Sabbah

Letter to President Obama: Why Are We Supporting Israel's War Crimes in Gaza?

2009-07-06T09:12:00Z

Cartoon by Carlos Latuff

by Mohamed Khodr

"Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long retain it." —Abraham Lincoln

“Right and wrong are the same in Palestine as anywhere else. What is peculiar about the Palestine conflict is that the world has listened to the party that has committed the offence and has turned a deaf ear to the victims." —Arnold Toynbee;

Dear President Obama:

Peace Be With You, your family, our nation, and all of humanity as we prepare to celebrate Our Independence Day, a day illegally denied to so much of humanity, but none more so unjust and cruel than our illegally and immorally supported Israeli occupation of millions of Palestinians in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and the besieged concentration camp we call Gaza.

The world is quite cognizant of the power and influence Israel and its powerful lobbies and Congressional allies hold on our foreign policy toward the Mideast and the Muslim world. Yet, in your destiny to become our President you have the innate intelligence, ability, charisma, and oratory skills to become the agent of change, the one to dare to accomplish the divine duty of justice for all, at home and abroad.

No greater need for your audacity to challenge injustice is needed than to end what the world knows to be the cruelest of injustice upon a hapless population who lost their nation by force and ethnic cleansing, not even sparing their churches and mosques, nor their cemeteries where generations of their ancestors are buried–the victimized, demonized, unseen and unheard cries of Palestinians living under the brutalism of a heartless regime, a regime we Americans fund, support, and protect as they unleash their military power at whim knowing their actions are above all divine and human laws. We Americans subsidize their continued war crimes as they invade their neighbors, bomb with banned weapons, fly into sovereign nations to destroy as they deem, knowing full well our government will stand behind their “right to defend themselves.”

Mr. President, you chose to challenge Israel on the simplest and safest issue deemed illegal even by most Israeli's: the Settlements. Yet, even in this small matter Israel is wielding enough strength to force your retreat and compromise being shameless in insulting the very hand that feeds it. This superpower nation is paralyzed to even force a food convoy of milk and medicines through an Israeli border crossing to feed a Palestinian infant. History tells us that Israel has the power to withstand Presidents as long as Congress, Wall Street, and the media ensure its lies and propaganda are the sole "true" narratives reaching the White House or Main Street.

Today, Amnesty International joins every other international human rights body, including those in Israel in portraying Israel's Pre Planned devastation in Gaza as a war crime. Two days ago Israel again violated International Law by hijacking a ship, the "Spirit of Humanity", in International waters that carried emergency aid to Gaza and imprisoned its human rights activists including Cynthia McKinney whom you know was a six term former Congresswoman and Mairead Maguire, Nobel Peace Laureate and other activists from several nations. What would you do Mr. President if Iran committed this crime?

You, Mr. President, chose, like our media to remain silent on this outrageous act of piracy. Is might more powerful than right in our democracy, the democracy you spoke of so passionately in your speech to the Muslim world? Is your support among Jewish Americans, your legislative agenda that will be watered down to negligibility or defeated, or your re-election more valued by you than the lives of young girls in Palestine who are as worthy in the eyes of God as your two precious daughters? Elie Wiesel said; “Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented."

America voted for you in hope and out of despair, sadly our nation after the vote hibernates back to its self serving niche believing their deed is done and the elected will do the right thing. Tragically, after the elected move to the bubble of D.C. they become the pawns of the very special interests you railed against in your campaign.

As long as Israel occupies Palestine and our capitol, America will never know peace and will always be on the verge of fighting another Mideast or Muslim nation to serve Israel's and not our national interest. The key to an enduring peace with the entire Muslim world, a world rich in oil, gas, and Pro American markets, begins, as you well know, with ending Israel's decade’s long oppressive and inhumane occupation of Palestinians allowing their own July 4th celebration.

All it takes President Obama for a series of events to occur to liberate Palestinians, our foreign policy, and our freedom from fear to debate Israel is ONE, just one, Oval office speech on the issue. You will be shocked and surprised at the outpouring of support of the American people who just need a courageous leader to unleash their oppressed voice in support of freedom and security for all in the Holy Land. Is Barack, the blessed one, the man of destiny, the deliverer of peace for the Holy Land? Should we have the audacity to hope for such?

“I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts." — Abraham Lincoln

God bless, your family, and this planet yearning for peace

Cynthia McKinney - Letter from an Israeli Jail

2009-07-05T18:24:20Z

by Carlos Latuff

by Cynthia McKinney*

This is Cynthia McKinney and I'm speaking from an Israeli prison cellblock in Ramle. [I am one of] the Free Gaza 21, human rights activists currently imprisoned for trying to take medical supplies to Gaza, building supplies - and even crayons for children, I had a suitcase full of crayons for children. While we were on our way to Gaza the Israelis threatened to fire on our boat, but we did not turn around. The Israelis high-jacked and arrested us because we wanted to give crayons to the children in Gaza. We have been detained, and we want the people of the world to see how we have been treated just because we wanted to deliver humanitarian assistance to the people of Gaza.

At the outbreak of Israel's Operation ‘Cast Lead' [in December 2008], I boarded a Free Gaza boat with one day's notice and tried, as the US representative in a multi-national delegation, to deliver 3 tons of medical supplies to an already besieged and ravaged Gaza.

During Operation Cast Lead, U.S.-supplied F-16's rained hellfire on a trapped people. Ethnic cleansing became full scale outright genocide. U.S.-supplied white phosphorus, depleted uranium, robotic technology, DIME weapons, and cluster bombs - new weapons creating injuries never treated before by Jordanian and Norwegian doctors. I was later told by doctors who were there in Gaza during Israel's onslaught that Gaza had become Israel's veritable weapons testing laboratory, people used to test and improve the kill ratio of their weapons.

The world saw Israel's despicable violence thanks to al-Jazeera Arabic and Press TV that broadcast in English. I saw those broadcasts live and around the clock, not from the USA but from Lebanon, where my first attempt to get into Gaza had ended because the Israeli military rammed the boat I was on in international water … It's a miracle that I'm even here to write about my second encounter with the Israeli military, again a humanitarian mission aborted by the Israeli military.

The Israeli authorities have tried to get us to confess that we committed a crime … I am now known as Israeli prisoner number 88794. How can I be in prison for collecting crayons to kids?

Zionism has surely run out of its last legitimacy if this is what it does to people who believe so deeply in human rights for all that they put their own lives on the line for someone else's children. Israel is the fullest expression of Zionism, but if Israel fears for its security because Gaza's children have crayons then not only has Israel lost its last shred of legitimacy, but Israel must be declared a failed state.

I am facing deportation from the state that brought me here at gunpoint after commandeering our boat. I was brought to Israel against my will. I am being held in this prison because I had a dream that Gaza's children could color & paint, that Gaza's wounded could be healed, and that Gaza's bombed-out houses could be rebuilt.

But I've learned an interesting thing by being inside this prison. First of all, it's incredibly black: populated mostly by Ethiopians who also had a dream … like my cellmates, one who is pregnant. They are all are in their twenties. They thought they were coming to the Holy Land. They had a dream that their lives would be better … The once proud, never colonized Ethiopia [has been thrown into] the back pocket of the United States, and become a place of torture, rendition, and occupation. Ethiopians must free their country because superpower politics [have] become more important than human rights and self-determination.

My cellmates came to the Holy Land so they could be free from the exigencies of superpower politics. They committed no crime except to have a dream. They came to Israel because they thought that Israel held promise for them. Their journey to Israel through Sudan and Egypt was arduous. I can only imagine what it must have been like for them. And it wasn't cheap. Many of them represent their family's best collective efforts for self-fulfilment. They made their way to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees. They got their yellow paper of identification. They got their certificate for police protection. They are refugees from tragedy, and they made it to Israel only after they arrived Israel told them "there is no UN in Israel."

The police here have license to pick them up & suck them into the black hole of a farce for a justice system. These beautiful, industrious and proud women represent the hopes of entire families. The idea of Israel tricked them and the rest of us. In a widely propagandized slick marketing campaign, Israel represented itself as a place of refuge and safety for the world's first Jews and Christian. I too believed that marketing and failed to look deeper.

The truth is that Israel lied to the world. Israel lied to the families of these young women. Israel lied to the women themselves who are now trapped in Ramle's detention facility. And what are we to do? One of my cellmates cried today. She has been here for 6 months. As an American, crying with them is not enough. The policy of the United States must be better, and while we watch President Obama give 12.8 trillion dollars to the financial elite of the United States it ought now be clear that hope, change, and ‘yes we can' were powerfully presented images of dignity and self-fulfilment, individually and nationally, that besieged people everywhere truly believed in.

It was a slick marketing campaign as slickly put to the world and to the voters of America as was Israel's marketing to the world. It tricked all of us but, more tragically, these young women.

We must cast an informed vote about better candidates seeking to represent us. I have read and re-read Dr. Martin Luther King Junior's letter from a Birmingham jail. Never in my wildest dreams would I have ever imagined that I too would one day have to do so. It is clear that taxpayers in Europe and the U.S. have a lot to atone for, for what they've done to others around the world.

What an irony! My son begins his law school program without me because I am in prison, in my own way trying to do my best, again, for other people's children. Forgive me, my son. I guess I'm experiencing the harsh reality which is why people need dreams. [But] I'm lucky. I will leave this place. Has Israel become the place where dreams die?

Former Congresswoman Cynthia Mckinney detained by Israel

Ask the people of Palestine. Ask the stream of black and Asian men whom I see being processed at Ramle. Ask the women on my cellblock. [Ask yourself:] what are you willing to do?

Let's change the world together & reclaim what we all need as human beings: Dignity. I appeal to the United Nations to get these women of Ramle, who have done nothing wrong other than to believe in Israel as the guardian of the Holy Land, resettled in safe homes. I appeal to the United State's Department of State to include the plight of detained UNHCR-certified refugees in the Israel country report in its annual human rights report. I appeal once again to President Obama to go to Gaza: send your special envoy, George Mitchell there, and to engage Hamas as the elected choice of the Palestinian people.

I dedicate this message to those who struggle to achieve a free Palestine, and to the women I've met at Ramle. This is Cynthia McKinney, July 2nd 2009, also known as Ramle prisoner number 88794.

* Cynthia McKinney is a former U.S. Congresswoman, Green Party Presidential candidate, and an outspoken advocate for human rights and social justice. The first African-American woman to represent the state of Georgia, McKinney served six terms in the U.S. House of Representatives, from 1993-2003, and from 2005-2007. She was arrested and forcibly abducted to Israel while attempting to take humanitarian and reconstruction supplies to Gaza on June 30th. This letter was originally broadcast on WBAIX on July 3rd. For more information, please see http://www.FreeGaza.org

Demonizing Iranian Democracy

2009-06-30T13:43:14Z

Iran Crisis - by Carlos Latuff

For the last three weeks the Western media had bombarded us with what they called the Iranian stolen election. They allege that the election was fraudulent and that the masses went into the streets of Tehran protesting the results and demanding new election. The Iranian government is described as fascist and oppressive and is responsible for the chaos in the streets. The opposition is described as reformists and democratic, who are peacefully demonstrating in the streets demanding justice and freedom.

This brings memories of similar previous Western media campaigns about elections in different countries around the world such as 2004 Georgia's election, 2002 Venezuela's election, 1992 Mongolias's election, 1991 Albania's election, and 1990 Bulgarian election just to name a few, where elections were described as stolen and the winning parties as oppressive of the, usually pro-American, alleged peaceful demonstrators in the streets demanding freedom and justice.

What is worth noting is the fact that none of the entire Western so-called Iran experts, who had strongly claimed that there was an obvious wide scale electoral fraud , had never provided any shred of evidence of such fraud. The lack of any evidence leads one to believe that such fraud accusations are only unsubstantiated accusations based on wishful thinking. They based their evaluation on what they claim the highly unlikely statistical probability that Ahmadinejad would have surpassed his opponents with almost 11 million votes (32%) margin. They denied the possibility of Ahmadinejad's wide popularity and successful campaigning.

Many had ignored the fact that democratic election is not new in Iran. Iran has a history of three decades of continuous unimpeded elections despite its war with Iraq, the imposed economic embargo, and the attacks of Western-supported terror organizations, such as Mujahideen el-Khalq, Jundullah, and Party for Free Life in Kurdistan, who carried a campaign of assassination of dozens of Iranian lawmakers among many other terror attacks. Iran has established a tradition of peaceful electoral orderliness, where elections are organized, monitored and counted by professionals including university professors, civil servants, and retirees.

None of the last thirty Iranian nationwide elections has been criticized by the West until today for obvious reason. Iran, under Ahmadinejad's leadership, has developed nuclear industry, strengthened its military forces, and confronted the American forces, who encircled Iran on all four directions as part of the American expansionist ambitions in the Middle East and South East Asia.

Ahmadinejad's victory came as a surprise to the West especially to the American administration, who expected his defeat. This expectation was based on American covert interventions in the Iranian affairs. It is an undeniable fact that the US has a long history of interference in the Iranian affairs. President Obama admitted to such interference in his Cairo speech in June 4th. Such intervention came in different forms. One mechanism came through what is called National Endowment for Democracy. This is a quasi-governmental agency funded by both the Congress and private organizations, whose main purpose is purportedly spreading freedom and democracy (causing regime change) in other countries by financially supporting foreign organizations sympathetic to the American foreign policy goals. This financial support, in the form of millions of Dollars and equipment, was given to oppositional groups in order to cause chaos and confrontation, especially in election time, to topple down the victorious, usually nationalist, parties, and to erect in their places pro-American governments. Such support was evident in Bulgaria, Albania, Mongolia, Haiti, Venezuela, and in Iran itself.

The National Endowment for Democracy has been active in Iran giving millions of American tax money to anti-governmental Iranian groups such as the Abdorrahman Boroumand Foundation, who supports the National Movement of the Iranian Resistance, and hundreds of thousands of Dollars to the National Iranian American Council. Other money is used to cover the expenses of forming what is called scientific seminars, where Iranian figures are invited to attend, with all expenses paid. Mohammad-Javad Zarif, the Iranian ambassador to the UN, had accused the US of using these scientific seminars as a front cover for political meetings, whose goal was to execute a "velvet revolution" in Iran. Last November Zarif explained that "when the Iranians attend these sessions, they realize they have gathered to discuss measures to topple the Iranian government".

In 2006 Condoleezza Rice, then the Secretary of State, requested $75 million fund to be spent on mounting the biggest ever propaganda campaign against the Iranian government. The fund was used to pay for radio and television programs broadcasted into Iran, and to provide scholarships to Iranian students to study in the US. The State Department had also created the Office of Iranian Affairs, with a branch in Dubai, to reach out to Iranian dissidents in their diaspora and to recruit them against the Iranian government. The implicit goal here is to indoctrinate Iranians to effect regime change from within.

With their decision to support terrorist Israel as the dominant nuclear (WMD) country in the Middle East the Western countries concentrated on depriving Iran from any nuclear technologies even a peaceful one. They directed all kinds of pressure, including political, economical and the threat of nuclear bombardment, on the Iranian government to shut down its nuclear facilities. The Iranian government, instead, hastened its nuclear program, bolstered its military, and improved its relationships with many other countries including the Gulf States.

Finally the American administration decided to follow Kermit Roosevelt, Jr.'s Operation Ajax example to effect regime change in Iran. Kermit Roosevelt, Jr. had financed, in 1953, two Iranian thug groups to create chaos in the streets of Tehran and fight each other in order to destabilize Mosaddeq's government.

ABC News reporters Brian Ross and Richard Esposito reported on May 23rd, 2007 that "The CIA has received secret presidential approval to mount a covert black operation to destabilize the Iranian government, current and former officials in the intelligence community tell ABC News".

The London Telegraph, also, had reported on May 27th, 2007 that "Mr. Bush has signed an official document endorsing CIA plans for propaganda and disinformation campaign intended to destabilize, and eventually topple the theocratic rule of the mullah".

In the New Yorker, June 29th, 2008, Symour Hersh reported that "Late last year, Congress agreed to a request from President Bush to fund a major escalation of covert operations against Iran, according to current and former military, intelligence, and congressional sources. These operations, for which the President sought up to four hundred million Dollars, were described in a Presidential Finding signed by Bush, and are designed to destabilize the country's religious leadership".

President Obama had denied, though, any American interference into the Iranian election. Yet, without any harsh criticism to the Iranian government, he expressed his admiration of the courage of Iranian people, who took to the streets demanding freedom and justice. Obama's administration knows very well that it will, eventually, have to deal with Ahmadinejad's government.

Zionist Republican Senators Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and John McCain of Arizona criticized Obama's soft approach and demanded tougher actions. Following Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu's promise, in his foreign policy speech June 4th, to form an international front against Iran, they called for tougher UN sanctions or other measures to put an "end to this tyrannical regime".

Israel, European countries (specifically British, French, and German), and the US do not really care about those courageous Iranian demonstrators, who have legitimate grievances against their government and aspire for more civil rights yet misguided about how to achieve them. In the eyes of the Western leaders these Iranian demonstrators are "useful idiots", who need to be sacrificed in order to achieve political gains.

All the Western politicians know very well that the Iranian government, similar to what all the Western countries had done throughout their history, will put an end to the chaos in the streets and maintain order. They also know very well that Iranian policies will not change, at least for now, whether Ahmadinejad, Moussavi, or any other leader forms the government. Similar to all the so-called democratic presidents of the world the Iranian President is a mere executer, rather than a drafter, of these policies.

The real goal of all this propaganda and disinformation war against Iran is to portray Ahmadinejad's government as an "election stealing illegitimate" government that the free world should not deal or negotiate with as Obama has intended to do.

Israeli ill-treatment and torture of Palestinian children - a report

2009-06-27T19:24:29Z

DCI-Palestine* released a report which documents the widespread ill-treatment and torture of Palestinian children at the hands of the Israeli army and police force - Palestinian Child Prisoners: The systematic and institutionalized ill-treatment and torture of Palestinian children by Israeli authorities.

