By Randall Kuhn

As Israel's air force began bombing Gaza in late December, its defense minister asked us to "think about what would happen if for seven years rockets had been fired at San Diego, California from Tijuana, Mexico."

Within hours, scores of American pundits and politicians had mimicked Ehud Barak's comparisons almost verbatim.

On 9 January, US House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and House Minority Whip Eric Cantor ended an opinion piece by saying, "America would never sit still if terrorists were lobbing missiles across our border into Texas or Montana."

But let's see if our political and pundit class can parrot this analogy:

Think about what would happen if San Diego expelled most of its Hispanic, African-American, Asian-American and Native-American population, about 48 percent of the total, and forcibly relocated them to Tijuana?

Not just immigrants, but even those who had lived in the United States for many generations. Not just the unemployed or the criminals or the America haters, but the school teachers, the small business owners, the soldiers--even the baseball players.

What if we established government and faith-based agencies to help move white people into their former homes? And what if we razed hundreds of their houses in rural areas and, with the aid of charitable donations from people in the United States and abroad, planted forests on their former towns, creating nature preserves for whites to enjoy?

Sounds pretty awful, huh? I'm sure I'll be called anti-Semitic for saying this. However, I'm Jewish and the scenario above is what prominent Israeli scholars say happened when Israel expelled Palestinians from southern Israel and forced them into Gaza. But this analogy is just getting started.

What if the United Nations kept San Diego's discarded minorities in crowded, festering camps in Tijuana for 19 years? Then, the United States invaded Mexico, occupied it for 40 more years and began to build large housing developments in Tijuana, where only whites could live.

And what if the United States built a network of highways, connecting American citizens who voluntarily (and illegally) moved to Tijuana, to the United States?

And checkpoints, not just between Mexico and the United States, but also around every neighborhood inside Tijuana? What if we required every Tijuana resident, refugee or native, to show an ID card to the US military on demand?

What if thousands of Tijuana residents lost their homes, their jobs, their businesses, their children, their sense of self worth to this hypothetical occupation? Would we be surprised to hear of a protest movement in Tijuana that sometimes became violent and hateful?

After all that think about what would happen if, after expelling all of the minorities from San Diego to Tijuana and subjecting them to 40 years of brutal military occupation, we just left Tijuana, removing all the white settlers and the soldiers.

Only instead of giving them their freedom, we built a 20-foot tall electrified wall around Tijuana. Not just on the sides bordering San Diego, but on all the Mexico crossings as well.

And say we set up 50-foot high watchtowers, with machine gun batteries, and told them that if they stood within 100 yards of this wall we would shoot them dead on sight.

And if four out of every five days we kept every single one of those border crossings closed, not even allowing food, clothing, or medicine to enter.

And what if we patrolled their air space with our state-of-the-art fighter jets but didn't allow them so much as a crop duster. And we patrolled their waters with destroyers and submarines, but didn't even allow them to fish.

Would we be at all surprised to hear that these resistance groups in Tijuana, even after having been "freed" from their occupation but starved half to death, kept on firing rockets at the United States? Probably not.

What might actually surprise us would be if the majority of people in Tijuana never picked up a rocket or a gun or a weapon of any kind. If the majority, instead, supported against all hope negotiations toward a peaceful solution that would provide security, freedom and equal rights to both people in two independent states living side by side as neighbors.

This is the sound analogy to Israel's military onslaught in the Gaza Strip.

Maybe someday soon, common sense will prevail and no corpus of misleading analogies abut Tijuana or the crazy guy across the hall who wants to murder your daughter will be able to obscure the truth.

Zaiton and Northern Rimal

Israel's compassion in Haiti can't hide our ugly face in Gaza

Israel's compassion in Haiti can't hide our ugly face in Gaza

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Who said we are shut up inside our Tel Aviv bubble? How many small nations surrounded by enemies set up field hospitals on the other side of the world? Give us an earthquake in Haiti, a tsunami in Thailand or a terror attack in Kenya, and the IDF Spokesman's Office will triumph. A cargo plane can always be found to fly in military journalists to report on our fine young men from the Home Front Command.

