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

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

:: 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.