I do what I want - You do what you're told

Systemic destruction of lives and infrastructure was not an unintended consequence

By Aditya Ganapathiraju

Why are people on Gaza so unhappy? Well, if you had to live in a prison, wouldn't you be unhappy?— Former CIA officer Robert Baer

It’s the most terrifying place I’ve ever been in… it’s a horrifyingly sad place because of the desperation and misery of the way people live. I was unprepared for camps that are much worse than anything I saw in South Africa.– Professor Edward Said 1993

They may be living but they're not alive. – Journalist Philip Rizk

The situation on the ground in Gaza has continued to deteriorate since January. One of the most densely populated areas in the world, this small coastal strip is home to a million and a half Palestinians, many of them refugees for over 60 years. It is now the worst condition it’s been in since 1967 when the Israeli army took military control of the land.

As numerous scholars and observers have concluded, the Israeli plan for Gaza seems to be to turn it into a depoliticized humanitarian catastrophe, turning the Palestinians trapped in there “beggars who have no political identity and therefore can have no political claims.”  

The Israeli assault against Gaza last winter brought this enclave to the forefront of the news cycle, only to disappear from the headlines in the weeks and months that followed.  The attention of much of the world’s dominant media moved on to other issues soon after a unilateral Israeli pullout—planned precisely timed so as not to cause an  unsightly distraction from the inauguration of the new American president. 

The lack of prominent coverage was not because there was a lack of newsworthy events in Gaza.  No, “breaking news is Gaza's middle name,” says freelance journalist Philip Rizk.  “But because this breaking news always holds the same kind of information, no one cares to report on it.”

“An Eye for an Eyelash”[8]

Violence in the occupied territories has always been bloody but many longtime observers were shocked by the brutality of winter assault, which killed more Palestinians in the first three weeks than during the entire first Intifada, or uprising against the occupation (1987-1993), prompting the UN to label it “one of the most violent episodes in the recent history of the occupied Palestinian territory.”

The January offensive left 1,417 people dead, 1,181 of which were non-combatants (313 children and 116 women). Another 5,303 Palestinians were injured in the attacks, including 1,606 children and 828 women, many left devastated with life-altering conditions.

The attack, carefully-planned six months in advance, destroyed 60 police stations early on, obliterated 20 ambulances and 30 mosques, in addition to leaving several hospitals bombed.  Some 280 schools and kindergartens were damaged, 18 of which were destroyed completely (including 8 kindergartens).

Another 6600 dunams of agricultural land, which Palestinian farmers depend on for their livelihood, were razed (1 dunam=1,000 square meters).  In all, some 21,000 buildings were damaged or destroyed.  An estimated $1.9 billion worth of damage was inflicted, according to an Economist Intelligence Unit report.  

“What we're witnessing today is an assault, a massacre,” and “not a war whatsoever,” said Zahir Janmohamed of Amnesty International on the 15 of January, reminding an audience that this was not a conflict between two equivalent military powers but rather another bloody chapter a long history of “Israel’s colonial operations” in the occupied territories. His views were confirmed by facts on the ground, as one scholar recently observed.

The systemic and widespread destruction of both lives and infrastructure was not an unintended consequence of the offensive but rather a deliberate strategy derived from the destruction inflicted during the 2006 Lebanon conflict.

The attack followed the “Dahiya Strategy,” referring to the Beirut area that was destroyed during the attack on Lebanon in 2006.  It concluded civilians must pay for their leader’s actions. 

Of course if one were to conclude that Israeli civilians should pay for their leader’s actions or American civilians be held responsible for George Bush’s actions, the (muted) international response might be different.

The strategy was formalized two months before the attacks by Tel Aviv University's Institute of National Security Studies and urged the use of “disproportionate force” ( by definition a war crime) to inflict crushing damage on “economic interests” and “centers of civilian power,” leaving the targeted society devastated and “floundering” in a long reconstruction process. (for more on the political dynamics involved and actions of Hamas and Israel before and during the attacks, see these papers).

“Behind the dry statistics lie shocking individual stories,” a group of Israeli human rights groups wrote. “Whole families were killed; parents saw their children shot before their very eyes; relatives watched their loved ones bleed to death; and entire neighborhoods were obliterated.”

The stories of those who experienced the attacks, who lost loved ones, and who continue to suffer, offer another perspective often absent here in the U.S.  Some of these stories, which described the toll of war beyond numerical abstractions, trickled out in the British press, where journalists are less ideologically constrained to follow the party line, even despite the Israeli military ban on foreign journalists.

Anwar Balousha, a 40-year-old man living in Jabalyia refugee camp in northern Gaza told British reporters of his personal loss.  It was around midnight when an Israeli bomb struck their refugee camp’s mosque with a blast so powerful it collapsed several neighboring buildings, including the Balousha’s home.  Of his seven daughters sleeping in a single room, five were killed—buried under bricks and rubble as they slept.

"We are civilians,” Anwar said.  “I don't belong to any faction, I don't support Fatah or Hamas, I'm just a Palestinian. They are punishing us all, civilians and militants. What is the guilt of the civilian?"

While human rights groups and other observers painstakingly extracted similar stories, the lesser-known narrative of a siege decimating Gaza’s society remained largely untold, confined to the dissident press and humanitarian groups.

Most stories usually report on the violence and bloodshed between two forces, which are often implied to be equivalent both morally and physically. The day-to-day struggles of 1.4 million Palestinians enduring and resisting a 42-year old occupation do not fit neatly into the standard narrative of events describing the Palestinian-Israeli issue.  It becomes easy for many to see ordinary Palestinians as nameless and faceless creatures, characters in a story taking place in a faraway land.

Israeli violence towards Gaza did not begin on the 27th of December.  

As Amnety’s Janmohamed observed, the assault included the blockade and other attacks and incursions into Gaza, all of which started well before that Saturday morning in December. The roots of the humanitarian disaster imposed by the Israeli need to be examined,  he said, alluding to what one OXFAM official described as “a serious crime against humanity,” a situation where 1.5 million people “are being punished for something they haven't done.”

[This is the first part of a series on Gaza, Part II describes life under siege]

Brutal Destruction Of Iraq's Archaeological Sites Continues (Photogallery)

Diane Tucker

 

September 21, 2009 Buried in Iraq's clay and dirt is the history of Western civilization. Great empires once thrived here, cultures that produced the world's first wheel, first cities, first agriculture, first code of law, first base-sixty number system, and very possibly the first writing. A brutal plundering of this rich cultural heritage has been taking place in broad daylight ever since the 2003 invasion of Iraq. These days Ancient Mesopotamia looks more like a scene from the movie Holes. "I still find it hard to believe this is happening," Clemens Reichel told the Huffington Post. "Since the 2003 Iraq War, my work as a field archaeologist has changed forever. Sometimes it feels more like an undertaker's work." Reichel, a Mesopotamian archaeologist at the University of Toronto, is former editor of the Iraq Museum Database Project at the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute. The scope of the catastrophe taking place cannot be overstated, said Reichel. Thousands of cuneiform-inscribed tablets, cylinder seals, and stone statues have illegally made their way to the lucrative antiquities markets of London, Geneva, and New York. Irreplaceable artifacts have been purchased for less than $100 on Ebay. Beyond the loss of these precious objects, reckless digging has destroyed the ability of researchers to assemble a mosaic of meaning from the shards of ancient art left buried in the ground. "Artifacts without context are decoration, nothing more. Pretty, but useless," said Reichel. Looters Aren't The Only Culprits The United States military turned the site of ancient Babylon into Camp Alpha in 2003, inflicting serious damage according to an exhaustive damage assessment recently released by UNESCO. Bulldozers leveled many of Babylon's artifact-laden hills. Helicopters caused structural damage to an ancient theater. But don't be quick to pin the blame on the U.S. military. In the past, protecting antiquities was an important part of U.S. military planning -- that is, when the leadership at the Defense Department deemed it important. During World War II, American officers persuaded allied commanders to avoid combat inside Florence, birthplace of the Italian Renaissance. Members of the Third Army rescued ten works by Rembrandt from the salt mines of Germany, then shipped them to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. for painstaking restoration before returning the works to Europe. Why, then, are military helicopters still landing on the remains of ancient Babylon? Why are looters still bringing shovels to the cradle of civilization and stripping it bare? The Buck Stops With Donald Rumsfeld Remember Rummy? The former defense secretary's jaw-dropping insensitivity was immortalized by the Washington Post's Thomas E. Ricks, after Army Specialist Thomas Wilson complained to Rumsfeld that he and his comrades were forced to root through Iraqi junkyards to improvise armor for their military vehicles: TW: "A lot of us are getting ready to move north soon. Our vehicles are not armored." DR: "You go to war with the Army you have." Rumsfeld was equally indifferent about the looting of more than 15,000 objects from the National Museum in Baghdad on his watch. "Stuff happens," he said. According to U.S. military intelligence officer Major James B. Cogbill, the principal reason the U.S. failed to protect the National Museum in Baghdad and key archaeological sites was the relatively small size of the force sent into Iraq. "There weren't enough troops on the ground to guard known ammunition dumps, let alone cultural and archaeological sites," Cogbill told the Huffington Post. Remember it was Rumsfeld who pushed hard to send as small a force as possible into Iraq. This failed strategy, now called the Rumsfeld Doctrine, resulted in unnecessary loss of life, and loss of history. In 2003, museum officials in Baghdad had more on the ball than Rumsfeld. They wisely hid many premier objects inside an air-raid shelter and the Central Bank before the Coalition invasion. Even so, thousands of precious objects covering 5000 years of recorded history were stolen or smashed to bits. Today nearly 10,000 artifacts remain missing. Even more devastating is the continued destruction of Iraq's reknowned archaeological sites. Here are three examples. There are thousands more. Babylon First built nearly 5,000 years ago, the ancient Mesopotamian city of Babylon was once the largest city in the ancient world. Hammurabi, whose principles of justice are still recognized today, lived here. So did Nebuchadnezzar, who reputedly established the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Alexander the Great once ruled this resilient city. The use of Babylon as a military base was a grave encroachment on the ancient site. Several areas were leveled to serve as parking lots. Heavy vehicles destroyed relics buried near the surface. Troops filled sandbags with soil full of archaeological fragments. (Something as simple as a broken plate can hold the key to how ancient cultures traded.) The remains of Ishtar Gate, the most beautiful of the eight gates that ringed Babylon's perimeter, was among the structures most abused. "The damage to Babylon is so great," said Maryam Mussa, an official from the Iraqi state board of heritage and antiquities, "it will be difficult to repair it, and nothing can make up for it." Samarra The Great Mosque of Samarra, built in the 9th century, was once the largest mosque in the world. It's minaret, the Malwiya Tower, is a dramatic spiraling cone that rises more than 170 feet above the desert. Not only is the tower one of the most recognized buildings in the Middle East, it was featured on Iraq's currency. Despite protests issued by scholars, U.S. snipers occupied the Malwiya Tower as a lookout. In 2005, the top of the minaret was blown apart by an insurgent bomb. Umm al-Aqarib Archaeologists uncovered a palace and a large temple complex more than 4,500 years old at the ancient site of Umm al-Aqarib, findings that were expected to help rewrite the history of Sumerian architecture. Today this buried treasure has been completely picked over by looters. Many of the illicit digs were massive efforts carried out by organized teams with backhoes and bulldozers, some financed by foreign operations. Stolen artifacts included fragile clay tablets etched in cuneiform script that revealed recorded decrees, business transactions, and other details of Mesopotamian life. Who is going to step in and protect these sites? The United Nations is trying to name Babylon a World Heritage Site, a designation that would bring additional support and protection. The hitch? The World Heritage Organization might deny the request if it decides Iraq doesn't have the personnel to maintain the site. Meanwhile, the U.S. State Department has kicked in $700,000 to help with restoration, a figure most archaeologists consider too small to make a difference. "Of course it is not enough, but it is better than nothing," said Mussa. Speaking of better than nothing, last fall the U.S. became the 123rd country to ratify the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict. (That date, 1954, is not a typo. It took 55 years for the U.S. to get on board.) The Hague Convention is the first multilateral treaty devoted exclusively to the protection of cultural heritage in the event of armed conflict. Major Cogbill is pushing to institutionalize wartime cultural planning "so it is not marginalized as an afterthought in the junk drawer of the Pentagon." The U.S. Government should create a permanent, dedicated structure within the Department of Defense that, at a minimum, ensures that appropriate cultural planning occurs and is disseminated to all levels of command. This organization should be fully integrated into the operations and policy directorates -- not marginalized as an afterthought in the "junk drawer" of the Pentagon. It would also be responsible for coordinating directly with whatever civilian agency has overall responsibility for protecting cultural arts and antiquities. Perhaps most importantly, cultural planning should not be relegated to the periphery as part of "phase IV" operations. Unless such planning is a formal aspect of all phases of the operation, it will not be executed properly. The Department of Defense is "seriously considering this recommendation" said Cogbill. Army cultural services manager Laurie Rush told the Huffington Post the Department of Defense has already started to do more than just talk about antiquities issues. In 2007, Rush developed a set of playing cards illustrating Iraq's wealth of ancient historical sites for U.S. forces. "This summer the Central Command Historical Cultural Advisory Group completed its first ever on-site archaeology training for military personnel in the Middle East. Next month, the group will return to Cairo to provide additional sessions with an international faculty." In the meantime, the U.S. military is in the process of slowly withdrawing its troops from Iraq, which begs the question: who is going to step in and stop the slow death of human history? Archaeological remains of the ancient city of Umm al Aqarib just weeks before the US-led invasion of Iraq. (Area in dotted box appears in next photo.) (March 2003) Umm al Aqarib five months later, looking more like a scene from the movie Holes. Looters brutally destroyed this archaeological site. (August 2003) Too late – a U.S. military patrol inspects deep trenches dug by looters hunting for valuable archaeological objects at the ancient site of Isin, which was irretrievably destroyed. (May 2003) In this recent photo of the ancient site of Babylon, what appears to be a military camp can be seen to the right of the Southern Citadel (1). Three helicopters can be seen in the upper left corner. Nearly 5,000 Mesopotamian cylinder seals were stolen from Iraqi museums and sites. Engraved stone cylinders like this one produced a raised impression when rolled over clay. This scene shows two gods attacking a Hydra with seven heads. Nearly 10,000 objects are still missing from the National Museum in Baghdad, including this ivory plaque with gold inlays and lapis lazuli stones that is one piece of a larger frieze. (c.900) When the famed Bull Lyre of Ur was carefully excavated from Iraqi soil in 1926, its wooden body had all but disintegrated. Fortunately, a cavity left in the undisturbed soil was recognized by archaeologists as the negative of the ancient artifact. Mounted on a new wooden frame, the fully restored Bull Lyre of Ur includes magnificent inlay work of lapis lazuli, carnelian, shell, and a golden bull's head. It is one of the world's oldest surviving stringed instruments. (c.2600 BCE) The Bull Lyre of Ur was severely damaged during the looting of the National Museum in Baghdad. Gold bands stripped off the instrument presumably were melted down. (The bull's head, stored separately, survived.)

:: Article nr. 58169 sent on 22-sep-2009 00:07 ECT
www.uruknet.info?p=58169

Link: www.huffingtonpost.com/diane-tucker/brutal-destruction-of-ira_b_290667.html

Memo From the Wretched: Enough About Nonviolence

by Steven Salaita

 