Everyone is truly doing a wonderful job: the rescuers, searching for survivors; the physicians, saving lives; and the reporters, too, who are rightfully patting them all on the back. After Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon became the face we show the world, the entire international community can now see Israel's good side.

But the remarkable identification with the victims of the terrible tragedy in distant Haiti only underscores the indifference to the ongoing suffering of the people of Gaza. Only a little more than an hour's drive from the offices of Israel's major newspapers, 1.5 million people have been besieged on a desert island for two and a half years. Who cares that 80 percent of the men, women and children living in such proximity to us have fallen under the poverty line? How many Israelis know that half of all Gazans are dependent on charity, that Operation Cast Lead created hundreds of amputees, that raw sewage flows from the streets into the sea?

The Israeli newspaper reader knows about the baby pulled from the wreckage in Port-au-Prince. Few have heard about the infants who sleep in the ruins of their families' homes in Gaza. The Israel Defense Forces prohibition of reporters entering the Gaza Strip is an excellent excuse for burying our heads in the sand of Tel Aviv's beaches; on a good day, the sobering reports compiled by human rights organizations such as B'Tselem, Gisha - Legal Center for Freedom of Movement, and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel on the situation in Gaza are pushed to the newspapers' back pages. To get an idea of what life is like in the world's largest prison, one must forgo "Big Brother" and switch to one of the foreign networks.

The disaster in Haiti is a natural one; the one in Gaza is the unproud handiwork of man. Our handiwork. The IDF does not send cargo planes stuffed with medicines and medical equipment to Gaza. The missiles that Israel Air Force combat aircraft fired there a year ago hit nearly 60,000 homes and factories, turning 3,500 of them into rubble. Since then, 10,000 people have been living without running water, 40,000 without electricity. Ninety-seven percent of Gaza's factories are idle due to Israeli government restrictions on the import of raw materials for industry. Soon it will be one year since the international community pledged, at the emergency conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, to donate $4.5 billion for Gaza's reconstruction. Israel's ban on bringing in building materials is causing that money to lose its value.

A few days before Israeli physicians rushed to save the lives of injured Haitians, the authorities at the Erez checkpoint prevented 17 people from passing through in order to get to a Ramallah hospital for urgent corneal transplant surgery. Perhaps they voted for Hamas. At the same time that Israeli psychologists are treating Haiti's orphans with devotion, Israeli inspectors are making sure no one is attempting to plant a doll, a notebook or a bar of chocolate in a container bringing essential goods into Gaza. So what if the Goldstone Commission demanded that Israel lift the blockade on the Strip and end the collective punishment of its inhabitants? Only those who hate Israel could use frontier justice against the first country to set up a field hospital in Haiti.

True, Haiti's militias are not firing rockets at Israel. But the siege on Gaza has not stopped the Qassams from coming. The prohibition of cilantro, vinegar and ginger being brought into the Strip since June 2007 was intended to expedite the release of Gilad Shalit and facilitate the fall of the Hamas regime. As everyone knows, even though neither mission has been particularly successful, and despite international criticism, Israel continues to keep the gates of Gaza locked. Even the images of our excellent doctors in Haiti cannot blur our ugly face in the Strip.

written by Akiva Eldar from Israel

Free Gaza ships are sailing again

'We're Sailing Again – Join Us!'

This spring, the Free Gaza Movement is sending at least six boats to Gaza to break Israel’s illegal blockade on 1.5 million Palestinians. This blockade constitutes an act of collective punishment, a crime prohibited under international humanitarian law. Gaza's man-made and internationally perpetuated crisis is set to deepen as Egypt builds an Iron wall 30 meters deep and 20 meters high on the southern Rafah border, closing off the final route for Palestinians to get basic supplies.

