Filed under: Colonialism, Gaza, Israel, Occupation, Uncategorized | Tags: Nir Rosen
One of the best articles on the Gaza massacre, by Nir Rosen, The Guardian.
A Zionist Israel is not a viable long-term project and Israeli settlements, land expropriation and separation barriers have long since made a two state solution impossible. There can be only one state in historic Palestine. In coming decades, Israelis will be confronted with two options. Will they peacefully transition towards an equal society, where Palestinians are given the same rights, à la post-apartheid South Africa? Or will they continue to view democracy as a threat? If so, one of the peoples will be forced to leave. Colonialism has only worked when most of the natives have been exterminated. But often, as in occupied Algeria, it is the settlers who flee. Eventually, the Palestinians will not be willing to compromise and seek one state for both people. Does the world want to further radicalise them?
Harvard scholar Sara Roy on the political economy of Palestine under Israeli occupation. Roy explains how the economic and social changes of the past decade in Israel and the Occupied Territories have undermined the possibility of peace in the region. (Running time 1:26:55)
Filed under: Israel, Occupation, Palestine, Video | Tags: Checkpoint, Machssomim
A sobering and human look at the Kafkaesque checkpoints Israel operates in the occupied Palestinian territories. Six clips follow.
Part One
(more…)
With the way Israel treats its Arab Israeli citizens and the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and West Bank the State is clearly running an apartheid system here an article leading Israeli paper, the Haaretz, agrees.:
The anchorwoman was clearly shocked: I don’t have time now to respond to what you have said, she told the former U.S. president, allowing Jimmy Carter to make a narrow escape from her clutches. Then she added that she did not want to imagine what would happen to him if he bumped into her colleague from the security affairs desk in Channel 2′s dark alley. And the pundit sitting there, sunk in deep thought as always, nodded his heavy head, confirming: He’s lucky, the bastard, that we didn’t gang up on him and cut him to shreds.
That’s how it is here: The rulers set the tone, and the media begins to gripe: Not only did Carter’s mission not help, it did damage. He alone was the reason Gilad Shalit was not ransomed out of captivity during the holiday. That’s what happens when an enemy of the human race, the twin of the Twin Towers’ bin Laden, sticks his nose where it does not belong.
Let’s let old Carter be, so he may let sleeping warriors lie; he will not be back. The contents of his words, however, should not be ignored. “Apartheid,” he said, “apartheid” – a dark, scary word coined by Afrikaners and meaning segregation, racial segregation.
Filed under: Israel, Israel's 60th Birthday, Occupation | Tags: Gideon Levy, IDF
Gideon Levy from the Haaretz:
At about midnight, the house was surrounded by soldiers. Mohammed Abu Arkub, a barber, woke up frightened at the sound of loud knocking on the door and the shouts demanding it be opened. Abu Arkub rushed to open the door and the soldiers pulled him outside and ordered him to take all the members of the household outside immediately. His wife Lubna and his two young daughters were sleeping, along with Lubna’s two younger sisters, who live with them. He woke them up and ordered them to go outside. His brother, Rami, who lives alone in the adjacent hut, was also called to go outside.
The night of March 19, the village of Wadi al-Shajneh in the South Hebron Hills, south of the town of Dura. The family stood outside for about 10 minutes, half asleep in the cold night air, and then the soldiers ordered them to all go inside Rami’s hut. Two soldiers stood at the door, guarding the family so they wouldn’t go out. The rest of the soldiers in the force entered the home of the barber and his wife and began to conduct a search. Abu Akrub asked to be present during the search, but the soldiers prevented him from doing so. The routine of the occupation.
Filed under: 1948, Apartheid, Documentary, Ethnic Cleansing, History, Israel, Israel@60, Issue, John Pilger, Occupation, Palestine, Video, Zionism
In 1974, John Pilger made the film ‘Palestine Is Still The Issue’. It was about a nation of people – the Palestinians – forced off their land and later subjected to a military occupation by Israel. An occupation condemned by the United Nations and almost every country in the world, including Britain.
