Treading where the U.S. and its European allies have failed to make any significant headway, the leaders of Turkey and Brazil have now engaged personally in dealing with the globally important Iran/nuclear issue– and they seem to be making real progress in de-escalating the tensions around it.
In Tehran today, Iranian Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki told reporters his government has agreed to ship about half of its low-enriched uranium to Turkey in exchange for the further enriched kind of fuel required to run a medical reactor.
The deal comes as the culmination of personal visits undertaken to Iran by Turkish Prime Minister Rejep Tayyip Erdogan and Brazilian President Luiz Ignacio Lula da Silva.
If this deal goes through, Erdogan and Lula’s diplomatic breakthrough will have a large impact not only on resolution of the globally vital Iran/nuclear issue itself but also on the whole face and structure of world politics.
The U.S., Britain, France, and Germany have all been pushing– within the ‘P5+1′ forum established specifically a couple of years ago to add Germany’s economic (and pro-U.S.) heft to the UN’s traditional P5 leadership– to impose a U.S.-designed solution on Iran, primarily by ratcheting up hostile economic actions against Iran backed up by a threat of military action.
Within the P5+1, the other two members of the P5, China and Russia, have adopted a fairly passive stance on the issue, showing neither any great support for the western countries’ line nor any readiness to actively resist it.
Enter the leaders of Turkey and Brazil– two significantly rising, mid-size countries whose current governments are generally pro-western but have also shown their willingness to challenge Washington where they judge their own core interests outweigh those of the U.S.
In contrast to the P5’s membership group, which coincides exactly with the group of five nations “allowed” to have nuclear weapons– for a while anyway– under the terms of the worldwide Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), Turkey and Brazil are determinedly non-nuclear states. Both have good relations, including military relations, with the U.S. But perhaps most importantly, the current governments of these two states enjoy a wide and indisputable democratic mandate from their own citizenries– as well as considerable soft-power (diplomatic and economic) heft within the regions of which they are a part.
Therefore, though some European diplomats have apparently been a little huffy about the deal Erdogan and Lula achieved in Tehran, it would seem very counter-productive for the western governments to try to do anything active to try to undermine it.
That does not mean they won’t try, of course. All the western governments have been subjected to great pressure by Israel to continue ratcheting up the pressure on Iran; and it seems doubtful that either that pressure or those governments’ susceptibility to it will end overnight.
This is a great– and potentially very hopeful– story, in so many different respects. Watch this space.
Author: Helena
‘White’ settler power structure digging in
… and yes, this is Arizona, USA I’m talking about: the state that recently passed a law mandating its police to check the immigration status of anyone they judge just might be an undocumented immigrant, and that this week passed one prohibiting the teaching of any “ethnic” (read Mexican-American) studies in state classrooms.
Hey, it’s starting to sound just like Israel down there…
The WaPo’s Gene Robinson (an African-American and a strong supporter of civil rights for all Americans) wrote today that the new law was designed as “a weapon against a program in Tucson that teaches Mexican American students about their history and culture.”
He goes on:
- The education bill begins with a bizarre piece of nonsense, making it illegal for public or charter schools to offer courses that “promote the overthrow of the United States government.” Then it shifts from weird to offensive, prohibiting classes that “promote resentment toward a race or class of people,” that “are designed primarily for pupils of a particular ethnic group,” and that “advocate ethnic solidarity instead of the treatment of pupils as individuals.” When you try to parse those words, the effect is chilling.
Is it permissible, under the new law, to teach basic history? More than half the students in the Tucson Unified School District are Latino, the great majority of them Mexican American. The land that is now Arizona once belonged to Mexico. Might teaching that fact “promote resentment” among students of Mexican descent? What about a class that taught students how activists fought to end discrimination against Latinos in Arizona and other Western states? Would that illegally encourage students to resent the way their parents and grandparents were treated?
The legislation has an answer: Mexican American students, it seems, should not be taught to be proud of their heritage.
It really does sound just like Israel’s law prohibiting commemoration or study of the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe). Like the Palestinian citizens of Israel, ‘Mexican’-Americans in Arizona and a broad swathe of other southern and western states are the remnants of the populations who were there long before the ‘white’ (Anglo) settler colonists and ranchers moved in.
