The post-Annapolis crush toward forcing Israel to lift checkpoints is leading the charge (and the USA Today webbot can’t spell “Israel”).
The Palestinian prime minister said he failed to win assurances from Israel’s defense minister Thursday that he’ll ease stifling restrictions on Palestinian movement — a measure seen as key to the success of an ambitious international effort to revive the Palestinian economy.
The World Bank warned that unless Israel removes some of the physical and administrative obstacles to Palestinian travel and trade, donor countries asked to pledge $5.6 billion at a conference in Paris next week may be wasting their money.
Even if the donors pay the full amount, the Palestinian economy would keep shrinking by about 2% a year as long as the Israeli restrictions remain in place, the World Bank wrote in a report Thursday.
Israel’s military has been reluctant to remove some of the hundreds of roadblocks and barriers in the West Bank, saying they’re an effective tool against Palestinian militants, and that the Palestinian government does not have sufficient control over the territory to prevent attacks on Israelis.
The issue of roadblocks was raised Thursday in a meeting between international Mideast envoy Tony Blair, Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad and Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak. Asked whether he won any Israeli guarantees of easing restrictions, Fayyad said: “It’s a one-word answer — no.”
That’s because of a one-word problem: Terrorism. Stop the murders, and I’m sure Israel would be more than happy to lift checkpoints and let the boys in the IDF go home. Not that the problem of Israelis being murdered makes anyone outside of Israel (and the Jewish community) lose any sleep. Certainly not Tony Blair.
However, Blair’s presence made it clear that the international community has a “huge stake in all of this,” Fayyad said.
“Donors are being asked to fund the Palestinian Authority whose funding needs are at least in part caused by these (Israeli) restrictions,” he said. “Clearly, the trade- off is there for everyone to see.”
Definitely not the AP writers and editors.
In violence Thursday, a rocket fired by Gaza militants hit a house in the Israeli border town of Sderot and seriously injured an Israeli woman. The rocket smashed through the roof, and Israeli TV showed medics carrying a woman out of the house on a stretcher.
Palestinian militants fire crude rockets almost daily at southern Israeli border communities, but the inaccurate projectiles rarely cause casualties or damage. However, they disrupt daily life there, and Israel has been indicating strongly that it will launch a large-scale ground attack in Gaza to try to stop the barrages.
See? A woman was seriously injured today, and a woman was lightly injured two days ago, but the rockets “rarely cause casualties or damage.” The fact that they’ve done so two days this week means—nothing.
The incoming U.N. Mideast envoy, Robert Serry, denounced the rocket attack in unusually strong terms. “Let me be clear about this: We consider that to be terrorist acts,” he said.
I’ll believe that means something when I see more than words.
Ahead of Monday’s pledging conference, Israel was coming under heavy pressure to show flexibility on the restrictions issue.
Gordon Brown is supposedly putting restrictions on the British pledge of half a billion dollars in aid.
British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has said he would link an aid package of $500 million to improved security in the region, progress in peace talks, and an easing of Israeli restrictions.
Britain has lobbied Israel to ease restrictions and pressed for the removal of barriers to travel within the West Bank. “The aid is dependent on the conditions the prime minister set out,” a British Foreign Office spokesman said on customary condition of anonymity in line with policy.
Britain is the only country to raise such a condition ahead of the Paris conference, said a diplomat in Paris, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter.
Yeah, we’ll see how long that lasts. Watch for the conditions to disappear or be satisfied by mere tokens.
Also jumping onboard: The ICRC, the organization that refused to let Magen David Adom use the Star of David as a member, but that lets the Muslim world use the Crescent of Islam.
In Geneva, the International Committee of the Red Cross said the humanitarian situation in the Palestinian territories is worsening. Gaza’s situation is particularly dire; it’s been cut off from the world since June when Hamas seized control, and Israel and Egypt virtually closed their borders with the territories.
Referring to the donors’ conference, the ICRC called for immediate political action to alleviate the suffering. The Red Cross rarely addresses conflict parties so openly, preferring instead to raise its concerns through less-public channels.
“The measures imposed by Israel come at an enormous humanitarian cost, leaving the people living under occupation with just enough to survive, but not enough to live a normal and dignified life,” said Beatrice Megevand Roggo, ICRC’s head of operations for the Middle East.
But that’s not all. Oxfam has leaped into the fray as well. But then, Oxfam has a history of anti-Israel proclamations and actions.
International assistance to the Palestinians will not be effective unless Israel eases travel restrictions that have stalled some aid projects and sent the costs of others soaring, Oxfam International warned on the eve of a donors’ conference.
Israel says the restrictions in the West Bank and Gaza Strip are necessary to ensure its security. But with 80 percent of Palestinians depending on aid, Oxfam urged donor states to challenge Israel on its policies at their meeting in Paris next week.
Now, read this next paragraph carefully, and tell me what is missing:
“It is not enough simply to plow more money into Palestine foreign governments and the Palestinian Authority must increase the pressure on the Israeli government to lift the blockade of Gaza and make it possible for people in the West Bank to go about their business,” Oxfam head Jeremy Hobbs said in a news release.