Filed under: Canada, Diana Buttu, Israel, Occupation, Palestine, Racism | Tags: Freedom, Majda, photographs, sea
A moving essay by Diana Buttu -
In September 2000, I decided to do my part to bring peace to the Middle East. As a Canadian attorney of Palestinian origin, I believed I could use my legal skills to help broker a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. Naive? Perhaps.
I left my comfortable life in California and moved to the West Bank. Moving there was not easy: I did not know what life is like under military rule. My Western upbringing left me unprepared for life without freedom. Seven years later, I am still not used to it.
As a lawyer for the Palestinian peace negotiating team, I met Presidents, Prime Ministers, Nobel Laureates, Secretaries of State and other important figures. But none of these individuals hit me with the same emotional wallop as a young woman named Majda.
Filed under: Apartheid, Ethnic Cleansing, History, Israel, Jewish State, Jonathan Cook, Middle East, Occupation, One-State Solution, Palestine, Racism, Two-State Solution, Zionism
Jonathan Cook, as I said before, is one of my favourite journalists and this has to be the best argument for a resolution to the Israel Palestine conflict that I’ve come across. Start reading it and finish it – you won’t be disappointed.
One State or Two? Neither.
The Issue is Zionism
Editors’ note: On Monday we ran Michael Neumann’s argument against the so-called “one state” solution for Israel and Palestine. This is the second of three replies. AC / JSC.
If the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the world’s most intractable, much the same can be said of the parallel debate about whether its resolution can best be achieved by a single state embracing the two peoples living there or by a division of the land into two separate states, one for Jews and the other for Palestinans.
The philosopher Michael Neumann has dedicated two articles, in 2007 and earlier this week, for CounterPunch discrediting the one-state idea as impractical and therefore as worthless of consideration. In response, Kathy Christison has mounted a robust defence, neatly exposing the twists and turns of Neumann’s logic. I will not trouble to cover the same ground.
I want instead to address Neumann’s central argument: that it is at least possible to imagine a consensus emerging behind two states, whereas Israelis will never accept a single state. That argument, the rallying cry of most two-staters, paints the one-state crowd as inveterate dreamers and time-wasters.
Filed under: Ethnic Cleansing, Gaza, Holocaust, Israel, Jonathan Cook, Middle East, Occupation, Palestine, Shoah | Tags: Matan Vilnai
Jonathan Cook is one of my favourite reporters on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Yet again his analysis is sharp and harrowing – Israel’s plan to ethnically cleanse all of Gaza.
Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai’s much publicized remark last week about Gaza facing a “shoah” — the Hebrew word for the Holocaust — was widely assumed to be unpleasant hyperbole about the army’s plans for an imminent full-scale invasion of the Strip.
More significantly, however, his comment offers a disturbing indication of the Israeli army’s longer-term strategy towards the Palestinians in the occupied territories.
Vilnai, a former general, was interviewed by army radio as Israel was in the midst of unleashing a series of air and ground strikes on populated areas of Gaza that killed more than 100 Palestinians, at least half of whom were civilians and 25 of whom were children, according to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem.
The interview also took place in the wake of a rocket fired from Gaza that killed a student in Sderot and other rockets that hit the center of the southern city of Ashkelon. Vilnai stated: “The more Qassam fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, they [the Palestinians of Gaza] will bring upon themselves a bigger shoah because we will use all our might to defend ourselves.”
His comment, picked up by the Reuters wire service, was soon making headlines around the world. Presumably uncomfortable with a senior public figure in Israel comparing his government’s policies to the Nazi plan to exterminate European Jewry, many news services referred to Vilnai’s clearly articulated threat as a “warning,” as though he was prophesying a cataclysmic natural event over which he and the Israeli army had no control.
Nonetheless, officials understood the damage that the translation from Hebrew of Vilnai’s remark could do to Israel’s image abroad. And sure enough, Palestinian leaders were soon exploiting the comparison, with both the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, and the exiled Hamas leader, Khaled Meshaal, stating that a “holocaust” was unfolding in Gaza.
Within hours the Israeli Foreign Ministry was launching a large hasbara (propaganda) campaign through its diplomats, as the Jerusalem Post reported. In a related move, a spokesman for Vilnai explained that the word shoah also meant “disaster”; this, rather than a holocaust, was what the minister had been referring to. Clarifications were issued by many media outlets.
