Michael Snyder

Eventually, the big corporations and the federal government will have near total control over food production in America.

An entire way of life is rapidly dying right in front of our eyes. The family farm is being systematically wiped out of existence in America, and big agribusiness and the federal government both have blood all over their hands. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the number of farms in the United States has fallen from about 6.8 million in 1935 to only about 2 million today.

That doesn't mean that there is less farming going on. U.S. farms are producing more than ever. But what it does mean is that farming is increasingly becoming dominated by the big boys. The rules of the game have been tilted in favor of big agribusiness so dramatically that most small farmers find that they simply cannot compete anymore. Back in 1900, about 39 percent of the U.S. population worked on farms. At this point, only about 2 percent of all Americans now live on farms.

Big agribusiness, the food processing conglomerates, and big seed companies such as Monsanto completely dominate the industry. Unless something dramatic is done, the family farm is going to continue to be wiped out of existence. Unfortunately, it does not look like things are going to turn around any time soon. The way that the farming industry is structured today, it is simply not economically feasible to operate a small family farm. According to Farm Aid, every week approximately 330 farmers leave their land for good.

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Philip Giraldi

It is interesting to note that while Americans elect a president based on their perception of what he will do to create jobs and lower taxes, the issues that seem to rise to the surface and demand attention are frequently related to foreign affairs. Witness how in the aftermath of the election there has been considerable focus on what happened in Benghazi nearly three months ago, most recently leading to demands for multiple congressional investigations. The Petraeus/Broadwell scandal also resonates because the general was the proponent of the spectacularly unsuccessful COIN policies in Iraq and Afghanistan who then parlayed his resume into being named Director of the CIA, the principal U.S. instrument for collecting and analyzing foreign intelligence.

And if that weren’t enough, the U.S. appears prepared to provide heavy weapons to the Syrian opposition while the question of whether or not to negotiate with Iran continues to hang in the air, though it will probably be rejected due to the usual domestic political considerations, which means AIPAC. U.S. client Israel is, as always, creating fresh crises obliging Washington to twist like a pretzel to demonstrate its love for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and all his works. Tel Aviv’s latest surprises include initiating a new wave of targeted assassinations and air attacks on Gaza while threatening harsh reprisals including possible “regime change” against the Palestinians if they go ahead to seek observer status at the United Nations at the end of this month. The White House has already put the Palestinians on notice for the U.N. bid while immediately giving a pass to Israel’s bombing of Gaza, describing it as “self-defense.”

So the rest of the world is regularly in your face and it does matter even to those who try to tune it out. For those of us who try to understand the pickle that we are in, the defeat of Mitt Romney has been a victory of sorts as it is always possible for things to get worse. Romney was truly an empty suit on foreign policy and it should be assumed that he would have continued the worst parts of the Obama program while adding some particular enhancements of his own including more money for the Pentagon. His victory would have meant a return of the neocons to the front stage coupled with a more generally aggressive military-based posture overseas which could easily have led to a war with Iran and heightened tension with Russia and China. It would also have resulted in major donors like Sheldon Adelson having a voice in policy formulation relating to the Middle East.

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Norman G. Finkelstein

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that Israel has just suffered a historic defeat.

One only had to watch the international news coverage. BBC persisted in its typically awful reportage on the Israel-Palestine conflict during Israel’s latest rampage. But tonight it had to acknowledge that the people of Gaza were out in the streets celebrating. It desperately sought some “balance” by positing that “some people in Israel are probably also celebrating.”

Fat chance.

CNN aired Christiane Amanpour’s “exclusive” interview with Khaled Meshal. Despite, or perhaps because of, her silly histrionics (“What do you want?” she tearfully pleaded), Meshal came across as remarkably articulate. Meshal also explicitly endorsed a settlement on the June 1967 border, which won’t please the BDS/One-State cultists.

It could not have failed to register even on the terrifyingly stupid Abu Mazen that the PA Comedy Hour will soon be cancelled.

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Stephen Lendman

Tuesday night, Israel and Hamas agreed to halt hostilities. Midnight local time was chosen. Hamas didn't want conflict in the first place. Israel is a rogue state. It's a serial provocateur. Multiple attacks were launched. Hamas responded defensively. It's their right and responsibility under international law. It had no other choice. It was wrongly accused of terrorism.

Israel planned Operation Pillar of Cloud months ago. Choosing target sites, overall tactics, and strategic aims require extensive planning. Killing Qassam Brigades leader Ahmed Jabari enraged Gazans justifiably. Israel did it to subvert a peace agreement he helped negotiate. Hamas responded.

