per fortuna il mondo si puo' cambiare....

[principessa]

Volevo postarvi quest'articolo di Gideon Levy (un giornalista israeliano che scrive su Ha'aretz, uno dei principali quotidiani israeliani ...quindi non proprio un pinco pallino qualunque e neanche uno schierato...purtroppo l'articolo e' in inglese...mi perdoneranno coloro che non lo possono leggere...

Who started?
By Gideon Levy
Ha'aretz, 2006, July

We left Gaza and they are firing Qassams - there is no more precise a formulation of the prevailing view about the current round of the conflict. They started, will be the routine response to anyone who tries to argue, for example, that a few hours before the first Qassam fell on the school in Ashkelon, causing no damage, Israel sowed destruction at the Islamic University in Gaza.
Israel is causing electricity blackouts, laying sieges, bombing and shelling, assassinating and imprisoning, killing and wounding civilians, including children and babies, in horrifying numbers, but they started.
They are also breaking the rules laid down by Israel: We are allowed to bomb anything we want and they are not allowed to launch Qassams. When they fire a Qassam at Ashkelon, that's an escalation of the conflict, and when we bomb a university and a school, it's perfectly alright. Why? Because they started. That's why the majority thinks that all the justice is on our side. Like in a schoolyard fight, the argument about who started is Israel's winning moral argument to justify every injustice.
So, who really did start? And have we left Gaza?
Israel left Gaza only partially, and in a distorted manner. The disengagement plan, which was labeled with fancy titles like partition and an end to the occupation, did result in the dismantling of settlements and the Israel Defense Forces' departure from Gaza, but it did almost nothing to change the living conditions for the residents of the Strip. Gaza is still a prison and its inhabitants are still doomed to live in poverty and oppression. Israel closes them off from the sea, the air and land, except for a limited safety valve at the Rafah crossing. They cannot visit their relatives in the West Bank or look for work in Israel, upon which the Gazan economy has been dependent for some 40 years. Sometimes goods can be transported, sometimes not. Gaza has no chance of escaping its poverty under these conditions. Nobody will invest in it, nobody can develop it, nobody can feel free in it. Israel left the cage, threw away the keys and left the residents to t

 

[principessa]

Volevo postarvi quest'articolo di Gideon Levy (un giornalista israeliano che scrive su Ha'aretz, uno dei principali quotidiani israeliani ...quindi non proprio un pinco pallino qualunque e neanche uno schierato...purtroppo l'articolo e' in inglese...mi perdoneranno coloro che non lo possono leggere...

Who started?
By Gideon Levy
Ha'aretz, 2006, July

We left Gaza and they are firing Qassams - there is no more precise a formulation of the prevailing view about the current round of the conflict. They started, will be the routine response to anyone who tries to argue, for example, that a few hours before the first Qassam fell on the school in Ashkelon, causing no damage, Israel sowed destruction at the Islamic University in Gaza.
Israel is causing electricity blackouts, laying sieges, bombing and shelling, assassinating and imprisoning, killing and wounding civilians, including children and babies, in horrifying numbers, but they started.
They are also breaking the rules laid down by Israel: We are allowed to bomb anything we want and they are not allowed to launch Qassams. When they fire a Qassam at Ashkelon, that's an escalation of the conflict, and when we bomb a university and a school, it's perfectly alright. Why? Because they started. That's why the majority thinks that all the justice is on our side. Like in a schoolyard fight, the argument about who started is Israel's winning moral argument to justify every injustice.
So, who really did start? And have we left Gaza?
Israel left Gaza only partially, and in a distorted manner. The disengagement plan, which was labeled with fancy titles like partition and an end to the occupation, did result in the dismantling of settlements and the Israel Defense Forces' departure from Gaza, but it did almost nothing to change the living conditions for the residents of the Strip. Gaza is still a prison and its inhabitants are still doomed to live in poverty and oppression. Israel closes them off from the sea, the air and land, except for a limited safety valve at the Rafah crossing. They cannot visit their relatives in the West Bank or look for work in Israel, upon which the Gazan economy has been dependent for some 40 years. Sometimes goods can be transported, sometimes not. Gaza has no chance of escaping its poverty under these conditions. Nobody will invest in it, nobody can develop it, nobody can feel free in it. Israel left the cage, threw away the keys and left the residents to t

