“I will play music and celebrate what the Israeli air force is doing.” Those were the words, spoken on Al Jazeera today by Ofer Shmerling, an Israeli civil defense official in the Sderot area adjacent to Gaza, as images of Israel’s latest massacres were broadcast around the world.

A short time earlier, US-supplied Israeli F-16 warplanes and Apache helicopters dropped over 100 bombs on dozens of locations in the Israeli-occupied Gaza Strip killing at least 195 persons and injuring hundreds more. Many of these locations were police stations located, like police stations the world over, in the middle of civilian areas. The US government was one of the first to offer its support for Israel’s attacks, and others will follow.

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SUNDAY, DECEMBER 28th 13h00
Norman Bethune Square
corner: Guy & de Maisonneuve
(metro Guy-Concordia)
Montreal, Quebec

Photo: Hatem Omar. Israel’s siege has forced bakeries in the Gaza Strip to close.

Israel’s siege of Gaza began on 5 November, the day after an Israeli attack inside the strip, no doubt designed finally to undermine the truce between Israel and Hamas established last June. Although both sides had violated the agreement before, this incursion was on a different scale. Hamas responded by firing rockets into Israel and the violence has not abated since then. Israel’s siege has two fundamental goals. One is to ensure that the Palestinians there are seen merely as a humanitarian problem, beggars who have no political identity and therefore can have no political claims. The second is to foist Gaza onto Egypt. That is why the Israelis tolerate the hundreds of tunnels between Gaza and Egypt around which an informal but increasingly regulated commercial sector has begun to form. The overwhelming majority of Gazans are impoverished and officially 49.1 per cent are unemployed. In fact the prospect of steady employment is rapidly disappearing for the majority of the population.

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Sameh A. Habeeb writing from the occupied Gaza Strip, 25 December 2008.

Photo: Matthew Cassel. Running on the downed Israeli-built wall with Egypt.

Israeli politicians, in the run-up to elections, are promising to deal a severe blow to Gaza as this is how Israeli policy is made. However, every household in Gaza is already under siege. In Gaza you can only find pale, angry and frustrated faces. If you visit my house you won’t find power, while my neighbor is out of gas. Another neighbor seeks potable water as power outages have left him without for four days. A third neighbor desparately looks for milk for his child but does so in vain. Another friend who lives on the corner needs medicine that can’t currently be found in Gaza.

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FRIDAY JANUARY 9th 2009
5-7pm Café l’Escalier
552 Ste-Catherine east
(metro Berri-UQAM)
this is a free event

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JANUARY 2009: Cinémathèque québécoise
Salle Fernand-Séguin
entry: 7$ (students, elders 6$)
335, boul. De Maisonneuve Est – Métro Berri-UQAM

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On December 14, I arrived at Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv, Israel to carry out my UN role as special rapporteur on the Palestinian territories.

I was leading a mission that had intended to visit the West Bank and Gaza to prepare a report on Israel’s compliance with human rights standards and international humanitarian law. Meetings had been scheduled on an hourly basis during the six days, starting with Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, the following day.

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photos capturing Montreal solidarity action with Muntader al-Zaidi.

Inspired by Iraqi journalist Muntader al-Zaidi, who launched a pair of shoes at U.S. President George W. Bush this past week in Baghdad, local activists in Montreal held a mass shoe-throwing directed at the U.S. Consulate and the Canadian Armed Forces recruiting centre in downtown Montreal this past Saturday.

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Interview with Sergio Yahni of the Alternative Information Center, by Stefan Christoff.

Photo: Active Stills. Palestinians protest against Israel’s apartheid wall.

U.S.-backed negotiations between the Palestinian Authority and Israel continue with little concrete results, as political promises from the U.S. administration to establish an independent Palestinian state in 2008 are distant from the reality on the ground. On the street level in both Israel and Palestine popular opinion expresses increasing political frustration towards the ongoing ‘peace process’.

Palestinian political prisoners are a key issue to the ongoing conflict, as Israel continues to imprison an estimated seven-thousand Palestinian prisoners. Israel released around two-hundred prisoners last week in an attempt to boost waning political support for the Palestinian Authority, while thousand more remain behind bars many held without trail under the Israeli policy of ‘administrative detention’.

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SATURDAY DECEMBER 20, 1pm
In solidarity with Muntadar al-Zeidi
outside the US Consulate in Montreal
(1155 St-Alexandre, métro McGill)

bring extra shoes and footwear to throw! bring noisemakers!

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