The first event below is a call for art entries for a new by Seattle-based
organization, MAS Yale (which is an initiative of Mission of Hope).  This is a
creative program to involve Muslim youth in making peace and spreading hope for
communities in distress around the world.  The initiative below is a benefit for
Gaza.  Please read the project's mission and objectives below. Please forward to
local and national groups that work with Muslim youth.

The 2nd event is a fundraiser on March 15th at Saint Mark's Cathedral in
Seattle, a benefit for Ahli Children's Hospital in Gaza.

Thank you, Amineh

Amineh Ayyad
www.peacesculpture.org
www.pmrs.ps


1) Let Gaza live art project

Let us educate ourselves on the Palestinian plight and preserve their dignity
and humanity


Children and youth (up to age 23) are invited to express themselves and create
art for awareness and hope. Art will be displayed in an exhibit and event in May
and auctioned off with proceeds benefiting Gaza through Islamic Relief.

Visit www.masyale.org  for art rules and educational resources.

Art categories: Literature, Visual Art, Photography, Film/Video, Spoken
Word/Drama

   Art submissions due March 30, 2009

This project is endorsed by Amnesty International, Arab American Community
Coalition, MAS Freedom Foundation, Palestinian Medical Relief Society,
Palestinian Solidarity Committee and Voices
of Palestine

Presented by MASYale, MASeattle and Islamic Relief

MAS Yale is an initiative of Mission of Hope, a not-for-profit Muslim program
under MASeattle mother organization. MAS Yale has received an endorsement from
twelve  major youth private and governmental youth organizations and has the
full support from the City of Bellevue.



2) Fundraiser for Ahli Hospital in Gaza at Saint Mark's Cathedral

Speakers will be Ramzy Baroud of Palestine Chronicle; and Thomas Nelson, of the
National Lawyers' Guild who just returned from Gaza. Desserts and
coffee/tea/juice will be served.

Saturday, March 14, 2009. 7:00 pm
   St. Mark's Cathedral
   1245 10th Avenue East
   Seattle, WA 98102


3) Seattle Art Museum ARTattack: TeenNight Out

Are you ready to be a cultural rebel? Do you have the talent it takes to start
a teen cultural revolution? Come make ARTattack your stage. We all know the
American Revolution didn't stop in 1776. Give props to your revolutionary role
models—it could be a historical freedom fighter or someone in your family or
community who gives back in a big way. Rock a poem, dance, make a work of art or
sing your heart out. We want to see your skills!
   This event is FREE to teens ages 13 to 19 with ID.

Questions: afterhours@... [12]

ARTattack: Teen Night Out
   American Rebels
   May 8, 2009
   6–9 pm
   South Hall

Dear Global Health colleagues,


On Feb. 5, 2009, a two-hour teach-in was held on the humanitarian crisis in
Gaza. The teach-in, spearheaded by me, featured three speakers and an hour of
Q&A. The teach-in was sponsored  by Health Alliance International, UW Students
for Justice in Palestine, the UW School of Social Work, and several co-sponsors.


This was a very informative and lively event! We  have put together a website
with photos and audio from the event at www.uwteachinongaza.shutterfly.com. You
can log on and post comments and share links.


In related updates, I will be posting a petition soon stating the importance of
offering a three-credit course in War and Mental Health as part of the general
MPH curriculum, and in the MPH Global Health track in particular, in an attempt
to have the course offered next year and in subsequent years.  I will need your
help, so stay tuned.


Thank you,
Amineh Ayyad
UW Student

Dear friends and colleagues.

As I am designing a mental health interventions for women and children in my
village Silwaad and the city of Qalqilia with my team for an MCH course, an idea
of Building Hope Campaign came about.  Here is a Palestinian graffiti artists
group offering to spray our, your messages too on the separation wall.  This is
just one of the ways we plan to utilize to spread our messages of health and
hope.

Thinking of building hope as a way to aid Palestinians cope with mental health
(and other health) problems caused by the occupation, and the wall,  I would
like to invite you to contribute with your ideas. Please send your
messages/ideas to me or to the link below. If you choose to send your ideas to
me, I will do my best to share them and paint them on the wall and for free. If
you use the link below, there is a fee . The cost is listed in the article below
and funds go to support grassroots youth social and cultural organizations in
the West Bank.

www.sendamessage.nl

Just think of the power of turning this Apartheid wall into a big public health,
peace, truth and reconciliation display board, on both sides, the Israeli and
Palestinian.

Also, the Israeli Apartheid Weeks is March 1 - 8th

http://apartheidweek.org

Feel free to contact me on local educational events.  Stay tuned to information
on the upcoming Congressman Baird report back on his visit to Gaza.

In solidarity.
Amineh



Spray your tag on West Bank wall -- online
Wed Feb 25, 4:18 pm ET

RAMALLAH, West Bank (Reuters) – It could turn out to be the world's longest
graffiti space -- the massive concrete barrier separating Israel from the
Palestinians.

Over the Internet, a group of Palestinian graffiti artists is offering to
spray-paint your personal message on Israel's towering security wall in the
occupied West Bank.

It costs 30 euros ($40) per message and they can be as solemn or wacky as you
want. Everything goes, except for obscene, offensive or extremist hate speech.
Clients get three digital pictures of the finished product.

The 8-meter (25-foot) high barrier of massive concrete slabs is part of a 620-km
(385-mile) fence Israel says is intended to keep suicide bombers out, and which
can be dismantled at some point in the future when peace reigns.

But with its slit-eyed watchtowers and burgeoning Palestinian protest graffiti,
it is already reminiscent of the hated Berlin Wall, which divided the German
capital for 28 years before it was torn down 10 years ago.

The taggers at www.sendamessage.nl are members of the Palestinian Peace and
Freedom Youth Forum, which set up the scheme in collaboration with a Dutch
Christian organization.

"It is a new way to speak with the people, that we the Palestinians exist," says
graffiti artist Yusef Njm.

"We are not only throwing stones and clashing. We are alive. We think in a new
way to tell them that we are alive."

Organizers stress that revenue does not go to buy weapons for the Palestinians.
It is intended to support grassroots social and cultural projects in the West
Bank.

(Writing by Douglas Hamilton; editing by Michael Roddy)

FYI. More inspiring news on partnerships and education. Please forward to
interested students and faculty.  Amineh

= =  1  = =
University partnership

       A history-making U.S.-Palestinian educational partnership was announced by
Presidents Leon Botstein of Bard College (New York State) and Sari Nusseibeh of
Al-Quds University (East Jerusalem).

       "The Honors College combines the best of educational traditions of
Palestine with contemporary approaches to American liberal arts education,"
announces their new Web site.
Al-Quds Bard Partnership
http://www.alqudsbard.org/

       Bard College has deep interest in international collaborative programs
that incorporate its innovative approaches to liberal arts education and the
conduct of secondary-level schooling.

       Al-Quds University desires to play a central role in improving Palestinian
education and offer students a high-level liberal arts undergraduate
experience.

       The two institutions have formed task teams, and lively dialogue and
discussion is occurring both within each institution and between the two.

       Frequent meetings are conducted via video-conference, as well as
face-to-face gatherings on both sides of the ocean.

       This 2008-2009 academic year is dedicated to program design and
development, faculty recruitment, and student recruitment.

       The Honors College and MAT Program will open in this Fall 2009, and the
Model School a year later in 2010.

       Interested students may apply for admission to the Honors College through
Al-Quds University Admissions office - Tel: +972-2-2799753 or Fax:
+972-2-2796960.


       Faculty members wishing to teach in the Honors College or Master of Arts
in Teaching (MAT) program submit a cover letter, resume, salary expectations
and names of three references by e-mail only to alquds-bardrecruitment@...
or hr@... .


       SEE PHOTOS and more at:
Palestinian Campus Looks to East Bank (of Hudson)
The New York Times - Saturday, 14 February 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/world/middleeast/15quds.html?_r=2&emc=eta1

Bard College and Al-Quds University to Open Joint Campus
The Chronicle of Higher Education - 08 February 2009
http://chronicle.com/news/article/5941/bard-college-and-al-quds-university-to-op\
en-joint-college


= =  2  = =
Environmental partnership

       Green Mideast Peace is a partnership of young people of different faiths
and cultural backgrounds.
       They cross boundaries toward one another, to work together on
environmental projects like keeping water supplies pure.
       This benefits the whole Holy Land community, and fosters understanding
between these Palestinian and Jewish youth and their counselors.
       SEE VIDEO at:
Green Mideast Peace
Goodwater Neighbors Project
On Falafel TV
http://falafel.tv/index.php?option=com_seyret&task=videodirectlink&Itemid=26&id=\
27
or Current.com
http://current.com/items/89688761/green_mideast_peace.htm


= =  3  = =
Create a new partner in time of crisis

       When you feel threatened, don't call your friend.
       Phone your enemy.
       This is wisdom of Eboo Patel, an American Muslim with roots in India.
       Patel is founder and executive director of the Interfaith Youth Core -
http://ifyc.org/ - a Chicago-based international non-profit organization that
promotes interfaith cooperation.

       "The first phone calls Jewish and Muslim officials should make when bombs
explode over there are not to organizations within their own religious
community, but to reasonable people in the other community," writes Patel.
       "The first line should be, 'I'm on the side of coexistence, and I bet you
are too. What public statements can we collectively make, what press releases
can we cooperatively issue, which helps the side of coexistence defeat the
demon of conflict?'"
       In sports language, Eboo believes, "That's a play that could change the
game."
US Jews, Muslims need new playbook
by Eboo Patel
Common Ground News Service - 06 January 2009
http://www.commongroundnews.org/article.php?id=24616&lan=en&sid=1&sp=0
       This February 2009, President Obama named Eboo the first Muslim in the
newly created White House Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.
       The 25 religious and secular advisors will guide decisions on both
domestic and foreign policy issues.

"If we are to have partners for peace, then we must first be partners. . ."
          - President Dwight D. Eisenhower
            Centennial Commencement Address, Pennsylvania State University
            June 11, 195

"You don't have to be pro-Israeli or pro-Palestinians, one or the other.  You
can be both."
          - Melek Nasr-Totah
"It's is not possible to be "pro-Israel" if you are not "pro-Palestinian," and
vice versa.  There is no such thing as one without the other."
          - Gail Weinstein
"If we are to have partners for peace, then we must first be partners. . ."
          - President Dwight D. Eisenhower
            Centennial Commencement Address, Pennsylvania State University
            June 11, 1955

FYI. News worth sharing.  I still remember when the Iraqi scholar was prevented
from entering the US to speak at a UW global health event.  We should have had
an organized response against that as a university, students and faculty. We
should not let acts of such sort against educational efforts go unprotested, at
least. Just an idea! Hope such courage continues to inspire more courageous
stands for freedom, justice, solidarity, ...

Amineh


Hundreds of Canadian professors protest efforts to limit freedom of speech on
campuses in relation to Palestine

UNIVERSITY PROFS PROTEST THE SILENCING OF DEBATE ON CANADIAN CAMPUSES

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

February 18, 2009

Hundreds of university professors across Canada are protesting deliberate
efforts to limit freedom of speech on campuses in relation to Palestine .