 

[principessa]

Volevo postarvi quest'articolo di Gideon Levy (un giornalista israeliano che scrive su Ha'aretz, uno dei principali quotidiani israeliani ...quindi non proprio un pinco pallino qualunque e neanche uno schierato...purtroppo l'articolo e' in inglese...mi perdoneranno coloro che non lo possono leggere...

Who started?
By Gideon Levy
Ha'aretz, 2006, July

We left Gaza and they are firing Qassams - there is no more precise a formulation of the prevailing view about the current round of the conflict. They started, will be the routine response to anyone who tries to argue, for example, that a few hours before the first Qassam fell on the school in Ashkelon, causing no damage, Israel sowed destruction at the Islamic University in Gaza.
Israel is causing electricity blackouts, laying sieges, bombing and shelling, assassinating and imprisoning, killing and wounding civilians, including children and babies, in horrifying numbers, but they started.
They are also breaking the rules laid down by Israel: We are allowed to bomb anything we want and they are not allowed to launch Qassams. When they fire a Qassam at Ashkelon, that's an escalation of the conflict, and when we bomb a university and a school, it's perfectly alright. Why? Because they started. That's why the majority thinks that all the justice is on our side. Like in a schoolyard fight, the argument about who started is Israel's winning moral argument to justify every injustice.
So, who really did start? And have we left Gaza?
Israel left Gaza only partially, and in a distorted manner. The disengagement plan, which was labeled with fancy titles like partition and an end to the occupation, did result in the dismantling of settlements and the Israel Defense Forces' departure from Gaza, but it did almost nothing to change the living conditions for the residents of the Strip. Gaza is still a prison and its inhabitants are still doomed to live in poverty and oppression. Israel closes them off from the sea, the air and land, except for a limited safety valve at the Rafah crossing. They cannot visit their relatives in the West Bank or look for work in Israel, upon which the Gazan economy has been dependent for some 40 years. Sometimes goods can be transported, sometimes not. Gaza has no chance of escaping its poverty under these conditions. Nobody will invest in it, nobody can develop it, nobody can feel free in it. Israel left the cage, threw away the keys and left the residents to t

 

[batgirl]

Al tuo articolo,aggiungo questo che mi è stato inviato da un amico maltese. È lungo e triste, pero vale la pena leggerlo:

Paradise Lost: Robert Fisk's elegy for Beirut

Elegant buildings lie in ruins. The heady scent of gardenias gives way to the acrid stench of bombed-out oil installations. And everywhere terrified people are scrambling to get out of a city that seems tragically doomed to chaos and destruction. As Beirut - 'the Paris of the East' - is defiled yet again, Robert Fisk, a resident for 30 years, asks: how much more punishment can it take?

Published: 19 July 2006

In the year 551, the magnificent, wealthy city of Berytus - headquarters of the imperial East Mediterranean Roman fleet - was struck by a massive earthquake. In its aftermath, the sea withdrew several miles and the survivors - ancestors of the present-day Lebanese - walked out on the sands to loot the long-sunken merchant ships revealed in front of them.

That was when a tidal wall higher than a tsunami returned to swamp the city and kill them all. So savagely was the old Beirut damaged that the Emperor Justinian sent gold from Constantinople as compensation to every family left alive.

Some cities seem forever doomed. When the Crusaders arrived at Beirut on their way to Jerusalem in the 11th century, they slaughtered every man, woman and child in the city. In the First World War, Ottoman Beirut suffered a terrible famine; the Turkish Xxxxx had commandeered all the grain and the Allied powers blockaded the coast. I still have some ancient postcards I bought here 30 years ago of stick-like children standing in an orphanage, naked and abandoned.

