Wednesday 29 August 2012
palestine
Rachel was standing in front of this home. As the bulldozer approached she stood her ground. Rachel was wearing an orange fluorescent jacket. She was clearly visible to the bulldozer driver as well as to the soldiers in the tank. The bulldozer began to push up the ground from beneath her feet. The pile of earth was mounding up and she tried her best to stay on top of it. As the ground continued to move Rachel went down on her knees. The bulldozer continued to move forward. Rachel began to become buried beneath the dirt. Still it did not stop. Finally, Rachel was beneath the bulldozer. The bulldozer did not even pick up its blade. It ran over her completely and continued to advance. It stopped when she was completely underneath the body of the bulldozer. It then moved backwards over her body. It moved clear of her and backed away. Four eyewitnesses describe the murder of Rachel Corrie ☀
Wednesday 8 August 2012
The Border Between Israel and Palestine ☀
Perhaps we need to look at the conflict with fresh eyes. For Jewish Israelis, the Biblical relation with the land of their forefathers is crucial to why they’re there. But in his controversial book “The Invention of the Jewish People,” Shlomo Sand argues that Judaism used to be a proselytizing religion like Christianity or Islam, and that consequently many of today’s Jewish Israelis are descendants of converts, without an ancestral link to Eretz-Israel. Inversely, many of the Palestinians may just be the descendants of the large Jewish community who remained to toil the land, even after the destruction of the Temple and the suppression of the Bar Kochba revolt in the first and second centuries, respectively — and who gradually converted to Islam in the centuries after the Arab conquest.
These are highly controversial and extremely speculative notions, but they highlight an important underlying truth: Israeli Jews and Palestinians have much in common. Maybe — just maybe — one day the realization will dawn that the complicated, contested and highly lethal border between Palestinians and Israelis is separating brothers from brothers, and sisters from sisters.
So should the fence be torn down, the border erased? Considering the level of animosity on either side toward the other, arriving at a one-state solution would be nothing short of miraculous, even by Holy Land standards. But miracles are not only unlikely, they’re not always a good idea. The Holy Land has taught us some harsh truths about human nature: brotherhood does not necessarily imply brotherly love, and sometimes, as in the Biblical story of Cain and Abel, it leads to its exact opposite — fratricide.
Until the day when the lamb will lie down with the lion and the lamb will live to tell it, only an equitable borderline between them will prevent carnage. Good borders, as an instrument of civil commerce between nations, are a godsend — literally: the Romans made yearly sacrifices to the god Terminus, offering him wine, honey and blood at boundary stones, thus hallowing the borderlines they marked. “Only when borders disappear,” remarks Régis Debray in his “Éloge des frontières,” “does the need arise to construct walls.”
Thursday 2 August 2012
Somewhere in one of Ray Bradbury’s short stories, a young boy stops on the sidewalk, looking up at the top of the town hall. He is troubled because he realizes he is seeing the town clock for the first time. He thinks to himself, “If I haven’t seen the clock before, what else have I missed?” It is a scary thought that our next president could be Mitt Romney, who traveled to Israel and ignored the obscene wall Israel has built to guarantee that the Palestinian people will have none of the freedoms he claims to espouse. If Romney failed to grasp the obscenity of Israel’s “security wall”, what else has he missed? Romney Visits Culturally “Superior” Israel; Totally Ignores the Occupation ☀
Romney’s Clueless Remark on Palestine ☀
Conspicuously missing was any mention of the huge, elephant-in-the-room reason for the dismal state of the Palestinian economy: the systematic Israeli suppression of Palestinian economic activity.
That suppression has included in the Gaza Strip a suffocating blockade and in the West Bank (the explicit subject of Romney’s comparison) a less all-encompassing but still pervasive system of restricting transportation, separating people’s homes from their livelihoods, denying access to natural markets, requiring and denying permission for the simplest transactions, and countless additional ways of turning into a struggle the daily task of earning a living.
A recent World Bank report on the Palestinian economy stated, “The major constraints to private sector activity are the tight Israeli restrictions, and growth will not be sustainable until Palestinians have access to resources and are allowed to move freely.”
