GRASSROOTS JERUSALEM.HAY QUE APOYARLES

The Grassroots Al-Quds Network is a online platform that enables urban and human rights activists and organizations in Jerusalem to connect, share knowledge and coordinate on issues of immediate and long term concern. The platform is open source, enabling activists and community based organizations to contribute and create a shared picture of the activities, initiatives and needs of Jerusalemites. more...

LA SABIDURIA DEL MAESTRO

Nelson Mandela

"The path of those who preach love, and not hatred, is not easy. They often have to wear a crown of thorns." ~ Nelson Mandela during a message to the Global Convention on Peace and Non-violence, New Delhi, India, 31 January 2004 ‪#

RUSIA,CRIMEA Y LAS FRONTERAS

Leo en estos días diversos análisis sobre la situación política ucraniana.

Vaya por delante que hasta hoy no tengo elementos de análisis suficientes como para dar respuestas a preguntas importantes.lo que lleva,indefectiblemente, a emitir opiniones que se pueden aproximar a la realidad,pero que hay que tamizar al máximo.

Se aprecian diversas analogías con lo sucedido en la guerra de los Balcanes,comenzando por las notables equivocaciones de la UE,especialmente Alemania,y acabando por el enfrentamiento violento entre diversas etnias y facciones, pertenecientes a la antigua U.Soviética,y antes de esto,al Imperio turco Otomano.

A grandes Imperios,múltiples culturas y etnias,es decir,posibilidad,bien cierta,de enfrentamientos tribales en un momento u otro.

Sorprende,y mucho,el olvido o la ignorancia de los antecedentes próximos de esta situación,la Guerra de Crimea,choque violento de imperios coloniales con los restos del Imperio turco.

Los recursos minerales de la zona,por no hablar de los estratégicos.

La Península de Crimea ha sido casi de siempre,la salida al mar del Imperio ruso,base naval importante para el equilibrio en el Mediterráneo Oriental,y,por último,pero no menos importante,asentamiento de una importante comunidad de origen ruso,además de una de las zonas de influencia tártara.

No vamos a entrar en lo que fueron los pasados siglos en esta historia,ni tampoco a comentar los brutales excesos de Stalin,que tanto significó en este área,sería muy largo de explicar para unas líneas en un blog.

El aquí y ahora tiene un precedente más cercano.

El regalo por parte de un estadista soviético de una parte básica para la política de la Unión Soviética, allá por los años 50,no solo fue una decisión errónea desde el punto de vista político,propia de un oligarca,también supuso marginar a una buena parte de la población rusa,y dejar aislada a la flota del Mar Negro.

Los porqués,conocidos,ahora se trata de enmendar esta equivocación,y esto pasa,guste o no,por una negociación diplomática y el reconocimiento de la anormalidad del 58.

Ninguna de las minorías residentes en la zona va a vivir de forma distinta a como lo han hecho durante cientos de años,combinando tiempos de paz con otros de persecución y exilio.

Ucrania es algo así como la extensión de Rusia que nunca quiso estar allí,pero a la que la realidad política unió durante generaciones.

Leemos sobre los disturbios recientes en Ucrania y surgen dos evidencias,la represión de un dictador en función de sus intereses,apoyado por Rusia,y el llamativo grupo opositor que lo mismo incluye a la extrema izquierda que a neonazis de uniforme.Francotiradores diversos,cuyo trabajo evidente es sembrar el odio y el pánico,y al fondo,una realidad económica difícil,necesitada de alianzas con otras potencias para sobrevivir.

Si Ucrania,si Rusia,si los habitantes de Crimea no moderan su discurso,mal va la andadura.

Parece haber intereses sesgados en que la tensión se mantenga,ruines y destructivos.

La UE,fiel a si misma,amaga y no da,intentando protegerse a si misma,pero al mismo tiempo queriendo tener parte del posible pastel político que origina la situación.Lo dicho,como en los Balcanes.

El mundo no esta para más guerras,bastantes existen ya,focos de hambre,emigración,exterminio y muerte.