Conflict rages into day 8. Israel has lots of killing and destruction left to do. It bears full responsibility for hostilities. It's guilty of grievous crimes of war and against humanity. Who knows when conflict will subside. Truce or not truce, it won't end. Israel won't let it. Israeli ceasefires and other agreements aren't worth the paper they're written on. Duplicity, state terror, institutionalized racism, and belligerence as a way of life define Israel. It menaces the region and humanity. It's worse than ever under Netanyahu. He can't wait to kill again. Children and other civilians are his favorite targets.

A previous article expressed doubts about an announced truce. Netanyahu gave it away saying Israel "will not hesitate to do what is necessary to defend our people." In other words, Israel will enforce occupation harshness, continue targeted assassinations after agreeing not to, bomb and shell at will, accost fishermen at sea, kill farmers in their fields, shoot children for target practice, and maintain Gaza's siege.

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Stuart Littlewood

…before world leaders deliver law and justice? The international community must finally confront the problem it has created.

Despite the piles of dead in Gaza and – for the second time in four years – the row upon row of charred and broken little bodies of children, Western leaders still shirk their duty and call on the two parties to restart the squalid, lopsided peace process that had led nowhere and only serves to give the Israelis more time to consolidate their territorial gains.

Instead of carrying out their responsibilities, they shamelessly shovel their foul mess onto the Palestinians to clean up. What are the Palestinians supposed to negotiate? Why should they have to bargain for their freedom and property with the thugs that stole it?

For decades the Israelis have played for time, whining that they have “no partner for peace” while continuing to seize and colonize all the Palestinian land and water resources needed to fulfil the Zionist dream of a Greater Israel from the Jordan to the Mediterranean – or, some say, the Euphrates to the Nile.

To that end the Zionist regime has continually violated UN resolutions, international law and the norms of human decency while rushing to establish irreversible facts on the ground, like the monstrous settlements and their supporting infrastructure, and to press ahead with further demolition of Arab homes and more ethnic cleansing.

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Stephen Lendman

The whole world's watching. Growing millions know. Israel is a rogue terror state. It is amoral, brutish, and ruthless. Arabs are murdered for not being Jews.

Gazans suffer most of all. Israel's been terror-bombing them daily. Civilians are maliciously targeted. Growing numbers are killed. Official totals way understate the toll. Many others are injured. Children are traumatized. Parents are frantic. How much more of this can people take?

Gazans dig through rubble for survivors. Others bury their dead. Media scoundrels assault truth. They run cover for Israel's worst crimes. Imagine supporting mass murder. Doing so makes them complicit.

A scurrilous New York Times editorial headlined "Hamas's Illegitimacy," saying:

"Hamas, which took control of Gaza in 2007 and is backed by Iran, is so consumed with hatred for Israel that it has repeatedly resorted to violence, no matter the cost to its own people."

Fact check: Vicious lies like this demand condemnation. Setting the record straight is vital. Hamas is Palestine's legitimate government. In January 2006, Palestinians elected their officials overwhelmingly. Israel and Washington imposed a West Bank coup d'etat regime. It's illegitimate. It's also pro-Israeli. Conflict followed. Hamas was wrongly blamed. Abbas serves illegitimately as president. Israel rigged his election. His term expired in January 2009. He won't step down or hold new elections. He's a longtime Israeli collaborator. He sold out at Oslo. He spurns his own people. He replicates Quisling harshness. He's an embarrassment to legitimate governance.

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Bill Van Auken

After initial reports Tuesday that a ceasefire agreement with Israel was imminent, a senior Hamas official, Izzat Risheq, told the media that a deal would not be finalized until Wednesday at the earliest, as Israel had failed to respond to proposed terms of a settlement.

With the world media focused on international efforts to broker a truce in the week-old military assault on Gaza, the war crime initiated by the Israeli government’s assassination last Wednesday of Hamas military leader Ahmed al-Jaabari continued to escalate.

The unrelenting attack by F16s, drones, warships, tanks and artillery has killed or wounded well over 1,000 Palestinians, in their great majority civilians. On Tuesday afternoon, it was reported that the death toll had topped 140, with at least 27 more people killed during the day. More than 900 others have been injured by bombs, missiles and shells.

The Israel Defense Forces increasingly appears to be hitting homes and other clearly civilian targets. In the wake of Sunday’s shocking massacre of 10 members of the same family—including four young children and four women—there have been a number of similar atrocities.