In an open letter released today they call on university presidents to respect
academic freedom and create a space for frank and open debate about the ongoing
conflict in the Middle East .


In a shocking article also released today, Lisa Schofield documents the
extraordinary efforts of the University of Toronto administration to shut down
Palestine solidarity activities on that campus in October 2008.


Through Freedom of Information, Schofield learned that in one week more than 250
pages of emails and other documents were generated for the purpose of stopping a
simple conference for students about Palestine solidarity organizing. The emails
were not only between U of T President David Naylor and other senior U of T
administrators, but also between U of T and McMaster administrators. "U of T
seems to have declared a full-fledged war against its Palestinian and
pro-Palestinian students," writes Schofield.


"The evidence uncovered by Schofield along with documented efforts at silencing
on other campuses amounts to an organized effort to shut down debate on one of
the most important issues of the day on many Canadian campuses, " said Alan
Sears, Professor of Sociology at Ryerson University and spokesperson for Faculty
4 Palestine, the sponsors of the letter.


The open letter by faculty is being released as student groups prepare for
campus events to mark the fifth annual Israeli Apartheid Week (March 1- March
8), which is intended to draw attention to the Israeli occupation of Palestine .
Efforts to mount events during this week have faced administrative obstacles on
a number of campuses in the past, including a failed attempt by McMaster
administration to ban the term "Israeli Apartheid" in February 2007. And this
past week, Carleton administration banned a poster promoting Israeli Apartheid
Week, and circulated* *a vaguely worded letter to the entire Carleton community
threatening indefinite expulsion for anyone contravening the university's equity
and human rights codes.


Faculty 4 Palestine finds this selective and ill-defined use of "equity" a
dangerous precedent, and is concerned that the administration is silencing
debate on controversial topics and singling out advocates of Palestinian rights
for unique discriminatory treatment


The open letter is issued by Faculty 4 Palestine, and signed by 325 professors
from over 40 universities and 10 colleges across Canada .

See following links for Open Letter and related articles:

http://www.socialistproject.ca/bullet/bullet187.html


---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Margaret Cerullo <margaretcerullo@...>
Date: Thu, Feb 12, 2009 at 7:41 PM
Subject: Re: Hampshire College divests from Israel--first college in the country
To: Amineh Ayyad <amineh.ayyad@...>


Dear Amineh,

Thank you so much for writing. We are certainly celebrating here. I am going to
attach two faculty statements, one simply a statement of pride and humility
before the impressive organizing of our students; the other, more important in
the face of the Administration's response--to deny that their divestment
decision had anything to do with the Occupation of Palestine. And, thanks for
re-connecting me to Darren Wade!


I look forward too to meeting you. I am a great admirer of Dr. Barghouthi who we
were fortunate enough to have here several years ago. (At that time, the college
refused to allow the posters advertising his visit to say that he was from
Ramallah, Palestine--"because Palestine is not a country." Courageous students
mounted a challenge then, and they continue to be fierce in their advocacy for
justice in Palestine.

Warmly,

Margaret

Dear friends and colleagues.

Here are a few important events on Gaza, specially for those who are interested
in work for peace and reconciliation as a step toward better health.  Various UW
students are part of this work.

Hope you can join us.

Amineh


(2) PALESTINE TODAY: VISIONS OF AND FROM THE HOMELAND

Wednesday, February 25, 2009, 10am - 8:30pm
Antioch University Seattle
2326 6th Ave - Seattle, WA 98121
Rooms 100, 101 and 103

This day-long teach-in is on the circumstances of the Palestinians since
1948

Event is free and open to the public. Snacks and refreshments will be
provided

There will be numerous documentaries by Palestinian, Israeli and American
filmmakers (followed by moderated discussions), an interactive workshop,
and, beginning at 5 p.m., expert lectures as well as a panel of Palestinian,
Israeli and American speakers.

Sponsored by BAC and the AUS Library
RSVP suggested, but not required. Contact Jill Mattern at
Jill_Mattern@...

Schedule of Events:
Documentaries:
10:00am - 10:45am This Body is a Prison - Film by Dylan Bergeson
10:55am - 12:10pm Gaza Strip - Film by James Longley
12:20pm - 1:15pm Iron Wall - Film by Mohammed Alatar
1:20pm - 2:30pm Breaking the Silence - Film by Yehuda Shaul
Discussion facilitated by Judith Kolokoff

2:35pm - 4:00pm Jenin Jenin - Film by Mohammed Bakri
Discussion facilitated by Amal Eqeiq

Forum
5:00pm - 6pm Historical Context of the Crisis
              Ed Mast
6pm - 6:45pm Trauma in Conflict Areas
              The Rev. Dr. John Van Eenwyk
7:00pm - 8:30pm Working for Peace: Transnational Perspectives
              Amal Eqeiq
              Huda Giddens
              Judith Kolokoff
              Peter Lippman
              Amin Odeh


(3) INTERNATIONAL WOMEN�S DAY:
BENEFIT FOR THE PEOPLE OF GAZA
Saturday March 7th
6:30pm: refreshments and socializing
7 � 9pm: music, panel, discussion
Location: POCAAN (People of Color Against Aids Network)
1609 19th Ave., 1 block S. of Madison, 2 blocks N. of Union
On bus lines #2, 11 and 12

Raising Women�s Voices for Gaza: Honoring International Women�s Day
Three Palestinian women speakers from three different eras of recent
Palestinian history, and a speaker about what the Israeli resistance
movement.
Powerful opening and closing with Sistah Drum.
Suggested donation to benefit the people of Gaza: $5-25 � more if you can,
less if you can�t. No one turned away.
Wheelchair accessible; to make this event more accessible to everyone,
please no fragrances.

Co-sponsored by Dyke Community Activists and Sistah2Sistah.
For more information, Google: Dyke Community Activists or call 206-722-0729.


(4) FUNDRAISER FOR AHLI HOSPITAL, GAZA
Saturday March 14, 7:00 PM
St. Mark�s Cathedral, 1245 Tenth Ave. E., Seattle, WA 98102
(206) 323-0300 mideast.focus@...

St. Mark�s Cathedral is hosting a community event to raise money for Ahli
Hospital, Gaza. For over 100 years the hospital has provided affordable
services to poor people of all faiths and is desperately needed. It was
seriously damaged by the bombing last month, and was already short on needed
medicine and supplies because of the two-year long siege.

* Ramzy Baroud will inform us about the situation in Gaza. A
Palestinian-American journalist, and author of several books. Baroud has
taught Mass Communication at Australia's Curtin University of Technology,
and is Editor-in-Chief of the website, www.PalestineChronicle.com He is
sought after as a speaker and his articles are published world wide.

His upcoming book, �Gaza: The Untold Story� narrates the story of his family
as a representation of millions of Palestinians in Diaspora, from the early
1940�s until the present. With pictures and stories from home, Baroud will
take us into the recent experience of Gaza, where his sister is a doctor.

* Bishop William C. Boerger of the Northwest Washington Synod of the
Evangelical Lutheran Church in America will share his experiences as part of
a delegation of 40 ELCA bishops from around the US who spent 11 days in
Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Tiberius during the January attacks on Gaza.

* Tom Nelson, former corporate lawyer now in solo practice, who co-founded
Americans United for Palestinian Human Rights, also will speak. He has just
returned from investigating possible war crimes in Gaza, with a concern for
upholding international law, focusing on health and health care.

* The Rev. David Mesenbring, pastor for Church in the World Ministries, St.
Mark�s Cathedral, will be the moderator.

We will be able to see and hear about the hospital so we can begin to sense
the depth of need and the importance of this work in the face of an
humanitarian crisis.

Co-Sponsors for the event include The Mid East Focus Initiative of St.
Mark�s; The Palestine Concerns Task Force of the Council of Churches of
Greater Seattle; American Jews for a Just Peace � Seattle; Pax Christi
Northwest; The Save Gaza Coalition; Jewish Voice for Peace; Episcopal
Bishop�s Committee on Israel/Palestine; The Palestinian Solidarity
Committee; Sabeel - Puget Sound; Rachel Corrie Foundation; American Friends
Service Committee; Rauschenbusch Center; Middle East Fellowship, and more to
be announced.

This is the listserve for the friends of Palestine Solidarity Committee, =
based in Seattle.  You can  find out more about PSC by replying to this =
email address, emailing us at palestinejustice@..., going to =
www.palestineinformation.org, or by coming to one of our events.  We =
welcome all anti-racists working for justice and human rights all over =
the world, including Palestine, to work with us.  To unsubscribe, please =
email palestinejustice-unsubscribe@...

Gaza: What's Next? A Teach-in on the Humanitarian Crisis in Gaza


- Come and expand your understanding of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and
hear from experts on the health effects of war.
- Learn more about the political and historical events affecting the region.
- Be a part of the discussion, and help formulate ideas for action.
- Refreshments will be served.

Date: Thursday, February 5th
Time: 7:00 - 9:00 PM
Location: UW Health Sciences Building, Room T-439


SPEAKERS:
Dr. Steve Niva, Professor of International Politics and International Studies,
Evergreen State College
Expert on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and U.S. foreign policy in the
Middle East.

Dr. Evan Kanter, Assistant Professor, UW School of Medicine/Psychiatry and
Behavioral Sciences
Psychiatrist, VA Puget Sound
President, Physicians for Social Responsibility
Expert on mental health effects of war.

Aaron Katz, Senior Lecturer on health policy, Health Services,
UW School of Public Health
Director, Packard Gates Population Leadership Program
Presenting a Jewish American perspective and on our responsibilities as U.S.
citizens.


FACILITATORS:
Dr. Amy Hagopian, Assistant Professor, Health Service, UW School of Public
Health and Community Medicine
Senior Health Workforce Policy Advisor, Health Alliance International

Peter House, Director of Regional and Rural Education, Research & Support,
School of Medicine
Associate AHEC Director & Director of Programs for Healthy Communities,
University of Washington


SPONSORS:
Health Alliance International (HAI)
UW Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP)
UW Students for Equal Health (SEH)
Northwest International Health Action Coalition (NIHAC)
Friend of Palestinian Medical Relief Society
Jewish Voice for Peace (Seattle chapter)


FOR MORE INFORMATION, CONTACT:
Amineh Ayyad, amina@...
Dr. Amy Hagopian, hagopian@...

_______________________________________________
Ghforum mailing list
Ghforum@...
https://mailman1.u.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/ghforum

Gaza: What's Next?
A Teach-in on the Humanitarian Crisis in Gaza

* Come and expand your understanding of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, and
hear from experts on the health effects of war.
* Learn more about the political and historical events affecting the region.
* Be a part of the discussion, and help formulate ideas for action.