The release of the report came just days after an article was published in The Independent newspaper reporting the testimonies of two Israeli soldiers which detail the deliberate abuse of Palestinian children. One soldier is reported as saying that in an incident that occurred in a Palestinian village in March, he saw a lot of soldiers 'just knee (Palestinians) because it's boring, because you stand there for 10 hours, you're not doing anything, so they beat people up.'

The report published contains the testimonies of 33 children, one as young as 10 years old, who bear witness to the abuse they received at the hands of soldiers from the moment of arrest through to an often violent interrogation.

Most of these children were arrested from villages near the Wall and illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank. There is evidence that many children are painfully shackled for hours on end, kicked, beaten and threatened, some with death, until they provide confessions, some written in Hebrew, a language they do not speak or understand.

Following are some excerpts from this chill-shocking report. It is a must-read report and worth saving for your reference in the future. It can be downloaded from here and here (both PDF format):

Executive summary

The Israeli military court system in the Occupied Palestinian Territory has operated for over 42 years almost devoid of international scrutiny. Each year an average of 9,000 Palestinians are prosecuted in two Israeli military courts operating in the West Bank, including 700 children.

From the moment of arrest, Palestinian children encounter ill-treatment and in some cases torture, at the hands of Israeli soldiers, policemen and interrogators. Children are commonly arrested from the family home in the hours before dawn by heavily armed soldiers. The child is painfully bound, blindfolded and bundled into the back of a military vehicle without any indication as to why or where the child is being taken. [...] Most children confess and some are forced to sign confessions written in Hebrew, a language they do not comprehend. These interrogations are not video recorded as is required under Israeli domestic law.

Children as young as 12 years are prosecuted in the Israeli military courts and are treated as adults as soon as they turn 16 [...] In 91% of all cases involving Palestinian children, bail was denied. [...] With no faith in the system and the potential for harsh sentences, approximately 95% of cases end in the child pleading guilty, whether the ofence was committed or not. [...] Many children receive no family visits whilst in prison and limited education [...]

Some examples of torture

What amounts to torture or ill-treatment will depend on the circumstances of each individual case. However, it is useful to list some of the types of circumstances that have been held to amount to torture and ill-treatment by the Committee as a general guidance:

- Restraining in very painful conditions;
- Hooding under special conditions;
- Playing loud music for prolonged periods of time;
- Threats, including death threats;
- Violent shaking;
- Kicking, punching and beating with implements;
- Using cold air to chill;
- Excessive use of force by law enforcement personnel and the military;
- Incommunicado detention (detention without access to a lawyer, doctor or the ability to communicate with family members);
- Solitary confnement;
- Sensorial deprivation and almost total prohibition of communication;
- Poor conditions of detention, including failure to provide food, water, heating in winter, proper washing facilities, overcrowding, lack of amenities, poor hygiene facilities, limited clothing and medical care.

The above list is by no means exhaustive and in every case, the particular vulnerability of the victim, such as his or her young age or medical condition should be taken into consideration.

Case Study No. 15

Name: Islam M.
Date of arrest: 31 December 2008
Age at arrest: 12
Accusation: Throwing stones

On 31 December 2008, 12-year-old Islam from a village near the West Bank city of Nablus, was out hunting birds in an olive grove when he and his friends were arrested by Israeli soldiers and accused of throwing stones. The olive grove was located about 500 metres from an Israeli settler bypass road.

At around 4:00pm we decided to go home. We collected the nets. Our houses are about one kilometre away. After walking 20 metres we heard a gun shot from the bypass road. We began walking faster towards our houses in the opposite direction to the bypass road. When we reached the edge of the village, we were surprised to see Israeli soldiers, about 10 to 20 metres behind us, with their guns pointed at us. They were shouting at us to stop in Hebrew. We stopped where we were. [...] One of them approached me and grabbed my hand. Another soldier grabbed Hasan's hand. They then tied our hands together with the same plastic cord. They tied my right hand to Hasan's left hand. The soldiers then pushed us and forced us to walk towards our house. The soldiers did not tell me why they were arresting me [...] When we reached the jeep, the soldiers blindfolded me and Hasan with a piece of cloth that the soldiers had. They pushed me inside the jeep. I fell on the ground. I was seated on the floor of the jeep. I lifted the blindfold using my untied left hand and looked around. I saw six soldiers inside the jeep, sitting on seats. Hasan and I were seated between their legs.

Twelve-year-old Islam was arrested by Israeli soldiers while out hunting birds. He was transferred to an Israeli military base for interrogation. Ten minutes later a soldier asked me [...] whether I threw stones at the soldiers. Three minutes later a captain called Hasan, wearing a military uniform, came to us … He took me to a pine tree and made me sit on the ground. 'Have you seen kids throwing stones at the soldiers?' he asked. 'Yes,' I answered. 'Do you know them?' He asked. 'No,' I said. He threatened to pour hot water on my face. 'I don't know who threw stones,' I said. Five minutes later he took me to a place full of thorny bushes. He ordered me to sit in the bushes. I refused. He pushed me and I fell in the bushes. That really hurt me. They placed me inside a jeep [...] Captain Hasan approached me and asked me to confess to throwing stones. I refused. 'We'll put you in jail, patriotic boy' he said. [...] A policeman in blue uniform came and took me to interrogation. I was still tied and blindfolded, but managed to see things from beneath the blindfold. In the interrogation room, there was one policeman with a solider sitting next to him. 'You threw stones. You were photographed while throwing stones' the policeman said. I denied it [...] I asked the soldiers for food. They brought me an apple, one half rotten. I ate the good half and gave the rotten half back to the soldier [...] They seated me on a chair for about five hours without asking me anything.

A policeman in blue uniform came and took me to an office. He allowed me to watch a DVD that had children throwing stones at soldiers. 'See yourself throwing stones?' He said. I did not see myself because I had not thrown stones. He then took me out of the room. I was kept alone, tied and blindfolded, sitting on the ground for three hours. (2 February 2009)

Islam was charged with throwing stones and fned NIS 1,000 (US$ 250) by a military court after entering into a plea bargain. He spent three days in detention in Ofer.

Case Study No. 22

Name: Afaf B.
Date of arrest: 5 February 2008
Age at arrest: 16
Accusation: Contact with a wanted person and the intention to carry out a suicide bombing

On 5 February 2008, Afaf and her father voluntarily went to the Israeli intelligence headquarters at Ras al-Amoud, Jerusalem, after being ordered to attend. Afaf was immediately taken for interrogation where she was accused of having contact with a wanted person and intending to carry out a suicide bombing. Afaf's father was not permitted to remain with her during interrogation. Afaf was then interrogated for 59 consecutive days and then sentenced to 16 months imprisonment inside Israel.

The interrogator began asking me general questions about myself and how I was doing. I asked him to stop asking such questions and get straight to the reason why they brought me here. He said that I had committed some security ofences [...] he then asked me about a young man called Murad … I agreed that I had never seen Murad but I used to talk to him on the phone [...] The interrogator did not charge me directly with any wrongdoing, and he did not accuse me of a specifc accusation. He only said that I had committed some security ofences without giving any further details [...] An hour later, the interrogator came back to the room and told me I was under arrest and that they would transfer me to Al Mascobiyya Interrogation and Detention Centre in Jerusalem. [...]

Two interrogators named Arsan and David were already in the room. They had a typed paper written in Hebrew. They told me that this paper was sent via fax from the same interrogator who interrogated me earlier in Ras al-Amoud, and that I had confessed to doing many things. I told them that what was in the paper was a lie and that I did not confess to anything and no specifc accusation was made against me. They said that the paper says that I knew a young man named Murad and I knew that he was wanted by the intelligence … This interrogation lasted until midnight. [...] In the morning of 6 February 2008, they came and took me to Jerusalem's Magistrate's Court. My hands and feet were tied. A lawyer hired by the State was waiting for me, but none of my family was there [...] In the court, the prosecution asked for my detention to be extended for 10 days, relying on a secret file submitted to the judge. My lawyer objected and asked for my immediate release. However, the judge decided to extend my detention [...]

Israeli Military Court

My interrogation lasted for several hours for 59 consecutive days. In one of the interrogation rounds, a tall interrogator told me that I should confess that I had asked Murad to help me carry out a suicide bombing. I denied that of course, and he slapped me so hard that I fell over to the ground and my mouth began bleeding.

On the seventh day of my arrest [...] the interrogator told me that Murad had been arrested, and he had interrogated him. He added that Murad confessed that I asked him to help me to carry out a suicide bombing. [...] After 10 days of interrogation [...] I came back from the court and I was put in a room inside the Centre with another detainee named Nisreen Z. She was detained on a theft case. On the same day I had a stomach ache. Nisreen handed me a white pill, which turned out later to be a narcotic pill. I fainted for some time. When I woke up, Nisreen told me that I had said many things and confessed to many things and that it was recorded. I was then removed from the room and taken to the interrogation room. The tall interrogator asked me to confess to everything but I refused [...] the interrogator played the recording. I heard myself speaking with Nisreen who was asking me many questions about Murad and carrying out a suicide bombing, and I would answer her 'yes' without giving further details [...] I did not sign any confession papers. (23 December 2008)

Afaf was charged with contact with a wanted person and the intention to carry out a suicide bombing. She was sentenced to 16 months imprisonment by a military court after entering into a plea bargain. She is currently detained in Telmond Prison inside Israel. Afaf was released on 7 May 2009.

Case Study No. 33

Name: Ezzat H.
Date of arrest: 11 June 2008
Age at arrest: 10
Accusation: None

On 11 June 2008, Israeli soldiers stormed Ezzat's family's shop in a village near the West Bank town of Qalqiliya, situated near the Wall. The soldiers said that they were looking for a hand gun.

At around 10:30am, I was sitting in my father's shop selling animal feed and eggs. I was wearing a red T-shirt and blue jeans. My brother Makkawi (7) and sister Lara (8) were sitting with me [...] I was surprised by the arrival of two Israeli soldiers to the shop. One of them had dark skin, wearing khaki jeans and a black T-shirt with a blue vest on top. The other one was in green clothes. Both of them were wearing helmets and carrying black weapons. The soldier with the black T-shirt was carrying a pistol around his chest in addition to the assault rife.

They suddenly walked into the shop. Once they entered the shop, the soldier with the black T-shirt began shouting at me, telling me: 'your father has sent us to you and we want the pistol your father has.' I became terrifed and said: 'my father has nothing. He doesn't own such things.' He slapped me hard across my right cheek and he slapped my brother on the face too. He then asked my siblings to get out of the shop. He asked me all over again and I told him we had nothing. He asked me to get out the pistol from the animal feed sacks. I answered him we had no pistol. He slapped me again and this time it was on my left cheek. [...]

A group of locals gathered around the store and some of them tried to enter and help me, but the soldier standing by the door prevented them from doing so. When the other soldier did not find anything, he asked me again to tell him where the pistol was. When I answered him back saying: 'we don't have anything' he punched me hard in my stomach and I fell over onto the empty egg boxes. I was crying and screaming because I could not stand the pain and I was terrified too.

The soldier with the black T-shirt made fun of me and imitated my crying. He spoke very fluent Arabic. He kept me inside the shop for 15 minutes. He then grabbed me by my T-shirt and dragged me out of the shop. I asked him to let me close the shop but he said leave it open so that it would be robbed. Some of my friends who were at the scene closed the shop.

When he dragged me out of the shop, he ordered me to walk in the street in front of him. He and the other soldier, who was pointing his weapon at me, walked behind me, and some people gathered around. While walking, the soldier in the black T-shirt would slap me hard on my neck now and then … I was slapped three to four times on my nape while walking towards the house. When we reached the house, 100 meters away, I saw many soldiers around the house and a number of dark green military vehicles. The word 'Police' was written on an olive coloured jeep. When I entered the house [...] the soldier with the black T-shirt made me stand in the yard and asked me to get the pistol out of the flower basin. When I was about to answer him and say we had no pistol, he slapped me so hard that I fell down on my face in the fower basin. [...]

My father was standing by the door of the guest room, where my family was held. The soldier slapped me on my nape in front of my father and I fell to the ground. He slapped me again on my nape and I fell to the ground after I stood up. All of this was in front of my father. He then lifted me in the air after he grabbed my T-shirt. He told my father that he was going to take me to prison [...] He threatened to arrest my older sister who was 19 years old [...] he then pushed me into the guest room where my mother and siblings were held. My mother was crying. When she saw me crying, she asked me why and I told her that I had been hit. She asked them to leave me alone and hit her instead. They told her that they would take me to prison. [...] The soldier with the black T-shirt took me to the bedroom and slapped me at the door. He then brought my older sister to search and interrogate her while forcing me to stand by the kitchen door. They then moved me to another bedroom.

Torturing Ezzat H

While passing me, the soldier with the black T-shirt slapped me so hard on my face that I fell on the ground. He asked me to stay there in the room. He would go for five minutes and then come back to slap me on the face, and punch me several times in my stomach. I would shout and burst into tears. He would imitate me and make fun of me. He continued coming to the room around six times where he would hit me and slap me. [...] I spent about one hour in the room all alone with the soldiers. During this hour, the soldier with the black T-shirt ordered me to stand on one foot and lift my hands up in the air with my back against the wall. This lasted for about half an hour. I was exhausted but I did not dare to put my foot on the ground because he ordered me not to. [...] The soldier with the black T-shirt [...] then brought my older sister and asked me whether I cared about her or not. I said: 'yes I do.' He then asked me to tell him where the pistol was and he would not tell my father. I said we did not have a pistol, so he took my sister out, and then came back and hit me all over my body. He left the room and after a while he came back and ofered me 10 Shekels if I would tell him where the pistol was. I told him I did not care about money. He really became so angry that he took of his helmet and hit me with it from two metres away. He asked me to bring him the helmet and when I did, he threw it again at me, but this time he missed. He again asked me to bring him the helmet but this time he did not hit me with it. Instead, he left the room for five minutes and came back and slapped me on the face and stomach without asking me anything. Once again he left the room and was gone for a while, and I was all alone in the room. He then came back and asked me about the pistol and I answered that we did not have any pistol. He slapped me twice on my face and pushed me back. He then left the room for a while and came back to repeat it all over again. [...]

Afterwards, a soldier wearing black sunglasses came into the room where I was held and pointed his rife at me. The rife barrel was a few centimeters away from my face. I was so terrified that I started to shiver. He made fun of me and said: 'shivering? Tell me where the pistol is before I shoot you.' I replied by saying that we had nothing. He lowered his rife and took out the bullets [...] (21 June 2008)

After initially wishing to file a complaint against the soldiers involved, Ezzat's father changed his mind for fear of retaliation.

Since DCI-Palestine last published a report on Palestinian child detainees (April 2008), the practice of ill-treatment and torture has continued unabated. During the course of the reporting period DCI-Palestine continued to receive numerous testimonies from Palestinian children speaking of their ill-treatment and torture at the hands of Israeli soldiers, policemen and security operatives. This abuse occurs from the moment of arrest, and continues during transfer, interrogation and detention. The ill-treatment documented by DCI-Palestine appears to be widespread, systematic and institutionalised, suggesting complicity at all levels of the political and military chain of command. This abusive system operates with the knowledge and assistance of some doctors, and is overseen by a military court system that ignores basic principles of juvenile justice and fair trial rights, whilst willfully turning a blind eye to the presentation in court of one coerced confession after another. This system imposed by Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory operates beyond international legal norms and within a general culture of impunity.DCI-Palestine continues in its eforts to bring this situation to the attention of the international community which is itself bound by a number of legal obligations to ensure that these violations are fully investigated, and where appropriate, prosecuted and that such conduct is not rewarded.

Without some measure of accountability, it is unlikely that the situation endured by Palestinian children described in the pages above, will improve.

* Defence for Children International - Palestine Section (DCI-Palestine) is a national section of the international non-governmental child rights organisation and movement, Defence for Children International (DCI), established in 1979, with consultative status with ECOSOC. DCI-Palestine was established in 1992, and is dedicated to promoting and protecting the rights of Palestinian children in accordance with the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), as well as other international, regional and local standards. As part of its ongoing work to uphold the rights of Palestinian children, DCI-Palestine provides free legal assistance, collects evidence, researches and drafts reports and conducts general advocacy targeting various duty bearers.

Video: Two years under siege

2009-06-24T19:08:03Z

Two years after the outbreak of the war in Nahr Al-Bared, the camp's fate remains unclear. the reconstruction of the official camp might start soon, but the army keeps its tight grip on the camp. Several checkpoints, barbed wire and military posts cut Nahr Al-Bared off from its surroundings.

Nahr Al-Bared camp used to be a thriving marketplace in the northern Lebanese region of Akkar and about half its costumers were Lebanese. During the war, the Lebanese army has not only defeated the militant group Fatah Al-Islam, but also completely destroyed the refugee camp. Its businesses were looted, smashed and burnt, even after the war had ended. The camp's once flourishing economy was physically eliminated.

Two years later, about half the camp's population has returned to its adjacent area. Hundreds of businesses have re-opened, but economic recovery is seriously hampered by the tight siege imposed by the Lebanese army. Thus, suspicions have risen that the war's actual target wasn't Fatah Al-Islam, but Nahr Al-Bared's economic life.

In this 10-minute film, the co-owner of an ice cream factory, the president of the local trader's committee and the imam of the Al-Quds mosque speak out on the siege and its economic consequences.

