At approximately 8:00pm on Sunday, 20 January, the Gaza Strip power plant ran out of fuel and shut down, plunging the Gaza Strip into darkness. The closure of the Gaza power plant, in addition to Israel’s continued, tightened siege on the Gaza Strip, will have a catastrophic effect on the 1.5 million residents of Gaza, who are already suffering chronic shortages of fuel, medicine and some basic food stuffs. The director of Gaza’s main hospital, al-Shifa, describes the current situation as “potentially disastrous.”

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Nahr el-Bared, camp de réfugiés palestiniens situé au bord de la Méditerranée, au Liban près de Tripoli, a été le théâtre d’un violent conflit entre l’armée libanaise et la faction armée Fatah al-Islam, du 20 mai au 4 septembre 2007, obligeant ses 40,000 résidents à évacuer contre leur gré. Aujourd’hui, il ne reste que des ruines, la plupart inhabitables.

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2007 has been a busy and exciting year for the Palestine solidarity movement. While Mahmoud Abbas and Ehud Olmert attempt to hide Israel’s crimes behind the lie of ‘peace negotiations’, thousands of individuals and organizations around the world are building a real and effective alternative centered on boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against Israeli apartheid. Here in Toronto, the Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid (CAIA) has been a proud participant in this global movement. This brief report captures some of our activities over 2007.

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Craig Appleby did not take part in the Second Lebanon War. The 36-year-old Briton from Farnham came to Lebanon in September 2007, more than a year after the end of the fighting. A month later he had joined the list of war dead.

An Israeli cluster bomblet, one of hundreds of thousands of bomblets contained in cluster rockets that the Israel Defense Forces fired at Lebanon during the war, blew up in his hands not far from Bint Jbail. Appleby, a British Army veteran who was head of one of the UN cluster munition clearing teams in South Lebanon, was killed instantly. A week earlier, a six-year-old Lebanese boy and a shepherd were also killed by bomblets.

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Washington: Un groupe d’Indiens Lakotas a décidé de faire sécession des Etats-Unis. Une délégation est venue en informer les autorités américaines le 17 décembre à Washington. Leur responsable, l’écrivain, acteur et militant Russell Means, a remis à un fonctionnaire du département d’Etat une lettre annonçant leur décision de rompre les traités signés en 1851 et 1868. “Nous ne sommes plus citoyens des Etats-Unis”, a expliqué Russell Means lors d’une conférence de presse organisée dans une église de Washington.

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As two of the authors of a recent document advocating a one-state solution to the Arab-Israeli colonial conflict, we intended to generate debate. Predictably, Zionists decried the proclamation as yet another proof of the unwavering devotion of Palestinian – and some radical Israeli – intellectuals to the “destruction of Israel”. Some pro-Palestinian activists accused us of forsaking immediate and critical Palestinian rights in the quest of a “utopian” dream.

Inspired in part by the South African Freedom Charter and the Belfast Agreement, the much humbler One State Declaration, authored by a group of Palestinian, Israeli and international academics and activists, affirms that “the historic land of Palestine belongs to all who live in it and to those who were expelled or exiled from it since 1948, regardless of religion, ethnicity, national origin or current citizenship status”. It envisages a system of government founded on “the principle of equality in civil, political, social and cultural rights for all citizens”.

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On Wednesday afternoon a group of 50 Palestinians, Israelis and international Human Rights activists gathered at Har Homa settlement, known to Palestinians as Abu Ghinim settlement, which is built on land illegally taken by the Israeli army from the southern West Bank city of Bethlehem.

The non-violent action was organized by the Israeli communist party, it came to protest against the expansion of the settlement, which comes weeks after the Annapolis Conference, and is in clear breach of the 2003 USA sponsored Road Map Peace Plan.

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Over a month ago, a French documentary, “Liban, Pays des Esclaves,” harshly criticized Lebanese society and the authorities for their treatment of migrant domestic workers. But instead of being outraged by the behavior of their fellow citizens, many Lebanese expressed outrage against the filmmaker who dared to sully their reputation in France. One group even organized a petition against the documentary on Facebook, Lebanon’s latest craze.

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