Palestinian Authority

Hamas takes control of Fatah security HQ in Gaza City

By Avi Issacharoff, Haaretz Correspondent, and Agencies

Hamas fighters took control of the key Preventative Security headquarters in Gaza City on Thursday, as part of a systematic offensive aimed at seizing the security mechanism across the Gaza Strip.The Islamist group's gunmen broke through Fatah defenses at the compound in Gaza City on Thursday morning. Hamas fired rocket-propelled grenades toward the Fatah compound from a distance of 800 meters, provoking return fire from Abbas' presidential guard. The rival factions have been engaged in bloody battles since Sunday, resulting in the deaths of at least 70 people. By noon Thursday, at least eight people had been killed.Fatah officials said seven of their fighters were shot dead in the street outside Preventive Security building. A witness, Jihad Abu Ayad, said the men were being killed before their wives and children."They are executing them one by one," Abu Ayad said. "They are carrying one of them on their shoulders, putting him on a sand dune, turning him around and shooting."Some of the Hamas fighters kneeled down outside the building, touching their foreheads to the ground in prayer. Others led Fatah fighters out of the building, some of them shirtless or in their underwear, holding their arms in the air. Several of the Fatah men flinched as the crack of gunfire split the air."We are telling our people that the past era has ended and will not return," Islam Shahawan, a spokesman for Hamas' militia, told Hamas radio. "The era of justice and Islamic rule have arrived."Sami Abu Zuhri, a Hamas spokesman, heralded what he called Gaza's second liberation, after Israel's 2005 evacuation of the coastal strip.Abbas gives Fatah order to fight backAn aide to Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas said earlier Thursday that the Fatah leader had issued the first orders to his elite guard to strike back against Hamas fighters. Fatah forces had previously lashed out at Abbas, saying he left them with no directions and no support in the fight. Abbas' strongman in Gaza, Mohammed Dahlan, is in Cairo where he has been receiving medical treatment. Numerically superior Fatah forces have been crumbling fast under the onslaught by the better-armed and better-disciplined Hamas fighters. "There will be no dialogue with Fatah, only the sword and the rifle," Nezar Rayyan, a senior Hamas official, told Hamas radio Thursday. "God willing, we will lead the Friday prayer in the president's office, and transform the [Gaza City] security complex into a big mosque."Before dawn Thursday, Fatah fighters abandoned positions in central Gaza, then blew them up rather than turn them over as Hamas forces advanced.Gaza hospitals were operating without water, electricity or blood units. Even holed up inside their homes, Gazans weren't able to escape fighting that turned so many apartment buildings into battlefields.Angered by the rout of their comrades in the Gaza fighting, Palestinian security forces in the West Bank allied to Abbas have arrested large numbers of men from Hamas. Abbas met Thursday with the decision-making bodies of the organization and the PLO, and was to make an important announcement later, aides said. One aide, speaking on condition of anonymity because no decision had been made, said Abbas was considering dissolving the governing coalition with Hamas.Earlier in the week, Fatah ministers suspended their activities in the government due to the Gaza violence, but stopped short of dismantling the partnership. The unity government was formed in March in a bid to stem a previous round of violence, and in the hopes of easing the international boycott imposed in the wake of the Hamas election victory in January 2006. Neither aim was achieved. Thr fighting continued despite an agreement Wednesday night by Abbas and Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas of the need to bring an end to the fighting between their respective parties.