Source: A-Films

The necessity of cultural boycott

2009-06-24T18:48:44Z

Boycott Israel

By Ilan Pappe *

If there is anything new in the never-ending sad story of Palestine it is the clear shift in public opinion in the UK. I remember coming to these isles in 1980 when supporting the Palestinian cause was confined to the left and in it to a very particular section and ideological stream. The post-Holocaust trauma and guilt complex, military and economic interests and the charade of Israel as the only democracy in the Middle East all played a role in providing immunity for the State of Israel. Very few were moved, so it seems, by a state that had dispossessed half of Palestine's native population, demolished half of their villages and towns, discriminated against the minority among them who lived within its borders through an apartheid system and divided into enclaves two million and a half of them in a harsh and oppressive military occupation.

Almost 30 years later it seems that all these filters and cataracts have been removed. The magnitude of the ethnic cleansing of 1948 is well known, the suffering of the people in the occupied territories recorded and described even by the US president as unbearable and inhuman. In a similar way, the destruction and depopulation of the greater Jerusalem area is noted daily and the racist nature of the policies towards the Palestinians in Israel are frequently rebuked and condemned.

The reality today in 2009 is described by the UN as "a human catastrophe." The conscious and conscientious sections of British society know very well who caused and who produced this catastrophe. This is not related any more to elusive circumstances, or to the "conflict" — it is seen clearly as the outcome of Israeli policies throughout the years. When Archbishop Desmond Tutu was asked for his reaction to what he saw in the occupied territories, he noted sadly that it was worse than apartheid. He should know.

As in the case of South Africa, these decent people, either as individuals or as members of organizations, voice their outrage against the continued oppression, colonization, ethnic cleansing and starvation in Palestine. They are looking for ways of showing their protest and some even hope convince their government to change its old policy of indifference and inaction in the face of the continued destruction of Palestine and the Palestinians. Many among them are Jews, as these atrocities are done in their name according to the logic of the Zionist ideology, and quite a few among them are veterans of previous civil struggles in this country for similar causes all over the world. They are not confined any more to one political party and they come from all walks of life.

So far the British government is not moved. It was also passive when the anti-apartheid movement in this country demanded of it to impose sanctions on South Africa. It took several decades for that activism from below to reach the political top. It takes longer in the case of Palestine: guilt about the Holocaust, distorted historical narratives and contemporary misrepresentation of Israel as a democracy seeking peace and the Palestinians as eternal Islamic terrorists blocked the flow of the popular impulse. But it is beginning to find its way and presence, despite the continued accusation of any such demand as being anti-Semitic and the demonization of Islam and Arabs. The third sector, that important link between civilians and government agencies, has shown us the way. One trade union after the other, one professional group after the other, have all sent recently a clear message: enough is enough. It is done in the name of decency, human morality and basic civil commitment not to remain idle in the face of atrocities of the kind Israel has and still is committing against the Palestinian people.

In the last eight years the Israeli criminal policy escalated, and the Palestinian activists were seeking new means to confront it. They have tried it all, armed struggle, guerrilla warfare, terrorism and diplomacy: nothing worked. And yet they are not giving up and now they are proposing a nonviolent strategy — that of boycott, sanctions and divestment. With these means they wish to persuade Western governments to save not only them, but ironically also the Jews in Israel from an imminent catastrophe and bloodshed. This strategy bred the call for cultural boycott of Israel. This demand is voiced by every part of the Palestinian existence: by the civil society under occupation and by Palestinians in Israel. It is supported by the Palestinian refugees and is led by members of the Palestinian exile communities. It came in the right moment and gave individuals and organizations in the UK a way to express their disgust at the Israeli policies and at the same time an avenue for participating in the overall pressure on the government to change its policy of providing immunity for the impunity on the ground.

It is bewildering that this shift of public opinion has had no impact so far on policy; but again we are reminded of the tortuous way the campaign against apartheid had to go before it became a policy. It is also worth remembering that two brave women in Dublin, toiling on the cashiers in a local supermarket, were the ones who began a huge movement of change by refusing to sell South African goods. Twenty-nine years later, Britain joined others in imposing sanctions on apartheid. So while governments hesitate for cynical reasons, out of fear of being accused of anti-Semitism or maybe due to Islamophobic inhibitions, citizens and activists do their utmost, symbolically and physically, to inform, protest and demand. They have a more organized campaign, that of the cultural boycott, or they can join their unions in the coordinated policy of pressure. They can also use their name or fame for indicating to us all, that decent people in this world cannot support what Israel does and what it stands for. They do not know whether their action will make an immediate change or they would be so lucky as to see change in their lifetime. But in their own personal book of who they are and what they did in life and in the harsh eye of historical assessment they would be counted in with all those who did not remain indifferent when inhumanity raged under the guise of democracy in their own countries or elsewhere.

On the other hand, citizens in this country, especially famous ones, who continue to broadcast, quite often out of ignorance or out of more sinister reasons, the fable of Israel as a cultured Western society or as the "only democracy in the Middle East" are not only wrong factually. They provide immunity for one of the greatest atrocities in our time. Some of them demand we should leave culture out of our political actions. This approach to Israeli culture and academia as separate entities from the army, the occupation and the destruction is morally corrupt and logically defunct. Eventually, one day the outrage from below, including in Israel itself, will produce a new policy — the present US administration is already showing early signs of it. History did not look kindly at those filmmakers who collaborated with US Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s or endorsed apartheid. It would adopt a similar attitude to those who are silent about Palestine now.

A good case in point unfolded last month in Edinburgh. Filmmaker Ken Loach led a campaign against the official and financial connections the city's film festival had with the Israeli embassy. Such a stance was meant to send a message that this embassy represents not only the filmmakers of Israel but also its generals who massacred the people of Gaza, its tormentors who torture Palestinians in jails, its judges who sent 10,000 Palestinians — half of them children — without trial to prison, its racist mayors who want to expel Arabs from their cities, its architects who built walls and fences to enclave people and prevent them from reaching their fields, schools, cinemas and offices and its politicians who strategize yet again how to complete the ethnic cleansing of Palestine they began in 1948. Ken Loach felt that only a call for boycotting the festival as whole would bring its directors into a moral sense and perspective. He was right; it did, because the case is so clear-cut and the action so simple and pure.

It is not surprising that a counter voice was heard. This is an ongoing struggle and would not be won easily. As I write these words, we commemorate the 42nd year of the Israeli occupation — the longest, and one of the cruelest in modern times. But time has also produced the lucidity needed for such decisions. This is why Ken's action was immediately effective; next time even this would not be necessary. One of his critics tried to point to the fact that people in Israel like Ken's films, so this was a kind of ingratitude. I can assure this critic that those of us in Israel who watch Ken's movies are also those who salute him for his bravery and unlike this critic we do not think of this an act similar to a call for Israel's destruction, but rather the only way of saving Jews and Arabs living there. But it is difficult anyway to take such criticism seriously when it is accompanied by description of the Palestinians as a terrorist entity and Israel as a democracy like Britain. Most of us in the UK have moved far away from this propagandist silliness and are ready for change. We are now waiting for the government of these isles to follow suit.

* Ilan Pappe is chair in the Department of History at the University of Exeter.

Video: Palestinian homes on sale to 'private buyers'

2009-06-23T20:12:34Z

Ever ask what happen to the homes of those that become refugees in 1948?

This 3 minute clip from Al Jazeera English sums up the latest Israeli actions to make sure the "right of return" becomes just as unfeasible as they have made a true 2-state solution.

Bikini-clad activists crash 'Tel Aviv Beach' party at Central Park

2009-06-23T20:06:20Z

by Codepink

On the sands of the Israeli Ministry of Tourism's Tel Aviv Beach in Central Park last Sunday, bikini-clad activists from the women's group CODEPINK covered themselves in mud to expose the truth behind the event: as a tool to clean up Israel's reputation in light of its dirty policies toward Palestine, including West Bank settlements, a border blockade of Gaza and this winter's devastating 22-day war on Gaza that killed more than 1,400 civilians, injured 5,300 and destroyed approximately 4,000 homes.

The activists have seen for themselves the devastation caused by the assault, and Israel's continuing blockade of the Gaza border. Within the past two months, five CODEPINK delegations of more than 150 American and international activists traveled to Gaza, Egypt and Israel and delivered medical supplies, humanitarian aid and playgrounds for Gazan children.

The bikini-clad CODEPINK women also distributed information exposing Israeli Dead Sea cosmetics company AHAVA ("love" in Hebrew), which uses mud illegally extracted from and packaged in the occupied territories.

"Despite its name, there is nothing loving about a company that profits from stolen resources and oppressed people," said CODEPINK coordinator Rae Abileah, who organized a protest of AHAVA in Tel Aviv last week. "We will paint ourselves with mud to show AHAVA's dirty side."

CODEPINK's "Stolen Beauty" AHAVA boycott campaign is part of the International Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement for Palestine to economically pressure the Israeli government to end its assault on Palestine and comply with international law.

More photos are found here.

Also, following is a video clip from the protest:

Loyalty to racism

2009-06-23T18:29:35Z

by Pat Oliphant

Israel's attempt to legislate loyalty to the Jewish state is proof of the failure of the Zionist/colonial project of Israelification.

by Azmi Bishara

What is behind the latest wave of legislative proposals flooding the Knesset agenda? I refer specifically to those intended to curb manifestations of Palestinian patriotism and to restrict the political activity of Arab Israelis.

The aim of these laws is to impose the Israeli nationalist creed by coercion. It's really that simple. Over the last decade, the Knesset has experienced several bursts of legislative activity seeking to restrict freedom of opinion and expression on the questions of the Jewishness of the state and the right to resist occupation. The advocates of these laws are indefatigable. If the proposals fail to pass through any of the necessary stages, they are resubmitted over and over again in the hope of wearing out their opponents.

Is Israel really heading towards fascism? Is its vaunted democracy on the wane? Or, I suppose, we could rephrase these questions as follows: Was Israel more democratic at some point of time than it is today and are liberal civic rights in that country being beaten back after having thrived at that particular point of time? What exactly is going on?

I would say that two developments are unfolding in tandem. On the one hand, Israel is experiencing a deepening of and expansion in the concept and exercise of liberal political and economic civil rights (for Jewish citizens). At the same time, there is an upsurge in ultranationalist and right-wing religious extremism accompanied by flagrant manifestations of anti-Arab racism. As a consequence, the Jewish citizen endowed with fuller civil rights (than those that had existed in earlier phases when Zionist society was organised along the lines of a militarised quasi- socialist settler drive) is simultaneously an individual who is more exposed to and influenced by right-wing anti-Arab invective.

The contention that Israel had at one point been more democratic and is now sliding into fascism is fallacious. It brings to mind our protest demonstrations in the 1970s and the earnest zeal with which we chanted, "Fascism will not survive!" Our slogans were inspired by the Spanish left before the civil war in Spain and by the Italian left in the 1930s. But, in fact, the context was entirely different. Israel was the product of a colonialist settler drive that came, settled and survived. Fascism is a very specific form of rule, one that does not necessarily have to exist in a militarised settler society that founded itself on top of the ruins of an indigenous people. Indeed, that society organised itself along pluralistic democratic lines and it was unified on a set of fundamental principles and values as a basis for societal consensus. As militarist values figured prime among them, there was no need for a fascist coup to impose them. Even Sharon, who, from the perspective of the Israeli left, seemed poised to lead a fascist coup was one of the most ardent advocates of women's rights during his rule. He also proved one of the more determined proponents of implementing the rulings of the Israeli Supreme Court, which is a relatively liberal body in the context of the Zionist political spectrum and within the constraints of Zionist conceptual premises. Israel has grown neither more nor less democratic. The scope of civil rights has expanded, as has the tide of right-wing racism against the Arabs.

Among the Arabs in Israel there have also been two tandem developments. The first is an increasing awareness of the rights of citizenship and civil liberties after a long period of living in fear of military rule and the Israeli security agencies, and in isolation from the Arab world. That period was also characterised by attempts to prove their loyalty to the state by dedicating themselves to the service of the daily struggle for material survival and progress in routine civic affairs. At the same time, however, the forces of increasing levels of education, the growth of a middle class, the progress of the Palestinian national movement abroad, the advances in communications technologies, the broadening organisational bonds among the Palestinians in Israel, and the cultural and commercial exchanges between them and the West Bank and Gaza combined to give impetus to a growing national awareness.

The Arab Israelis' growing awareness of rights has paved the way for an assimilation drive to demand equality in Israel as a Jewish state. Such a demand is inherently unrealisable, as it would inevitably entail forsaking Palestinian national identity without obtaining true equality. Instead of assimilation there would only be further marginalisation. However, this danger still looms; there are Arab political circles in Israel that are convinced that this is the way forward. At the same time, there is the danger that truly nationalist forces could lose their connection with the realities of Palestinians' civil life, by stressing their national identity exclusively with no reference to their citizenship or civil rights, or the conditions of their lives. This tendency threatens to isolate the nationalist movement from its grassroots, and this danger, too, persists although to a lesser extent.

The flurry of loyalty bills and the like reflects another phenomenon that has taken root among Arabs in Israel and that the Israeli establishment regards as a looming peril. This peril, from the Israeli perspective, is twofold. Not only can Palestinians exercise their civil rights in order to fight for equality, they can also take advantage of their civil rights in order to express and raise awareness of their national identity by, for example, commemorating the Nakba and establishing closer contact with the Arab world. Commemorating the Nakba — the anniversary of the creation of the state of Israel and the consequent displacement and dispossession of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians — is a relatively new practice for Arabs inside Israel, dating only to the mid-1990s. Before this — until at least the end of the 1970s, before the spread of national awareness gained impetus among Arabs inside Israel — many of them participated in the celebrations of Israel's independence day and offered their congratulations to Israelis on the occasion. There were no laws against commemorating Nakba Day, not because Israel was more democratic but merely because there was no need for such laws in the eyes of the Israeli establishment, since the Arabs were not commemorating it anyway. In fact, open demonstrations of disloyalty to the state as a Zionist entity were very rare.

But since that time, change did not affect Israel alone. The political culture of broad swathes of Arabs inside that country shifted towards more open expressions of their national identity. To them, there is no contradiction between this and the exercise of their civil rights. Indeed, they felt it their natural right to use the civil liberties with which they are endowed by virtue of their citizenship to engage in forms of political expression that the Israeli establishment regards as contradictory to its concept of citizenship. Naturally, the clash became more pronounced with the growing stridency of right-wing Zionist racism.

The citizenship of Arabs inside Israel has a distinct quality that I have been attempting to underscore for years. Theirs does not stem from ideological conviction or the exercise of the Zionist law of return. Nor is their situation similar to migrant labour or minorities who have chosen to immigrate to the country and who accommodate to the status quo, as is the case with immigrant communities in the US or France, for example. Their citizenship stems from the reality of their having remained in the country after it was occupied. They are the indigenous people. It is not their duty to assimilate to the Zionist character of the state and the attempt to transform them into patriotic Israelis is an attempt to falsify history, to distort their cultural persona and fragment their moral cohesion. A Palestinian Arab who regards himself as an Israeli patriot is nought. He is someone who has accepted to be something less than a citizen and less than a Palestinian and who simultaneously identifies with those who have occupied Palestinian lands and repressed and expelled his people.

It is impossible, here, to examine all facets of the phenomenon, but we should also touch upon a third trend, which is the growing degree of showmanship, sensationalism and catering to the forces of popular demand on the part of Knesset members. This trend is to be found in all parliamentary systems since television cameras made their way into parliamentary chambers. Parliament has become a theatre and a large proportion of MPs have become comedians or soap opera stars, depending on their particular gifts and/or circumstances. However, when the favourite drama or comedy theme is incitement against the Arabs, this can only signify that anti-Arab prejudices, fear mongering, abuse and intimidation are spreading like wildfire. This is the very dangerous and not at all funny part about the parliamentary circus. And it's going to get grimmer yet for Arabs in Israel.

In the Obama era, following the failure of Bush's policies, the Israeli government will be directing the venom of its right-wing racist coalition against East Jerusalem and Israeli Arabs. After all, it will be easier to focus on domestic matters, such as emphasis on the Jewishness of the state, than on settlements in the occupied territories. Some of the proposed loyalty laws, such as that which would sentence to prison anyone who does not agree to the Jewishness of the state, will have a tough time making it through the legislative process. However, merely by submitting the proposal, the racist MK will have killed two birds with one stone: he will have made a dramatic appearance before the cameras so that his constituents will remember his name come next elections, and he will have stoked the fires of anti-Arab hatred. Other laws may stand a better chance. The proposal to ban the commemoration of Nakba Day could pass like the law prohibiting the raising of the Palestinian flag, or it could fail because even on the right there are those who object to such a ban. It is also doubtful that this country could promulgate a law compelling people to swear an oath of allegiance, because the intended targets are not immigrants but citizens by birth. It would require quite a feat of constitutional re-engineering in order to render citizenship acquired by birth subject to a loyalty oath at some later phase in a person's life.

Naturally, no state, however totalitarian it may be, can impose love and loyalty for it by force, let alone a colonialist state that would like to force this on the indigenous inhabitants it had reduced to a minority on their own land. Certainly it would be much easier for Israel to prohibit manifestations of disloyalty than to legislate for forced manifestations of loyalty.

For many years I've been advocating a Palestinian interpretation of citizenship in Israel that Israel continues to reject, with consequences to myself that readers may well be aware of. According to this interpretation, the Palestinian Israeli effectively tells the ruling authorities, "My loyalty does not go beyond the bounds of being a law abiding citizen who pays his taxes and the like. As for my keeping in touch with Palestinian history and with the Arab world in matters that should be inter-Arab, such things should not have to pass via you or require your approval." Such talk was previously unheard of in Israel and it came as quite a shock to the ears of interlocutors used to liberal-sounding references to "our Arab citizens" who serve as "a bridge of peace" and proof of "the power of Israeli democracy". Rejecting such condescension, the new type of Palestinian says, "My Palestinianness existed before your state was created on top of the ruins of my people. Citizenship is a compromise I have accepted in order to be able to go on living here in my land. It is not a favour that you bestow on me with strings attached."

