A fortnightly Green Bulletin of News, Action and Analysis
NEWS
SUPPORT FOR THOSE IN TROUBLE IN PALESTINE GOES BOTH WAYS
said Green Human Rights Spokesperson Keith Locke on 28 August.
”It’s time for the New Zealand Government to return the favour it was granted by Palestinian politicians who helped in the release of captured cameraman Olaf Wiig”, he said. Keith put a a motion in support of Palestinian parliamentarians onto the Parliamentary Order Paper for the New Zealand Government. It called for the release of over 20 members of the Palestinian Parliament detained by Israel.
“Our government has been praising the critical role Palestinian politicians played in Olaf Wiig’s release. We should be returning the favour and calling for our fellow Palestinian parliamentarians to be freed. The motion will also note that the Inter-parliamentary Union and the European Parliament have also protested the arrests. “It is quite unacceptable for elected parliamentarians to be imprisoned, essentially as political hostages in the Israel – Palestine dispute,” Keith said.
More at
https://www.greens.org.nz/searchdocs/PR10105.html
The text of the motion, which went to the House on 5 September, is:
That this House
•
supports the right of parliamentarians to freely pursue their duties;
•
notes the opposition of the Inter-Parliamentary Union and the European Parliament to Israel’s arrest of more than 20 members of the Palestinian parliament;
•
and calls for the immediate and unconditional release of the Palestinian Speaker Abdelaiziz El-Dweik, the Deputy Prime Minister Naser al-Shaer, and the other arrested Ministers and members of the Palestinian Parliament.
The 8 parties in Parliament allowed the motion to go forward. Then it was then passed, without dissent, on a voice vote.
ACTION
DO YOU WANT TO BE SHOCKED?
is the question posed by the organisers of a public meeting on the Taser gun trial in CHRISTCHURCH on THURSDAY SEPTEMBER 7.
It’s at the Hurst Seager Room in the Arts Centre, (corner of Rolleston Ave and Hereford St) and starts at 7:30 p.m. Speakers include Green MP Keith Locke, and Police Superintendent John Rivers (the project manager of the Taser trial).
REGISTER FOR NEXT YEAR’S WAIHOPAI SPYBASE PROTEST
–
JANUARY 19-21, 2007
The public face of New Zealand’s role as an American ally is the NZ military presence in Afghanistan. But New Zealand’s most significant contribution to that, and other American wars, including the one in Iraq, is the Waihopai spy base.
The Anti-Bases campaign invites people from around the country to join a weekend of anti-war protest at the spy base next January. Costs (covers vegetarian food and a campsite) are $40 waged or $20 unwaged. Send your cheque (made out to ABC) to Anti-Bases Campaign, Box 2258, Christchurch.
E-mail
cafca
[at]
chch [dot] planet [dot] org [dot] nz
or go to
for more information and a registration form.
ANALYSIS
STOPPING THE GENOCIDE IN GAZA.
”Nothing apart from pressure in the form of sanctions, boycotts and divestment will stop the murdering of innocent civilians in the Gaza Strip” concluded Israeli academic Ilan Pappe* in his article in the Palestine Chronicle on 2 September. The full article can be found at
and some key paragraphs are excerpted below.
”A genocide is taking place in Gaza. This morning, 2 September, another three citizens of Gaza were killed and a whole family wounded in Beit Hanoun. This is the morning reap, before the end of day many more will be massacred. An average of eight Palestinian die daily in the Israeli attacks on the Strip. Most of them are children. Hundreds are maimed, wounded and paralyzed….
…The inhuman living conditions in the most dense area in the world, and one of the poorest human spaces in the northern hemisphere, disables the people who live it to reconcile with the imprisonment Israel had imposed on them ever since 1967. There were relative better periods where movement to the West Bank and into Israel for work was allowed, but these better times are gone.
Harsher realities are in place ever since 1987. Some access to the outside world was allowed as long as there were Jewish settlers in the Strip, but once they were removed the Strip was hermetically closed. Ironically, most Israelis, according to recent polls, look at Gaza as an independent Palestinian state that Israel has graciously allowed to emerge.The leadership, and particularly the army, see it as a prison with the most dangerous community of inmates, which has to be eliminated one way or another…
…The chief culprits are the Israeli pilots who have a field day now that one of them is the General Chief of Staff. In the 1982 Lebanon war, the Israeli airforce issued orders to its pilots to abort missions if within 500 square meters of their target they spotted innocent civilians. Not that these orders were kept, but the pretense for internal moral consumption was there. It is called in the Israeli airforce, the “Lebanon Procedure” [Nohal Levanon]. When the pilots asked a year ago if the “Lebanon procedure” is intact for Gaza, the answer was no. The same answer was given to the pilots in the second Lebanon war…
… Much depends on the international reaction. When Israel was absolved from any responsibility or accountably for the ethnic cleansing in 1948, it turned this policy into a legitimate tool for its national security agenda. If the present escalation and adaptation of genocidal policies would be tolerated by the world, it would expand and used even more drastically. Nothing apart from pressure in the form of sanctions, boycotts and divestment will stop the murdering of innocent civilians in the Gaza Strip. There is nothing we here in Israel can do against it. Brave pilots refused to partake in the operations, two journalists – out of 150 – do not cease to write about it, but this is it. In the name of the holocaust memory let us hope the world would not allow the genocide of Gaza to continue.”
* Ilan Pappe is senior lecturer in the University of Haifa Department of Political Science and Chair of the Emil Touma Institute for Palestinian Studies in Haifa. His books include among others The Making of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (London and New York 1992), The Israel/Palestine Question (London and New York 1999), A History of Modern Palestine (Cambridge 2003), The Modern Middle East (London and New York 2005) and forthcoming, Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006)
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