Stephen Lendman

With peace talks underway in Washington; Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt; Jerusalem; then New York, Israel, almost daily, commits crimes of war and against humanity. Some of the latest include:

● air strikes against Gaza, killing two Palestinian civilians in another one;
● peaceful protesters attacked in Gaza and the West Bank;
● live rounds and shells fired against farmers and workers in the Strip's border areas, killing an old man, his grandchild, another boy, and 30 sheep;
● over 100 live rounds fired at an Erez Crossing peaceful demonstration near Beit Hanoun;
● its medieval siege maintained, suffocating 1.5 million people and preventing 40,000 students from attending UN schools;
● violations against Palestinian prisoners and detainees in Israeli prisons escalated; most are political prisoners;
● 16 new Jordan Valley demolition orders for Palestinian barns and greenhouses issued plus others to bulldoze their homes;
● 87 incursions into West Bank communities and three in Gaza in the first half of September, arresting 43 civilians, including nine children; and
● unabated illegal settlement construction.

Israeli does what it pleases, defiling the rule of law, including letting its security forces kill with impunity, a new B'Tselem report confirming it. Titled "Void of Responsibility: Israeli Military Policy not to investigate Killings of Palestinians by Soldiers," it provides plenty of evidence.

Protests throughout the Territories occur regularly, in Bil'in village every Friday against the Separation Wall. April 17 was typical. Soldiers attacked demonstrators with tear gas, rubber bullets, at times live fire, and extended-range gas canisters. Used against Bassem Abu Rahmeh, it killed him from massive internal injuries, a case of cold-blooded murder.

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Gilad Atzmon
Gilad Atzmon's Blog

A meeting between Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad and Israeli deputy foreign minister Danny Ayalon ended abruptly yesterday. The dispute followed the Israeli deputy foreign minister’s demand that the meeting’s summary should refer to the notion of ‘two states for two peoples,’ rather than just ‘two states.’

"I wanted that at the very least it will note two states for two peoples. I demanded to know what they meant. One Palestinian state and one bi-national state, or another Palestinian state?" the deputy minister told Ynet. "I made it clear that we were out of the picture if the summary didn’t say two states for two peoples."

The Palestinian PM could not accept such a demand for very many reasons: Israel is located on historic Palestine. It came to life through robbery and ethnic cleansing. It is maintained by theft. At least a fifth of Israel’s population are Palestinians. And if this is not enough, not a single living Palestinian negotiator is ever going to let the refugee issue go, and for a good reason. The right of return is still the crux of the Palestinian cause.

Interestingly enough, within the context of the two states solution, a Palestinian state would be geographically defined: it would be a state of its citizens, and it would also be a civilised amalgam of different ethnicities and religions. Israel, on the other hand, would be a racially orientated setting: it would be the Jewish State, where Jews come first. I wonder why anyone in the international community would support such a solution or such a state. However, I wasn’t surprised to read in Ynet that Tony Blair, who participated in the earlier part of the meeting yesterday, “supported the Israeli stance”. I guess that after dragging us all into a religious war with no end, Blair has developed an affinity with Judeo-centric arguments and the Zionist way of thinking. After all, let’s not forget, it was Zionist Lord Levy and the Labour Friends of Israel who funded his party at the time it launched the war in Iraq.

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Vladimir Volkov & Andrea Peters
WSWS

Dmitry Medvedev & Vladimir Putin

At the World Political Forum in Iaroslavl, Russia on September 10, Russian President Dmitri Medvedev outlined his views on the meaning of democracy. When taken together with his other declarations about “modernizing” the country, his latest statement underscores the right-wing and anti-democratic character of his policies, which are profoundly hostile to the working class. Medvedev’s definition of democracy is entirely in keeping with the overall rightward shift in official European politics.

Insisting that that the political system that presently exists in Russia is democratic and well suited to the country, and that nothing “needs to be radically changed,” the Russian president outlined “five signs of democracy.”

These included “the legal incarnation of humanistic values and ideals,” “the ability of the state to guarantee and support a high rate of technological development, which secures a worthy standard of living for its citizens,” “the ability of the state to defend its citizens from the dangers of criminal associations,” “a high level of culture, education, means of communication and exchange of information,” and, finally, the conviction on the part of citizens “that they are living in a democratic state.”

Declaring “representative democracy” to be unacceptable for Russia, Medvedev excluded freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, the right to vote, freedom of the press, the separation of church and state and the other rights associated with bourgeois democracy from his five principles.

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Bill Van Auken
WSWS

The “poverty summit” that concluded at the United Nations Wednesday served to expose capitalism’s responsibility for the poverty and hunger confronting billions of people across the planet. Despite vows by the UN and the major powers over the past decade to ameliorate these conditions, the desperation and misery of the world’s most oppressed layers have only deepened as a result of imperialist predations and the shocks arising from the global financial crisis.

The meeting saw numerous heads of state parade before the UN General Assembly in New York City to platonically proclaim their commitment to the so-called Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) that were adopted by a similar summit exactly ten years ago.

In the more frank statements. there were admissions that ten years into the supposed pursuit of these goals, the achievement of proposed benchmarks in relation to extreme poverty, hunger, child and maternal health and other areas by the 2015 deadline is already out of the question.

The goals represented a commitment to eradicate what amounted to the worst symptoms of the poverty and oppression to which the profit system has relegated much of the world’s population. Even if they had been achieved, billions of people would still be left in hunger and misery.

In adopting the MDGs, the UN approved a “Millennium Declaration” which proclaimed that “the central challenge we face today is to ensure that globalization becomes a positive force for all the world’s people.”

The intervening decade has made a mockery of this statement, which from the start was aimed at providing window-dressing for world finance capital’s exploitation of the most oppressed countries.

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PeoplesGeography
The People's Voice

Cited in a recent Ha’aretz piece about the decline of the israeli left, the late academic Yeshayahu Leibowitz is described as remarking that he is not sure whether Israel’s policies since 1967 are evil stupidity or stupidly evil. In another, verbatim citation, Leibowitz is quoted as having said, more resolutely, in 1990: “Everything Israel has done, and I emphasize everything, in the past 23 years is either evil stupidity or stupidly evil.“

Along with a number of other academics such as Ilan Pappe and Neve Gordon, journalists such as Amira Hass and Gideon Levy, and other critics of conscience such as David Grossman, it is good to see instances of intellectuals fulfilling their proper role of speaking up. In Liebowitz’s case, he is not as well known outside Israel. In 1969 he reportedly began describing the “inevitable Nazification” of Israeli society. Further, by the time of the (first major, 1982) Lebanon War, he became known for using the term Judeo-Nazi to describe the Israeli army. He also called for soldiers to refuse to serve in the IOF.

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