Apparently, more and more Arab citizens have come around to this attitude, to the extent that Israel has begun to realise that the material exigencies of life or gradual acclimatisation to Israeli ways and political realities will not be able to stop the trend. It has come to believe that only new laws will bring a halt to what it regards as dangerous manifestations of disloyalty. Such laws will be inherently oppressive but they will simultaneously pronounce the failure of Israelification.

Author's note: In his defence of the need for a law to punish with imprisonment those who refuse to recognise Israel as a Jewish state, MK Zevelun Orlev cited the "case of Azmi Bishara". According to this right-wing lawmaker, "this case" began when Bishara refused to recognise the state verbally, after which he proceeded to visit "the countries of the enemy" without permission and to "abet the enemy" in time of war. Naturally, the accusations are groundless. Azmi Bishara did indeed visit Arab countries, openly and without permission, because he refuses to subordinate the relationship between himself, as an Arab, and the Arab world to Israeli authority. However, as an opposition Arab Knesset member, Bishara had no information to hand to an "enemy" or anyone else for that matter. Meanwhile, his ideas on politics and other matters are in the public domain, having been published and discussed in Israel and elsewhere. The allegation of abetting the enemy in time of war was merely a cover-up for a political witch-hunt. Its leaders are now trying to create legislation so they do not have to concoct security excuses in the future in order to suppress the advocates of opinions such as those Bishara expresses.

The language that absolves Israel

2009-06-23T17:56:19Z

by Carlos Latuff

A special political vocabulary prevents us from being able to recognize what's going on in the Middle East.

By Saree Makdisi

On Sunday night, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a speech that — by categorically ruling out the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state — ought to have been seen as a mortal blow to the quest for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

On Monday morning, however, newspaper headlines across the United States announced that Netanyahu had endorsed the creation of a Palestinian state, and the White House welcomed the speech as "an important step forward."

Reality can be so easily stood on its head when it comes to Israel because the misreading of Israeli declarations is a long-established practice among commentators and journalists in the United States.

In fact, a special vocabulary has been developed for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the United States. It filters and structures the way in which developing stories are misread here, making it difficult for readers to fully grasp the nature of those stories — and maybe even for journalists to think critically about what they write.

The ultimate effect of this special vocabulary is to make it possible for Americans to accept and even endorse in Israel what they would reject out of hand in any other country.

Let me give a classic example.

In the U.S., discussion of Palestinian politicians and political movements often relies on a spectrum running from "extreme" to "moderate." The latter sounds appealing; the former clearly applies to those who must be — must they not? — beyond the pale. But hardly anyone relying on such terms pauses to ask what they mean. According to whose standard are these manifestly subjective labels assigned?

Meanwhile, Israeli politicians are labeled according to an altogether different standard: They are "doves" or "hawks." Unlike the terms reserved for Palestinians, there's nothing inherently negative about either of those avian terms.

So why is no Palestinian leader referred to here as a "hawk"? Why are Israeli politicians rarely labeled "extremists"? Or, for that matter, "militants"?

There are countless other examples of these linguistic double standards. American media outlets routinely use the deracinating and deliberately obfuscating term "Israeli Arabs" to refer to the Palestinian citizens of Israel, despite the fact that they call themselves — and are — Palestinian.

Similarly, Israeli housing units built in the occupied territories in contravention of international law are always called "settlements" or even "neighborhoods" rather than what they are: "colonies." That word may be harsh on the ears, but it's far more accurate ("a body of people who settle in a new locality, forming a community subject to or connected with their parent state").

These subtle distinctions make a huge difference. Unconsciously absorbed, such terms frame the way people and events are viewed. When it comes to Israel, we seem to reach for a dictionary that applies to no one else, to give a pass to actions or statements that would be condemned in any other quarter.

That's what allowed Netanyahu to be congratulated for endorsing a Palestinian "state," even though the kind of entity he said Palestinians might — possibly — be allowed to have would be nothing of the kind.

Look up the word "state" in the dictionary. You'll probably see references to territorial integrity, power and sovereignty. The entity that Netanyahu was talking about on Sunday would lack all of those constitutive features. A "state" without a defined territory that is not allowed to control its own borders or airspace and cannot enter into treaties with other states is not a state, any more than an apple is an orange or a car an airplane. So how can leading American newspapers say "Israeli Premier Backs State for Palestinians," as the New York Times had it? Or "Netanyahu relents on goal of two states," as this paper put it?

Because a different vocabulary applies.

Which is also what kept Netanyahu's most extraordinary demand in Sunday night's speech from raising eyebrows here.

"The truth," he said, "is that in the area of our homeland, in the heart of our Jewish homeland, now lives a large population of Palestinians."

In other words, as Netanyahu repeatedly said, there is a Jewish people; it has a homeland and hence a state. As for the Palestinians, they are a collection — not even a group — of trespassers on Jewish land. Netanyahu, of course, dismisses the fact that they have a centuries-old competing narrative of home attached to the same land, a narrative worthy of recognition by Israel.

On the contrary: The Palestinians must, he said, accept that Israel is the state of the Jewish people (this is a relatively new Israeli demand, incidentally), and they must do so on the understanding that they are not entitled to the same rights. "We" are a people, Netanyahu was saying; "they" are merely a "population." "We" have a right to a state — a real state. "They" do not.

And the spokesman for our African American president calls this "an important step forward"?

In any other situation — including our own country — such a brutally naked contrast between those who are taken to have inherent rights and those who do not would immediately be labeled as racist. Netanyahu, though, is given a pass, not because most Americans would knowingly endorse racism but because, in this case, a special political vocabulary kicks in that prevents them from being able to recognize it for exactly what it is.

Saree Makdisi is a professor of English and comparative literature at UCLA. He is the author of, among other books, "Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation."

Video: Lift the closure - give life a chance

2009-06-22T18:47:02Z

To mark two years of the closure Israel has imposed on the Gaza Strip, a new online film was released last Thursday by eight human rights organizations in Israel.

Gaza Bonanza

2009-06-21T20:33:01Z

[Sabbah's Blog note: For simplicity, read COGAT = OCCUPATION ADMINISTRATORS. For your info, these are administrators in military uniform.]

by Carlos Latuff

By Yotam Feldman and Uri Blau

Every week, about 10 officers from the Israel Defense Force's Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) unit convene in the white Templer building in the Kirya, the Defense Ministry compound in Tel Aviv, to decide which food products will appear on the tables of the 1.5 million inhabitants of the Gaza Strip. Among those taking part in the discussion are Colonel Moshe Levi, head of the Gaza District Coordination Office (DCO), Colonel Alex Rosenzweig, head of the civil division of COGAT and Colonel Doron Segal, head of the economics division. These officers decided, for example, that persimmons, bananas and apples were vital items for basic sustenance and thus permitted into the Gaza Strip, while apricots, plums, grapes and avocados were impermissible luxuries. Over the past year, these officers were responsible for prohibiting the entry into the Gaza Strip of tinned meat, tomato paste, clothing, shoes and notebooks. All these items are sitting in the giant storerooms rented by Israeli suppliers near the Kerem Shalom crossing, awaiting a change in policy.

The policy is not fixed, but continually subject to change, explains a COGAT official. Thus, about two months ago, the COGAT officials allowed pumpkins and carrots into Gaza, reversing a ban that had been in place for many months. The entry of "delicacies" such as cherries, kiwi, green almonds, pomegranates and chocolate is expressly prohibited. As is halvah, too, most of the time. Sources involved in COGAT's work say that those at the highest levels, including acting coordinator Amos Gilad, monitor the food brought into Gaza on a daily basis and personally approve the entry of any kind of fruit, vegetable or processed food product requested by the Palestinians. At one of the unit's meetings, Colonel Oded Iterman, a COGAT officer, explained the policy as follows: "We don't want Gilad Shalit's captors to be munching Bamba [a popular Israeli snack food] right over his head."

The "Red Lines" document explains: "In order to make basic living in Gaza possible, the deputy defense minister approved the entry into the Gaza Strip of 106 trucks with humanitarian products, 77 of which are basic food products. The entry of wheat and animal feed was also permitted via the aggregates conveyor belt outside the Karni terminal."

After four pages filled with detailed charts of the number of grams and calories of every type of food to be permitted for consumption by Gaza residents (broken down by gender and age), comes this recommendation: "It is necessary to deal with the international community and the Palestinian Health Ministry to provide nutritional supplements (only some of the flour in Gaza is enriched) and to provide education about proper nutrition." Printed in large letters at the end of the document is this admonition: "The stability of the humanitarian effort is critical for the prevention of the development of malnutrition."

In fact, the number of trucks entering the Gaza Strip is very close to the absolute minimum required for basic sustenance, as determined by the IDF itself. Data compiled by UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, shows that while the minimum number of trucks per day set by the IDF is 106, in May, 117 trucks passed through the Kerem Shalom terminal; in April the number was 113 and, before the start of Operation Cast Lead in December 2008, just 37.

These quantities allow a very slim margin for error or mishaps. Moreover, COGAT's analysis is statistically accurate only on condition that there is an equal division of the minimum supplies that are allowed in. "This analysis does not take distribution in the field into consideration," says the "Red Lines" document. A COGAT official says that he assumes that food distribution within Gaza is not equal. If some are receiving more, others are necessarily receiving less than the required minimum. So it is hard to reconcile this information with the claims of the defense minister and COGAT officers that there is no real food shortage in Gaza.

COGAT officers are in regular contact with international organizations, listen to their complaints and examine their requests to bring in various goods, in both official and unofficial meetings. For example, Amos Gilad has dinner from time to time with an official from the UNRWA delegation in Israel. The Israeli officers repeat the following phrase in their meetings with organization officials: "No prosperity, no development, no humanitarian crisis." A senior COGAT officer explains to Haaretz that it's not a siege policy, but rather the restriction of entry of luxury products. The decision as to which products qualify as "luxury" changes from week to week, and sometimes from day to day.

Some of these changes are the result of international pressure exerted upon Israel. For example, when he visited Gaza last February, U.S. Senator John Kerry was stunned to discover that Israel was not allowing Palestinians to bring in trucks loaded with pasta. Following American pressure, on March 20 the cabinet decided to permit the unrestricted transfer of food products into Gaza. Incredibly, the COGAT personnel do not see any contradiction between this decision and the serious restrictions that are nevertheless imposed on the entry of various food items.

"Let it be clear that the decision was not intended to lift the restrictions that were imposed in the past in relation to the entry of equipment and food into the Gaza Strip, as determined by the cabinet decision of September 19," said COGAT in response to Gisha: Legal Center for Freedom of Movement, which has demanded that "prohibited" foods be allowed to enter Gaza.

Despite the many resources invested by the IDF in coordinating with the Palestinians, since the start of the blockade no list of permitted and prohibited items has been relayed to the Palestinian side. The DCO spokesperson says there is no such list and that the Palestinians "know what they're allowed to bring in." But the Palestinians are less satisfied with this situation: Riad Fatouh says that at a meeting three months ago at the Agriculture Ministry in Tel Aviv, attended by al-Sheikh and Mhana from the Palestinian side, he asked DCO chief Moshe Levi for an official document detailing which products the army currently allows to be brought into Gaza. "Even if there are just 10 types of goods, I want to see it in writing," says Fatouh.

According to Fatouh, Levi was visibly angered upon hearing the request, and told him never to make such a request again, to be satisfied with the transfer of information by telephone. When Fatouh asked Levi why, the DCO chief told him: "Any goods that we allow in, or prohibit - you'll know about it by phone. That's the way we work." No one else in the room mentioned it again.

"If you go back two years, you see that it was utter foolishness," says a senior officer who was serving in COGAT when the blockade was imposed. "There was a vague, unclear policy, influenced by the interests of certain groups, by this or that lobby, without any policy that derived from the needs of the population. For example, the fruit growers have a powerful lobby, and this lobby saw to it that on certain days, from 20-25 trucks full of fruit were brought into Gaza. It's not that it arrived there and was thrown out, but if you were to ask a Gazan who lives there, it's not exactly what he needs. What happened was that the Israeli interest took precedence over the needs of the populace."

This move was greeted with dismay by many farmers in Israel, who were very pleased with Madar's performance. At an April 20 meeting in the office of Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai, it was decided that Madar is the one "who will set the agricultural agenda." Vilnai decided at that same meeting that Madar would be returned to the Erez checkpoint, but a military source explained that security considerations prevent his permanent return there. The spokesperson for the coordinator of activity in the territories would not permit Madar to be interviewed.

Avshalom Herzog, a member of Moshav Almagor, is a fruit grower and the proprietor of a large packing house. He says he has connections with 80 percent of the packing houses in Israel that transport goods to Gaza, in part because of his partnership with Khaled Uthman, the largest fruit trader in Gaza. Herzog is an energetic farmer, and frequently writes to the decision-makers - Deputy Defense Minister Vilnai, Agriculture Minister Shalom Simhon and COGAT officers - about bringing goods into Gaza.

"Until three or four years ago, in a normal year I transported 30-40 percent of the fruit that went into Gaza," says Herzog. "Today it's no more than 10-15 percent, because the market in Gaza is not a real market, but rather a market determined by the Defense Ministry. If the Defense Ministry says only 10 trucks will enter, then it doesn't matter who works in Gaza - he'll make money. And then there are wars between people who were never traders and there is bribery and people start to pay huge sums for the transport of fruit - irrational things, and then my share is diminished. I know that's how it is and there's not much I can do about it."

Herzog and other farmers have found an attentive audience in Simhon and Vilnai, but they are still not satisfied. "Simhon helps us sometimes," says Herzog, "but if he wanted to, he could have solved the problems a long time ago. You know what really makes me mad? There was a decision made in a meeting back in April. They came out with a protocol that required the entry of 20 trucks a day, and required that at least three trucks be filled with melons and that an officer from the agriculture staff who was exiled to Julis, in north Israel, be immediately returned to the Erez crossing, where he needed to be for the farmers' sake. This decision makes it plain as day that the one determining the mix of fruit [to be trucked in] is the director of the fruit growers' organization together with an officer of the agriculture staff in the Gaza DCO. But it's ignored. Today it's permissible to bring in peaches, bananas, apples, dates. Kumquats were permissible until yesterday. There are no plums, no pumpkin, no watermelon and no onion. It's just impossible to believe."

Summaries of the discussions about entry of food into Gaza show just how deeply the captains of the defense establishment seem to care about the income of Israeli farmers. Hence, in a discussion that took place in the office of Deputy Minister Vilnai, it was decided that every day, 15 trucks filled with agricultural produce would be brought in. "The problem right now is the emphasis on melons and fruit in general," Agriculture Ministry Director General Yossi Yishai said at the meeting. At the conclusion of the discussion, Vilnai instructed that three trucks with melons be brought into Gaza each week, "So as not to cause a market failure in Israel." Another document, from the end of April, signed by Vilnai's public information officer, says: "Israel's policy at the crossings is set at various times in accordance with a number of considerations … Economic considerations, including the agricultural establishment, are at the basis of the policy considerations."

Meir Yifrah, secretary of the Vegetable Growers Organization, also tries to exert influence on the decisions of COGAT and the Defense Ministry, with occasional success. "Once a month or so, I send a text message to [Agriculture Minister Simhon] Shalom saying the situation in the market is very tough, the growers need to send produce to Gaza, see what you can do with the Defense Ministry, so they'll bring in what's needed. It seems odd to me that pumpkin can be defined as a luxury item. It's sometimes used to feed animals, more than for people. If there are two or three or four growers who want to send stuff in and it's something they're short on there (in Gaza), I say they should be able to do that. I tried to pressure the Agriculture Ministry, and in the end we were successful. Last year I had a bad situation with onions. A lot of growers were stuck with their stock. We pressed the Agriculture Ministry and then they increased the onion quota from five to eight trucks at the end of last year."

Are sales to Gaza significant for Israeli farmers?

"The farmers' interest is to find other markets, so we can increase profitability for the grower, by creating demand in Israel and avoiding surpluses."

The Agriculture Ministry claims it also takes care of Palestinian interests: "When it comes to a decision on the kind of produce to be allowed into Gaza, the ministry takes into consideration Palestinian needs, the Israeli growers' ability to fulfill these needs as well as their own interests, and especially the Israeli consumer, to maintain reasonable prices in the local market. Minister Simhon, as a matter of policy, sees agriculture as a bridge to peace, and in every government in which he served, he has demanded the continuation of trade in farm products with the Palestinians, as well as cooperation in disease control in animals and plants - even in the worst security situations."

COGAT's "Red Lines" document, which defines the minimum necessary for the sustenance of Gaza residents, also finds that 300 calves a week are needed to feed Gazans - That's at least 200 fewer than the number brought in when the crossing was open for trade. Nevertheless, in the six months since Cast Lead, Israel has not permitted the entry of any live calves into Gaza, allowing only frozen meat and fish. In the period prior to the war, when Gaza residents were able to obtain permits to import calves, this was limited to calves from Israel, not from other countries as in the past.

In recent months, Israeli cattle breeders have been exerting pressure on the Agriculture Minister to get him to allow calves into Gaza. Most impacted by the restrictions on bringing meat into Gaza is Eyal Erlich, a former journalist who 15 years ago made a drastic career switch to become an importer of beef. Each year, until the blockade of Gaza was announced, Erlich sold 50,000 calves that he imported from Australia to Palestinians in Gaza (Gazans apparently prefer beef to lamb).

Erlich, 50, heavyset and white-haired, complains about the severe dent in his income and that of his Gazan partner, Hosni Afana. He believes that Agriculture Minister Simhon, who was involved in shaping the policy regarding import of beef to Gaza, exploited the situation to compel the Gazan market to buy Israeli, and thereby assist local breeders.

One way the Palestinians make up for the shortage of beef is by bringing in a large number of sheep via the Rafah tunnels. Unlike other animals, lambs will walk on their own to the other end of the tunnel, so they are easier to smuggle. Veterinary services in Israel estimate that since the start of the blockade, the Palestinians have smuggled in about 40,000 lambs through the tunnels, without any veterinary oversight. The Agriculture Ministry is concerned that these animals could spread epidemics that would eventually reach Israel.