September 9, 2009 No people has been the recipient of more unsolicited advice than the Palestinians. The exemplars of barbarity to neoconservatives and the subjects of anguished progressive reprimands, the Palestinians often serve as a pretext for blowhards of all political affiliations to dust off their soapboxes. A particularly egregious form of sermonizing to which the Palestinians are subject is the admonition that they undertake nonviolent modes of resistance. I would like to argue that this sort of admonition is both ignorant and immoral. I do not want to explore whether or not nonviolence is the best strategic or moral form of anti-colonial resistance. The difference between violence and nonviolence is not as trenchant as most commentators imagine. Violence and nonviolence, both amorphous terms, are in constant dialectic, and no historical example can be found of either of these approaches being effective without the other present. Undertaking nonviolent resistance is an ethical and strategic decision with which I have no quarrel. In fact, I have tremendous admiration for those who practice this method at the risk of their personal safety and in the service of national liberation. I dislike the frequent lecturing from Western liberals to Palestinians about the merits of nonviolence, an act as misguided as it is patronizing. Michael Tomasky of The Guardian, for example, posed the following hypothetical amid Israel’s January, 2009, massacre of civilians in the Gaza Strip: "A hypothetical question for you. Suppose the Palestinian liberation movement, going way back to the founding of the PLO in 1964, had been dedicated to nonviolent struggle as opposed to armed struggle, and the Palestinians had had a Gandhi, and not an Arafat." The Palestinians, Tomasky surmises, would have had a state over twenty years ago. His colleague Gershom Gorenberg argues that "[t]hrough violence—from airplane hijackings to suicide bombings and rocket fire—Palestinians have failed to reach political independence…. So why not adopt the strategy of nonviolent civil disobedience, the methods of Gandhi?" Gorenberg wonders, "Is that kind of radicalism imaginable in Islam?" On CommonDreams.org, Marty Jezer explains, "Palestinian nonviolence seems a romantic fantasy, an idealistic dream. But perhaps idealism is the most realistic approach at this time; and nonviolence the solution most grounded in reality. I challenge anybody to come up with an equivalent strategy, one that assures Israelis their security and Palestinians their state." Michael Lerner asks what he imagines to be a self-evident question: "Who are Palestine’s friends? Those who encourage a path of non-violence and abandoning [sic] the fantasy that armed struggle combined with political isolation of Israel will lead to a good outcome for Palestinians." It would be too time consuming to respond to all the problems in these passages, but in them we can identify some useful points of analysis. The most important point is that the Palestinians do practice nonviolence. They have done so ever since Zionists began settling their land, a process that is by its very nature violent. Today, as throughout the twentieth century, one can find ample examples of intrepid and imaginative civil resistance. I have met very few Westerners who have traveled to Palestine and didn’t return home inspired. An interesting feature of Palestinian nonviolence is that it usually evokes a ferocious response by Israel. During the 1980s, peaceful demonstrators had their bones broken at the behest of Yitzhak Rabin. Earlier generations were deported and had their homes demolished. Today’s nonviolent activists are often shot, imprisoned, or beaten. The village of Bi’lin in the West Bank has done a weekly protest for over four years. During the course of these peaceful gatherings, the Israeli military has been utterly brutal. In April, 2009, soldiers shot and killed an unarmed demonstrator, Bassem Ibrahim Abu Rahmah. Abu Rahmah was hit in the chest with a tear-gas grenade, the same weapon that earlier in the year cracked open the skull of American demonstrator Tristan Anderson. In June, 2009, one of the leaders of the Bi’lin demonstrations, Adeeb Abu Rahme, was arrested and kept in military detention without due process. The breathless appeals by concerned Western liberals for the Palestinians to practice nonviolence are both ludicrous and immoral in light of the historical record and the invidious violence of the Israeli state. The Palestinians have always mixed violence and nonviolence, like all anti-colonial movements. It is through a host of racist presuppositions and an inherent commitment to Zionism that American liberals imagine that somehow Palestinians are a special case, that their reliance on violence is culturally innate (Gershon Gorenberg) or that they are motivated by factors other than liberation, such as anti-Semitism and civilizational envy (Alan Dershowitz). The inability or unwillingness of so many liberal intellectuals to recognize the long tradition of Palestinian nonviolent resistance bespeaks tacit racism in addition to a hypocritical devotion to Israel’s normative and continuous state violence. These calls for Palestinian nonviolence pretend to be ethically disinterested, but they are entangled with troublesome politics that are fundamentally destructive and undemocratic. For instance, they are often accompanied by appeals to avoid criticism of Zionism (Norman Finkelstein), to eschew effective nonviolent tactics such as boycott and divestment (Michael Lerner), and to reject counterproductive things like binationalism and right of return (Finkelstein and Lerner). In other words, the Palestinians should reject violence, and while they’re at it go ahead and give up all of their legal entitlements and decolonial aspirations. My good friend, the philosopher Mohammed Abed, pointed out to me recently that the grueling endurance of life under military occupation—waiting hours at checkpoints, being denied medical care, having universities shut down—is itself a testament to an unusual commitment to nonviolence. I suspect that when many Western liberals urge the Palestinians (and other colonized people) to undertake nonviolence, they are using a truncated definition of the term informed by a poor or distorted understanding of the concept. In this usage, they conflate nonviolence with passivity. It is a great convenience to the liberal advocates of colonization to have a colonized population comprised of passive resistors. But colonized people are never as stupid and gullible as their liberal saviors imagine them to be. The Palestinians, anyway, are far too evolved to listen to those who would use their courage and diligence to dispossess them of their right to active resistance. Violent or nonviolent, their choice of resistance isn’t the business of liberal armchair ethicists. Those ethicists are fond of claiming that if the Palestinians resisted nonviolently they would have already achieved their liberation. This claim is factually untrue. It is just as likely that if liberal commentators would assess their own profound support of violence they would have a lot less to say to others and more time to devote to their own failed selves. Steven Salaita's latest book is The Uncultured Wars: Arabs, Muslims, and the Poverty of Liberal Thought

 

Against the Reintroduction of Race Laws in Europe

 

To European democratic public opinion and the press that keeps it informed

Events in Italy have always – for better or worse – had an extraordinary influence on the whole of European society, from the Italian Renaissance to Fascism.
But, all too often, Europe has not become aware of these events in time.
There is currently a great deal of attention in major European newspapers on some aspects of the crisis that has engulfed our country. But we believe that it is our duty – the duty of all those living in Italy – to inform European public opinion on other alarming aspects that have not elicited such interest, such as the draft legislation proposed by the Italian Government, called the “Security Decree”. If it is not prevented, this legislation runs the risk of disfiguring the image of Europe and dealing a severe setback to human rights worldwide.
The Berlusconi Government, using security as a pretext, has imposed on our Parliament – over which it has total control – the adoption of laws discriminating against immigrants, laws the likes of which we had not seen in this country since the passing of the Fascist Race Laws.
The victim of the discrimination has changed: it is no longer the Jews but the undocumented migrant population, hundreds of thousands of people. But the discriminating measures have not changed: if passed, these new laws may, for example, forbid mixed marriages.
Such a prohibition would prevent a person from exercising a fundamental right, the right to marry without constraints of an ethnic or religious nature. The victims of discrimination would be denied this right simply on the basis of their nationality. Not to mention the fact that Italians would equally be denied their right to marry the person of their choice.
Another norm contained in the decree – even more abusive of human rights and dignity – is the prohibition for foreign women lacking permits (an administrative offence) to recognize their children at birth. Thus, the children born to “undocumented” foreign women, by virtue of a political decision by a temporary majority, shall be for their entire lives the children of unknown parents, they may be removed from their own mothers at birth and placed under the care of the State.
Not even Fascism had gone that far! The Race Laws introduced by the Regime in 1938 did not subtract children from their Jewish mothers, nor did they induce the mothers to abort rather than have their children confiscated by the State.
We would not be addressing European public opinion if the gravity of these measures were not such that it transcends national boundaries, calling for a reaction by all those who believe in our shared humanity. Europe cannot accept that one of its founding members regresses to primitive levels of social organization, contradicting international law and the very principles upon which the European political union is based.
It is in the interest of all of us that this not happen. It would dishonour us all.
European democratic public opinion must become aware of the disease ravaging Italy and act swiftly so that it does not spread further.
We are confident that each one of you will choose an effective way to demonstrate your opposition.

Roma, June, the 29th 2009

Andrea Camilleri, Antonio Tabucchi, Dacia Maraini, Dario Fo, Franca Rame, Moni Ovadia, Maurizio Scaparro, Gianni Amelio

ISRAEL ATTACKS JUSTICE BOAT; KIDNAPS HUMAN RIGHTS WORKERS; CONFISCATES MEDICINE, TOYS AND OLIVE TREES
 
For more information contact:
Greta Berlin (English)
tel: +357 99 081 767 / friends@freegaza.org

Caoimhe Butterly (Arabic/English/Spanish):

tel: +357 99 077 820 / sahara78@hotmail.co.uk
www.FreeGaza.org

[23 miles off the coast of Gaza, 15:30pm] - Today Israeli Occupation Forces attacked and boarded the Free Gaza Movement boat, the SPIRIT OF HUMANITY, abducting 21 human rights workers from 11 countries, including Noble laureate Mairead Maguire and former U.S. Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney (see below for a complete list of passengers). The passengers and crew are being forcibly dragged toward Israel.

“This is an outrageous violation of international law against us. Our boat was not in Israeli waters, and we were on a human rights mission to the Gaza Strip,” said Cynthia McKinney, a former U.S. Congresswoman and presidential candidate. “President Obama just told Israel to let in humanitarian and reconstruction supplies, and that’s exactly what we tried to do. We're asking the international community to demand our release so we can resume our journey.”

According to an International Committee of the Red Cross report released yesterday, the Palestinians living in Gaza are “trapped in despair.” Thousands of Gazans whose homes were destroyed earlier during Israel’s December/January massacre are still without shelter despite pledges of almost $4.5 billion in aid, because Israel refuses to allow cement and other building material into the Gaza Strip. The report also notes that hospitals are struggling to meet the needs of their patients due to Israel’s disruption of medical supplies.

“The aid we were carrying is a symbol of hope for the people of Gaza, hope that the sea route would open for them, and they would be able to transport their own materials to begin to reconstruct the schools, hospitals and thousands of homes destroyed during the onslaught of "Cast Lead”. Our mission is a gesture to the people of Gaza that we stand by them and that they are not alone" said fellow passenger Mairead Maguire, winner of a Noble Peace Prize for her work in Northern Ireland.

Just before being kidnapped by Israel, Huwaida Arraf, Free Gaza Movement chairperson and delegation co-coordinator on this voyage, stated that: “No one could possibly believe that our small boat constitutes any sort of threat to Israel. We carry  medical and reconstruction supplies, and children’s toys. Our passengers include a Nobel peace prize laureate and a former U.S. congressperson. Our boat was searched and received a security clearance by Cypriot Port Authorities before we departed, and at no time did we ever approach Israeli waters.”

Arraf continued, “Israel’s deliberate and premeditated attack on our unarmed boat is a clear violation of international law and we demand our immediate and unconditional release.”
###

WHAT YOU CAN DO!

CONTACT the Israeli Ministry of Justice
tel: +972 2646 6666 or +972 2646 6340
fax: +972 2646 6357

CONTACT the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs
tel: +972 2530 3111
fax: +972 2530 3367

CONTACT Mark Regev in the Prime Minister's office at:
tel: +972 5 0620 3264 or +972 2670 5354
mark.regev@it.pmo.gov.il

CONTACT the International Committee of the Red Cross to ask for their assistance in establishing the wellbeing of the kidnapped human rights workers and help in securing their immediate release!

Red Cross Israel
tel: +972 3524 5286
fax: +972 3527 0370
tel_aviv.tel@icrc.org

Red Cross Switzerland:
tel: +41 22 730 3443
fax: +41 22 734 8280

Red Cross USA:
tel: +1 212 599 6021
fax: +1 212 599 6009
###

Kidnapped Passengers from the Spirit of Humanity include:

Khalad Abdelkader, Bahrain
Khalad is an engineer representing the Islamic Charitable Association of Bahrain.

Othman Abufalah, Jordan
Othman is a world-renowned journalist with al-Jazeera TV.

Khaled Al-Shenoo, Bahrain
Khaled is a lecturer with the University of Bahrain.

Mansour Al-Abi, Yemen
Mansour is a cameraman with Al-Jazeera TV.

Fatima Al-Attawi, Bahrain
Fatima is a relief worker and community activist from Bahrain.

Juhaina Alqaed, Bahrain
Juhaina is a journalist & human rights activist.

Huwaida Arraf, US
Huwaida is the Chair of the Free Gaza Movement and delegation co-coordinator for this voyage.

Ishmahil Blagrove, UK
Ishmahil is a Jamaican-born journalist, documentary film maker and founder of the Rice & Peas film production company. His documentaries focus on international struggles for social justice.

Kaltham Ghloom, Bahrain
Kaltham is a community activist.

Derek Graham, Ireland
Derek Graham is an electrician, Free Gaza organizer, and first mate aboard the Spirit of Humanity.

Alex Harrison, UK
Alex is a solidarity worker from Britain. She is traveling to Gaza to do long-term human rights monitoring.

Denis Healey, UK
Denis is Captain of the Spirit of Humanity. This will be his fifth voyage to Gaza.

Fathi Jaouadi, UK
Fathi is a British journalist, Free Gaza organizer, and delegation co-coordinator for this voyage.

Mairead Maguire, Ireland
Mairead is a Nobel laureate and renowned peace activist.  

Lubna Masarwa, Palestine/Israel
Lubna is a Palestinian human rights activist and Free Gaza organizer.

Theresa McDermott, Scotland
Theresa is a solidarity worker from Scotland. She is traveling to Gaza to do long-term human rights monitoring.

Cynthia McKinney, US
Cynthia McKinney is an outspoken advocate for human rights and social justice issues, as well as a former U.S. congressperson and presidential candidate.

Adnan Mormesh, UK
Adnan is a solidarity worker from Britain. He is traveling to Gaza to do long-term human rights monitoring.

Adam Qvist, Denmark
Adam is a solidarity worker from Denmark. He is traveling to Gaza to do human rights monitoring.

Adam Shapiro, US
Adam is an American documentary film maker and human rights activist.

Kathy Sheetz, US
Kathy is a nurse and film maker, traveling to Gaza to do human rights monitoring.
###

Netanyahu's "brilliant" peace plan

Hasan Abu Nimah and Ali Abunimah

 

17 June 2009 The Har Homa settlement in the occupied West Bank. Netanyahu defied calls for a halt to settlement expansion in his speech on Monday. (ActiveStills) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proposed a peace plan so ingenious it is a wonder that for six decades of bloodshed no one thought of it. Some people might have missed the true brilliance of his ideas presented in a speech at Bar Ilan University on 14 June, so we are pleased to offer this analysis. First, Netanyahu wants Palestinians to become committed Zionists. They can prove this by declaring, "We recognize the right of the Jewish people to a state of their own in this land." As he pointed out, it is only the failure of Arabs in general and Palestinians in particular to commit themselves to the Zionist dream that has caused conflict, but once "they say those words to our people and to their people, then a path will be opened to resolving all the problems between our peoples." It is of course perfectly natural that Netanyahu would be "yearning for that moment." Mere heartfelt commitment to Zionism will not be enough, however. For the Palestinians' conversion to have "practical meaning," Netanyahu explained, "there must also be a clear understanding that the Palestinian refugee problem will be resolved outside Israel's borders." In other words, Palestinians must agree to help Israel complete the ethnic cleansing it began in 1947-48, by abandoning the right of return. This is indeed logical because as Zionists, Palestinians would share the Zionist ambition that Palestine be emptied of Palestinians to the greatest extent possible. Netanyahu is smart enough to recognize that even the self-ethnic-cleansing of refugees may not be sufficient to secure "peace": there will still remain millions of Palestinians living inconveniently in their native land, or in the heart of what Netanyahu insisted was the "historic homeland" of the Jews. For these Palestinians, the peace plan involves what Netanyahu calls "demilitarization," but what should be properly understood as unconditional surrender followed by disarmament. Disarmament, though necessary, cannot be immediate, however. Some recalcitrant Palestinians may not wish to become Zionists. Therefore, the newly pledged Zionist Palestinians would have to launch a civil war to defeat those who foolishly insist on resisting Zionism. Or as Netanyahu put it, the "Palestinian Authority will have to establish the rule of law in Gaza and overcome Hamas." (In fact, this civil war has already been underway for several years as the American and Israeli-backed Palestinian "security forces," led by US Lt. General Keith Dayton, have escalated their attacks on Hamas). Once anti-Zionist Palestinians are crushed, the remaining Palestinians -- whose number equals that of Jews in historic Palestine -- will be able to get on with life as good Zionists, according to Netanyahu's vision. They will not mind being squeezed into ever smaller ghettos and enclaves in order to allow for the continued expansion of Jewish colonies, whose inhabitants Netanyahu described as "an integral part of our people, a principled, pioneering and Zionist public." And, in line with their heartfelt Zionism, Palestinians will naturally agree that "Jerusalem must remain the united capital of Israel." These are only the Palestinian-Israeli aspects of the Netanyahu plan. The regional elements include full, Arab endorsement of Palestinian Zionism and normalization of ties with Israel and even Arab Gulf money to pay for it all. Why not? If everyone becomes a Zionist then all conflict disappears. It would be nice if we could really dismiss Netanyahu's speech as a joke. But it is an important indicator of a hard reality. Contrary to some naive and optimistic hopes, Netanyahu does not represent only an extremist fringe in Israel. Today, the Israeli Jewish public presents (with a handful of exceptions) a united front in favor of a racist, violent ultra-nationalism fueled by religious fanaticism. Palestinians are viewed at best as inferiors to be tolerated until circumstances arise in which they can be expelled, or caged and starved like the 1.5 million inmates of the Gaza prison. Israel is a society where virulent anti-Arab racism and Nakba denial are the norm although none of the European and American leaders who constantly lecture about Holocaust denial will dare to admonish Netanyahu for his bald lies and omissions about Israel's ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians. Netanyahu's "vision" offered absolutely no advance on the 1976 Allon Plan for annexation of most of the occupied West Bank, or Menachem Begin's Camp David "autonomy" proposals. The goal remains the same: to control maximum land with minimum Palestinians. Netanyahu's speech should put to rest newly revived illusions -- fed in particular by US President Barack Obama's Cairo speech -- that such an Israel can be brought voluntarily to any sort of just settlement. Some in this region who have placed all their hopes in Obama -- as they did previously in Bush -- believe that US pressure can bring Israel to heel. They point to Obama's strong statements calling for a complete halt to Israeli settlement construction -- a demand Netanyahu defied in his speech. It now remains to be seen whether Obama will follow his tough words with actions. Yet, even if Obama is ready to put unprecedented pressure on Israel, he would likely have to exhaust much of his political capital just to get Israel to agree to a settlement freeze, let alone to move on any of dozens of other much more substantial issues. And despite the common perception of an escalating clash between the Obama administration and the Israeli government (which may come over minor tactical issues), when it comes to substantive questions they agree on much more than they disagree. Obama has already stated that "any agreement with the Palestinian people must preserve Israel's identity as a Jewish state," and he affirmed that "Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel and it must remain undivided." As for Palestinian refugees, he has said, "The right of return [to Israel] is something that is not an option in a literal sense." For all the fuss about settlements, Obama has addressed only their expansion, not their continued existence. Until the Obama administration publicly dissociates itself from the positions of the Clinton and Bush administrations, we must assume it agrees with them and with Israel that the large settlement blocks encircling Jerusalem and dividing the West Bank into ghettos would remain permanently in any two-state solution. Neither Obama nor Netanyahu have mentioned Israel's illegal West Bank wall suggesting that there is no controversy over either its route or existence. And now, both agree that whatever shreds are left can be called a "Palestinian state." No wonder the Obama administration welcomed Netanyahu's speech as "a big step forward." What is particularly dismaying about the position stated by Obama in Cairo -- and since repeated constantly by his Middle East envoy George Mitchell -- is that the United States is committed to the "legitimate Palestinian aspiration for dignity, opportunity, and a state of their own." This formula is designed to sound meaningful, but these vague, campaign-style buzzwords are devoid of any reference to inalienable Palestinian rights. They were chosen by American speechwriters and public relations experts, not by Palestinians. The Obama formula implies that any other Palestinian aspirations are inherently illegitimate. Where in international law, or UN resolutions can Palestinians find definitions of "dignity" and "opportunity?" Such infinitely malleable terms incorrectly reduce all of Palestinian history to a demand for vague sentiments and a "state" instead of a struggle for liberation, justice, equality, return and the restoration of usurped rights. It is, after all, easy enough to conceive of a state that keeps Palestinians forever dispossessed, dispersed, defenseless and under threat of more expulsion and massacres by a racist, expansionist Israel. Through history it was never leaders who defined rights, but the people who struggled for them. It is no small achievement that for a century Palestinians have resisted and survived Zionist efforts to destroy their communities physically and wipe them from the pages of history. As long as Palestinians continue to resist in every arena and by all legitimate means, building on true international solidarity, their rights can never be extinguished. It is from such a basis of independent and indigenous strength, not from the elusive promises of a great power or the favors of a usurping occupier, that justice and peace can be achieved. Hasan Abu Nimah is the former permanent representative of Jordan at the United Nations. Co-founder of The Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah is author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli-Palestinian Impasse (Metropolitan Books, 2006). A version of this article first appeared in The Jordan Times and is reprinted with the authors' permission.

