concert this Saturday evening. It's at Boulevard Music, 4316 Sepulveda
Blvd., just So. of Culver Blvd. Culver City, CA 90230
(310) 398-2583, http://www.boulevardmusic.com for into & reservations
***
From: Marcy Winograd
What's Next for Israel-Palestine: War, Peace or More Occupation?"
A Public Forum with
Jeff Halper & Richard Falk
Saturday, February 5th - 3:00 to 6:00 PM
Iman Cultural Center, 3376 Motor Avenue, Los Angeles
$10 Donation at Door
RSVP to: 310-657-5511
What's next in the stalled quest for peace between Palestinians and
Israelis? Will it be war? A negotiated peace? Continued occupation? What's
changed in the two years since the war on Gaza and nine months since the
Gaza Freedom Flotilla fiasco? What can we expect and what actions can we
take? What is the state of relations between Turkey and Israel today? What
can progressives do to support better relations between Israelis/Jews and
Palestinians/Arabs who seek a shared future? What does U.S. foreign policy
hold for the near future in the region?
A $100/Plate Donor Dinner with Richard Falk & Jeff Halper at the Iman Center
will Follow the Forum.
Get details at: http://www.lajewsforpeace.org/talks/ImanCenterDinner.pdf
Dinner generously donated by Carnival Restaurant, Sherman Oaks, California
This event is presented within Progressive Conversations on Israel,
Palestine and U.S. Foreign Policy in the Middle East, the new monthly
lecture series, organized by LA Jews for Peace and the Levantine Cultural
Center. It is also cosponsored by Jewish Voice for Peace, Friends of Sabeel
LA & OC, Middle East Fellowship of SCAL, Shura Council of Southern
California, Muslims for progressive Values, and Progressive Democrats of
America - LA. KFPK 90.7 FM is the official media sponsor
Organized by LA Jews for Peace -www.lajewsforpeace.org & The Levantine
Cultural Center - www.levantinecenter.org
Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions: www.icahd.org
Jeff Halper: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Halper
Jeff Halper is Director of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions
(ICAHD), an Israeli-Palestinian NGO that works on the ground to resist the
Israeli occupation of the West Bank including East Jerusalem. ICAHD rebuilds
some of the 24,000 Palestinian homes that have been destroyed by the Israeli
occupation authorities. The American Friends Service Committee nominated
Halper, along with Palestinian activist Ghassan Andoni, for the Nobel Peace
Prize in 2006. Halper is an American anthropologist who immigrated to Israel
in 1973. For a more complete Jeff Halper biography, Click here.
Link to all Jeff Halper's Presentations in Los Angeles and Orange Counties.
Click here.
Richard Falk: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_A._Falk
Dr. Richard A. Falk is Princeton professor of international law emeritus. He
has been the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in the
Palestinian Territories.
PDLA@svpal.org
http://mailman.svpal.org/mailman/listinfo/pdla
***
From: "Macdonald Stainsby" <mstainsby@resist.ca>
Egypt's Uprising And Its Implications For Palestine
By Ali Abunimah
The Electronic Intifada: 30 January, 2011
We are in the middle of a political earthquake in the Arab world and the
ground has still not stopped shaking. To make predictions when events are
so fluid is risky, but there is no doubt that the uprising in Egypt --
however it ends -- will have a dramatic impact across the region and
within Palestine.
If the Mubarak regime falls, and is replaced by one less tied to Israel
and the United States, Israel will be a big loser. As Aluf Benn commented
in the Israeli daily Haaretz, "The fading power of Egyptian President
Hosni Mubarak's government leaves Israel in a state of strategic distress.
Without Mubarak, Israel is left with almost no friends in the Middle East;
last year, Israel saw its alliance with Turkey collapse" ("Without Egypt,
Israel will be left with no friends in Mideast," 29 January 2011).
Indeed, Benn observes, "Israel is left with two strategic allies in the
region: Jordan and the Palestinian Authority." But what Benn does not say
is that these two "allies" will not be immune either.
