Stephen Lendman

Each year, PCHR publishes its annual report on Occupied Palestine, this year's a detailed 250 page review of the past year, including the first days of Israel's war on Gaza, Operation Cast Lead, "the major issue in the record of human rights and international humanitarian law violations in the Occupied Palestinian Terrority (OPT) in 2009," the bloodiest since the 1948 Nakba that stole a nation from its people.

Today, 1.5 million Gazans struggle to rebuild their lives, "in spite of sustaining permanent disabilities, losing loved ones or becoming homeless" after war under siege - collective punishment in violation of international law, and fundamental human rights, including free movement of persons and goods, proper shelter, adequate health care and education, and the right to rebuild homes and other structures destroyed by the war's onslaught.

Israel's settlement expansion, Separation Wall, and control matrix exacerbates West Bank conditions, "turning Palestinian communities into (isolated) Bantustans." In addition, efforts continue to consolidate and illegally annex East Jerusalem by dispossessing its residents, en route to making the entire city exclusively Jewish, unheard of in the modern era, especially by a so-called civilized state, in fact, barbarian and brutish while touting its democratic credentials and victimhood, more evidence of a scoundrel caught red-handed.

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Charles Glass

When you’re losing bad on Afghanistan’s plains
And the critics dare to question your gains
Just roll to your geology and use your brains
And go to your gold like I told yer
~ With apologies to Rudyard Kipling

Now that the Pentagon and the US Geological Survey have uncovered $1 trillion worth of stones in Afghanistan, the big question is: why didn’t the Afghan geologists burn the old Soviet maps the US used to go prospecting? If they had, Afghanistan could stay as it was. Now, it stands to be Afghanistan with Saudi Arabia thrown in. A gruesome thought. There is always the hope that the Pentagon’s experts are exaggerating. It wouldn’t be the first time the military (encouraged by eager politicians) played loose with facts to rekindle love in a war that the public no longer wanted to pay for.

Blame the Afghan geologists, who found mineral survey maps the Soviets left behind in 1989. (The Russians took the tanks, the missiles, the vodka and the troops. Why didn’t they take the maps?) Instead of destroying the diabolic documents, the geologists hid them from the warlords and Taliban throughout the 1990s. When the US invaded in 2001, they handed them over to the Americans. The rest, as they say, is mystery.

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Jonathan Cook

Jonathan Cook explains why Israel’s recent “easing” of the siege of Gaza – hailed by Israeli agent of influence and former British Prime Minister Anthony Blair as a sensible path to peace – is a ruse that will change virtually nothing for the ordinary people of Gaza.

As Israel this week declared the “easing” of the four-year blockade of Gaza, an official explained the new guiding principle: “Civilian goods for civilian people.” The severe and apparently arbitrary restrictions on foodstuffs entering the enclave – coriander bad, cinnamon good – will finally end, we are told. Gaza’s 1.5 million inhabitants will have all the coriander they want.

This “adjustment”, as the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, termed it, is aimed solely at damage limitation. With Israel responsible for killing nine civilians aboard a Gaza-bound aid flotilla three weeks ago, the world has finally begun to wonder what purpose the siege serves. Did those nine really need to die to stop coriander, chocolate and children’s toys from reaching Gaza? And, as Israel awaits other flotillas, will more need to be executed to enforce the policy?

Faced with this unwelcome scrutiny, Israel – as well as the United States and the European states that have been complicit in the siege – desperately wants to deflect attention away from demands for the blockade to be lifted entirely. Instead it prefers to argue that the more liberal blockade for Gaza will distinguish effectively between a necessary “security” measures and an unfair “civilian” blockade. Israel has cast itself as the surgeon who, faced with Siamese twins, is mastering the miraculous operation needed to decouple them.

The result, Mr Netanyahu told his cabinet, would be a “tightening of the security blockade because we have taken away Hamas’s ability to blame Israel for harming the civilian population”. Listen to Israeli officials and it sounds as if thousands of “civilian” items are ready to pour into Gaza. No Qassam rockets for Hamas but soon, if we are to believe them, Gaza’s shops will be as well-stocked as your average Wal-Mart. -Be sure, it won’t happen.

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