Israeli strikes at Palestinian power network
Air force strikes on electricity transformers on 28 June cut power to more than 70 per cent of the Gaza Strip and the damage is expected to take up to six months to repair. Full Story
Category: Archive
Archived material from historical editions of The Generator
The Gaza Beach Party Massacre
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/?articleid=9224
by Justin Raimondo
The pretext under which the Israelis have re-invaded the Gaza Strip speaks volumes about the mentality of the settler state and those who hold it up as an exemplar of heroic virtue worthy of American support: one of their soldiers, Gilad Shalit, was kidnapped, and so, of course, this justified taking out half the Strip’s electrical grid – a form of " collective punishment" that will result in the deaths of young innocents, as the water-purification facilities for many thousands are knocked out. The Israeli leadership firmly believes that the life of one of their own is worth more than hundreds of Palestinians, young or old, fighters or bystanders, guilty or innocent. This is the message they are sending to their antagonists in Hamas and Fatah, and, in an interview with Abu Abir, a leader of the " Popular Resistance Committees," it is quite clear that this message has been received:
Q: "But the murder of the hostage doesn’t improve your reputation in the world, and doesn’t help end the IDF incursion in Gaza."
Abu Abir: "We executed a person belonging to the category of people who are stealing Palestinian land and daily harming Palestinian civilians. What is inhumane is the execution of our women and children in cold blood. The blood of Zionists is not dearer than the blood of our children, women, and warriors."
Insurance problem for US after Israel smashes Palestinian power plant
The destruction of the only power plant in the Gaza Strip threatens to create a humanitarian disaster because the plant supplied electricity to two-thirds of Gaza’s 1.3 million residents and operated pumps that provided water, reported The Sydney Morning Herald (30 June 2006, p.9).
Six transformers wrecked: Twelve hours later, workers at the power station were still hosing down six wrecked transformers billowing smoke after each one was picked off by a single Israeli missile, leaving heaps of burned metal.
"The electricity sector doesn’t have weapons": The plant’s operations manager Derar Abu Sisi, predicted it would not be generating again before the end of the year. He said: "What I know about war is that economics and infrastructure is usually the last target … We’re very sorry that it’s the first stage of war here. They know very well the electricity sector doesn’t have weapons."
"Military target" says Israel: Mark Regev, a spokesman for the Israeli Foreign Ministry, insisted the destruction of the plant was done for purely military reasons. He denied destroying the power station was illegal, saying his country was involved in a genuine military conflict.
Insurance issues: The plant cost about $US150 million ($A205 million) and took more than five years to build. It is insured by a US government agency and US officials say they expect American funds to be used to pay for the damage. But paying a claim on the plant, which was insured for $US48 million, could prove problematic for the US, which cut off funding for all infrastructure projects in the Palestinian territories after the militant group Hamas won legislative elections in January.
Enron involved: Plans for the plant began in 1999, when two private investors laid down the blueprint for making the Palestinian territories less reliant on buying electricity from Israel. The project faltered when violence broke out in Gaza in 2000 and when one of the shareholders, Enron Corporation, collapsed into bankruptcy. But the other shareholder, the Palestinian construction mogul Said Khoury, continued to push forward.
Operational from 2002: His construction company’s American subsidiary, the Morganti Group, bought out Enron’s stake in the plant. In 2002, the plant began operating and became the first such facility regulated by the Palestinian Energy Authority. In 2004, it reached full commercial capacity and its owners were able to buy $US48 million in "political risk" insurance from the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, an arm of the US government that provides American businesses with financing abroad.
The Sydney Morning Herald, 30/6/2006, p. 9
Source: Erisk Net
Israeli attack on Gaza is Racist
Last week, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert came out and publicly stated something that every unbiased observer of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has privately known for many years: that, to the Israeli oligarchs, the life of an Israeli citizen is "more important" than that of a Palestinian.
Speaking of the recent mass murders by the Israeli army of Palestinian civilians in Gaza (murders which Olmert blamed on Hamas beause of the continued firing of harmless ‘qassam’ rockets at the Israeli town of Sderot ) Olmert said: "I am deeply sorry for the residents of Gaza, but the lives, security and well-being of the residents of Sderot is even more important."
The weapon of last resort
Azzam Tamimi
June 29, 2006 01:30 PM
http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/azzam_tamimi/2006/06/saving_corporal_shalit.html
Rather than negotiate to free its 19-year-old solider Gilad Shalit, the Israeli government seems to have decided that he is worth more dead than alive.
Both the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, and his defence minister, who do not hail from the Israeli military, feel they are being tested. Their priority, it would seem, is to prove that they are as tough and fearsome as their military predecessors were.
Shimon Peres knows all about this. His Grapes of Wrath adventure in Lebanon in 1996 was motivated by a similar drive, and so was his decision earlier that year to liquidate Hamas’s chief bomb-maker, Yahya Ayyash. He and Israel paid dearly for both actions.
The Cabal, Outed
The looming conflict between Iran and the United States has a nightmarish quality about it: it is like one of those dreams in which a horrific series of events is endlessly reenacted, while the dreamer is powerless to stop it. You scream and nothing comes out.
It is a rerun of the run-up to war with Iraq: the "weapons of mass destruction" that may (or, more likely, may not) exist, the exile groups proffering dubious "intelligence," platoons of laptop bombardiers urging us to strike while they sit, sipping a latté, in the cushioned comfort of their well-subsidized Washington think tanks. The fevered editorials, the presidential posturing, the dramatic showdowns in the UN Security Council, the tragicomic behavior of the proposed target, as its leaders alternately proclaim their innocence and shout their defiance, grimly preparing for the inevitable assault. A creepy feeling of déjà vu overcomes me as I contemplate this familiar litany rising from the ranks of the War Party.
How, one wonders, could we be repeating the disastrous series of bad decisions, grossly self-serving projections, and alleged intelligence " failures" that led us into the Iraqi quagmire? And so soon!