‘Israel has been ordered to open up its hefty nuclear arsenal for inspection, in an overwhelming majority vote by the UN general assembly.

The unexpected resolution has taken the limelight off Iran (who is not yet capable of producing nuclear weapons) and on to the Zionists, who ironically have been the ones screaming the loudest at the Ahmadinejad Government, but are well known to have had the bomb themselves for years.

Out of 193 members, only 6 rejected the resolution. They unsurprisingly include Israel themselves, the US and Canada. The Marshall Islands, Micronesia and Palau sheepishly followed.

In what may be a sign that the Zionists have been overstepping their boundaries, Britain and France voted for nuclear transparency; this just hours after Britain considered recalling their Ambassador to Israel, following plans by Prime Minster Netanyahu to further encroach on Palestinian land by building 3,000 new illegal settlements.

The pressure is now on Israel to join the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) and open its nuclear facilities to inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency.

It will be hard for them to claim any grounds for rejecting the proposal, not after they’ve pushed so hard for Iran (who are actually an active and for the most part cooperative member of the NPT) to be re-inspected by the body.

What’s the old saying? Those in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones? Perhaps warmongers with nuclear stockpiles shouldn’t make baseless accusations?

The Guardian reports:

Israel insists there must first be a Middle East peace agreement before the establishment of a proposed regional zone free of weapons of mass destruction. Its rivals in the region argue that Israel’s undeclared nuclear arsenal presents the greatest threat to peace in the region.

The vote came as a sequel to the cancellation of a high-level conference aimed at banning nuclear weapons from the Middle East. All the Arab nations and Iran had planned to attend the summit in mid-December in Helsinki, Finland, but the US announced on 23 November that it would not take place, citing political turmoil in the region and Iran’s defiant stance on non-proliferation. Iran and some Arab nations countered that the real reason for the cancellation was Israel’s refusal to attend.

All this being said, the resolution is not legally-binding and Israel continually break international law with no repercussions. It is however the first step by the international community to demonstrate a level of equality in their decisions. Only time will tell whether Britain’s recent stance against Jewish settlement expansion, and this vote for nuclear transparency, will actually turn in to something meaningful.

Until then it’s business as usual.’

(Source: wideshut.co.uk)

‘The Israeli assault on Gaza was triggered Nov. 8 when the IDF crossed the border and murdered Ahmed Younis Khader Abu Daqqa, a 13-year-old boy playing football in his front yard: the official explanation for this action was an alleged weapons cache, supposedly stored nearby, but no credible evidence supporting this contention has come to light. In retaliation, Hamas launched a — generally ineffective — counterattack, and the conflict escalated.

However, there had been rumblings for months of the oncoming Israeli assault, and this incident was merely a pretext: the real reason is that the Israelis were deathly afraid, not of Hamas’s pathetic attempts to make a dent in “Iron Dome,” but of the prospects for a general ceasefire, albeit not a settlement of the outstanding issues, which was in the works well before Netanyahu unleashed the latest blitzkrieg.

According to Gershon Baskin, initiator and negotiator of the secret back channel for the release of Gilad Shalit, Ahmed al-Jabari, leader of the military wing of Hamas, was ready for a peace deal — which was in the works in the days before Jabari was assassinated in a targeted Israeli strike:

“My indirect dealings with Mr. Jabari were handled through my Hamas counterpart, Ghazi Hamad, the deputy foreign minister of Hamas, who had received Mr. Jabari’s authorization to deal directly with me….

“Passing messages between the two sides, I was able to learn firsthand that Mr. Jabari wasn’t just interested in a long-term cease-fire; he was also the person responsible for enforcing previous cease-fire understandings brokered by the Egyptian intelligence agency. Mr. Jabari enforced those cease-fires only after confirming that Israel was prepared to stop its attacks on Gaza. On the morning that he was killed, Mr. Jabari received a draft proposal for an extended cease-fire with Israel, including mechanisms that would verify intentions and ensure compliance. This draft was agreed upon by me and Hamas’s deputy foreign minister, Mr. Hamad, when we met last week in Egypt.”

