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- 17 nov 2010
Press freedom, Turkish style
If Turkish citizens are taking to the streets to denounce Israel, who can blame them, given the AKP's stranglehold on the media.
In May, a ship full of civilians but not full of humanitarian aid sailed from Turkey to join the Free Gaza flotilla. Having warned the Mavi Marmara that it would not be allowed to breach the blockade, Israeli commandos raided the ship. In the clash, nine Turks were killed.
I've lived in Istanbul for five years and I've spoken to hundreds of Turks about these events. A Turkish documentary filmmaker and I have filmed some of these conversations.
Something will immediately strike the viewer: the Turkish people have no idea what happened.
This is because the most basic facts about and surrounding these events have not been reported in Turkey.
In billing the flotilla as a humanitarian mission, the IHH the expedition's Islamist sponsor exploited the Turks Achilles heel: their generosity.
Turks think of themselves as charitable and compassionate, as indeed they are. They genuinely believe, because this is what has been reported here, that the Palestinians are starving.
They know almost nothing about the reasons for the blockade. They believe that the ship was on a humanitarian mission and nothing but a humanitarian mission. They are bewildered that anyone would have interfered with such a noble-minded endeavor.
They do not know the most rudimentary facts about Hamas. As one man said: These are elected people. It's not like they took over by force, via a coup.
Almost no one in Turkey understands any language but Turkish. If this obviously thoughtful man was unaware that indeed, Hamas took over precisely by force, via a coup, it is because he had no way to know. The men and women to whom we spoke were astonished when we told them that Israeli officials had invited the ship to disembark at Ashdod and deliver the aid overland.
But they were not disbelieving and importantly, when we told them this, it changed their view.
Many spontaneously said that they knew they could not trust what they heard in the news, that the situation confused them and that something about the story just didn't sound right.
TURKEY'S JUSTICE and Development Party, known by its Turkish initials as the AKP, came to power in 2002. When Western journalists note in a casual aside that press freedom has experienced certain setbacks under the AKP, they are failing to do justice to the severity of this calamity and its ramifications for Turkey and the region. The calamity is exacerbated by the tendency of the foreign media to repeat, without scrutiny, the very idiocies peddled in the Turkish press, where the range of opinion on offer has become severely limited.
The AKP has brought under its influence most of the media in Turkey, and what it hasn't purchased or neutered, it has terrified. Since taking office in 2003, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has launched an energetic series of lawsuits against Turkish journalists and cartoonists for character defamation. No one knows how many have been sued, though the number is probably in the hundreds, and Erdogan has refused to answer this question when asked in parliament.
The government, meanwhile, has been locking down larger and larger portions of the internet: more than 1,000 websites have been banned, among them YouTube.
So what's left? Chiefly such newspapers as Zaman and Yeni Safak the AKP's unofficial mouthpiece which are staunchly Islamist and connected to or controlled by the AKP or the Gülen media empire.
Now, cronyism and government influence over the media is nothing new in Turkey; it would be completely misleading to suggest otherwise. What's new, and disturbing, is the agenda this media consolidation is now serving and the eagerness of foreign journalists to swallow it whole and promote it.
If Turkish citizens are taking to the streets to denounce Israel, who can blame them? Here's what they're reading in the Turkish press. Yasin Aktay of Yeni Safak, a popular figure on the talk-show circuit, writes: Israel is contrary to logic, to human rights and to democracy.
Ali Bulaç, a columnist for Zaman, describes Gaza as a concentration camp that in reality surpasses the Nazis camps. In Ortadogu, Selcuk Duzgun warns: We are surrounded.
Wherever we look we see traitors. Wherever we turn we see impure, false converts.
Whichever stone you turn over, there is a Jew under it.
And we keep thinking to ourselves: Hitler did not do enough to these Jews. Abdurrahim Karakoç of Vakit adds: It is impossible not to admire the foresight of Adolf Hitler... Hitler foresaw what would happen these days. He cleansed off these swindler Jews, who believe in racism for a religion and take pleasure in bathing the world in blood, because he knew that they would become a big curse for the world... The second man with foresight is evidently Osama bin Laden... It was Hitler yesterday, and it is Osama bin Laden today.
What is astonishing, then, is not that we see so much hostility towards Israelis among Turks, but that we see so little of it.
Given the level of anti-Semitic propaganda to which they are exposed, this can only be attributed to their basic decency.
The Turkish Penal Code clearly prohibits incitement on the basis of religion, but no one is ever prosecuted for writing this garbage, although the prime minister has, par contre, sued a cartoonist for depicting him as a cat caught in a ball of string after all, that was really offensive.
Turkey's religious affairs department has recently been given the right to request the banning of anti-Islamic and sacrilegious websites. They are duly banned.
The wonderment of this story is that, certain honorable exceptions aside, the Western media embraces the idea that the main threat to press freedom here comes from the military and from the antediluvian, antidemocratic secular elites, who in the received narrative long to return to what Michael Thumann, for example, in the Wilson Quarterly, published by the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars, calls a decaying old order. On the other hand, he continues: Pious Muslims lead the way toward modernization...
The AKP is conservative, but contrary to critics suspicions it is not a religious party...
after eight years in power the AKP has not pursued any Islamist objectives, such as establishing laws based on religious sources.
What he's missing, and what anyone who lives here could tell him, is that you don't need to establish laws based on religious sources to pursue Islamist objectives, you just need to enforce laws based on religious sources. If you enforce the tax code, laws on foreign financing of the media and laws on religious incitement selectively, well then, voila! you've got yourself an Islamist press, all without writing a single law based on religious sources, and mirabile dictu, people like Thumann are none the wiser.
I have no great love for Turkey's secular elites, who are pretty much as decayed as described. It's the enthusiasm for the AKP's equally decayed elites and the credulous swallowing of its party line that puzzle me. The party does, certainly, cultivate the foreign media carefully and shrewdly and sometimes you can see precisely where the effort pays off.
In the wake of the bloodletting on the Mavi Marmara, for example, the veteran Middle East specialist Hugh Pope published a defense of Erdogan in the Israeli daily, Haaretz. Erdogan's rhetoric may often be pugnacious and out of date, he wrote, but his ideology is not devoted to Israel's destruction. Just over two years ago, he entertained Israel Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to a long dinner in his official Ankara residence.
Naively perhaps, but certainly sincerely, Erdogan believed that he had brought Israel and Syria to the brink of face-to-face talks or even a peace deal. Yet just days later, and having given no warning, Olmert launched Israel's winter 2009 assault on Gaza. This was the turning point, not the outburst against President Shimon Peres in Davos a few weeks later.
I've seen that explanation repeatedly in the Western media. I know exactly where it comes from. I've personally heard it from two senior figures in the AKP, both very smooth guys, fluent English speakers, who tell this story to journalists in cosy little salon settings, off the record, in precisely these words. You get tea and biscuits, they tell you this story and a few others like it and the story just keeps getting repeated, verbatim, in the press, as if the journalist writing the story had been a first-hand witness to this dinner. What seems to escape those repeating it is that clearly the AKP has an interest in spinning it this way but that doesn't mean it's what really happened or that it's the most salient point.
Indeed, I'd say one of the sources of this story at least, the one from whom I last heard it has a massive credibility problem on the face of it, because he followed this anecdote by denying the genocide in Darfur and proposing that whatever was happening there paled in comparison with the crimes against humanity being perpetrated in Gaza. That part never makes it into the press, even though I know at least a dozen other foreign journalists heard him say this. Watch for variants on the long-dinnerwith- Olmert story, you'll see it everywhere Erdogan was so personally hurt, because he doesn't smoke, in fact he hates smoking, but Olmert does, and he'd even dispatched his aide to get Olmert a cigar.
THE SUPPRESSED assumption, almost universal in the Western media, is that Turkey is divided into two camps, the anachronistic, godless, elitist generals who hunger for military coups just for the thrill of hearing the tank engines rumble, and the pious conservatives who are so forward-thinking and democratic they're practically channeling the spirit of Thomas Jefferson with one hand and building a bridge between East and West and straight into the 27th century with the other.
It's not so. This simply ignores the lack of democratization across the board in Turkey, not to mention roughly 80 percent of the Turkish population, who belong to neither camp and just wish the government whoever's controlling it these days would stop stealing everything.
The struggle is taking place among the ruling elites, not the people, and these ruling elites are pretty much all thieving scum, as they will be until parliamentary immunities are lifted, voters are given the chance to elect their own MPs and government service is seen as something other than a chance to enrich oneself through cronyism and corruption.
The deeper struggle here is about power and the right to steal, not religion or the military. Those are just the excuses to manipulate public sentiment, which is particularly easy to do if the media goes along for the ride.
The Turkish people are generally well-meaning. They suspect that they cannot trust what they hear in the media. You saw what was on TV, in the news, and what was published, said one young woman whom we interviewed about the Gaza flotilla. We know nothing less and nothing more.
It's murky, agreed her mother.
They have no way of knowing more. So they may be forgiven.