Here are a couple of interesting aspects of the Arizona situation. First, many institutions and bodies– even city governments– from all around the rest of the U.S. reacted to Arizona’s anti-‘Mexican’ measures by rapidly announcing an economic boycott of the state. As Katrina Vanden Heuvel wrote today,
- This week, the Los Angeles City Council voted 13 to 1 to ban most official city travel to Arizona and to avoid future contracts with Arizonan companies. With its resolution, Los Angeles joins San Francisco and Oakland as major cities that have passed similar anti-Arizona resolutions.
That’s interesting! Responding to policies you don’t like by imposing an economic boycott… H’mm, it could prove catching. BDS against Israel, anyone?
Second interesting thing: Here is Rabbi Marvin Hier, head of the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles, speaking out against the boycott of Arizona.
Yes, that would be the same Simon Wiesenthal Center that’s trying to build a so-called ‘Museum of Tolerance’ atop the gravestones of an ancient Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem.
Plenty of other Angelenos take a view different from Hier’s however. AP tells us that,
- Last month, Cardinal Roger Mahony, head of the Los Angeles Roman Catholic Archdiocese, said the law encourages people to turn on each other in Nazi- and Soviet-style repression.
… References to fascism also came up on Wednesday as the Los Angeles City Council voted to boycott Arizona businesses.
Councilman Paul Koretz likened the law — and other Arizona laws such as one that curbs high school ethnic studies programs — to the beginnings of Nazi Germany when Jews were singled out for persecution.
“We can’t let this advance any further,” said Koretz, who said he lost relatives in the Holocaust. “It is absolutely dangerous.”
He’s absolutely right.
Virginia planning an execution May 20
I spent half of last weekend at the annual Board Retreat for Virginians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty. It was my first Board Retreat, since I only joined the board last September. But the retreat was a deeply moving experience, that made me really glad I accepted the invitation to join the board– and that I have come back into working closely with this inspirational group after a few years of putting more of my energies into other matters.
However, one of our first activities coming out of the Board Retreat is to organize around our state’s upcoming execution, planned for May 20, of Darick Walker, the 107th person to be executed by the state since the death penalty was reinstated here in 1976.
Reinstated! Imagine that!
Is the United States the only country that has been traveling back in time to the Middle Ages on this important question of capital punishment?
I’m sure that if you were to compile a list of the countries that since 1970 have struck the death penalty off their lawbooks, it would be pretty lengthy. I certainly hope it would include countries that between them have a far larger population than that of the United States.
I’m planning to write more here about VADP over the weeks and months ahead. The main thing I want to write now is that, though we have a really excellent board and a great workplan, we desperately need more funds! Recently, our great Executive Director, Beth Panilaitis, moved to another job because we could not offer her a minimum of financial stability. Now, we’ve decided not wait to hire a replacement until we have the funds to attract and retain a good new person– which we want to be able to do as soon as possible.
So if you are able to make a donation of any size from large to small, please do so.
Palestinian refugees beating the odds!
A wonderful story from CNN about three Palestinian refugee girls, their science teacher, and their head-teacher who have all contributed to the girls’ success in being selected to participate in the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair in San Jose, California, this week.
(HT: American Friends of UNRWA.)
The 14-year-old girls are all students at the UNRWA Girls School in Askar refugee Camp, near the West bank city of Nablus. Their project involved designed and making a walking-cane for blind people that beeps when it comes near either an obstacle or an un-even-ness in the road ahead of it.
It sounds like a great invention– especially given the extent to which all Palestinians in the West Bank, whether sighted or blind, have to navigate rutted roads riven with deep IOF-dug trenches or blocked by IOF-built earth mounds, as they try to move around.
(Hey, imagine how much more these girls and all their classmates might have achieved if their families didn’t have to live in refugee camp hovels but were still living on their ancestral lands, and if they had been able to win the benefits of normal economic development over the past 62 years… )
Still, what they have achieved is fabulous; and it looks really useful. Congratulations to these smart young females!
It might be worth noting– for those people who still think that Islamic-style hair-veiling is a sign of backwardness or the oppression of females– that all three of these dedicated girls, and their science teacher, and the head-teacher who enabled the whole project, wear such veils. It is quite likely that the science teacher and the head-teacher (who, CNN tells us, is about to retire) are both refugees, as well.
