Israel and PA Discuss Man-Made Gaza Island for Air and Seaports
by Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu MAR 29,11
Israel and the Ramallah-based Palestinian Authority have discussed building air and seaports on a man-made island off Gaza which would exclude Hamas, according to Israel television Channel 2. The government has not commented on the report.The idea has been discussed for the past two months among senior officials and has won wide support, Channel 2 added. The proposed two-acre man-made island would give PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas complete control over land and sea imports and exports, while keeping Hamas-controlled Gaza out of the picture. How that control would be defended was not mentioned.The idea of man-made islands in the Mediterranean Sea was proposed by President Shimon Peres four years ago.We must invest in the sea, and stretch our western border in that direction by building artificial islands, he said at a 2007 conference.Separate ideas proposed by other officials were to build an international airport a quarter-mile offshore from north Tel Aviv and to build between one and five islands along the central Israel coast between Bat Yam and Netanya as a way of alleviating central Israel's land shortage problem.(IsraelNationalNews.com)
Israel considering annexing West Bank settlements
By AMY TEIBEL, Associated Press – Tue Mar 29, 3:39 pm ET
JERUSALEM – Israel is considering annexing major West Bank settlement blocs if the Palestinians unilaterally seek world recognition of a state, an Israeli official said Tuesday — moves that would deal a grave blow to prospects for negotiating a peace deal between the two sides.Israel has refrained from taking such a diplomatically explosive step for four decades. The fact that it is considering doing so reflects how seriously it is concerned by the Palestinian campaign to win international recognition of a state in the absence of peacemaking.The Palestinians launched that campaign after peace talks foundered over Israeli construction in West Bank settlements. On Tuesday, the Israeli Interior Ministry said it would decide next month whether to give final approval to build 1,500 apartments in two Jewish enclaves in east Jerusalem. Israel captured both east Jerusalem and the West Bank from Jordan in 1967.Israel annexed east Jerusalem, home to shrines sacred to Judaism, Islam and Christianity, immediately after seizing it. But it carefully avoided annexing the West Bank, where 300,000 settlers now live among 2.5 million Palestinians.Although it is widely assumed that under any peace deal, Israel would hold onto major settlements it has built in the past 44 years, any decision to formally annex West Bank territory would be a precedent-setting move that could increase Israel's already considerable international isolation. The Palestinians claim all of the West Bank and east Jerusalem, in addition to the Gaza Strip, for a future state.
The government official who disclosed the possible annexation said he did not know how seriously authorities were considering the option. He said that adopting unilateral measures is not a one-way street and added that other options were also being considered.These could include limiting water supplies beyond agreed-upon amounts and restricting Palestinian use of Israeli ports for business purposes, he said. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was aware of the moves being discussed, he added, speaking on condition of anonymity because no final decisions have been made.Netanyahu's office had no comment. Nimr Hamad, an aide to Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, said these threats are not new. ... But we are continuing (our campaign) and are convinced our position is right.In a related development, the Israeli Transportation Ministry is working on a plan to build an island off the coast of Gaza, where an Palestinian-run airport and seaport would be located. Ministry spokesman Ilan Leizerovich said this would allow Israel to cut all ties with Hamas-ruled Gaza.At present most goods and people enter and exit Gaza through Israeli land crossings.Leizerovich said the island would be built about three miles (4.5 kilometers) off the Gaza coast and would be connected by a bridge. He said it would take about six years and cost more than $5 billion to build. The grandiose scheme would need additional government approval, Palestinian acceptance and funding.
Although peace negotiations have taken place since Netanyahu came to power two years ago, they have been sporadic and largely mediated by the U.S. Three weeks of direct talks broke down in September over Palestinian objections to continued Israeli settlement construction.Palestinians say they won't talk peace with Israel unless Israel freezes all construction in both the West Bank and east Jerusalem, lands they claim along with the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip for their hoped-for state. Israeli officials fault Palestinians for the peacemaking impasse, saying a construction moratorium should not be a condition for peacemaking, because it never was in the past.Israeli building in east Jerusalem is especially contentious because the Palestinians want to create their future capital there. Because of the annexation, Israel does not consider the Jewish enclaves housing 200,000 Jews there to be settlements, but the rest of the international community does.Roi Lachmanovich, a spokesman for Interior Minister Eli Yishai, said officials would decide the fate of the 1,500 new apartments on April 14. The homes would be built in two existing Jewish enclaves in east Jerusalem.Major Western powers have not given up on the concept of a negotiated solution. But with talks deadlocked, Palestinian leaders plan on seeking international recognition of a state, with or without an agreement with Israel, at the United Nations in September.Their campaign has received a boost from Latin American countries that have lined up in recent months to offer recognition. It hasn't received crucial U.S. or Western European support.Although international recognition wouldn't immediately change the situation on the ground, it would isolate Israel and put additional pressure on it to withdraw from occupied territories.Additional reporting by Associated Press writer Ian Deitch in Jerusalem.