La solución es relativamente fácil,el reconocimiento por parte de Ucrania de lo endeble de la anexión del 58.Un alto grado de autonomía para la zona,lo de siempre,las Repúblicas Federalistas.Y la voluntad cierta de no sembrar más odio con mentiras e intereses ocultos,no tan ocultos como algunos quisiesen.

Las fronteras son tan movibles como una valla en el campo,no hay que intentar poner puertas al viento,las derriba todas.

La situación aún permite encontrar un plan que satisfaga a todas las partes,algo habrá de perderse,para eso la negociación.

Esperemos,deseemos,que el sentido común y la sensatez se imponga a los delirios de unos y otros,por el bien de estos pueblos,de la zona y del equilibrio político.

DR.HENRY SIEGMAN.THIS ISN´T A NEW NETANYAHU

 

http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.577730

This isn’t a new Netanyahu

Yet again the experts have been proven wrong: There’s no newly pragmatic Bibi, so perhaps the time for a UN Security Council-brokered peace has come.

 

By Henry Siegman | Mar. 3, 2014 | 10:12 PM |  

 

It has been widely reported that Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, who is starting his U.S. visit today, is likely to accept Secretary of State John Kerry’s framework for a two-state peace agreement between Israel and the PLO, even though several of his coalition partners have threatened to bring down his government were he to do so. Indeed, he has been warned they would leave his government even if he were just to agree to freeze new construction in the settlements while negotiations proceed.

These reports were construed by many as an indication of an important change in Netanyahu’s former bitter opposition to Palestinian statehood, which he always maintained was intended by Palestinians as a platform from which to assault the very existence of the Jewish state. To be sure, Netanyahu famously committed himself to a two-state solution in his Bar Ilan speech of 14 June, 2009. But no one in Israel believed him. Both his critics and his supporters understood it was intended to gain time for the achievement of irreversibility for Israel’s settlement project in the West Bank.
Now, however, it is widely believed that Netanyahu has finally come to understand that Israel’s occupation of the West Bank is not sustainable, for it threatens to isolate and delegitimize the Jewish state.
Unfortunately, this reading of Netanyahu’s intentions is as mistaken as it has always been in the past. Each time he has been elected to office - it is now his third time - the experts assured us we were dealing with a newly pragmatic Bibi, and each time they were proven wrong.
When Netanyahu was elected as prime minister in 1996, I was visiting former president Hosni Mubarak, who told me that messages he had received from Netanyahu through intermediaries reassured him that he had acquired a new and promising pragmatism. He dismissed the doubts I expressed, but the next time we met he declared his deep disappointment with Netanyahu and questioned his honesty. We had that same discussion when Netanyahu was re-elected prime minister in 2009.
To say that Netanyahu is not a visionary leader is an understatement. To be sure, he is a clever tactician who knows how to stay in office. That goal, which he believes is unbreakably linked to retaining his leadership of Israel’s political right wing, trumps every other domestic and international challenge that faces Israel. If reports about his current willingness to accept Kerry’s framework for a negotiated agreement are correct, it is evidence of Netanyahu’s tactical savvy, not of his conversion. For the new pragmatism he is credited with would be nothing more than more of the same—a deception providing additional time for a deepening of the settlement enterprise and for preparing the ground for blaming Palestinians for the failure of Kerry’s effort.
Why so pessimistic a conclusion? Because it is also reported that Netanyahu has convinced Kerry to present a framework that would not set the 1967 border as the starting point for minor territorial swaps; would not clearly require the capital of the new Palestinian state to be in East Jerusalem; and would not allow Palestinians, rather than Israel’s IDF, to control the new Palestinian state’s borders. The framework would also not prevent the presence of Israeli military and security forces, rather than international forces, to monitor the Palestinian transition to full statehood, and would allow Israel’s continued control of the Jordan Valley.
In other words, the framework would be entirely consistent with Israel’s continued control of Greater Israel.
As to the threat posed by Netanyahu’s acceptance of Kerry’s framework to the survival of Netanyahu’s coalition government, the only party likely to leave it in those circumstances is Habayit Hayehudi headed by Naftali Bennett. It is a party that Netanyahu could easily replace (the Labor Party’s new head, Itzhak Herzog, regularly declares his readiness to join Netanyahu’s government). Nothing would make Netanyahu happier than the departure of Bennett, a man he detests.
The only way Kerry could change the long history of U.S. diplomatic failure in bringing about a two-state accord is if he abandons the notion that the parties themselves are capable of reaching a reasonable two-state agreement if the U.S. provides the proper diplomatic formula. The U.S. should long ago have understood that given the vast discrepancies in the economic, military, and diplomatic capacities of Israel and the Palestinians, if left to their own devices, no such agreement is possible.