Over the past few weeks I was in Doha examining the Palestine Papers
leaked to Al Jazeera. These documents underscore the extent to which the
split between the US-backed Palestinian Authority in Ramallah headed by
Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah faction, on the one hand, and Hamas in the
Gaza Strip, on the other -- was a policy decision of regional powers: the
United States, Egypt and Israel. This policy included Egypt's strict
enforcement of the siege of Gaza.
If the Mubarak regime goes, the United States will lose enormous leverage
over the situation in Palestine, and Abbas' PA will lose one of its main
allies against Hamas.
Already discredited by the extent of its collaboration and capitulation
exposed in the Palestine Papers, the PA will be weakened even further.
With no credible "peace process" to justify its continued "security
coordination" with Israel, or even its very existence, the countdown may
well begin for the PA's implosion. Even the US and EU support for the
repressive PA police-state-in-the-making may no longer be politically
tenable. Hamas may be the immediate beneficiary, but not necessarily in
the long term. For the first time in years we are seeing broad mass
movements that, while they include Islamists, are not necessarily
dominated or controlled by them.
There is also a demonstration effect for Palestinians: the endurance of
the Tunisian and Egyptian regimes has been based on the perception that
they were strong, as well as their ability to terrorize parts of their
populations and co-opt others. The relative ease with which Tunisians
threw off their dictator, and the speed with which Egypt, and perhaps
Yemen, seem to be going down the same road, may well send a message to
Palestinians that neither Israel's nor the PA's security forces are as
indomitable as they appear. Indeed, Israel's "deterrence" already took a
huge blow from its failure to defeat Hizballah in Lebanon in 2006, and
Hamas in Gaza during the winter 2008-09 attacks.
As for Abbas's PA, never has so much international donor money been spent
on a security force with such poor results. The open secret is that
without the Israeli military occupying the West Bank and besieging Gaza
(with the Mubarak regime's help), Abbas and his praetorian guard would
have fallen long ago. Built on the foundations of a fraudulent peace
process, the US, EU and Israel with the support of the decrepit Arab
regimes now under threat by their own people, have constructed a
Palestinian house of cards that is unlikely to remain standing much
longer.
This time the message may be that the answer is not more military
resistance but rather more people power and a stronger emphasis on popular
protests. Today, Palestinians form at least half the population in
historic Palestine -- Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip combined.
If they rose up collectively to demand equal rights, what could Israel do
to stop them? Israel's brutal violence and lethal force has not stopped
regular demonstrations in West Bank villages including Bilin and Beit
Ommar.
Israel must fear that if it responds to any broad uprising with brutality,
its already precarious international support could start to evaporate as
quickly as Mubarak's. The Mubarak regime, it seems, is undergoing rapid
"delegitimization." Israeli leaders have made it clear that such an
implosion of international support scares them more than any external
military threat. With the power shifting to the Arab people and away from
their regimes, Arab governments may not be able to remain as silent and
complicit as they have for years as Israel oppresses Palestinians.
As for Jordan, change is already underway. I witnessed a protest of
thousands of people in downtown Amman yesterday. These well-organized and
peaceful protests, called for by a coalition of Islamist and leftist
opposition parties, have been held now for weeks in cities around the
country. The protesters are demanding the resignation of the government of
Prime Minister Samir al-Rifai, dissolution of the parliament elected in
what were widely seen as fraudulent elections in November, new free
elections based on democratic laws, economic justice, an end to corruption
and cancelation of the peace treaty with Israel. There were strong
demonstrations of solidarity for the people of Egypt.
None of the parties at the demonstration called for the kind of
revolutions that happened in Tunisia and Egypt to occur in Jordan, and
there is no reason to believe such developments are imminent. But the
slogans heard at the protests are unprecedented in their boldness and
their direct challenge to authority. Any government that is more
responsive to the wishes of the people will have to review its
relationship with Israel and the United States.
Only one thing is certain today: whatever happens in the region, the
people's voices can no longer be ignored.
Ali Abunimah is co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, author of One
Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse and is a
contributor to The Goldstone Report: The Legacy of the Landmark
Investigation of the Gaza Conflict (Nation Books).
--
Macdonald Stainsby
Co-ordinator,
http://oilsandstruth.org
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moderated radical discussion list:
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In the contradiction lies the hope.
-Bertholt Brecht.
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