What's the Western media's excuse?
The writer is an Istanbulbased American freelance journalist and novelist. She is author of Menace in Europe: Why the Continent's Crisis Is America's, Too and There Is No Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters (Basic Books). This article is republished by kind permission of Standpoint magazine (www.standpointmag.co.uk), where it originally appeared in a longer version.
http://bit.ly/9cw67A 26 nov 2010, 01:53 , Respect -
Maria
20 juni 2010
Prime Minister's Office statement following the Israeli Security Cabinet meeting
Israel seeks to keep weapons and war materiel out of Gaza while liberalizing the system by which civilian goods enter Gaza.
Israel's policy is to protect its citizens against terror, rocket and other attacks from Gaza. In seeking to keep weapons and war materiel out of Gaza while liberalizing the system by which civilian goods enter Gaza, the Government of Israel has decided to implement the following steps as quickly as possible:
1. Publish a list of items not permitted into Gaza that is limited to weapons and war materiel, including problematic dual-use items. All items not on this list will be permitted to enter Gaza.
2. Enable and expand the inflow of dual-use construction materials for approved PA-authorized projects (schools, health facilities, water, sanitation, etc.) that are under international supervision and for housing projects such as the U.N. housing development being completed at Khan Yunis. Israel intends to accelerate the approval of such projects in accordance with accepted mechanisms and procedures.
3. Expand operations at the existing operating land crossings, thereby enabling the processing of a significantly greater volume of goods through the crossings and the expansion of economic activity.
4. Add substantial capacity at the existing operating land crossings and, as more processing capacity becomes necessary and when security concerns are fully addressed, open additional land crossings.
5. Streamline the policy of permitting the entry and exit of people for humanitarian and medical reasons and that of employees of international aid organizations that are recognized by the GOI. As conditions improve, Israel will consider additional ways to facilitate the movement of people to and from Gaza.
6. Israel will continue to facilitate the expeditious inspection and delivery of goods bound for Gaza through the port of Ashdod.
Israel welcomes cooperation and coordination with its international and regional partners in implementing this policy and will continue to discuss with them additional ways to advance this policy.
The current security regime for Gaza will be maintained. Israel reiterates that along with the U.S., EU and others, it considers Hamas a terrorist organization. The international community must insist on a strict adherence to the Quartet principles regarding Hamas.
Hamas took over Gaza and turned it into a hostile territory from which Hamas prepares and carries out attacks against Israel and its citizens. The Israel Defense Forces will continue to prevent the flow into and out of Gaza of terrorist operatives, weapons, war material and dual use items which enhance the military capability of Hamas and other terrorist groups in Gaza. Israel calls on the international community to stop the smuggling of weapons and war materials into Gaza.
Gilad Shalit is approaching four years in captivity. The international community should join Israel in strongly condemning those who hold him captive and in redoubling their efforts to secure his immediate release.
Gisha is an Israeli not-for-profit organization, founded in 2005, whose goal is to protect the freedom of movement of Palestinians, especially Gaza residents. Gisha promotes rights guaranteed by international and Israeli law. http://bit.ly/c80Pq2
http://bit.ly/9DBNxC 9 dec 2010, 17:53 , Respect -
Maria 18 nov 2010
Israel's answer for Gaza: If they haven't bread, let them eat gravel
The eve of Eid al-Adha celebrated this week brought news of a shortage of flour in the Gaza Strip. For the past two weeks, traders and flour mill owners have warned of shortages of wheat in the Strip (PDF) http://bit.ly/8XLKH1, claiming that the mills have been providing about half of their production capacity. The mathematical formulas (PDF) http://bit.ly/co9NXP , which the army used to determine the level to which they would allow the stock of flour in Gaza to be reduced, are no longer in effect. So why is there a shortage?
Goods: Needs Vs. Supply for 10/17/10 -11/13/10
Wheat is delivered to Gaza through the conveyer belt at the Karni crossing (currently the only operational part of the crossing, which was closed to trucks in June 2007). So far, the conveyer belt has been operational on only two days per week for the transfer of wheat and animal feed into Gaza. However, since mid-October, Israel has reduced the transfer of wheat and animal feed to just one day per week.
On the other day, Israel allows gravel to be transferred to the Strip, pursuant to its June announcement regarding changes to the policy for the entry of goods into Gaza, including a promise to allow the entry of construction materials for projects run by international organizations. Incidentally, Israel also promised to open other land crossings "if the need arises to further increase the capacity of the crossings".
In practice, approvals for construction projects are extremely limited - since the change in policy, an average of 107 trucks carrying construction materials were allowed into Gaza per month compared to an average of about 5,000 trucks which entered Gaza every month prior to the closure. In addition, instead of opening additional crossing points, Israel has announced its intention to close the Karni conveyor belt and transfer all operations to Kerem Shalom.
Thus Israel's promise to allow the entry of construction materials, which was supposed to be good news for the residents of Gaza, has created additional difficulties in transferring basic and essential nutritional ingredients. Israel refuses to increase the number of days the conveyor belt operates and with regard to opening additional crossing points there is no room for discussion.
Moreover, the gravel which Israel allows into the Gaza Strip is not sufficient for the construction planned by international organizations. According to UNRWA, at this rate, it will take 75 years to implement the organization's plan to rehabilitate Gaza. UNRWA (PDF) http://bit.ly/dAnzur , incidentally, is also facing a shortage in its flour reserves, because it buys flour from the local market in Gaza after the wheat is transferred to the Strip through the Karni crossing.
Gisha is an Israeli not-for-profit organization, founded in 2005, whose goal is to protect the freedom of movement of Palestinians, especially Gaza residents. Gisha promotes rights guaranteed by international and Israeli law. http://gisha.org/ 9 dec 2010, 17:54 , Respect -
Maria 26 nov 2010
Franco Frattini is either a fool or ignorant, or possibly both
By Khalid Amayreh in occupied Jerusalem
During his recent visit to Israel and the Gaza Strip, Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini revealed rather brazenly his low intellectual capacity, a scandalous lack of honesty as well as stunning ignorance of the situation in this part of the world. He made many strident statements which can be described as, inter alia, hasty, inaccurate, mendacious and ignorant.
While in the small Israeli town of Sderot, a conspicuously complacent Frattini told a group of Israeli jingoists and right-wingers, "You are victims of this extreme entity that is taking hostages its own people and attacking you."
This, of course, is far from the truth; the people of Gaza are victims of the clear genocidal policies of Israel and Israelis. The Zionist state claims that it withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005. In reality, Israel has maintained absolute control of the coastal enclave's skies, territorial waters and border crossings. Furthermore, Israel imposed a draconian blockade on that territory, inflicting one of the harshest human tragedies in modern history with its collective punishment of the people of Gaza.
Israel claims that the siege was imposed in response to projectiles fired from Gaza on nearby Israeli colonies. However, the truth is that the siege was an established Israeli policy and the Zionist state has violated ceasefire agreements with Hamas consistently.
In brief, Israel wants to retain the "right" to murder and maim as many innocent Palestinians as possible with absolute impunity and without any response from the victims. Various statements from Israeli rabbis %u2013 never disowned by Israel's political elite %u2013 demonstrate that racism is rife in Israel and non-Jews are regarded as inferior beings.
It is tempting to ask how the Italian Foreign Minister could refer to the people of Sderot as victims and the people of Gaza as aggressors when Israel has killed and maimed thousands of Palestinian civilians; 1,400 alone (one-third of them children) were killed during Operation Cast Lead last year; 13 Israelis were killed. It is safe to assume that Frattini wasn't told by his Israeli hosts that Sderot was built on the ruins of the Palestinian town of Najd from which the Arab population was driven out by Jewish militias on 13th May 1948.
Are Palestinian lives that worthless? Or is Frattini indoctrinated in classical Italian fascism, albeit laminated with a thin veneer of pseudo-liberalism? Frattini told the settlers that Hamas "is taking hostage its own people and attacking you." Even Israel acknowledges that Hamas has been preventing attacks by some splinter groups.
Does the Italian politician know %u2013 or care - that Hamas won the parliamentary election in the occupied territories in 2006, an election that was monitored closely by the international community, including the European Union (EU) and US, Israel's guardian-ally? And that the election was declared to be "free and fair"?
It is true that the EU and US rejected the election outcome once it became clear that Hamas, not the western-backed secular puppets, was the winner. The blame for this does not lie with Hamas; it is and remains an expression of western hypocrisy, moral duplicity and false commitment to true democracy.
One of the most incredible statements uttered by Franco Frattini was that "the Israeli government wanted peace". Is the man blind? Does he read the newspapers? Wasn't he briefed by his diplomats before the visit? If he was, and was in possession of the facts of the situation, his statement would be even more scandalous than those made by someone steeped in ignorance.
How can a government that keeps building illegal settlements on occupied territories really want peace? How can a government that makes withdrawal from occupied territories contingent on the outcome of a referendum, in utter contempt of international law, be a true seeker of peace?