Two days before the High Court's hearing on Erlich's petition, there was a meeting with attorney Hila Gorny of the State Prosecutor's Office. At this meeting, Uri Madar, of the agriculture department of the DCO, voiced his concern that the prohibition on importing beef to Gaza was adversely affecting the residents' nutrition. Colonel Alex Rosenzweig, head of the civilian division of COGAT, argued the opposite, saying there was no shortage of meat in Gaza and the ban on importation of cattle was not endangering the Palestinians' nutrition.

Madar declined to sign the state's response to the petition, asserting that there was "a black flag waving over it," and his view was not presented at the High Court hearing. Furthermore, at the hearing, the IDF did not present the COGAT document which states that at least 300 calves are to be imported into Gaza per week.

A Justice Ministry spokesperson, responding on behalf of the High Court Petition department, confirms this, adding, "Not only that, the state's position was never that the weekly quota of 300 calves, which applied for a certain period of time, was defined as a minimal humanitarian need. The position of the COGAT officials charged with assessing the humanitarian situation in Gaza was presented to the court, stipulating that the entire 'food basket' that is brought into Gaza, which includes frozen meat products, meets the humanitarian needs there. This position was supported by data presented to the State Prosecutor. These officials also stated that they were informed that this was the case by Palestinian officials with whom they are in contact. Beyond this, the State Prosecutor does not intend to relate to the content of the internal discussions held in anticipation of the filing of responses to the petition."

The spokesperson continues, "Although Erlich is seeking to paint his motives for filing the petition as stemming from concerns about the humanitarian situation in Gaza, he is essentially seeking to promote his business, which is being harmed by government policy on Gaza. The Supreme Court also reached this conclusion."

Erlich's experience in the ongoing fight to get cattle allowed into Gaza prompted him to establish Adam Solutions, a company devoted to assisting Palestinians in coping with the restrictions imposed on Gaza by the Israeli government. Erlich and his partner Basel Darawshe, son of former MK Abdulwahab Darawshe, hire out their services to wage a public and legal battle for "traders who need to bring in products" or "people who want to go out to get to hospitals."

How would you have helped?

"It's a legitimate and legal activity. What I would have done is go to a journalist, for example, and show how we're wrecking Israel's public relations."

Why did they turn to you?

"I'm a private businessperson. People come to me because they know I've solved more than a few problems because I was determined and clever."

Adiri also spoke about the matter with Bikel, a familiar figure in the flower, fruit and vegetable, and spice export field, who in the early 1990s also headed the Agricultural Strategy Committee, which dealt with agricultural relations with Palestinian farmers, among other things. Bikel remembers the problem with the bulbs: "The authorities wouldn't allow them to be imported. Hillel asked me if there was anything I could do. I told him that I thought I could do something, but it meant having to appeal to defense officials, to persuade the government and the agriculture minister, the defense minister and the prime minister. It's a tiring process. It's work. I told him that remuneration would only be due in the event of success, even though it meant a lot of work either way."

If it was really a security decision, how could it be subject to change?

"Decisions can be changed," Bikel insists.

In the end, Adiri did not avail himself of Erlich's or Bikel's services. "I asked the Dutch and they said absolutely not," says Adiri. "But the inquiry showed them that it was possible and motivated them to keep trying. They went to Ehud Barak and he eventually approved it."

Three months ago, an acquaintance walked into the shop run by H., an electronics merchant from Gaza City, and started talking about the situation in Gaza and the difficulty of bringing in goods. Then the acquaintance "casually mentioned" a friend of his who could help in obtaining merchandise. "After he started dropping hints, he told me that for NIS 60,000- 70,000 he might be able to bring in my merchandise," says H. He says he didn't go for the offer because of the high price. Other merchants say they've received offers to get their goods into Gaza for the exorbitant price of anywhere from NIS 40,000-100,000 per truck (the regular cost is about NIS 3,000). At least one admits that because of the ongoing blockade he did accept one such offer from an Israeli shipper.

One Israeli shipper explains how merchandise can be smuggled into Gaza. He says shippers often use permits obtained from aid organizations to bring in products Israel does not allow merchants to receive, such as clothing and shoes.

"We have no information whatsoever about this," says a spokesperson for the UN World Food Program. "This question does not apply to us since we use only our own trucks and drivers," says the International Red Cross. "All of our aid for Gaza is coordinated with the Israeli authorities," says a UNRWA spokesperson. "We have not encountered the kind of irregularities described. And if we did, we would report them."

How is it possible to do that?

"Let's say a merchant receives a turn to bring in sugar. He relays the name of the driver and the truck number to the Israeli side. The shipper who received the turn contacts another merchant, who didn't receive a turn and is ready to pay a lot of money to bring in his merchandise, which is stuck in Israel. The shipper arranges with the Palestinian shipper and transfers the sugar to the merchant who paid him. He makes up some story to tell the merchant who was supposed to receive the merchandise - that the truck got stuck or that it wasn't allowed through for some reason."

Since the blockade was placed on Gaza, the Karni terminal, through which more than 600 trucks used to pass daily has been closed. Now most goods are transferred through the Kerem Shalom crossing, and the only thing in operation at the Karni terminal is a conveyor belt that brings wheat, seeds and animal feed to the Palestinian side. The person who has profited most from this change is Nissim Jan, a former Shin Bet agent who served, among other things, as "head of the crossings department." In the seven years since he left the Shin Bet security service, he has managed to build himself a little empire that includes a company for logistical services, shipping services and real estate deals; he is currently constructing a building in the Barnea area of Ashkelon, together with contractor Didi Yamin.

Jan lives in a villa on the Ashkelon coast, drives a fancy Audi and wears neatly pressed button-down shirts. "Anyone who's anyone in the PA, and in Israel too apparently, knows me," he tells Haaretz. Palestinian and Israeli sources say that Jan is particularly close to Nasser Saraj, who oversees the operation of the crossings between Israel and Gaza.

Israel and Palestinian sources say that Jan gets a significant cut of this sum, ostensibly as payment for supplying food to the drivers and fuel for the trucks, a cost that cannot exceed more than a few thousand shekels a month. Man'am Shehaiber agreed to describe to Haaretz the way in which merchandise is transported from either side of the terminal. He said he employs 50 people at the crossing, but declined to reply to questions about his income from providing this service or the nature of his business connections with Jan. In addition, says an Israeli familiar with his business, Jan receives payment from the Palestinians for various jobs he does on the western (Gazan) side of the crossing.

Jan's profits seem dazzling to the Palestinians and the other Israelis involved in operating the crossings. One Israeli familiar with their operation says: "The services Jan supplies on both sides of the crossing have made him one of the most significant figures at Kerem Shalom." Some of the Palestinian traders mistakenly thought that he was the actual director of the crossing. Jan himself attests to his deep involvement there: "Nothing that happens at the crossings escapes my notice," he told Haaretz in a phone conversation. Sources in the Defense Ministry said that lately they've been checking into various complaints about his activity at the crossings.

Jan says that he handled, on behalf of the Palestinian Authority, the passage back into Gaza of Palestinians who found themselves stuck in Egypt after Hamas took control in Gaza and the Rafah crossing was closed. "They came to me because you go to people you can rely on," he says. "I think I'm someone who has a different approach than anyone else at the crossings."

We've been told you get a share of the NIS 500 that the Shehaiber family collects on each truck that goes through the crossing.

"That's a total lie."

But you know the Shehaiber brothers?

"Of course I do. They work with me every day."

And it's not a business partnership?

"It has nothing at all to do with what you're talking about. It's purely business, all legal, and has nothing to do with any 500 shekels."

What is your connection with Nazmi Mhana (the Palestinian director of the crossings)?

"Nazmi is a personal friend of mine. For some reason, it's hard for people to accept a proper, legitimate relationship between two adults."

We've been told that you also do jobs for the Palestinians.

"All the time, all the time. Including now."

How does one get these kinds of jobs?

"Be a person like me - serious, quiet, honest - and apply for any tender in proper legal fashion, and then work. Anyone who wants to can apply."

Doesn't the Israeli crossings administration have a problem with the fact that you also work in the Palestinian Authority?

"I don't speak with the crossings administration about anything. What I do with the Palestinian population, with the Palestinian Authority, with the Europeans - has nothing to do with that."

A lot of people we've talked with seemed genuinely nervous to even speak about you. Why are people afraid of you?

"Because I have integrity. Maybe because I don't deal in dirt."

Maybe because you were in the Shin Bet?

"What does the Shin Bet have to do with anything? It's been 10 years since I was in the Shin Bet."

Jan's business wasn't hurt by his entanglement in the affair of the transfer of gas canisters to the Palestinian Authority area. Less than a year ago, in late August, inspectors from the enforcement unit of the Infrastructure Ministry raided warehouses belonging to Jan in the southern industrial zone in Ashkelon. There the inspectors found about 100 tons of cooking gas and reported at the time that this was the largest amount of stolen gas ever discovered in Israel in recent years. The Israel Police's economic crimes unit began an investigation into the matter.

But you paid a fine.

"We paid, but not at the crossings. My shippers, who operate legally, stored the gas canisters in a place where they shouldn't have been stored, and so we paid the fine and I said that it was my merchandise, so I would bear the expenses and the consequences."

Isn't paying the fine akin to an admission that you committed an offense?

"Paying the fine is just a way of saying 'Leave me alone.' People just find it hard to accept that I'm not the person they think I am. When I was given the fine, I told [the person from the Infrastructure Ministry] right to his face: I'm paying, even though I think I'm more moral than anyone." W

Source: Haaretz

Ensemble Ambitions in a World Divided

2009-06-21T20:07:42Z

Above, from left, Suhail Khoury, Ahmad Al Khatib, Ibrahim Atari and Yousef Hbeisch performing at the Kennedy Center in Washington in March.

By DANIEL J. WAKIN

WISPS of mournful tunes from a cane flute mingled with the plucking, jangling arabesques of the zitherlike qanun, the oud and gentle drums. The sounds arose from a quartet of Arab musicians who call themselves the Oriental Music Ensemble as they shared a precious moment of togetherness in the Miller Theater at Columbia University in March.

Despite the cohesion implied by the word "ensemble," these four men are rarely in the same city, much less the same room. The politics of the Middle East confine them to four separate spheres and have turned them into a living metaphor for inescapable division.

"It's our story," said Suhail Khoury, who plays the traditional flute, or ney, and clarinet in the group. "It's like summing up Palestine."

The men are a cross section of the Palestinian experience in miniature: two Muslims, a Christian and a Druse. They live in Israel, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and abroad. The West Bank member cannot go to Israel because of Israeli travel restrictions on Palestinians. The Israeli Arab cannot go to the West Bank because of Israeli travel restrictions on Israelis. The one who lives in Sweden has a Jordanian passport but can travel to neither the West Bank nor Israel. And the one who lives in East Jerusalem said he is denied entry to Jordan for what he called "political reasons."

So when do they rehearse? Not very often. If they do, it is in places like Istanbul; New York; Bonn, Germany; or Morocco, where they are to perform at a festival in July. They gather in hotel rooms for intensive sessions before performances. When they go back to their homes, they exchange computer files of music, both written and recorded. The system is shaky; because so much of their music is improvised, rehearsal becomes even more crucial.

"Basically we have to get together in some place that has nothing to do with Palestine and Israel," Mr. Khoury said. "I just think how better we could perform if we were all the time together." He mused about what the simple act of gathering at his house in Jerusalem to jam would be like but sounded resigned that it might never happen. "Maybe this is it," he said. "This is how it gets energy."

The ensemble's artistic mission is intertwined with a more prosaic impulse: to make the case for Palestinian rights.

"We have to keep on," said Ahmad Al Khatib, who plays the lutelike oud and is the group's musical brain. "It's part of our identity, this cultural struggle."

The group started in 1997, when Mr. Khoury; Yousef Hbeisch, the percussionist; and Ibrahim Atari, who plays the qanun, were teaching at the recently founded National Conservatory of Music, now named after the Palestinian-American scholar Edward W. Said. Mr. Khatib replaced the original oud player in 2002.

The musicians gave a joint interview in a hotel room when they were in New York in March. They spoke further in April, in separate conversations. Mr. Khoury met with me in the Bethlehem branch of the national conservatory; Mr. Hbeisch, at a trendy seaside cafe in Haifa; and Mr. Atari, in his office in Ramallah, where he is director of another branch of the national conservatory. Mr. Khatib spoke by telephone from his home in Gothenburg, Sweden.

Their tale is the story of Palestinians in other ways. Mr. Khoury and Mr. Atari were politically active in their younger days, participants in the first intifada. Mr. Khatib grew up partly in a Jordanian refugee camp. Mr. Hbeisch feels the conflicting currents of Israeli Arabs. Mr. Khoury is a Christian; Mr. Atari and Mr. Khatib are Muslims; and Mr. Hbeisch is a Druse.

Though unabashedly political, they must walk a fine line in their music.

"We are playing classical instruments and music," Mr. Khatib said. "That's rare." For a performance to have honesty "it shouldn't be so connected to the political situation," he said. "Otherwise it becomes another form of music."

"We try to compose music that has a connection to the political situation but still sounds Oriental," he said. "Sometimes it succeeds. Sometimes it fails."

The classical forms in the Arabic music the ensemble plays generally do not use voices, so it is difficult to sing protest songs. But while the music sounds neutral, the group gives it a political cast in its program notes and discussions from the stage.

At the Miller Theater concert Mr. Khoury introduced a piece called "Oriental Tale," written by Mr. Khatib while Ramallah was under siege by Israeli forces. "From misery and darkness, sometimes a light, a flower has to come out," Mr. Khoury said. Then he took up his ney, inclining his head to the left, the ney extending to the right as he blew across its top from the right side of his mouth.

The final piece on the program was called "Atleet," after an Israeli prison where Mr. Khoury said he had been held for six months. There, he said, he fashioned a ney out of the plastic insulation for an electric wire by poking holes in it with a heated nail. He played music off in a corner, he added, out of the hearing of guards, as a few fellow prisoners listened.

Mr. Khoury, 45, the dominant extra-musical personality in the group, took the lead in the joint interview despite a quiet, almost motionless manner. He is a major presence on the Palestinian music scene, having helped found the national conservatory and now serving as its general director, in East Jerusalem. A composer, he also led other arts groups and served as an official in the Culture Ministry.

"He feels the burden of the occupation heavily, trying to run an institution in that situation and have it grow and expand," said Kathryn Habib, a former official of the American Near East Refugee Aid organization, who arranged the ensemble's American tours in 2006 and 2009.

Mr. Khoury was born to a music-loving family in Jerusalem, he said. He listened to Western classical music as a child and pretended to conduct. He studied clarinet, then picked up the ney. He spent two years at Birzeit University in the West Bank, where he became politically aware.

Then came clarinet study at the University of Iowa in Iowa City. In 1993, around the time of optimism for Palestinians after the Oslo peace accords, he and several fellow musicians opened the national conservatory.

Mr. Atari, 37, joined the faculty soon after and now runs the Ramallah branch. He studied music briefly at An-Najah National University, then catch-as-catch-can with various Turkish and Egyptian masters, learning both the Arabic and the Turkish forms of the qanun. (The Arabic qanun plays half-tones; the Turkish, quarter-tones, he explained.)

Mr. Atari, a burly, balding man, worked as an electrician to earn money, at first playing mostly at weddings, a major source of earnings for many Arabic classical musicians in the Palestinian territories. Then he joined the conservatory and built up the qanun program. He met his future wife, an Israeli Arab, in Ramallah, and the couple have two daughters. He cannot visit them in Israel because of the travel restrictions, but his wife can slip into the West Bank.

For Mr. Atari the ensemble is a source of comradeship. "We are not just a group, together just for performance," he said. "We are friends."

The youngest member is Mr. Khatib, 34. He produces many of the group's compositions and arrangements. His father, a poetry-loving amateur oud player, fled his village as a boy for Nablus in 1948. As an adult he went to teach in the Irbid refugee camp in Jordan, where Mr. Khatib spent the first 10 years of his life.

Mr. Khatib started studying the violin in school. He switched to the oud after three years, studying with an Iraqi teacher. Iraq at the time was a center of oud virtuosity. At Yarmouk University in Irbid, Mr. Khatib tried computer engineering.

"I couldn't do it," he said. "Music was much more appealing to me." So he changed to cello, which has fingering distances and shifts similar to those of the oud.

Mr. Khatib went to work at the national conservatory in Ramallah in 1998. He left the West Bank briefly in 2002, around the time he joined the group, after overstaying a visitor's permit, and because of a bureaucratic tangle and the denial of permission by the Israeli authorities, he has been unable to return. He found refuge in Sweden, which supports music in the Palestinian territories. He received a master's degree from the University of Gothenburg and now coaches ensembles and teaches theory there as well as leading oud master classes in Jordan and Sweden.

The long fallow periods between meetings of the ensemble put a strain on the music-making, Mr. Khatib said.

"We all need to generate energy and the ideas again from zero almost," he said. "You have to be so delicate. To be tight you have to play with the members a lot. It's not an issue of knowing what you want to do. It's playing, playing, playing. This is very difficult to do if you don't live in an easy situation, if you don't meet once a week.

"Every time we meet, we have to remember where we are. This makes the job very hard and not so satisfying musically. It's obvious we have a problem in communication musically due to where we live."

Mr. Hbeisch, 42, the percussionist, spends half the year in Haifa and half the year in Paris. In France he plays with an assortment of world music, classical and jazz groups. When in Israel, he occasionally slips into Ramallah to teach at the conservatory.

He was born in the village of Yirka, in Galilee, to a Druse family. Druse are an Arabic-speaking minority whose secretive religion is an offshoot of Islam.