An American woman living in Beirut in 1916 described how she passed women and children lying by the roadside with closed eyes and ghastly, pale faces. It was a common thing to find people searching the garbage heaps for orange peel, old bones or other refuse, and eating them greedily when found. Everywhere women could be seen seeking eatable weeds among the grass along the roads...

How does this happen to Beirut? For 30 years, I've watched this place die and then rise from the grave and then die again, its apartment blocks pitted with so many bullets they looked like Irish lace, its people massacring each other.

I lived here through 15 years of civil war that took 150,000 lives, and two Israeli invasions and years of Israeli bombardments that cost the lives of a further 20,000 of its people. I have seen them armless, legless, headless, knifed, bombed and splashed across the walls of houses. Yet they are a fine, educated, moral people whose generosity amazes every foreigner, whose gentleness puts any Westerner to shame, and whose suffering we almost always ignore.

They look like us, the people of Beirut. They have light-coloured skin and speak beautiful English and French. They travel the world. Their women are gorgeous and their food exquisite. But what are we saying of their fate today as the Israelis - in some of their cruellest attacks on this city and the surrounding countryside - tear them from their homes, bomb them on river bridges, cut them off from food and water and electricity? We say that they started this latest war, and we compare their appalling casualties - 240 in all of Lebanon by last night - with Israel's 24 dead, as if the figures are the same.

And then, most disgraceful of all, we leave the Lebanese to their fate like a diseased people and spend our time evacuating our precious foreigners while tut-tutting about Israel's disproportionate response to the capture of its soldiers by Hizbollah.

I walked through the deserted city centre of Beirut yesterday and it reminded more than ever of a film lot, a place of dreams too beautiful to last, a phoenix from the ashes of civil war whose plumage was so brightly coloured that it blinded its own people. This part of the city - once a Dresden of ruins - was rebuilt by Rafiq Hariri, the prime minister who was murdered scarcely a mile away on 14 February last year.

The wreckage of that bomb blast, an awful precursor to the present war in which his inheritance is being vandalised by the Israelis, still stands beside the Mediterranean, waiting for the last UN investigator to look for clues to the assassination - an investigator who has long ago abandoned this besieged city for the safety of Cyprus.

At the empty Etoile restaurant - best snails and cappuccino in Beirut, where Hariri once dined Jacques Chirac - I sat on the pavement and watched the parliamentary guard still patrolling the façade of the French-built emporium that houses what is left of Lebanon's democracy. So many of these streets were built by Parisians under the French mandate and they have been exquisitely restored, their mock Arabian doorways bejewelled with marble Roman columns dug from the ancient Via Maxima a few metres away.

Hariri loved this place and, taking Chirac for a beer one day, he caught sight of me sitting at a table. Ah Robert, come over here, he roared and then turned to Chirac like a cat that was about to eat a canary. I want to introduce you, Jacques, to the reporter who said I couldn't rebuild Beirut!

And now it is being un-built. The Martyr Rafiq Hariri International Airport has been attacked three times by the Israelis, its glistening halls and shopping malls vibrating to the missiles that thunder into the runways and fuel depots. Hariri's wonderful transnational highway viaduct has been broken by Israeli bombers. Most of his motorway bridges have been destroyed. The Roman-style lighthouse has been smashed by a missile from an Apache helicopter. Only this small jewel of a restaurant in the centre of Beirut has been spared. So far.

It is the slums of Haret Hreik and Ghobeiri and Shiyah that have been levelled and rubble-ised and pounded to dust, sending a quarter of a million Shia Muslims to seek sanctuary in schools and abandoned parks across the city. Here, indeed, was the headquarters of Hizbollah, another of those centres of world terror which the West keeps discovering in Muslim lands. Here lived Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the Party of God's leader, a ruthless, caustic, calculating man; and Sayad Mohamed Fadlallah, among the wisest and most eloquent of clerics; and many of Hizbollah's top military planners - including, no doubt, the men who planned over many months the capture of the two Israeli soldiers last Wednesday.