How can a government be truly interested in peace when it gives heavily-armed, ultra-right wing Jewish settlers carte blanche to attack unarmed Palestinian farmers and vandalise their property? How can a government that includes in its coalition far-right parties whose spiritual leaders claim openly that non-Jews, presumably including Frattini, are merely donkeys and animals, view peace with its non-Jewish neighbours as a prime objective?
To cap it all, Frattini referred to the "danger" facing the whole world from Iran. What was the man talking about? Has Iran ever said that it seeks world domination if it acquires nuclear weapons? There is one aggressor and aggressive state in the Middle East which already possesses a nuclear arsenal; why didn't Franco Frattini ask the Israelis about that?
Perhaps the Italian minister and his neo-colonial mindset still thinks that Muslims have to be pacified and kept under control, at the mercy of a nefarious Zionist state. When people like Frattini represent the West on visits to the Middle East, it is a clear demonstration that it is futile for anyone, least of all the Palestinians, to expect Western politicians to do anything to achieve peace with justice for the people in historic Palestine. In any case, as long as their Foreign Minister thinks that the Israelis want peace and Palestinians don't, Italians can have no constructive role in the region.
http://bit.ly/gebkFa 18 dec 2010, 18:57 , Respect -
Maria 9 dec 2010
'The first issue is justice': Questions for John Ging
By Jared Malsin
GAZA CITY (Ma'an) -- UN humanitarian officer John Ging was in Rwanda during the genocide. He was in the former Yugoslavia during ethnic cleansing. And he does not hesitate to call the Israeli siege of Gaza a crisis.
A former Irish army captain, Ging is the director of operations for the United Nations Relief Works Agency in Gaza, overseeing a huge network of services for the three-quarters of Gazans exiled from the land that became Israel in 1948.
He was on the ground during Israel's unprecedented 2008-2009 assault on the territory, taking to the airwaves to denounce attacks on UN installations and civilians. He helped put out the fire white phosphorus hit the central UN warehouse, burning sacks of food indented for Palestinians.
Ging is that rare public official who doesn't do spin. Speaking with him, one gets the sense that his views are authentically his own. Over the years he has angered pro-Israel figures with his criticism of blockade. Recently he angered pro-Palestinian activists by publicly rejecting calls for boycotts against Israeli institutions.
He also understands the dilemma of using humanitarian aid to address an essentially political problem: the dispossession and denial of Palestinians' rights.
"The denial of human rights, the injustice of decades of experience of Palestinians," he told Ma'an, "is then what is at the core of the creation of all the other problems. So the humanitarian problem flows out of the denial of basic human rights to Palestine and Palestinians."
"The first issue for Palestinians is the issue of justice. That has to be the top priority: the restoration of Palestinians' fundamental human rights, all of them."
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Jared Malsin: What happened to the billions pledged by donor states to rebuild Gaza at Sharm El-Sheikh in March 2009?
John Ging: It's just a pledge at the moment, a promise, from the countries who attended the conference that they would provide the money needed. But because there's no access for the massive reconstruction program, the money has not come.
Access is the key. That has been identified as the key, since that time and prior to that time. Since 2007 with the imposition of the blockade, everything has revolved around a lack of access, so the physical circumstances, the humanitarian situation, the psychological circumstance of the people here is determined by the lack of access.
JM: You're still facing problems, rebuilding schools and so on.
JG: Oh yes. There is in this adjustment [in June] approval for a limited number of UN-supervised projects and other internationally supervised projects. To put it into context, the numbers of schools that have been approved have been six for the coming period. The number that is needed by UNRWA is 100.
It's the same in all the other areas. For us, seven percent of our project portfolio is approved for implementation over the next six to eight months. That means we have 93 percent not approved.
We want to welcome every positive development, but we want to keep it in its proper context, the context being the massive need. Because there's a civilian population here, 1.5 million whose lives are being destroyed, whose daily life is unbearable because of a lack of access in the first instance.
JM: Do you have any reaction or analysis to the documents released by the Israeli organization Gisha about Israel's policy of setting red lines for Palestinian consumption?
JG: Our position has been crystal clear. The blockade is illegal. It's a contravention of international law. And on top of that it's inhumane and counterproductive -- counterproductive to the objectives of security, stability, and peace. So therefore it's counterproductive not just to the interests of Palestinians, but it's counterproductive to the interests of Israel.
JM: What needs to happen for that to change? Do the donor countries need to step in?
JG: In the first instance there has to be more realization of the urgency -- internationally, politically and regionally, locally -- the scale of the counterproductivity of this policy, and the long-term detrimental consequences that are being generated now need to be better understood.
There's a lot of rhetoric out there that policymakers have to tackle. There are contradictory narratives. One side says one thing, the other side says completely the opposite. Both sides present evidence to try and back up their contention. And it becomes very confusing, frankly speaking, because the rhetoric is so compelling, and yet the truth is so simple.
The best way to get beyond the rhetoric is to actually physically come and see for yourself, first hand, and make your own personal calculation, your own personal judgment on what is the state of affairs, not just in terms of challenges but also in terms of opportunity.
JM: You speak with Israeli officials. What are you hearing from them?
JG: I speak with Israeli officials at all levels, from ministers through to the military, foreign ministry officials and so on, right down to the people who operate the crossing points. My experience -- and it's part of the tragedy of this conflict -- is that when you talk to people, you normally get a humane and honest reaction from the people that you engage with. The policies are the problem, not, in my experience, the people who are engaged in the issues at the operational level. The people at the crossing points on a daily basis are working to get the supplies into Gaza, and they're working very hard to do that.
But there's this policy, and those that are making the policy are where the attention needs to focus. We need to draw out the best of people and their good nature, their humanity, but we need a fundamental change of policy for that to actually happen in a way that will have a meaningful and positive impact on the people here.
JM: The closure of Gaza has been going on in one form or another for almost 20 years. Placing it in that context, where are we? We're at an absolutely low point, but we're close to it?
JG: In the last couple of months we have seen some modest, positive change. And this is what we hope now will be the new direction, but we don't want to get into a misrepresentation of the scale or impact of that change, because it's very limited and modest, but we do believe that it points the way.
We've been calling for a change. A change has occurred and we need to build on it rapidly. That's what the people of Gaza have been waiting for.
As you point out, access has been a problem for a long, long time. And it has been a very severe problem for the last couple of years, for the last four years in particular, since this very restrictive blockade was put in place, which has taken the whole dynamic in a negative direction starting with the collapse of the economy, which was struggling before that blockade was implemented, which was under severe restriction before that blockade was implemented, but which we were working to try and develop at that time but then it gets cut off completely.
JM: What long-term effects do you see coming out of the blockade?
JG: I see first and foremost the physical hardships. There's so many facets and aspects to the detrimental effect. Obviously, first and foremost the physical environment here is very difficult for people on a daily basis, particularly when you see the infrastructure in a state of collapse, be it water, be it sanitation.
Then of course the economic collapse. It takes a long time to build up an economy, then in almost an instant it can be destroyed. So we're going to have a long path to rebuild what we had in 2007 in terms of re-establishing markets and reactivating the industry here and so on.
When we look at the impact of the blockade on things like education, that's very devastating. Kids don't get a second chance at education. Their time is now. When you look at the overcrowding in the schools, the impact that all of these restrictions have had on the quality of education, then this is a generation that is missing their opportunity to achieve their academic potential, to achieve their development potential, and of course that is devastating for them, and it's devastating for the future potential of Palestine.
When we look at the health of the population, the undernourishment of the children particularly, and the general level of poor nutrition of a population that are impoverished, 80 percent of whom are living on a food aid ration which is only an emergency ration, it doesn't provide the full calorific intake that people need, and yet people have been surviving on this for years.
Equally, when we look at the psychosocial health of the population, the mental health of the population, particularly the children: All the mental health specialists are telling us that there is a very big problem here. Also a lot of depression and despair.
JM: You mentioned trauma, which brings us of course to the war two years ago. Where do things stand in terms of getting compensation from Israel for UN facilities damaged during the war?
JG: To be clear, UNRWA is not the address for compensation for the damage and destruction that occurred to Gaza. What we at UNRWA have been calling for is full accountability for all of the actions that took place during that conflict and particularly for the families who were so traumatized and grieved by the loss of family members, the injury to family members and also the loss of their houses and livelihoods and everything else.
We've called for an effective mechanism for accountability for all of the loss that was suffered, by the way, on both sides. As the UN we're calling for accountability not just for the loss on the Palestinian side but were calling for accountability for the loss on the Israeli side.
JM: One thing that's been in the news was the UN bringing in machine guns for your personal protection. Why now?
JG: We don't comment on security. That's always and consistently the position of the United Nations around the world. At the end of the day we have to deal with security realities, but we won't comment on the details. You won't find any comments from us on those press reports.
JM: During your visit last month to the United States and after you came under some criticism from the left for a comment you made about the role of boycotts in putting political pressure on Israel.