His father would sing sacred Druse songs to the young Yousef. A brother began teaching him percussion, and he showed early expertise.

Mr. Hbeisch was drafted into the Israeli army but aggravated a spine injury in his first weeks of training. Surgery left one of his legs partly paralyzed, and he was forced to stay in bed for months. To practice he worked on complex rhythms by chattering his teeth, an art he demonstrated for me. Later he suffered macular degeneration, a loss of central vision, and he is nearly blind in his right eye.

"All these illnesses pushed me to go further and further," he said.

At 25 he went to the University of Haifa and studied philosophy and, later, music. He played in a rock band there.

Mr. Hbeisch's place in society is, in a sense, more complicated than that of his ensemble colleagues. He identifies with Palestinians displaced by the Jewish state but has the benefits of Israeli citizenship. At the same time, he said, he feels slighted as a member of a minority, the Druse. Mr. Hbeisch used to play for a mixed Jewish-Arab group, he said, but he came to see his presence in the group as tokenism, especially in the eyes of the audience.

"You see that they hate you, but they love it because you are playing with Jews," Mr. Hbeisch said. "They never invite you unless you are playing with Jews. It's pathetic."

With his Oriental Music Ensemble colleagues, the feeling is something else.

"I love this group and the music we are doing," he said. "It has a special character. There is something that unifies us on a personal level, and the experience we share together."

Source: The New York Times

Video: Israel Torturing Palestinian Civilian

2009-06-27T09:55:41Z

Haaretz - Border Policemen have filmed themselves abusing and humiliating Palestinians in videos they have posted on YouTube over the past year.

In one clip uploaded to the video sharing website an Arab youth is shown in arid terrain, slapping himself, while a voice is heard instructing him to say "I love you, Border Police," and "I will f**k you, Palestine," in Arabic. The victim is forced to respond to everything he is ordered to do, to the raucous laughter of the cameraman and his friends, all Border Policemen.

Embed code:

Forty-three seconds is all what you need to see to know what the Israeli-Jew-Zionist so called "Border Police" are all about. That's the duration of a video clip uploaded by an Israeli border police member to YouTube less than a year ago under the category of "Comedy."

For the "hero" of the clip, an unidentified young Arab, they were probably eternally long seconds and far from amusing. He was forced to slap himself and sing to the jubilant shouts of the photographer and his buddies - all of them members of Israel's Border Police.

This clip, which has been viewed more than 31,500 times (at the time of writing this), shows the unknown Palestinian standing in a desert setting while a disembodied voice orders him in Hebrew to hit himself: "Yallah, start, do it hard!"

The viewers hear the chuckles of the other policemen and a clear voice telling the Arab: "Say 'Ana behibak Mishmar Hagvul' ["I love the Border Police? in a mix of Arabic and Hebrew]. Say it!"

They see him obey in a subdued voice and with a frightened look, even as he goes on slapping himself. They hear the "director" laughing and the faceless voice shouting: "Again! Ana behibak Mishmar Hagvul."

After a little more than 30 seconds, the voice says, "Say 'Wahad hummus wahad ful'" - and the Arab man obeys and then is told to complete the rhyme: "Ana behibak Mishmar Hagvul" and "I will f**k you, Palestine" and the Arab youth obeys.

After 40 seconds, the abusers appear to have had enough and the voice impatiently orders the victim: "Yallah, rukh, rukh, rukh" ("go"). The camera turns and for a fraction of a second a Border Police Jeep is visible.

A few dozen Israeli-Jew viewers sent comments. "Hahahaha, it was great the way he excruciated himself." Another added: "That's how it should be!!!!! Stinking Arab."

And a third pointed out, "He should have been shot!! Sons of bitches." A few viewers took pity on the victim, though with reservations. One person remarked, "Mercy on the guy, even if he's an Arab. What's it in aid of? He didn?'t do anything."

This is the most moral army in the world!

Available on YouTube: http://bit.ly/13rnhM
Dailymotion: http://bit.ly/TFIgW
Blip.tv: http://blip.tv/file/2265481

Nahr al-Bared's forgotten Prime Areas

2009-06-19T17:24:51Z

A map of Nahr al-Bared refugee camp with the different areas marked.

The three-month-long war between the Lebanese army and Fatah al-Islam militants in the Palestinian refugee camp of Nahr al-Bared in northern Lebanon ended on 2 September 2007. While the Lebanese army has allowed displaced residents to return to some parts of the camp, the fate of other parts of the camp still under the army's control remains unclear.

Nahr al-Bared camp consists of an "old" and a "new" camp. The original or "old" refugee camp was established in 1949 on a piece of land 16 kilometers north of the Lebanese city of Tripoli. In 1950, the UN agency for Palestine refugees (UNRWA) started to provide its services to the camp's residents. Over the years, population density in Nahr al- Bared rose drastically while refugees who could afford it, left the boundaries of the official camp and settled in its immediate vicinity. This area is now referred to as the "new camp" or the "adjacent area" and belongs to the Lebanese municipalities of Muhammara and Bhannine. While the residents of the new camp benefit from UNRWA's education, health, relief and social services, the agency has no mandate for the construction and maintenance of the infrastructure and houses in this area.

Since the fighting in the camp ended nearly two years ago, most of the so-called "old camp" has been bulldozed and reconstruction is set to begin within the next month. Along the perimeter of the old camp however the ruins of more than 200 houses are still standing. They're under the sole control of the Lebanese army, which still prevents residents from returning.

Destroyed houses in area A'.

In October 2007, approximately one month after the Lebanese army declared victory, the first wave of refugees was allowed back into parts of the new camp. In the following months, the army gradually withdrew from the new camp and returned the houses and ruins to their former residents. However, the handover wasn't complete. At least 250 houses in the new camp, adjacent to the old camp, remain sealed off by barbed wire, controlled by the Lebanese army and inaccessible to its residents. These areas are now referred to as the "Prime Areas," known among the refugees under the Arabized term primaat. They consist of A'-, B'-, C'- and E'-Prime.

Adnan, who declined to give his family name, works in a small shop in the Corniche neighborhood, adjacent to area E'. He has been waiting for the handover of the area by the army. "They tell you, 'Next week, next month.' But nothing happens. They say, 'We first have to remove the bombs and the rubble, then we let people in.' These are empty words. Nobody is honest. They constantly lie to us," Adnan complained.

Temporary housing serves as the makeshift office of the Nahr al-Bared Reconstruction Commission for Civil Action and Studies (NBRC), a grassroots committee heavily involved in the planning of the reconstruction of the old camp. Abu Ali Mawed, an active member of the NBRC, owns one of the 120 buildings in area E and has been waiting for its handover for 21 months. "The army once more says they'll open the primaat, but first the army will need to clear them of unexploded ordnance devices and rubble. Where have the parties responsible for this work been in the past two years? Let us be honest: This area could be de-mined and cleared within just under a month!"

Destroyed houses in area B'.

Ismael Sheikh Hassan, a volunteer architect and planner with the NBRC, said, "The main reason for the delays is the army. They haven't taken the decision at command level to allow people to return until last month."

Since the end of May, things have seemed to finally move forward. On 19 May, an UNRWA contractor started clearing rubble in area B' and de-mining teams took up their work. UNRWA wrote in its weekly update on 3 June that its contractor had finished clearing rubble in areas B' and C'. In a meeting among the Lebanese army, Nahr al-Bared's Popular Committee, Palestinian parties and UNRWA on 2 June, the army announced its intention to allow the return of the residents of these two areas within two or three days. As of 7 June however the promise hadn't been delivered.

Sheikh Hassan explained that the suspension was mainly due to delays in de-mining procedures and those related to miscommunication among the various structures of the Lebanese army. He expected them to open areas B' and C' in a few days. There are 40 houses in B' and 60 buildings in C' to be handed over. On 11 June, UNRWA announced that they were told by the Lebanese army that the handover of B' and C' would take place mid-month.

The army's procedures have raised doubts. Abu Ali Mawed, the reconstruction commission member, asked, "How could they allow people last year to return to their burnt, looted and destroyed homes to save some of their belongings, if there were still vast amounts of unexploded ordnance lying around? They should have de-mined the area before letting people in. In the primaat, many houses aren't completely destroyed, which facilitates de-mining. I suppose that the unexploded ordinance have already been cleared and de-mining is only used as an excuse for further delaying the handover."

Destroyed houses in area E'.

According to UNRWA, the army and the Popular Committee will be responsible for announcing and coordinating the schedules and logistics of families returning to the Prime Areas.

Nidal Abdelal of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine shook his head: "So far, neither the Popular Committee nor UNRWA understand why the army doesn't hand the primaat over so people can return. The Lebanese army sets dates but doesn't deliver; this has happened four or fives times. And until today, minor problems in the details constantly prevent them from handing over the primaat."

Abdelal points out that the persistent delays of the handover dates cause skepticism and worries among the refugees. "They even call UNRWA and the Popular Committee liars," he says. "They tell people a date, then they postpone it. Then they set another date and again postpone it. In the end, the army controls the primaat and is responsible for their handover. They should eventually hand the areas over to UNRWA and the Popular Committee and let people return."

Another camp resident, Abu Ali Mawed, compared the situation of displaced residents of Nahr al-Bared to that of southern Lebanese displaced during the summer war of 2006: "Israel dropped about one million cluster bombs in the south, but people could immediately return to their homes once the war was over. Why have we for two years not been allowed to return to our houses? We asked these questions to the government, army representatives and politicians many times, but never got clear answers. They kept giving us lame excuses that were far from convincing."

Besides the upcoming handover of areas B' and C', further questions need to be answered. For example: What will happen to the houses in the primaat once they're accessible? These houses were assessed and will be stabilized and rehabilitated. If this isn't possible and their owners agree, they'll be torn down. An anonymous source with UNRWA believes that only a few homeowners will agree to the total destruction of their homes because other landlords have experienced that the Lebanese government doesn't sign building permits for Palestinians to build in the new camp.

Soldier at entrance to area E'

Currently unscheduled is the handover of areas A' and E'. Sheikh Hassan of the NBRC says there's speculation "that those areas will be opening in the upcoming months. However, there are no guarantees on this. E' will definitely be opened first. A' will be opened last." Access to E' seems to depend on the rubble removal and de-mining process in the adjacent two sectors of the old camp, because they're still heavily contaminated with unexploded ordnance. According to Nidal Ayyub of UNRWA, the Lebanese army so far has "no plan to open area A'."

However, the Lebanese army did have plans for the construction of an army base in Nahr al-Bared. On 16 January, the Lebanese cabinet decided to establish a naval base in the camp as well. Both plans concern mainly areas A' and E' and the coastal strip along the old camp. Just months ago, fierce protest to these plans was voiced by the camp's residents and the government has reportedly dropped its plans. However, only when the Lebanese army finally makes clear its intentions for the handover of the remaining parts of the camp will residents' worries be dispelled — or their fears for the future of Nahr al-Bared confirmed.

All images by Ray Smith.

Ray Smith is an activist with the anarchist video collective a-films.

Photo of the day

2009-06-19T12:42:59Z

Occupation of Gaza is Death

[Source: Anon]

Netanyahu Speaks with Twisted Tongue

2009-06-17T19:33:07Z

Cartoon by Khalil Bendib

By Dr. Elias Akleh*

In his foreign policy speech, Sunday 6/14 at the religiously extremist Bar Ilan University, the Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu did not only put the cart of peace in front of the horse, but he also loaded that cart with tons of heavy rocks. The Palestinian senior negotiator, Saeb Erekat, explained "The peace process has been moving at a turtle speed; tonight Netanyahu had flipped this turtle on its back".

Netanyahu started his speech paying lip service to peace, and claiming that all the Israelis want is peace because they are peaceful people starting with their ancient prophets who had a vision of peace. Apparently Netanyahu has not studied his religion very well, otherwise he would have discovered that all the ancient Jewish prophets, including Moses himself, were warmongers and soldiers for a militaristic god, who ordered them to slaughter every living non-Jewish soul. When Israelis talk about peace they are actually talking about war. Their ancient, as well as modern, history is a clear evidence of this fact.

Netanyahu mentioned "three tremendous challenges: The Iranian threat, the financial crisis, and the promotion of peace". Diverting attention from terrorist nuclear Israel he claimed that "the greatest danger to the Middle East and to all of humanity is the encounter between extremist Islam and nuclear weapons" represented in Muslim Iran not in Talmudic Israel. He vowed to work with American and European leaders to form "an international front against Iran". He would do that by inciting the clash between civilizations; Christianity vs Islam while Talmudists are maliciously watching.

As for economy Netanyahu called upon the leaders of the Arab countries, especially oil rich states, ".. the initiatives that I see in the Persian Gulf, which amaze the entire world", to join with the Israelis "to promote economic peace". He shamelessly called upon "the talented entrepreneurs of the Arab world to come and invest here (in Israel) … to give the (Israeli) economy a jump-start". He tried to lure these Arab entrepreneurs by enumerating the industrial talents of Israelis. He put a condition, though, on such cooperation; "If you only agree to work together"; in other words, according to the Israeli rules and under their leadership.

As for promoting peace Netanyahu asked the rhetorical question: "…why is peace still so far from us… why has the conflict been going on for over 60 years?" and he answered himself with his distorted simple truth: "The simple truth is that the root of the conflict has been - and remains - the refusal (of Arabs) to recognize the right of the Jewish People to its own state in its historical homeland". The real simple truth Netanyahu is trying to distort is that Palestinians refuse to be enslaved and subjugated by the Zionist occupation of their land, and resist the Zionist colonizing ambition of building greater Israel from Nile to Euphrates in order to rule the world from Jewish Jerusalem as the capital. Israel's occupation of Palestine and the denial of Palestinian legitimate rights are the real cause of the conflict.

Turning the historical facts upside down, distorting the real historical "cause and effect" of the conflict and ignoring the Zionist terror attacks against Palestinian civilians in their market places since the 1920's Netanyahu repeated the Israeli propaganda that the Arabs had instigated the conflict by attacking the Jews since then until the present. He ignored the fact that Israel's seven wars against the Arabs had always been initiated by successive Israeli governments.

Netanyahu claimed that Israelis had listened to "great many people", who advised them that withdrawal is the key to peace with Palestinians. So Israel tried withdrawal by agreement, withdrawal without agreement, partial withdrawal and full withdrawal, yet peace was not achieved. These so-called withdrawals, he talked about, were in fact defeats suffered by Israelis, who recognized that withdrawal from these occupied areas was cheaper and less painful than their continued occupation.

Ignoring all the peace negotiations, peace agreements, peace plans, and the Arab peace initiative, Netanyahu had the audacity to "appeal to the leaders of the Arab countries and say: Let us meet. Let us talk about peace. Let us make peace", and asked them to receive him in their capitals or to come to Jerusalem. He claimed that "the more we (Israelis) get to a peace agreement with them (Palestinians), the more they are distancing themselves from peace. They raise new demands". Netanyahu has flipped the coin, here. It is an undeniable fact that the Israelis, themselves, are distancing themselves from peace and are constantly raising new demands. Netanyahu's speech is a clear example of sabotaging peace agreements and raising new demands.

Arabs had been talking peace since 1948 but the Israelis had never listened. There are no real peace partners in Israel. They have rejected all peace initiatives even the one that would have guaranteed them full recognition, protection, and economical relationships.

Netanyahu wanted to annul all previous negotiations and agreements and start fresh from point zero. "Let us begin peace negotiations immediately without prior conditions" he called upon the Arabs. Yet prior and impossible to accept conditions was his speech all about.

"The fundamental condition for ending the conflict is the public, binding and sincere Palestinian recognition of Israel as the national homeland of the Jewish People" He warned. He claimed that there is 3,500 years connection between the Jewish People and the Land of Judea and Samaria (West Bank of Palestine); the land of Jewish forefathers. This lie is refuted by remembering the fact that Abraham, the father of the three religions, had come from Ur on the Iraqi/Iranian borders, and that the original inhabitants of Palestine were the Cana'anites, who are the forefathers of the present-day Palestinians. Read ancient history and the Old Testament Mr. Netanyahu! He is alleging here that Palestinians are foreigners in, and possibly occupiers of, Palestine.

This precondition aims to annul Palestinians' rights to the land, to sabotage any peace negotiations, and to eventually legitimize illegitimate Zionist Jewish Israel. Initially the condition was to recognize Israel's right to exist. Now they want Israel to be recognized as a Jewish state. Next step will be to recognize legitimacy of terrorist Zionist Jewish Israel. This recognition is the first step of ethnically cleansing all the non-Jews from occupied Palestine. The Zionist term of "Jewish Israel" has the hidden Israeli future intention and agenda of deporting the 1.5 million Palestinians living as Israeli citizens in the Zionist state.

The second precondition, or principle as Netanyahu named it, is demilitarization, which "..is crucial to the existence of Israel". He stated that "Any area in Palestinian hands has to be demilitarized, with solid security measures. Without this condition, there is a real fear that there will be an armed Palestinian state which will become a terrorist base against Israel". We have to notice here that he did not mention a Palestinian state but "area in Palestinian hands", thus not recognizing the two-state solution. Such areas, according to Netanyahu, must not have control over its air or its borders, but should have a strong Palestinian government, whose job is to protect Israeli security by suppressing Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation, and brainwashing the mind of the new generations through programmed education to accept Zionist occupation and enslavement. What Netanyahu proposes here is isolated Palestinian ghettos with suppressive self-rule within heavily militarized Jewish Israel.

The third precondition was solving "the Palestinian refugee problem outside of the borders of the State of Israel". Netanyahu considered the internationally recognized Palestinian right of return to their homeland as contradictory to the continued existence of Israel as a Jewish state. He considered the Palestinian refugee problem a humanitarian problem and called for international investment to solve it. "I believe that with good will and international investment we can solve this humanitarian problem once and for all". Netanyahu denied the responsibility of the Israeli occupation in creating the Palestinian refugee problem. This is an occupation not a humanitarian problem. Netanyahu wants the international community to take care of this problem. It seems Israel is accustomed to, and feels has the right to, get the international community to pay for its own crimes.