Kudos, finally, to UNRWA, for sustaining this whole, really important school-system throughout all these decades.
Ameer Makhoul and the Nakba that continues
Kudos to Richard Silverstein and Marsha Cohen for the great English-language blogging they’ve been doing over the past week on the appalling story of the secret arrest and extremely abusive detention by Israel of its citizens Ameer Makhoul and Omar Said.
Yesterday, Amnesty International called on the Israeli authorities to “end their harrassment of Makhoul.”
Makhoul heads Ittijah (‘The Direction’), a coalition of NGOs active in the community of ethnic Palestinians, citizens of Israel, who make up some 20% of the country’s citizenry. When I traveled to Israel and neighboring countries in 2002 with the 14-person International Quaker Working Party on Palestine and Israel, Makhoul and several of his colleagues graciously received us in the Ittijah headquarters in Haifa, where we had a 90-minute session hearing about their work and their concerns. I’ve been trying to find the detailed notes that I and another group member took of the meeting. But in lieu of those, I wanted to share the written account in the book-length report, When the Rain Returns, that we published in 2004. I’ve copied the whole of that excerpt from pp. 150-153 of the book, below.
What Makhoul and his colleagues from Ittijah were quoted as saying there aptly sums up both the situation of the Palestinian citizens of Israel and that of the whole broader Palestinian people today, victim as they all are of Israel’s continuing campaigns to fragment them into ever smaller and smaller sub-sections as it continues to take their land out from under their feet, forcing them both to points outside their historic homeland and, when they refuse to leave it, into ghettoes within it that are ever more densely concentrated and thus unsustainable and vulnerable.
We are now coming up to Nakba Day. It is evident, from reflecting on the fate of Makhoul or of any Palestinians whether under Israel’s control or somewhat free of it outside the homeland, that the Palestinian Nakba can be seen both as a discrete historical event, in 19467-48, and as a long-drawn-out process of dispossession, marginalization, rights denial, and collective punishment that continues to this day.
—
Excerpt from When the Rain Returns, pp. 150-153:
… In Haifa, we also visited the headquarters of Ittijah, the Union of Arab Community Based Associations. Here, representatives of a number of different groups gathered around a broad table in a busy central space to tell us about their work. One of the first to speak was Khalid al-Khalil, a veteran land-affairs activist. Khalil is a leader in a group dedicated to winning “recognition” for some forty Arab villages that had not yet won that status from the government. Only recognized villages are part of Israel’s planning process, and only the residents of recognized villages are included in government plans for providing infrastructure and government services—like schools—to the country’s citizens.
“In 1965, the Israelis made a master-plan for the whole country. But they didn’t recognize these villages at that point,” Khalil told us. “So suddenly, our villages and homes, some of which had been there for centuries, became ‘illegal’. They tried to evict everyone into what they called ‘concentrations.’ … The word they use for that in Hebrew is rikuz.” He estimated the number of people affected at around 100,000.
“Our association made a plan for the unrecognized villages,” he explained. “We found all the necessary data and suggested a solution. We suggested that some of these villages should receive recognition as they were, and some could be attached as new ‘neighborhoods’ to existing towns or villages.” In the 1990s, he said, the group won recognition for nine villages—though he told us they had still not been provided with construction permits or basic services yet. “The issue is not about planning only, but about policy,” Khalil stressed. “The issue is land, as between the state and us, the indigenous residents.”
He said that in the Negev region, in southern Israel, “The government put 135,000 Arabs into seven ‘concentrations’. But any Jewish family that goes to the Negev is given five hundred dunums, free. As for us, we’re not even allowed to rent land there to use.”
“They have started even more since October 2000 to treat us as enemies,” he concluded. “But this is the compromise we offer to them: we want to be treated as equal citizens.”
We also heard from two articulate younger-generation members of Ittijah’s own central staff: its Director, Ameer Makhoul, and program director Sanaa Hammoud, a lawyer.
Hammoud told us that 60 percent of Arab children in Israel live under the poverty line. “From the beginning, the Israelis put us on the margins of their national life. And since October 2000, things have become even worse. … There are lots of laws being discussed that would harm our interests a lot, and lots of agitation against the Arab leaders here, especially the Arab Members of Knesset.”