However, no one in Israel was fooled. Shoah — which literally means “burnt offering” — was long ago reserved for the Holocaust, much as the Arabic word nakba (catastrophe) is nowadays used only to refer to the Palestinians’ dispossession by Israel in 1948. Certainly, the Israeli media in English translated Vilnai’s use of shoah as “holocaust.”
Filed under: 1948, 2008, Anniversary, Ethnic Cleansing, History, Independence, Israel, Israel at 60 Celebration, Israel's 60th Anniversary, Israel's 60th Birthday, Israel's Birthday Plans, Israel@60, May, Middle East, Nakba, Occupation, Palestine, UK, War, War Crimes, Zionism | Tags: MIKE MARQUSEE
| The facts of the Nakba (catastrophe) are now well documented and beyond dispute. Yet Nakba denial remains widespread, and is as vile as denial of any other historic crime. |
In the coming months, the same event will be commemorated by two different groups in starkly contrasting fashions.
May 15 sees the 60th anniversary of the birth of the State of Israel. In Britain, the programme of celebrations includes a gala fund-raising dinner at Windsor Castle in the presence of the Duke of Edinburgh (the Queen’s husband), a variety show at Wembley Stadium and street parades for Israel in London and Manchester.
Remembering a tragedy Meanwhile, Palestinians and their supporters will be recalling the same event in entirely different tones, and without the benefit of State support or vast sums of money. In meetings, conferences and exhibitions they will seek to remind the world of the Nakba — catastrophe in Arabic — that accompanied Israel’s birth in 1948.
In 1947, there were 12,93,000 Arabs and 6,08,000 Jews in Palestine. Though Jews made up 32 per cent of the population, the U.N. partition plan assigned them 55 per cent of the country, including the economically developed citrus growing plains. Israel’s Declaration of Independence was preceded by several months of civil war between Jewish and Palestinian forces, and followed by more months of war between the new State and its Arab neighbours. When the fighting finished in early 1949, the Jewish State had acquired 78 per cent of Palestine. 1,80,000 Palestinians found themselves a minority within the expanded borders of the Jewish State. 7,00,000 to 9,00,000 had been made refugees.
Filed under: Apartheid, Colonialism, Human Rights, Israel, Israel@60, John Dugard, Occupation, Palestine, Resistance, Terrorism, UN, War, Zionism | Tags: Human Rights Council
He might have been better saying “as long as there is occupation, there will be resistance.” However John Dugard, of the UN Human Rights Council, is to be commended for insisting the world recognise that violent acts committed by the Palestinian are part of an ongoing nationalist war being fought against colonialism, apartheid and military occupation. His goal? To understand the drivers behind the violence to gain peace for the region and for him that means ending the occupation. The following is from the Haaretz -
A report commissioned by the United Nations suggests that Palestinian terrorism is the inevitable consequence of Israeli occupation and laws that resemble South African apartheid – a claim Israel rejected Tuesday as enflaming hatred between Jews and Palestinians.
The report by John Dugard, independent investigator on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for the UN Human Rights Council, will be presented next month, but it has been posted on the body’s Web site.
In it, Dugard, a South African lawyer who campaigned against apartheid in the 1980s, says “common sense … dictates that a distinction must be drawn between acts of mindless terror, such as acts committed by Al-Qaida, and acts committed in the course of a war of national liberation against colonialism, apartheid or military occupation.”
“While Palestinian terrorist acts are to be deplored, they must be understood as being a painful but inevitable consequence of colonialism, apartheid or occupation,” writes Dugard, whose 25-page report accuses the Israel of acts and policies consistent with all three.
He cited checkpoints and roadblocks restricting Palestinian movement to house demolitions and what he terms the Judaization of Jerusalem.
Filed under: Collective Punishment, Gaza, Humanitarian Crisis, Israel, Israel's 60th Anniversary, Israel@60, Middle East, Occupation, Palestine, Video, War, War Crimes
Gaza’s 1.5 million residents are struggling to cope without electricity and other basic necessities on the fourth day of an Israeli blockade.
Hospitals have begun to run short of fuel for generators, and sewage has spilled out onto the streets.