Netanyahu resembled the Palestinian refugees' problem to what he called "Jewish refugees from Arab countries, who were uprooted from their homes". These so-called uprooted Jewish refugees from Arab countries had immigrated to Israel on their own accord despite the pleas of Arab governments not to leave. Many of these so-called Jewish refugees were lured and misguided by Zionist money and ideology, and others were coerced to leave Arab countries by Zionist terror attacks attributed to Arabs. Many Jews are still living in Arab and Islamic countries not willing to leave such as in Lebanon, in Iraq, in Syria, in Iran and practically in all the North African Arab countries.

The fourth precondition was the territorial issues that "… will be discussed in a permanent agreement". Netanyahu tried here to appease Obama's settlement freeze demand when he stated that "we have no intention to build new settlements". Yet, at the same time, he needed to assure his pro-settlement governmental coalitional parties, such as the extremist Israel Beituna, that he would not freeze settlements. So he stated that "settlers are not enemies of peace. They are our brothers and sisters". He supported "normal growth" to meet the people's (Jewish) need to live normal lives; a growth on the expense of Palestinian land. Palestinians are denied such normal growth by denying them building permits.

The most controversial pre-condition was the issue of Jerusalem. Netanyahu stated that as part of the permanent arrangement "Israel needs defensible borders with Jerusalem remaining the united capital of Israel". Jerusalem is one of the most holy places for Christian and Muslim Arabs, so holy that they ceded 78% of Palestine to Israel on the condition to keep east Jerusalem, at least, as a Palestinian capital. Jerusalem is the mother of all conflict.

Like the rest of all Zionist leaders before him, Netanyahu could not but exhibit the racist, extremist, condescending Zionist attitude of Jews as the light unto all nations when he declared that "the right to establish our sovereign state here, in the Land of Israel, arises from one simple fact: Eretz Israel is the birthplace of the Jewish People …where the People of Israel created the Book of Books, and gave it to the world".

Palestine is not the birthplace (god's promised land) of the Jews. Most of the Israeli Jews were not born in Palestine and those who did were the result of illegal occupation. The majority of the present-day Jews are the descendents of the Khazars and Westerners, who adopted Judaism. Judaism is a religion and not a nationality.

What "Book of Books" is Netanyahu talking about? Is he talking about the racist, hate-inciting, warmongering Talmud with teaching such as Jews as god's chosen people while the rest of nations are merely animal souls incarnated in human bodies only to serve Jews? Such a book fades away next to the other religious books that teach human brotherhood, love and peace.

* Dr. Elias Akleh is an Arab writer from a Palestinian descent born in the town of Beit Jala. His family was first evicted from Haifa after the "Nakba" of 1948, then from Beit Jala after the "Nakseh" of 1967. He lives now in the US, and publishes his articles on the web in both English and Arabic.

Video: Nahr al-Bared Camp - A Sip of Coffee

2009-06-17T17:51:47Z

In may 2007, the battle between Fatah Al-Islam and the Lebanese army broke out in Nahr Al-Bared refugee camp in northern Lebanon. Amidst heavy fighting, the Lebanese army had systematically destroyed the entire camp by september 2007. Two years later, nearly all the rubble has been cleared from the "old camp", the core of Nahr Al-Bared. however, though the displaced residents grow increasingly desperate, reconstruction has yet to begin.

Not only does the Lebanese army keep people away from the old camp, but it also controls movement in and out of the surrounding area known as the "new camp." Anyone entering the new camp requires a valid permit issued by the army. Refugees and NGOs working to revitalize the once robust economy of the camp face crippling isolation, as the marketplace of Nahr Al-Bared is totally cut off from the surrounding villages. A flailing economy and soaring unemployment are only a few of the consequences of the destruction and ongoing siege of the camp.

This 26-minute film follows a father and his son as they attempt to deal with their unemployment. The two have been living in metal barracks for more than a year, waiting to return to their camp. By documenting issues of reconstruction, temporary housing, economy, unemployment and despair, the film touches on the daily experience of life in Nahr Al-Bared camp.

The film can be downloaded here (.mpeg/804mb) and here (.mov/313mb) in good quality. It can be watched here (part 1/2/3) on youtube or below.

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Via: A-Films

Does Israel Really Have a Right to Exist?

2009-06-17T19:26:43Z

Get out of MY land - By Carlos Latuff

by Susan Abulhawa*

Following Netanyahu's much anticipated policy speech, politicians and journalists, like mindless automatons, have set about repeating Israel's tired mantra that Palestinians should recognize Israel's right to exist. Never mind the fact that the PLO and Palestine Authority have obliged this ludicrous call, not once, but four times. And never mind that Israel has always denied Palestine's right to exist, not only as a nation, but as individuals seeking a dignified life in our own homeland.

Does anyone find it interesting that Israel is the only country on the planet going around with this incessant insistence that everyone recognize her right to exist? Given that we Palestinians are the ones who have been dispossessed, occupied, and oppressed, one might expect that we should be the ones making such a demand. But t hat isn't the case. Why? Because our right to exist as a nation is self-evident. We are the natives of that land! We know we have that right. The world knows it. That's why Palestine doesn't need Israel or any other country to recognize her right to exist. We are the rightful heirs to that land and this can be verified legally, historically, culturally, and even genetically. And as such, the only true legitimacy Israel will ever have must come from us abdicating our inheritance, our history, and our culture to Israel. That's why Israel insists we declare she had a right to take everything we ever had - from home and property, cemeteries, churches and mosques, to culture and history and hope.

Israel is a country that was founded by Europeans who came to Palestine, formed terrorist gangs who set about a systematic ethnic cleansing of the native Palestinians from their homes on 78% of Historic Palestine in 1948. Those Palestinians and their descendants still languish in refugee camps. Israel attempted a similar scenario in 1967 when they conquered the remainder of Palestine, but Palestinians then couldn't be dislodged from their homes as easily. This remains true, despite 40 years of Israel's violent and oppressive military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Despite home demolitions, land confiscations, rapacious building of Jewish-only colonies, endless checkpoints, targeted assassinations, bombings of schools, hospitals, municipal buildings and malls, closures and denials; despite the massive human rights abuses, the imprisonment and torture of men women and children alike, the separation of families, the daily humiliations; despite the massive killings - Palestinians remain. We still resist. We still live, love, and have babies. As much as we can, we rebuild what Israel destroys. Such are rights!
Rights are inherent and inherently just, like the right to live with dignity and to be masters of one's own fate. It is a human right not be persecuted and oppressed because you happen to belong to one religion and not another.

That Israelis simply take property belonging to Palestinians is not a right. That is theft. That Israel cut off the movement of food, medicine and other basic goods to the Gaza strip, causing massive malnutrition, economic collapse and misery because Palestinians elected particular leaders is not a right. That is an affront to humanity. That Israel rain death from the skies on an already battered and starved Gaza, murdering over 3000 human beings and maiming thousands more in a single month is not a right. It's a war crime. That Israel has employed every imperialistic tactic to subjugate, humiliate, break, and expel an entire nation of principally unarmed civilians because of their religion is not a right. It is a moral obscenity. That every Jew from Europe, Africa, Asia, the Americas, and Australia be entitled to dual citizenship, one in their native country and one in Israel, while the rightful heirs to the land linger as refugees without citizenship anywhere is not a right. It is an outrage.

I'm sure my words will be twisted in some way to imply that I'm advocating pushing Israelis "into the sea" or some other asinine claim. So let me be explicit: We all have the right to exist, to live, to be masters of our own destiny. We all have the right not to be oppressed by others. Such rights are inherent to every individual living in that land: Jew, Muslim, or Christian. But Israelis do not have the right to create particular religious demographics by causing the demise of the natives. To be a Jewish [or Muslim or Christian] state, where privilege is accorded to those belonging to a particular religion at the expense of those who do not is not a right.

A nation that discriminates against and oppresses those who do not belong to a particular religious, racial, or ethnic group is not a light onto nations. It is a blight. And to recognize such racism as a human or national right goes against every tenet of international law. It defies the basic sense that the worth of a human being should not be measured by their religion, any more than it should be measured by the color of their skin or the language they speak.

* Susan Abulhawa is the author of The Scar of David, a work of historic fiction. She is also the founder of Playgrounds for Palestine, http://www.PlaygroundsforPalestine.org and Board Member of Deir Yassin Remembered. She can be reached at: sjabulhawa@yahoo.com.

To make an Israeli omelet is it necessary to break so many eggs?

2009-06-15T20:02:56Z

By ROGER PULVERS

"Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg. . . . Bombers and tanks and rockets and white phosphorus shells are that high, solid wall. The eggs are the unarmed civilians who are crushed and burned and shot by them. . . . Think of it this way. Each of us is, more or less, an egg. Each of us is a unique, irreplaceable soul enclosed in a fragile shell."

Haruki Murakami at the (Occupied) Jerusalem Prize

Though many of his compatriots criticized him for accepting Israel's Jerusalem Prize for 2009, Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami nonetheless went to Israel to accept it. In his moving acceptance speech, delivered in English on Feb. 20, Murakami identified with the Palestinian victims, the eggs, against what he called "the System" that Israel has created in various physical and psychological forms to contain and isolate Palestinians.

"The System," said Murakami in this speech, "is supposed to protect us, but sometimes it takes on a life of its own, and then it begins to kill us and cause us to kill others - coldly, efficiently, systematically."

In his reference to the wall, Murakami meant not only the structure that Israel is erecting, presumably to afford it security, but also a slew of Israeli actions, including the use of illegal weaponry, unleashed on their Palestinian neighbors.

The wall itself, scheduled for completion next year, comprises imposing, vertical slabs of concrete, as well as watchtowers, electrified fences and razor-coil wire. Its $2-billion cost includes the leveling of Palestinian land and the felling of more than 100,000 trees to guarantee the wall's "integrity."

Can Israelis sit back, once this wall is finished, and feel secure? Or has the Israeli government, with its wall and its oppressive measures against Palestinians, become the very architect of the nation's insecurity?

Walls are built to be torn down, as is this one which offers sham protection. U.S. President Barack Obama, who on June 4 delivered a moderate speech in Cairo to the Muslim world, would have made a greater impact had he paraphrased the words of another president (Ronald Reagan) about another "great wall": "Mr. Netanyahu, tear down that wall!"

Murakami generally shuns the limelight and rarely makes political statements. It took personal courage on his part to denounce Isreal's apartheid-like policies while there.

A similar stance was taken recently by U.S. scholar Herbert Bix, whose "Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan" won a Pulitzer Prize in 2001. Writing this month in the online newsletter, The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus, Bix brilliantly analyzes Israeli intentions and deeds in his essay titled "The Israeli-U.S. Gaza War and its Aftermath." (I add here that I am an associate of the journal.) There, he reminds us that the wall is an utterly illegal manifestation of a broad policy of intimidation and aggression against Palestinians.

"In July 2004," Bix writes, "Israeli jurists on the High Court of Justice deliberated on Israel's separation wall in the occupied Palestinian West Bank. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) at The Hague had just determined, by a vote of 13 to 2, that the 30-foot-high (10-meter) wall was part of Israel's policy of building settlements on stolen or confiscated Palestinian land, and had condemned it as an illegal land grab which other states should not recognize. The U.N. General Assembly almost immediately called on Israel to comply with the ICJ advisory opinion and end its illegal wall-building, whose real aim was the defense of settlements, not Israel itself."

But everyone, as Murakami suggested in his acceptance speech, relates to great issues in a personal way; and I, too, see Israel from the standpoint of my own upbringing and education.

I grew up in a thoroughly Jewish household and can trace my ancestors, on my mother's side, back through the 400 years they lived in Krakow, Poland. Though my parents spoke no foreign languages, I made it a point to study Russian and Polish and, thanks to that knowledge, was able to find out more about my roots than my parents could have known. I have read and studied every major Jewish author who came from East-Central Europe, cook a blintz as light as a dirigible, and can tell so many Jewish jokes it isn't funny.

I open that window on myself neither to boast nor to establish a pedigree. I just don't want any schmendriks writing in and calling me an anti-Semite just because I don't believe Israel should be a Jewish state. (A schmendrik is half fool, half jerk.)

I am also not a philo-Semite. If we Jews are the chosen people, we have been chosen to be like anybody else. And if Israeli policies toward Palestinians are wide open to criticism, as Bix suggests in his essay, then it just goes to show that when Jews establish their own state, they end up acting much like the Japanese did in their period of expansion (roughly the half-century from 1895 to 1945): Take what you can get and blame it on persecution past and present.

When the state of Israel was founded 61 years ago, it was recognized immediately by the United States, whose support has been the linchpin of Israeli geopolitics ever since. The second nation to recognize Israel was the USSR, ensuring that, at least in the initial stage, Israel's national integrity was protected from Cold War posturings. Recognition by Arab states and Iran one day is desirable and inevitable.

I have every reason to believe that, once Israeli citizens renounce the definition of their country as "the Jewish state," Israel can exist securely as a multicultural democracy in peace with a Palestinian state and its other Arab neighbors.

In the long history of the Jewish people, there have been, on the whole, harmonious relations with Muslims in their societies. Jews in the Middle East, in Turkey and in Iran lived for centuries in harmony with Muslims, experiencing little or no persecution. It has been the Christians who have given Jews a hard time; and it is ironic that countries such as the United States, overwhelmingly Christian as it is, now bend over backward to demonstrate support for Israel as a Jewish state. Is this association by guilt?

The issues between Muslims and Jews are geopolitical, not religious, though fanatics on both sides are wont, for their own aggrandizement, to couch them in terms of the latter. This is why I am hopeful for the future of the Middle East, insofar as the problems there relate to Israel. History is on the side of Muslim- Jewish harmony.

Murakami was right to go to Israel and say his peace. His eloquence, I believe, will someday resound throughout the Middle East:

"We are all human beings, individuals transcending nationality and race and religion, fragile eggs faced with a solid wall called the System. We must not allow the System to exploit us. We must not allow the System to take on a life of its own. The System did not make us: We made the System. That is all I have to say to you."

Source: The Japan Times

Haruki Murakami Acceptance Speech:

Always on the side of the egg

I have come to Jerusalem today as a novelist, which is to say as a professional spinner of lies.

Of course, novelists are not the only ones who tell lies. Politicians do it, too, as we all know. Diplomats and military men tell their own kinds of lies on occasion, as do used car salesmen, butchers and builders. The lies of novelists differ from others, however, in that no one criticizes the novelist as immoral for telling them. Indeed, the bigger and better his lies and the more ingeniously he creates them, the more he is likely to be praised by the public and the critics. Why should that be?

My answer would be this: Namely, that by telling skillful lies - which is to say, by making up fictions that appear to be true - the novelist can bring a truth out to a new location and shine a new light on it. In most cases, it is virtually impossible to grasp a truth in its original form and depict it accurately. This is why we try to grab its tail by luring the truth from its hiding place, transferring it to a fictional location, and replacing it with a fictional form. In order to accomplish this, however, we first have to clarify where the truth lies within us. This is an important qualification for making up good lies.

Today, however, I have no intention of lying. I will try to be as honest as I can. There are a few days in the year when I do not engage in telling lies, and today happens to be one of them.

So let me tell you the truth. A fair number of people advised me not to come here to accept the Jerusalem Prize. Some even warned me they would instigate a boycott of my books if I came.

The reason for this, of course, was the fierce battle that was raging in Gaza. The UN reported that more than a thousand people had lost their lives in the blockaded Gaza City, many of them unarmed citizens - children and old people.

Any number of times after receiving notice of the award, I asked myself whether traveling to Israel at a time like this and accepting a literary prize was the proper thing to do, whether this would create the impression that I supported one side in the conflict, that I endorsed the policies of a nation that chose to unleash its overwhelming military power. This is an impression, of course, that I would not wish to give. I do not approve of any war, and I do not support any nation. Neither, of course, do I wish to see my books subjected to a boycott.

Finally, however, after careful consideration, I made up my mind to come here. One reason for my decision was that all too many people advised me not to do it. Perhaps, like many other novelists, I tend to do the exact opposite of what I am told. If people are telling me - and especially if they are warning me - "don't go there," "don't do that," I tend to want to "go there" and "do that." It's in my nature, you might say, as a novelist. Novelists are a special breed. They cannot genuinely trust anything they have not seen with their own eyes or touched with their own hands.

And that is why I am here. I chose to come here rather than stay away. I chose to see for myself rather than not to see. I chose to speak to you rather than to say nothing.

This is not to say that I am here to deliver a political message. To make judgments about right and wrong is one of the novelist's most important duties, of course.

It is left to each writer, however, to decide upon the form in which he or she will convey those judgments to others. I myself prefer to transform them into stories - stories that tend toward the surreal. Which is why I do not intend to stand before you today delivering a direct political message.

Please do, however, allow me to deliver one very personal message. It is something that I always keep in mind while I am writing fiction. I have never gone so far as to write it on a piece of paper and paste it to the wall: Rather, it is carved into the wall of my mind, and it goes something like this:

"Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg."

Yes, no matter how right the wall may be and how wrong the egg, I will stand with the egg. Someone else will have to decide what is right and what is wrong; perhaps time or history will decide. If there were a novelist who, for whatever reason, wrote works standing with the wall, of what value would such works be?

What is the meaning of this metaphor? In some cases, it is all too simple and clear. Bombers and tanks and rockets and white phosphorus shells are that high, solid wall. The eggs are the unarmed civilians who are crushed and burned and shot by them. This is one meaning of the metaphor.