:: Article nr. 55230 sent on 17-jun-2009 20:54 ECT
www.uruknet.info?p=55230

Link: electronicintifada.net/v2/article10606.shtml

:: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this website.

As part of their racist campaign against the indigenous Palestinians, Israeli lawmakers are now insisting upon making the commemoration of the Nakba illegal. Recently a number of Israeli cabinet and Knesset Members proposed a "draft law" that would criminalize the remembrance of 1948 Palestinian holocaust (Nakba) by Palestinians holding Israeli citizenship. Interestingly enough, the Jewish state that sets its raison d'être around the remembrance of Jewish suffering is attempting to ban Palestinians from doing exactly the same with their own.

 

As we know, Israel had wiped out every possible remnant of Palestinian existence on the ground.  Palestinian villages, towns, orchards, fields and cultural assets had been erased soon after 1948. Currently, the Israeli lawmakers are taking the war against the Palestinian heritage one step further. It is not just a physical expulsion and erasure of facts on the ground, it is not just racially motivated ethnic cleansing, starvation, land confiscation, house demolition, bombing schools or spreading white phosphorous over populated neighbourhoods, from now on, Israel wants to invade the Palestinian mind. Israeli Knesset members insist upon eradicating the Palestinian collective memory. At least formally, they are trying to ban the right to remember.

 

As Khalid Amayreh pointed out a few days ago, “one Israeli Palestinian parliamentarian compared the proposed law with an imagined promulgation by Germany of a law banning all Jewish activities commemorating the holocaust.” The equation between the Nakba and the Jewish holocaust is well placed. We are talking about two racist crimes of a colossal magnitude. Yet, it is rather obvious that while Germans came collectively to terms with their past, the Jewish state is advancing into its seventh decade of denial bonded with total abuse of an innocent civilian population.

 

In the light of the new measures of Israeli merciless brutality it is rather interesting to explore a Jewish ‘voice of reason’. The odd voice of a person who stood up against this very ludicrous draft law. Professor Ruth Gavison is such a voice. Gavison is an Israeli Law professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.  She is also ‘the president’ of, try not to laugh,  ‘The Centre of Zionist, Jewish, Liberal and Humanitarian Thought’. Last week she published an article in the highly popular Hebrew Ynet online news magazine denouncing the new proposed law.

 

Professor Gavison believes that Zionism could be interpreted as humanist and a liberal endeavour. However, a brief scrutiny of her thoughts reveals the devastating truth, the Law professor lacks the essential comprehension of the notion of universal ethics or humanism. Her vision of justice, is rather Zionised.  She, seemingly, tries to juggle some old Zionist symbolic clichés hoping that her Hebrew readers would be too bored to challenge her lame argument.

 

Gavison is against the draft law. She rightly argues that the proposed law is, “Unjustified and foolish for misidentifying the core problem in our public life.” She argues that legalism is the least appropriate route to confront the core issue.  But this is more or less where Professor Gavison runs out of kindness.

 

In spite of the promising departure, it doesn’t take too long before the Israeli law professor shows her spots.

 

Here is Gavison on the Nakba.

 

“It is an accepted fact that the day when the Jewish majority celebrates their independence in their own land, is the same day that symbolizes for some of the Arab minority the day of their disaster.” It is indeed revealing to know that as far as Professor Gavison is concerned, it is not the Palestinians as a whole who commemorate their Nakba as a disaster but only just “some” of them. However, for Gavison, the Palestinians have themselves to blame for it and no one but themselves.

 

“It must be remembered,” says Gavison, that “it could as well be different… this day could have been a celebration for both Israelis and Palestinians who could celebrate the foundation of two national states.” One may wonder at this stage, who is it exactly which Gavison is trying to fool or mislead. Surely she must know that the plan to expel the Palestinians was well imbued in the Zionist agenda from the very beginning. “The Palestinians,” she continues, “stood up against the partition resolution and the consequences of this war is the fact that the Israeli state was erected on the wreckage of the Palestinian 

society and over the Palestinian land.  Many Palestinians became refugees and a Palestinian state is yet to be established.”

 

One would expect that at this stage, the Israeli law professor who is also a ‘president’ of an institute that is there to promote an image of ‘Jewish humanism’ would come with the necessary conclusion: time is more than ripe to bring the expelled Palestinians back to their lands and homes.

 

Do not hold your breath, Gavison is not exactly a universal humanist, she is just a Zionist one. All she really wants is to stop the current legislation that bans Palestinians from mourning. In other words, she wants to allow Palestinians to be sad so they can lament as much as they want.

 

“Sadness is a natural feeling for people who suffer so much,” acknowledges the gracious professor, “We should never deny the history, we should never ban it legally, our challenge is to confront it.” One would expect that such a revelation from an alleged humanist would lead her to acknowledge the Zionist sin and even take responsibility.

 

This is not going to happen.  The president of  ‘The Centre of ‘Zionist, Jewish, Liberal and Humanitarian Thought’ doesn’t fit easily into our common notion of a humanist. She is more of a Jewish tribal campaigner that tries to mould some liberal sporadic terminology to justify some relentless and crude non-ethical behaviour.  Gavison doesn’t really want to bring justice to the region. All she demands is to develop an “awareness of the past, that would eventually evolve into a civilian future in which Arab and Jews live side by side,” never together I guess.

 

True, Gavison is indeed compassionate enough to let the Palestinians lament over their past. But she is clearly reluctant to take responsibility for the consequences of the Jewish national colonial apparatus. She clearly prefers to dwell on Palestinian land and even to call it “homeland” rather than giving it back to its true owner. More than the right wing Zionist zealots who brought up the sinister draft law, it is actually Professor Gavison, the so-called ‘humanist Zionist’, who embodies the true meaning of Israeli brutality and ugliness. In the name of humanist symbolism she promotes the maintenance of the Jewish nationalist crime.

 

Professor Gavison ends her article by declaring that, “denial of the past is inappropriate, but failing to take responsibility for it is unacceptable either. We have to come with solutions that approve the right of the Jews of self determination in (part of their) homeland.” I would really expect the profound  ‘Zio-humanist’ professor to open our eyes so we understand once and for all what gives the Jews the right to ‘self determination’ at the expense of others. Once we understand that, we may be mature enough to let professor Gavison or any other ‘Humanist Zionist’ enlighten us so we grasp what is it in Palestine that makes it into a legitimate Jewish homeland.

 

Reading Gavison reveals once again how devastating the truth of the matter is:  Zionism and liberal Jewish thought have very little to do with humanism, ethics or universalism. If anything, Zionism and humanism are opposing concepts for the simple reason that Zionism is a racially orientated tribal philosophy and humanism aims at the universal.

Palestinian fisherman collecting his nets in Rafah. Image Credit: Mohammed Omer, Rafah Today 2007-03-26. May 23, 2009 GAZA: INTERVIEW OF FISHERMAN WOUNDED BY ISRAELIS GAZAN FISHERMAN, SAMI AL GOAGA, DESCRIBES HOW HE LOST HIS HAND IN ATTACK BY ISRAELIS. GAZA: INTERVIEW OF FATHER OF FISHERMAN KILLED BY ISRAELIS GAZAN FATHER OF FISHERMAN, HANY AL NAJAR, KILLED BY ISRAELIS RECALLS HIS SON AND ATTACKS ON FISHING BOATS.

:: Article nr. 54517 sent on 24-may-2009 16:23 ECT
www.uruknet.info?p=54517

:: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this website.

Human Rights Organizations Warn of Obstacles to Gaza Reconstruction (Report)

Palestinian Information Center

 

May 16, 2009 After the passage of more than a hundred days since the end of the Zionist war on the Gaza Strip, international humanitarian and human rights organizations are warning of the consequences of an alarming humanitarian situation in the Strip. This is due to an inability to reconstruct homes and businesses and to repair the extensive damage caused to infrastructure and basic services that were destroyed in the assault. That inability is a result of the ongoing Israeli policy of keeping the border crossings closed and refusing to allow the entry of many materials necessary for reconstruction. The policy is being implemented in an atmosphere of international complicity and silence. Robert Serry, the United Nations Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, after a visit to the Gaza Strip on April 30th, warned that "the situation is really worrying, and it seems it will be impossible to meet the humanitarian needs and repair the damage as long as it is impossible to bring in the necessary quantities of funds and materials." He added, "Time is passing, and we do not see any real progress." Rehabilitation and Recovery He explained that, even though a hundred days have passed since the end of the war, tens of thousands of Gaza’s residents whose homes were damaged during the Israeli attack, "have found themselves without proper housing for the hot summer. It is urgent to begin reconstruction and repair houses." At the same time he warned of, "a resumption of the violence due to the lack of progress in reconciliation between the Palestinians, in the opening of the border crossings, in the exchange of prisoners, and in the extension of security on the borders," as he put it. For its part, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) announced on April 27th that the situation of children in the Gaza Strip remains unsettled, despite the passage of a hundred days since the end of Zionist military operations in the Strip. The organization said that children in Gaza continue to suffer physically and psychologically and that it is essential for the purposes of rehabilitation and recovery that permission be granted for entry of the required materials and supplies to Gaza. UNICEF added: "Electricity is still unavailable to 10% of the population, while about 9% of them lack safe drinking water;" not only that; 65 types of essential medicines have run out at the central warehouse in the Gaza Strip. 20 Thousand Families Left Homeless In the same vein, several international humanitarian organizations operating in the Gaza Strip have mentioned that about 20 thousand families in Gaza are living without shelter and without any basic services, more than three months after the end of the war. Maya Myers, the director of CARE in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, issued a statement in which she declared, "The industrial and agricultural sectors in the Gaza Strip have almost entirely collapsed and the reconstruction process is almost impossible. Operation "Cast Lead" has destroyed what was already, after months of siege, a fragile economy in the Strip. In addition, 35 thousand people in the Strip have no access to drinking water or safe sewage systems." She stressed that "unless the European Union places limits on strengthening its relations with Israel, it gives a dangerous signal to the world that it is in agreement with a policy of destruction and siege." The U.S. Downplays the Impact of the Crossings Closure Expressing similar sentiments, John Brooks, the director of the British charity, Oxfam, said, "There has been no progress at all in getting the construction materials into Gaza that would help people rebuild, and this is totally unacceptable." He called for pressure on the Israeli government "so that Palestinian families will be able to see a glimmer of light at the end of a long, dark tunnel." He stressed that the occupation is still "failing to implement its obligations in respect of the basic rights of the Palestinians in the Strip by restricting the free movement of people, goods and materials." Despite the foregoing, the American administration has maintained silence over the continuation of the occupation’s criminal blockade and its refusal to allow the entry of a great deal of basic aid and materials necessary for reconstruction. Not only that; the American administration has gone out of its way to downplay the effects of the border closure on Gaza, which has prompted human rights organizations to criticize American officials. Human Rights Watch, in a letter addressed to the US Secretary of State, criticized her testimony before the Congressional Committee on Foreign Relations, in which she minimized the impact of closing Gaza’s borders by stating that the crossings are not completely closed and that many supplies are being transferred through the crossings now. The organization said: "The Israeli restrictions on the borders are preventing the rebuilding of homes and schools destroyed or badly damaged during the recent military aggression, which lasted three weeks." Sarah Leah Whitson, the executive director for the Middle East and North Africa in the organization, said: "Secretary of State Clinton’s comments made it seem like border closure is not a big problem for the civilians of Gaza," emphasizing rejection of the policy of collective punishment of civilians in Gaza. Mud Houses and the Challenge to the People of Gaza Whitson requested the United States to "dissociate itself from the illegal Zionist policy, which directly harms civilians," and warned that failure to do so would suggest that it supports policies that violate international law. Despite the negative impacts caused by the Zionist war on Gaza and the continued Israeli closure of the border crossings, the people have not surrendered to this situation and all its tragic implications; rather, they are actively participating with ministries and governmental institutions to deal with what can be done. Examples of this approach include feasibility studies for model buildings and installations using mud, rubble and the ruins of houses and buildings as substitutes for cement and other construction materials that are being prevented from entering the Strip. In this regard, the Department of Public Works and Housing of the legitimate government in Gaza established a committee to conduct empirical studies for the establishment of model buildings and installations from clay. The Minister of Public Works and Housing, Yousuf al-Mansi, announced that his government would construct model buildings of this type, including a mosque, school and clinic, which will be treated as an experiment for evaluation. If they pass the test, then the Department will start expanding the implementation of such projects. The government is actively striving to develop the idea of constructing buildings and houses from clay as a substitute for buildings made of cement due to its scarcity in the Gaza Strip, and because of the resulting delay in reconstruction of the Strip as well. He stressed the determination of the people of Gaza to get through this period and its challenges, and he commended the government of Gaza for making great efforts to communicate with Arab and international governments and institutions in order to open the crossings and allow the entry of cement and other construction materials to the Strip.

:: Article nr. 54309 sent on 16-may-2009 22:33 ECT
www.uruknet.info?p=54309

Link: www.palestine-info.co.uk/en/default.aspx?xyz=U6Qq7k%2bcOd87MDI46m9rUxJEpMO%2bi1s
   7Xfn6A%2bj%2fksYG4bKtDpJzXsL8BYeTqLth%2bMDa9%2bAJ5dLn9fIjUOIK0%2b
   FVzym2AmK4Bt%2ba8F1AKLmbQbT3Ua1eI%2bUn4H%2fEq54WuJspHHvx%2bS0%3d

                                           

 

 

 

May wasn't a good month for me 'till now...I had some bad heartbreaks, I've been beaten down in all the ways possible on earth (and I still am for what it matters), I've been pretty fucked up and on the edge of turning into alchool.

So well....

Nice thing that Green Day are back with a new album, I'll have something to fill my mind with instead of thinking of the same crappy things over and over again.

 

The funny thing now is that because I preordered the album on ebay, and preordered it from UK....I still haven't got it!!

(WTF you say? Yes....I still haven't listened to it yet!!)

So I'm freaking out, trying to resist the urgency to download it or to run to the first store and buy it once again!

I think I'll make up something like borrow it from some friends like....Oh damn! I haven't got anymore friends with a Green Day passion...uhm..

 

Ah ah ah

Whatever...

Now comes the better news...

 

I'M GOING TO SEE GREEN DAY LIVE!

 

So no cold, no fever, no fuckin' heartattack, earthquakes, tsunamy, vulcan explosions, nuclear attack, war, Berlusconi's death and graduation's day....nothing will stop me!!

I'll be in Bologna november 11th, whatever it happens to me in those six months I'll have to wait.

 

End of the rant....

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On 18/07/1948 David Ben-Gurion wrote in his diary: We must do everything to ensure they (the Palestinian refugees) never do return…. The old will die and the young will forget.” (1) 

Today, 61 years after the Nakba of 1948 and despite the on-going Zionist terror and ethnic cleansing, we are still here and we have not forgotten, nor will we ever. In 1948/49, accompanied by looting, pillage and plunder, 418 Palestinian localities, including towns, villages and tribes, were destroyed by Zionist terror groups, the predecessors of the IOF. A study by researcher Salman Abu Sitta lists 531 destroyed localities and 11 emptied urban neighbourhoods. (2) Many villages were completely erased off the face of the earth, while others stand in ruins today. The inhabitants of these villages were faced with massacres and forced expulsion, and Palestinian houses, belongings and lands were usurped. 70 massacres left 15,000 Palestinians dead and up to 850,000 Palestinians were made refugees. (3) The Zionists did not spare those living peacefully on their lands nor the dead lying peacefully under their lands. Graves were desecrated, dug and destroyed. Knowing they were stealing something that didn’t belong to them, and as if fearing that even the dead would wake up one day and demand justice and their homes back, they wanted to erase every trace of its real owners, including the graves. Palestinian towns and villages were given Jewish names to hide their Palestinian origin, new Zionist colonies were built on the ruins of many of them and resettled by Zionists coming from Europe and elsewhere and who had no right to Palestine and its lands. Addressing the Technion in Haifa in 1969, Moshe Dayan said: “Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneifis; and Kefar Yehushua in the place of Tal al-Shuman. There is not a single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population”. (4)  Israelis and others, using Sderot as an excuse for Israel’s war crimes in Gaza, should remember where it stands, on the ruins of which Palestinian town, on the ruins of whose houses. Sderot was built on the remains of the Palestinian village Najd, which like other villages was ethnically cleansed before being erased from today’s world map. A map created by a biased world, which even after 61 years of on-going ethnic cleansing could not bring itself to shed its bias and take action. But these villages still stand in our maps because we didn’t forget. 