That's fine. Everyone is entitled to their opinion. We walk a straight line here. Sometimes we're criticized by one side, other times we're criticized by other sides.
I'm here for five years now trying to get access for the people of Gaza, to get a siege lifted. I am not going to turn around and advocate for the imposition of boycotts, blockades, sieges, on anybody else. That's not what we do at the United Nations. We work to have an environment which is positive. And sieges, blockades, in our view, in my view, are counterproductive. They don't achieve the objective that they state, and it's ordinary, innocent people who end up paying the price.
So we're here in Gaza. We want to see an opening of Gaza, the re-establishment of economic links into the West Bank, through Israel. We want to see the re-establishment of economic links with Israel. A hundred-thousand people from Gaza used to go to Israel every day to work. That was a positive experience for them and also for their Israeli neighbor. And this is what we'd like to see re-established.
So that's my position, and that will continue to be my position. We have our differences of view and opinion but certainly I'm against sieges, boycotts, blockades. I'm for rule of law, liberty, freedom, respect for human rights.
JM: Certainly. I don't think anyone is calling for a siege on Israel the way a siege is imposed on Gaza.
JG: Sure.
JM: I think what advocates of boycott are saying is that pressure should be put on Israeli institutions, through boycotts and divestment and sanctions. Are you saying you're opposed to those measures as well? Boycotts of Israeli institutions?
JG: I am for freedom, liberty, rule of law, respect for human rights, for everybody. So I don't find that one can argue both sides of this, in opposition. If other people want to have a different view and a different position, then that's up to them, but as long as I'm working for the United Nations, this is my view. It's not my view because I work for the United Nations, it happens to be my view, and it's of course entirely consistent with the position of the United Nations. That's why I'm so comfortable working within the United Nations framework, because that's where I am coming from.
JM: When you were first asked that question, why not sidestep it? Why intervene in a political matter?
JG: I'm not intervening in anything. I could refuse to give you an interview. I could refuse to give everybody an interview, but I think I have a responsibility to be clear about why it is that we take the position that we take. So I'm here fighting for the liberation of one-and-a-half-million people from a siege, and I'm fighting for it from the perspective of international law, respect for human rights, and the counterproductivity of the effects of the blockade. All of these aspects for me are the key drivers of my position. I'm not going to be inconsistent in my position vis-à-vis any other sanctions regime; boycotts, divestment, or whatever.
I feel it is my obligation to speak the truth, however inconvenient it might be. That's part of our role as United Nations officials.
JM: Turning back to the local situation, how are relations with the government here, with Hamas?
JG: The de facto government have in their term here respected UNRWA's operations. That's been our experience. They respect the integrity of our operations. They don't interfere with our operations. They provide a secure environment in Gaza for the UNRWA operations and other UN operations. That has been the situation to date, and that's the situation we expect will continue.
JM: What some people say about UNRWA is that it constitutes a parallel administration or government in Gaza.
JG: People say that, and it's very important to correct that. Our mantra is serving Palestine refugees -- serving. We serve, we don't administer; we don't rule; we don't govern. We're not elected.
We serve the people. We serve the refugees. We listen to what their needs are. We listen very attentively to what their feedback is about how we serve them, and we do our very best every day to improve the quality of our services to them; in education, healthcare, humanitarian support, and so on. We don't seek to dictate to them or have any authoritative relationship over those that we are here to serve.
JM: What about Hamas' performance in terms of security, like the attack on the summer camp in May?
JG: That was a situation where armed masked people in the dark of night attacked one of our summer games locations, and again the de facto government here had to deal with that fact. We don't have security forces here, and that becomes a problem for them, and thankfully the issue was dealt with in a way that didn't interfere with the continuation of our program. Our program went ahead.
JM: Some people will say that Hamas officials allowed it to happen.
JG: Let's also be clear. There are some officials in the Hamas movement who have been very vocal in their criticism of UNRWA. There's obviously a view within the Hamas movement that is expressed in newspapers, in leaflets, in different public statements, that criticize UNRWA from time to time, that criticize our summer games and other parts of our program, but that has not influenced our work, and it has not impeded our work. There have been occasions when there have been attacks on our locations, and these are big challenges, but the de facto government has lived up to its responsibility to get the situation under control.
JM: Is the situation here a humanitarian crisis, a development crisis, or a political crisis?
JG: It's all of those and more. It's a psychological crisis for people who despair of their circumstance. When people get up in the morning here -- no job, no money. The water, they can't drink it. The sewage system doesn't work. They despair of their circumstance. So psychologically they're in crisis. What did they do wrong? This is what they ask themselves on a daily basis.
So, every aspect of human life here is in something of a crisis to a different degree, on who you are and what your circumstance is, depending. Most people, 80 percent of the population, are aid dependent. So for them it's a crisis just to survive. Their kids come to them for money to buy this and that, and they can't afford. So they look at their kids every day, and that's a crisis. No parent wants to face that situation where they can't provide for their children.
If we look at the 90 percent of the water, by World Health Organization evaluation, is undrinkable. That's a crisis. That is a very big crisis. And the situation with water is becoming worse. The water table is becoming more and more polluted and, again, that's a big crisis because, again, sustaining life here requires water.
As I say when you go through all the aspects of human life here and different aspects of people's struggle to survive, every aspect of their life is a struggle.
JM: By treating the Palestinian question as a humanitarian issue first where, in fact, it's an issue of the denial of political rights, it raises the issue of the alleged complicity of humanitarian organizations in occupation, in collective punishment.
JG: This is something we have to be acutely aware of, because it as a matter of sequencing. The first issue for Palestinians is the issue of justice. That has to be the top priority: the restoration of Palestinians fundamental human rights, all of them. And if you were to ask a Palestinian today, "Do you want food, medicine, or your human rights?" they would say "human rights."
All of us who are involved in the international effort have to make sure that is the issue: the denial of human rights, the injustice of decades of experience of Palestinians, is then what is at the core of the creation of all the other problems. So the humanitarian problem flows out of the denial of basic human rights to Palestine and Palestinians. The economic circumstance, the humanitarian circumstance, the crisis in education, in health. It's all flowing from the core issue of the injustice, the illegality of the situation of Palestinians.
I don't subscribe to the argument that you should deal with the consequences if you don't have a solution to the cause. That would be saying, well, if we can't fix the problem in its totality then we don't do anything, because again that would be inhumane.
But at the same time that keeping people alive is not the objective here. It's providing people with an opportunity to live with all of their rights and entitlements and so on. We can't be satisfied with just providing humanitarian assistance. We must provide humanitarian assistance in a framework that is seeking to achieve the objectives of justice, of the restoration of the rights of all Palestinians, upholding international law.
That's why at UNRWA, for example, we give so much focus to education because it's through education, it's through the development of Palestinians in terms of their potential, their capacity, that you're equipping them to be prepared, to be able to contribute to the achievement of their rights and their potential.
http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=340247 7 jan 2011, 23:27 , Respect -
Maria
6 jan 2011
Persecution in place of policy
It is ironic that Lieberman, responsible for some of Israel's delegitimization, is the person leading this crusade to silence and persecute human rights groups in Israel.
Haaretz Editorial
The more Israel's isolation in the world increases as a result of the government shunning the peace process, the more energy the right-wing parties, led by Yisrael Beiteinu, are investing in silencing internal criticism.
It may seem ironic that Avigdor Lieberman, the same foreign minister responsible for some of the crises that have led to Israel's delegitimization, is the person leading this crusade to silence and persecute leftist and human rights groups in Israel, a crusade that culminated yesterday in the initiative to establish a parliamentary panel of inquiry to "investigate" such organizations as Breaking the Silence, Yesh Gvul B'Tselem on the grounds that they are "damaging Israel's legitimacy."
But it shouldn't seem ironic, since these things all go together, as history shows: Confrontational leadership that attempts - out of ideology or cynicism - to establish its rule by disseminating fear, paranoia and hatred toward the entire world, will not stop at destroying foreign relations. It will blame the results of its mistakes on internal enemies, on a fifth column.
The extent of the political right's cynicism is evident in the fact that its demand to "investigate" "the intervention of foreigners in Israel's affairs" is directed only at left-wing groups, while "foreign" interference in the country's affairs by the supporters and financiers of the settlement movement is ignored and silenced with a wink.
There is nothing new in criticism being leveled at those who spread information or opinions that are not always convenient for the reigning national-security narrative.
What is new is the intensity of the "persecution of the left," which has become not only a craze but a replacement for any sort of policy.
The blame for this wave of attacks lies with the "sit and do nothing" policy of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who despite lip service to the contrary here and there, is celebrating the victory of this fatalistic and pessimistic narrative - the narrative that claims that the conflict with the Arabs is insolvable and all that that can be done is to manage it. And the more detached and fragile this "management policy" becomes, the greater the incentive to uproot any information that threatens to pull the ground from under it.