Hamas rejects multinational force along Gaza-Egypt border

By Yoav Stern and Avi Issacharoff, Haaretz Correspondents, and news agencies

Hamas said Thursday that it would refuse to accept a multinational force along the Gaza-Egypt border and would treat it as an occupying power."Hamas rejects any dispatch of foreign forces to the Gaza Strip," Hamas official Sami Abu Zuhri said. "The movement would regard those forces as occupation forces no different to the Israeli occupation, regardless of their nationality."A multinational force in Gaza was suggested by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas during separate phone conversations Tuesday with UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who in turn discussed it with the Security Council on Wednesday.A top official of the world's main Muslim body also rejected the idea of deploying a multinational force in Gaza to stop the fighting between Fatah and Hamas groups, insisting Thursday that the Palestinians need strong leadership."These are the same people," Ihsanoglu said, referring to the Hamas and Fatah fighters who have been locked a fierce power struggle since Hamas won parliamentary elections last year. Their battles have escalated in recent days as Hamas began a systematic assault on security forces to take over Gaza."What is needed is not external forces. What is needed is a better understanding between internal forces, said Ihsanoglu who is in Kuala Lumpur to attend a health ministers' conference of the 57-member OIC of which the Palestinian territory is also a member," he said.Ihsanoglu said he has been in contact with Abbas and other Palestinian leaders, and has told them to show more strength of leadership."The situation cannot be allowed to further deteriorate. There is a need for strong leadership on behalf of all political leaders ?the leadership should immediately show its strength and its resolution," said Ihsanoglu, and expressed concern that the fighting could spread to the West Bank, which is under Fatah control.The deployment of a multinational force along the Philadelphi Route in Rafah, on the Gaza-Egypt border, should be seriously considered, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Tuesday.The presence of an international force could help curb the smuggling of weapons into the Gaza Strip from Egypt, and halt the ongoing strengthening of the militant groups in the Gaza Strip. Olmert raised the likelihood of such a deployment following the continued internecine violence in the Gaza Strip that claimed the lives of at least 25 Palestinians Tuesday. Speaking after a meeting with visiting Dutch Foreign Minister Maxime Verhagen, Olmert said that "Western countries need to act soon to alter the situation in the Gaza Strip."Olmert suggested that the multinational force would be similar to the United Nations peacekeeping force in southern Lebanon.Olmert is likely to raise the idea of a multinational force during his talks with President George Bush in Washington next Tuesday.The idea of a such a force along the Philadelphi Route was proposed by the Foreign Ministry, and was presented during a meeting of the security cabinet three weeks ago, which centered on the situation in the Strip. According to the plan the force would serve to prevent the smuggling of arms from Sinai to the Gaza Strip in coordination with an Egyptian force operating on the Egyptian side of the border.The multinational force is not envisioned to have a role in preventing the clashes between Fatah and Hamas, or ending the Qassam rocket attacks.Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni described the arms smuggling as the main "cause of terrorism" in the Gaza Strip, and proposed that the U.S. fund the building of a barrier that will prevent smuggling.

EU commission suspends Gaza humanitarian aid projects

By Associated Press

The European Commission on Thursday suspended its humanitarian aid projects in the Gaza Strip, citing the escalating violence."I fervently hope that the projects can resume very soon," said EU Humanitarian Aid Commissioner Louis Michel.EU humanitarian operations in both Gaza and the West Bank totaled 84 million ($110 million) last year. So far this year, it has earmarked 60 million ($80 million).The United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) said that in the wake of the killings of its staff that it was suspending most of its activities in Gaza. Another UNRWA employee has also been killed in the Strip.UNRWA said it couldn't distribute food to the 30 percent of the Gaza Strip residents who rely on international food aid.The agency's Gaza director, John Bing, said the agency would scale back its operations, but insisted, "We are scaling back, we are not pulling back."

Israel in the New York Times

June 11, 2007
Israeli Airstrikes, Aiming at Militants, Hit Gaza City
By ISABEL KERSHNER

http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?query=israel&srchst=nyt