The original residents of these and other Palestinian towns and villages and their descendants, ethnically cleansed from their homes, are scattered all over the world. Today, there are over 7 million displaced Palestinian, constituting the world’s largest displaced population. On the 60th Anniversary of the Nakba, the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) issued a special report stating that Palestinians worldwide have multiplied 7.5 timers since the Nakba of 1948. While there were 1.4 Million Palestinians in Palestine in 1948, there were some 10.6 million Palestinians worldwide in 2008, half of which are refugees. 3.76 Million Palestinians live in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, 44.6% of whom are refugees. (5) One of my favourite songs as a child was a song aired on the Syrian TV. Little children singing: “my country is very beautiful” while painting and playing with small toy houses. The song goes on: “Do you know what happened? In 1948 they took everything. They burned the room, and they broke down the houses. They uprooted the forests and erased the whole village, and they changed the names.” The children then gather the destroyed houses and tree figures and place them in boxes and sing that the chests have remained in their hearts, with them grandmother’s tales, mother’s tales, grandfather’s proverbs and father’s bequests. The song ends with “My country is still beautiful, my country is called Palestine.” And then, one child after the other says his/her name and where they come from. It is clear that these are Palestinian children living in refugee camps either in Syria or Lebanon, but even the smallest of them knows that she comes from a small village in Palestine (6). As in the song, Palestinians worldwide carry the “chests from Palestine” in their hearts and with them their national and cultural identity as Palestinians. This is not exclusive to Diaspora Palestinians. My cousins in Dheisheh Refugee camp, their friends and other kids from the refugee camp know how it feels to be at home and not yet at home. Although they live in Palestine, they are not in their original villages. When asked where they come from, they would say: from Jrash, from Zakariya, from Dayr Aban, etc…. Their answer would be full of confidence and pride, and would come quick and natural, because there was nothing there to think about: “My home is Jrash, I am here on a temporary basis.” Not only do they know that these villages are their one and only home, these villages are part of what they are: in addition to the family name Ramadan or Salem, today they are also known as Jrashi (from Jrash) or Derabany (from Dayr Aban) or ‘Ajjuri (from ‘Ajjur). 

The Zionists see themselves as the ultimate victims. They refuse to accept any comparison between the Holocaust and any other human catastrophe. They insist that their suffering is the ultimate suffering, as if suffering can be measured by the kilo or the litre. Every cry of a child, every agony, every death counts, and is a human suffering. And if they measure their “ultimate suffering” with the atrocities committed by the Nazis, then they better look closely at their own state and their own deeds, for there is only one reflection to see. What they are, other than the “ultimate murderers” and “the ultimate racists”, are the ultimate thieves, and Zionism not only incorporates terror but the ultimate theft. They not only stole another peoples’ land, they are stealing their culture as well. For even with a land, you can’t have a nation without a culture that reflects and represents this nation and binds all its members together. And since they stole the land, and since they come from all parts of the world except that part they stole, the culture of that land is necessary to give the thieves some kind of “right” or “legitimacy” to the land. There is no surprise there: for one thing; if you steal the land, why not also all that comes with it? For another: no wonder with all those illegal settlers and “immigrants” gathered from all over the world trying to establish some sort of “nation”. Some 10 years ago, during my first trip to Amsterdam, I remember friends and I stopped at a small kiosk and bought Falafel Sandwiches. That was during my first trip outside Palestine and I was still naive, believing European countries were at the least “neutral” and not biased in favour of Israel like the US. At least, that was what the Israeli government was always complaining about. I later understood this complaining to be yet another of Israel’s PR gags, a manoeuvre to blackmail Europe to yet more bias. European countries seem pleased with this, since on the one hand they and Israel know exactly well that these countries are in no way neutral. On the other hand, they can continue deceiving the Arabs and the Palestinians and creating this image of a neutral Europe, who has both sides’ interest at heart. During every visit to Palestine since then, I was often confronted with people asking me about Europeans: it must be great living there, especially that they support us and so on. Sometimes I tell those asking the truth: that they see these international activists and think that all Europeans are alike. That many Europeans don’t give a damn one way or the other, and that if it were up to them, they would sink both of us in the deepest ocean. The only thing preventing many of them from saying that out loud is the threat of “anti-Semitism” when to comes to talking about Israelis. When it comes to talking about Palestinians, Europeans can be as racist or as brainwashed as they want thanks to the one-sided “freedom of speech”. And thanks to the biased media or the biased governments, many are brainwashed. The activists who choose to come to Palestine do this because they choose to investigate and search and find out about the truth for themselves, they realize that there must be something amiss with the general presentation of the conflict: i.e., the Palestinians are always the bad guys and the Israelis always the victims. More than once I heard from such activists that the reason behind their investigating the truth about the conflict was the way it was presented in their media and what they were told by their governments, and that no clear mind would accept the concept of a people that has no goal in life other than to destroy another nation and for no reason at all. Why would the Palestinians “hate” the Israelis so much? And then the important question: what have the Israelis done to the Palestinians to deserve their “hate”? Those with a still-functioning brain would come to the conclusion that there is something wrong with the media presentation of the conflict and that the Israelis must have done, or are still doing, something really bad, namely the on-going ethnic cleansing of Palestine and the brutal military occupation. But often, when asked about Europeans, I just nod and say: yes, they are good. I know how disappointed I was when I came to Europe and slowly discovered the lies. I remember how many times, after the IOF killed children or unarmed demonstrators or after massacres, how many of us said: This news would reach Europe today and they will support us to end this brutal occupation. Little did we know. 

Returning to the Falafel shop, I was pleased to find Falafel in Amsterdam and to see that so many people stood in line in front of that tiny kiosk to buy a sandwich. It was years later that, during one conversation, I realized that that kiosk owner was actually an Israeli. It made me angry. The truth is, I wouldn’t have minded if it was a Dutch, a German or any other nationality selling Falafel, but it upset me that an Israeli was selling Falafel. For one very simple reason: the Dutch, the German or the American would never claim that Falafel is a Dutch, German or American national food. They would be just another person selling something, like a Dutch selling Pizza. He would never claim the Pizza to be a national Dutch dish. But with the Israelis selling Falafel is another thing: they claim that Falafel and other Palestinian and Arab dishes are their national dishes, which is yet another theft. In Europe and the US many conceive not only Falafel, but Hummus as well, as Israeli traditional dishes. In these countries, Msakhan, Maqluba, Mansaf, Manaqeesh Za’tar are unknown and are being marketed as Israeli. The Israeli government, assisted by the media in these countries, established this idea through campaigns, ads, etc. Last August, the Israeli foreign ministry started yet another campaign, this time in Vienna, to introduce Israel to the Austrian public. Entitles “Israel - love from second sight”, the campaign aimed at promoting Israeli “culture” inside Austrian trams. Using the newest media technologies, info about Israel, Israeli sights, sounds and tastes were presented, and the trams were decorated with posters of Falafel, Humus, Maftoul and other Palestinians and Arabic dishes depicted as Israeli.  (7)Lebanon is suing Israel for exporting Hummus, Falafel, Tabuleh, Fatush, Baba Ghanuj and other dishes as its own dishes. Greece on the other hand had already won a case against Israel and other European countries for exporting “Feta” cheese as Israeli product. 

To steal the cultural identity of another nation is not limited to its national dishes. The cultural heritage of a nation distinguishes one nation from another and is transferred from one generation to the next. It is the identity of that nation, and includes traditional costumes, dance, music, literature, sculptures and handicrafts such as embroidery, weaving, pottery, glass-making, olive-wood and mother of pearl carvings and soap-making. Embroidery is an integral part of the Palestinian cultural identity, part of our cultural heritage. The Palestinian traditional dress “Thob” is part of the family heirloom, handed down from mother to daughter. Every region in Palestine has its own stitch form, its own symbols and motifs and its own colours. The symbols usually depict some feature of the region, its heritage and beliefs. According to Maha Sacca of the Palestinian Heritage Centre, the red colour prevails in Palestinian dresses, for example the red wine colour for the Ramallah dress, and the orange red for Beer Sabi’ (Beersheba). The Beer Sabi’ dress has cypress and palm trees as symbols and changes colour according to the status of the wearer: the bride’s dress is dominates by the red colour, while that of a widow is dominated by blue. If a woman marries for a second time, flowers and other motifs are added to her red dress. The “Paradise and Hell” dress is called so because of its prevailing red and green colours. The Rafidia dress, a town in Nablus, is characterized by its red and green stripes, the green tie and the shawl distinctive of the Nablus region. (8) Bethlehem dresses are known for their use of gold or silver cord. The trousseau of the Palestinian bride included 12 embroidered dresses, headdresses, shawl, belts, kerchiefs, cushions and Kohl containers, all embroidered. Every girl learns to do embroidery, even nowadays it is taught at school as part of the home management curriculum. Embroidery goes beyond clothes to decorative pieces. Such pieces are found in every Palestinian home. 

During the Nakba, Palestinian homes were looted and their content stolen. In the 1970s, Moshe Dayan filled his house and garden in Tel Aviv with stolen artefacts, while his ex-wife opened a shop in London and sold Palestinian traditional dresses as Israeli heritage. (9) In 1980 the Israeli airline El Al adopted the Palestinian dress worn in the Ramallah region as the official uniform for its stewardesses, and introduced it as Israeli culture during the tourism season. In 2007 Sacca reported that Israel stole the Bride dress of the Bethlehem area known as “Malak” and registered it in the 4th volume of the International Encyclopaedia as its own. After a campaign of the Palestinian Heritage Centre, the dress was removed. (10) The “Malak” dress is characterized by its thick embroidery, mainly on the neckline and the sides, and by its head cover, “Shatwah”, decorated with silver and gold pieces. Other Palestinian traditional dresses, such as those of the Naqab and Galilee are introduced in international exhibitions as Israeli traditional costumes. Not even the traditional Kuffeyah, another symbol of Palestinian national identity, escaped the theft. Claiming that Israel has the right to have its own Kuffeyah, two Israeli designers designed one with the colours of the Israeli flag and small David stars instead of the usual dots. Palestinian traditional dresses, jackets, handbags and shawls, decorated with Palestinian stitches, are being sold to tourists as Israeli souvenirs. One day, I was waiting at the train station for my train, when I noticed some German woman sitting nearby wearing a jacket decorated with Palestinian embroidery. The truth is I hoped she knew what she was wearing. So, I asked her where she got that jacket from. As if waiting for someone to notice the jacket, she started talking about how beautiful it is, how rare and expensive and how lucky she was to have one, adding that one can only get them from Israel. I asked her if she knew what the lines, the colours, the patterns and symbols meant? When she said she had no idea, I told her that this was Palestinian embroidery, Palestinian cultural heritage, and to make my point clear, I explained to her that these patterns and colours have meanings, that every region in Palestine has its own colour and pattern. As I explained, she just kept nodding her head and her face grew redder, I hope out of shame for helping promote the theft of our culture. During the first Intifada, embroidery was a means of living for many families. Being a symbol of Palestinian identity, it was also used as a form of protesting the Israeli occupation. Since owning a Palestinian flag was punished with imprisonment, women started stitching the Palestinian flag or its colours on dresses, on shawls, on cushions, and even on wool blouses and jackets. 

And the list of thefts goes on: from stealing our traditional dance, the “Dabka” to an Israeli version of the “Dal’ona” song, which is an integral part of the Palestinian wedding. Palestinian weddings are characterized by popular songs, whereas every village and town had its own songs describing the beauty of the area and relating some of the local stories. The Dal’ona and the Ataba are common among all regions of Palestine. During a 6 month stay in Germany some 10 years ago, I remember watching on TV a group of dancers dancing the Dabkeh and other well-known Palestinian dances. I thought at first it might be the famous Palestinian dance group the “Founoun”, until it was made clear that this is an Israeli dance group performing “Israeli traditional dances”. When on the next day I mentioned this shameless theft in class, the teacher abruptly and in a somewhat impolite way changed the subject. I suppose, for that German teacher, discussing Israeli theft is part of the “Israel-Criticism Taboo”. Imitations of Palestinian pottery, silverware and jewellery, are also being sold to tourists as Israeli souvenirs. The olive tree and the poppy (Anemone Coronaria) have also been stolen and at the Chinese garden, held during the last Olympic Games in China, they were adopted and claimed by Israel as representatives of the Zionist state. [11] Palestinians have been celebrating the Olive tree as a symbol of their steadfastness in Palestine and the Poppy as a symbol of the sacrifices given on the road to freedom and independence for decades, and long before Israel start promoting them as their own symbols. 

But one thing they forgot: they can - for now - steal the land, the culture and forge history, but they can’t delete our memory nor forge the blood that flows in our veins. One afternoon, back in 1982, my sister, brother, some friends and I, decided to have a picnic. At school, we used to do this often. All we would need would be some slices of bread, a couple of tomatoes, and some salt in a paper. During the second break, which lasted some 20 minutes, we would have our picnic in one corner of the school playground. On that afternoon, we planned to have the picnic with our friends after we get back from school the following day. We were very enthusiastic, because our friends didn’t know what a “picnic” was and we wanted to share that with them. That evening, when we told our parents about our plans, father said: no, there will be no picnic tomorrow. For me, that was one of those days that remain branded in one’s mind for ever, memories of what we Palestinians should never ever forget and never forgive. On TV, we saw the pictures of butchered Palestinians, piled up like sacks one over the other. We saw pictures of murdered women, children and elderly filling the streets. We saw women crying and shouting and cursing. We saw what had happened in Sabra and Shatila. It was like waking up from a dream, and realizing that for you, as a Palestinian, there was no place for picnics, no place for happiness when other Palestinians are being murdered. These Palestinians were not in Palestine, they were far away from us, but they were part of us. They were a part that makes Palestine full, for Palestine belongs to all Palestinians, and when Palestinians bleed, whether in Palestine or in the Diaspora, Palestine as a whole bleeds. More massacres and Israeli crimes followed, and with every massacre, with every crime, with every war, we stood together as one. We cried for every child, we went to the streets for every martyr and every wounded and every prisoner, we protested and made our voice heard. It is our unity that makes us strong, a blood bond that not Israel, not the US, not even some treacherous Palestinians can break.

Despite their Nazi-like methods, Zionists continue to deny it and shout anti-Semitism when accused of it, although a number of Zionists had as early as 1948 realized and admitted they were acting like Nazis towards the Palestinians. Aharon Cizling of the 1948 Israeli cabinet commented on reports of Israeli war crimes against Palestinians: “… But now Jews too have behaved like Nazis and my entire being has been shaken … Obviously we have to conceal these actions from the public, and I agree that we should not even reveal that we’re investigating them.” (12) Also, the “Stern” terror gang collaborated with Nazi Germany during WWII, and a scanned copy of the document sent by the “Stern” in 1941 asking Nazi Germany for alliance can be seen at Palestine Remembered (13). One would expect that, when Jews are being sent to gas chambers in Germany, armed Jewish gangs in Palestine would rush to Germany to save their brothers and sisters. What they did, in addition to terrorizing Palestinians, was attack British troops in Palestine, who contrary to these gangs, were fighting the Nazis in Europe. (14) Defending themselves, Zionists usually rush to claim that they have not erected any gas chambers. Well, although it would have much pleased the Zionists to erect the Nazi gas chambers in Palestine and get rid of the Palestinians once and for all, they are not that stupid. They realize that even the strongest of their allies won’t be able to turn a blind eye anymore and would have to say: stop. But this doesn’t mean that there are no gas chambers in Palestine. Times change and mass murderers develop their gas chambers to fit the times. Sharon knew this and in 1988 he was reported saying: “You don’t simply bundle people onto trucks and drive them away … I prefer to advocate a positive policy, to create, in effect, a condition that in a positive way will induce people to leave”. (15) The positive policy being the policy of land grab, siege and military operations. Instead of killing millions in a few months and drawing world uproar, why not kill gradually? Every couple of years a war here and an incursion there, wiping out thousands and leaving thousands crippled. Every now and then an air raid here and there, leaving dozens killed and hundreds other crippled. And why not use checkpoints, peaceful demonstrations and the siege to kill an extra few here and there? The problem here is that with every Palestinian killed, at least 10 others are born, and with every massacre committed, our roots in the land get deeper and our memory gets stronger. 

So, although after 61 years of an on-going Nakba, an on-going ethnic cleansing and terror, we are scattered everywhere, one thing binds us: our Palestinian identity, the place we all call home, the home we all want to return to. No matter what nationality some of us have today, or where we were born, as long as Palestinian blood flows through our veins, we have one nationality and one homeland: Palestine. During my Masters programme, there were students from all over the world who had enrolled in the same programme as me. Among those, I was not the only Palestinian, but the only Palestinian with a Palestinian passport and the only one who was born and grew up in Palestine. There were others who were born in the Diaspora. To the other students, except for those who knew better, we were of different nationalities. To us, we were Palestinians, share the same history and heritage, and have the same homeland. And while statistics show that many Russian and European Jews see Israel only as a step towards the US, we see Palestine as the “ultimate” step: a return to Palestine, to stay there, and plant ourselves there and spread our roots deep into this land like the olive tree. This is why the olive tree is our national symbol and can never be the symbol of a Zionist who was brought to Palestine by financial inducements and to escape poverty elsewhere. 

In 1983, Chairman Heilbrun said: “We have to kill all the Palestinians unless they are resigned to live here as slaves.” The dream of completely ethnically cleansing Palestine and of getting rid of all Palestinians failed, but not out of lack of trying on the side of Zionists. Nor have they succeeded in making slaves out of us, for despite the suffering, we stand armed with our pride and dignity against those armed with hate and terror. After 61 years of Zionist terror and land theft, the Zionists are fighting a lost war. Many of us are still standing steadfast in Palestine, others are packing their bags to return to Palestine. When passing towns, villages and refugee camps, and seeing all the illegal settlements scattered everywhere, the confiscated lands surrounded by barbed wire, one would realize the extent to which the Zionists state would go to delete a whole existence, a whole nation and a whole country. The greatest threat to Israel is our existence, and as long as we are steadfast in Palestine, they can’t take Palestine away from us. The destroyed homes will be rebuilt one day, and the empty villages will be refilled one day and all those ethnically cleansed will return one day. This is no wishful thinking, nor an illusion. History teaches us that nothing lasts forever, especially injustice. It might take another 61 years or another 10 years or another 100 years, but one day all Palestinians will return and Palestine will find its rightful place on the world map again. And today, 61 years after its establishment, the only thing the Zionist state achieved is that the more they kill, the more they expose themselves as a racist and a terror state and the harder we cling to the land. At a time when Israel is doing its best to get rid of us, it is bringing us closer to our homeland, because it is our duty to stand still on our land, and thosewho can return should return, it is a national duty.