Israel and The Occupation Myth
by MK Danny Ayalon, Dep. Foreign Min.MAR 29,11
The hatred and violence that killed five members of the Fogel family existed before the Jewish state did.The recent murder of a family of five in Itamar shocked Israelis to their core. A terrorist broke into the Fogels' home before stabbing and garroting to death the two parents, Udi and Ruth, and their children Yoav, 11 years old, Elad, 4, and almost decapitating Hadas, who was only three months old.
There has since been very little outcry from the international community. Many nations who are so used to condemning the building of apartment units beyond the Green Line remained silent on this sadistic murder. Meanwhile, the few international correspondents to have covered the massacre have placed it in the context of ongoing settlement-building and Israel's so-called occupation.However, regardless of one's views on which people have greater title to Judea and Samaria, or the West Bank, it is a historically inaccurate distortion to claim that the occupation that breeds this type of violence. If this mantra were true, then it must be the case that before the occupation there was no violence. This defies the historical record.In 1929, the Jewish community of Hebron—which stretches back millennia, long before the creation of Islam and the Arab conquest and subsequent occupation of the area—was brutally attacked. The Jews who had been living peacefully with their Muslim neighbors were set upon in a bloody rampage, inspired by Palestinian Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, who later became notorious as Hitler's genocidal acolyte during the Holocaust. In two days, 67 Jews were hacked or bludgeoned to death. Jewish infants were beheaded and Jewish women were disemboweled. Limbs were hacked off the dead as well as those who managed to survive.
On visiting the scene shortly after the massacre, Britain's High Commissioner for Palestine John Chancellor wrote to his son I do not think that history records many worse horrors in the last few hundred years.This and other similar pogroms happened, not only before the occupation of Judea and Samaria, but even two decades before the state of Israel was reestablished. From 1948 to 1967, Judea and Samaria were illegally occupied by Jordan, which renamed the area the West Bank, in reference to the East Bank of the Kingdom of Jordan that fell beyond the Jordan River. Not one Israeli was allowed into this area, yet nor did Israel know one day of peace in that time, during which it saw brutal attacks launched from the West Bank against Israeli civilians.Further evidence against the mantra that the occupation breeds violence can be culled from Palestinian sources. Take Hamas's founding charter, for instance, which does not mention occupation or settlements. What is does contain are calls for the complete destruction of Israel, down to its last inch, such as: Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it. The charter goes even further, aspiring to a point in time when there will be no Jews left anywhere in the world.Meanwhile, the Palestine Liberation Organization, currently headed by President Mahmoud Abbas, notes in its founding charter that this organization does not exercise any regional sovereignty over the West Bank, while still calling for a liberation of its homeland. This was written in 1964, fully three years before Israel conquered the West Bank during the Six Day War.It's safe to say that the violence and terror visited upon Israelis has little connection to occupation or settlements. This myth has no historical foundation, but is easy to proclaim for those who have little understanding of the conflict.Yet these fatuous canards only make our conflict harder to solve. The recent massacre in Itamar highlighted the Palestinian Authority's ongoing incitement to violence through its media, mosques and educational system. At this point, the basic parameters of the peace process need an overhaul. If our aim is to reach a peaceful resolution, then merely ending the occupation would far from guarantee that, as history has shown.
Israel was assured in the past by the international community that if it just retreated from Gaza and Lebanon, peace would flourish and violence would come to an end. In both cases, this hope proved deadly wrong, and millions of Israelis have been subjected to incessant attacks from these territories since the retreat.This is not about occupation or territory; it is about meaningful coexistence. Only when the root ideological causes of our conflict are solved can Israelis and Palestinians make the painful concessions necessary for peace.(reprinted from the Wall Street Journal, sent to INN by the dep. minister's advisor, Mr. Ashley Perry)Adar Bet 23, 5771 / 29 March 11
DANIEL 7:23-24
23 Thus he said, The fourth beast(THE EU,REVIVED ROME) shall be the fourth kingdom upon earth,(7TH WORLD EMPIRE) which shall be diverse from all kingdoms, and shall devour the whole earth, and shall tread it down, and break it in pieces.(TRADE BLOCKS)
24 And the ten horns out of this kingdom are ten kings that shall arise:(10 NATIONS) and another shall rise after them;(#11 SPAIN) and he shall be diverse from the first, and he shall subdue three kings.(BE HEAD OF 3 KINGS OR NATIONS).