JERUSALEM, June 10 — The Israeli Air Force struck at least two buildings in Gaza City early Sunday morning in what appeared to be a response to a raid across the Gaza-Israel border by Palestinian militants on Saturday.
Also, internal violence between rival Palestinian organizations flared up again in the Gaza Strip, with at least four people killed over the weekend.
An Israeli Army spokeswoman said the air force attacked one building used by the militant group Islamic Jihad and another building, which she described as a weapons-producing plant belonging to Fatah. Both groups had ties to the raid on Saturday, in which fighters for Islamic Jihad and Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades, an offshoot of the mainstream Fatah organization, crossed the border into Israel and fought with soldiers for hours, apparently in an attempt to capture one.
Palestinian medics said the Israeli strike on Sunday hit three locations and described them as a study center and a charitable association, both run by Islamic Jihad, and a privately owned metal workshop. Seven civilians were wounded, according to Dr. Muawiya Hassanein, director of emergency services in the Palestinian Health Ministry.
The army spokeswoman said that on Saturday soldiers had spotted the four militants approaching the border fence in an armored jeep marked with “TV” and “Press” insignia, and “thought they were foreign reporters, so did not shoot at them.” The militants then broke through a gate in the barrier and took over an empty Israeli military post. Mortar shells were fired from inside Gaza at Israeli forces who rushed to the scene, the army said.
The Palestinian Journalists’ Union condemned the militants’ use of press markings on their vehicles, saying that such acts “endanger journalists’ lives and give justification to the Israeli occupation for targeting and killing journalists.”
Abu Ahmed, a spokesman for the military wing of Islamic Jihad, issued a statement accusing Israel of having stuck the TV signs on the jeep after it was abandoned by the militants, but Palestinian journalists lent little credence to his claim.
The Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, said Sunday that Israel’s military activity in Gaza “will continue for as long as necessary,” in order “to prevent terrorist acts, attempts to infiltrate Israel, and the firing of Qassam rockets.”
Violence erupted again over the weekend between the rival Palestinian parties, Fatah and Hamas, in the southern town of Rafah, after a local cease-fire lasting less than two days. According to Dr. Hassanein, one member of Hamas’s military wing and one member of the pro-Fatah National Security Forces were killed, and 45 were wounded, most of them civilians.
Dr. Hassanein added that each of the factions had kidnapped and tortured members of the other, and that several Palestinians had been shot in the legs. At least 50 Palestinians were killed in fierce fighting in May between the factions, which share power in a unity government.
Gun battles also broke out in Gaza City after a member of the Presidential Guard, which is loyal to Fatah, was thrown to his death off the roof of an 18-story building, Palestinian security officials said. Shortly afterward, a cleric from Hamas was abducted and killed.
[Gunmen opened fire early Monday on the house of the Palestinian prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, of Hamas, near Gaza City, The Associated Press reported, citing security officials. There were no immediate reports of casualties.]
Separately, two senior Israeli government ministers have confirmed earlier news reports that Israel has passed messages to Syria through third parties investigating the possibility of renewing peace talks. According to Israeli news media reports, the Israeli messages were sent via Turkey and Germany.
Defense Minister Amir Peretz told Israel Radio that Israel was obliged to try to verify Syrian “declarations on the possibility of starting negotiations, in the open or secretly, and we have done this.”
Israel’s transportation minister, Shaul Mofaz, a former defense minister, said that there had been “approaches through secret channels” but that so far there had been no official response from Syria.
A state-run Syrian newspaper, The Syria Times, said that Syria “has every right to doubt the intentions” of Israel’s prime minister, since Mr. Olmert was making “statements about his desire to talk peace” while “his war generals and senior aides are launching warlike threats.”
Taghreed El-Khodary contributed reporting from Gaza.