Thursday, February 5th
7:00 - 9:00 PM

University of Washington
Health Sciences Building
Room T-439

Refreshments will be served

SPEAKERS:
Dr. Steve Niva, Professor of International Politics and International Studies,
Evergreen State College
Expert on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and U.S. foreign policy in the
Middle East

Dr. Evan Kanter, Assistant Professor, UW School of Medicine/Psychiatry and
Behavioral Sciences
Psychiatrist, VA Puget Sound
President, Physicians for Social Responsibility
Expert on mental health effects of war

Aaron Katz, Senior Lecturer on health policy, Health Services,
UW School of Public Health
Director, Packard Gates Population Leadership Program
Presenting a Jewish American perspective and on our responsibilities as U.S.
citizens


FACILITATORS:
Dr. Amy Hagopian, Assistant Professor, Health Service, UW School of Public
Health and Community Medicine
Senior Health Workforce Policy Advisor, Health Alliance International

Peter House, Director of Regional and Rural Education, Research & Support,
School of Medicine
Associate AHEC Director & Director of Programs for Healthy Communities,
University of Washington


SPONSORS:
Health Alliance International (HAI)
UW Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP)
Northwest International Health Action Coalition (NIHAC)
Friend of Palestinian Medical Relief Society
Jewish Voice for Peace (Seattle chapter)


DIRECTIONS/MAP:
Health Sciences Building is adjacent to and west of the University of Washington
Medical Center, on NE Pacific Street.
http://www.washington.edu/home/maps/?HST


FOR MORE INFORMATION, CONTACT:
amina@...
hagopian@...


_______________________________________________

_______________________________________________
HAIheadquartersallstaff mailing list
HAIheadquartersallstaff@...
https://mailman1.u.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/haiheadquartersallstaff

Here is an account on the history and current crisis in Gaza by a Jewish Oxford
professor who served
in the Israeli army in the 60s.  I hope this article would answer some of the
questions I received about
the background of the conflict in the area.

For those who are interested in more information, we are
organizing a teach-in on UW campus on this issue where local experts on history
and politics of the
Middle East, public health, mental health, human rights and policy will be
presenting and answering
questions. Will post more details as soon the date is and location are
determined.

Thank you.

Amineh


Oxford professor of international relations Avi Shlaim served in the Israeli
army and has never
questioned the state's legitimacy. But its merciless assault on Gaza has led him
to devastating
conclusions

Avi Shlaim
The Guardian, Wednesday 7 January 2009
Article history

A wounded Palestinian policeman gestures while lying on the ground outside Hamas
police
headquarters following an Israeli air strike in Gaza City. Photograph: Mohammed
Abed/AFP/Getty
Images

The only way to make sense of Israel's senseless war in Gaza is through
understanding the historical
context. Establishing the state of Israel in May 1948 involved a monumental
injustice to the
Palestinians. British officials bitterly resented American partisanship on
behalf of the infant state. On 2
June 1948, Sir John Troutbeck wrote to the foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, that
the Americans were
responsible for the creation of a gangster state headed by "an utterly
unscrupulous set of leaders". I
used to think that this judgment was too harsh but Israel's vicious assault on
the people of Gaza, and
the Bush administration's complicity in this assault, have reopened the
question.

I write as someone who served loyally in the Israeli army in the mid-1960s and
who has never
questioned the legitimacy of the state of Israel within its pre-1967 borders.
What I utterly reject is the
Zionist colonial project beyond the Green Line. The Israeli occupation of the
West Bank and the Gaza
Strip in the aftermath of the June 1967 war had very little to do with security
and everything to do with
territorial expansionism. The aim was to establish Greater Israel through
permanent political,
economic and military control over the Palestinian territories. And the result
has been one of the most
prolonged and brutal military occupations of modern times.

Four decades of Israeli control did incalculable damage to the economy of the
Gaza Strip. With a large
population of 1948 refugees crammed into a tiny strip of land, with no
infrastructure or natural
resources, Gaza's prospects were never bright. Gaza, however, is not simply a
case of economic
under-development but a uniquely cruel case of deliberate de-development. To use
the Biblical
phrase, Israel turned the people of Gaza into the hewers of wood and the drawers
of water, into a
source of cheap labour and a captive market for Israeli goods. The development
of local industry was
actively impeded so as to make it impossible for the Palestinians to end their
subordination to Israel
and to establish the economic underpinnings essential for real political
independence.

Gaza is a classic case of colonial exploitation in the post-colonial era. Jewish
settlements in occupied
territories are immoral, illegal and an insurmountable obstacle to peace. They
are at once the
instrument of exploitation and the symbol of the hated occupation. In Gaza, the
Jewish settlers
numbered only 8,000 in 2005 compared with 1.4 million local residents. Yet the
settlers controlled
25% of the territory, 40% of the arable land and the lion's share of the scarce
water resources. Cheek
by jowl with these foreign intruders, the majority of the local population lived
in abject poverty and
unimaginable misery. Eighty per cent of them still subsist on less than $2 a
day. The living conditions
in the strip remain an affront to civilised values, a powerful precipitant to
resistance and a fertile
breeding ground for political extremism.

In August 2005 a Likud government headed by Ariel Sharon staged a unilateral
Israeli pullout from
Gaza, withdrawing all 8,000 settlers and destroying the houses and farms they
had left behind. Hamas,
the Islamic resistance movement, conducted an effective campaign to drive the
Israelis out of Gaza.
The withdrawal was a humiliation for the Israeli Defence Forces. To the world,
Sharon presented the
withdrawal from Gaza as a contribution to peace based on a two-state solution.
But in the year after,
another 12,000 Israelis settled on the West Bank, further reducing the scope for
an independent
Palestinian state. Land-grabbing and peace-making are simply incompatible.
Israel had a choice and it
chose land over peace.

The real purpose behind the move was to redraw unilaterally the borders of
Greater Israel by
incorporating the main settlement blocs on the West Bank to the state of Israel.
Withdrawal from Gaza
was thus not a prelude to a peace deal with the Palestinian Authority but a
prelude to further Zionist
expansion on the West Bank. It was a unilateral Israeli move undertaken in what
was seen, mistakenly
in my view, as an Israeli national interest. Anchored in a fundamental rejection
of the Palestinian
national identity, the withdrawal from Gaza was part of a long-term effort to
deny the Palestinian
people any independent political existence on their land.

Israel's settlers were withdrawn but Israeli soldiers continued to control all
access to the Gaza Strip by
land, sea and air. Gaza was converted overnight into an open-air prison. From
this point on, the
Israeli air force enjoyed unrestricted freedom to drop bombs, to make sonic
booms by flying low and
breaking the sound barrier, and to terrorise the hapless inhabitants of this
prison.

Israel likes to portray itself as an island of democracy in a sea of
authoritarianism. Yet Israel has never
in its entire history done anything to promote democracy on the Arab side and
has done a great deal
to undermine it. Israel has a long history of secret collaboration with
reactionary Arab regimes to
suppress Palestinian nationalism. Despite all the handicaps, the Palestinian
people succeeded in
building the only genuine democracy in the Arab world with the possible
exception of Lebanon. In
January 2006, free and fair elections for the Legislative Council of the
Palestinian Authority brought to
power a Hamas-led government. Israel, however, refused to recognise the
democratically elected
government, claiming that Hamas is purely and simply a terrorist organisation.

America and the EU shamelessly joined Israel in ostracising and demonising the
Hamas government
and in trying to bring it down by withholding tax revenues and foreign aid. A
surreal situation thus
developed with a significant part of the international community imposing
economic sanctions not
against the occupier but against the occupied, not against the oppressor but
against the oppressed.

As so often in the tragic history of Palestine, the victims were blamed for
their own misfortunes.
Israel's propaganda machine persistently purveyed the notion that the
Palestinians are terrorists, that
they reject coexistence with the Jewish state, that their nationalism is little
more than antisemitism,
that Hamas is just a bunch of religious fanatics and that Islam is incompatible
with democracy. But the
simple truth is that the Palestinian people are a normal people with normal
aspirations. They are no
better but they are no worse than any other national group. What they aspire to,
above all, is a piece
of land to call their own on which to live in freedom and dignity.

Like other radical movements, Hamas began to moderate its political programme
following its rise to
power. From the ideological rejectionism of its charter, it began to move
towards pragmatic
accommodation of a two-state solution. In March 2007, Hamas and Fatah formed a
national unity
government that was ready to negotiate a long-term ceasefire with Israel.
Israel, however, refused to
negotiate with a government that included Hamas.

It continued to play the old game of divide and rule between rival Palestinian
factions. In the late
1980s, Israel had supported the nascent Hamas in order to weaken Fatah, the
secular nationalist
movement led by Yasser Arafat. Now Israel began to encourage the corrupt and
pliant Fatah leaders to
overthrow their religious political rivals and recapture power. Aggressive
American neoconservatives
participated in the sinister plot to instigate a Palestinian civil war. Their
meddling was a major factor in
the collapse of the national unity government and in driving Hamas to seize
power in Gaza in June
2007 to pre-empt a Fatah coup.

The war unleashed by Israel on Gaza on 27 December was the culmination of a
series of clashes and
confrontations with the Hamas government. In a broader sense, however, it is a
war between Israel and
the Palestinian people, because the people had elected the party to power. The
declared aim of the
war is to weaken Hamas and to intensify the pressure until its leaders agree to
a new ceasefire on
Israel's terms. The undeclared aim is to ensure that the Palestinians in Gaza
are seen by the world
simply as a humanitarian problem and thus to derail their struggle for
independence and statehood.

The timing of the war was determined by political expediency. A general election
is scheduled for 10
February and, in the lead-up to the election, all the main contenders are
looking for an opportunity to
prove their toughness. The army top brass had been champing at the bit to
deliver a crushing blow to
Hamas in order to remove the stain left on their reputation by the failure of
the war against Hezbollah
in Lebanon in July 2006. Israel's cynical leaders could also count on apathy and
impotence of the pro-
western Arab regimes and on blind support from President Bush in the twilight of
his term in the
White House. Bush readily obliged by putting all the blame for the crisis on
Hamas, vetoing proposals
at the UN Security Council for an immediate ceasefire and issuing Israel with a
free pass to mount a
ground invasion of Gaza.

As always, mighty Israel claims to be the victim of Palestinian aggression but
the sheer asymmetry of
power between the two sides leaves little room for doubt as to who is the real
victim. This is indeed a
conflict between David and Goliath but the Biblical image has been inverted - a
small and defenceless
Palestinian David faces a heavily armed, merciless and overbearing Israeli
Goliath. The resort to brute
military force is accompanied, as always, by the shrill rhetoric of victimhood
and a farrago of self-pity
overlaid with self-righteousness. In Hebrew this is known as the syndrome of
bokhim ve-yorim,
"crying and shooting".