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Finian Cunningham

The body of 18-month-old Palestinian boy Eyad Abu Khosa,
killed in the latest Israeli airstrikes, lies on the floor during his
funeral in the Bureij refugee camp in central Gaza Strip on Nov.
18, 2012. (General info about the deadly strikes: PCHR)

Israel’s holocaust of innocents in Gaza has not sated the blood lust of its Zionist rulers, with the death toll rising to over 110 and the injured numbering more than a thousand - less than six days after the latest murderous offensive began.

Preparations for a ground offensive involving up to 75,000 troops threaten a repeat of the slaughter carried out by Israel four years ago in Gaza when more than 1,400 Palestinians were killed during a three-week killing orgy.

Then as now, most of the victims are children, their bloodied bodies pulled out from rubble, piled up in morgues; their innocent eyes in a frozen stare at the moment of horror visited on them in their homes.

How can the world tolerate such barbarity? Well, the majority of the world is not tolerating it. Humanity is horrified and aggrieved by these atrocities. All across the world, civic society and a good many governments are mobilizing, condemning Israel’s crimes against humanity.

But the seeming helplessness of the world to put an abrupt end to the holocaust is down to one simple, irrefutable fact. The perpetrators of such evil are supported by the government and ruling class in Washington. In a secondary support role to mass murder are the despicable governments in London, Paris and Berlin. But the ultimate author of this barbarity is Washington. The massacre of civilians in Gaza and elsewhere in Palestine could be stopped right now with one phone call from US President Barack Obama.

One phone call telling the Israeli criminals-in-office that the USD 3 billion annual lifeline of economic and military aid from American tax-payers is being terminated would bring this killing machine to a halt.

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Elizabeth Murray

A whole family was killed in their home in Nasser street, Gaza
city. 4 children died, along with their parents and a grandmother.

Consortiumn News Exclusive: Israeli hardliners joke about the periodic need to decimate each new generation of Palestinian militants as “mowing the grass,” a process underway again in new bombardments of Gaza. This ugly metaphor has also penetrated the think-tank world of Official Washington.

In early 2010, one of Washington DC’s most prestigious think tanks was holding a seminar on the Middle East which included a discussion of Israel’s December 2008-January 2009 assault on Gaza which killed about 1,300 Palestinians. When the death toll was mentioned, one expert on the panel smiled enigmatically and intoned: “It’s unfortunate, but every once in a while you have to mow the lawn.”

The remark, which likened killing hundreds of men, women and children – many of them noncombatants – with trimming the grass, was greeted with a light tittering around the room, which was filled with some of Washington’s most elite, highly educated and well-paid Middle East experts. Not a single one objected to the panelist’s black humor.

On the contrary, several analysts and experts were grinning at the reference to Israel’s strategy of mounting periodic attacks on the Palestinians to cull each new generation of militants. Such is the nonchalance of Washington’s policy-advising cognoscenti toward the ongoing and systematic genocide of Gaza’s oppressed population.

The cavalier language is symptomatic of the policymaking community’s increasingly pervasive tendency to disregard and disparage the humanity of Palestinian victims of Israeli attacks, which are often waged by Israel’s high-tech drones and U.S.-supplied F-16’s. There is also a tendency to ignore or downplay Israeli war crimes.

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Gilad Atzmon

Gilad Sharon, son of Ariel Sharon, wrote in the Jerusalem Post that Israel should “Flatten all of Gaza.”

“There should be no electricity in Gaza, no gasoline or moving vehicles, nothing. Then they’d really call for a ceasefire,” he wrote. “We need to flatten entire neighbourhoods in Gaza. Flatten all of Gaza. The Americans didn’t stop with Hiroshima – the Japanese weren’t surrendering fast enough, so they hit Nagasaki, too.”

Many Israelis and even some Zionists are ‘outraged’ but the truth must be told – Sharon’s views are fully consistent with Zionism, Israeli thinking and some aspect of Jewish culture.