Political Parties in Israel

Ahdut Ha'avodah
Aguddat Israel
Arab Democratic Party
Arab Movement for Change
Ariel Sharon Forms New Political Party
The Center Party
Center Party Dissolves
Centrist Party Takes Shape
Citizen's Rights Movement
Degel Hattorah
Democratic Choice
Democratic Movement for Change
Gahal
General Zionists/Liberal Party
Gesher
Hadash
Herut
The Israeli Communist Party
Kach
Kadima
The Labor Party
The Likud Party
Mapai
Mapam
Meimad
Meretz-Yahad
Moledet
National Democratic Alliance
National Religious Party
National Unity Party
New Israeli Party Formed (Israel, Our Home)
New Party Recognized by Knesset
One Israel Party
One Nation
Party Financing Law - 1973
Rafi
Shas
Shinui
Tehiya
The Third Way
Tzomet
United Arab List
United Torah Judaism
Yisrael B'Aliya
The Platform of Yisrael B'Aliya - Israel on the Rise
Yisrael Beitenu

Israel in British Newspapers

'We will isolate them'

British academics' desire to boycott Israeli universities this week provoked the threat of legal action and counter-boycotts. Will it produce a fully-fledged international crisis?

Matthew Taylor, Suzanne Goldenberg and Rory McCarthy Saturday June 9, 2007

Guardian

As the pop group Girls Aloud ran through a sound check on the other side of the curtain, lecturers in the main hall at the Bournemouth International Centre tried to block out the music and concentrate on the matter in hand. In front of them was a motion calling for a nationwide debate on a proposed academic boycott of Israeli universities in protest at the continued occupation of the Palestinian territories.
As the discussions rumbled on, most of those in the hall for the University and College Union's (UCU) first annual conference on May 30 realised their decision would have ramifications beyond British academia. Few, however, could have predicted the scale of the backlash when the resolution, which called on the UCU to circulate a boycott request by Palestinian trade unions to all branches for "information and discussion", was passed by 158 votes to 99.
Within hours it was headline news in Britain and Israel, within days it was making waves in Europe and north America, and soon every newspaper from the Kansas City Star ("A stain on British academia") to the Turkish Daily News ("Israel discusses retaliation to boycott threats") was in on the act.
Tony Blair phoned the Israeli prime minister to reassure him that the motion did not reflect wider public opinion. In Israel, MPs began drafting a bill to label British imports - allowing consumers to stage their own counter boycott.
But in the two weeks since the vote, it is the US that has had the biggest surge of activity among the anti-boycott camp. About 2,000 American scholars - including at least nine Nobel laureates - have vowed to stay away from any event from which Israelis are excluded. A Democrat from suburban Philadelphia, Patrick Murphy, has moved a resolution in the House of Representatives, condemning the vote and calling on members of the UCU to reject the boycott. Thirty other members of Congress have signed on as co-sponsors.
Alan Dershowitz, the prominent lawyer and Harvard law professor, says he has mustered a team of 100 high-profile lawyers on both sides of the Atlantic to "devastate and bankrupt" anyone acting against Israeli universities.
"If the union goes ahead with this immoral petition, it will destroy British academia," Dershowitz told the Guardian last night. "We will isolate them from the rest of the world. They will end up being the objects of the boycott because we will get tens of thousands of the most prominent academics from around the world to refuse to cooperate and refuse to participate in any events from which Israeli academics are excluded. It will totally backfire."
As the global ramifications of the vote became clear yesterday, the leaders of the newly formed UCU met in central London to discuss their next move.
Union officials are unsure about what the vote will mean in practice, but president Sally Hunt is still clinging to the hope that, when push comes to shove, most members will vote against an academic boycott. "As I said at our congress, I simply do not believe that the majority of UCU members support an academic boycott of Israel or that they believe it should be a major priority for the union," she said. "When I speak to members, they tell me they want their union to focus on pay and conditions."
One option for the fledgling leadership would be to test that theory and ballot all UCU members - although it is thought that the rolling process of meetings and campaigns approved by conference would still have to take place.
Hunt said: "Now a boycott is to be discussed by UCU members, I hope all will genuinely get to have their say on the issue. I still believe that the best way to do that, and to ensure the full membership's views are properly reflected, is through a ballot of all members."
In 2005 the UCU's predecessor union, the Association of University Teachers, passed a motion calling for sanctions against Israeli institutions only for it to be overturned at an emergency general meeting a few weeks later. This time the row is likely to rumble on and surrounds a carefully worded motion that calls on the union to circulate a boycott request to all branches for "information and discussion" rather than a boycott. But for some in the anti-boycott camp these are "weasel-words" aimed at avoiding legal censure. Prominent UK lawyer and visiting professor at Birkbeck College, London, Anthony Julius, said: "Going for a boycott is gesture politics in the first place but a resolution that comes close but avoids actually spelling it out is a gesture wrapped up in a gesture - it's nothing more than a bad smell."