This is not all, though. It carries a deeper meaning. Think of it this way. Each of us is, more or less, an egg. Each of us is a unique, irreplaceable soul enclosed in a fragile shell. This is true of me, and it is true of each of you. And each of us, to a greater or lesser degree, is confronting a high, solid wall. The wall has a name: It is The System. The System is supposed to protect us, but sometimes it takes on a life of its own, and then it begins to kill us and cause us to kill others - coldly, efficiently, systematically.

I have only one reason to write novels, and that is to bring the dignity of the individual soul to the surface and shine a light upon it. The purpose of a story is to sound an alarm, to keep a light trained on The System in order to prevent it from tangling our souls in its web and demeaning them. I fully believe it is the novelist's job to keep trying to clarify the uniqueness of each individual soul by writing stories - stories of life and death, stories of love, stories that make people cry and quake with fear and shake with laughter. This is why we go on, day after day, concocting fictions with utter seriousness.

My father died last year at the age of 90. He was a retired teacher and a part-time Buddhist priest. When he was in graduate school, he was drafted into the army and sent to fight in China. As a child born after the war, I used to see him every morning before breakfast offering up long, deeply-felt prayers at the Buddhist altar in our house. One time I asked him why he did this, and he told me he was praying for the people who had died in the war.

He was praying for all the people who died, he said, both ally and enemy alike. Staring at his back as he knelt at the altar, I seemed to feel the shadow of death hovering around him.

My father died, and with him he took his memories, memories that I can never know. But the presence of death that lurked about him remains in my own memory. It is one of the few things I carry on from him, and one of the most important.

I have only one thing I hope to convey to you today. We are all human beings, individuals transcending nationality and race and religion, fragile eggs faced with a solid wall called The System. To all appearances, we have no hope of winning. The wall is too high, too strong - and too cold. If we have any hope of victory at all, it will have to come from our believing in the utter uniqueness and irreplaceability of our own and others' souls and from the warmth we gain by joining souls together.

Take a moment to think about this. Each of us possesses a tangible, living soul. The System has no such thing. We must not allow The System to exploit us. We must not allow The System to take on a life of its own. The System did not make us: We made The System.

That is all I have to say to you.

I am grateful to have been awarded the Jerusalem Prize. I am grateful that my books are being read by people in many parts of the world. And I am glad to have had the opportunity to speak to you here today.

Netanyahu Speech: Palestinian Reaction

2009-06-15T18:45:22Z

Netanyahu Peace Offer by Carlos Latuff

Ahmad Tibi, a Palestinian citizen of Israel and member of the Israeli Knesset representing the United Arab List-Ta'al party, which was nearly barred from running in Israel's last election: Netanyahu's speech is a deceptive attempt to bypass Obama's call for a complete settlement freeze. He said nothing new, but instead reiterated the racist demand that Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state. This is not only racist, but will give Israel the excuse to discriminate against more than 20 percent of its population. I hope the Americans see the speech for the deception that it is.

Mustafa Barghouthi, a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council, Secretary General of the Palestinian National Initiative and former candidate for Palestinian president: Netanyahu is attempting to mislead the world community by substituting a ghetto for a Palestinian state. He is no partner for peace. His whole speech was nothing but the consolidation of apartheid, not only in the territories but within Israel. Also, he preempted any possibility for negotiations because while he's calling for no preconditions he is simultaneously saying all of Jerusalem is Israel's capital, there will be no freeze of settlements, and the refugees cannot come home. He's clearly deciding the most important issues while claiming he's open to negotiations.

Hassan Jabareen, founder and general director of Adalah, The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel: "In his speech, Netanyahu put forth all the obstacles for reaching any reconciliation. First, when he spoke of recognizing Israel as a Jewish state he neglected the status of Arab Palestinian citizens of Israel as equal citizens of the state, and therefore, he relegated them to second-class citizenship status. Second, while he mentioned the term "Palestinian state," in fact, he spoke about Palestinian autonomy and not an independent state as it would not control its borders or skies, similar to the status quo. Third, East Jerusalem and the Palestinian refugees, in his vision, are excluded from any negotiation. Clearly, Netanyahu failed to recognize the Palestinians' right to self-determination.

Diana Buttu, a Palestinian citizen of Israel living in Ramallah, attorney and former advisor to Palestinian negotiators: Netanyahu offered a litany of demands that the Arabs and Palestinians must adhere to, but he failed to mention even a single statement about what Israel is going to do in order to effect peace. Even something as basic as a settlement freeze, Netanyahu refused to accept. He made it clear that what he wants to see in the future is a repackaging of the occupation in which Israel continues to control the Palestinians rather than complete Palestinian freedom. Netanyahu is trying to replace real peace with the fig leaf of an improved economic situation. His approach fails to recognize that this is a political problem requiring a political solution and not an economic problem with economic solutions."

Sam Bahour, a Palestinian-American businessman living in Ramallah: In a brief and shallow policy address at one of the most right-wing Israeli universities, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was visibly nervous and edgy as he reverted to sloganeering instead of accepting Israel's historic responsibility toward regional peace. Clearly aiming to appease President Obama's new thrust to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Netanyahu uttered some of the words that all were seeking like peace and statehood but stripped them of substance. Netanyahu and his coalition still refuse to acknowledge that Israel is an occupying power responsible for daily war crimes and the bearer of a sophisticated ethnic cleansing campaign against Palestinians. The speech clearly slapped President Obama and the international community in the face and should motivate the US to finally act to bring Israel in line with international law; otherwise, the future will offer only more of the past.

Source: IMEU

Reflect and resist

2009-06-17T19:31:13Z

From theatre in a Bethlehem refugee camp to the Venice biennale, Palestinians are making art out of adversity - and doing it with grace, finds Ahdaf Soueif, organiser of the Palestine festival of literature

Leaning against padded walls in a darkened room we eavesdrop on an argument: "the elite think they can get independence without resistance - by collaboration -"

"What's wrong with being normal? Normality as a form of resistance -"

"What is normal?"

"You know, sometimes I forget that we're under occupation . . ."

Last week I heard the same phrases in Ramallah. Today, we're listening to them at the Venice biennale, in Ramallah Syndrome, a sound installation by Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti.

New beginnings . . . Emily Jacir's proposal for Venice's vaporetto stops. Photograph: Emily Jacir

Three biennales ago, in 2003, Bethlehem-born Hilal and her husband, Petti, provided the exhibition with Stateless Nation: a number of giant passports that you came upon, one by one, in the pavilions of different states. The passports were issued by different authorities, but the bearer's place of birth was always Palestine. Now I'm struck by the converse: the number of people born in different parts of the world who identify themselves and act as Palestinians. And this year the Palestinians have - well, not a pavilion, but a space of their own. As one of the 44 "Collateral Events" of the 53rd biennale, they are housed - courtesy of the City of Venice - in the former Convento dei Santi Cosma e Damiano.

A few metres away from Ramallah Syndrome, on a spotlit patch of floor, tiny figures float, meet and merge, reproduce, splinter, vanish; OK, hit, hit but don't run is an animation by Shadi Habib Allah that aims, he says, to create a "tension between the mechanisation of nature and the naturalisation of the mechanical". It makes you think of amoebas, of cells under microscopes. You can follow a meandering train of thought to the Palestinian condition if you like. But you don't have to. The point about the art on show here is that it both resists the Israeli project for Palestine and resists being seen only in terms of resistance.

Six Palestinian artists are grouped in Palestine c/o Venice - the name reflects Palestine's historic condition of always being c/o someone else: the Ottoman empire, the British mandate, Jordan, Egypt, Israel. In an excellent catalogue, the curator, Salwa Mikdadi, describes the strategy of the exhibition, from the 100% Palestinian financing to seeking out Italian artistic partnerships. Most significant is the exhibition's presence, with duplicate work, in six art institutions in Palestinian cities. And here we have the elements at the heart of so much Palestinian work now.

Palestinian philanthropists and charitable organisations have been working in aid and education for some time; the Welfare Association, for example, marked its 25th anniversary last year. But recently a second generation has become visible. Young, dynamic and mostly American-educated, they are branching out to finance and invest in art - to notable effect.

Diaspora Palestinians are constantly activating links with home - and links between different bits of home - forming productive partnerships as part of a wider community of artists. As the Israeli process of building walls, settlements and settlement-only roads breaks up and cuts off established communities in Palestine, their friends abroad work to establish bridgeheads, virtual links, common projects.

Khalil Rabah's presentation at the biennale is an account of the restoration work undertaken in 50 Palestinian villages by the Palestinian architectural NGO, Riwaq. His aim is clear: "Riwaq has created an opportunity not only to investigate the trappings of our visual and cultural codes, but also to look at ways to reconnect isolated and walled Palestine to the international art world."

Jawad al-Malhi's House No 197 concentrates on the "project" where he grew up, Shufhat refugee camp in Jerusalem, where buildings - although built in concrete - are "never conceived as a whole from foundation to rooftop, but rather are built in piecemeal fashion for temporary use as their occupants wait to leave". The work, which also examines community and its durability under stress, is eerie in its crowdedness, emptiness, the occasional splash of colour.

Taysir Batniji zooms in on one room, his studio in Gaza - inaccessible to him for almost two years because of Israel's siege. In Hannoun, the studio floor blossoms with the pink curls of pencil shavings: are they evidence of a thousand acts of preparation for one act that hasn't - and may not - happen (writing or drawing)? Or are they poppies? The blood of martyrs dead in their thousands for something that may or may not happen? Batniji's works, the artist says, are always an attempt to speak to what is going on, but also beyond it; he wants them to have "an existence sustained through time, not consumed by the actual situation or event they evoke". As Mahmoud Darwish said in his address to the writers of the first Palestine festival of literature just before he died in 2008: "An art born of a defined reality is able to create a reality that transcends reality - an alternative, imagined reality."

The overall title of this year's Venice biennale is Making Worlds. "It is," says the director, Daniel Birnbaum, "about possible new beginnings." One such beginning - or resumption - was envisaged by Emily Jacir. Jacir, winner of the Golden Lion at the 2007 Venice biennale and, in 2008, of the Guggenheim's Hugo Boss prize, planned to display the names of each vaporetto station along the Grand Canal in Arabic alongside the Italian. "Centuries of cross-cultural exchange between Venice and the Arab world are clearly visible along the canal . . . The Arabic translations place each floating platform in direct dialogue with the surrounding architecture and urban design, linking them with various elements of Venice's shared heritage with the Arab world" - and pointing to possible future exchanges. The intervention was approved by the biennale commission and by the Venice municipality. It was welcomed by the vaporetto company, and Jacir began work, but a month later the official letter from the company came - and it refused the project. No reason was given for passing up this opportunity to highlight an un-crusading, mutually beneficial and productive historic relationship between a western power and the Arab world.

Mona Hatoum's exploration of relationships in her solo exhibition is more oblique. Her work is on two floors of the Fondazione Querini Stampalia museum. On one floor, her objects are wittily inserted into the permanent exhibits: a circle of elegant drawing-room chairs are connected by a spider's web of emerald beads. Under a huge late 17th-century painting of a battle, described as an oeuvre d'inspiration militaire and praised for the violence of its effets de lumiére, Hatoum's Natura Morta places - in an antique cabinet - hand grenades produced in mirrored glass. They are made in Murano and could be exquisite Christmas tree baubles in luminous reds, lime greens, sapphire blues and sunshine yellows. On the other floor are her stand-alone works: Hot Spot III, a huge wire globe with the contours of the world's continents outlined in red neon fizzing and spitting with electricity; and the breathtaking Impenetrable, where a cube constructed out of three-metre lengths of barbed wire becomes an object of both dread and wonder as it shimmers and levitates in a white room. From certain angles, you can just about see a way through the wire.

What is clear is that, behind Hatoum, Jacir, al-Malhi and every Palestinian artist making a name internationally, there is a whole society in a state of cultural mobilisation. You can interpret this mobilisation as a survival mechanism; a visceral response to Israel's continuing occupation, its ever-tightening siege. Or as a product of the money invested in Palestinian "culture" over recent decades by international donors. Whether it's one or the other, or both, the result is a tremendous surge of activity throughout Palestine, with people from every sector engaging in activities that they define as cultural and as affirming Palestinian identity and resistance.

People tend to think of resistance as resistance to one force. Palestinians today have several to choose from. Israel is the obvious one, then there's American and European complicity in the Israeli project, and the Arab leaders' subservience to American complicity. And recently there have been the bloody internal divisions of the Palestinian leadership. Resistance, therefore, is an insistence not just on freedom and statehood, important as they are, but on identity, cohesion and being part of the larger world.

As we travelled through Palestinian cities for the Palestine festival of literature two weeks ago, this cultural mobilisation was as evident, as visible, as Israel's wall - itself now a giant canvas for local and international drawings and graffiti. In Jenin, we visited the university and the Freedom Theatre, then lunched at a women's co-operative where the members made a living by cooking traditional recipes and selling traditional embroidery. The founder, Imm Imad, told us about her son, a journalist, who was killed by the Israelis as he photographed their invasion of Jenin in 2003. His portrait dominated the main room. "It is hard," she said, "he was my eldest and my friend and adviser. But he inspired this project and here it is."

We attended two concerts given by offshoots from the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music. The audience clapped and stamped and yelled. But for many of us, the most enduring image will be of Aida refugee camp in Bethlehem. In an exhibition of photographs taken by the children, a girl in a white dress smiles luminously from the grainy page, a Shrek-like giant of a man dozes on a chair in front of his house. There are no photographs of Israeli soldiers. Yet they are there. A British camp-worker/photographer told us that the kids used to hear the jeeps when they were playing on their football pitch, and would run and hide. Then the wall was built and swallowed up their football pitch and threw up the watchtowers.

Against the wall, and under one watchtower, the Palestinians built an open-air theatre: the Return Theatre, they call it. And after we've seen the exhibition and bought the crafts and eaten the fatayer, the children dance for us. Not in their theatre - that would be asking for trouble - but in the room where they practise. Little girls and boys fly around in their costumes of black and cerise. They skip and leap and tap out the dabka and sing songs of olive harvests and of travel and homecoming to villages they have never seen.

Palestinian talent is making itself felt. And, because of the divisions, there is no party line. They are making art out of adversity and are doing it with grace. This is clear at the Venice biennale. It is also clear in every Palestinian town, university and refugee camp.

For more on the Palestine festival of literature, go to www.palfest.org The Venice biennale continues until 22 November: details at www.labiennale.org

Source: Guardian

[Hat tip: Marisa]

Garry Trudeau comic is 'anti-Semitic' bemoans ADL, 'How To Cook A Gentile' is OK

2009-06-12T14:57:11Z

As widely reported, the Anti Defamation League (ADL) has sent a letter to cartoonist Garry Trudeau about his Doonesbury cartoon that ran May 31. They then released the content of that letter to media sources.

Click to Enlarge - Garry Trudeau Doonesbury Cartoon

The ADL is demanding Garry Trudeau to apologize because he "maligned Judaism" and is guilty of promoting "anti-Jewish stereotypes and biblical illiteracy".

I will leave this for concerned religious scholars to decide, but my concern is the multi-faced, racist, hate-promoting ADL and how they work tirelessly to tag anyone and everyone asbeing an anti-Semite if s/he touches or even comes close to anything Jewish, Israeli or Zionist (even if it's baseless), while they play deaf and blind when obvious and clear hate, racist, anti-human and anti-Gentile cartoons are promoted by Zionist-Jews (if you don't know what a Gentile is, well, then according to Zionist-Jews, you're probably a Gentile).

So the question is: How come Abe Foxman finds no hate in the "How To Cook A Gentile" cartoon?

The following Zionist-Jewish cartoon depicts a pair of Jews murdering and killing Gentiles in the best humor of a neo-Nazi!

Click to Enlarge - How To Cook A Gentile

The above cartoon was published by Heeb #16 ("the Goy issue"), as a "family-friendly little comic strip", as per the cartoonist words.

If this is a 'family-friendly', 'non-racist', 'non-hate', humanist peace-loving cartoon, then no wonder or doubt where all the hate is coming from the Zionist-Jew families of Israel and their ilk.

Imagine the ruckus raised by the ADL should a magazine do a cartoon like this about Jews.

Military Justice in Israel

2009-06-12T14:20:42Z

Adapted from the Amnesty International Report: http://bit.ly/13b6o4

Hundreds of Palestinians, including scores of children, were detained by Israeli forces in the OPT and many were held incommunicado for prolonged periods. Most were later released without charge, but hundreds were charged with security-related offences and tried before military courts, whose procedures often failed to meet international standards for fair trial. Some 8,000 Palestinians arrested in 2008 or in previous years were still imprisoned at the end of the year. They included some 300 children and 550 people who were held without charge or trial under military administrative detention orders, including some who had been held for up to six years.

Salwa Salah and Sara Siureh, two 16-year-old girls, were arrested at night from their homes in June and were still held in administrative detention at the end of 2008.
Mohammed Khawajah, aged 12, was arrested by Israeli soldiers at his home in Ni’lin village at 3am on 11 September. He was beaten and detained with adults in an army detention camp until 15 September, when he was released on bail. He was charged with throwing stones at soldiers and sent for trial before a military court.
Dozens of Hamas members of the Palestinian parliament and ministers in the former Hamas-led PA government remained detained without trial, up to two years after their arrest. The Israeli authorities held them apparently to exert pressure on Hamas to release an Israeli soldier held in the Gaza Strip by Hamas’ armed wing since 2006.

Almost all Palestinian detainees were held in prisons in Israel in violation of international humanitarian law, which prohibits the removal of detainees to the territory of the occupying power. This made it difficult or impossible in practice for detainees to receive family visits.

Read full report here: http://bit.ly/13b6o4

Gaza: Collaborate or Die

2009-06-12T08:40:45Z

No Right to Life:

With the lack of medical services in Gaza, critically ill patients must travel into Israel for treatment. Many are asked to collaborate with Israeli intelligence services before they receive aid. It has been alleged that if they refuse to become informers they are refused medical treatment. Inigo Gilmore reports