The urgency of breaking the blockade grows by the day, as Palestinians living in this prison are denied their most basic rights.

Our mission will include two boats committed by a Turkish NGO plus a cargo ship purchased with donations from the Malaysian people. This ship will be loaded with cement, water filtration systems and paper - all essential reconstruction materials denied entry to Gaza by Israel.

Free Gaza's missions were the first to challenge Israel’s hermetic closing of Gaza when we sailed two small boats into Gaza in August 2008. We did not ask permission of Israel or Egypt to travel to Gaza and sailed directly from international waters into the waters of Gaza. Since then, we have been the catalyst for a growing international movement of civilian advocates, including the Gaza Freedom March and Viva Palestina.

Of course we will face Israel’s illegal naval blockade. But we have broken through it before and we will do it again. We are writing to ask you to make sure the mission is funded and publicized.

We sailed four more successful missions to Gaza since August 2008, and we intend to come back this year with a small flotilla, so you still have time to get boats and come with us. We are calling on all NGOs, human rights organizations and communities around the world to join us. If you already have funding for boats, we can provide the logistical and technical advice on how get them ready to join the flotilla. If you want to help in other ways, we have listed five below.

1. Fundraise for this trip. Consider organizing a big or small fundraiser in your community. We already have people available to speak at your events. http://www.freegaza.org/en/join-in/speaker-bureau. Friends returning from the Gaza Freedom March, or the Viva Palestina convoy can be especially helpful by turning report backs into fundraisers.
2. Get your community involved and turn this flotilla into a global effort. Our boats will carry building supplies and school supplies, both banned by Israeli authorities. Contribute by donating paper, ink or books for our Right to Read campaign: http://www.freegaza.org/right-to-read. If you can donate reconstruction supplies, please contact us. Get your children and their schools involved by having them write letters to children in Gaza that we will carry on our boats and deliver.
3. Publicize the trip. Once we have announced the date, help us get the message out to the media and to your elected officials to assure the passengers and boats will sail safely.
4. Ask your Member of Parliament/Congress to come with us. We already have MPs from South America, South Africa, Malaysia, Turkey and Europe who are going. If you have contacts with other high profile people, please let us know.
5. Volunteer as land crew, media or support crew in your countries.

To help, organize a fundraiser, suggest passengers and offer support, please email us at friends@freegaza.org,and we will follow up immediately. We have only two to three months to finish organizing, raise the additional funds, and to set sail.

Join us as we sail together to Gaza this spring!

Amnesty says Israel curbing water to Palestinians | World | Reuters

Amnesty says Israel curbing water to Palestinians | World | Reuters

JERUSALEM (Reuters) - Human rights group Amnesty International said in a report on Tuesday that Israeli restrictions prevented Palestinians from receiving enough water in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip.

The report said Israel's daily water consumption per capita was four times higher than that in the Palestinian territories.

"Water is a basic need and a right, but for many Palestinians obtaining even poor-quality, subsistence-level quantities of water has become a luxury that they can barely afford," said Amnesty's Donatella Rovera.

A spokesman for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu dismissed Amnesty's statement that Israel was depriving the Palestinians of water as "preposterous."

Israel says it has met its obligations under the 1993 Oslo agreement while Palestinians have failed to meet their own requirements to recycle water and were not distributing water efficiently.

"Israel supplied Palestinians 20.8 million cubic litres above and beyond what it is obliged to do under the water agreement," said Netanyahu's spokesman Mark Regev.

Israel, itself facing unprecedented water shortages and rising tariffs, controls much of the West Bank's supplies, pumping from an aquifer that bridges Israel and the territory.

Israel sells some water back to the Palestinians under quotas agreed in the Oslo accords that rights groups say have not been increased in line with population growth.

The report said Gaza's coastal aquifer, its sole fresh water resource, had been polluted by infiltration of seawater and raw sewage and degraded by over-extraction. Continued...