During the present intifada, she said, Ittijah had started doing some media outreach work related to it:
- We have been working with the foreign media, the Arab media, and even the Israeli media, trying to get news out about what has been happening in the occupied territories.
In general, we’ve found the Israeli media very unresponsive. We called our campaign, “Don’t say you didn’t know!” We were getting information and telephone calls in real time from inside Jenin camp during the battles there, and we tried to pass it on to colleagues in the Israeli media. But Aviv Lavie from Ha’aretz admitted that they are not publishing everything they know.
When Makhoul spoke, he described some of the problems he saw the broader Palestinian national movement as facing. “All the Palestinians around the world are victims of Israel,” he said. “One of our main issues as Palestinians is our fragmentation. There is fragmentation between Palestinians who are citizens here, the residents of the occupied Palestinian territories, and the refugees outside. The Palestinian issue is not just what happened in 1967, but also 1948.”
He said that after much planning, in 2001, representatives of Palestinian NGOs in Israel, the occupied territories, and Lebanon were finally able to get together—but they had to go to Cyprus to do so. “The only way I could meet Raji Sourani was by going to Cyprus!” he noted with amazement, referring to the human rights lawyer we had earlier met with in Gaza, less than 100 miles away. “We are trying to work as a unified movement,” he added. “The PA [Palestinian Authority] accepted cutting us ‘inside’ Palestinians off from Palestinian issues because including our issues made their agenda with Oslo harder. But now, Oslo is ended! It is clear that all Palestinians are at risk—we have seen the attacks against Azmi Bishara, the threats against Palestinian NGOs. … And all this is done here inside Israel by military order, not by the courts.”
We asked Makhoul whether the Palestinian-Israeli organizations affiliated with Ittijah had cooperative relations with similar organizations in Jewish-Israeli society. He replied:
- After October 2000, many of the leftist Israeli organizations were in shock. That was really a period of ‘taking off masks.’ Now, the present period has shown us that we have several allies—groups like Physicians for Human Rights or B’tselem. So we continue to coordinate with them.
Now, we need to talk about protection—for us, as well as for the Palestinians in the occupied territories. Protection, not just solidarity…
You know, we used to use the word “apartheid” for what was going on here. But now, we feel that the Palestinians are facing a new nakba, just like the one of 1948. They’re facing that prospect in the occupied territories—but we’re also facing it here.
We feel and fear that everyone is against us. We can’t feel any sense of justice in the world.
Pentagon facing up to cash crunch
This article in today’s WaPo shows us Secdef Bob Gates as trying to raise the alarm regarding the ballooning of the costs for today’s overseas wars. Specifically, Gates is starting to raise questions about the pay/compensation packages being given to the 1.4 million members of the U.S. military.
A recent report– here in PDF— from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) noted that, if the value of health benefits, retirement benefits, and tax advantages are added in along with base pay, in 2006 enlisted personnel received on average $13,360 more in year than similarly qualified civilians, while officers received on average $24,870 more than civilian counterparts.
The WaPo article, which is by Craig Whitlock, says that,
- Congress has been so determined to take care of troops and their families that for several years running it has overruled the Pentagon and mandated more-generous pay raises than requested by the George W. Bush and Obama administrations. It has also rejected attempts by the Pentagon to slow soaring health-care costs — which Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates has said are “eating us alive” — by raising co-pays or premiums.
Now, Pentagon officials see fiscal calamity.
In the midst of two long-running wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, defense officials are increasingly worried that the government’s generosity is unsustainable and that it will leave them with less money to buy weapons and take care of equipment.
This is a great illustration of the fact that maintaining such a huge military is a huge burden on U.S. taxpayers– especially at a time of such deep financial emergency at home. It also gives a window into the fact that Congress and the U.S. political elite in general have been wanting to fight the U.S.’s two big and numerous smaller wars overseas in a way that essentially feather-beds the members of the U.S. military and makes them into a very pampered group of fighting men (and women) by any historical standard.
It is really time to bring an end to this whole process of worshiping the military that has held the US public in its grip for so long now.
Let’s face it, the military posture the U.S. has been trying to sustain around the whole world since the end of the Cold War is not only counter-productive– from the point of view of it’s not having built or sustained a more stable and equitable world order– but it also itself quite unsustainable into the medium term.
