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A friend posted this link on their Facebook profile and after watching, I can only say – wow. Taking nothing away from the people this song was written for and their fight, this should be our motivation in Pakistan also.

We will not go down without a fight!

Yoni Goldman, one of the creators of Oscar winner animated film “Waltz with Bashir,” has produced a 90 second animated short film to draw attention to the plight of the Gaza civilians.

“People talk about Hamas, but there are many civilians there who are not Hamas supporters but who are suffering from this blockade,” the animator said.

Israel has kept Gaza’s borders largely sealed since the Islamic militant Hamas took over the seaside territory in June 2007. Since then, Israeli has heavily restricted Palestinians from leaving Gaza and limited the goods that can enter.

Goodman said he began the film before Israel launched its offensive against Gaza’s ruling Hamas militants in December, but the conflict affected the story.

The film, a combination of animation and real-life scenes, follows a boy chasing a blue bird while large hands block his way. The hands cut Gaza’s borders in the ground with a giant cookie-cutter, then prevent the boy from crossing.

To get more information about Closed Zone, please visit their website.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan stormed off the stage at the World Economic Forum in Davos after an argument with Israel’s president.

Mr Erdogan clashed with Shimon Peres in a discussion on the recent fighting in the Gaza Strip, telling him: “You are killing people.”

I watched the whole debate and was very surprised at the attitude of the Israeli President in defending the war, the non-acceptance of democratic vote, and how no Gazan had missed a meal in the 20+ day offense in Gaza. Sadly, the point of Israel doing everything in its power to hide the identities of the soldiers that fought in Gaza to protect them from war crimes tribunals.

Mr Peres had told the audience Israel was forced on to the offensive against Hamas by thousands of rockets and mortars fired into Israel.

More than 1,300 Palestinians and 14 Israelis were killed during the three-week conflict which began on 27 December.

Watch the whole 1 hour debate here:

Retired Israeli official Avner Cohen told the Wall Street Journal, “Hamas, to my great regret, is Israel’s creation.”

In an amazing story, the Wall Street Journal draws a direct line between Hamas and the State of Israel with complete history of the hows and whys of its creation.

Mr. Cohen, a Tunisian-born Jew who worked in Gaza for more than two decades. Responsible for religious affairs in the region until 1994, Mr. Cohen watched the Islamist movement take shape, muscle aside secular Palestinian rivals and then morph into what is today Hamas, a militant group that is sworn to Israel’s destruction.

Instead of trying to curb Gaza’s Islamists from the outset, says Mr. Cohen, Israel for years tolerated and, in some cases, encouraged them as a counterweight to the secular nationalists of the Palestine Liberation Organization and its dominant faction, Yasser Arafat’s Fatah. Israel cooperated with a crippled, half-blind cleric named Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, even as he was laying the foundations for what would become Hamas. Sheikh Yassin continues to inspire militants today; during the recent war in Gaza, Hamas fighters confronted Israeli troops with “Yassins,” primitive rocket-propelled grenades named in honor of the cleric.

The Palestinian cause was for decades led by the PLO, which Israel regarded as a terrorist outfit and sought to crush until the 1990s, when the PLO dropped its vow to destroy the Jewish state. The PLO’s Palestinian rival, Hamas, led by Islamist militants, refused to recognize Israel and vowed to continue “resistance.” Hamas now controls Gaza, a crowded, impoverished sliver of land on the Mediterranean from which Israel pulled out troops and settlers in 2005.

When Israel first encountered Islamists in Gaza in the 1970s and ’80s, they seemed focused on studying the Quran, not on confrontation with Israel. The Israeli government officially recognized a precursor to Hamas called Mujama Al-Islamiya, registering the group as a charity. It allowed Mujama members to set up an Islamic university and build mosques, clubs and schools. Crucially, Israel often stood aside when the Islamists and their secular left-wing Palestinian rivals battled, sometimes violently, for influence in both Gaza and the West Bank.