 

'Racism in Israel is not like racism in other states.'

By Jeremy Salt - Ankara 

Racism is common to most and probably all societies. Laws never seem entirely to eliminate it. It was the essential tool in the creation of modern settler states. The United States could not have come into existence without the obliteration of North American Indian cultures and of large numbers of the people themselves. They had to die so the US could be born. In Australia the indigenous people of Tasmania were wiped out to the last man, woman and child, while on the mainland the tribes were massacred, confined, stripped of their ancestral land and eventually turned into fringe dwellers. Until recently Australia had a prime minister who could deny that aboriginal children of mixed ‘blood’ were taken from their parents up to the 1930s and refused to issue any expression of remorse for their mistreatment. More recent targets of racism have been Lebanese and Vietnamese immigrants, while the Howard federal government’s racist treatment of Iraqi and Afghan refugees and asylum seekers remains one of the most shameful chapters of Australia’s history. 

In the US the election of a colored president would have been inconceivable until very recently. It was so unbelievable that people wept when Barack Obama won the elections. 

Racism comes in many shades. Discrimination against people on the grounds of skin color, ethnicity or religion is a basic human rights issue, a first cousin to discrimination, harassment and denial of opportunity on the basis of gender. President Mahmud Ahmedinejad, in his recent speech at the Durban Review Conference in Geneva, drew attention to Israel as a racist state but Iran has serious issues of its own to deal with. Homosexuality in Iran is treated as a crime. Gays and prostitutes are executed in public. The Bahais have been the victims of discrimination and persecution throughout Iran’s modern history and this remains the case today. They have no legal identity in Iran. On all of these issues, Iran is itself vulnerable to criticism on the grounds of human rights, which does not, of course, detract in any way from his criticism of Israel. The outrage directed against Ahmedinajad obscured the real issue at the heart of what he was saying: is Israel a racist state?  

In settler societies such as the United States, Australia and Canada, the crude racism which drove invasion and colonization mostly belongs to the past, when there was an active concept of race, allied with the categories of civilization, barbarism and savagery. The North American Indian was regarded by the white settlers as a savage, perhaps noble, mean or cunning, but a savage ‘redskin’ nevertheless. In Australia the indigenous people were scarcely counted as human beings. It was not until the 1960s that they were even given the vote. The same relegation of ‘Negroes’ to a contingent category of humanity (at best) justified slavery and segregation in the southern states of the United States. The dehumanization of all of these groups was essential to the colonizing process (including the colonization of Algeria after the French invasion of 1830) and the enrichment of white settlers. 

All modern ‘western’ colonial settler states share the same characteristics, i.e. the obliteration of indigenous cultures and the displacement of people from their land. This was true of the North American settlers, the Australian colonists and the Boers who eliminated the Herero people of southwest Africa in the early 20th century. Treaties in which the indigenous people were compelled to consent to the invasion and settlement of their land were signed in North America and New Zealand but not in Australia, where the colonists regarded the indigenous people as less than human and could therefore assert that the land was ‘empty’. There are numerous parallels here with Zionism not only on the basis of an ‘empty’ land being settled or of civilization being brought to a ‘primitive’ people but in the double nature of the colonialism. In North America and Palestine, settlement was fostered by a distant government against which the settlers eventually rebelled before declaring their ‘independence’.

Gradually, mostly only in the last half century, laws and attitudes changed. This rolling process met with resistance at every stage from those who justified discrimination on the basis of the Bible or racist genetic theories. Not until the 1960s and 1970s were racially discriminatory laws eliminated from the statute books in modern settler states such as the US and Australia, which does not mean that structural racism has been eliminated. It has not. It can be measured in education, health and welfare statistics, while episodes of racism involving police and the public at large show that attitudes are harder to change than laws. 

The difference between Israel and these other settler states is partly one of timing. Israel was founded not at the beginning or the middle of the historical cycle of the settler state phenomenon but right at the end. Israel is a paradox – a settler state arising at the beginning of the post-colonial era. Across Africa, southeast Asia, Latin America and the Middle East, national liberation movements challenged powers unwilling to voluntarily relinquish the territories they had seized in the 19th century. The right of native people to self-determination was expressed in the UN Charter. It was at this precise moment that Israel was established. At a time when universal values were being emphasized Israel headed in the opposite direction.

The Holocaust generated enormous emotional support across the western world for the establishment of Israel. It might not have been the ‘pretext’ for its creation of Israel, as Mahmud Ahmedinejad is reported to have said in Geneva, but it was certainly exploited by the Zionists to make sure that Israel came into existence. Refugees from Europe might have gone elsewhere, but for ideological reasons the only place the Zionist movement wanted them to go was Palestine. The media joined the chorus calling for the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine as a solution to the refugee problem and an antidote to anti-semitism. In fact removing the victims from the scene of the crime was no answer to the historical problem of European anti-semitism. Their ‘solution’ allowed European governments to evade responsibility for the consequences of actions in which all of them were in some way complicit. A people who were in no way responsible for the massive crimes which had been committed against Jews were being made to pay for them. Their rights and interests were treated with as much indifference or disdain as anti-semites had traditionally treated the rights and interests of Jews. The export of the ‘Jewish problem’ to Palestine was in its own way anti-semitic.

Within the British government there were objections but only for financial reasons. Britain was broke and could not afford the extra cost of policing Palestine were 100,000 Jewish refugees from Europe to be admitted as the Zionists and President Truman were demanding in 1946.  Even within the US administrations there were reservations. How, for example, could the principle of self-determination be reconciled with the denial of the right of the majority of the people of Palestine to decide their own future? Would not a ‘socialist’ Jewish state in Palestine further the ambitions of the USSR in the Middle East? And what of America’s interests and its relations with the Arab world? They could only be seriously damaged by support for this project.   

Ultimately it was Truman and not the UN who decided that Israel would be created in Palestine. Without his direct intervention the partition vote would never have got across the finishing line at the UN General Assembly. It still has to remembered that the vote was only a recommendation, anyway, swept aside when Ben-Gurion, ignoring the provisions of the partition plan, made a unilateral declaration of ‘independence’ in the name of the state of Israel six months after the plan was passed. In essence it was no different from the declaration of UDI made in the 1960s by the Rhodesian Prime Minister, Ian Smith. In the name of ‘independence’, both Smith and David Ben-Gurion declared war on the right of an indigenous people to determine their own future on their own land. One got away with it and one did not. 

What kind of state Israel would become was predetermined. In Israel today there are individuals and organizations fighting for coexistence with the Palestinians but since the beginning of Zionist settlement such voices have always spoken from the margins. From Herzl’s time onward it was understand within the mainstream that the Palestinians would never give up their land voluntarily and somehow would have to be removed from it. Thus Israel deliberately set itself from the beginning not just against the Palestinians but against the entire population of the Middle East, for whom Palestine (with Jerusalem at its heart) was an inalienable part of the Arab-Islamic heritage. Zionist justification rested on the argument that the ‘Jewish people’ were the true indigenous people of Palestine and that Muslims and Christians were present only as ‘caretakers’ whose role in history had now come to an end. The secondary moral position was that the suffering of Jews throughout history added up to a stronger claim than the rights of the Palestinians, a line of reasoning supported by Arthur James Balfour in 1917. The end justified the means. If it took the deprivation of Palestinian rights for a Jewish state to come into existence, so be it.

In a land in which the vast bulk of the population was not Jewish, a Jewish state could only be constructed by taking one inherently racist measure after another. If the state were to be Jewish so would land ownership and labor. The conditions written into the charter of the Jewish National Fund and other land-purchasing organizations stipulated that land once acquired could never be retained to non-Jewish hands. This ‘extra-territorialisation’ of land as it was described by a British commission of inquiry sent to Palestine fuelled the Palestinian rebellion of 1936-39. Exclusive Jewish access to the land was followed through after 1948 by the destruction of approximately 500 villages and the passage of ‘absent property’ and ‘present absentee’ laws which prevented even Palestinians remaining inside Israel from returning to the property they owned.

Security laws were another means of separating the Palestinians from their land. Consolidation of the Jewish presence on the land has continued through the attempt to erase the Palestinian presence in Jaffa and other cities inside the ‘green line’.

On the other side of the green line the tactics are cruder and more obvious. Open demographic war is being waged against the Palestinians in East Jerusalem while in Hebron the centre of the city has been closed down and residents around the market moved out in the name of ‘security’, i.e. the protection of racist and fanatical Jewish settlers living in the heights above. Across the occupied West Bank it is the armed interlopers who describe the Palestinians as interlopers and ‘infiltrators’ of their own occupied land. All of their vandalism, bullying, harassment of men, women and children, destruction of property and uprooting of olive trees and occasional killing is underwritten by the state, and yet the state is outraged when the charge of racism is raised in Geneva. The colonization of the territories is not incidental or accidental racism but the carefully thought out strategic and ideological racism of a racist state. The fact that it continues every single day is testimony to Israel’s contempt for universal values and international law.           

Just as the land would have to be the exclusive possession of the Jewish ‘people’ (as 93 per cent of it is now legally classified), so it could only be worked by Jewish labor. Jewish employers were explicitly prohibited from hiring ‘Arab’ workers in the 1920s and 1930s. Until the 1960s the central Israeli labor organization, the Histadrut, would only admit Jewish members. In practice, labor discrimination has never worked perfectly because of the low cost of ‘Arab’ labor compared to ‘Jewish’ labor and because of the Palestinian need to work, a situation which has led to Palestinian laborers building the settlements being constructed on their own occupied land. When the Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir visited Gaza in the 1970s she expressed shock, not at the establishment of Jewish settlements on expropriated land, but at the use of ‘Arab’ labor to work the land for the settlers. 

As Israel was the state for Jews wherever they lived and not for all the people who lived within its borders (so to speak, seeing that Israel has never actually declared its borders), the laws would have to be framed accordingly. The Nationality Law automatically conferred Israeli citizenship only on Jews (i.e born of a Jewish mother). The Law of Return granted the ‘right’ of ‘return’ to Jews who had never lived in Palestine while denying the right of return to Palestinians who had lived there for generations. Some families could trace their origins in Palestine back to the Islamic conquest of the 7th century. 

The structural discrimination against the Palestinians can be measured in socio-economic statistics dealing with poverty, unemployment, access to government services and education, house construction and funding for municipalities. Taking their cue from the government, and the openly racist statements made by senior political, military and religious figures, describing the Palestinians as ‘two legged animals’, ‘drugged cockroaches’, ‘insects’, ‘snakes’ and ‘a cancer’, large numbers of Israelis polled have said they do not want to live in the same apartment blocks as ‘Arabs’ and in fact would like to see them out of the state altogether. The racism coming out of the mouths of rabbis and religious seminaries, couched in terms of an exclusive Jewish right to ‘Eretz Israel’, with many of the students or graduates of these seminaries living in the most aggressive of the West Bank settlements, is amongst the worst.  

Having set out on this path Israel has followed it unswervingly. One flagrant violation of human rights must be followed by another. Without war and without racism in spirit, deed and law there can be no Zionism and no ‘Jewish state’. The Palestinians have been pursued wherever they have gone because by their presence they constitute an existential threat to Israel. Over the years the attitudes of the Israeli mainstream towards the Palestinian ‘enemy’ have grown even harsher. Palestinian armed struggle, suicide bombings and the rocketing of settlements near Gaza are not connected with the policies pursued by Israel against the Palestinians for six decades but with some ex nihilio desire to kill Jews and destroy Israel. This state of mind is deliberately cultivated from the top with the aim of keeping Israel’s Jewish citizens in a state of permanent readiness for the next war. The recent ‘war’ in Gaza was approved by more than 80 per cent of Israel’s Jewish population. The misrepresentation of a massive military onslaught on a largely defenseless civilian population as a ‘war’ allowed the civilian mainstream to justify the crimes that were being committed. Israelis looked on with indifference and even with approval as ‘our boys’ killed hundreds of people in three weeks, most of them civilians and 400 of them children. The media turned into a kingdom of lies. Every specious argument of the political and military establishment was accepted without question and transformed into truth.

The racist t-shirts printed by Israeli ‘soldiers’ engaged in the attack on Gaza were only the surface manifestation of a much deeper psychosis. The t-shirts captured the attention of the outside world in a way that slow, structural, incremental racism never does. Literally every day brings some new or continuing manifestation of Israeli state racism to the surface. After 50 years the beduin are still being driven off their traditional land in the Naqab. Palestinians married to Israelis are prevented from living inside Israel with their spouses and families. The recently declared Jerusalem Regional Master Plan is inherently racist but apparently too complex for the outside media to work out its implications. It embodies the next stage of programmed discrimination that has continued without letup since 1967. The Jerusalem municipality is itself an illegal and racist body whose ‘master plan’ is a template for the further ‘Judaisation’ of Jerusalem whatever the cost to the Palestinians. It must be remembered that until 1948 Palestinian Muslims and Christians owned about 70 per cent of the property in West Jerusalem and all but one or two per cent of the property in the east. They did not forfeit their rights to their houses and land. Their rights have simply been usurped. In normal legal parlance the appropriation of their property is known as theft. For the first time since the Crusaders massacred Jews and Muslims in the 11th century Jerusalem is being transformed into a city for a people of only one religious denomination. Under Arab and Ottoman rule Jerusalem remained a polyglot city. What the Jerusalem municipality and the state of Israel both want is a city cleansed of its non-Jewish population except for tourists and a colorful ethnic remnant hanging around the old city. 

Is all of this racist? Of course it is. In fact, those who care to study the UN’s Convention on Genocide, passed in 1948 as Zionist militias were still driving Palestinians off their land and destroying their villages, will see that Israel’s behavior meets some of the criteria of article 2 of the convention which describes genocide as any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy in whole or part a national, ethnical, racial or religious group:

(a) killing members of the group
(b) causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group
(c) deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part

Israelis involved in the struggle against racism and occupation are fighting an uphill battle. The structural discrimination of the state against its non-Jewish citizens and against the Palestinians living in the occupied territories (as well as the Syrians living on the occupied Golan Heights) is a motor driving Israel and its people from one extreme to another. Thirty years ago it was regarded as unthinkable that Menahim Begin could ever be Israel’s Prime Minister but Begin was followed by Yitzhak Shamir, Benyamin Netanyahu and Ehud Olmert. All of them come out of the same school of Revisionist Zionism. Now revisionism is the mainstream, the labor movement is marginalized and Israel has again elected Netanyahu as its Prime Minister. He in turn has chosen as Foreign Minister the crude, arrogant, provocative and openly racist West Bank settler Avigdor Liebermann.

Racism in Israel is not like racism in other states, which is usually a matter of changing laws and slowly working on public opinion. In Israel racism is so deeply embedded in Zionist ideology and the structure of the state that without racism Israel cannot remain the state that it has become. Yet there are no signs that the Israeli people or the politicians they are electing as their leaders have any intention of changing direction. When they have a powerful military and when they are under no pressure from the outside world they see no reason to change. In its blockade of Gaza Israel has been supported from the beginning by the US, the EU and the Quartet. None of these venerable authorities could see any reason for Israel to be punished or restrained even after the killing of 1400 Palestinians in Gaza from late December 2008 to mid-January 2009. Their indulgence encourages a dangerous state of mind. The politicians, the generals, the rabbis, the media commentators and the academics know that they are in the right and that everyone else is in the wrong. The outrage at criticism, the arrogance, the self-righteousness, the self-justification, the endless claims of moral superiority and the contempt and hatred of the Palestinians are extremely disturbing. Israel is not a small, weak state in the middle of nowhere. It is a powerful state, armed with nuclear weapons, in the middle of the Middle East. The refusal of the ‘international community’ to restrain states which live outside the law has led to many disasters in the past. The species of animal life known as homo sapiens has a poor record when it comes to averting calamities ahead of time. In the Middle East the creation of Israel brought disaster down on the heads of the Palestinians and the surrounding Arab countries. The states which created Israel have not yet taken responsibility for the consequences of their actions, but have rather made themselves more complicit in the crimes still being committed. As long as the disaster is someone else’s (and not Israel’s) they do not seem to be concerned. How else can this be understood but as their own racism? Do they have to be pushed to the point where they are directly and unavoidably involved in Israel’s confrontation with the Palestinians and the surrounding Arab world to realize the consequences of what they have done these past six decades? 

- Jeremy Salt is associate professor in Middle Eastern History and Politics at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. Previously, he taught at Bosporus University in Istanbul and the University of Melbourne in the Departments of Middle Eastern Studies and Political Science. Professor Salt has written many articles on Middle East issues, particularly Palestine, and was a journalist for The Age newspaper when he lived in Melbourne. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.

