Peace, Peace, We need Peace!

Peace is needed in the Middle East. Barack Obama is to pursue a peace plan involving the recognition of Israel by the Arab world in exchange for its withdrawal to pre-1967 borders.

Obama wants to throw his support behind a 2002 Saudi Peace initiative endorsed by the Arab League and backed by Tzipi Livni, the Israeli foreign minister and leader of the ruling Kadima Party.

The Arab Peace plan received a boost when President Shimon Peres, a Nobel Peace laureate and leading Israeli Dove, commanded the initiative at a Saudi-sponsored United Nations conference in New York. Peres told King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia (who was behind this original intiative), "I wish that your voice will become the prevailing voice of the whole region."

Most of us don't want further procrastination BUT an END to the conflict! Barack Obama should lose no time in pursuing this peace plan.

After 63 years of the Palestinian Nakba, and despite 20 years of unsuccessful peace negotiations, the Palestinian people continue to be denied their most fundamental and inalienable rights to self-determination, national independence, sovereignty and return to their homes and properties from which they have been forcibly displaced.

“By virtue of the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations, all peoples have the right freely to determine, without external interference, their political status and to pursue their economic, social and cultural development, and every State has the duty to respect this right in accordance with the provisions of the Charter.”

The U.S. president said that an independent Palestine should be based on 1967 borders — before the Six Day War in which Israel occupied East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza — as adjusted by possible land swaps agreed upon by both sides. He said Israel can never live in true peace as a Jewish state if it insists on "permanent occupation."

"For the Palestinians, efforts to delegitimize Israel will end in failure. Symbolic actions to isolate Israel at the United Nations in September won’t create an independent state," Obama said, in a speech in which he repeatedly praised nonviolent protest in other parts of the region in pursuit of national "self-determination."

Livni, the leader of Kadima, which favours the plan, is the front-runner in Israeli elections due in February. Her rival, Benjamin Netanyahu, the leader of Likud, is adamantly against withdrawing to borders that predate the Six Day war in 1967.

But Netanyahu, don't be fooled by the applause! People around the world want peace, Peace. 

According to a Washington source Obama told Abbas: “The Israelis would accept this initiative because it would give them peace with the Muslim world from Indonesia to Morocco." 

Obama is endorsing the Palestinians' demand for their future state to be based on the borders that existed before the 1967 Middle East war. Israel says the borders of a Palestinian state have to be determined through negotiations.

Then, Please, let us start the negotiations! Palestinian people cannot live anymore in forced exile and they do need a state, a Palestinian state!

Petition in defence of Desmond Tutu

Archbishop Desmond Tutu has criticized publicly Israel's policy towards Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank. 

Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu has publicly criticised Israeli policy towards Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank. He has also criticised Palestinian attacks on Israeli civilians. These criticisms are well-known.

During the Second World War, Nazi Germany killed socialists, Roma people, resistance fighters, and six million Jews were transferred to ghettos and concentration camps before being murdered. This crime against humanity must never be forgotten. Its legacy and lessons must be guarded by all of humanity. 

But to call the Archbishop Desmond Tutu an anti-Semite, that is not acceptable!! to call him an anti-Semite because he has attacked the policies of the Israeli government is OUTRAGEOUS! 

Desmond Tutu embodies the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the rights contained in which pertain equally to Palestinians and Israelis. Desmond Tutu has dedicated his life for a more caring and just society in which Palestinian rights must be respected and valued and Israeli rights must be respected and valued. 

Nobel Peace Laureate Desmond Tutu calls for an END to Israeli Occupation. People in America are scared "to say wrong is wrong because the Jewish lobby is powerful, very powerful," Tutu said, and because they fear that to criticize Israel is "to immediately be dubbed anti-Semitic."  


Reverend Canon Richard Toll said, "All religions, men and women from all over the world are waking up and giving one message: END THE OCCUPATION"

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/1/defend-tutu/ "Tutu's life has been lived in the spirit of "never again" - the ultimate lesson of the Holocaust"

Sari & Oz: Rapprochement between Israelis and Palestinians

A committed writer, Amos Oz has always worked for a rapprochement between Israelis and Palestinians.Oz is the founder of Peace Now and he has remained an unwavering advocate of a two-state solution.


Six decades since the birth of Israel and the demise of Palestine! Palestine has been partitioned among Israel, Egypt (remained in occupation of the Gaza Strip), and Transjordan (which had taken the old city of Jerusalem and the territory west of the Jordan River).


No more a Palestinian Arab state and 700,000people had become refugees. A permanent mass exodus, as villagers abondoned their ancestral soil and city dwellers left behind their homes and businesses. The refugees live in makeshift camps located in Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, and the Gaza Strip. The camps became permanent! The absorption of Palestinian land and property into the Israeli economy made is next to impossible for Israel to consider the repatriation of the Palestinians (Cleveland, 2009).


In the refugee camps, concrete block dwellings have replaced the tents and they remain the home of thousands of Palestinian refugees. The people are deprived of work, freedom, and no future. They live with the sweeping political choices made by prime minister and presidents.


Sari Nusseibeh, a Palestinian philosophy professor and Al-Quds University President, offers drastically different views of Israel/Palestine and of Jerusalem where both Oz and Sari grew up.

Sari Nusseibeh was struck that Oz had excised Palestinian Arabs from his childhood memories in his book.

The Ta'ayush, the Palestinian-Israeli group that has taken up the most difficult and dangerous hands-on work of peacemaking by bringing convoys of medecine and food into the West Bank and helps Palestinian farmers harvest their wheat and olives, should be mentioned in the writings of Sari and Oz!!These courageous people often are placing themselves physically between groups of wild eyed guntoting settlers and Palestinian peasants simply trying to sow their fields. 

Now, Sari and Oz, please get together and try to find a two-state solution, please!

Once Upon a Country A Palestinian Life. By Sari Nusseibeh, with Anthony David. Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

A Tale of Love and Darkness By Amos Oz.

Palestinian Walks Notes on a Vanishing Landscape. By Raja Shehadeh.

Dark Hope Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine. By David Shulman.