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"

Palestine Refugees

For six decades the Palestine refugees and their descendants have suffered dispossession, exile, conflict, and poverty. Many thousands have lived their lives in concrete shanties.

Following World War I and as the result of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in 1917, the British started their three-decade presence in Palestine. The conflict between Jews and Arabs over Palestine put the British in the middle, between the Zionist hope to form a Jewish national home in Palestine (as promised by the British in the Balfour Declaration), and the Arabs who were against this idea. 

The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) came into being in 1949 and has been heping the refugees who lost their homes, businesses, and farms. In the refugee camps, there was disease, lack of food and water and shelter. Tens of thousands crowded into barracks or caves. 

Today the registered refugee population has grown to 4.8 million, and the agency employs over 29,000 staff, mostly refugees themselves to care for thei basic needs. In Gaza, the effect of years of conflict and siege since the start of the second intifada mean that 900,000 people are now reliant on UNRWA for emergency food aid. 

The refugee problem must be taken seriously at the negotiation table. The Palestine refugees embody the collective sense and experience of Palestinian loss! 

Gandhi wrote in The Hindu, 1 May 1947: ‘The Arabs are a great people with a great history and therefore if they provide refuge for the Jews without the mediation of any nation, it will be in their tradition of generosity." Therefore, Jews and Arabs has to be able to imagine and create peace and have a dialogue about a two state solution that will allow each community to secure its rights, identity, and legitimacy by embracing the other as equal. 

Israelis have been told for decades by their leaders that only an exclusive and controlled enclave can guarantee their survival! Is the conflict at a bleak impasse? Israel needs to give up land it had occupied in exchange for peace. Will the new generation of Palestinians engage in massive non-violent resistance in the areas occupied in 1967 and claim the "Right of Return". 

God, YHWH or Allah promised the land of milk and honey to the seed of Abraham. However, Abraham is the shared religious figure of Palestine and Israel, Muslim, Jewish and Christian citizens. Abraham had two sons, Ishmael and Isshak, from whom the Muslims (Ishmael) and the Jews (Isshak) base their religious claim to the same land. Therefore, each culture claims occupation of the same land through religious justification from God and the same prophet. 

Ta'3yush (Arabic for "life in common") is a Muslim-Jewish educational partnership working to break down the walls of racism, ethnocentrism, and segregation by constructing a true Palestinian-Israeli collaboration giving economic and social assistance. This association holds indeed a role model in the region. 
 

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.