Persecuting internal political rivals will do nothing to convince anyone of the just path of the right-wing government headed by Netanyahu and Lieberman. It will only undermine Israeli democracy even further.
http://bit.ly/h4wMqD 8 jan 2011, 13:04 , Respect -
Maria 8 jan 2011
NABULSI: Zionism A terrible disease of the mind
schizophrenia
by Zaid Nabulsi
- The Jordan Times - January 2009
I lost my gloves one day in a coffee shop in Geneva, and I tell you, it's difficult to ride a motorcycle without them when it's really cold. So as I was paying for a new pair with a credit card, the salesman who I knew was from Israel asked me what my family name means. I told him that it relates to the city of Nablus where my family is originally from. Suddenly, the most bewildered look got plastered on his face.
Where is Nablus? he asked, I've never heard of it. Then he pretended to remember. Ah, Shkheim you mean?
With my insistence not to learn these ugly sounding names that the Zionists have dug up from oblivion to erase our identity, that name certainly didn't ring a bell.
Now it was my turn. Although I knew where he was from, I asked: And you're from?
As he smiled, I replicated the look on his face moments ago. Israel? Where is that?
Then after a brief pause: Ah, the land of Canaan you mean. Palestine.
You see, if you want to get biblical, there was never such a thing as Israel, and I made that very clear to this gentleman with obnoxious chutzpah.
So here we were all of a sudden; my family descended from a place called Shkheim, and this guy became a Palestinian. God does work in mysterious ways, but I still thanked Him for His small mercies; that at least my name was not Zaid Shkheimy.
While the gloves warmed up my grip on the bike, my heart was still frozen. I just cannot stand thieves who steal your gloves, or any other kind of thieves.
Then it finally dawned on me. Zionism is a sickness, for it takes much more than just a twisted ideology to make people think like that. It requires a profound leap of immorality of a higher order to instill this mentality in your followers. Zionism is not merely a political movement, but in its essence represents a deeply disturbed view of the world, resulting from a terrible affliction of the mind.
Indeed, to deny the existence of a vibrant community such as the Palestinian society in the early 20th century and describe Palestine as a land without a people for a people without a land is a serious blinding ailment.
To assert property claims over real estate after thousands of years with the same certainty of title as if one resided there yesterday is the essence of arrogance.
To describe the colonial immigration to Palestine of a European people with no proven historical link to the ancient Israelites and whose great, great recorded ancestors have never set foot there as some kind of a return to that land is a distorted misapplication of the verb to return.
To blame the Palestinians for being unreasonable in rejecting a partition plan in 1947 which gave the Jews, who only owned 7 per cent of the land, an astounding half of Palestine, is an arithmetical impairment.
To eventually grab 78 per cent of Palestine through war, evict the population through massacres and then live in their same houses is unashamed theft.
To deny the orchestrated eradications of hundreds of Palestinian villages in 1948 and then denounce the Israeli historians who later exposed this truth as self-hating Jews is compulsive forgery.
To claim that having escaped the horrors of the Nazis is a justification for the murder, expulsion and occupation of another, guiltless, people is moral incapacity.
To legislate that any resident of Poland, New York or Brazil, who happens to be blessed with a Jewish mother (yet cannot point to Palestine on the map), has a right to return and settle in Palestine, unlike someone who has been expelled from his own land, confined to a squalid refugee camp and still holds the keys to his house, is racism.
To blame God for the theft and occupation of someone else's land by claiming that it was He who had pledged this land exclusively to the Jews, and to seriously promote the myth of a land promised by the Almighty to His favourite children as an excuse for this crime, is insanity.
To milk the pockets of the entire world for the atrocities of the Nazis, while stubbornly refusing a simple admission of guilt, let alone compensation or repatriation, for the catastrophe that befell the Palestinian people, is perverted conceit.
To keep blackmailing the world with expensive museums and endless movies of the plight of the Jews under Hitler 70 years ago, while at the same time inflicting on the Palestinians today the fate of the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto, is acute schizophrenia.
To impose collective guilt on the Western civilisation for the Holocaust and to criminalise all legitimate historical debate of the nature and extent of that horrific event is thuggery.
To incarcerate the Palestinian people inside degrading cages, destroy their livelihoods, confiscate their lands, steal their water and uproot their trees, and then to condemn their legitimate resistance as terrorism, and to exact vengeance on the innocent families of suicide bombers by punishing them with the dynamiting of their homes is sadistic cruelty.
To describe the offer of giving the Palestinians 80 per cent of 22 per cent of 100 per cent of what is originally their own land as a generous offer is macabre Shylockian humour.
To believe that you have the God-given right to continue to humiliate the Palestinians at gunpoint by making them queue for hours to move between their villages, forcing their mothers to give birth at checkpoints, is a predisposition to bestiality.
To flatten the camp of Jenin on its inhabitants heads and deny any wrongdoing is a severe delusional disorder.
To build a huge separation wall which disconnects farmers from their farms and children from their schools, while stealing even more territory as the wall freely zigzags and encroaches on Palestinian land is unrepentant immorality.
To leave behind, in the last 10 days of a losing war in Lebanon, more than one million cluster bombs which have no purpose except to murder and maim unsuspecting civilians is murderous depravity.
To believe that the entire world is out to get you, and to denounce any critic of the racist policies of the state of Israel as an anti-Semite, the latest victim being none other than peace-making Jimmy Carter, is hysterical mass paranoia.
To possess, in the midst of a non-nuclear Arab world, more than 200 nuclear warheads capable of incinerating the whole planet, in addition to having the most lethal arsenal of weaponry on earth, while continuing to demand sympathy, is the ultimate false victimisation syndrome.
And today, to blockade the world's most densely populated strip of land for 18 months, suffocate its already displaced and miserable inhabitants by asking them to die a slow death, and then punish them for refusing to die silently by deliberately bombing their schools, mosques, hospitals and ambulances with internationally prohibited weapons and poisonous gasses in the ugliest televised massacre of children in modern history, all the while looking the world in the eyes and claiming that this is an act of self-defence, is a critical stage of dangerous psychosis, and is pure, unadulterated madness.
Yes, and for that salesman in peaceful Geneva to be as insecure as a common thief to refuse to acknowledge the name of the largest West Bank city under his country's brutal military occupation is, sadly, more of the same infectious and ultimately fatal disease of the mind.
The writer is an attorney, partner in Nabulsi & Associates law firm. He contributed this article to The Jordan Times.
http://bit.ly/fZwFHg 10 jan 2011, 20:16 , Respect -
Maria 10 jan 2011
Israel's right have eyes but do not see, have ears but do not hear
Future historians will debate how Israel's leadership could have been so blind. They will wonder how it was possible that Israel - for 43 years - didn't realize what David Ben-Gurion saw a few weeks after the Six-Day War: that the occupation of the West Bank was a catastrophe for Israel.
They will wonder even more what the government of Benjamin Netanyahu had in mind when he allowed the destruction of the Shepherd Hotel, the eviction of Palestinians in Sheikh Jarrah and Silwan; they will wonder what was happening to the 18th Knesset, in which parliamentarians were competing with each other with their anti-democratic legislation.
They will be struck by the total blindness of these parliamentarians and ministers to Israel's place in the world, and their total lack of vision for what kind of state Israel would be in the future. All they seem to care about is to establish their patriotism through Judaizing Jerusalem and other areas; to grab another building from Palestinians; to show how Jewish they are by proposing anti-Arab legislation and by attacking NGOs that try to protect Israel the liberal democracy.
The frenzy of the Judaization of Jerusalem has now crossed the tipping point where the international community is no longer willing to just stand by. A while ago 26 former EU leaders, many of whom during their careers had been staunch friends of Israel, asked for sanctions against Israel. This has now been followed by a call of EU consuls to recognize East Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital; to place observers at each venue where Israel wants to destroy Palestinian buildings.
The ominous signs that Israel will soon be under great international pressure are mounting, and proposals for specific steps of boycott and sanctions are taking shape. One is to deny Israelis who live in the West Bank entry to the EU, and to forbid the sale of any Israeli products from the West Bank.
The present government will react to these steps with Netanyahu's usual lament that Israel's existence is delegitimized; that there is no connection between Israel's actions and criticism from abroad. Avigdor Lieberman will say that Israel needs to show the international community that it has backbone, and that it doesn't cave in under pressure.
Nothing; absolutely nothing seems to penetrate the minds of Israel's right-wing politicians. Talking to them, I mostly hear genuine surprise at Israel's isolation. They live in a deep bunker where the simplest of truths doesn't penetrate their minds: for the world, a Palestinian state along the 1967 lines with East Jerusalem as its capital is a non-negotiable demand.
Mind-boggling as it may be, they really don't understand that Israel's actions in East Jerusalem and the continued building in the settlements has categorized Israel as the peace-refusenik. Even our most highly educated prime minister and defense minister, the seemingly worldly Netanyahu and Barak, have lost complete touch with the universe outside the Knesset. Netanyahu's lamentations that it's the Palestinians fault, and Barak's assertion that during his tenure as prime minister Israel built more than now just show that their horizons are now exclusively defined by their desire to hold on to this coalition of shame for a few months longer.
