By James Bowen, Ha’aretz, April 13, 2007

The apartheid wall in Palestine – modern version of the Irish Pale?

In the late 19th century, changes in Ottoman law created a new class of large landholders, including the Sursuq family from Beirut, which acquired large tracts in northern Palestine. A similar situation had long existed in Ireland, where most land was controlled by absentee landlords, many of whom lived in Britain.

The 1880s, however, initiated dynamics that led the two lands in different directions. In 1882, the first Zionist immigrants arrived in Palestine, starting a process that subsequently led to the eviction of indigenous tenant farmers, when magnates like the Sursuqs pulled the land from under their feet, selling it to the Jewish National Fund. (…اكثر)

By Stephen Brook, Friday April 13, 2007, MediaGuardian.co.uk

The National Union of Journalists has voted at its annual meeting for a boycott of Israeli goods as part of a protest against last year’s war in Lebanon. Today’s vote was carried 66 to 54 – a result that met with gasps and a small amount of applause from the union delegates present.

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Belgium’s Defense Minister said last week that he would act to extract payment from Israel for the removal of cluster bomb fragments that the Israel Defense Forces fired into Lebanese territory during the Second Lebanon War.

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Some 100 Syrians and Golan Heights residents marched Saturday to the office of the International Red Cross to mark Arab Detainees Day.

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130 U.K. Physicians Call for a Boycott of the Israeli Medical Association and its expulsion from the World Medical Association.

In a letter appearing in the Guardian on April 21, 2007, prominent UK physicians have called for a boycott of the IMA and its expulsion from the WMA. The letter follows:

“…..Persistent violations of medical ethics have accompanied Israel’s occupation. The Israeli Defence Force has systematically flouted the fourth Geneva convention guaranteeing a civilian population unfettered access to medical services and immunity for medical staff. Ambulances are fired on (hundreds of cases) and their personnel killed. Desperately ill people, and newborn babies, die at checkpoints because soldiers bar the way to hospital. (…اكثر)

Turning the pages of De Niro’s Game, one is transported to the war-torn streets of Beirut in the midst of Lebanon’s 15-year civil war, a tragic reality of flying bombs and bullets. A debut literary work from Montreal author Rawi Hage, who conveys this era of Lebanon’s turbulent history through the experiences of a pair of youths from Beirut, childhood best friends growing to adulthood in the political quagmire of civil war.

“De Niro’s Game started as a short-story,” Hage explains at a café in Montreal’s Côte-des-Neiges district. “Initially I wanted to write a piece about an incident that I remember of some kids who started playing Russian roulette after watching The Deer Hunter, which screened in Beirut at the beginning of the war in the 1970s. Guns were available everywhere in Beirut so kids starting playing.”

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This year’s US State Department annual report on human rights practices in Israel identifies discrimination against Palestinian citizens in most spheres of their lives.

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Canada needed to acquire 120 new tanks to deal with another 10 to 15 years of conflicts in Afghanistan and other countries, Defence Minister Gordon O’Connor said yesterday, amid opposition concerns that the war is escalating.

“Afghanistan and these type of engagements are the future for 10, 15 years,” Mr. O’Connor told CTV’s current affairs program Question Period.

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Beit Arabiya is the name of the home of Salim and Arabiya Shawamreh, a family of nine whose home has been demolished four times.

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BEIRUT: The opening scene is shot from a camera shouldered on a running body. An image of a dirt road jolts in the frame with each step. From somewhere off screen comes the sound of someone shouting gruffly for an ambulance. A smashed car drifts into view. The driver’s side door is open. Slumped in the front seat is a man, his chest and gut covered in blood, clearly dead. Then comes the deafening sound of an explosion. The camera jerks around to the left, searching. The place and time are set – South Lebanon in the summer of 2006.

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