For example, Sharon’s call is fully consistent with some devastating Old Testament’s passages:

‘And ye shall chase your enemies, and they shall fall before you by the sword...And five of you shall chase a hundred, and a hundred of you shall chase ten thousand; and your enemies shall fall before you by the sword.' Leviticus, 26:7–8

‘When the LORD thy God shall bring thee into the land whither thou goest to possess it, and shall cast out many nations before thee...and thou shalt smite them; then thou shalt utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show mercy unto them.’ Deuteronomy 7:1–2

‘Howbeit of the cities of these peoples, that the LORD thy God giveth thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth; but thou shalt utterly destroy them...as the LORD thy God hath commanded thee.’ Deuteronomy 20:16-17

So, both like his real father and his spiritual forefathers, the young Sharon wants to destroy the Gazans, he wants to reduce them and their civilization into dust – thoughts unfortunately embedded in the Old Testament. Though religious Jews following the Talmud rather than the Torah and may be critical of literal interpretations of the Holy Book, Gilad Sharon, is a secular Israeli and yet he follows here the most banal and literal interpretation of the Biblical text.

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Nahida Izzat, Exiled Palestinian
Uprooted Palestinians

In Palestine

Terror reigns

Psychopaths claim dominance

and a "G-d given right" to rob, kill and maim

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Patrick Martin

Israeli warplanes and naval gunboats intensified their attacks on Palestinian homes and institutions throughout the Gaza Strip over the weekend, bringing the death toll in the five days of aggression against the densely populated area to more than 75.

At least 29 people were killed Sunday, the majority of them women and children. There are undoubtedly more dead people, who remain buried in the ruins of dozens of houses and buildings.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Saturday that Israeli warplanes had carried out more than 1,000 strikes against targets in Gaza. Spokesmen for the Palestinian Red Crescent said at least 660 people were wounded or missing in the rubble. At least 137 children have been wounded.

Hospitals in Gaza are overwhelmed with casualties and short on essential supplies, according to the World Health Organization. The Save the Children charity said families were running out of food and water, with most trapped in their homes and enduring power cuts of up to 18 hours a day.

In the single bloodiest atrocity Sunday, nine members of the family of Mohamed Dallu, a Hamas official, were killed when Israeli bombs destroyed his home. The dead include his four small children—Sara (7), Jamal (6), Yusef (4) and Ibrahim (2). The blast was so powerful that it also killed two people who were merely walking past the house at the time.

In another incident, at Jabalya Camp in northern Gaza, a man, his wife and two small children, aged three and two, were killed when a bomb fell while they were sleeping and collapsed their small home on top of them.

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Chris Floyd

"Too much of nothing can make a man a liar."
~ Bob Dylan

"Nothing will come of nothing. Speak again."
~ Shakespeare, King Lear

It sure was a quiet weekend in the progressive blogosphere, where peace, justice and the alleviation of human suffering is an earnest, burning concern. At Eschaton, Atrios gave an amiable shrug and declared, "I got nothing to say." Digby and her co-pilot, David Atkins, did have a few things to say -- about Sarah Palin, General Pants-Down Petraeus, the grubby "Grand Bargaining" in the Beltway, and several examples of the stupidity and perfidy of right-wing Republicans. The posters at Daily Kos plied the same themes.

But even for those who didn't got nothing to say, it was all very much in a low-key, mopping-up, post-election mode. It seemed as if there were no major news events going on anywhere in the world that involved the violent, unjust infliction of human suffering, with the direct monetary, military and political support of United States government and its entire bipartisan political and media establishments. Nothing that might grab the attention -- even in passing -- of writers publicly and professionally dedicated to discussing and analyzing major news events involving American policy, politics and the media.

Anything like that going on this weekend? Anyone? Digby, Dave? No? Kos and the gang? Anything? Atrios?

Nope. They got nothing.

Not on Friday. Not on Saturday. Not by Sunday evening (as I write this).

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Stephen Lendman

Bullies choose easy adversaries to pummel. Equal fights are shunned. It's the same in schoolyards or battlefields. America and Israel operate this way. They avoid foes able to give as much as they take. Rogue governments never say they're sorry.

During Cast Lead in January 2009, Professor Jeremy Salt wrote "A Message to the brave Israeli Airmen." His comments apply to what's now ongoing.

What’s it like firing missiles at people you can’t see, he asked? Does it help being unable to see who you're killing? Is your conscience eased by inflicting disproportionate force on people unable to fight back and civilian infrastructure? Are you comfortable about slaughtering civilian men, women, children, and infants? Does this weigh on your conscience, or are you at ease? Do you sleep well or have nightmares about men, women and children you killed at home, in beds, kitchens, living rooms, schools, mosques, at work, or at play? Do farmers in their fields, mothers with children, teachers in classrooms, imams in mosques, children at play, the elderly, frail or disabled threaten your security? Do you ever question what you’ve done and why? Have you no shame, no sense of decency, no idea of the difference between right and wrong? Do you know the law? If so, why do you violate it? Doing so makes you complicit in crimes of war and against humanity? Do you know that? Do you blindly follow orders or have a mind of your own? Have you murdered civilians before? Will you do it again if ordered? Will you keep following orders blindly or do the right thing?