I wish I knew of a way to stop the madness, but prospects for the immediate future are bleak. Human nature is deeply averse to accepting guilt and responsibility. Right-wing politicians in power refuse to look in the mirror and understand that their actions are bringing this disaster on Israel. They will need an internal scapegoat for whom they blame for Israel being under such heavy attack now.
We are therefore likely to witness an increase in attacks on NGOs, academics, men and women of letters, and citizens who have for years tried to avert disaster, and to divert Israel from the course of becoming an illiberal ethnocracy. The Knesset will step up its attempts to shut up criticism, and to claim that the critics of Israel are responsible for the sanctions, despite all the evidence to the contrary. They will do everything to avoid facing the simple truth: their actions, and not Israel's liberal critics, are putting Israel into its unprecedented international isolation.
While I cannot predict how and when exactly it will be, the day will come when Israel will awake from the nationalist and racist nightmare into which it has fallen. Until Israel's electorate wakes up and understands that a sane government needs to be elected, it is up to Israel's civil society to keep alive the vision of what Israel can become.
Legal scholars like Ruti Gavison, writers like David Grossman, philosophers like Avishai Margalit and political historians like Zeev Sternhell, along with institutions like the Israel Democracy Institute, its academia, its theaters, its musicians and its filmmakers are keeping the moral and political vision alive, on which the Israel of tomorrow can build its foundations. The day will come in which the moral clarity and political wisdom of those who kept their minds and hearts intact will determine Israel's future.
A final word to the majority of Jews around the world, whose worldviews are overwhelmingly liberal, and to the many non-Jewish friends of Israel who are disappointed by its actions: This is a difficult time to be a friend of Israel, and we have never been as much in need of friends as now, to help us through this time until Israel regains a viable moral and political vision for the future.
We need to remember that countries make mistakes. The McCarthyist wave that swept the U.S. darkened the horizon for a few years, but in the end, the American love for freedom overcame this terrible episode. At heart, Israel is a society that believes in life, freedom and creativity. Seeing Israel's potential beyond the mistakes of its politicians keeps alive the knowledge that Israel will become the flourishing, creative, just and liberal democracy we want it to be.
http://bit.ly/f7EQpP
Israel's right-wing politicians are trying to divert blame for its isolation onto the country's liberal critics. 14 jan 2011, 14:36 , Respect -
Maria 10 jan 2011
Everything is the Palestinians fault, even Israeli deaths from friendly fire
Not a particularly deep point, but it's worth noting that Israeli incitement against Palestinians really is limitless.
A couple days ago, initial reports suggested from the Israeli army that Palestinian militants had attacked soldiers, injuring at least four, but that it was unclear even hours after the event what had happened to "the terrorists". Later it emerged that the Israeli occupation army had actually fired mortars at itself, killing one soldier and injuring the others. http://bit.ly/hDwcVS
Of course, even when Israelis kill each other it is the fault of the Palestinians. Here, for example, is Yaakov Katz in the Jerusalem Post http://bit.ly/i3yZzc arguing that because there are constant hostilities on the border (one wonders how months/years go by without any Israeli casualties given the high level of terrorist activity), technical or human malfunctions that kill Israeli occupation forces are not due to those technical or human malfunctions themselves. Similarly, they are not due to the collective imprisonment of 1.5 million people those soldiers are enforcing, nor are they due to the continuous, murderous enforcement of the buffer zone, in which dozens of Palestinian gravel collectors, shepherds, and farmers have been murdered in cold blood. Hostilities indeed! http://bit.ly/eKaSXI
Nope, these Israeli military deaths are the fault of the Palestinians too. Such thinking allows a simpleton like Katz to write that the IDF has yet to find a solution to preventing friendly fire incidents, many of which are the result of mistaken identification like that which occurred during Cast Lead in the context of an op-ed with the title Friendly fire inevitable result of battle on border.
Incidentally, the same thinking http://bit.ly/i3yZzc (by the same militaristic functionary) is what allows Israelis to believe that somehow they are not responsible for murdering Jawaher Abu Rahma with a barrage of tear gas, which Israeli army doctors specifically warned http://bit.ly/hfzMu1 could be deadly in high concentrations, like those generated by the Israeli army's new weapons that launch multiple tear gas canisters at a time. http://huff.to/gNrI4D
It's the same thinking that causes Israelis to accept the murder this week of 21 year old Mahmoud Muhammad Darajme, because he was terrifyingly carrying a glass bottle. http://bit.ly/fpWKzH
It's the same thinking that allows Israelis to absolve themselves of the cold-blooded murder of a 65 year old man, while he was in his bed, a father and husband, executed at dawn for no reason whatsoever except that he was Palestinian and the Israeli occupation soldiers have the weapons and political power. The unarmed, sleeping man was, after all, returning fire. http://bit.ly/hHT5Fc
Is there no limit to the violence that Israelis will excuse?
http://bit.ly/htIOWx
14 jan 2011
Oppressors and liars, and they call themselves a light upon the nations
By Khalid Amayreh
When Israeli President Shimon President was pressed by some human rights organizations to stop the practice of "administrative detention" of Palestinian intellectuals, he claimed that "Palestinians who don't hurl fire bombs and who don't shoot have nothing to fear." Peres were lying through his teeth as usual because nearly all victims of administrative detention have not indulged in any illegal activity.
Administrative detention is very much like taking hostages. One is snatched from his home and family by the Israeli occupation army (and now by the Palestinian Authority-PA- forces) and kept behind bars for months or years without charge or trial). I remember one of these seemingly perpetual detainees, Mustafa Shawar of Hebron telling me that he begged the Israeli military judge to inform him why he was being kept in jail.
"I told him I need to know the violation I committed so that I won't do it again after I am released from here. But the Judge wouldn't tell me because of unspecified security reasons."
The truth of the matter is that there are no real violations and no security reasons barring the so-called judge from revealing the reasons for a given Palestinian's arrest and incarceration.
The real reason is the sadistic Israeli urge to torment and harm Palestinians. Israelis do feel good watching Palestinians suffer, just as the Nazis felt good watching Jews suffer and die throughout Europe during and prior to the Second World War.
Israelis often like to brag about having a country of "law and order" But the question that begs itself is what sort of law and order does Israel have and according to which it acts and behaves?
Even the Third Reich, from its beginning to end, was in a certain sense based on law and order.
In light, Israel commits every conceivable crime under the sun and claims that everything is done according to the law. Thus they rain down White Phosphorus in Gaza to incinerate as many children as possible according to the law! They murder babies and children by the thousands also according the rule of law! They even murder Arab youths to snatch their vital organs for transplanting in Jewish recipients, all according to the law, as disclosed by a Swedish journalist last year!
In fact, there are a thousand forms of Israeli criminality meted out to the Palestinian people by this hateful state which claims to be civilized and democratic. The criminal detention of Palestinian intellectuals is just one of these forms.
A few years ago, Israel arrested nearly sixty democratically-elected members of the Palestinian legislative Council for no reason other than appeasing the Israeli Jewish public opinion. These Palestinians committed no felony or misdemeanor or any other violation apart from taking part in democratic elections which Israel and its guardian ally, the United States, okayed.
However, when these Islamist candidates won the elections, Israel and the US and nearly the bulk of the western world rejected the results, not because they were marred with some irregularities or vote rigging, but rather because the US and Israel didn't like the identity and ideology of the winners.
And when an Israeli occupation soldier was taken prisoner by some resistance fighters in Gaza, Israel abducted all these lawmakers in one fell swoop, as if we were living in the American wild west.
Now, what is the difference between this kind of behavior and the behavior of gangsters, hoodlums and common criminals? Well, in Israel's case there seems to be no difference whatsoever.
Eventually, these 60 MPs had to serve up to 50 months for nothing, again in accordance with the law!!
According to sources within the Israeli "justice system," Israel has taken an "informal" decision whereby hundreds of Palestinian Islamists are kept in jail 8 months every year. This means that they are released for 4 months and then rearrested and dumped behind bars for eight months every year.
In recent weeks, the Israeli occupation army has rearrested four MPs of the sixty MPs abducted in 2006 in connection with the Shalit affair.
One of them is Sheikh Nayef Rajoub from Dura, who is also brother to the former PA security official Jebril Rajoub. Nayef Rajoub languished one fifth of his life in Israeli dungeons and detention camps. In June, 2010, he was released after spending 51 months in an Israeli concentration camp for being a "threat to Israel and the Jewish people." Such flimsy and frivolous charges are leveled against anyone the racist Israeli justice system views non-conformist.
Rajoub was rearrested a few weeks ago. He reportedly was sentenced to six months of administrative detention. Whether this unjust imprisonment will be extended or not depends on the whims of a junior Israeli officer.
Three other MPs have also been rearrested, including Khalil Rabei, Muhammed al-Till, and Hatem Qafeesha and most recently Omar Abdul Razzaq, an American-educated professor of economics and finance.
