells, grenades, and small arms. The Israeli “novel” doesn’t end here. The main point is the following: the weapons are Iranians, they are destined to Hezb’Allah. Concentrating in this point, the Zionist entity sought to influence the international public opinion and “fabricate” a new story against the Resistance. But, “unfortunately,” Israel failed in just convincing this international public opinion of the “accuracy” of its “novel.”

The following press release was issued by the University of Sussex Students' Union on 5 November 2009: Students at the University of Sussex, England have voted to boycott Israeli goods. The decision follows the Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel, which calls upon the Israeli state to respect international law and end the occupation of Palestine. In a campus-wide referendum, 56 percent of students voted in favor of the boycott. The referendum was held by the University of Sussex Students' Union (USSU), which represents the institution's 11,000 students. Goods from Israel will no longer be stocked in USSU shops on the university campus, and USSU will be lobbying the university administration to observe the boycott. Tom Wills, USSU President, said "Israel has broken more UN resolutions than any other state. No other Western-backed democracy has committed such egregious violations of international law, but the international community has failed to hold Israel to account. "Sussex was one of the first universities to boycott South Africa during apartheid, and we hope that this will help kickstart an international movement on a similar scale to put pressure on Israel to end its oppression of the Palestinian people.

The United Nations General Assembly has voted overwhelmingly in favor of a report, which accuses Israel of war crimes as well as crimes against humanity during the weeks-long onslaught on the Gaza Strip. 114 states endorsed a resolution supporting the report by a Human Rights Council panel led by the South African judge Richard Goldstone in Thursday's UN vote while only 18 states including the US objected to the report's adoption. Forty-four countries also abstained including France, Britain and Russia. The assembly's resolution demands that both the Israelis and the Palestinians carry out investigations within three months. It also pushes for Security Council attention.

It would be an understatement to say that the Obama administration has shot itself in the foot this week by stepping back from its initial call for a total Settlement freeze in the Palestinian territories and instead complimenting a partial and temporary halt that the Israeli government has agreed to. The misstep is fueling anger and disappointment in the Arab Street, that unless Washington shows seriousness about achieving a total freeze and readiness to layout policy implications of the violations, it might be risking losing its credibility in mediating the conflict.

The US House of Representatives has condemned the UN Goldstone report, which accused Israel of committing war crimes in its 22-day war against the Palestinians in Gaza. By a vote of 344 to 36, the members of the lower house of Congress approved a non-binding resolution that calls the report “irredeemably biased and unworthy of further consideration or legitimacy.” The harshly worded resolution calls on President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton "to oppose unequivocally any endorsement or further consideration" of the critical report. South African judge Richard Goldstone recently challenged the United States to justify its objections over his report about the December 27-January 18 Israeli war on the Gaza Strip that killed over 1,400 Palestinians, with many of the victims women and children. Goldstone recommended that the conclusions of the report be forwarded to the Hague-based International Criminal Court if the sides involved in the Gaza war failed to conduct credible investigations within six months.