When, Where the Pope Inspires No Hope

Nicola Nasser

 

Palestinians could not understand how the Pope has been to Auschwitz to pray for the people murdered there, 'as a duty to truth and to those that suffered', but could not similarly heal the wounds of those who are still suffering in Gaza, says Nicola Nasser. May 3, 2009 Pope Benedict XVI is scheduled to be the third pontiff to visit the Holy Land from 8 – 15 May, following in the footsteps of Paul VI in 1964 and John Paul II in 2000, on a mission officially described as a "pilgrimage" and one of "peace and reconciliation." However, the Pope will be stepping into "a diplomatic minefield," where the Catholic highest spiritual authority will be unmercifully scrutinized by the protagonists of the one hundred year old Arab – Israeli conflict for the Holy Father’s every step, word and handshake, which would force him into the defensive in an impossible balancing act that will rule out any hope his presence is supposed to inspire, especially among the down-trodden Arabs of Palestine, whether those who are "Israelis" living as second class citizens since 1948 or those Palestinians living under the Israeli military occupation since 1967. Even the pontiff’s own Catholic diminishing flock in the Holy Land seems in controversy over the timing and the itinerary of his pilgrimage. "We will ask him why he came, what he intends on saying … and why he isn't coming to Gaza," Father Manuel Mussalam, the pastor of the only Catholic church of about 300 believers in Gaza, out of 3000 Christians in the Israeli besieged Mediterranean strip, was quoted by AFP as asking. "We'll tell him that this is not the right moment to come and visit the holy places, while Jerusalem is occupied," Mussalam added. In November 2006, long before Gaza Strip came under the control of the Islamic movement Hamas, which is cited as the casus belli for the Israeli latest three – week bloody and destructive war on Gaza as well as for the nine – year old Israeli military blockade of 1.5 million Palestinians since 2000, Father Mussalam described the situation there: "Gaza cannot sleep! The people are suffering unbelievably. They are hungry, thirsty, have no electricity or clean water. They are suffering constant bombardments and sonic booms from low flying aircraft… They have no income, no opportunities to get food and water from outside and no opportunities to secure money inside of Gaza. They have no hope and no love. These actions are War Crimes!" Vindicating Mussalam’s statement, the World Bank reported on April 24 that a serious environmental threat is evolving in Gaza where only one tenth of water meets the world health standards, a fact that is responsible for a quarter of the disease cases, and creating a water crisis similar to that in Sudan and Congo. Nonetheless, the Holy See is determined to rule out Gaza from the Pope’s itinerary. In a recent letter to the Vatican 40 prominent Christians from the occupied Palestinian territories appealed to the Holy See to add Gaza to his itinerary. They could not understand how the Pope has been to Auschwitz to pray for the people murdered there, "as a duty to truth and to those that suffered," as he said, but could not similarly heal the wounds of those who are still suffering in Gaza. The Vatican cites security reasons, according to the spokesman of the Apostolic Nuncio to Israel, Father Peter Madros. Israel recently barred the Apostolic Nuncio, Archbishop Antonio Franco, from Gaza. But security did not prevent Ban Ki-moon, the UN Secretary General from visiting Gaza when the guns were still smoking, nor did it prevent Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams, to name only a few. The Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem, Archbishop Fouad Twal, in an interview provided by the Franciscan Custody of the Holy Land and published by Zenit.org on April 22, acknowledged that the Pope’s trip has undoubtedly a "political dimension": "We mustn't fool ourselves: there is 100% a political dimension … everything will have a political connotation. Here we breathe politics, our oxygen is politics." But Twal has three explanations. First, "it is difficult to find a good balance and to maintain it." Second, "imagine the negative consequences it would have on the pilgrimage industry, if the Pope himself was afraid of coming on pilgrimage." Third, "what should be done? Wait for better times … until the Palestinian question is resolved? I'm afraid that two or three Sovereign Pontiffs will pass before it is definitively settled." The three reasons Twal cited are shocking, but his conclusion devastates whatever hope the papal visit might inspire: "The more the Vatican is a friend of Israel, the more it will be able to draw profit," otherwise, "we will all lose, we Christians and we Arabs"! When His Holiness is to meet on April 14 with Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has dispelled all hopes for even the resumption of a peace process, let alone peace, both by his on-record political platform as well as by the composition of his extreme right ruling coalition, and when he will meet with Israeli President Shimon Peres in Jerusalem, the spiritual capital of Christianity and Islam which his Israeli hosts are determined to Judaise as theirs only eternal capital, and to visit the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem, the Islamic Al-Buraq Wall as the Jewish Western (Wailing) Wall of the Temple, and when Israel forces his protocol team to drop from the list of his Arab audience in Nazareth the Palestinian mayor of Sukhnin, Mazen Ghanaim, because he rallied against the Israeli war on Gaza, then the itinerary of his pilgrimage could be described as anything but being apolitically balanced when Gaza is ruled out. In his Easter message on April 12, Benedict XVI noted the world food shortage, the financial turmoil, the old and new forms of poverty, the disturbing climate change, the violence and deprivation, "the ever present threat of terrorism," to conclude that, "it is urgent to rediscover grounds for hope," and urged his audience to spread the kind of hope that inspires courage to do good even when it costs dearly. But his oversight that did not make him mention military occupation and the long standing refugee problem emanating therefrom, as it is the case in Palestine, to where he is heading as a pilgrim, dispels any hope that he will say, let alone do, anything that would inspire hope. Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist based in Bir Zeit, West Bank of the Israeli – occupied Palestinian territories.

:: Article nr. 53917 sent on 04-may-2009 00:20 ECT
www.uruknet.info?p=53917

:: The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of this website.

 

Gilad Atzmon – Ahmadinejad: “Read My Lips”

By Gilad Atzmon • Apr 21st, 2009 at 12:14

What we saw yesterday at the UN Anti Racism Forum was crude collective institutional Islamophobic racism in its making, a coordinated show of rabid western chauvinism. A bunch of European diplomats behaving as a herd of sheep, exhibiting complete denial of the notion of freedom of speech and the culture of debate.   

Considering Israel being an apartheid state due to this institutionalised discrimination, one would expect that the Geneva anti-Racism Forum would primarily serve to deal with states such as Israel. But the truth of the matter is tragic, in current world affairs, Israel is the one and only racially orientated state. And as we could see yesterday, the ‘West’ failed once again to address the most obvious humanist call for action.  

 

It was indeed Jewish suffering that bought about the formation of the Jewish state. It is true also that the Jewish state was founded at the expense of the Palestinian people who are in fact the last suffering victims of the Nazi era.  

The crux of matter is very simple.  European diplomats proved yesterday that they cannot take the truth when it is conveyed by a Muslim. Hence, it would be correct to argue that this flock of Western diplomats shouldn’t have been participating in an ‘anti-racism forum’ in the first place.  The fact that they have behaved intolerantly proves that they and the governments behind them are the root cause of current racism, namely Islamophobia.  

Those Europeans who cannot take the truth from the mouth of a Muslim, not to say a Muslim state leader, would be better advised to meet instead in a conference that celebrates Western supremacy. I'm sure that Tel Aviv and Jerusalem host a few of those every year.  

On a final note, if the British government insists upon sending delegates to such a conference, it better make sure that those assigned to the task are capable of presenting an eloquent argument that can withstand intellectual scrutiny. Peter Gooderham, the UK ambassador to the UN in Geneva, is clearly not suited to the job. The Ambassador went on record saying "Such outrageous anti-Semitic remarks should have no place in a UN anti-racism forum."

President Ahmadinejad did not refer to a Jewish race, he did not refer to Judaism either. He did not refer to the Jewish people, if anything, he was referring to their suffering. 

Ambassador Gooderham, in case you have managed to miss it all, while acting like a sheep in a herd, President Ahmadinejad was telling the truth referring to some universally accepted facts.  

It would save some embarrassment in the future if British diplomats would be properly trained to understand the complexity of current world affairs and the ideologies that are involved in shaping those affairs. It would save us from watching the odd buffoon diplomats throwing around meaningless sound bites, which they themselves fail to fully comprehend. 

Ahmadinejad's speech:
http://www.foreignpolicyjournal.com/2009/04/21/full-text-of-president-ahmadinejads-remarks-at-un-conference-on-racism/

 

By Stuart Littlewood – London

So the Pope won't be visiting Gaza on his trip to the Holy Land next month. The Holy Father's spokesman has told the Israeli press that he’ll refrain from visiting Gaza regardless of attempts to persuade him otherwise. ‘Refrain’ is a telling choice of words: "the Pope will refrain from visiting Gaza...." It smacks of abstinence, as in abstaining from having sex. Setting foot in Gaza would be so sinful that it is forbidden.

Gaza's isolated and besieged Catholic community are none too happy judging by the reaction of their redoubtable priest Fr Manuel Mussallam, who feels the Holy Father’s trip is miss-timed. "We will ask him why he came, what he intends saying to the Christians, the Jews, the Muslims and why he isn't coming to Gaza," he said. "We'll tell him that this is not the right moment to come and visit the holy places, while Jerusalem is occupied."

Bad timing or not, if the Pope arrives in Palestine he must visit Gaza or it’ll look as if he doesn’t give a damn about the human condition in the very land where Christianity was born. He might as well hammer one more nail into Christendom’s coffin.

We've seen quite enough wishy-washy conduct by Christian leaders in the face of Israel’s defilement of the Holy Land. Last November, while the Israeli regime was planning its knockout blitzkrieg against Gaza's Muslims and Christians after blockading and starving them for 2 years, we in the West were treated to the spectacle of the Archbishop of Canterbury joining the Chief Rabbi on a visit to Auschwitz to show joint solidarity against extreme hostility and genocide. The Archbishop called it "a place of utter profanity" and spoke of the collective corruption and moral sickness that made the Holocaust possible.

Will these two visit Gaza in the same spirit? The scale of horror may be different but the moral sickness and corruption are the same. And this being the Holy Land the profanity is many times worse.

The Pope too has been to Auschwitz to pray for the people murdered there. "I had to come here as a duty to truth and to those that suffered," he said and talked of the Nazis' mania for destruction and domination, well aware that the same thing was being perpetuated in the Holy Land.

So why isn’t he just as keen to come and pray for those in Gaza - Muslim and Christian - who have been subjugated and cruelly slaughtered or maimed or made homeless? Has his 'duty to truth' evaporated? According to the Pope’s itinerary he'll be turning up at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial and the Western (Wailing) Wall, and hob-nobbing with Israel’s two chief rabbis. But not with his heroic priest in Gaza. 

My last visit to Gaza was in 2007. I wrote then:

“Fuel is running out, so are basics like washing powder. Shattered infrastructure and food shortages mean serious public health problems. Power cuts disrupt hospitals and vital drugs cannot be kept refrigerated. Thousands look death in the face as medicare collapses.”

A friend emailed: “Today in Gaza we have no cement to build graves for those who die.” 

The subjugation and dispossession of Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land continues.

It remains a mystery to me why our largely Christian (but increasingly Muslimised) democracy in Britain slavishly supports the Middle East ethnocracy that’s doing this.

Today things are much, much worse and Gazans need to be shown that the Christian Church cares about them even if nobody else does. So where are these magnificently robed and mitred Men of God when needed?

I hear the temperature in Gaza today is 36ºC, an unimaginable torment amid the dust and rubble, the stench of untreated sewage, the lack of running water and the continual power cuts. A little too rugged for the Holy Father perhaps, and for the Archbishop and the Chief Rabbi.

- Stuart Littlewood is author of the book Radio Free Palestine, which tells the plight of the Palestinians under occupation. For further information please visit www.radiofreepalestine.co.uk. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.

Rescuer describes earthquake effort

Rescue workers in central Italy are searching for survivors after a powerful earthquake killed dozens of people and caused widespread damage.

Duncan Kennedy talks to a rescue worker in the city of L'Aquila city where there is a race against time to reach people trapped under the rubble of buildings.

 

Quake rubble cleared with bare hands

Rescuers are frantically searching for survivors after dozens were killed in a powerful earthquake that struck central Italy, Italian officials say.

The 6.3-magnitude quake struck at 0330 (0130 GMT) close to L'Aquila city, 95km (60 miles) north-east of Rome.

Duncan Kennedy reports from L'Aquila.

 

'Incredible noise' of Italy quake

A Briton has described the ''incredible noise'' of an earthquake that struck the medieval city of L'Aquila in Italy.

John Collis, who lives about 25 miles from the medieval city, said the 6.3-magnitude quake made his bed feel like ''a bouncy castle.''

Dozens of people have been killed and thousands of buildings damaged.

 

Italy's 'complicated' rescue operation

Rescue workers in central Italy are searching for survivors after a powerful earthquake killed dozens of people and caused widespread damage.

The epicentre was near the medieval city of L'Aquila north-east of Rome.

Agostino Miozzo is a spokesman for Italy's Civil Protection agency which is co-ordinating the rescue operation.

A desperate search for survivors is on in and around the Italian city of L'Aquila after a quake killed, Italian media say, at least 150 people.

Some 5,000 rescuers are picking through rubble in the walled medieval city and nearby towns and villages, some of them said to have been virtually destroyed.

Tents are being put up in tennis courts and on football pitches to house some of the 30,000-40,000 homeless.

The number of people injured has been put at 1,500.

Italy's PM Silvio Berlusconi declared a state of emergency in the region.

Gianfranco Fini, speaker of the lower house of parliament, told MPs: "Some towns in the area have been virtually destroyed in their entirety."

Such is the damage in L'Aquila, where between 3,000 and 10,000 buildings were reportedly affected, that the city will be uninhabitable for some time, the BBC's David Willey reports.

Surrounding villages were also hit hard:

• In the village of Onna, 24 people were killed, according to the Italian news agency Ansa; the village of 250 was virtually deserted as survivors sought shelter
• In Castelnuovo, a village of about 300 people, five deaths were confirmed

It has been reported that a major earthquake in the L'Aquila area was predicted by an Italian scientist several weeks ago.

But a spokesman for the Italian Civil Protection Agency, Dr Agostino Miozzo, was adamant that this was not possible.

"We can only say that an area is prone to earthquakes," he told the BBC.

"From here down to Sicily is historically an area interspersed by earthquakes, but even that we cannot predict."

Bare hands

Fire-fighters aided by dogs worked feverishly to reach people trapped in fallen buildings in L'Aquila, including a student dormitory where several students were believed to be still inside.

Residents and rescuers used their bare hands to clear the debris from collapsed buildings.

"We are not using machines for this because experience has shown us that it is important to dig by hand [to avoid further casualties]," said Mr Berlusconi after arriving in L'Aquila.

He said a field hospital, 2,000 tents and 4,000 hotel rooms were being made available.

"I can assure you that there is no building that has fallen down without rescuers, without fire brigade being there," he told reporters.

Italy, he said, had the resources it needed to deal with the disaster: "Financially, there are no problems. The government has all the necessary funds at its disposal. We also have the EU catastrophe fund."

Officials say 26 cities and towns have been damaged in the region, not including villages and hamlets.

There have been stories of rescues all day, the BBC's Duncan Kennedy reports from L'Aquila.

Men, women and children have been brought out of the rubble, some carried on ladders used as makeshift stretchers, some screaming with delight at having survived.

'Struck the heart'

The 6.3-magnitude quake struck at 0330 (0130 GMT) close to L'Aquila, 95km (60 miles) north-east of Rome.

It lasted about 30 seconds, bringing down many Renaissance-era and Baroque buildings, including the dome on one of L'Aquila's churches.

Boulders fell off mountain slopes, blocking roads. Houses were reduced to piles of rubble and cars crushed by raining debris.

One resident, Antonio di Marco, recounted his experience for the BBC: "We escaped outside like madmen, we didn't understand what was happening, the whole building was moving under our feet, it is something that's impossible to describe…"

"It's a catastrophe and an immense shock," resident Renato Di Stefano told the Associated Press as he and his family headed for shelter in a tent camp outside L'Aquila.

"It's struck in the heart of the city, we will never forget the pain."

'State of shock'

Dr Miozzo said many survivors faced a rough night ahead.

"Tonight we'll have a great number of people that will sleep in their car, people that will go to their relatives in the neighbouring area, in the neighbouring towns that are in safe conditions," he told the BBC.

"But they are very shocked, you see, especially the aged people and obviously children."

Phone and power lines have been down and some bridges and roads have been closed as a precaution against aftershocks.

Italy lies on two fault lines and has been hit by powerful earthquakes in the past, mainly in the south of the country.

World leaders have sent messages of condolence and Pope Benedict XVI offered prayers for the "victims, especially the children".

The EU, Austria, France, Germany, Greece, Israel and Russia immediately stepped forward with offers of aid, if required.

A T-shirt printed at the request of an IDF soldier in the sniper unit reading 'I shot two kills.'