To be sure, Hamas is not an entirely innocent party in this conflict. Denied the
fruit of its electoral
victory and confronted with an unscrupulous adversary, it has resorted to the
weapon of the weak -
terror. Militants from Hamas and Islamic Jihad kept launching Qassam rocket
attacks against Israeli
settlements near the border with Gaza until Egypt brokered a six-month ceasefire
last June. The
damage caused by these primitive rockets is minimal but the psychological impact
is immense,
prompting the public to demand protection from its government. Under the
circumstances, Israel had
the right to act in self-defence but its response to the pinpricks of rocket
attacks was totally
disproportionate. The figures speak for themselves. In the three years after the
withdrawal from Gaza,
11 Israelis were killed by rocket fire. On the other hand, in 2005-7 alone, the
IDF killed 1,290
Palestinians in Gaza, including 222 children.

Whatever the numbers, killing civilians is wrong. This rule applies to Israel as
much as it does to
Hamas, but Israel's entire record is one of unbridled and unremitting brutality
towards the inhabitants
of Gaza. Israel also maintained the blockade of Gaza after the ceasefire came
into force which, in the
view of the Hamas leaders, amounted to a violation of the agreement. During the
ceasefire, Israel
prevented any exports from leaving the strip in clear violation of a 2005
accord, leading to a sharp
drop in employment opportunities. Officially, 49.1% of the population is
unemployed. At the same
time, Israel restricted drastically the number of trucks carrying food, fuel,
cooking-gas canisters,
spare parts for water and sanitation plants, and medical supplies to Gaza. It is
difficult to see how
starving and freezing the civilians of Gaza could protect the people on the
Israeli side of the border.
But even if it did, it would still be immoral, a form of collective punishment
that is strictly forbidden by
international humanitarian law.

The brutality of Israel's soldiers is fully matched by the mendacity of its
spokesmen. Eight months
before launching the current war on Gaza, Israel established a National
Information Directorate. The
core messages of this directorate to the media are that Hamas broke the
ceasefire agreements; that
Israel's objective is the defence of its population; and that Israel's forces
are taking the utmost care
not to hurt innocent civilians. Israel's spin doctors have been remarkably
successful in getting this
message across. But, in essence, their propaganda is a pack of lies.

A wide gap separates the reality of Israel's actions from the rhetoric of its
spokesmen. It was not
Hamas but the IDF that broke the ceasefire. It di d so by a raid into Gaza on 4
November that killed
six Hamas men. Israel's objective is not just the defence of its population but
the eventual overthrow
of the Hamas government in Gaza by turning the people against their rulers. And
far from taking care
to spare civilians, Israel is guilty of indiscriminate bombing and of a
three-year-old blockade that has
brought the inhabitants of Gaza, now 1.5 million, to the brink of a humanitarian
catastrophe.

The Biblical injunction of an eye for an eye is savage enough. But Israel's
insane offensive against Gaza
seems to follow the logic of an eye for an eyelash. After eight days of bombing,
with a death toll of
more than 400 Palestinians and four Israelis, the gung-ho cabinet ordered a land
invasion of Gaza the
consequences of which are incalculable.

No amount of military escalation can buy Israel immunity from rocket attacks
from the military wing of
Hamas. Despite all the death and destruction that Israel has inflicted on them,
they kept up their
resistance and they kept firing their rockets. This is a movement that glorifies
victimhood and
martyrdom. There is simply no military solution to the conflict between the two
communities. The
problem with Israel's concept of security is that it denies even the most
elementary security to the
other community. The only way for Israel to achieve security is not through
shooting but through talks
with Hamas, which has repeatedly declared its readiness to negotiate a long-term
ceasefire with the
Jewish state within its pre-1967 borders for 20, 30, or even 50 years. Israel
has rejected this offer for
the same reason it spurned the Arab League peace plan of 2002, which is still on
the table: it involves
concessions and compromises.

This brief review of Israel's record over the past four decades makes it
difficult to resist the conclusion
that it has become a rogue state with "an utterly unscrupulous set of leaders".
A rogue state habitually
violates international law, possesses weapons of mass destruction and practises
terrorism - the use of
violence against civilians for political purposes. Israel fulfils all of these
three criteria; the cap fits and
it must wear it. Israel's real aim is not peaceful coexistence with its
Palestinian neighbours but military
domination. It keeps compounding the mistakes of the past with new and more
disastrous ones.
Politicians, like everyone else, are of course free to repeat the lies and
mistakes of the past. But it is
not mandatory to do so.

• Avi Shlaim is a professor of international relations at the University of
Oxford and the author of The
Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World and of Lion of Jordan: King Hussein's Life
in War and Peace.

Many have asked me about local groups organizing local action in support of
Gaza, so here is an excellent source:

a newly launched website by UW Students for Justice in Palestine


http://students.washington.edu/sjpal/index.htm


The website also has info on Palestine, the conflict, local and internationals
news and films on the topic, and much more.  SJP-UW was established and mainly
led by young UW undergraduate students. Very impressive effort. More info about
the group is below.

Amineh


Students for Justice in Palestine is a diverse group of students, faculty,
staff, and community members working towards common goals of creating a forum
for Palestinian independence and basic human rights. We are organized on
principles to promote justice, human rights, liberation, and self-determination
for the Palestinian people.


- If you need more information, have more questions, or you are interested in
subscribing to our emailing list or getting involved, please send us an email
to: sjpal@...

- Join our Facebook group


All rights reserved - Students for Justice in Palestine, UW chapter 2008

As I was researching stands/statements that were issued by various organizations
on Gaza, I read the following letter by Kavita Ramdas. Kavita is the president
of Global Fund for Women and was the keynote speaker for the  global health
conference at the UW a few years ago.  I just want to share her letter with you.

As I am writing to you, there is breaking news on Al Jazeera that Lebanon has
just fired rockets into Israel. I hope this won't create another war front

Hope to see many of you at the rally by the HUB on main campus at noon today.

Amineh



Dear Friends!

As I write, fighting rages on in Gaza. We call upon the Israeli government,
Hamas, the Palestinian Authority, and their respective allies to stop: stop the
statements essentially condoning the status quo, stop the rockets, missiles, and
the carnage - now. We call upon the United Nations and political leaders in the
U.S., Europe and the Middle East, to demand that the warring factions
immediately end hostilities, no pre-conditions. Precious lives - not Israeli or
Palestinian - simply human lives - are at stake and they matter. They always
have.

The Israeli/Palestinian conflict does not lend itself to easy solutions or
simple analysis. The issues cannot be neatly compartmentalized; passions run
high, distrust runs deep. Political leaders in Israel and Palestine are quick to
claim that they seek peace, yet their actions suggest otherwise. This latest
chapter builds on an increasingly asymmetrical and unequal conflict between the
government of Israel and the people of Gaza, who today live in a no-man's land
that has neither the status of an independent state, nor the recognition of the
world community.

The Israeli military air attacks on Gaza have exacerbated what the United
Nations calls a �humanitarian crisis of significant proportions�. The fact that
collective punishment of civilians is still happening around the world in the
21st century is appalling. That it continues under the watch of a world
community that has promised more than once, �never again� is even more so.

The violence of the past few days has already claimed over 400 lives and injured
and maimed more than 2000 most of whom are civilian residents of Gaza, including
women and children. They are caught in an impossible situation over which they
have no control and one that threatens their fundamental right to live in peace.

We have said it before and will say it again: when governments and
non-governmental actors choose military action as their primary response to
conflict, women and children suffer most. As the backbone of their communities,
women around the world still bear primary responsibility for feeding and caring
for the family, tending to the sick and providing a stable environment.
Performing such tasks under conditions of war can be and often is, as dangerous
as being a soldier on the front lines. Worse, women can be trapped in their
homes or bomb shelters unable to provide for their families�so children go
hungry, the sick get sicker, communities suffer.

At the Global Fund for Women, we hold fast to the prospect of new, possibly more
enlightened leadership. Few of us were na�ve enough to believe that violence
would magically end; the recent massacres in the DRC and the November attacks in
Mumbai, India were stark reminders of the deadly sway of militarism. Yet we held
out some hope that with the right degree of political will and commitment from
the international community, warring factions might consider coming to the
negotiating table once more; putting people and peace first, instead of money
and power. Clearly, we are still far from that ideal.

Yet, it was with a sense of hope that I ended my phone exchange with Majeda Al
Saqqa, a grantee partner and advisor based in Gaza, who continues to work for
peace; even as bombs fell around her. I have hope because of the Coalition of
Women for Peace, a network of Israeli women�s groups that has already issued a
strong statement condemning the current violence. Their resoluteness reminds me
of the courage and resilience demonstrated daily by women who face such
situations around the world.

Perhaps, Gaza is our clarion call: to dismantle militarism as the dominant
ideology in world politics; to require Israel to comply with UN resolutions
regarding the status of the Palestinians, to hold the UN to its commitments to
expand peacekeeping forces and negotiating teams to include more women; and to
ensure that women can take the lead in building a lasting peace.

The Global Fund for Women intends to be there for Majeda and the thousands of
women like her around the world who face injustice, fear, discrimination,
occupation, and violence. We urge the world community, including governments in
the region, their powerful allies in the Global North, and the United Nations to
stand with us. The women of the world deserve peace now.

In Solidarity,

Kavita N.Ramdas
President & CEO

_______________________________________________
Ghmph_fac mailing list
Ghmph_fac@...
http://mailman2.u.washington.edu/mailman/listinfo/ghmph_fac

This event is organized by the UW Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP-UW
chapter). Amineh

Rally Against Genocide in Gaza
Thursday, January 8, 2009
12:00pm - 2:00pm
UW Hub Lawn

Rain or shine: Join us in solidarity against the war crimes taking place against
the people of Gaza!

Over 470 Palestinian civilians murdered, over 2,400 injured, half of them
fatally injured.

We will not rest until these brutal, barbaric, unjust attacks on the Palestinian
people in Gaza stop! Stand for the dying innocent civilians and let your voice
be heard. Scream for those who are not being heard in Palestine. Make a
difference. Do what the media doesn't.

The march will begin on the HUB lawn. Wear black and Palestinian kuffiyehs (if
you have them) to show your support. No fake kuffiyehs please :)

Bring flags, signs, your friends, your family, and your voice.

March to stop the massacre of innocent children, women, and men.

See you there,
The SJP Crew

The humanitarian emergency in Gaza continues. Below are some of the local
actions in response to it.

Mary Anne

-----Original Message-----
From: Jean Buskin [mailto:bb369@...]
Sent: Tuesday, December 30, 2008 2:03 AM
Subject: end the bombing of Gaza

Many groups including local Palestinian and Jewish peace groups are
calling on Israel to stop the aerial bombardment of Gaza.  Hundreds of
people in Gaza including many civilians have died.  Here are three
demonstrations:

SEATTLE-
Tuesday, December 30, 2008 @ 4:00PM
Federal Building ( 915  2nd Ave, 98104)
Sponsored by: Voices of Palestine
info general@...

TACOMA-
Tuesday, December 30, 2008, 5 pm
Federal Courthouse, 1717 Pacific Ave., Tacoma, WA 98402
Organized by People for Peace, Justice, and Healing
info Nancy Farrell, 952-0571, nfarrellvt@...