"Brave" Israeli airmen, soldiers, sailors, and other security force personnel are cowards. They've acted lawlessly for decades. Palestinian suffering is a way of life. Imagine living every day not sure if you'll live or die. Imagine young children growing up this way. Do Israeli children know what Palestinian ones endure? Are they told? Do they care? Do their parents?

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Khalid Amayreh

The mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small ~ Sextus Empiricus

It is very difficult to humanly understand the ongoing pornographic murderous bloodshed in the Gaza Strip at the hands of the Israeli occupation forces.

The indiscriminate and callous killings are really beyond the pale of what is humanly acceptable. Zionist Jews, whether we like it or not, are behaving in Nazi-like manner.

It may be politically incorrect to speak in such terms in some capitals such as Washington D.C. and London where the political establishments are thoroughly enslaved by Jewish money and Jewish power.

But the truth must be proclaimed even at the expense of angering some Jewish supremacists who think that non-Jews are sub-humans whose lives have no sanctity.

Take, for example, the Daleou family whose 11 members were completely annihilated in central Gaza Sunday afternoon, 18 November, when an American supplied Israeli F-16 warplane bombed their home with a laser-guided missile, killing the husband, the wife and their 9 children. Now, what sort of human beings or more correctly beasts, would commit such an obscenity? How will they see their faces in the mirror from now on?

Since the beginning of the current murderous aggression on Gaza in which Israel has used hundreds of warplanes, tanks and other state-of-the-art machines of death, as many as 65 Palestinians have been killed, the vast majority of them innocent civilians, including more than 20 children. More than 600 others were maimed or injured, many with handicaps that will remain with them for the rest of their lives.

Israel claims it is killing Palestinian children in self- defense. But Israel is an occupying power that illegally occupies other people's land and continues to build illegal colonies on land that belongs to the Palestinians.

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Arthur Silber

A Palestinian woman and her child run for cover after an Israeli air-
strike hit the northern Gaza City on Friday. (M. Longari/AFP/Getty)

The most striking and significant quality of our national conversation "is one of overwhelming, oppressive and suffocating unreality. It is as if everyone knows, but will never acknowledge, that we may speak only in code, and that we may only utilize the safe, empty phrases that we have agreed are 'acceptable' -- phrases and language that are safe precisely because they have been drained of all correspondence to facts. It is as if everyone realizes, but will never state, that we are engaged in an elaborate charade, a pageant of gesture and indication, where substance and specific meaning have been banned. ... [T]he truth is not merely unpleasant, an uninvited guest who makes conversation difficult and awkward. Truth is the enemy; truth is to be destroyed."

Gaza is a concentration camp. It is not like a concentration camp. It is not a metaphorical or figurative concentration camp. It is a concentration camp. Our culture, our political leaders, and the cacophony of voices in the media have all agreed that this truth must never be spoken. If one wanted to be momentarily charitable about people's absolute refusal to recognize the obvious, one might argue that a land area of approximately 140 square miles, containing a population of roughly 1.7 million people, could not possibly be a concentration camp. But size and the number of prisoners are not the distinguishing characteristics of a concentration camp. The most essential characteristic of a concentration camp is what is permitted, and what is not. Only one question matters: Under what conditions are the people within its borders permitted to live?

Israel controls most of Gaza's land borders, just as Israel controls the air space above it and the waters that border Gaza on the west. The sole exception is the small border with Egypt, and Israel subjects that border to attacks whenever it chooses. In essence, nothing is permitted in or out of Gaza without Israel's permission.

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Kate Randall

The ranks of the unemployed in the United States rose last year to 49.7 million, based on a new measure that provides a fuller picture of poverty than that previously reported by U.S. Census Bureau data. The revised poverty rate of 16.1 percent is up more than a percentage point from the 15 percent figure reported by the government in September.

Coming a little more than a week after the 2012 elections, the news that nearly one in six Americans is living in poverty received little attention in the media or from the Obama administration. Neither big-business party has any policies to alleviate growing poverty, which is exacerbated by entrenched unemployment and a sluggish economy.

The Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM), devised a year ago, factors in expenses for food, clothing, shelter, utilities, health care and other essentials beyond what the previous official formula took into account. It includes in its income measure such government-provided benefits as Social Security, unemployment benefits and nutrition assistance.