However, many within the UCU object to the ferocity of the backlash. James Sanderson, who was attending his first union conference in Bournemouth, said the motion gave UK academics the time and space to consider the merits of a boycott. "This motion was not as quoted in the press as a direct attack on Israeli academics but merely an opportunity for everyone in this new union to fully participate in a frank and open debate on how we can support our comrades in the Middle East."
Sue Blackwell, who spoke in favour of the motion, said it was outrageous that a democratic vote to discuss a boycott had provoked such a virulent response. "The fact that so many people outside the union do not like the idea of a us taking a democratic decision to have a debate about this issue is quite incredible," she said. "We have voted to discuss how best to help our Palestinian brothers and sisters who often are not allowed to get to college or university and that is what we will do whatever the threats and intimidation that come our way."
In the US, moves to censure Israel by students on American campuses have been met with much stronger, well-organised opposition. Campaigns for universities to divest from firms that sell arms and equipment to the Israeli army have been strenuously resisted. Only one governing body - at the University of Wisconsin, Platteville - has issued such a call. "The political climate here is a lot different than Britain. It's difficult in the States even to get a discussion going about boycotts," said Mohammed Abed, a philosophy student who was active in the divestment campaign.
Many in the anti-boycott camp see the UCU's stance as part of a wider trend of attacks on Israel, pointing to recent boycott proposals from the NUJ, Unison and some British doctors. Julius said Israel was being treated as "uniquely evil" in a way he said was reminiscent of the anti-semitism of the medieval Christian church. "I sometimes think that Jews born in the 1940s and 1950s have been living through a golden period but that the closed season on Jews has now come to an end." He is drawing up a paper with Dershowitz outlining what he claims are the moral weaknesses of the boycott proposal and explaining how it would infringe on academic freedom.
Steven Weinberg, a Nobel laureate in physics at the University of Texas, who cancelled a visit to the UK after NUJ boycott calls this year, told the Guardian the UCU stance was anti-semitic. "I am not saying that every criticism of the state of Israel is necessarily anti-semitic, but this kind of moral condemnation is, it seems to me, when there is nothing to condemn."
But this argument is dismissed by supporters. "It is offensive and is beginning to wear very thin indeed," said Blackwell. "This is explicitly a debate about the policies of the Israeli government and role of Israeli universities and the fact that many Jewish people in this country support a boycott shows that it has nothing to do with anti-semitism."
In Israel, the UCU's position has triggered a wave of criticism. Some have threatened a retaliatory boycott of British products and union workers have said they may refuse to unload British imports. Many have repeated the accusation that there is a seam of anti-semitism just below the surface of the boycott debate. "Boycotting a product because it's made in Israel resembles, in my opinion, hanging a sign on the store that reads 'Jew'," Otniel Schneller, the Kadima MP who has proposed the bill, told the Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper this week. "The fact that we tend to take it and to apologise weakens us."
Bill Rammell, the higher education minister, will travel to Israel tomorrow to meet Israeli ministers and the heads of several Israeli universities to discuss the boycott. He has already said he was "very disappointed" at the UCU vote.
Israel's leading trade union federation, Histadrut, is hoping to send delegates to the Unison conference this month. "We believe in solidarity and in dialogue and not in a one-sided attitude," said Avital Shapiro-Shabirow, director of international activity for Histadrut.
Among some Palestinians the view is different. The Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel says boycotts are legitimate efforts to end the occupation. Pro-boycott Palestinian academics are expected to tour UK universities in coming months.
However, the feeling among Israeli peace activists is mixed. Uri Avnery, a veteran activist and founding member of the Gush Shalom peace movement, said a campaign against organisations or firms that contribute to the occupation might better help change public opinion. "[A general boycott] drives people in Israel into the hands of rightwing demagogues and stigmatises everybody. The question is: do you believe Israel can be changed from the inside or not? I believe it can and must be changed from inside. I don't believe any pressure from the outside, except perhaps from the White House and the US Congress, can change Israeli policy."

