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By Marc Schabracq
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By Frances Itani
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Social and political epochs rarely end precisely on schedules provided by calendars. The outcome of this year’s election means that 2009 will, finally, mark the beginning of the 21st century.
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AP photo / Dan Balilty
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By Robert Scheer — So, why didn’t they give peace a chance? Why did the leaders of Hamas and Israel not wait for the incoming U.S. president’s inauguration before mutually escalating hostilities?
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AP photo / Fadi Adwan
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By Chris Hedges — Can anyone who is following the Israeli air attacks on Gaza—the buildings blown to rubble, the children killed on their way to school, the long rows of mutilated corpses, the wailing mothers and wives, the crowds of terrified Palestinians not knowing where to flee, and our callous indifference to this widespread human suffering—wonder why we are hated?
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Mike Keefe, The Denver Post —
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Yaakov Kirschen, The Jerusalem Post, Dry Bones —
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Shifa hospital in Gaza has struggled to keep pace with Israel’s punishing airstrikes. Bloomberg reports that the hospital’s morgue has three bodies crammed in each drawer, with dozens more lying on stretchers.
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AP photo / Hatem Moussa
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By Robert Fisk — We’ve got so used to the carnage of the Middle East that we don’t care anymore—providing we don’t offend the Israelis.
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Israeli Foreign Minister (and prime minister contender) Tzipi Livni responds to international criticism of the Gaza airstrikes that have killed hundreds: “The one who needs to be condemned by the international community is Hamas.”
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AP photo / Eyad Baba
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By Robert Fisk — If reporting is, as I suspect, a record of mankind’s folly, then the end of 2008 is proving my point.
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iffkv.cz
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By Sheerly Avni — With Gaza exploding in violence and the eyes of the world fixed once again on the Middle East, “Waltz With Bashir” may be the most important movie of the season. As an “animated documentary,” it’s also in a genre all its own.
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AP photo / Hatem Omar
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More than 150 people were killed and hundreds more wounded Saturday during Israeli airstrikes on Gaza, which were launched in retaliation for last week’s rocket attacks on Israel by the Palestinians, according to Israeli officials.
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state.gov
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Hamas agreed to temporarily stop fighting Israel for 24 hours on Monday, but the Palestinian organization said it would respond to any subsequent military action from Israeli forces with suicide attacks at the end of the cease-fire.
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Once again, the cease-fire is off between the Israelis and Palestinians, and even though the United Nations has again weighed in with Security Council Resolution 1850, which supports a two-state solution, the new measure is not likely to change things in the near future. Over to you, Mr. President-elect.
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AP photo / Khalil Hamra
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By Robert Fisk — No one in 1967 dreamed that the Israeli-Arab conflict would still be in ferocious progress 41 years later, but the wording in United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 has something to do with this ongoing clash.
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AP photo / Hatem Moussa
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By Chris Hedges — Israel’s siege of Gaza, largely unseen by the outside world because of Jerusalem’s refusal to allow humanitarian aid workers, reporters and photographers access to Gaza, rivals the most egregious crimes carried out at the height of apartheid by the South African regime. It is meant to break Hamas, but will only breed future generations of militants.
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By Amy Goodman — As President-elect Barack Obama focuses on the meltdown of the U.S. economy, another fire is burning: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
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blogs.tnr.com
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The U.S. presidential election was watched with interest, of course, by Israelis, some of whom favored John McCain because they believed he would have been a better “friend of Israel” than Barack Obama will be. Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy wonders if there aren’t some problems with this idea.
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Flickr / World Economic Forum
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Tony Blair had hoped to visit Gaza in his capacity as Mideast envoy for the Quartet—that’s the U.S., the U.N., the EU and Russia—but had to cancel because of a “specific security threat.” It’s hard to be an envoy if you can’t get to where you need to go, but the former British prime minister promised to make it to Gaza eventually and “press for help for the people there.”