Klaus warns euro pact will lead to full political union
LEIGH PHILLIPS 29.03.2011 @ 18:26 CET
EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - Vaclav Klaus, the Czech Republic's famously eurosceptic president renowned across Europe for holding up passage of the Lisbon Treaty for months, has launched an attack against a fresh EU target: the Euro-plus-pact.The Brussels summit on 25 March was not about anything else but the further integration of Europe towards fiscal ... union, he wrote in an opinion piece in Czech daily newspaper Pravo on Monday, referring to the meeting of EU premiers and presidents where 23 out of the bloc's 27 member states signed up to a pact that aims to boost European competitiveness.It was a radical reduction of the sovereignty of other EU countries.However, while trade unions and the left criticise the pact for its institutionalisation of fiscal retrenchment, limits to public spending and demands for wage constraint, Klaus, an ardent free-market liberal, attacked the document for delivering the opening steps towards a redistribution union between rich and poor states.The pact, along with other far-reaching measures endorsed by the summit last Friday, intends to deliver ever closer economic governance where the economic polices of each member state are co-ordinated centrally and supervised by Brussels.
The hair-shirt approach to fiscal policies contained in the pact are the quid pro quo demanded by Germany in particular in return for boosting the size of eurozone rescue funds. Klaus believes this is the beginning of large-scale financial transfers between states.The Czech president, the last EU leader to sign on to the Lisbon Treaty on 3 November, 2009, after months of stonewalling, accused EU leaders of using the economic crisis as an excuse to push for deeper integration. A few years ago when these people managed to pass the Lisbon Treaty - a European constitution - they knew that at the time this probably moved forward too fast and that there should now be a pause,he said.They even told me personally when trying to convince me to sign up to the Lisbon Treaty that there would now be a pause [from further integration moves] for an interval of at least ten years.By using the economic and financial crisis of 2008-2009 and the subsequent crisis of the euro in 2010 - still continuing - it gave them a wonderful excuse to get back to pushing forward with the further deepening of European integration.He worries that the fiscal integration that is occurring today will inevitably be followed by full political integration.He wrote that the European Economic Community later became just the European Community, then along came European Monetary Union and the European Union.Sooner or later, this will be followed by other developments, he wrote, saying that a European fiscal union, or EFU as he terms it, will be followed by an EPU.Where an EFU has been agreed in Brussels agreed ... an EPU is the final stage - the European Political Union.
Softer position from prime minister
The Czech government for its part has said, similar to the position of the UK, Sweden and Hungary, that it does not intend to join for the time being. It has said that while it has little problem with most of what is contained in the pact, there are two reasons why Prague could not join at the moment.The government is wary that language contained in the document encouraging consistency among national tax systems is the first step towards tax harmonisation across the bloc. Ireland and Slovakia, already in the eurozone and signatories to the euro-pact, as well as Hungary, which lies outside both, also have strong reservations about a shake-up of tax policies.The second concern is more easily resolved, in that the government being outside the eurozone had only had a few days to glance at the document before being pressured to sign on.Government sources say that a consultation with other coalition members and the full parliament will be required before any endorsement can be given.Once this consultation is completed and should sufficiently mollifying language on tax issues be found, Prague, like Budapest, could well join.Sweden has also indicated that it would like to join but cannot so long as there is no majority in parliament in favour.It is unlikely, say analysts, that the Czech Republic will choose to be left out in the cold for long.The prime minister welcomes the opportunity to still be able to join at a later stage, said one Czech source.Klaus however indicated he will resist pressure on his country to sign up to the pact.
The position of [Czech] Prime Minister Necas - I wish this was the attitude of the whole of the government - in not entering the EFU, is certainly right and we should support him in it, he wrote.On 18 March, Klaus gave another speech in the Italian Tyrol attacking fiscal integration.In the first historical phase of European integration, liberalisation trends prevailed. In the second phase, especially in the last twenty years, unfortunately, centralisation, harmonisation, standardisation and regulatory trends have dominated.A source close to the president said he is unlikely to drop his campaign against the pact any time soon.Czech diplomats stress however that the president was speaking in a personal capacity and that his arguments may not be the official position of the government.
Bulgarian central bank, finance ministry oppose euro-pact
In related news, EUobserver has learnt that Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borisov spurned advice from his finance minister and the head of the central bank last week, who recommended against the country joining the euro-pact.Bulgaria has a flat income and corporate tax rate of 10 percent, the lowest taxes in the EU. Like the Czechs, Hungarians and Irish, it hopes to retain its ultra-low tax burden.But the prime minister felt that if he signed on despite the opposition of his colleagues, he would guarantee entry to the euro for his country.A government spokesperson confirmed the negative stance of the finance ministry and the central bank, adding however: The whole of the government participated in analysis of the pact, and all opinions were considered, but the final decision was taken by the prime minister.