Time to figure out how to cut back our military considerably and to cooperate with all the other nations of the world in designing and establishing a system that ensures “public security” for the whole global commons in a way other than having it all be dominated and decided on by one, decidedly minority member of the world community.
London, election day
I’m here at Heathrow preparing to return to the U.S. while the voting proceeds in this country’s pretty dramatric election. I picked up a bunch of newspapers. The (Murdoch-owned) Sun has on its front page a massive graphic of Tory leader David Cameron, executed in the fashion of that iconic screen print of Barack Obama, over the words ‘Our Only HOPE’. The Daily Mirror is leaning more pro-Labout than ever, and has given over its first 20 pages or so to lots of exhortations to people to get out and vote Labour. On the front page is a picture of David Cameron, aged about 20, in a group photo taken at Oxford’s very upper-class ‘Bullingdon Club’, dressed along with his confreres there in a snappy bowtie and tailcoat.
The Independent, which seems lean a little cautiously pro-Lib Dem, is a lot more seriousin its coverage. It has a helpful two-page spread outlining what the three major parties have promised to do in various areas of policy.
Meanwhile, Greece has been burning, facing the EU’s monetary policy (and perhaps beyond that the whole world financial system) with a huge new challenge. Interesting days.
By the time I get back to Charlottesville– near midnight EST– we may have a good picture of how this British election will turn out. If there is no clear winner and if Cameron is unable to speedily form a majority coalition, then I gather that Gordon Brown stays on as PM until some party is able to form a government. However, several of his ministers may lose their seats today.
Mike MccGwire on the Iraq war
One of my dearest friends and most esteemed mentors in the field of strategic studies is Mike MccGwire, a veteran analyst of (then-)Soviet military affairs who started out life as an officer in Her Majesty’s Navy. Or maybe His Majesty’s Navy, since MccGwire is now 85 years old.
I’m on a brief visit to England, and today I had the immense pleasure of going down to the MccGwires’ home in southern Dorset to visit Mike and his wife Helen. He always makes such good, succinct sense. We talked a little about the mega-lethal debacle of the US-led invasion of Iraq. One of his judgments ran something along these lines: “It was doomed to fail, anyway. Cheney wanted to use it to project a fearsome threat against Iran, along the lines of ‘Look, see, this is what you’ll be facing very soon.’ That involved pummeling Iraq very hard; pulverizing it. But Wolfowitz wanted it to be a little island of pro-American democracy in the region; an example of a completely different sort to the whole region. Their goals were at complete odds with each other.”
He also said, with his characteristic air of amazement, that he couldn’t understand why, whenever the American government is faced with a tricky problem on the international scene, “Its first instinct is to reach for the gun.”
Anyway, it was great to see him. Sorry this is all I have time to blog tonight.
“Another Acre and Another Goat”
- I am very happy to be able to publish this essay by veteran Israeli peace activist Amos Gvirtz of Kibbutz Shefayim. The essay vividly captures the continuity in the conduct of the Zionist settlement movement in Palestine from pre-state days to the present. It also captures, as Amos puts it, “the continuation of the slow and ongoing implementation of all the components of the ‘Nakba.'” Thanks, Amos! ~HC
Another Acre and Another Goat
By Amos Gvirtz
During my childhood in the 1950s I still heard echoes of the argument (from pre-state days) between the Zionist Labor Movement and the Zionist Right. The Labor Movement people criticized the Zionist Right for declaring the intention of the Zionist Movement to inherit the Land of Israel. They argued that these declarations would arouse Arab resistance to the Zionist enterprise. In their view, the state-in-the-making should be built quietly, according to the slogan “another acre and another goat.”
When one sees and hears what’s going on in the occupied territories today, one can only conclude that the same approach characterizes our own times as well, together with the same old argument between quiet action and declared intentions. Except that today, instead of buying land, it is taken by force. Along with the building of settlements, Palestinians are expelled and their houses destroyed. All these things are done on a small scale – after all, our entire existence depends on the international community that supports us. If Israel were to act on a larger scale, that support would decline. Only in the context of a war does Israel allow itself massive action, as was the case in the “Cast Lead” operation in Gaza, where the IDF killed 1400 people and destroyed more than 4000 homes!