Needless to say, the purpose of these arrests is obviously to punish these dignified Palestinians who reject capitulation to the Zionist fait accompli, preferring imprisonment over disgraced surrender.
The Zionist behavior vis-à-vis the Palestinian people differ very little from the treatment meted out to Jews when they were underdogs.
This criminal treatment, which is devoid of justice and fairness, shows that Jews are like all underdogs, when they get on the top they become as brutal and oppressive as their former oppressors were to them when they were underneath.
This is certainly one of the main reasons why Israel is an illegitimate state that must go sooner or later. States that don't practice justice won't live long.
http://bit.ly/hy3NOj 15 jan 2011, 23:58 , Respect -
Maria 15 jan 2011
Vera Macht Reports from Gaza
Author Gilad Atzmon
The air is filled with the noise of the Israeli F-16s, which are flying so low that it's almost like the air is trembling. You can positively feel the bombs before they fall, before they explode with a horrendous bang, that is unmistakable, with a pressure wave that breaks the windows of the houses in the whole surrounding area, and makes the walls shake miles away.
And even if you know rationally that you are not in an immediate danger, this bang triggers a primal fear, the feeling of vulnerability, of being absolutely exposed. "We people of Gaza die hundreds of times", a young Palestinian woman said. "In our thoughts, we are buried every night under the rubble of our crumbling house, we are shot every morning by a sniper on a carelessly chosen path, we may starve to death every day, because no more food is coming in."
This night four bombs fall, three in the middle area of Gaza Strip, one in Khan Younis. All places have been declared "terrorist targets" in the official statement of the Israeli military, including a Navy police building.
They fly overhead for about an hour, and you try to ignore the noise by focusing on something else, on your laptop, the text before you. The people of Gaza might watch TV, but the images are constantly disturbed by dozens of drones in the sky above. Their pervasive, never-ending buzz can drive you crazy, not to mention the prospect of how they record every single detail of each house, each car and each movement of the people, of yourself. Always aware of how they can transform into a deadly weapon at any moment. And perhaps their bombs aren't aimed at yourself, but at the car next to you, the person behind you, or at the friend on the motorcycle seat in front of you. This happened yesterday afternoon in Khan Younis, as a resistance fighter was executed in broad daylight as he rode his motorcycle with a friend.
Whoever writes about Gaza, whoever writes about the buffer zone without writing about the rockets, which are shot from there to Israel, is accused of writing only half the truth. Half of the truth about farmers being killed, stone collectors who are shot at, and bombs in the night. The other half of the truth would then be the approximately 20 mortar shells and missles that have landed in Israel since the beginning of the year, the Israeli soldier who died by "friendly fire", which was actually aimed at a Palestinian, and the Thai workers, who were injured by fragments of a missile. The whole truth would then be a mutual terror, incited on both sides, and in which both parties would be equally responsible for the spiral of violence.
If there were two equal parties, then each Israeli police station would be a legitimate target, any Israeli soldier who, on his day off, rides with a friend on his motorcycle through Tel Aviv, would be a legitimate target for execution. That is how Israel operates. The discourse is, however, not about equality, it is about self-defense and protection of a state on one side, and about terrorism on the other side.
What about the safety of the people of Gaza? One wonders, living here. What about the safety of the children in the schools near the border that are shot at, of the pregnant women, over whom the F-16 circles? Where is the protection of the baby, who was sleeping in his bed, as a few weeks ago the bullet of an Israeli tank shattered the wall above him? All of this is a response to the terror of the Islamists, says Israel and the mainstream journalism.
The terrorists are called Muqawima here in Gaza. The people who sneak at night to the border with homemade rockets and Kalashnikovs, and they come from the whole political edge spectrum of Gaza, from the Communist and the radical-Islamic, but not from the government. That it's Hamas supporters who throw missiles at Israel is a common propaganda myth. Since the massacre in Gaza two years ago, there is a truce between Hamas and Israel, and Hamas is abiding by it, in contrast to Israel. Not only that, Hamas cracks down on those militant factions which don't. Right now, Hamas would take little advantage from a war, and that is what they act upon. The firing of rockets is thus punished heavily, many fighters of these groups have been arrested before doing anything. Israel doesn't even claim that the missiles come from Hamas. The Israeli rhetoric is that they "hold solely Hamas to account for everything happing in Gaza". It is not Hamas from which this Muqawima, resistance in English, comes.
If it's not Hamas, from whom Israel officially has to protect itself, who is this resistance then? What drives these men to the border at night, with homemade rockets and Kalashnikovs?
When one wants to apply oneself over the allegedly other half of the truth about Gaza, one must deal with the militant resistance in Gaza.
In Europe the rhetoric of the media and politicians differentiates traditionally between Western and Arab resistance. "When justice becomes injustice, resistance becomes a duty," said Bertolt Brecht, and this is probably the general moral guideline by which Western resistance is measured.
Israel is committing blatant injustice in Gaza, not just from an emotional, but from a legal point of view. The entire population of Gaza lives under a total siege, the nutrition of 55% of the Palestinians in Gaza is not ensured, and 10% of children show impairments caused by malnutrition. During the Israeli attack on Gaza 2008 / 9, phosphorus bombs were used. According to article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, collective punishment is prohibited. Article 55 of the Fourth Geneva Convention states that the occupying power has the obligation to maintain the nutrition and medical care for the population to the maximum extent possible. The Additional Protocols of 1977 to the Geneva Conventions of 1949 explain that the use of incendiary weapons against civilians, or in a manner in which it can easily result in so-called "collateral damage", is prohibited. Those are only the most serious examples of a long list of Israel%u2019s injustices toward Gaza.
Is it resistance in the Brechtian sense then, which drives the fighters to the border? Maybe, that's what the supporters of the militant wing of PFLP, the Communist Party, would say, perhaps they have read Marx. They mostly fight against Israeli incursions into Gaza's land, when the soldiers come with tanks and bulldozers to uproot the fields.
Two big questions remain for everyone who condemns violence, and deals with the resistance at the border. Even if one accepts that words, at some point, are not enough anymore, that at some point you have to actively defend yourself, the first question arises: How can you accept that from these the missiles children can potentially be killed? Perhaps we should say that these missiles are not better than fireworks, that they normally cause little damage, maybe this won't change the fact. Amira Hass, an Israeli journalist, has asked this question to a leader of the Qassam Brigades, who answered: "We want the mothers and children in Israel to have the same fear that our mothers and children feel every day."
The second big question is about the absolute pointlessness of this kind of resistance. Any better firework, which leaves a hole in the Negev, is repaid by bombs, which shake the houses of Gaza, and bury innocent people among them. Any better firework, which leaves a hole in the Negev, produces an outcry in the Western media, which is a hundred times louder than any voice that speaks of the incredible suffering in Gaza, about the open-air prison in which people are living here, under-supplied with food and medicine, which speaks of injustice, and a racism which deprives the Palestinians of their most basic human rights.
When you deal with this pointlessness, the way is short to hopelessness, which runs like a thread through the lives of those who go as martyrs to the border, with their homemade rockets and Kalashnikovs. Their death is almost certain, the border zone is a maximum security zone, hardly anybody comes back alive. And when you visit the families of these martyrs, the basic constants you find are poverty, unemployment and hopelessness. They come from the smaller villages around Gaza City, from the border area, from the camps, from refugee families who have settled in small concrete houses. Their fathers may have worked in Israel as long as there were permits for that. In Gaza there is no work, the unemployment rate since the blockade is 45%.
There is also nothing for the children, barely enough to eat, let alone money to study. "The only thing we have left is God", one often hears, the other crucial constant is religiosity. For it's the radical Islamic factions which send these martyrs to the border, the best known of them is probably Islamic Jihad. It's the children of those families who go to their death, believing there is a paradise, with all those things they can't hope to acquire on earth. They are in their twenties, often younger, and convinced that in their lives they will never have liberty, nor work, nor the money to get married. Convinced that the only thing they can decide about themselves is the time of their death, and the way. Maybe they think they help their people. Maybe they don't know about the voice, which tries to be heard outside, and which speaks of the blatant injustice and the suffering of Gaza, maybe they just don't believe it can possibly help. Who knows, you can't ask them afterwards, and the next potential martyrs are almost impossible to find beforehand.
The people of Gaza you encounter in your daily life, the fruit-seller, the taxi driver, your friends and colleagues, they all speak with respect about the bravery of those who confront the Israeli soldiers in the way of David and Goliath. They don't feel protected by them, but they esteem those that at least try to resist.
What about the ones who launch missiles into Israel, you then ask. Here in the center of Gaza City, where people's lives differ from ours more in the way than in the outline, in which they are engaged in a normal everyday life, locked in terror and fear, here you can hardly find someone who can understand them. In some shoes you may have to be born to know what it's like to walk in them.
After one year in Gaza you can only approach the answer to the two big questions of the militant Palestinian resistance.
After one year in Gaza, while sitting at your desk, the air full off the noise of the Israeli F-16s, so loud that it makes things tremble, and you can positively feel the bombs coming, you know something else. You know that when you speak of Israeli terror in the buffer zone, of dead farmers and bombs in the night, you don't write only half of the truth.
