Remember Palestinian women & children

The world is abuzz with the accusations made by senior Fatah member Farouk Kaddoumi (Abu Al Lutf), against Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and former security minister Mohammad Dahlan for having allegedly conspired with former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon to get rid of Yasser Arafat in 2004.

Speaking to an Arabic satellite channel from Jordan, Kaddoumi revealed the contents of a secret document - apparently shown to him personally by Arafat - regarding a meeting between Sharon, Abbas, Dahlan, U.S. undersecretary of state William Burns and a number of CIA officials.

The meeting was aimed at eliminating Arafat and Hamas leaders Abdul Aziz Rantisi (assassinated by Israel in April 2004), Esmail Haniya and Mahmoud Zahar.

Kaddoumi said he advised Arafat to flee Ramallah, seeing that the death threat was serious, but the ageing Arafat, who had been confined to his office in Ramallah since 2001, curtly refused. Kaddoumi accused Abbas of "deserting Fatah" and "collaborating and conniving with Israel".

Responding to the accusations, which spread like forest fire throughout the Palestinian areas, Abbas said, "Kaddoumi claims to be in possession of five-year-old documents that prove [his allegations], so why did he not reveal them immediately?"

Abbas, who shared a close relationship with both Kaddoumi and Arafat since the 1960s, claimed that the accusations were "lies" intended to show him in poor light at the upcoming sixth Fatah General Congress, scheduled for August 4, 2009.

Gaza disowned

• “Gaza is not on the Pope’s itinerary, nor will it be. There will be no change in these plans. But I’ll say it very clearly, the Pope is absolutely not going to Gaza.”

Such were the astounding comments made by the Pope’s spokesman in Israel, Wadie Abunasser, prior to Pope Benedict XVI visiting Palestine and Israel.

As if there was no massacre in Gaza, no families entirely slaughtered, no human rights violated to match the record of the most grisly of crimes in modern history. As if Gaza were a mere irritant in the annals of human suffering. More, as if there were no Catholic flock in Gaza. To clarify, there are actually nearly 2,000 Catholics in Gaza, apparently not important enough for the ‘cut’.

Now, there are a lot of important religious sites to see around the Holy Land, lots of old churches, stones, ruins and the like…sites of much more significance, such as the Western Wall, the Holy Sepulcher and so on… far more important than visiting the site of a fresh massacre, where the stench of rotting bodies - laid to rest beneath a tomb consisting of the rubble of their own homes - has just faded. Such sites are apparently of little import to the Holy See. Rather, there are memorials to victims of greater standing, in shrines of superior grandeur, such as Yad Vashem…now, that’s something to see.

Normally a city opens up to other cities, infinite in itself because infinitely open to the world; one moves with a certain freedom through space and imagination. What is it like instead to live and write from inside a ghetto, or an open air prison, or a city closed to other cities, one in which nearly every act of resistance is taken as a pretext by the warders to tighten that very straightjacket? A famous example of such writing comes to us from the great German-Jewish litterateur Walter Benjamin, in his essays written after Hitler’s rise to power. Fleeing the Nazis Benjamin committed suicide near the closed Spanish border, rather than risk being sent to a camp the next day. It was in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, however, that Benjamin wrote of “The Angel of History”. The figure of “The Angel of History” has been much discussed ever since.

A Palestinian family has filed a lawsuit against officials responsible for the three-week Israeli war on the population of the Gaza Strip. The Samouni family of the southern Gazan suburb of Zeitoun has filed a suit against Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Defense Minister Ehud Barak and Army Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi, Ha'aretz reported on Wednesday. The Samounis are demanding some 200 million dollars in compensation for the loss of 29 family members during Israel's December onslaught, which killed nearly 1,350 Palestinians and injured 5,450 others. Some forty five members of the family have also been injured in the attacks, the report adds. The suit filed at a court in the northern Arab-Israeli town of Nazareth, accuses the Israeli military of "criminal negligence" by killing innocent civilians who were seeking refuge in their home and a shelter. In the early hours of January 4, the family's three-story building was targeted by an Israeli tank shell, instantly killing seven civilians. Their apartment was burnt down completely, forcing the remaining survivors to take refuge at a nearby shelter, only to be targeted for a second time resulting in the death of 22 more civilians. Investigations have revealed that Israel committed various war crimes in Gaza, including the use of deadly white phosphorus shells in densely populated civilian areas. The International Criminal Police Organization (ICPO or Interpol) on Tuesday said that it is reviewing a request to issue international Red Notices for 25 Israelis suspected of committing war crimes during Tel Aviv's Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip. "We were reviewing a request to make sure it did not breach rules that prevent the body from making any intervention or activities of a political, military, religious or racial character," Interpol said in a statement. A Red Notice is not an international arrest warrant but a request to national police forces to identify or locate suspects with a view to arrest and extradite criminals.

The Gaza ghetto

The report on life in Gaza just issued by the International Committee of the Red Cross six months after the brutal Israeli attacks which killed between 1,100 and 1,400 people makes bitter reading.

According to the ICRC, there has been almost no improvement since the Israelis stopped their brutal onslaught. The daily round of killing may have stopped but Gazans are still condemned to living in a war zone. It remains a bombsite. Even if they had the money to rebuild their shattered homes and lives, they cannot get hold of the equipment.

The reopening of the Rafah checkpoint on the border with Egypt has slightly improved matters — some trucks with medical aid have got through but it is a tiny fraction of what is needed. Israel’s blockade of the strip remains devastatingly effective. Gaza is, as the ICRC report so horrifyingly points out, a state of despair. Imprisoned by the Israelis, still mourning the deaths of family and friends (there is hardly a family that did not lose someone), with woefully insufficient medical care, a destroyed economy, no hope of a job and living in what looks like an earthquake zone (the reports’ own words), there is a hopelessness that shocks.

A state of despair... facing, on the other side of the prison wires, a state of arrogance. For over 60 years now, the Israelis have treated the Palestinians with contempt and hatred. Time after time, the latter’s human rights are trampled over, their political aspirations crushed, UN resolutions ignored, international outrage scorned and efforts to mediate peace spurned.

It is not merely a state of arrogance, it is a state of insanity. The despair sown by the Israelis in Gaza breeds militancy and hatred. It breeds, too, a counter arrogance which displays itself in a refusal to countenance Palestinian-Israeli cohabitation, indeed to countenance anything other than Israel’s complete destruction.