By Jeff Gates

Israeli officials are right to worry. Gazans too. Yet Americans should worry even more.

Israel's "legitimacy" will not last. Of course, that assumes its legitimacy was deserved. That issue also is now called into question in light of the consistency of Israeli behavior over the past six decades. The emerging issues are these:

When and how will the recognition of Israel's nation-state status be withdrawn? How will Tel Aviv behave in the interim?

Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman may have tipped his Masada hand when he reportedly told Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan that Israel may use nuclear weapons against Gaza. The threat to Israel is not the 1.5 million Gazans who reside in the world's largest open-air prison.

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Eric S. Margolis

The US government has wanted to dump the hapless Karzai, but could not find an equally obedient but more effective replacement. There has been talk in Washington of imposing an American `chief executive officer’ on him. Or, in the lexicon of the old British Raj, an imperial Viceroy. This may yet happen.

Here we go again with more political theater in war-ravaged Afghanistan. -The last vote, held in August, was so blatantly rigged that Washington put a gun to the head of its Afghan client, Hamid Karzai, and forced him into the humiliation of holding a runoff vote in November against rival Abdullah Abdullah.

As Henry Kissinger once observed, being America’s ally can be more dangerous than being its enemy.

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Jean Shaoul

Israel has responded to the United Nations Human Rights Council’s endorsement of the Goldstone report accusing it of war crimes during its assault on Gaza in 2008-2009 by denouncing the UN and seeking to overturn existing international law.

The explicit aim of Tel Aviv is to give the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) carte blanche to do as it likes in the name of “combating terrorism.”

The report by South African Judge Richard Goldstone said the war on Gaza was “a deliberately disproportionate attack designed to punish, humiliate and terrorise a civilian population, radically diminish its local economic capacity both to work and to provide for itself, and to force upon it an ever-increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability.”

Goldstone said that the UN Security Council should refer the case to the International Criminal Court if Israel failed to carry out an independent investigation into the military’s conduct. Those countries that were signatories to the 1949 Geneva Conventions had a duty to use their powers of “universal jurisdiction” to search for and prosecute those responsible for war crimes, he added.

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eileen fleming

Protestors shut down
Ehud Olmert speech at
University of Chicago

The passionate Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah, was the first to be arrested on October 15, 2009, when 30 activists vocally disrupted former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert during his speech at the University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy.

Olmert was Prime Minister during Israel's Dec.-Jan. attack on Gaza that killed 1,400 Palestinians in Gaza and also during Israel's 2006 invasion of Lebanon that killed 1,200. As Prime Minister and the top civilian commander of Israel's armed forces, he was involved in and responsible for planning and execution of both attacks.

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