SEATTLE-
Saturday, January 3, 12:00 noon - 2:00 pm
Westlake Park: 4th and Pine
Initiated by Voices of Palestine
Contact: general@...
[this is a weekly demonstration]

[Note from calendar compiler:  I am also opposed to the missiles that are
being launched from within Gaza attacking Israel.  But Israel's response
is making the situation worse.  Nobody is getting safer, and many people
are dying.  Everybody is being terrorized.]

Many inquired about local solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza events/vigils.

This protest/rally below is organized by the local group Voices of Palestine. I
hope our efforts will go farther than just venting some frustrations and
influence those with political power to help stop this madness and senseless
violence and destruction.  I will be passing out a petition to be signed and
other information on how to help out from here.  This information was already
emailed to this listserv and there are various online petitions circulating. 
The following one is out of Dr. Mustafa Barghouthi's office, the president of
the health NGO I work for in Palestine.  There is a need for medical
professionals and social workers (graduate professional student volunteers are
welcome), so please contact me directly if you are able to help.

http://www.petitiononline.com/pni/petition.html


There is also a vigil being planned for this coming Saturday, which will be
sponsored by numerous community organizations, including the peace and
co-existence groups.  Will send info. on this when more details are available.


Thank you,

Amineh Ayyad
NIHAC Steering Committee Member

--
Amineh Ayyad
Volunteering & Community Advocacy Officer
External Relations Unit
Palestinian Medical Relief Society
P.O. Box 572
Ramallah-Palestine
Tel:  +970-2-2969970
Fax: +970-2-2969991
Mobile: +970-598567430
Email: amineh@...
www.pmrs.ps


GAZA PROTEST/RALLY


Come join us to protest the Israeli bombardment
of the Palestinian people in Gaza


WHEN:  Tuesday, December 30, 2008 @ 4:00PM


WHERE:  Federal Building ( 915  2nd Ave, 98104)


Amin Odeh


<http://www.voicesofpalestine.org/> VoicesofPalestine.org
<http://www.theaacc.org/> Theaacc.org

Dear Mary Anne.

Here is another article, by Dr. Sara Roy, which speaks on last Fall's GH seminar
theme, how Israeli policies in Gaza contribute to ill health and hunger crisis
in the area.  Gaza was the focus of one of the seminar sessions in Fall quarter.
Dr. Sara Roy is an expert on the Gaza Strip and teaches at Harvard’s Center
for Middle Eastern Studies and is the author of Failing Peace: Gaza and the
Palestinian-Israeli Conflict.

Amineh

If Gaza falls . . .
Sara Roy

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.

On 5 November the Israeli government sealed all the ways into and out of Gaza.
Food, medicine, fuel, parts for water and sanitation systems, fertiliser,
plastic sheeting, phones, paper, glue, shoes and even teacups are no longer
getting through in sufficient quantities or at all. According to Oxfam only 137
trucks of food were allowed into Gaza in November. This means that an average of
4.6 trucks per day entered the strip compared to an average of 123 in October
this year and 564 in December 2005. The two main food providers in Gaza are the
UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and
the World Food Programme (WFP). UNRWA alone feeds approximately 750,000 people
in Gaza, and requires 15 trucks of food daily to do so. Between 5 November and
30 November, only 23 trucks arrived, around 6 per cent of the total needed;
during the week of 30 November it received
12 trucks, or 11 per cent of what was required. There were three days in
November when UNRWA ran out of food, with the result that on each of these days
20,000 people were unable to receive their scheduled supply. According to John
Ging, the director of UNRWA in Gaza, most of the people who get food aid are
entirely dependent on it. On 18 December UNRWA suspended all food distribution
for both emergency and regular programmes because of the blockade.

The WFP has had similar problems, sending only 35 trucks out of the 190 it had
scheduled to cover Gazans’ needs until the start of February (six more were
allowed in between 30 November and 6 December). Not only that: the WFP has to
pay to store food that isn’t being sent to Gaza. This cost $215,000 in
November alone. If the siege continues, the WFP will have to pay an extra
$150,000 for storage in December, money that will be used not to support
Palestinians but to benefit Israeli business.

The majority of commercial bakeries in Gaza – 30 out of 47 – have had to
close because they have run out of cooking gas. People are using any fuel they
can find to cook with. As the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) has
made clear, cooking-gas canisters are necessary for generating the warmth to
incubate broiler chicks. Shortages of gas and animal feed have forced commercial
producers to smother hundreds of thousands of chicks. By April, according to the
FAO, there will be no poultry there at all: 70 per cent of Gazans rely on
chicken as a major source of protein.

Banks, suffering from Israeli restrictions on the transfer of banknotes into the
territory were forced to close on 4 December. A sign on the door of one read:
‘Due to the decision of the Palestinian Finance Authority, the bank will be
closed today Thursday, 4.12.2008, because of the unavailability of cash money,
and the bank will be reopened once the cash money is available.’

The World Bank has warned that Gaza’s banking system could collapse if these
restrictions continue. All cash for work programmes has been stopped and on 19
November UNRWA suspended its cash assistance programme to the most needy. It
also ceased production of textbooks because there is no paper, ink or glue in
Gaza. This will affect 200,000 students returning to school in the new year. On
11 December, the Israeli defence minister, Ehud Barak, sent $25 million
following an appeal from the Palestinian prime minister, Salaam Fayad, the first
infusion of its kind since October. It won’t even cover a month’s salary for
Gaza’s 77,000 civil servants.

On 13 November production at Gaza’s only power station was suspended and the
turbines shut down because it had run out of industrial diesel. This in turn
caused the two turbine batteries to run down, and they failed to start up again
when fuel was received some ten days later. About a hundred spare parts ordered
for the turbines have been sitting in the port of Ashdod in Israel for the last
eight months, waiting for the Israeli authorities to let them through customs.
Now Israel has started to auction these parts because they have been in customs
for more than 45 days. The proceeds are being held in Israeli accounts.

During the week of 30 November, 394,000 litres of industrial diesel were allowed
in for the power plant: approximately 18 per cent of the weekly minimum that
Israel is legally obliged to allow in. It was enough for one turbine to run for
two days before the plant was shut down again. The Gaza Electricity Distribution
Company said that most of the Gaza Strip will be without electricity for between
four and 12 hours a day. At any given time during these outages, over 65,000
people have no electricity.

No other diesel fuel (for standby generators and transport) was delivered during
that week, no petrol (which has been kept out since early November) or cooking
gas. Gaza’s hospitals are apparently relying on diesel and gas smuggled from
Egypt via the tunnels; these supplies are said to be administered and taxed by
Hamas. Even so, two of Gaza’s hospitals have been out of cooking gas since the
week of 23 November.

Adding to the problems caused by the siege are those created by the political
divisions between the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and the Hamas
Authority in Gaza. For example, Gaza’s Coastal Municipalities Water Utility
(CMWU), which is not controlled by Hamas, is supposed to receive funds from the
World Bank via the Palestinian Water Authority (PWA) in Ramallah to pay for fuel
to run the pumps for Gaza’s sewage system. Since June, the PWA has refused to
hand over those funds, perhaps because it feels that a functioning sewage system
would benefit Hamas. I don’t know whether the World Bank has attempted to
intervene, but meanwhile UNRWA is providing the fuel, although they have no
budget for it. The CMWU has also asked Israel’s permission to import 200 tons
of chlorine, but by the end of November it had received only 18 tons – enough
for one week of chlorinated water. By mid-December Gaza City and the north of
Gaza had access to water only six hours every three days.

According to the World Health Organisation, the political divisions between Gaza
and the West Bank are also having a serious impact on drug stocks in Gaza. The
West Bank Ministry of Health (MOH) is responsible for procuring and delivering
most of the pharmaceuticals and medical disposables used in Gaza. But stocks are
at dangerously low levels. Throughout November the MOH West Bank was turning
shipments away because it had no warehouse space, yet it wasn’t sending
supplies on to Gaza in adequate quantities. During the week of 30 November, one
truck carrying drugs and medical supplies from the MOH in Ramallah entered Gaza,
the first delivery since early September.

The breakdown of an entire society is happening in front of us, but there is
little international response beyond UN warnings which are ignored. The European
Union announced recently that it wanted to strengthen its relationship with
Israel while the Israeli leadership openly calls for a large-scale invasion of
the Gaza Strip and continues its economic stranglehold over the territory with,
it appears, the not-so-tacit support of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah
– which has been co-operating with Israel on a number of measures. On 19
December Hamas officially ended its truce with Israel, which Israel said it
wanted to renew, because of Israel’s failure to ease the blockade.

How can keeping food and medicine from the people of Gaza protect the people of
Israel? How can the impoverishment and suffering of Gaza’s children – more
than 50 per cent of the population – benefit anyone? International law as well
as human decency demands their protection. If Gaza falls, the West Bank will be
next.


On Fri, 26 Dec 2008, MaryAnne Mercer wrote:

> Happy Holidays to Global Health-ers around the world,
>
> Fall quarter at UW included the Global Health seminar with a focus on food
issues, and the Problems in International Health course that presented some of
the ways that international policies contribute to ill health in poor countries.
The following article presents evidence linking these two themes, discussing
World Bank and IMF policies as they have contributed to the current world hunger
crisis.
>
> Mary Anne
>
> [Excerpt:  The World Bank has 'given consistently wrong advice,' said Jose
Ramos-Horta, the president of East Timor in Asia and the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize
winner. It is their advice -- that buying externally is cheaper than producing
-- that has resulted in this, he said.]
>
> World Bank's 'Wrong Advice' Left Silos Empty in Poor Countries
>
> By Alison Fitzgerald and Helen Murphy
>
> Dec. 10 (Bloomberg) -- Inside and out, the rusted towers of El Salvador's
biggest grain silo show how the World Bank helped push developing countries into
the global food crisis.
>
> Inside, the silo, which once held thousands of tons of beans and cereals, is
now empty. It was abandoned in 1991, after the bank told Salvadoran leaders to
privatize grain storage, import staples such as corn and rice, and export crops
including cocoa, coffee and palm oil.
>
> Outside, where Rosa Maria Chavez's food stand is propped against a tower wall,
price increases for basic grains this year whittled business down to 16
customers a day from 80.
>
> It's a monument to the mess we are in now, says Chavez, 63.
>
> About 40 million people joined the ranks of the undernourished this year,
bringing the estimate of the world's hungry to 963 million of its 6.8 billion
people, the Rome-based United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization said
yesterday. The growth didn't come just from natural causes. A manmade recipe for
famine included corrupt governments and companies that profited on misery.
Another ingredient: The World Bank's free- market policies, which over almost
three decades brought poor nations like El Salvador into global grain markets,
where prices surged.
>
> The World Bank made one basic blunder, which is to think that markets would
solve problems of such severe circumstances, said Jeffrey Sachs, director of the
Earth Institute at Columbia University and a special adviser to UN
Secretary-General Ban Ki- moon. ?But history has shown you need to help people
to get above the survival threshold before the markets can start functioning.
>
> The Washington Consensus
>
> Created in 1944, the Washington-based World Bank Group spent much of its first
35 years dispensing low-interest loans, grants and development advice to poor
countries with an eye toward promoting self-reliance. In 1980, the bank's
executives began attaching conditions to loans that required 'structural
adjustments' in the recipients' national economies. The mandates were designed
to have poor countries cut import tariffs, reduce government's role in
enterprises such as agriculture and promote cultivation of export crops to
attract foreign currency.
>
> The philosophy, which came to be known as 'The Washington Consensus,' was
based in part on assumptions that importing basic grains would be inexpensive
and that farmers in developing nations could earn more producing exports. Food
prices had fallen for years and few economists thought that would change, said
Mark Cackler, manager of the bank's Agriculture and Rural Development Department
in Washington.
>
> Exporter to Importer
>
> In 2007 and the first half of 2008, an index of more than 60 food commodity
prices compiled by the FAO rose 82 percent. While costs have since eased, they
were 20 percent higher on Nov. 1 than at the end of 2006.
>
> The increases hit hard in countries such as El Salvador, which had adopted the
principles of the Washington Consensus in return for loans. El Salvador's
Central Reserve Bank said the total amount of the lending was 'not available.'
The Agriculture Ministry did provide this measure of their effects: The country
was a net exporter of rice 20 years ago; now it imports 75 to 80 percent of what
it consumes.
>
> The World Bank has "given consistently wrong advice," said Jose Ramos-Horta,
the president of East Timor in Asia and the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize winner.
>
> "It is their advice -- that buying externally is cheaper than producing --
that has resulted in this," he said.
>
> More Than Underinvestment
>
> Current and former World Bank officials say small countries hurt their own
agriculture industries by suppressing prices, taxing farms, inflating exchange
rates and favoring urban development. They reject the assertion that structural
adjustment loans hurt developing nations' self-sufficiency.
>
> "The premise that this crisis was caused by these policies is something that
we don't agree with," said World Bank spokeswoman Geetanjali Chopra. "This
crisis was caused by much more than underinvestment in agriculture."
>
> Still, in nations such as Honduras and Ghana, imports of basic grains climbed
after governments eliminated agricultural subsidies, sold off grain stores or
decreased tariffs to get World Bank loans in the 1990s, according to data from
the UN's FAO.
>
> In Honduras, 23,000 rice farmers went out of business, and employment from
rice fell to 11,200 people from 150,000 after the government trimmed import
duties, according to the human rights group Oxfam International. Honduran farms
now supply 17 percent of the domestic demand for rice, down from 90 percent
before the tariffs changed.
>
> McNamara's Shift
>
> In Ghana, the World Bank required a tariff reduction on rice to 20 percent
from 100 percent. Imports tripled, said Raj Patel, a scholar at the Center for
African Studies at the University of California at Berkeley.
>
> The free-market policies were a sharp turn from the bank's earlier efforts --
led by former bank President Robert McNamara - - to develop poor countries'
domestic agriculture and self- reliance, said Uma Lele, a World Bank economist
from 1971 to 1991 and 1995 to 2005.
>
> McNamara, who oversaw the escalation of the U.S. war in Vietnam as defense
secretary under presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson before joining the
bank in 1968, shifted his views. He introduced the structural adjustment concept
in 1979, in a speech in Manila urging rich nations to open their markets to
imports from poor countries.
>
> "Developing countries will need to carry out structural adjustments favoring
their export sector," he said in the speech. McNamara, 92, declined to comment
for this story.
>
> Free Market Principles
>
> World Bank officials were frustrated that their investment in agriculture
through the 1970s wasn't paying off, especially in Africa, said Pierre
Landell-Mills, a bank economist at the time.
>
> "There were state marketing organizations that were a complete nightmare of
mismanagement and corruption," said Landell-Mills, 69, now a principal at the
Policy Practice, a public policy consulting group in Brighton, England, in a
June interview. "There were unsustainable subsidies."
>
> The 'preferred solution,' he said, was to dismantle the marketing boards,
shrink governments and remove barriers to entrepreneurship. McNamara in 1980
approved the first three structural adjustment loans. By 1985, they made up more
than 25 percent of the World Bank's total lending, according to Kyle Peters, its
country services director.
>
> Free-market principles were on the rise in the U.S. and the U.K., the bank's
major funders. Margaret Thatcher had become British prime minister in 1979 with
promises of privatizing state-owned enterprises. Ronald Reagan was elected U.S.
president in 1980, pledging to cut taxes and government programs.
>
> New Ideas, New Staff
>
> Reagan appointed Alden "Tom" Clausen, a former chief executive officer of Bank
America Corp., to succeed McNamara in 1981. The new bank president was convinced
"that you could fight poverty better and more efficiently and more quickly if
you get the policies of a country right," Clausen said in an interview.
>
> "I loved structural adjustment loans, and I made a lot of them," he said.
>
> As the bank's philosophy evolved, so did its staff. Clausen hired Anne
Krueger, an economist known for her advocacy of 'getting prices right' by
removing government controls, as vice president for economics and research in
1982. She "reshuffled the central economics staff," wrote Devesh Kapur, in the
bank's official history, "The World Bank: Its First Half Century."
>
> "Of course the direction of research had changed," Krueger, 74, said in an
interview on Aug. 25. She acknowledged that some economists left because they
didn't agree with the bank's focus. "Research moved away from big planning
models with unreasonable incentives and swung toward things that were much more
conducive to agriculture."
>
> Dysfunctional Systems
>
> Krueger led a five-volume study that concluded developing countries were
hurting their own agriculture with tax and exchange rate policies. She said the
bank's free-trade principles boosted output and growth.
>
> "These were largely dysfunctional systems," she said. "It made sense to reduce
tariffs so that countries could produce the goods that they were most efficient
at."
>
> After leaving the bank in 1986, Krueger became first deputy managing director
of the International Monetary Fund, which makes loans to help countries correct
balance of payment problems and promotes economic policies.
>
> As structural adjustment loans grew, the portion of the World Bank's lending
devoted to agriculture fell, to about 8 percent in 2000 from 30 percent in 1980.
Last year, farm-related loans made up 12 percent of the bank's $24.7 billion
portfolio.
>
> A Human Face
>
> "One of the reasons we have problems today is because of the cuts in
agriculture," said Montague Yudelman, 86, who was director of the World Bank?s
agriculture department under McNamara. "If they'd made a continuously high level
of investment, we'd have been in much better shape."
>
> By the late 1980s critics began saying the bank, along with the IMF, was
fostering poverty and dependence. UNICEF, the United Nations Childrens Fund, in
1987 published a two-volume study titled, "Adjustment With a Human Face." It
concluded that some of the bank's programs led to increases in malnutrition and
disease in poor nations and urged new strategies to protect the most vulnerable
people.
>
> In 1995, just 30 days into his tenure as bank president, James Wolfensohn
promised changes.
>
> During a meeting with representatives of 12 non-profit organizations,
Wolfensohn heard their argument that 15 years of adjustment lending had wiped
out small farmers in countries from Africa, Latin America and Asia, damaging
their ability to feed people. Some called for the bank to be disbanded.
>
> A Different Way
>
> "What I'm looking for is a different way of doing business in the future,"
Wolfensohn, a former Australian Olympic fencer and New York banker, told them.
Wolfensohn, 75, who left the World Bank in 2005, declined to be interviewed for
this story.
>
> The bank's commitment to free-market principles didn't waver.
>
> In 2000, as a condition for a $6.8 million agriculture loan in East Timor, the
bank demanded that publicly funded agricultural service centers be privatized
and rejected money for a public grain silo and slaughterhouse, according to Tim
Anderson, a political economy lecturer at the University of Sydney. He has
written several papers on East Timor's development.
>
> It also turned down proposals for the government to provide research and
advice to farmers and to supply seeds and fertilizer because "such public sector
involvement has not proved successful elsewhere," according to a World Bank
mission report that year.
>
> Small Farms Ignored
>
> At the time, there was already evidence that private entrepreneurs weren't
serving so-called smallholders, who the bank says make up 60 percent of the
world's 2.5 billion farm households.
>
> A 1998 study by Michael L. Morris, then a senior economist and project
coordinator with the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in El
Batan, Mexico, found that private seed companies in Africa focused on supplying
large commercial operations and "often ignored small-scale, subsistence-oriented
farmers located in remote areas." Morris, 53, is now the World Bank's lead
agriculture economist for the Africa region.
>
> In its 2008 World Development Report, the bank acknowledged that limiting
governments' participation in agriculture had hurt small farmers -- citing
Morris's 10-year-old study as part of the evidence.
>
> The expectation was that removing the state would free the market for private
actors to take over these functions -- reducing their costs, improving their
quality, and eliminating their regressive bias. "Too often, that didn't happen,"
the bank said in the report.
>
> No "Evil Force"
>
> In 2000, Wolfensohn defended the bank to critics. During a meeting at Prague
Castle that year, he told an invited crowd of 300 activists, bankers and
government officials: "You should not regard us as a black and evil force. Maybe
we've gotten things wrong. I'm sure we have in many cases."
>
> The next year, several non-profit groups that had worked with the bank to
study its loan conditions released a report saying that the policies "have
undermined the viability of small farms, weakened food security and damaged the
natural environment."
>
> In response to the criticism from the Structural Adjustment Participatory
Review International Network, the bank issued its own analysis that listed
successes as well as missteps. It concluded that the required changes in
agriculture were too much, too soon.
>
> Lessons Learned
>
> "The lessons for future policies are that agricultural adjustments are complex
and require a sequence of modest steps," the bank said in the report.
>
> In August 2004, James Adams, the World Bank's head of operations policy,
declared the end of structural adjustments.
>
> "We have abandoned the prescriptive character of the old policy," Adams said
in a statement. At the same time, he said, the underpinnings of the Washington
Consensus "remain important themes of economic policy."
>
> The next year, the bank demanded that Niger privatize its irrigation systems,
according to a 2007 report by Eurodad, a Brussels-based coalition of 56
non-profit groups. The requirement "has seriously damaging effects on poor
farmers' access to a precious and scarce resource," said the report, based on an
analysis of the bank's databases. In all, the group found economic policy
conditions were attached to 71 percent of loans and grants.
>
> The World Bank in May pledged $1.2 billion for a Global Food Response Program
that's designed to speed money to the neediest countries without the usual red
tape. As of last month the Bank approved $364 million for 25 countries, and $541
million more is designated for 10 others.
>
> Trade Talks Stalled
>
> Current Bank President Robert Zoellick, a former U.S. trade representative,
has promised to double agriculture spending while touting free trade as a
solution to rising food prices. Zoellick, 55, declined to be interviewed.
>
> Poor countries remained skeptical of open markets during the latest round of
World Trade talks in Geneva, in July. They insisted that they be allowed to
raise tariffs to protect domestic agriculture, stalling the negotiations.
>
> El Salvador, meanwhile, has invested about $240 million in agriculture since
2004. It now gives farmers a $30 bag of the seed of their choice and a $30 sack
of fertilizer.
>
> "The World Bank had a very short-term vision; it couldn't have been more
wrong," said Mario Salaverria, El Salvador's agriculture minister, as he
inspected corn in Sonsonate province, about 50 kilometers (31 miles) west of San
Salvador.
>
> His country must regain self-sufficiency, he said. "We can stop using our cars
because of price increases, but we can?t stop eating."
>
> (Recipe for Famine: Part 3 of 7.)
>
> To contact the reporters on this story: Alison Fitzgerald in Washington at
Afitzgerald2@... ; Helen Murphy in Bogota at hmurphy1@....
>
> Last Updated: December 9, 2008 19:01 EST
>
>
>
> etanetanetanetanetanetanetanetanetanetanetanetan
>
> Support ETAN! Read a message from Noam Chomsky -  Read what
http://www.etan.org/etan/2008-09app.htm
<http://www.etan.org/etan/2008-09app.htm>
>
> John M. Miller        john@...
> National Coordinator, ETAN
>
> Web site: http://www.etan.org <http://www.etan.org/>
>
> Send a blank e-mail message to info@... to find out  how to learn more
about East Timor on the Internet
>

Happy Holidays to Global Health-ers around the world,

Fall quarter at UW included the Global Health seminar with a focus on food
issues, and the Problems in International Health course that presented some of
the ways that international policies contribute to ill health in poor countries.
The following article presents evidence linking these two themes, discussing
World Bank and IMF policies as they have contributed to the current world hunger
crisis.