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AP photo / Oded Balilty
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Egypt has brokered a deal between Israel and Hamas to end fighting in Gaza. The agreement calls for a six-month cease-fire, and the possibility of reopening Gaza’s borders and returning a captured Israeli soldier.
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By Robert Fisk — So they are at it again, the great and the good of American democracy, groveling and fawning to the Israeli lobbyists of American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), repeatedly allying themselves to the cause of another country and one that is continuing to steal Arab land. Will this ever end?
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AP photo / Kevin Frayer
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By Allen McDuffee — George W. Bush’s attempt to juggle Israel’s 60th anniversary, Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts and his hostility toward Iran means that Palestinians lose again.
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By Robert Fisk — Another American humiliation. The Shia gunmen who drove past my apartment in west Beirut yesterday afternoon were hooting their horns, making V-signs, leaning out of the windows of SUVs with their rifles in the air, proving to the Muslims of the capital that the elected government of Lebanon has lost.
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AP photo / Oded Balilty
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By Chris Hedges — War creates a world without empathy. Those who have empathy cannot, as did Palestinian gunman Alaa Hisham Abu Dheim, coldly murder students in a Jerusalem library. Those who have empathy cannot drop tons of iron fragmentation bombs on crowded Palestinian refugee camps in Gaza, killing more than 120 Palestinians in a week, of whom one in five were children and more than half were civilians.
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A Palestinian gunman opened fire during dinner at Jerusalem’s Mercaz Harav seminary on Thursday, killing eight people and wounding nine before he was shot to death. President Bush condemned the attack, as did Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, while Hamas officials reportedly praised it but didn’t claim responsibility.
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guardian.co.uk
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A coalition of human rights and development groups has condemned Israel’s blockade of Gaza as the worst humanitarian crisis the territory has suffered since 1967. The Israeli government has defended the blockade as a necessary strategy against rocket attacks, a claim the aid groups reject.
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As Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama battled it out in several states Tuesday, Republican front-runner John McCain sent out a word of warning about the “dangerous” state of the world in trying to win supporters in San Antonio, Texas.
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AP photo / Gerald Herbert
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In keeping with the tradition of U.S. presidents attempting to forge peace agreements during their last years in office, President Bush remains optimistic about securing an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal in the final 10 months of his administration despite the recent outbreak of violence in the Middle East.
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AP photo / Adel Hana
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Attacks by Israeli forces killed more than 70 Palestinians on Saturday as fighting intensified in northern Gaza, prompting Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to call the incursion “more than a holocaust.” Two Israeli soldiers were killed and seven were wounded, the Israeli military reported. Updated.
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news.bbc.co.uk
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Tens of thousands of Palestinians flooded from a blockaded Gaza into Egypt on Wednesday after militants blew a gap in the border wall. Egyptian authorities stood by as the mob rushed to stock up on food and other supplies. Israel has raised concerns and appealed to Egypt to get control of the situation.
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news.google.com
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Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak has decided to temporarily ease a blockade on Gaza after international organizations showered Israel with warnings and condemnation. Israel has promised not to allow Gaza to turn into a humanitarian crisis, but that’s exactly what our own Chris Hedges calls it in his latest column.
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AP photo / Khalil Hamra
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By Chris Hedges — The former New York Times Middle East bureau chief warns that the actions that led to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza will not bring peace to Israel but will instead create a new generation of Palestinian militants.
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The Mosaic Intelligence Report looks at Bush’s rosy predictions for peace in the Middle East and explains why his optimism is unwarranted.
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AP / Khalil Hamra
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By Chris Hedges — The N.Y. Times’ former Middle East bureau chief, writing about Israel’s unrelenting attack on the Gaza Strip, argues: “It is a sad commentary on the gutlessness of the American press and timidity of the Democratic opposition that most Americans are not aware of the catastrophic humanitarian crisis they bear so much responsibility in creating.”
Above: Water mixes with blood in a street of a northern Gaza Strip town after an Israeli tank shelling in November.
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