Last update - 22:41 20/03/2009

Dead Palestinian babies and bombed mosques - IDF fashion 2009

By Uri Blau

Tags: Israel News, IDF, Gaza

The office at the Adiv fabric-printing shop in south Tel Aviv handles a constant stream of customers, many of them soldiers in uniform, who come to order custom clothing featuring their unit's insignia, usually accompanied by a slogan and drawing of their choosing. Elsewhere on the premises, the sketches are turned into plates used for imprinting the ordered items, mainly T-shirts and baseball caps, but also hoodies, fleece jackets and pants. A young Arab man from Jaffa supervises the workers who imprint the words and pictures, and afterward hands over the finished product. Dead babies, mothers weeping on their children's graves, a gun aimed at a child and bombed-out mosques - these are a few examples of the images Israel Defense Forces soldiers design these days to print on shirts they order to mark the end of training, or of field duty. The slogans accompanying the drawings are not exactly anemic either: A T-shirt for infantry snipers bears the inscription "Better use Durex," next to a picture of a dead Palestinian baby, with his weeping mother and a teddy bear beside him. A sharpshooter's T-shirt from the Givati Brigade's Shaked battalion shows a pregnant Palestinian woman with a bull's-eye superimposed on her belly, with the slogan, in English, "1 shot, 2 kills." A "graduation" shirt for those who have completed another snipers course depicts a Palestinian baby, who grows into a combative boy and then an armed adult, with the inscription, "No matter how it begins, we'll put an end to it." There are also plenty of shirts with blatant sexual messages. For example, the Lavi battalion produced a shirt featuring a drawing of a soldier next to a young woman with bruises, and the slogan, "Bet you got raped!" A few of the images underscore actions whose existence the army officially denies - such as "confirming the kill" (shooting a bullet into an enemy victim's head from close range, to ensure he is dead), or harming religious sites, or female or child non-combatants. Advertisement In many cases, the content is submitted for approval to one of the unit's commanders. The latter, however, do not always have control over what gets printed, because the artwork is a private initiative of soldiers that they never hear about. Drawings or slogans previously banned in certain units have been approved for distribution elsewhere. For example, shirts declaring, "We won't chill 'til we confirm the kill" were banned in the past (the IDF claims that the practice doesn't exist), yet the Haruv battalion printed some last year. The slogan "Let every Arab mother know that her son's fate is in my hands!" had previously been banned for use on another infantry unit's shirt. A Givati soldier said this week, however, that at the end of last year, his platoon printed up dozens of shirts, fleece jackets and pants bearing this slogan. "It has a drawing depicting a soldier as the Angel of Death, next to a gun and an Arab town," he explains. "The text was very powerful. The funniest part was that when our soldier came to get the shirts, the man who printed them was an Arab, and the soldier felt so bad that he told the girl at the counter to bring them to him." Does the design go to the commanders for approval? The Givati soldier: "Usually the shirts undergo a selection process by some officer, but in this case, they were approved at the level of platoon sergeant. We ordered shirts for 30 soldiers and they were really into it, and everyone wanted several items and paid NIS 200 on average." What do you think of the slogan that was printed? "I didn't like it so much, but most of the soldiers wanted it." Many controversial shirts have been ordered by graduates of snipers courses, which bring together soldiers from various units. In 2006, soldiers from the "Carmon Team" course for elite-unit marksmen printed a shirt with a drawing of a knife-wielding Palestinian in the crosshairs of a gun sight, and the slogan, "You've got to run fast, run fast, run fast, before it's all over." Below is a drawing of Arab women weeping over a grave and the words: "And afterward they cry, and afterward they cry." [The inscriptions are riffs on a popular song.] Another sniper's shirt also features an Arab man in the crosshairs, and the announcement, "Everything is with the best of intentions." G., a soldier in an elite unit who has done a snipers course, explained that, "it's a type of bonding process, and also it's well known that anyone who is a sniper is messed up in the head. Our shirts have a lot of double entendres, for example: 'Bad people with good aims.' Every group that finishes a course puts out stuff like that." When are these shirts worn? G. "These are shirts for around the house, for jogging, in the army. Not for going out. Sometimes people will ask you what it's about." Of the shirt depicting a bull's-eye on a pregnant woman, he said: "There are people who think it's not right, and I think so as well, but it doesn't really mean anything. I mean it's not like someone is gonna go and shoot a pregnant woman." What is the idea behind the shirt from July 2007, which has an image of a child with the slogan "Smaller - harder!"? "It's a kid, so you've got a little more of a problem, morally, and also the target is smaller." Do your superiors approve the shirts before printing? "Yes, although one time they rejected some shirt that was too extreme. I don't remember what was on it." These shirts also seem pretty extreme. Why draw crosshairs over a child - do you shoot kids? 'We came, we saw' "As a sniper, you get a lot of extreme situations. You suddenly see a small boy who picks up a weapon and it's up to you to decide whether to shoot. These shirts are half-facetious, bordering on the truth, and they reflect the extreme situations you might encounter. The one who-honest-to-God sees the target with his own eyes - that's the sniper." Have you encountered a situation like that? "Fortunately, not involving a kid, but involving a woman - yes. There was someone who wasn't holding a weapon, but she was near a prohibited area and could have posed a threat." What did you do? "I didn't take it" (i.e., shoot). You don't regret that, I imagine. "No. Whomever I had to shoot, I shot." A shirt printed up just this week for soldiers of the Lavi battalion, who spent three years in the West Bank, reads: "We came, we saw, we destroyed!" - alongside images of weapons, an angry soldier and a Palestinian village with a ruined mosque in the center. A shirt printed after Operation Cast Lead in Gaza for Battalion 890 of the Paratroops depicts a King Kong-like soldier in a city under attack. The slogan is unambiguous: "If you believe it can be fixed, then believe it can be destroyed!" Y., a soldier/yeshiva student, designed the shirt. "You take whoever [in the unit] knows how to draw and then you give it to the commanders before printing," he explained. What is the soldier holding in his hand? Y. "A mosque. Before I drew the shirt I had some misgivings, because I wanted it to be like King Kong, but not too monstrous. The one holding the mosque - I wanted him to have a more normal-looking face, so it wouldn't look like an anti-Semitic cartoon. Some of the people who saw it told me, 'Is that what you've got to show for the IDF? That it destroys homes?' I can understand people who look at this from outside and see it that way, but I was in Gaza and they kept emphasizing that the object of the operation was to wreak destruction on the infrastructure, so that the price the Palestinians and the leadership pay will make them realize that it isn't worth it for them to go on shooting. So that's the idea of 'we're coming to destroy' in the drawing." According to Y., most of these shirts are worn strictly in an army context, not in civilian life. "And within the army people look at it differently," he added. "I don't think I would walk down the street in this shirt, because it would draw fire. Even at my yeshiva I don't think people would like it." Y. also came up with a design for the shirt his unit printed at the end of basic training. It shows a clenched fist shattering the symbol of the Paratroops Corps. Where does the fist come from? "It's reminiscent of [Rabbi Meir] Kahane's symbol. I borrowed it from an emblem for something in Russia, but basically it's supposed to look like Kahane's symbol, the one from 'Kahane Was Right' - it's a sort of joke. Our company commander is kind of gung-ho." Was the shirt printed? "Yes. It was a company shirt. We printed about 100 like that." This past January, the "Night Predators" demolitions platoon from Golani's Battalion 13 ordered a T-shirt showing a Golani devil detonating a charge that destroys a mosque. An inscription above it says, "Only God forgives." One of the soldiers in the platoon downplays it: "It doesn't mean much, it's just a T-shirt from our platoon. It's not a big deal. A friend of mine drew a picture and we made it into a shirt." What's the idea behind "Only God forgives"? The soldier: "It's just a saying." No one had a problem with the fact that a mosque gets blown up in the picture? "I don't see what you're getting at. I don't like the way you're going with this. Don't take this somewhere you're not supposed to, as though we hate Arabs." After Operation Cast Lead, soldiers from that battalion printed a T-shirt depicting a vulture sexually penetrating Hamas' prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, accompanied by a particularly graphic slogan. S., a soldier in the platoon that ordered the shirt, said the idea came from a similar shirt, printed after the Second Lebanon War, that featured Hassan Nasrallah instead of Haniyeh. "They don't okay things like that at the company level. It's a shirt we put out just for the platoon," S. explained. What's the problem with this shirt? S.: "It bothers some people to see these things, from a religious standpoint ..." How did people who saw it respond? "We don't have that many Orthodox people in the platoon, so it wasn't a problem. It's just something the guys want to put out. It's more for wearing around the house, and not within the companies, because it bothers people. The Orthodox mainly. The officers tell us it's best not to wear shirts like this on the base." The sketches printed in recent years at the Adiv factory, one of the largest of its kind in the country, are arranged in drawers according to the names of the units placing the orders: Paratroops, Golani, air force, sharpshooters and so on. Each drawer contains hundreds of drawings, filed by year. Many of the prints are cartoons and slogans relating to life in the unit, or inside jokes that outsiders wouldn't get (and might not care to, either), but a handful reflect particular aggressiveness, violence and vulgarity. Print-shop manager Haim Yisrael, who has worked there since the early 1980s, said Adiv prints around 1,000 different patterns each month, with soldiers accounting for about half. Yisrael recalled that when he started out, there were hardly any orders from the army. "The first ones to do it were from the Nahal brigade," he said. "Later on other infantry units started printing up shirts, and nowadays any course with 15 participants prints up shirts." From time to time, officers complain. "Sometimes the soldiers do things that are inside jokes that only they get, and sometimes they do something foolish that they take to an extreme," Yisrael explained. "There have been a few times when commanding officers called and said, 'How can you print things like that for soldiers?' For example, with shirts that trashed the Arabs too much. I told them it's a private company, and I'm not interested in the content. I can print whatever I like. We're neutral. There have always been some more extreme and some less so. It's just that now more people are making shirts." Race to be unique Evyatar Ben-Tzedef, a research associate at the International Policy Institute for Counter-Terrorism and former editor of the IDF publication Maarachot, said the phenomenon of custom-made T-shirts is a product of "the infantry's insane race to be unique. I, for example, had only one shirt that I received after the Yom Kippur War. It said on it, 'The School for Officers,' and that was it. What happened since then is a product of the decision to assign every unit an emblem and a beret. After all, there used to be very few berets: black, red or green. This changed in the 1990s. [The shirts] developed because of the fact that for bonding purposes, each unit created something that was unique to it. "These days the content on shirts is sometimes deplorable," Ben-Tzedef explained. "It stems from the fact that profanity is very acceptable and normative in Israel, and that there is a lack of respect for human beings and their environment, which includes racism aimed in every direction." Yossi Kaufman, who moderates the army and defense forum on the Web site Fresh, served in the Armored Corps from 1996 to 1999. "I also drew shirts, and I remember the first one," he said. "It had a small emblem on the front and some inside joke, like, 'When we die, we'll go to heaven, because we've already been through hell.'" Kaufman has also been exposed to T-shirts of the sort described here. "I know there are shirts like these," he says. "I've heard and also seen a little. These are not shirts that soldiers can wear in civilian life, because they would get stoned, nor at a battalion get-together, because the battalion commander would be pissed off. They wear them on very rare occasions. There's all sorts of black humor stuff, mainly from snipers, such as, 'Don't bother running because you'll die tired' - with a drawing of a Palestinian boy, not a terrorist. There's a Golani or Givati shirt of a soldier raping a girl, and underneath it says, 'No virgins, no terror attacks.' I laughed, but it was pretty awful. When I was asked once to draw things like that, I said it wasn't appropriate." The IDF Spokesman's Office comments on the phenomenon: "Military regulations do not apply to civilian clothing, including shirts produced at the end of basic training and various courses. The designs are printed at the soldiers' private initiative, and on civilian shirts. The examples raised by Haaretz are not in keeping with the values of the IDF spirit, not representative of IDF life, and are in poor taste. Humor of this kind deserves every condemnation and excoriation. The IDF intends to take action for the immediate eradication of this phenomenon. To this end, it is emphasizing to commanding officers that it is appropriate, among other things, to take discretionary and disciplinary measures against those involved in acts of this sort." Shlomo Tzipori, a lieutenant colonel in the reserves and a lawyer specializing in martial law, said the army does bring soldiers up on charges for offenses that occur outside the base and during their free time. According to Tzipori, slogans that constitute an "insult to the army or to those in uniform" are grounds for court-martial, on charges of "shameful conduct" or "disciplinary infraction," which are general clauses in judicial martial law. Sociologist Dr. Orna Sasson-Levy, of Bar-Ilan University, author of "Identities in Uniform: Masculinities and Femininities in the Israeli Military," said that the phenomenon is "part of a radicalization process the entire country is undergoing, and the soldiers are at its forefront. I think that ever since the second intifada there has been a continual shift to the right. The pullout from Gaza and its outcome - the calm that never arrived - led to a further shift rightward. "This tendency is most strikingly evident among soldiers who encounter various situations in the territories on a daily basis. There is less meticulousness than in the past, and increasing callousness. There is a perception that the Palestinian is not a person, a human being entitled to basic rights, and therefore anything may be done to him." Could the printing of clothing be viewed also as a means of venting aggression? Sasson-Levy: "No. I think it strengthens and stimulates aggression and legitimizes it. What disturbs me is that a shirt is something that has permanence. The soldiers later wear it in civilian life; their girlfriends wear it afterward. It is not a statement, but rather something physical that remains, that is out there in the world. Beyond that, I think the link made between sexist views and nationalist views, as in the 'Screw Haniyeh' shirt, is interesting. National chauvinism and gender chauvinism combine and strengthen one another. It establishes a masculinity shaped by violent aggression toward women and Arabs; a masculinity that considers it legitimate to speak in a crude and violent manner toward women and Arabs." Col. (res.) Ron Levy began his military service in the Sayeret Matkal elite commando force before the Six-Day War. He was the IDF's chief psychologist, and headed the army's mental health department in the 1980s. Levy: "I'm familiar with things of this sort going back 40, 50 years, and each time they take a different form. Psychologically speaking, this is one of the ways in which soldiers project their anger, frustration and violence. It is a certain expression of things, which I call 'below the belt.'" Do you think this a good way to vent anger? Levy: "It's safe. But there are also things here that deviate from the norm, and you could say that whoever is creating these things has reached some level of normality. He gives expression to the fact that what is considered abnormal today might no longer be so tomorrow."

Mohamed Hassan
INTERVIEW : Grégoire Lalieu and Michel Collon

For a lot of medias, the case seems clear: the Hamas is terrorist,
fundamentalist and fanatic. Though, this movement has won the last
elections and his popularity increases among the Palestinians. Why? We
raised the question to Mohamed Hassan, co-author of Iraq, Eye-to-eye with
the occupation, and one of the best Middle-East specialists.

What is really the Hamas?
Hamas is a political movement coming from the Muslim Brotherhood, which is
one of the oldest political movements in Egypt. The word "hamas" means
awakening, erupting... It's an islamo nationalist movement, which we could
compare to the Irish catholic nationalist movement. In 1916, the Irish
Republican Army has developed against the colonial British occupation. As
the Irish were Catholics and the British settlers were Protestants, the
occupier tried to make it a religious conflict. Religion can be utilized to
mobilize people for a cause.

What is the historical context explaining the rise of the Hamas?
To understand that, we have to take a look to several events. The first one
is the six-day war which discredited the Nasserism in 1967. Nasser was an
Egyptian president who encouraged an Arabic revolution for independence and
development. As Israel inflicted him a severe defeat, his ideology ran out
of steam. After he died, Egypt and Israel were again engaged into a
conflict with the October war in 1973. Egypt and Syria wanted to take back
territories under Israeli occupation. Finally, Egypt and Israel signed an
agreement but it created a division in the Arab world between the countries
who wanted to accept the Israeli conditions and those who wanted to resist
like Syria, Algeria, Iraq... Of course, the Palestinian question was
crucial in those conflicts and the resistance to Israel drove to the
formation of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). This organization
was created in order to gather the several movements of resistance to ally
their efforts in the struggle against Israel. Before negotiating with this
organization at the Oslo accords, Israel considered it as terrorist
organization and inflicted it several defeats that can explain the rise of
the Hamas.
The first important defeat is the Black September in 1970. The PLO had his
headquarter in Jordan where King Hussein made a deal with Israel to
brutally crash the Palestinian insurrection. So the PLO was forced to flee
to Beirut. The second important defeat comes in 1982. Israel attacked
Lebanon and most of the PLO combatants had to move far away from the
Palestinian areas and the headquarter of the organization was set in Tunis.
In this particular context, comes the first Intifada in 1987. A popular
uprising in reaction to the Israeli occupation which started in Gaza and
then touched the whole Palestine. As I said, the PLO was very far away. On
the contrary, the Hamas was inside Palestine and took part to the Intifada.
That event marks the coming of the Hamas which started in the prisons!
Prisons used to be considered as a place of punishment. But after that the
resistants of the Intifada were put in jail, things have changed... It's in
the prisons that the Hamas started to recruit and to develop as an
organization. With the Intifada, the Hamas was exposed to the Palestinian
opinion, to the Israeli opinion and to the international opinion.

How did the PLO react to the Intifada?
With the Intifada, the PLO was divided in two wings: the strongest one who
wanted to continue the resistance and was installed in Tunis and those who
wanted to work out a deal. Those ones were hiding and didn't have the
courage to defend their opinion until the Oslo Accords where they came up
and became stronger. Arafat was a tactician and after the end of the
Intifada, in order to bring the PLO in Palestine, he used the different
lines of the Palestinian reactions.

What were these lines?
First, you have those who wanted to continue the fight against Israel
without concession. Arafat had to marginalize them to obtain something. In
the other hand, you've got those who wanted to capitulate, and they lead
the Palestinian government today. Finally, you've got the little
bourgeoisie who wanted to negotiate for their own profits. Arafat used them
to get what he wanted and it drives us to the Oslo Accords (1993). They
allowed the PLO to come back in Palestine but except that, it was a great
defeat. The Palestinians accepted to get only 22% of their total land!
There is no agreement in history that confers to somebody only 22% of what
he was demanding! The PLO was no more considered as a terrorist
organization and won the recognition of Israel but didn't manage to really
improve the situation in Gaza and Cisjordania. Nothing in the agreement was
mentioned to stop the Israeli colonization. This fact discredited the
Palestinian authority to the population and also explains the success of
the Hamas as a movement of resistance. Another important point is that the
Palestinian authority, which was receiving money from the West, became
corrupted. On the contrary, the Hamas doesn't have this problem. The
organization receives money mainly from a charity system. And there is no
indication that they put this money in their pocket. As they critic the
authority for its corruption, they are very cautious to this problem.

How can you explain the success of the Hamas?
Three factors explain the success of the Hamas. First, the maintaining of
the resistance, refusing imposed solution, which correspond to the will of
the population. The second point is that the Hamas wants the refugees of
1948 and 1967 to come back. In 1948, after the creation of the Israel
state, a lot of Palestinians were pushed out of the territory. With the Six
Day War in 1967, around three hundred thousand refugees flew away to
Jordan. Today, there are more than six millions of refugees who don't have
the right to go back to their land! On the other hand, as a Jewish state,
Israel welcomes any Jew from everywhere: Spain, Russia, Ethiopia... People
who have never been seen in Palestine! The question of the refugees is an
important element of the Palestinian demands that the Hamas claim.
The last point which contributed to the success of the Hamas is the
elimination within the Palestinian community of the elements used by
Israel, corrupted people, to bring information. A few ones were eliminated
physically but most of them - delinquent people, alcoholics or drug dealers
- were reintegrated by the social program of the Hamas. So the information
doesn't circulate anymore. This is very important. Israel had made a
corrupted society where everybody was against everybody and they exploited
that to build an information network and have a control over the
Palestinian resistance. This is a typical colonial mentality that the
British also had applied in Northern Ireland. Nothing new. But the Hamas
crushed that network and it's a big success against Israel.