This nails it: it shows why Israel escalated a series of routine border incidents into a major conflict: Hamas was ready to negotiate. Jabari was going to drop a gigantic “peace bomb” on Tel Aviv, and Netanyahu and his cabinet launched a preemptive strike to make sure it never hit its target. The last thing they wanted was peace breaking out in spite of their systematic provocations.

Hamas is useful to Netanyahu and his coalition partner, wannabe ethnic cleanser Avigdor Lieberman: or, at least, the version of Hamas they have successfully sold to the West. The hasbara brigade in the American media regularly portrays the Palestinian resistance group as inherently and intransigently opposed to Israel’s very existence, pointing to its charter — which calls for the destruction of the Jewish state — and posits from this the utter impossibility of negotiations or even coexistence.

Yet Jabari’s peace feelers belie this simplistic nonsense and show that Hamas, like every other political entity on earth, is concerned first and foremost with maintaining its own grip on power. In order to do that, Hamas has to actually govern: that is, provide the inmates inhabitants of Gaza with the basic prerequisites of civilized life, i.e., access to food, shelter, and protection from harm. Under the conditions of the Israeli blockade, however, fulfilling these basic needs has been increasingly impossible.

As Melissa Harris Perry pointed out on her show Sunday morning, Hamas faces competing political currents inside Gaza: Islamic Jihad and the Popular Resistance Committees, who are more than ready to take the helm if and when Hamas fails to protect and care for its constituency. Faced with the IDF’s overwhelming military superiority, Jabari and the moderate faction of Hamas entered into back channel negotiations, brokered by the Egyptians, and were about to go public with a peace proposal.

That’s when the Israelis took him out. The timing of this is undeniable, and hardly coincidental. Netanyahu offed Jabari because peace is not in his political interests: he and his party, Likud, thrive on war, and the Israeli Prime Minister’s electoral prospects are almost entirely dependent on the continuation of the state of emergency that exists in Israel during wartime. Jabari was about to pull the rug out from under Netanyahu, and therefore he had to go.’

(Source: original.antiwar.com)

‘The way western politicians and media have pontificated about Israel’s onslaught on Gaza, you’d think it was facing an unprovoked attack from a well-armed foreign power. Israel had every “right to defend itself”, Barack Obama declared. “No country on earth would tolerate missiles raining down on its citizens from outside its borders.”

He was echoed by Britain’s foreign secretary, William Hague, who declared that the Palestinian Islamists of Hamas bore “principal responsibility” for Israel’s bombardment of the open-air prison that is the Gaza Strip. Meanwhile, most western media have echoed Israel’s claim that its assault is in retaliation for Hamas rocket attacks; the BBC speaks wearisomely of a conflict of “ancient hatreds”.

In fact, an examination of the sequence of events over the last month shows that Israel played the decisive role in the military escalation: from its attack on a Khartoum arms factory reportedly supplying arms to Hamas and the killing of 15 Palestinian fighters in late October, to the shooting of a mentally disabled Palestinian in early November, the killing of a 13 year-old in an Israeli incursion and, crucially, the assassination of the Hamas commander Ahmed Jabari last Wednesday during negotiations over a temporary truce.

Israel’s prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, had plenty of motivation to unleash a new round of bloodletting. There was the imminence of Israeli elections (military attacks on the Palestinians are par for the course before Israeli polls); the need to test Egypt’s new Muslim Brotherhood president, Mohamed Morsi, and pressure Hamas to bring other Palestinian guerrilla groups to heel; and the chance to destroy missile caches before any confrontation with Iran, and test Israel’s new Iron Dome anti-missile system.

So after six days of sustained assault by the world’s fourth largest military power on one of its most wretched and overcrowded territories, at least 130 Palestinians had been killed, an estimated half of them civilians, along with five Israelis. The goal, Israel’s interior minister, Eli Yeshai, insisted, had been to “send Gaza back to the middle ages”.’

(Source: Guardian)