We should not be surprised anymore that Romney, in his effort to win whatever votes he thinks he can win by posing as the most unquestioning and uncompromising lover of Israel in the presidential race, should offer such an absurdly biased and truncated picture of economic realities on the ground.
Wednesday 1 August 2012
Romney’s deeply offensive comments about the Palestinians probably won’t hurt him in the election at all. There is no group in America you can insult with more impunity than Palestinians and Arabs. That doesn’t hurt your electoral chances, it might even help. But what does hurt is the overwhelming sense you get from Romney that he is looking down his nose at you. This son of a bitch actually thinks he’s better than the rest of us because he was born to a mega-rich dad, figured out how to cheat the system at Bain and hid away so much of his money abroad (tax avoidance was an enormous contributor to his fortune - do you have any idea how much more you save up if you pay 10% in taxes a year rather than 35%). Now, that doesn’t sit so well. Who wants to have a beer with a guy who thinks he’d rather be having a Chardonnay with one of his equals? To Mitt, we’re all Palestinians. Mitt Romney: Richer Means Superior ☀
Thursday 14 June 2012
Tuesday 6 March 2012
What is being done in Gaza, the world’s largest open-air prison, is a pale reflection of what is slowly happening to the rest of us. It is a window into the rise of the global security state, our new governing system that the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin calls “inverted totalitarianism.” It is a reflection of a world where the powerful are not bound by law, either on Wall Street or in the shattered remains of the countries we invade and occupy, including Iraq with its hundreds of thousands of dead. And one of the greatest purveyors of this demented ideology of violence for the sake of violence, this flagrant disregard for the rule of domestic and international law, is the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC. I spent seven years in the Middle East. I was the Middle East bureau chief for The New York Times. I lived for two of those seven years in Jerusalem. AIPAC does not speak for Jews or for Israel. It is a mouthpiece for right-wing ideologues, some of whom hold power in Israel and some of whom hold power in Washington, who believe that because they have the capacity to war wage they have a right to wage war, whose loyalty, in the end, is not to the citizens of Israel or Palestine or the United States but the corporate elites, the defense contractors, those who make war a business, those who have turned ordinary Palestinians, Israelis and Americans, along with hundreds of millions of the world’s poor, into commodities to exploit, repress and control. Chris Hedges ☀
Thursday 9 February 2012
Auntie, I simply Can’t Imagine It! Joining the Freedom Flotilla II To Gaza ☀
I have never believed in the Israeli/Palestinian peace talks. Whenever I saw the men gathering to talk about peace I was reminded of what the Indians said to the white colonizers of America who came to talk peace with them: ” Where are your women?” An occasional woman has appeared to take part in the talks, but overwhelmingly the process has been male driven. I like to think if women, in equal numbers to men, had been at the table things might not have turned out so badly. But perhaps, recalling the disrespectful young Israeli women at the check-points, this is naive. In any case, it is when one sees the Israeli settlements, after hearing about them for decades, that the final “Aha” moment arrives. They are colossal, and, like the wall, they are everywhere. It is obvious, looking at them, gigantic, solid, white and towering, that they have been constructed to completely devour the rest of Palestine, and that the peace talks have been a ruse to continue their growth so that Jewish Israelis can claim the land by possession alone. Possession is nine-tenths of the law is one of the dictums I learned from my Jewish lawyer former husband. This belief might even be enshrined in the Torah. In any case it is a very old idea, and Israelis have made good use of it.
Dispossessed of land and houses, poverty stricken, refugees in their own country since the catastrophe of 1948, when Zionist terrorists drove them from their villages, towns and cities, Palestinian laborers have been forced to build these settlements for the Israeli settlers and, having built them, are rarely permitted inside them, except to service them. This is similar to our own history, in America: the genocide and enslavement of Native people, and the forced black and Indian labor that built so much of America, including The White House. Sometimes one wonders if this greed that devours the very substance of other human beings is part of human DNA. I don’t think it is; and, in any case, I hope not!
