No pasta for Palestinians

by: shergald

Wed Feb 25, 2009 at 15:19

Uri Avnery, founder of Gusn Shalom, the Israeli peace activist group, once predict that America will eventually turn against Israel on grounds of its human rights abuses, but like a large ship in the ocean, its turn will be slow. The turn has come as we are seeing more and more evidence that Israel will no longer wag America's tail and bring it more and more international opprobrium on its account.

This article, Clinton warns Israel over delays in Gaza aid, which appeared in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz today, already intimates a new US policy concerning Israel and its treatment of the Palestinians.
February 25, 2009

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has relayed messages to Israel in the past week expressing anger at obstacles Israel is placing to the delivery of humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip. A leading political source in Jerusalem noted that senior Clinton aides have made it clear that the matter will be central to Clinton's planned visit to Israel next Tuesday.

Ahead of Clinton's visit, special U.S. envoy to the Middle East George Mitchell is expected to issue a sharply worded protest on the same matter when he arrives here Thursday.

It has already been announced that the US is willing to contribute 900 million dollars to the rebuilding of Gaza, devastated by Israel's 22 day bombing and shelling of the Strip in December and January, America again paying for Israel's foibles. Of particular note was Israel's earlier ignorance of President Obama's request that Israel open all entrances to Gaza in order to permit humanitarian aid to flow in freely. Israel's actions, tantamount to a refusal, continued to permit only 10-15% of food and medical supplies into Gaza.

Unless Israel is depending upon AIPAC and other right wing American Jewish organizations to intervene, confrontation is inevitable. And Hillary seems to be providing the first round.

In the meantime, Israel continues to play games, even insisting that aid is sufficient and that there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Here is an interesting interaction that John Kerry had on his recent trip into Gaza (from the same article):

Major General (res.) Amos Gilad, who heads the diplomatic-security bureau at the Defense Ministry, issued a statement yesterday denying European Union reports on the breadth of humanitarian aid being allowed to enter Gaza...."any claim of food shortage [in Gaza] is false."

...an incident occured last week at a crossing into the Gaza Strip that gave a very different impression to a senior observer. When Senator John Kerry visited the Strip, he learned that many trucks loaded with pasta were not permitted in. When the chairman of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee inquired as to the reason for the delay, he was told by United Nations aid officials that "Israel does not define pasta as part of humanitarian aid - only rice shipments."

Kerry asked Barak about the logic behind this restriction, and only after the senior U.S. official's intervention did the defense minister allow the pasta into the Strip.

"This is outrageous (said another Israeli official). Why should a senior American official issue a protest on pasta in order for us to recognize that we need to allow it into the Gaza Strip?"

Confrontation is inevitable. Apparently, some American politicians are not longer willing to play a game that recently led to the killings of over 1,300 mostly Palestinian civilians. And let's not even begin to talk about the number of Palestinian children slaughtered.
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