Alan Hart

The answer to my headline question is that he, Marwan Barghouti, is in an Israeli jail where he has been since his arrest in Ramallah by an IDF unit in 2002, after which, in 2004, he was sentenced to five life terms in prison. Some months before his arrest one of Israel’s security agencies tried and failed to assassinate him. A missile was fired at his bodyguard’s car and killed the bodyguard. (If the attempt on Barghouti’s life had succeeded, his killers would not have been brought to justice because as well as bulldozing Palestinian homes and stealing Palestinian land and water, Israel kills, murders, with impunity).

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I don’t wish to offend readers other than perhaps those of the parties of my headline, but I have to say that it, the headline, was the first thought that came into my mind when I learned from the BBC that, according to leaks to the French media, a team of French scientists do not believe Arafat was poisoned and that he died of a “generalized infection.”

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Following the interim agreement with Iran the next six months will tell us whether or not the American-led Zionist lobby and Zionism itself has played its last card and lost. If it does lose President Obama will be free to use the leverage he has to try to cause Israel to be serious about peace on terms almost all Palestinians and most other Arabs and Muslims everywhere could accept (and which would not pose any threat to the wellbeing and security of those Jews now living in Palestine that became Israel and who wanted to stay). The stakes could not be higher.

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The following is the text of the address I made to the Seek, Speak and Spread Truth Conference in London yesterday, 23 November. Its main thrust is about the need for citizens to become politically engaged to make democracy work (before it’s as dead as the two-state solution for Israel-Palestine) in order for our children and grandchildren to have the real prospect of a future worth having.

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His own explanation was that he wants to avoid or minimise the prospects for an “unnecessary confrontation” with the international community, for which read President Obama and the European leaders who would follow his lead (with the arguable exception of the French whore).

I think it’s more than reasonable to believe that Netanyahu was concerned, possibly even alarmed, by the explicit nature of U.S. Secretary of State Kerry’s condemnation on 6 November of Israel’s on-going colonization of the occupied West Bank.

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