BEIRUT: For the contemporary art scene in Beirut, 2006 was a tough year, as it was for nearly every other sector in the country, creative industries and otherwise. Twelve months ago, few might have guessed that 2007 would be worse. But it was. The opposition protests in Downtown Beirut turned epic. Riots broke out on Black Tuesday. Explosions and assassinations continued. The fighting at Naher al-Bared and the displacement of thousands of refugee-camp residents made vibrant cultural life remote, irrelevant and impossible. The ongoing fiasco surrounding the failure of Lebanon’s political class to elect a president is at best bad theater.

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In the European Union, Canada and the United States, numerous organizations – including many national liberation movements and organizations – are listed as “designated terrorist organizations.” This status is used in an attempt to criminalize popular resistance and national liberation movements, equate those movements with “terrorism,” frighten and silence communities’ support of their national movements, and potentially penalize supporters of the Palestinian cause, as well as other national liberation movements.

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JERUSALEM: The Israeli army on Monday said it will not press charges against officers who ordered the use of cluster bombs during last year’s war in Lebanon, brushing off international criticism that the weapons unnecessarily put Lebanese civilians at risk.

Announcing the results of a more than year-long probe, the army said investigators determined Israel’s use of cluster bombs was a “concrete military necessity” and did not violate international humanitarian law. Lebanese officials accused the army of covering up war crimes.

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GAZA CITY: “Santa Claus is empty handed this year … insolvent,” says Father Manuel Musallam, head of the Holy Family School in Gaza City.

“All forms of celebration are absent,” he says, raising his empty palms skywards. “We Christians and Muslims all live in fear and instability. The Israeli tanks, bulldozers and warplanes have laid siege on us all.”

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Friday, December 21
12 noon to 1pm
The Israeli Consulate
Peel & Rene Levesque

Since Monday, December 17, in a series of air strikes that are continuing, Israel killed 24 and wounded dozens of residents of the Gaza strip leaving some of them with severed limbs. Israeli air strikes in the past also bombed crowded streets and markets in Gaza — Gaza is the most densely populated place on earth — resulting in many civilian casualties.

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Increasingly, Israel is handing over its ‘Judaisation’ project to private firms
– leading to a corrosion of accountability…

For less than four dollars an hour, the Jewish teenagers removed furniture, clothes, kitchenware and toys from the homes and loaded them on to trucks. As they worked diligently alongside the many policemen who had come to secure the destruction of 30 houses in two unrecognised Bedouin villages, Bedouin teenagers stood by watching their homes being emptied.

When all the belongings had been removed, the bulldozers rapidly destroyed the homes. All those present, Jews and Bedouins, were Israeli citizens; together they learned an important lesson in the discrimination characterising civic life in the Jewish state.

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Palestinian medical sources reported on Tuesday that six Palestinians have been killed and 19 others wounded, during an Israeli army ground offensive on southern Gaza Strip today.

Dr. Moa’wiya Abu Hasanin, chief of emergency room of the health ministry, told the IMEMC that a number of the wounded had to undergo surgery to amputate limbs and that majority of those killed had burns all over their bodies.

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“A kind of aggression.” “A successor to the Berlin Wall.” “A lever in the long power struggle between democratic values and fundamentalism.” “An insult to education.” “A terrorist operation.” These descriptions–by former French President Jacques Chirac; economist Jacques Attali; and philosophers Bernard-Henri Lévy, Alain Finkielkraut and André Glucksmann–do not refer to the next great menace to human civilization but rather to the Muslim woman’s headscarf, which covers the hair and neck, or, as it is known in France, the foulard islamique.

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For decades, efforts to bring about a two-state solution in historic Palestine have failed to provide justice and peace for the Palestinian and Israeli Jewish peoples, or to offer a genuine process leading towards them.

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Photo: Israeli Settlement in the West Bank

Israel’s housing ministry said yesterday it plans to build 307 new homes in a settlement in East Jerusalem, drawing swift condemnation from Palestinian officials.

Tenders were published for housing units in Har Homa, a settlement to the south-east of the city on land captured by Israel in the 1967 war and later annexed. East Jerusalem is now home to around 200,000 Jewish settlers. Most of the international community does not recognise Israel’s annexation of the east of the city.

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