The only way the U.S. can persuade Israelis to accept a reasonable two-state accord is by changing Israel’s cost/benefit calculations, which can happen only if the U.S. informs Israel that it is pulling out of a fraudulent peace process and will allow the Security Council to set Israel’s borders and the consequences for noncompliance. This would instantly produce a new Israeli reasonableness that may yet rescue the Jewish and democratic character of the state.

That Israel needs such rescuing is beyond question. For would even one of the fourteen thousand participants in this week’s AIPAC meeting in Washington D.C. accept the democratic claims of a country that condemns its Jewish population to the kind of half-century-long subjugation, disenfranchisement and dispossession that the Palestinian people have been subjected to?

A state of the Jews would be well advised to heed the admonition of its sages in the Ethics of the Fathers: “Do not presume to judge your fellow man until you have stood in his place.”

Have we not stood in that place?

Henry Siegman is the president of the U.S./Middle East Project. He served as a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and as a non-resident research professor at the Sir Joseph Hotung Middle East Program, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He was the national director of the American Jewish Congress and of the Synagogue Council of America.

MANDELA.1990

Nelson Mandela

"As ‘no man is an island’, so too are we not men of stone who are not moved by the noble passions of love, friendship and human compassion." ~ Nelson Mandela during an address at the Cathedral of Uppsala, Uppsala, Sweden, 13 March 1990 ‪#‎LivingTheLegacy

GIDEON LEVY.THE MOST MORAL ARMY IN THE WORLD.HAARETZ

 

                                

The most moral army in the world fired an anti-tank missile at the house in which a wanted young Palestinian was hiding. The most moral army in the world ran a bulldozer over the top of the house and destroyed it.
The most moral army in the world used dogs to search the ruins. The most moral army in the world used a drill it calls a “pressure cooker” – a rather disgusting drill it invented for itself.
It happened last Thursday, at Bir Zeit in the West Bank. The soldiers of the most moral army arrived early in the morning for another “arrest operation,” like others that happen every night and which you rarely hear anything about.
It involves sowing fear in villages in the middle of the night, invading houses whose inhabitants – including the children – are sleeping soundly, brutal searches and destruction. Sometimes, like last Thursday, it also ends in death.
All this is happening at a time when terror operations are very limited.
Sometimes these operations are conducted for a true operational need, but also sometimes as a training routine in order to preserve the readiness of the forces and a demonstration of sovereign power toward the residents.
The Israel Defense Forces has also created a heartwarming name for all this: the “Tool of Disruption” – storming a civilian community for the purpose of causing panic and fear, and to disrupt its life – as was once exposed in the military court and by the Yesh Din human rights organization.
In Bir Zeit, it was for three young men who were members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, an organization that is not especially active.
And even as the military correspondents rushed to say, as is their wont, that the IDF claimed the three “had the intention to carry out a terror attack in the near future” – yes, the most moral army in the world is also an army that reads intentions – it is doubtful if they were worthy of death.
But the IDF killed Muataz Washaha, who refused to surrender, claiming he had a rifle – an assassination in the third watch without a ticking bomb, and Israel also accepted this story with a yawn.
That is how the most moral army in the world acts, and how it believes it must act. There is no other way to arrest a young man except for killing him with an anti-tank missile and destroying his family’s home.
As luck would have it, that very same day a professional opinion was released on the true morality of the IDF: Amnesty International published a report, called Trigger Happy, in which it determined that IDF soldiers demonstrate gross contempt for human life, expressed in the killing of dozens of Palestinian citizens, including children. The organization states that this is intentional killing that is possibly even a war crime.
Of course, this did not succeed in breaking the enthusiastic belief of Israelis in the exalted morality of their army. “Go to Syria” is their frequent riposte.
The Foreign Ministry and the IDF explained that Amnesty International suffers a “complete lack of understanding of the operational challenges.”
And in truth, what does Amnesty understand? At the end of last week, the military regime that rules in Myanmar (Burma) halted the activities of the Médecins Sans Frontières organization within its borders, for similar reasons. If it could, Israel would also stop the work of Amnesty and similar groups.
But a respectable citizen does not need Amnesty International to know. Only two days ago, the IDF killed a woman on the Gaza border at Khan Yunis, after conducting another protocol against her – the “Distancing Protocol.” The killing of demonstrators near the fence that chokes the Gaza Strip is routine – what’s to report? It’s just like the firing on fishermen.
In the West Bank, too, protesters, stone throwers, children and young people are shot and killed.
That is how the child Wajih al-Ramahi was shot in Jalazun, about two months ago. Two weeks ago, B’Tselem – The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories published its autopsy conclusions: Ramahi was shot in the back, from a range of 200 meters.
This was also the fate of the youth Samir Awad from Budrus, and of dozens of others killed who did not endanger the lives of anyone and were shot to death by a frighteningly easy trigger finger, dying for no purpose.
No one was put on trial for these acts of killing. With Awad, who was shot in the back in an ambush and whose death was documented at the time, the case has been gathering dust for over a year with the military prosecutor.
And all this from the most moral army in the world. Just try to appeal it. Just try to claim that the IDF is the second most moral army in the world – let’s say, after the army of Luxembourg

