Apparently the Obama administration has placed a hold on the transfer of Hellfire missiles to Israel, making clear that routine military shipments to Israel will now come under scrutiny. According to a senior White House official in the Wall Street Journal, this decision means “the United States is saying ‘The buck stops here…It’s not OK anymore.”
The Jewish Voice for Peace writes in an email: “The US currently writes a blank check to Israel for 3 billion dollars a year in unrestricted military aid. Israel has used these tax dollars to utterly devastate Gaza over the last five weeks, killing over 2000 Palestinians, and creating a massive humanitarian disaster the scale of which we are still struggling to comprehend. 16,800 homes have been partially or completely destroyed, 450,000 Palestinians are displaced, and food, electricity, and water are all in dangerously short supply. The Obama administration’s move yesterday signals a very important first step toward what we really need: an end to US funding for Israel’s ceaseless war on Palestinian civilians. But we can’t get there if we don’t back this win.”
“We know that the pro-war forces have already flooded the Obama Administration with angry emails and calls. We know about the unconditional support Israel has in Congress for this one-sided war on Gaza. This is the kind of backbone we have been waiting for, and we simply must overwhelm the hawkish voices to show President Obama that we support him”. (Jewish Voice for Peace)
The Jewish voice for Peace has asked everyone to sign a petition. They need to reach 18,000 by Tuesday. If they reach this goal, they will hand-deliver the petition to one of the President’s senior advisors.
Visit this website to thank Obama: http://bit.ly/ObamaThankYou
The whereabouts of the Jewish Voice for Peace is:
Jewish Voice for Peace
1611 Telegraph Ave, Suite 550
Oakland, CA 94612
510.465.1777
info@jewishvoiceforpeace.org
This is one of several active and sane Jewish organizations that oppose what Israel is doing. They are extraordinarily brave, and the Epicurean Blog honours them as peacemakers and opposers of a policy that amounts to anti-semitism. Anti-semitism because if the Israeli government continues to refuse to do a civilised deal with the Palestinians and start to make money from them instead of attacking them, they have ultimately seal their own fate. The JVP and people like them are pro-semitic. That is logic.
A 91-year-old Dutch man who was handed an award for saving a Jewish child’s life during the Second World War
Henk Zanoli is a 91 year old Dutchman who was declared Righteous Among the Nations along with his late mother by the Yad Vashem Holocaust museum in 2011 for saving Elhanan Pinto during the Nazi occupation of Holland. He has returned his medal after six of his relatives were killed by Israel’s air offensive on the Gaza Strip last month.
The lawyer’s great-niece, Angelique Eijpe, is a Dutch diplomat who serves as deputy head of the Dutch diplomatic mission in Oman. Her husband is Ismail Ziadah, who was born in the al-Bureij refugee camp in Gaza.
The bomb that fell on the Ziadah family home killed a mother, Muftiyah, 70, three of her sons – Jamil, Omar and Youssef, Jamil’s wife Bayan and their 12-year-old son Shaaban – orphaning their five other children.
Zanoli, returning his medal to the Israeli Embassy in The Hague, called the deaths “Murder carried out by the State of Israel”.
He wrote a letter to send with the award that explained his decision:
“For me to hold on to the honour granted by the State of Israel, under these circumstances, will be both an insult to the memory of my courageous mother who risked her life and that of her children fighting against suppression and for the preservation of human life as well as an insult to those in my family, four generations on, who lost no less than six of their relatives in Gaza at the hands of the State of Israel.”