Monday 6 February 2012
Friday 1 July 2011
I have some personal experience with this. I was in the West Bank in 2002, just a week after the Israelis pulled out of the Jenin refugee camp, and I saw exactly how the Israelis “internalized the lessons” taught by the Germans: as they swept through the camp, they had spray-painted the Star of David on the walls of many of the houses on one street, and elsewhere throughout the camp. In the mosque in the center of Jenin—which the Israelis had taken over and used as a sniper tower—we found an empty can of spray paint they’d left behind, and a Star of David drawn on the chalkboard of the kindergarten in the basement. There was smashed glass everywhere I went, in Jenin, Ramallah, Bethlehem, Rafah and Hebron. As I listened to it crunching beneath my shoes and surveyed the destroyed homes, shops, and offices, and the cars crushed like tin cans by Israeli Merkavas and bulldozers, I couldn’t help but think of it as a Palestinian Kristallnacht. Israel is at war with the people of Gaza ☀
Wednesday 29 June 2011
I thought of my niece as I found myself approaching Jews Only roads with a van filled with Palestinian Arabs. Our driver conscientiously pulled over to wait for the appropriately colored license plate (on another van, into which we moved) that would permit us to continue. The Palestinian license plate color is green: the Israeli one yellow. In fact, on the night of our arrival, we had noticed our driver had turned off the big, new American looking highway onto a poorly constructed and congested road that in fact was blocked at the top of a steep hill. The driver, muttering, had turned around on a dangerous curve and continued on the main road. Nervous, I now realized, because it was illegal for him to be on it. Now here, I thought, was something even white Southerners had not thought to segregate, the very roads! Though I did recall how my grandparents in Georgia, in their mule drawn wagon, when I was a very small child, had had to pull over, almost into the ditch, if a white driver in a car roared past. Alice Walker ☀
Monday 13 June 2011
PALESTINE/ISRAEL: WHERE DO WE GO FROM HERE? ☀
Imagine. September 22nd (or 23rd or 24th), the day after the Security Council recognizes Palestine as a member state within the 1967 borders and it is ratified in the General Assembly by more than 150 countries:
The Palestinian flag joins that of 192 other member states, all of whose territorial integrity is ensured by the United Nations. Indeed, this is one of the most fundamental of UN tasks.
The entire Matrix of Control constructed by Israel over the past 44 years collapses. There are no longer any Areas A, B and C, or prohibitions on entering Jerusalem, since the entire West Bank, “East” Jerusalem and Gaza are now the sovereign territory of the state of Palestine. Tens of thousands of Palestinians begin marching throughout their country, accompanied by thousands of supporters from abroad, passing through and dismantling checkpoints that have no legal status. So as not to create unnecessary confrontation, the settlements are avoided. The Palestinian government tells the settlers that they are welcome to stay in their homes, although it is made clear that their communities now come under Palestinian law and Palestinian citizens are free to move in. Those existing on private Palestinian land are either removed or, after compensating the Palestinian owners, are given to refugees or to families whose homes have been demolished by the Israeli authorities (some 25,000 since 1967).
All the myriad campaigns for pursuing Palestinian rights, including BDS, now focus on one single unifying goal: getting Israel out of Palestine. No negotiations over borders (unless the Palestinian government seeks border adjustments); no negotiations over settlements. As between any two countries, Palestine and Israel will negotiate security issues, but from a mutually beneficial point of view. No security measures need be accepted – such as an Israeli military presence in the Jordan Valley, changes in the 1967 borders that allow Israel to retain its major settlement blocs or Israeli control of Palestinian airspace – that in any way compromise Palestinian sovereignty.
Thursday 2 June 2011
Foundation Myths ☀
On May 15, five days after Israel’s Independence Day, Palestinians rallied around the Nakba—the Arabic word for catastrophe, used to mark the displacement of as many as 750,000 Palestinians in 1948. It was a bid to reiterate their opposition to Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and control of the Gaza Strip. For the first time in years, every Israeli newspaper carried the word “Nakba” on its front page, albeit not in reference to the historical event but to demonstrations that consumed the West Bank and Israel’s border towns. The episode highlighted an important truth: Sooner or later, Israel will be forced to incorporate the Palestinian Nakba narrative into the larger Israeli societal discourse. There can be a Zionist narrative of 1948 that includes the tragic and violent Palestinian experience of displacement—but it must be predicated on the acceptance of the Nakba in Israeli society.
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