But did the tens of thousands of poor who live here deserve this act of mass punishment? For a country that boasts of its pin-point accuracy - a doubtful notion in any case, but that's not the issue - what does this act of destruction tell us about Israel? Or about ourselves?

In a modern building in an undamaged part of Beirut, I come, quite by chance, across a well known and prominent Hizbollah figure, open-neck white shirt, dark suit, clean shoes. We will go on if we have to for days or weeks or months or... And he counts these awful statistics off on the fingers of his left hand. Believe me, we have bigger surprises still to come for the Israelis - much bigger, you will see. Then we will get our prisoners and it will take just a few small concessions.

I walk outside, feeling as if I have been beaten over the head. Over the wall opposite there is purple bougainvillaea and white jasmine and a swamp of gardenias. The Lebanese love flowers, their colour and scent, and Beirut is draped in trees and bushes that smell like paradise.

As for the huddled masses from the powder of the bombed-out southern slums of Haret Hreik, I found hundreds of them yesterday, sitting under trees and lying on the parched grass beside an ancient fountain donated to the city of Beirut by the Ottoman Sultan Abdul-Hamid. How empires fall.

Far away, across the Mediterranean, two American helicopters from the USS Iwo Jima could be seen, heading through the mist and smoke towards the US emb

 

[gordon]

un riassunto?

 

[khil]

Principessa l'articolo è interessante e basato su analisi condivisibili, non supporta però l'ottica macro con cui guardare alla questione israelo-palestinese e soprattutto costituisce un esempio di libertà d'opinione.Trovami un articolo analogo di parte avversa.

 

[gordon]

beh sì, ascoltare una campana sola mi sembra oltremodo semplicistico.

 

[khil]

Intendo dire Gordon...trova un articolo palestinese che sostenga le ragioni di israele e libecci
in modo così inequivocabile gli atti della propria parte..

 

[khil]

Questo articolo de La Stampa dà letture ulteriori sul conflitto:

I VECCHI OBIETTIVI NAZIONALISTI RISCHIANO DI LASCIARE IL POSTO A UNA VISIONE PANISLAMICA MENTRE GLI SCIITI SFIDANO LA LEADERSHIP SUNNITA

La causa palestinese ingoiata dall’utopia islamista
21/7/2006
di Mimmo Cándito

Ci sono due aspetti che, a più d'una settimana dall'inizio di questa guerra, sono rimasti fuori dall'attenzione che il mondo rivolge verso la crisi del Medio Oriente. E poiché anche le guerre si articolano nelle forme dei processi della comunicazione (la guerra è l'evento che ormai maggiormente si dispiega secondo le tecniche più organizzate, le più raffinate, della comunicazione), accade allora che il «segnale» più forte copra ed emargini gli altri. Questo segnale forte è stato la tenaglia che Iran e Siria hanno stretto addosso a Israele per ricavarne vantaggi diretti nei loro obiettivi strategici, attraverso le operazioni compiute sul terreno da Hamas e da Hezbollah; i due segnali che, invece, sono stati coperti dall'egemonia della tenaglia, finendo per restare emarginati rispetto al focus delle analisi strategiche, riguardano la nuova identità della lotta palestinese, e le nuove relazioni che si vanno disegnando tra il mondo sunnita e quello sciita. Cominciamo dai palestinesi. Quanto sta accadendo non solo cambia le forme della loro lotta, ma ne muta profondamente, quasi geneticamente, la stessa identità. Fino a poco tempo fa, le rivendicazioni che l'Organizzazione per la liberazione della Palestina (l'Olp) e poi l'Autorità Palestinese nata dagli accordi di Oslo (l'Ap) ponevano alla base della loro azione politico/militare avevano una natura esclusivamente nazionalistica. Il loro obiettivo era la creazione di uno Stato palestinese, uno Stato indipendente, sovrano, membro della Lega Araba e null'altro.