Mary Anne

[Excerpt:  The World Bank has 'given consistently wrong advice,' said Jose
Ramos-Horta, the president of East Timor in Asia and the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize
winner. It is their advice -- that buying externally is cheaper than producing
-- that has resulted in this, he said.]

World Bank's 'Wrong Advice' Left Silos Empty in Poor Countries

By Alison Fitzgerald and Helen Murphy

Dec. 10 (Bloomberg) -- Inside and out, the rusted towers of El Salvador's
biggest grain silo show how the World Bank helped push developing countries into
the global food crisis.

Inside, the silo, which once held thousands of tons of beans and cereals, is now
empty. It was abandoned in 1991, after the bank told Salvadoran leaders to
privatize grain storage, import staples such as corn and rice, and export crops
including cocoa, coffee and palm oil.

Outside, where Rosa Maria Chavez's food stand is propped against a tower wall,
price increases for basic grains this year whittled business down to 16
customers a day from 80.

It's a monument to the mess we are in now, says Chavez, 63.

About 40 million people joined the ranks of the undernourished this year,
bringing the estimate of the world's hungry to 963 million of its 6.8 billion
people, the Rome-based United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization said
yesterday. The growth didn't come just from natural causes. A manmade recipe for
famine included corrupt governments and companies that profited on misery.
Another ingredient: The World Bank's free- market policies, which over almost
three decades brought poor nations like El Salvador into global grain markets,
where prices surged.

The World Bank made one basic blunder, which is to think that markets would
solve problems of such severe circumstances, said Jeffrey Sachs, director of the
Earth Institute at Columbia University and a special adviser to UN
Secretary-General Ban Ki- moon. ?But history has shown you need to help people
to get above the survival threshold before the markets can start functioning.

The Washington Consensus

Created in 1944, the Washington-based World Bank Group spent much of its first
35 years dispensing low-interest loans, grants and development advice to poor
countries with an eye toward promoting self-reliance. In 1980, the bank's
executives began attaching conditions to loans that required 'structural
adjustments' in the recipients' national economies. The mandates were designed
to have poor countries cut import tariffs, reduce government's role in
enterprises such as agriculture and promote cultivation of export crops to
attract foreign currency.

The philosophy, which came to be known as 'The Washington Consensus,' was based
in part on assumptions that importing basic grains would be inexpensive and that
farmers in developing nations could earn more producing exports. Food prices had
fallen for years and few economists thought that would change, said Mark
Cackler, manager of the bank's Agriculture and Rural Development Department in
Washington.

Exporter to Importer

In 2007 and the first half of 2008, an index of more than 60 food commodity
prices compiled by the FAO rose 82 percent. While costs have since eased, they
were 20 percent higher on Nov. 1 than at the end of 2006.

The increases hit hard in countries such as El Salvador, which had adopted the
principles of the Washington Consensus in return for loans. El Salvador's
Central Reserve Bank said the total amount of the lending was 'not available.'
The Agriculture Ministry did provide this measure of their effects: The country
was a net exporter of rice 20 years ago; now it imports 75 to 80 percent of what
it consumes.

The World Bank has "given consistently wrong advice," said Jose Ramos-Horta, the
president of East Timor in Asia and the 1996 Nobel Peace Prize winner.

"It is their advice -- that buying externally is cheaper than producing -- that
has resulted in this," he said.

More Than Underinvestment

Current and former World Bank officials say small countries hurt their own
agriculture industries by suppressing prices, taxing farms, inflating exchange
rates and favoring urban development. They reject the assertion that structural
adjustment loans hurt developing nations' self-sufficiency.

"The premise that this crisis was caused by these policies is something that we
don't agree with," said World Bank spokeswoman Geetanjali Chopra. "This crisis
was caused by much more than underinvestment in agriculture."

Still, in nations such as Honduras and Ghana, imports of basic grains climbed
after governments eliminated agricultural subsidies, sold off grain stores or
decreased tariffs to get World Bank loans in the 1990s, according to data from
the UN's FAO.

In Honduras, 23,000 rice farmers went out of business, and employment from rice
fell to 11,200 people from 150,000 after the government trimmed import duties,
according to the human rights group Oxfam International. Honduran farms now
supply 17 percent of the domestic demand for rice, down from 90 percent before
the tariffs changed.

McNamara's Shift

In Ghana, the World Bank required a tariff reduction on rice to 20 percent from
100 percent. Imports tripled, said Raj Patel, a scholar at the Center for
African Studies at the University of California at Berkeley.

The free-market policies were a sharp turn from the bank's earlier efforts --
led by former bank President Robert McNamara - - to develop poor countries'
domestic agriculture and self- reliance, said Uma Lele, a World Bank economist
from 1971 to 1991 and 1995 to 2005.

McNamara, who oversaw the escalation of the U.S. war in Vietnam as defense
secretary under presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson before joining the
bank in 1968, shifted his views. He introduced the structural adjustment concept
in 1979, in a speech in Manila urging rich nations to open their markets to
imports from poor countries.

"Developing countries will need to carry out structural adjustments favoring
their export sector," he said in the speech. McNamara, 92, declined to comment
for this story.

Free Market Principles

World Bank officials were frustrated that their investment in agriculture
through the 1970s wasn't paying off, especially in Africa, said Pierre
Landell-Mills, a bank economist at the time.

"There were state marketing organizations that were a complete nightmare of
mismanagement and corruption," said Landell-Mills, 69, now a principal at the
Policy Practice, a public policy consulting group in Brighton, England, in a
June interview. "There were unsustainable subsidies."

The 'preferred solution,' he said, was to dismantle the marketing boards, shrink
governments and remove barriers to entrepreneurship. McNamara in 1980 approved
the first three structural adjustment loans. By 1985, they made up more than 25
percent of the World Bank's total lending, according to Kyle Peters, its country
services director.

Free-market principles were on the rise in the U.S. and the U.K., the bank's
major funders. Margaret Thatcher had become British prime minister in 1979 with
promises of privatizing state-owned enterprises. Ronald Reagan was elected U.S.
president in 1980, pledging to cut taxes and government programs.

New Ideas, New Staff

Reagan appointed Alden "Tom" Clausen, a former chief executive officer of Bank
America Corp., to succeed McNamara in 1981. The new bank president was convinced
"that you could fight poverty better and more efficiently and more quickly if
you get the policies of a country right," Clausen said in an interview.

"I loved structural adjustment loans, and I made a lot of them," he said.

As the bank's philosophy evolved, so did its staff. Clausen hired Anne Krueger,
an economist known for her advocacy of 'getting prices right' by removing
government controls, as vice president for economics and research in 1982. She
"reshuffled the central economics staff," wrote Devesh Kapur, in the bank's
official history, "The World Bank: Its First Half Century."

"Of course the direction of research had changed," Krueger, 74, said in an
interview on Aug. 25. She acknowledged that some economists left because they
didn't agree with the bank's focus. "Research moved away from big planning
models with unreasonable incentives and swung toward things that were much more
conducive to agriculture."

Dysfunctional Systems

Krueger led a five-volume study that concluded developing countries were hurting
their own agriculture with tax and exchange rate policies. She said the bank's
free-trade principles boosted output and growth.

"These were largely dysfunctional systems," she said. "It made sense to reduce
tariffs so that countries could produce the goods that they were most efficient
at."

After leaving the bank in 1986, Krueger became first deputy managing director of
the International Monetary Fund, which makes loans to help countries correct
balance of payment problems and promotes economic policies.

As structural adjustment loans grew, the portion of the World Bank's lending
devoted to agriculture fell, to about 8 percent in 2000 from 30 percent in 1980.
Last year, farm-related loans made up 12 percent of the bank's $24.7 billion
portfolio.

A Human Face

"One of the reasons we have problems today is because of the cuts in
agriculture," said Montague Yudelman, 86, who was director of the World Bank?s
agriculture department under McNamara. "If they'd made a continuously high level
of investment, we'd have been in much better shape."

By the late 1980s critics began saying the bank, along with the IMF, was
fostering poverty and dependence. UNICEF, the United Nations Childrens Fund, in
1987 published a two-volume study titled, "Adjustment With a Human Face." It
concluded that some of the bank's programs led to increases in malnutrition and
disease in poor nations and urged new strategies to protect the most vulnerable
people.

In 1995, just 30 days into his tenure as bank president, James Wolfensohn
promised changes.

During a meeting with representatives of 12 non-profit organizations, Wolfensohn
heard their argument that 15 years of adjustment lending had wiped out small
farmers in countries from Africa, Latin America and Asia, damaging their ability
to feed people. Some called for the bank to be disbanded.

A Different Way

"What I'm looking for is a different way of doing business in the future,"
Wolfensohn, a former Australian Olympic fencer and New York banker, told them.
Wolfensohn, 75, who left the World Bank in 2005, declined to be interviewed for
this story.

The bank's commitment to free-market principles didn't waver.

In 2000, as a condition for a $6.8 million agriculture loan in East Timor, the
bank demanded that publicly funded agricultural service centers be privatized
and rejected money for a public grain silo and slaughterhouse, according to Tim
Anderson, a political economy lecturer at the University of Sydney. He has
written several papers on East Timor's development.

It also turned down proposals for the government to provide research and advice
to farmers and to supply seeds and fertilizer because "such public sector
involvement has not proved successful elsewhere," according to a World Bank
mission report that year.

Small Farms Ignored

At the time, there was already evidence that private entrepreneurs weren't
serving so-called smallholders, who the bank says make up 60 percent of the
world's 2.5 billion farm households.