Backstory

Steven Rose, professor of biology at the Open University, started the boycott campaign with a letter to the Guardian in 2002 arguing for a moratorium on European funding of Israeli research.
However, it was not until 2005 that the Association of University Teachers - the predecessor to the University and College Union - voted to cut links with Haifa and Bar Ilan universities, which it claimed were complicit in the abuse of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza.
The decision provoked an angry international response, with AUT members opposed to the vote mobilising support in Europe, the US and the Middle East. A few weeks after the initial vote, the union held an emergency meeting at which the boycott was overturned.
Last year the issue was overshadowed by the merger of the UK's two big academic unions - the AUT and the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education - to form the UCU. But at the union's first conference last month, members put an academic boycott back at the top of the agenda.


Israel critic denied post at university
By Leonard Doyle in Washington
Published: 12 June 2007
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article2646369.ece

A top American university has denied tenure to a prominent academic amid allegations of anti-Semitism and his defence of the Palestinian cause.
Norman Finkelstein, a frequent critic of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, said he had been "blacklisted" by the university and would now have to leave teaching. He had been offered lifelong tenure by the political science department of the Catholic DePaul University in Chicago, but faced with a bitter campaign against him, the university denied him the post.
Mr Finkelstein, whose family survived the Holocaust, has been public enemy number one of the Israel lobby in the US for a number of years. He has frequently accused American Jews of exploiting the Holocaust for financial gain and is a regular critic of Israel for its treatment of the Palestinians. He described DePaul's move as an "egregious violation" of academic freedom.
One of his main critics, Alan Dershowitz, an attorney and Harvard law professor, said: "It was plainly the right decision."

Israel offers the Golan Heights to Syria

By Charles Levinson in Katzrin, Israel
Last Updated: 2:16am BST 09/06/2007

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/06/09/wmid109.xml

The Israeli prime minister has offered to return the Golan Heights to Syria in exchange for peace, the nation's press reported yesterday.

Israelis tour a military bunker in the Golan Heights. The strategic highlands could be returned to Syria in exchange for peace
In a secret communique, Ehud Olmert demanded that in exchange for the return of the strategic highlands, Syria dissolve its alliances with Iran, Hezbollah and Palestinian militant factions who maintain headquarters in Damascus.
Syria, under the regime of Bashar al Assad, is a key supporter of the Lebanese Shia Hizbollah militia, who battled Israel to a standstill last summer. Many of the anti-tank rockets that wreaked havoc on Israeli ground forces originated in Syria, a crucial conduit for the Iranian Katyushas and other rockets that rained down on Israeli cities throughout the 34-day war.
Were Syria to abandon its Shia allies in Lebanon and Iran in exchange for peace with the Jewish state, it would seriously weaken Israel's most potent foes.
"I am your partner for making peace between our countries," Mr Olmert told Damascus through German and Turkish mediators, Israel's Yediot Ahranot newspaper reported. "I know that a peace agreement with Syria requires me to return the Golan Heights to Syrian sovereignty. I am willing to fulfil my part in this deal."
Mr Olmert reached out to Syria only after America's president George W Bush gave the green light in an hour-long phone conversation last month. The prime minister's office would neither confirm nor deny the reports.
Israel and Syria participated in arduous peace talks throughout much of the 1990s. But those efforts collapsed in 2000 amid disagreement over sovereignty of a narrow strip of land near the eastern shore of Lake Kinneret.

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