“When I look back at the chain of events I think we made a mistake,” says David Hacham, who worked in Gaza in the late 1980s and early ’90s as an Arab-affairs expert in the Israeli military. “But at the time nobody thought about the possible results.”

Israeli officials who served in Gaza disagree on how much their own actions may have contributed to the rise of Hamas. They blame the group’s recent ascent on outsiders, primarily Iran. This view is shared by the Israeli government. “Hamas in Gaza was built by Iran as a foundation for power, and is backed through funding, through training and through the provision of advanced weapons,” Mr. Olmert said last Saturday. Hamas has denied receiving military assistance from Iran.

This is a must read for anyone who wants to understand the Palestinian concerns and the reasons for them.

Naomi Klein, author of No Logo and The Shock Doctrine, said it best in a column published in The Guardian:

It’s time. Long past time. The best strategy to end the increasingly bloody occupation is for Israel to become the target of the kind of global movement that put an end to apartheid in South Africa. In July 2005 a huge coalition of Palestinian groups laid out plans to do just that. They called on “people of conscience all over the world to impose broad boycotts and implement divestment initiatives against Israel similar to those applied to South Africa in the apartheid era”. The campaign Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions was born.

Every day that Israel pounds Gaza brings more converts to the BDS cause – even among Israeli Jews. In the midst of the assault roughly 500 Israelis, dozens of them well-known artists and scholars, sent a letter to foreign ambassadors in Israel. It calls for “the adoption of immediate restrictive measures and sanctions” and draws a clear parallel with the anti-apartheid struggle. “The boycott on South Africa was effective, but Israel is handled with kid gloves … This international backing must stop.”

Yet even in the face of these clear calls, many of us still can’t go there. The reasons are complex, emotional and understandable. But they simply aren’t good enough. Economic sanctions are the most effective tool in the non-violent arsenal: surrendering them verges on active complicity. Here are the top four objections to the BDS strategy, followed by counter-arguments.

Visit The Guardian website to read the rest of Naomi’s article. Boycott, Divesture and Sanction models have worked in the past and the only way to get the message across.

I was reminded of a comment made by Israeli Deputy Defence Minister Matan Vilani that Palestinians risked a “shoah,” the Hebrew word for a big disaster and for the Nazi Holocaust. While his colleagues insisted to the international media that he had not meant “genocide” the events of the past few weeks would lead us to believe otherwise.

In a fantastic article today on the Huffington Post website, David Bromwich puts forward a fantastic argument to the, as he calls it, “Bush-Sharon doctrine” of “if you harbor a terrorist — that is, if you live anywhere in the vicinity of a terrorist — you are yourself as blamable as the terrorist and are as appropriate a target of destruction.”

What prompts the fantasy that you can “kill all the terrorists” without sowing the seeds of new terrorism? Partly, the fantasy comes from the idea that any civilian deaths you cause will be forgiven; but, much more, it derives from the secondary fantasy that civilian deaths will go mainly unwitnessed. They will be recorded as numbers, perhaps, but they will pass out of the awareness of the world. That is not the way things work, of course. There are people in the world — not hundreds, not thousands, but hundreds of millions — who feel more closely allied to the killed than they do to the killers.

“Those to whom evil is done, do evil in return.” In every culture and every civilization, to kill the innocent is evil. Fifty civilians who live in a neighborhood where one terrorist has built a hidden sniper’s nest are understood to be innocent. If you kill the fifty, you have done something worse than not killing the one.

Yet to put it like that brings up the revaluation of state terror that entered our language with the Sharon-Bush doctrine, first propounded in 2001-02. According to the Sharon-Bush doctrine, if you harbor a terrorist — that is, if you live anywhere in the vicinity of a terrorist — you are yourself as blamable as the terrorist and are as appropriate a target of destruction. This, no matter what the impediments on your freedom of movement, no matter how unconscious you may be of the existence of the terrorist, no matter how much your toleration of him may have been driven by fear. Read the rest of this entry »