That’s right. Any words at all urging the Palestinians to stop their murderous attacks on Israelis. Because after all, it’s much more important that the Palestinians be allowed to move freely to get their handouts from the world organizations that are effectively funding the murder of Jews in Israel than it is for Jews in Israel to not be murdered.
Exit questions: Will all this pressure cause Israel to make eliminate checkpoints? And how soon afterward will the first suicide bomber hit Tel Aviv?
“Will all this pressure cause Israel to make eliminate checkpoints? And how soon afterward will the first suicide bomber hit Tel Aviv?”
Aye, there’s the rub. How effective, really, are the checkpoints in preventing suicide attacks in Israel proper? Do they really add a whole lot of value to the security barrier? I’m willing to believe that the checkpoints are a vital security necessity but I just haven’t heard a convincing argument for them yet.
If the media told the truth…
Let me fix that first paragraph:
Let’s see…
2001:
204 Israelis killed, 1572 wounded
25 checkpoints in the West Bank
2002:
451 Israelis killed, 2307 wounded
23 checkpoints in the West Bank (two destroyed by bombs)
2003:
210 Israelis killed, 994 wounded
147 checkpoints in the West Bank
2004:
117 Israelis killed, 595 wounded
205 checkpoints in the West Bank
2005:
55 Israelis killed, 483 wounded
376 checkpoints in the West Bank
2006:
30 Israelis killed, 302 wounded
528 checkpoints in the West Bank
Seems to be a bit of a correlation there. I’m sure it’s totally meaningless.
But Tatterdemalian, 2003 is also the year Israel started building the security barrier. I’m trying to ascertain whether the checkpoints add a lot of beneifit on top of the barrier. I tend to think that building an impressive barrier — landmines galore! — would protect Israel from infiltration just as well as the checkpoints.
(By the way, do you have a link for the statistics? Thanks.)
The problem with Lefty and the left wing in general is that they really believe that you can negotiate with the psychotic radical Moslems.
It is naive as hell to believe that these killers will in the long term do anything different then the Hamas charter tells them what to do, and that strict rule is “all Jews out of the middle east or living as second class citizens under Moslem rule.”
Lefty, a number of the checkpoints are at the fence itself, including those parts of it designed to protect Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria. Still others are designed to prevent the transport of explosives, bomb parts and other weapons (as well as would-be “martyrs”) from one part of the “West Bank” to another so that production and distribution are made more difficult. So, yes, the checkpoints unfortunately do add a significant necessary benefit on top of the fence.
“The World Bank warned that unless Israel removes some of the physical and administrative obstacles to Palestinian travel and trade, donor countries asked to pledge $5.6 billion at a conference in Paris next week may be wasting their money.”
They’ll be wasting it anyway. The PA, and Hamas too, are sinks of corruption and waste. What isn’t stolen will be channelled into supporting jihad and, therefore, attempted genocide. If the clowns in the “Internatioanl Community”, especially the EU, actually wanted to end this war without a bloodbath they would cut off the Palestinian Arabs completely from all aid. Force them to work or starve and they will have to work to eat, and not have time for their activites aimed at Jewish genocide.
The Muslims aim at genocide and all those complaceniks around the world shut their eyes to this fact. Because it aims at genocide, the Muslim war against Israel is itself a violation of international law (such as it is), a violation of the Genocide Convention adopted after WWII when the horror of what the Nazis had done was fresh and people still remembered what it meant.
For that reason, if anybody took real international law seriously they would be Israel supporters. That the clowns who blather loudest about international law are not speaks volumes about the falsity of their advocay of such law.
B”H I think that the issue is that of double standards and of Israel’s codependence. The so-called “Road Map” says that the Arabs are supposed control terror before any final status talks are to proceed, yet a deadline has been set for final status talks in Annapolis, even though that hasn’t happened.
And why on earth would it ever happen? The Tanzim (Fatah’s military wing) are behind many of the attacks. The PA’s educational programming supporting suicide bombings and other forms of violence against Jews also does not help to quell the attacks.
Lefty wants evidence that the checkpoints are effective. In a “normal” situation, I, too, would expect some kind of statistical justification. This is not a normal situation.
They’re not 100% effective, especially with self-hating Jews like Mahsom Watch yelling at IDF soldiers to release terorists (unbeknownst to them), and the soldiers actually listening to them, like what recently happened in Hawara (in Samaria, east of Shchem).
Even if one Israeli life is saved at the inconvenience of 1,000’s of Arabs, isn’t it worth it? Granted the EU and UN do not value Jewish lives as much as others, but I don’t care.
I’m all for finding a more efficient way to prevent terrorist attacks. Resettlement will have to be the ultimate answer,…of Arabs that is.
I am against the need for checkpoints. I am also against a stupid fence running through the middle of my country.
Fences do not send the message the “this is ours,” they send the message that the other part on the other side of the fence, isn’t.
So-called Palestinians already have a country. They actually came from three: Jordan, Syria, and Egypt.