Some people say Israel deliberately favored the rise of the Hamas. Is it true?
Absolutely not! There is no evidence on that. Israel tolerated Hamas,
hoping interpalestinian conflicts. They wanted to weaken the PLO and the
Fatah. But they didn't expect the quality, the ability and the organization
of the Hamas to develop in such a way. Every colonial power always
considers his subjects as naïve children.

How an Islamist movement went on so popular in Palestine?
Under the occupation of Gaza and the Palestinian areas, there is no
possibility for the Palestinian people to openly discuss or have a vision
about their future except in the mosque or in the university. Of course,
the Hamas was already active on the first place. But they also then
started, as any political group, to become dominant in student
organizations. The market is open for every party! So the Hamas recruited
brilliant young students who were well considered in the society because of
their dedication or their honesty. It was easy for the group to convince
them because they both want resistance. No big secret about it! Hamas spoke
what was in the heart of the population. With the most combative, the most
intelligent and the most highly educated elements of the society, Hamas
became a big organization.


How did the Palestinian authorities react to the evolution of the Hamas?
Authorities have been involved into corruption and a lot of scandals. Even
Palestinian journalists have condemned them for that. Arafat was a kind of
arbiter between the several factions and once he died, the contradiction
between Hamas and Fatah became antagonistic. Israel exploited those
disagreements and managed to use the Fatah to cut the popularity of the
Hamas in the political view. They were thinking that Hamas wouldn't accept
to participate to elections so they organized it quickly. Everybody was
surprised that the Hamas took part to those elections but nobody was really
worried as they were thinking that the Hamas would come with a very limited
dogmatic way of thinking and would be defeated by the major party. Against
all expectations, the Hamas made a coalition and presented a flexible
image, very far away from a fundamentalist organization. In fact, they wish
an Islamic state but the reality is different.

Will the Hamas put an Islamic regime in Palestine or not?
Well, an Islamic regime is the maximum program of the Hamas but they
couldn't apply it because on the ground, the organization is based on a
patriotic movement. We've got to consider the fact that after the brutal
Israeli war in Gaza, not only the Hamas was fighting but all the patriotic
forces on the ground, including Fatah. This aggression has unified
Palestinian people.
Can the Hamas change into a more progressive movement in alliance with
other movements? Yes, they can, because of the Israeli aggression. The idea
that the Hamas will create a society based on an Islamic pattern of
production is an illusion. It's impossible. In many ways, the Hamas looks
like the Hezbollah, which says: « Lebanon is a country with a big
diversity. We're just representing a fraction of it and our aim is to build
with all the Lebanese progressives a national independent economy. »
Finally, I would draw your attention over the fact that nobody asks the
question of Islamic state for some countries like Saudi Arabia for example!

What is the social economic program of the Hamas?
Their project is a capitalist economy with an important state intervention.
Let me notice than now, even the European conservatives want a state
intervention. If you look at Iran, it's an Islamic state where you've got
state intervention. But they refuse the domination from outside and want
the wealth from the oil to be distributed. About the Hamas, you've got to
know that it's not mostly his social program which had seduced the
Palestinians but the fact that this movement embodies the resistance. And
today, the resistance is the most important thing for the Palestinians.

What is the role of the woman according to the Hamas?
Their vision of the woman on paper and in the reality is different. Let me
explain. In Palestine, the situation is very difficult. The women have to
work to win their own bread and raise their children. Hamas could never
forbidden women to work and force them to go back home. Except a few rich
countries with oil, nobody thinks like that in the Arabic world. How could
Hamas put out of the society more than 50% of the most active elements of
the Palestinian community? In fact, some people in the West believe that
the women could be controlled as passive subjects and think they've got no
brain!
Of course, there are cultural differences between the Arabic world and the
West. These differences are not well understood because of some clichés.
Let me give you an example. In western bookshops, there are hundred of
magazines with naked women, blondes with big breast... Nobody says it is
disgusting and that the women on the covers should not been considered this
way. But when someone sees a woman wearing a headscarf, he speaks about
oppression! There is a kind of hypocrisy in the West. For example, in
Indonesia, the regime is installed since 1965 after a putsch marked by the
massacre of a million of communists. Most of the women now wear a
headscarf. But nobody speaks about them because this country produces oil
and is aligned with the West.


Why is the Hamas rejected in Europe?
Islam is not well received in Europe, which identifies itself to the
Christianity. There is a real rejection of the Islam contribution to the
development of the western civilization. So, as an Islamic group, the Hamas
is not well considered. But why does someone who's against the Zionism have
a problem with the Hamas? And why does the same person, who supports the
Irish cause, have no problem with a catholic organization? The cultural
difference explains that and we can observe that phenomenon. I'm just
coming back from Egypt and I could observe that when you cross the
Mediterranean Sea, you change of world, you change of way of thinking. I
don't blame the Europeans. They are marked by their education and the
mediatic propaganda. We are in a system where we always have to identify
some enemies to justify our existence. I think we must put things in
perspective.
For me, as a Marxist living in a western country, I have of course some
contradictions with the Hamas and the Hezbollah. I regret that the
resistance is led by a movement taking an inspiration in Islam, but that is
so. And for the moment, those contradictions are secondary. On the other
hand, I'm totally opposed with people like Abbas or Moubarak, who are laics
but who serve the United State. I'm reading the news in Arab, I know the
situation over there and I see the contradictions from a different point of
view than the European left.

Why does the European left not (openly) support the Palestinian resistance?
The problem with the European left is that she refuses to make a big
alliance against the imperialism, because of the Hamas, the women with
headscarf and all sorts of pretexts. In fact, they accept to get involved
in the big alliance of the Christians against the Islam. They go into the
"civilization war" set in motion by American ideologists. They are more
influenced than they believe. Why did the European left not get worked up
when the Christian Phalangists slaughtered in Lebanon? For my part, as a
laic, I've supported the Irish resistance against the British occupation
and if those Irish are Catholics, it doesn't disturb me. In fact, the
problem with the Europeans is that they have been educated in a
civilization that has prejudices against the Jews and the Muslims.

Why is the Palestinian question so crucial for the USA ?
Palestine is a very small place and became yet one of the biggest stakes in
the world for two reasons. First, the settler state created has to be
defended by imperialism powers, US and Great Britain, to be the most
dominant element the Middle East. This is a way to crush the revolutionary
democratic movement in the region. If you crush the Palestinian issue, you
prevent an alliance of the Arab world with all the lines of resistance in
Iraq, Lebanon, ... At the time of the Shah, Iran was doing the police in
the region. The United States had installed a military dictatorship to
serve their interests in the region. After Iran, it is Israel. One of the
most demonstrative examples of this practice is the revolution in northern
Yemen in the 60's. Some officials, helped by Egypt to install a democratic
republic in northern Yemen, led a coup. The cheick who was ruling Yemen ran
away in Saudi Arabia. The Britains organized troops against the republic to
crush the Arab nationalist movement and soldiers, trained by Israel, were
involved to fight against the liberation forces. Israel was or is also
participating as militias in Salvador, Sri-Lanka, Colombia,... In fact,
wherever United State is involved, Israel is involved.
The second reason is the importance of Jerusalem as a holy city. It's the
second important place for Islam. So this point mobilized all the Muslims
in the world. Jerusalem is also important for the Christian Palestinians.
Israel won't leave it. It would be considered as a victory for the
Palestinian and the Islam. And of course, Jerusalem is a strategic place,
on the border between Israel and the Cisjordania. So the question of that
city is an important element considering the perpetual expansion of Israel.
In fact, that state has no define border. They even don't have a
constitution so they've got the possibility to go on with the expansion.

By butchering Gaza, what is the message that Israel wants to send ?
The message is "Israel will be there forever, even with the nuclear weapon.
We can impose you what we want".

Will it work?
No because on the other side, there are combatants with an ability to
sacrifice, something that the Israelis have lost. With this attack, Israel
didn't obtain something on the feature. And the Hamas will get out
reinforced. Even in Cisjordania, people are saying that if they were
elections, they would vote for that party. In fact, those who resist always
win.

10th of February 2009

Justifying Israeli War Crimes
By: Reem Salahi
 
Having left Gaza now, I am trying to come to terms with what I saw, what I heard and honestly, what I don't think I will ever understand – the justification.  While Israel's recent offensive has been the most egregious of any historical attack upon the Palestinians in Gaza, it is just that, one of many.  Gaza has been under Israeli bombardment and sanctions for many years.  Prior to the Israeli pullout in 2005, Gaza was under the complete control and occupation of Israel.  Nearly 8000 Israeli settlers occupied 40% of Gaza while the 1.5 million Palestinians occupied the remaining 60%.  Settlements were located on the most fertile lands and along Gaza's beautiful coastal regions and checkpoints prevented Palestinian mobility.  Despite being one-fifth the size of Rhode Island, 25 miles long by 4-7.5 miles wide, Gaza was divided into three sections and Palestinians had to pass through multiple checkpoints to get from one section to the next.  Often Israeli forces would close these checkpoints and not allow the Palestinians access to the other regions in Gaza as a form of collective punishment. 
 
Yet with Israel's pullout in 2005, the Palestinian experience has not improved.  Rather, it has become even more unpredictable and isolated.  Palestinians who celebrated the exodus of the Israeli settlers and the return of their land could not have imagined what would follow and how Israel would subsequently unleash its brutal force against them.  As the saying goes, nothing in life is free and the Palestinians have paid, and continue to pay, a dear and unforgivable price for Israel's withdrawal from their legally rightful land.
 
From the first moments of Israel's military campaign on December 27, Israel's indifference to civilian casualties was clear.  Its first attacks started at around 11:30 AM, at a time when children leave the morning session of school and the afternoon students arrive.  The streets were packed with civilians – children no less.  Within moments, hundreds of Palestinians were killed and even more Palestinians were injured (at least 280 Palestinians were killed on the first day, and 700 wounded including more than a dozen policemen attending a graduation ceremony at the Gaza City police station).  One of the little girls in Jabalia told me that she was in school when the attacks started.  She fainted from the overwhelming fear and was not able to go home and see her family for days.  When she did go home, she remembers seeing dead and injured bodies stranded all over street and hearing the thundering sound of missiles falling. 
 
In its offensive, Israel attacked UNRWA warehouses, schools, mosques, civilian neighborhoods, businesses, factories, hospitals, universities and the media center.  Its attacks took place during the day, night, during temporary ceasefires, and often without any notice or=2 0warning.  I would ask the Palestinians I met who had lost loved ones in the recent incursion whether they were warned about an oncoming attack by some flyer or radio announcement.  The majority would laugh at my question.  "Why would I stay in my home if I knew that it was going to be attacked?  Do you think I want to die?  Do you think I would want to put my family and children in danger?"  Most of the Palestinians had no notice that they were going to be attacked and bombarded until it was too late, and at that point, all they could do was stay in their homes, far from any window or door, and pray that their house would not be next.
 
Those, like Majid Fathi Abd al-Aziz al-Najjar, who were warned, tended to flee to "safer" areas.  Majid and his wife and children resided in a border town in Khan Younis.  Shortly after the start of its incursion, the Israeli military dropped flyers on his town, a copy of which he showed me.  It said in Arabic that militants had entered your area and as a result we are forced to react and attack this area.  Yet these flyers were only dropped in the center of town and Majid did not even realize that they were dropped until after the attacks on his way to see the rubble that used to be his home.  Realizing that Israeli tanks were planning on entering Gaza and would destroy anything that would block their entry, Majid packed his family and fled to his relative's home far from the border, in an area deemed safe.  Yet at 10 PM on January 3, 2009, a white phosphorus missile strayed off course and rammed right into the home that Majid and his family had taken refuge in, along with 15-20 other Palestinians.  The missile came through the roof and broke through the wall and hit Majid's wife, Hanan Abd al-Ghani al-Najjar, dead center in her chest.  She died immediately upon impact.  Six or seven others, including Hanan's elderly mother and Hanan and Majid's daughter were severely injured by shrapnel and rushed to the hospital.  Whereas Majid thought he had fled from certain death in his home on the border, death followed him to his place of refuge.  Yet the sad reality is that no matter where Majid fled, no place in Gaza was safe.  Hanan's death was not the unpredictable result of a misguided missile, but rather the predictable consequence of a one-sided war waged by the fifth largest army against a population that is trapped within a prison and weakened by decades of occupation and years of blockade.   
 
While Israel has perfected its many excuses in justifying innocent Palestinian death and destruction ("there were militants present…well we thought there were militants present" "we warned the m but they did not to leave" "missiles were being fired from that [insert location here]" "we are investigating this attack" "it was an accident"), Israel has fallen short of providing actual evidence to substantiate killing people like Hanan Al-Najjar, Kassab Shurrab, Mahmoud Masharrawi, Sabha's husband and the majority of others killed.  After attacking the UN-operated al-Fakhura School in Jabalia on January 6, where many families had taken refuge and killing at least 40 innocent women and children and injuring dozens more, Israel made a rare attempt to actually justify its attacks.  Not only did Israel use one of its staple excuses ("militants were firing from inside the school"), but it actually showed a video of militants firing mortars from the school.  Within a matter of days, though, the video was dated to 2007 and till now, Israel has not provided us with another staple excuse of why, two years later, the al-Fakhura School was attacked and the hundreds of Palestinian civilians were killed and injured.  
 
How does Israel explain the executions, the shooting of Palestinians point blank in cold blood?  How does it justify Israeli soldiers shooting Kassab Shurrab with five bullets across the chest as he came out of his car with his hands to his side, especially as one of the Palestinian hostages sitting blindfolded by the soldiers heard the commander tell the soldier in Hebrew to shoot the civilians that were driving down the road.  What about the two daughters of Khaled Abed Rabbo, Amal, age 2, and Suaad, age 7, murdered by an Israeli soldier using a semi automatic rifle before their father 's eyes as the other Israeli soldiers ate chips and chocolate?  Let us not forget about Sameer Rashid Mohammad Mohammad, a 43 year old UNRWA worker, who was separated from his family by Israeli soldiers and taken to a separate room and shot in the chest?  For four days after killing Sameer, Israeli soldiers held his family hostage and would make the family prepare the murdered Sameer food.  Only when the Israeli soldiers left their home, did Sameer's children see that their father was executed and by their father's dead and bleeding body were piles of food.  How about Farah al-Halo, 1.5 years of age, who was shot in the stomach when her family was forced to evacuate from their home at 6:30 PM by Israeli soldiers who assured them of their safety?  Only 50 meters down the road they were shot at by other Israeli soldiers.  Farah, with her intestines spilling from her stomach, died on the side of the road a few hours later as the same soldiers that had assured their safety watched.
 
Further, how can Israel explain its use of the Palestinians as human shields?  Upon entering a village, Israeli soldiers would separate the men from the women.  Sami Rashid Mohammad Mohammad, Sameer's brother, was taken as a hostage and forced to accompany the Israeli soldiers for four days.  He was handcuffed and blindfolded and made to walk in front of the Israeli tanks and soldiers as bullets would whiz by.  At other times, he was made to sit on his knees in an open field for hours while Israeli soldiers would shoot from behind him and often at his feet.  These Palestinians were nothing more than entertainment for the soldiers, a child's play toy.  When I asked Sami whether he saw any Palestinian militants during his time as a human shield, he laughed and said that he only saw Israeli soldiers with their blackened faces and camouflage outfits.  "It was only Israeli soldiers shooting at each other," he remarked.  It is thus no wonder that between four to six Israeli soldiers were killed and 24 others injured in "friendly fire."
 
Additionally, how can Israel explain the humiliation tactics it used against the Palestinians such as forcing Palestinian ambulance drivers to abandon their ambulance cars and drive donkey carts to pick up the dead and wounded as if to equate Palestinians with donkeys?  The soldiers would grant the ambulance drivers half an hour to clear the area using donkey carts and threatened to shoot after half an hour.  And what about the racist remarks painted on the walls of the Palestinian homes?  One of my co-delegates took pictures of the Hebrew writings graffitied on the walls of some of the Palestinian homes we visited in Zeitoun and had a friend translate them.  Among the things written were: "Death to Arabs" "War now between Arabs and Jews" "An Arab brave is an Arab in a grave" "Bad to the Arab=good for me" "He who dreams Givati [Israeli infantry brigade] does not expel Jews. He who dreams Givati kills Arabs!!!" 
 
The reality is that Israel cannot explain or justify any of these things, nor does it even care to do so.  When Israel's staple excuses are not readily consumed or when it is examined under a critical lens, Israel applies another tactic– threat and demonization.  Israel has created one of the strongest lobby organizations in the U.S., AIPAC, which actively demonizes any opponent or criticizer of the State of Israel.  Due to John Ging's, the Director of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), open opposition to Israel's attacks in Gaza and his call for the investigation of Israeli attacks, he has been demonized and AIPAC recently introduced House Resolution 29 attacking UNRWA and alleging that it supports terrorists.  Even I have received a few threatening emails upon the issuance of NLG's Press Report which documented some of our findings.  One of the emails indicated that I, along with the other attorneys, will have our careers followed.  As the email stated, "Israel is smart not stupid, and will continue to do what they must as will America to survive even over the bodies of their leaders if necessary."
 
Almost every Palestinian I met in Gaza believes that Israel's recent attack will only be followed by another bloodier and more deadly attack on Gaza that will exterminate the Palestinians once and for all.  Considering the history of attacks on Gaza, the level of atrocities recently committed in Gaza and the lack of international redress, I do not think that these statements are mere paranoia.  Israel must be held accountable for its crimes in Gaza lest it commit larger and more egregious crimes in the future.  As one who has been trained in the legal profession, I demand that Israel engage the legal arena and provide the international community with real evidence, and not just staple excuses and dated videos, that can justify every single civilian murder and the widespread d estruction of Palestinian civil society.  Until Israel is able to do so, the evidence in Gaza leads anyone willing to visit to the inevitable conclusion that Israel has committed war crimes.