Jane Adas
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs

[Trash, that is, seen from below. On a street near the Abraham Mosque, occupation apartheid takes on unusually sharp visual clarity in the form of Israeli settlements comprising the the upper echelon of houses and Palestinian shops, the lower. This means the settlers can, and do, throw their trash out their windows onto the Palestinians. The torn chain-link fence halving the street manages to keep out the somewhat solid trash like bottles and bags, but not urine, dishwater, and other ugly precipitations such as egg yolks…(Work Abroad)]

Separation ("apartheid" in Afrikaans; "us here, them there," according to the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin) is almost complete in the southern West Bank city of Hebron. The Hebron Protocol of 1997 divided the city into two parts: 80 percent of the city, designated H1, is theoretically under the administration of the Palestinian Authority; H2, which includes the Old City and the Tomb of the Patriarchs, is under Israeli military control. Life for Palestinians in H1, except for occasional Israeli incursions and the fact that every plane heard overhead is military, is almost normal. Israeli settlers stay clear of the area and the uniformed men in the streets are Palestinian security forces.

H2, the eastern fifth of the city, is a different matter. A few hundred Israeli settlers and yeshiva students, guarded by more than a thousand Israeli soldiers, live here in four scattered colonies. For their security and convenience, roads that connect the colonies to each other and to the larger illegal settlements of Kiryat Arba and Givat Harsina east of the city are off-limits to Palestinians, whether by car or on foot. This includes Shuhada Street, the main road running through the center of Hebron, rebuilt in 1997 as a USAID project ostensibly to benefit both communities. The Israeli military has welded shut the doors of Palestinian homes and shops along the street, meaning that the only way residents, including schoolchildren, can leave and return to their homes is out a back door, then over rooftops and up and down ladders. - For Palestinians living there, the Old City itself is a ghetto.

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Rick Rozoff
Stop NATO

A year after assuming the post of president of the French Republic in 2007, and while his nation held the rotating European Union presidency, Nicolas Sarkozy invited the heads of state of the EU’s 27 members and those of 17 non-EU Mediterranean countries to attend a conference in Paris to launch a Mediterranean Union.

In the words of Britain’s Daily Telegraph regarding the subsequent summit held for the purpose on July 13, 2008, “Sarkozy’s big idea is to use imperial Rome’s centre of the world as a unifying factor linking 44 countries that are home to 800 million people.”

Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, however, announced that his nation would boycott the gathering, denouncing the initiative as one aimed at dividing both Africa and the Arab world, and stating:

“We shall have another Roman empire and imperialist design. There are imperialist maps and designs that we have already rolled up. We should not have them again.” [1]

The unprecedented summit was held with the intention of “shift[ing] Europe’s strategic focus towards the Middle East, North Africa and the Balkans.” [2]

The Mediterranean Union was renamed the less controversial Union for the Mediterranean and its members include all 44 nations originally invited to join except for Libya.

Less than three years later Sarkozy’s Mirage and Rafale warplanes were bombing Libyan government targets, initiating an ongoing war being waged by France, the United States, Britain and what the world news media refer to as an international coalition – 12 members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and the emirate of Qatar – to overthrow the Gaddafi government and implant a more pliant replacement.

The Mediterranean Sea is the main battle front in the world currently, superseding the Afghanistan-Pakistan war theater, and the empire of the new third millennium – that of the U.S., the world’s sole military superpower in the words of President Barack Obama in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, and its NATO partners – is completing the transformation of the Mediterranean into its mare nostrum.

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Nahida Izzat
Exiled Palestinian

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Patrick Martin
WSWS

It has been six days since Khalifa Hifter was appointed the top military commander for the Libyan rebel forces fighting the regime of Muammar Gaddafi. His appointment was noted by reporter Nancy Youssef of McClatchy Newspapers, a US regional chain that includes the Sacramento Bee and the Kansas City Star.

Two days later, another McClatchy journalist, Chris Adams, wrote a brief biographical sketch of Hifter that left the implication, without saying so explicitly, that he was a longtime CIA asset. It headlined the fact that after defecting from a top position in Gaddafi’s army, Hifter had lived in northern Virginia for some 20 years, as well as noting that Hifter had no obvious means of financial support.

The World Socialist Web Site published a perspective March 28 taking note of both the McClatchy articles and earlier reports providing more details of Hifter’s connections to the CIA. These included a 1996 article in the Washington Post and a book published by the French weekly Le Monde diplomatique. (See "A CIA commander for the Libyan rebels”)

Both the McClatchy sketch of Hifter’s background and the WSWS perspective have been widely circulated on the Internet. The WSWS perspective has been linked to by a myriad of left-liberal and antiwar web sites, although, significantly, there has been no mention of Hifter in the press of the International Socialist Organization and other pseudo-socialist groups that adapt themselves politically to the pro-Obama liberal milieu.

Hifter has been interviewed and his appointment reported by the European press, including the Independent of Britain, the German weekly Stern, and newspapers in Spain, France, Italy and Turkey (with variant spellings, including Heftar and Haftar). But not in America.

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