Tutti i paesi della Umma musulmana affermavano di sostenere questo obiettivo palestinese come un dovere naturale esercitato per conseguire la restaurazione dei diritti violati d'un Paese «fratello»; ma poi nei fatti, nella realtà delle politiche seguite da ciascuno di quei paesi presuntamente fratelli, questo loro sostegno alle lotte dei palestinesi era soprattutto verbale, di facciata, giusto per acquietare i popoli musulmani e le tensioni sociali che la causa palestinese rischiava d'infiammare. Arafat ne era stato perfettamente consapevole, e più volte aveva anche espresso il proprio disgusto per questo cinismo che, al massimo, quando dava un sostegno concreto (esemplare il caso della Siria), questo sostegno era palesemente strumentale verso gli obiettivi «nazionali» di chi mostrava di dare una mano d'aiuto (per restare al caso siriano: l'obiettivo di Assad era la costruzione d'una egemonia regionale di Damasco, scalzando l'autorità di Arafat con il rafforzamento dei suoi concorrenti, assumendo il controllo reale dell'Olp con Jibril, Mussa, Habbash e Hawatmeh, e proiettando questo controllo sulla sovranità limitata di Beirut). Gli ultimi, drammatici, avvenimenti, ma già prima della vittoria elettorale di Hamas, hanno rivelato come l'intervento di fattori esterni rispetto all'obiettivo nazionale stia trasformando questo obiettivo in qualcos'altro: un processo politico dove la rivendicazione dell’indipendenza si veste ormai - e sempre più compiutamente - dei panni propri della lotta generale dell'Islam contro una presunta crociata antimusulmana dell'Occidente. Palestina come Stato sovrano, ma come Stato di una comune identità islamica, vista e vissuta come soggetto antagonista in una lotta globale dove l'Islam riveste in forme sempre più inarrestabili ruoli e forme tipici dell'integralismo fondamentalista.

In questo orizzonte si colloca il secondo aspetto che la «tenaglia» ha emarginato: le nuove relazioni tra mondo sunnita e mondo sciita. I sunniti sono l'ortodossia dell'Islam e la larga maggioranza dei suoi fedeli; gli sciiti sono la più forte delle minoranze, con una rappresentazione demografica però maggioritaria in Iran, nel Sud dell'Iraq, e comunque di presenza incisiva negli sceiccati e nelle monarchie del Golfo. Ciò che è significativo di questa mappatura religiosa, non è tanto la definizione delle maggioranze numeriche ma, piuttosto, la qualità e le forme dell'esercizio di fede: e sotto questo aspetto, il credo sciita con le sue manifestazioni di forte tensione testimioniale, con la costanza della sua cultura antagonista, con il vigore del suo radicalismo martirologico, si propone di assumere una leadership movimentista lontana dalla cultura sunnita.

Stiamo assistendo all'insorgenza di qualcosa di simile a quello che fu la rivoluzione khomeinista, quando il vecchio ayatollah vedeva i suoi pasdaran e i ragazzi delle formazioni bassiji come l'irresistibile avanguardia d'un moto che avrebbe travolto gli equilibri dell'intero Medio Oriente, scalzando l'Arabia Saudita dalla sua centralità e guadagnando all'Iran sciita il controllo delle politiche confliggenti con l'Occidente capitalista e ateo (quando non comunista). Negli Anni ‘80, se non fosse intervenuto Saddam a fermare l'avanzata della rivoluzione verde - Saddam lo fece per conquistarsi il ruolo di gendarme del Golfo che precedentemente aveva avuto lo Scia Palhevi - la storia di oggi sarebbe certamente diversa. Oggi Hezbollah non vale i pasdaran e i bassiji quanto a dimensione militare, ma li vale tutti come strumento e punta di lancia d'una nuova politica espansionista, la stessa che Ahmadinejad propone nel suo proclama messianico di distruzione dell’«entità sionista». Chi possa essere il nuovo Saddam non è ancora chiaro; impotenti gli Usa impantanati in Iraq, ora appare in tutta la sua drammatica evidenza quanto sia carente la dimensione della politica e un ruolo mediatore dell'Europa.