Whoever follows these things in the news, hears from time to time about small land confiscations near settlements, for security needs or for paving a road. The very existence of the separation barrier (“the wall”) serves as a means for stealing land. After the separation barrier is built, as the years go by, additional lands are taken from their Palestinian owners on the grounds that they are not cultivated – even if there is no possibility of cultivating them since many landowners are denied permits to cross the barrier and work their lands. And if the IDF doesn’t confiscate the land, then land-greedy settlers attack Palestinian farmers. The IDF protects the attackers and expels the farmers. After three years when Palestinians are unable to or do not dare to enter their lands, the lands are officially declared “state lands” because they have not been cultivated.
It’s the same story with home demolitions. First they confiscated the granting of building permits from Palestinians by disenfranchising the work of the Palestinian building and planning committees. After that the Israeli authorities practically stopped granting building permits to Palestinians. And then, when thousands of Palestinian families had no choice but to build without permits, they were issued demolition orders. The demolitions are carried out little by little over time, so that the media loses interest.
The policy of expulsions works in a similar way. Permanent residency is denied to people who marry local Palestinian residents, even if they live in “Area A” (the Palestinian cities) which are under the full control of the Palestinian Authority. Even after decades of married life, these non-resident spouses are required to go abroad every three months and return to their families as tourists. Sometimes they are not allowed to return at all. It seems that the State of Israel wants these families to leave their homes in the occupied territories in the wake of the spouses who are denied residency.
And so it seems that we have returned to pre-state days. Israel has eradicated its borders with the occupied territories, ignores international law and international norms, and systematically acts to annex the West Bank and the Golan Heights. For this purpose the State steals lands, builds settlements, destroys houses and expels people.
In the 1980s the country was up in arms: The racist Rabbi Meir Kahane succeeded in becoming a Knesset Member! He announced in a loud voice what Israel was doing little by little. The shock was great. Legislation against racist incitement was passed – not, of course, against racist actions – and Kahane’s party was declared illegal. If a law against racist actions had been legislated, we would be in danger of placing Israeli governments outside the law.
On the eve of Holocaust Day, the headline in the Israeli newspaper “Ha’aretz” informed us of a military order issued by the Head of the Army Central Command that would enable the expulsion of tens of thousands of Palestinians from the West Bank. At this point I will take the risk of saying something that is prohibited among us: that’s how it started in Germany. They spoke about the transfer of Jews from Europe. Only when they realized that this was impossible did they decide on the “final solution.”
These days Knesset Members are busy initiating legislation that will prohibit commemorating the “Nakba” (the Palestinian catastrophe) of 1948… The only thing lacking is the initiation of legislation that would prohibit the continuation of the slow and ongoing implementation of all the components of the “Nakba.”
Building the Paltustan road system
The 2.8 million Palestinians of the occupied West Bank are now gaining their very own segregated (and visibly inferior) road system– in a way that is completely reliant, for any inter-city connectivity it provides, on a chain of tunnels and under-passes that the IOF can easily choke off at will.
Welcome to Paltustan!
Nadia Hijab and Jesse Rosenfeld have an excellent article on this new portion of the Israeli-engineered apartheid system in the OPTs, in the current issue of The Nation.
They write,
- armed with information from United Nations sources and their own research, Palestinian nongovernmental organizations are raising the alarm. Their evidence spotlights the extent to which PA road-building is facilitating the Israeli goal of annexing vast areas of the West Bank–making a viable Palestinian state impossible.
Roads currently under construction in the Bethlehem governorate are a prime example, as they will complete the separation of the Gush Etzion settlement bloc, which includes some of the earliest Israeli settlements, from the Palestinian West Bank, swallowing up more pieces of Bethlehem on the way. The PA is building these roads with funding from the US Agency for International Development and thus ultimately the US taxpayer.
Bethlehem Palestinians had not grasped the implications of the PA-USAID road construction until a meeting organized last month by Badil, the refugee rights group. Representatives of local councils, refugee camps, governorate offices and NGOs were shocked by the information presented, and are calling for a halt to road construction until risks are assessed.
Anyway, go read the whole of this superb, informative article. It has a link to this helpful short slideshow from Badil. You can gain further information on how this issue is working out in the bethlehem governorate issue through these English-language presentations from the UN’s Office of the Coordinator for Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA)– PDF and PPT. Arabic and Hebrew-language versions are also available through the OCHA website.