A 1998 study by Michael L. Morris, then a senior economist and project
coordinator with the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in El
Batan, Mexico, found that private seed companies in Africa focused on supplying
large commercial operations and "often ignored small-scale, subsistence-oriented
farmers located in remote areas." Morris, 53, is now the World Bank's lead
agriculture economist for the Africa region.

In its 2008 World Development Report, the bank acknowledged that limiting
governments' participation in agriculture had hurt small farmers -- citing
Morris's 10-year-old study as part of the evidence.

The expectation was that removing the state would free the market for private
actors to take over these functions -- reducing their costs, improving their
quality, and eliminating their regressive bias. "Too often, that didn't happen,"
the bank said in the report.

No "Evil Force"

In 2000, Wolfensohn defended the bank to critics. During a meeting at Prague
Castle that year, he told an invited crowd of 300 activists, bankers and
government officials: "You should not regard us as a black and evil force. Maybe
we've gotten things wrong. I'm sure we have in many cases."

The next year, several non-profit groups that had worked with the bank to study
its loan conditions released a report saying that the policies "have undermined
the viability of small farms, weakened food security and damaged the natural
environment."

In response to the criticism from the Structural Adjustment Participatory Review
International Network, the bank issued its own analysis that listed successes as
well as missteps. It concluded that the required changes in agriculture were too
much, too soon.

Lessons Learned

"The lessons for future policies are that agricultural adjustments are complex
and require a sequence of modest steps," the bank said in the report.

In August 2004, James Adams, the World Bank's head of operations policy,
declared the end of structural adjustments.

"We have abandoned the prescriptive character of the old policy," Adams said in
a statement. At the same time, he said, the underpinnings of the Washington
Consensus "remain important themes of economic policy."

The next year, the bank demanded that Niger privatize its irrigation systems,
according to a 2007 report by Eurodad, a Brussels-based coalition of 56
non-profit groups. The requirement "has seriously damaging effects on poor
farmers' access to a precious and scarce resource," said the report, based on an
analysis of the bank's databases. In all, the group found economic policy
conditions were attached to 71 percent of loans and grants.

The World Bank in May pledged $1.2 billion for a Global Food Response Program
that's designed to speed money to the neediest countries without the usual red
tape. As of last month the Bank approved $364 million for 25 countries, and $541
million more is designated for 10 others.

Trade Talks Stalled

Current Bank President Robert Zoellick, a former U.S. trade representative, has
promised to double agriculture spending while touting free trade as a solution
to rising food prices. Zoellick, 55, declined to be interviewed.

Poor countries remained skeptical of open markets during the latest round of
World Trade talks in Geneva, in July. They insisted that they be allowed to
raise tariffs to protect domestic agriculture, stalling the negotiations.

El Salvador, meanwhile, has invested about $240 million in agriculture since
2004. It now gives farmers a $30 bag of the seed of their choice and a $30 sack
of fertilizer.

"The World Bank had a very short-term vision; it couldn't have been more wrong,"
said Mario Salaverria, El Salvador's agriculture minister, as he inspected corn
in Sonsonate province, about 50 kilometers (31 miles) west of San Salvador.

His country must regain self-sufficiency, he said. "We can stop using our cars
because of price increases, but we can?t stop eating."

(Recipe for Famine: Part 3 of 7.)

To contact the reporters on this story: Alison Fitzgerald in Washington at
Afitzgerald2@... ; Helen Murphy in Bogota at hmurphy1@....

Last Updated: December 9, 2008 19:01 EST



etanetanetanetanetanetanetanetanetanetanetanetan

Support ETAN! Read a message from Noam Chomsky -  Read what
http://www.etan.org/etan/2008-09app.htm
<http://www.etan.org/etan/2008-09app.htm>

John M. Miller        john@...
National Coordinator, ETAN

Web site: http://www.etan.org <http://www.etan.org/>

Send a blank e-mail message to info@... to find out  how to learn more
about East Timor on the Internet

The University of Washington School of Public Health, the Department of Global
Health, World Health Cinema, and the Women's Center present:

A FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC screening of the Emmy-nominated documentary film
"revealing the truth about child sex trafficking in Nepal and India"

"The Day My God Died", narrated by Tim Robbins & Winona Ryder

Friday, October 17, 2008
3:30p
Hogness Auditorium
A 420, UW Health Sciences Building

Q&A with Brigitte Cazalis-Collins, Founder of Friends of Maiti Nepal, and
Andrew Levine, Producer of the film

For more information about Friends of Maiti, Nepal, www.friendsofmaitinepal.org


(Directions to Hogness Auditorium are attached)

Health Alliance International (HAI) is pleased to present Unembedded: Four
Independent Photojournalists on the War in Iraq. This exhibit is on display in
Odegaard Undergraduate Library from Sep. 20th - Dec. 6th, 2008.

Join two of the photographers, Thorne Anderson and Kael Alford, this weekend
for a book signing and artist lecture titled "Through the Looking Glass: Seeing
Iraq from the Other Side."

Saturday, Oct. 11th
1:00 PM - Book Signing, University Bookstore, 4326 University Way NE

Sunday, Oct. 12th
4:00 PM - Viewing & Reception, Odegaard Undergraduate Library
5:00-6:30 PM - Artist Lecture & Slideshow, Kane Hall 120


Unembedded is a nationally touring exhibit of 60 powerful and visually stunning
images that tell the story of the war’s impact on the lives of the Iraqi
people “on the ground” where the war is being waged. It is a powerful
expression of the effects of war that go largely ignored by the mainstream
media. It aims to enhance public awareness of the effects of U.S. policy on the
Iraqis, their country and returning American veterans and their families. For
more information please visit: http://www.unembedded.net/

“Truth, it has been said, is the first casualty of war. In the U.S.-led
invasion of Iraq, official truth died months before the bombing of Baghdad
began. Unembedded bears witness to the enduring power of independent
journalism. In their unflinching look at war-ravaged Iraq, four freelance
photojournalists show that life there is brutal yet poignant; that compassion
co-exists with anger, hatred and fear.” -excerpt from the book, Unembedded

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Ghforum mailing list
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An excellent conference.  This year's focus is on Iraq and Palestine
Occupations.

Amineh


---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 3 Oct 2008 07:26:37 -0700
From: Cindy Corrie <cindy@...>
To: Cindy Corrie <cindy@...>
Subject: Peace Works Conference in Olympia October 17-19


Peace Works Conference

Focus on Iraq and Palestine Occupations, Oct. 17-19

Register Now!



The Rachel Corrie Foundation for Peace and Justice is sponsoring its third
annual Peace Works event, Dual Occupations: Sovereignty and Freedom from
Iraq to Palestine, October 17-19, in Olympia, Washington.  This
multi-generational conference will bring together journalists, scholars,
peace organizers, Iraq veterans, and community leaders to deepen
understanding of foreign military occupation in the Middle East and to
connect those who work for justice and an end to occupation and war.



The three-day conference centered at The Evergreen State College Longhouse,
will include panel discussions, workshops and cultural events, that provide
a forum for bridging communities, acknowledging differences, and building
broader and more effective coalitions for peace and justice.  The conference
will feature talks on U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, women and war,
personal witness of occupation, peace curriculum for middle and secondary
teachers, art and media activism, organizing with veterans and military
families, and other topics.



    Conference speakers include:

              Phyllis Bennis - Fellow of the Institute of Policy Studies and
the Transnational Institute

                  Haj Sami Sadiq Subaih - Palestinian Mayor of West Bank
village targeted for demolition

              Adam Shapiro - Filmmaker and co-founder of the International
Solidarity Movement

                  Dahlia Wasfi - Iraqi-American activist whose childhood was
spent in Saddam Hussein's Iraq

                  Dr. Simona Sharoni - Israeli scholar, researcher and
activist and Professor of Women's Studies

Representatives of Iraq Veterans Against the War and G.I. Voice

                  Zoriah Miller - award-winning photojournalist in Iraq,
Afghanistan, Lebanon, and the Gaza Strip

          Dr. Steve Niva - author and Professor of Middle East Studies and
International Politics

          Dr. Bill Dienst - Emergency room physician and recent passenger on a
Free Gaza boat

                  Dr. Rula Awwad-Rafferty - Palestinian Professor of
Architecture and Sustainable Communities

                  Dr. Susan Greene - artist/activist, clinical psychologist
and co-founder of Break the Silence Mural Project



Friday, October 17th, 7:30 pm at the Washington Center for the Performing
Arts, Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies will give the
conference keynote address, "The Presidential Elections and the Future of
the Middle East." This will be followed by a roundtable discussion with
Palestinian Mayor Haj Sami Sadiq Subaih and Iraqi-American activist Dahlia
Wasfi.  Tickets for this event are available to the general public through
the Washington Center for the Performing Arts at www.washingtoncenter.org
<http://www.washingtoncenter.org/>  or at (360) 753-8585.

Saturday, October 18th, a conference party with spoken word performance,
Palestinian hip-hop film, and a DJ dance party will begin at 8:00 pm in the
Old K Records Loft at the corner of 5th and Cherry, above Fishtail Ales in
downtown Olympia.  Tickets for the general public are available at the door
for $5.



The Peace Works Conference is sponsored by the Rachel Corrie Foundation for
Peace & Justice and the (Re) Imagining the Middle East Program at The
Evergreen State College.



For registration, an expanding list of speakers, and a full conference
schedule, go to http:// <http://www.rachelcorriefoundation.org/>
www.rachelcorriefoundation.org, email info@..., or
call (360) 754-3998.  Special rates are available for students, low-income
participants, veterans and military families, and K-12 teachers.

FYI:

UNEMBEDDED:
Four Independent Photojournalists on the War in Iraq
University of Washington Odegaard Undergraduate Library
September 20-December 5, 2008

UNEMBEDDED is a national touring exhibit of 60 powerful and visually
stunning images that tell the story of the war's impact on the lives of
the Iraqi people "on the ground" where the war is being waged. It is a
powerful expression of the effects of war that go largely ignored by the
mainstream media. It aims to enhance public awareness of the effects of
U.S. policy on the Iraqis, their country and returning American veterans
and their families.

Exhibition:
University of Washington Odegaard Undergraduate Library
September 20-December 5, 2008

Opening reception and artist lecture:
Sunday, October 12th, 2008
4:00 pm Viewing & Reception at Odegaard Undergraduate Library
5:00 - 6:30pm Artist Lecture and Slideshow at Kane Hall
Photographers Thorne Anderson and Kael Alford will share their experiences at a
presentation:
"Through the Looking Glass: Seeing Iraq from the Other Side"

Book signing and talk:
With Photographers Thorne Anderson and Kael Alford
Saturday, October 11th, 2008, 1 pm
University of Washington Bookstore
4326 University Way NE

For more information, please visit
www.unembedded.net
www.healthallianceinternational.org


********************************************************************************\
*****
Wendy Johnson, MD, MPH
Director of New Initiatives
Health Alliance International
wjohns@...<mailto:wjohns@...>
206-543-8382

skype id: wendy.l.johnson