The SPM figures released by the Census Bureau on Thursday show that while some households may have incomes above the poverty line, factors such as medical expenses are pushing increasing numbers into poverty. The new figures also indicate that the tepid job growth in the more than four years since the financial crisis has come mostly in the form of low-wage jobs that in many cases are not able to lift families out of poverty.

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Philip Giraldi

RE Map: Why does Israel continue to build settlements on the west bank and continue its expansionist policies? The ultimate goal is to capture all of ‘Eretz Israel’. The ‘Promised Land’ extends from the River of Egypt to the Euphrates. It includes parts of Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, Jordan, Iraq, a bit of Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Yasser Arafat always used to keep an Israeli coin in his pocket showing Israel with the ‘Eretz Israel’ borders, to remind people that they shouldn’t be fooled by the Zionists, as they have no defined borders and continue to expand their land.

Most observers have become wearied by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s frequently voiced demands that Iran must be attacked because it is a threat to the entire world. The reality is otherwise, that Iran’s theocratic government’s security apparatus oppresses mostly its own people and its military lacks the capabilities that would enable it to threaten either Israel or the United States. Israel’s government knows that perfectly well and has even conceded that Iran currently has no nuclear weapons program, a viewpoint shared by America’s CIA. It also knows that any attempt by its air force and navy to attack Iran would be fraught with peril, quite likely leading to a regional war in which Israel would sustain considerable damage even if it would ultimately prevail due to its superior armaments provided by the United States.

So if Iran is no threat and Israel is incapable of staging a successful attack using its own resources, why is there a constant drumbeat from Netanyahu? One might suggest that Israel has been all along intending to let Washington do the fighting and dying for it by creating a sense of urgency over what Iran’s intentions and capabilities might actually be. Useful idiots in Congress, most recently Senators Kirk and Menendez, continue to push through resolutions demanding more and harsher sanctions against Iran. This demonization effort has been successful in that it has placed the US Congress firmly on the side of wrecking the Iranian economy as a means to eliminate Tehran’s nuclear program while prominent media spokesmen have been voicing much the same sentiment. Mitt Romney also drank the Kool aid, pledging to stop Iranian “capability” to create a nuclear weapon, something that it already has, before demonstrating that he did not even know where Iran was located. Because of the misinformation that circulates freely, opinion polls suggest that most Americans believe that Iran already has a nuclear weapon and constitutes a threat, though few would want a new war in the Middle East to deal with it.

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Stephen Lendman

Photo: Ahmed Jabari, leader of Qassam Brigades in the Gaza Strip, oversees a prisoner exchange with Israel near the Rafah border crossing on October 18, 2011. The landmark swap freed abducted Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit after five years in Hamas hands. (Mahmud Hams AFP/Getty Images/Global Post)

On November 15, thousands in Gaza City residents mourned Jabari's assassination. Israel murdered him the previous day in cold blood.

Score another victory for occupation harshness. Add one to the column of Israeli crimes against humanity. Volumes are needed to list them. Israel lives by the sword of injustice. One day perhaps it will perish for its villainy.

Hamas officials and Qassam Brigades leaders stayed away from Jabari's funeral for their safety. They're marked men. IDF spokesman General Yoav Mordechai said, "Were I a Hamas operative, I would opt to shelter underground." Mourners carried Jabari's body ritualistically. Others fired guns in the air chanting, "You have won." London Telegraph writer Phoebe Greenwood said Gazans called his assassination

"the straw that's broken the camel's back. The people are saying that 'we don't care. We want all our men to fight. We've got nothing to lose now.' "

Gaza is in "emergency mode." People are angry and defiant. The London Independent headlined "Massed Israeli troops poised for invasion of Gaza," saying:

"Military sources told The Independent that a ground invasion was 'a distinct possibility.' The army has deployed extra infantry units near the Gaza border, halted major exercises, cancelled soldiers' leave and mobilized some reserve forces."

The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and its military wing, the Abu Ali Mustafa Brigade, mourns Jabari's death. They called him a martyred liberating struggle "great leader." They promised greater resistance. They called for Palestinian unity and solidarity against a common enemy.

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Nahida Izzat, Exiled Palestinian
Uprooted Palestinians

LOOK AT ME

I would love to write poetry about love,

Paint rainbows and butterflies,

Smell the scent of pink rose buds,

And dance;

Dance with the melody of jubilant bluebirds.

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