MANIFESTACIONES MASIVAS CONTRA LAS PROSPECCIONES EN CANARIAS

Fotograma RTVC

Las manifestaciones tendrán lugar el próximo 22 de marzo, coincidiendo con la proximidad de la fecha en la que el Tribunal Supremo decidirá la validez o no de la autorización dada por el Gobierno a Repsol.

Sociedad - 01/03/2014 EFECerca de un centenar de representantes de organizaciones ecologistas, colectivos sociales y partidos han anunciado este sábado marchas populares en todas las islas contra las prospecciones petrolíferas autorizadas en aguas cercanas a Canarias y a favor del derecho de los ciudadanos a decidir.

Las manifestaciones tendrán lugar el próximo 22 de marzo, coincidiendo con la proximidad de la fecha en la que el Tribunal Supremo decidirá la validez o no de la autorización dada por el Gobierno a Repsol para llevar a cabo las prospecciones frente a las costas de Lanzarote y Fuerteventura, han indicado los organizadores de la concentración celebrada hoy.

Santiago Medina, uno de los miembros históricos del colectivo ecologista lanzaroteño dijo que "luchando (contra las prospecciones) podemos perder; pero si no luchamos, estamos perdidos ya", motivo por el que pidió a los ciudadanos que salgan a la calle para expresar su rechazo a las prospecciones.

Las movilizaciones tratan de "decir al Supremo que los ciudadanos de las islas tienen voz y dignidad" y criticar la actitud del ministro de Industria, Energía y Turismo, José Manuel Soria, "porque ningunea el sentir de los ciudadanos canarios" al permitir los sondeos.

El acto, al que asistieron representantes de colectivos de La Graciosa, Fuerteventura y Lanzarote, se celebró en el terrero de lucha de la Ciudad Deportiva de Arrecife "porque simboliza el lugar donde luchan los canarios con nobleza", según los organizadores.

NELSON MANDELA LEGACY

Nelson Mandela

"Whether you change the linen or stitch up wounds, cook the food or dispense the medicines, it is in your hands to help build a public service worthy of all those who gave their lives for the dream of democracy." ~ Nelson Mandela at the Naming of the Tambo Memorial Hospital, Boksburg, South Africa, 16 April 1998 ‪#‎LivingTheLegacy