Vera Macht, Gaza; Tel: 00972597355082; Email: [email protected]
http://bit.ly/fKUmXv 17 jan 2011, 02:54 , Respect -
Maria 16 jan 2011
"Soldiers, Settlers, and the Police are the Occupation: Palestinian Life Inside a Settlement
Hani Abu Haikal and his family live in Hebron's H2, which is under Israeli control. They are part of the 30,000 Palestinians that live among 500 settlers in this part of the city. Life for Palestinians inside H2 is extremely difficult, with many of them facing settler harassment, movement constraints, and a large military and police presence serving settlers interests, even if most attacks are directed at Palestinians.
Hani and his family have to deal with all these issues, in addition to the fact that they live deep inside the Tel Rumeida settlement, surrounded by settlers on all sides. Only around five Palestinian families remain inside, while many have left because of the troubles they faced. The situation got especially bad during the second Intifada, in 2000, when there was a curfew imposed on Palestinians for three years. This meant that Palestinians could not work, or go to school, among other much needed activities needed to survive.
Many restrictions continue to exist for families inside the settlement. They cannot have guests without getting prior permission from Israeli authorities. This includes family member and friends, and even ambulances and doctors. Israeli authorities reject around 60% of their requests for visitors. This makes life for Hani's family very difficult, especially for his mother who is very sick and old. She cannot walk, so she needs to have doctors come inside the settlement to visit her.
There are many other restrictions that Hani's family has to deal with. Palestinians have no permission to own cars so they have to walk everywhere, and carry everything to their home. Settlers on the other hand, can have as many cars as they want. Palestinians inside the settlement live under martial law, while the Israelis live under civilian law. Palestinians constantly face harassment at the hands of settlers. Settlers have beaten up Hani's son, without any repercussions. In the past, when Hani was able to own cars, settlers burned more than six of his cars. Settlers have also repeatedly damaged and burned his land.
Recently, an empty Palestinian home was taken over by settlers. The Palestinian owner of the house has an Israeli Supreme Court order to evacuate the settlers, but the police have not followed the order.
On Wednesday, January 5, Hani had a visit from the recently appointed Hebron governor, Kamil Hamid as well as Palestinian Authority doctors, who came to visit Hani's sick mother. As is the case with all people coming to visit his home, he had to get special permission from Israeli authorities to allow the visit. It took two weeks to get the permission. It was also promised that the military would protect the governor from settler attacks.
Things did not turn out so smoothly, however. The governor faced settler verbal and physical attacks, without any protection from the military or police. Baruch Marcel, the founder of the extreme right-wing Jewish National Front party, who also lives in the Tel Rumeida settlement, lead and gathered all the settlers. The Israeli military and police stood by while the attacks were happening, and Hani and his body guards had to rush over to protect the governor.
After the governor, the doctors and Hani were able to get inside his home safely, they were trapped inside for three hours while the settlers mob remained outside. Soldiers tried to get the governor to leave the building from the back, but he refused, and said "I am a governor, I am not a thief. I come with special permission, under Israeli protection and I'm supposed to come back as I came in."
For Hani, this incident was indicative of the troubles Palestinians face in Hebron's H2. "I liked what happened because the governor saw what our real lives are like here" Hani said. It was an opportunity for the governor to see the unfair treatment that Palestinians receive from Israeli authorities. Even with all the preparation that went into having the governor visit Hani's home, he was still not provided with the protection he was promised. This shows that the Israeli system is unjust in its treatment of Palestinians, even if they are high government officials.
According to Hani, the occupation's strength comes from soldiers, settlers, and police working together to uphold the occupation. There is a misconception that the Israeli soldiers and police uphold the system of law and justice, and protect everyone equally. He says. "Anyone who lives here like me knows that the soldiers, the police and the settlers are a team that work together." he says. "The settlers, they attack us. The solders give settlers protection. And the police arrests us." This team works together to implement and enforce Israel's efforts at population transfer of Palestinians from areas Israel wants to control. Life is made so difficult for Palestinians that they often have no other choice but to leave.
http://www.uruknet.info/?p=m73978&hd=&size=1&l=e 17 jan 2011, 12:09 , Respect -
Maria 17 jan 2011
Experience the Warsaw Ghetto
Visitors to a new exhibit at the Yad Mordechai Museum can take a virtual train to a virtual death camp, and feel the cannon-fire in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Is the Disneyland approach the only way to interest today's kids in Holocaust history?
One of the first stops made by visitors to the new Warsaw Ghetto Uprising exhibit in the Yad Mordechai Museum, in Kibbutz Yad Mordechai, is the projection of a yellow star on their clothing. By moving your body, you put the virtual patch in the place where it belongs. It's part of the concept of bringing viewers into the experience.
Later on, in order to peek at a model of the Warsaw Ghetto one takes a virtual journey on a railway car to a death camp. After the doors shut, with a realistic-sounding noise, the trip begins. A subwoofer speaker under the car simulates the sounds of traveling by train, while images of the ghetto, and then of the extermination camps, go past the barbed-wire-covered windows.
The freight car doesn't actually move. Its "journey" leads to two of the exhibit's high points.
The first is a huge, 1:100 scale model of the Warsaw Ghetto, with all the buildings as they were prior to its destruction. As stories from the ghetto are projected onto a background screen, walls and buildings in the model are lit in accordance with the narrative.
The second high point is the sound-and-light show of the main stages of the ghetto revolt and the recreation of a room in Mila 18, the famed bunker headquarters of the Jewish resistance. Against a background wall of burned bricks, the events play out, with museum visitors in the middle: Cannons fire shells, houses explode and fall down, guns are fired, planes are bombing, sirens, shouts and the crying of babies - fire and death all around. All in order to thrill audiences and make them part of the experience. The jury is still out as to whether this Warsaw-Ghetto Disneyland, whose official public opening is tomorrow, is the only way to make the history of the Holocaust real to young viewers.
The Yad Mordechai Museum is not the first one in Israel or abroad to tackle the challenge of conveying history in a way that will grab the attention of today's "instant thrills" generation, for whom the Holocaust is not a top priority. That is apparently also the reason that the museum staff often use words like "exciting," "unique" and "experiences," demonstrating a surrender to trends that are problematic at best, or populist at worst. A press release boasts that the new exhibit "has not yet been seen in museums that deal with the Holocaust in Israel and the world over."
The designer of the exhibit, David Gafni, doesn't hesitate to say that among his sources of inspiration were Epcot Center in Orlando, Florida. "I wanted to cause people who come from far away to say that there's something very special here that doesn't exist anywhere else, something that's impossible to send in a picture or by email," he explains.
Sparking the imagination
The exhibit in Yad Mordechai is one of many designed by Gafni during his 40-plus years spent preserving Jewish and Israeli heritage sites. He was the chief designer of Tel Aviv's Beth Hatefutsoth, the Museum of the Jewish People (former the Museum of the Jewish Diaspora ); Jerusalem's Western Wall tunnels museum; the Ghetto Fighters' House Museum, in Kibbutz Lohamei Hageta'ot, the Illegal Detention Camp Museum in Atlit, the Timna Park exhibit, the Historical Museum of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, the museum at the memorial site for the fallen of the Israel intelligence community. In addition, he was the house designer of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art.
Gafni says the challenge of historical exhibits is "to leave a strong impression on the visitors by creating a 360-degree environmental experience, and not to create another conventional museum with framed pictures hanging on the walls." He says the Yad Mordechai exhibit is meant to give visitors "the experience that the entire surroundings are shaking and walls are falling, to see a spark of fighting by Jews who had no choice, of an uprising the likes of which wasn't seen anywhere in Europe; to present a heroic story."
Isn't it a little tasteless to project the yellow star onto visitors' clothing?
"Images that are close to the truth or reality is important. When a group passes through and receives a patch, they can feel as though they're in the ghetto. I didn't want to attach a real patch to their clothing, I wanted to spark their imagination."
I can already imagine visitors who will see it as a game and will move the patch to various parts of their bodies.
"Children may play and not understand, but the moment the patch becomes a game you can ask about it. You can describe to them a situation in which they have to wear a patch."
Isn't it a gimmick?
"It's a stimulus. I search for hints. Of course there was some opposition. I suggested the idea in the past, and the director of Yad Vashem was opposed to it and said that if we screen a patch on people, we'll have to station an intensive care ambulance outside the museum to take care of Holocaust survivors who come to visit the museum."
Most of the museum's visitors are high-school students or soldiers on organized tours. Vered Bar Samakh, the museum's director and chief curator, says that in 2010 there were nearly 25,000 visitors, two thirds of whom were on school trips. Only a few were foreign tourists. The museum staff say it's very important that teens who are about to go on school trips to Poland visit the new exhibit, because it shows them where they'll be going and can help them to better understand how the Warsaw Ghetto used to looked when they see its remains.
Bar Samakh says that at first she opposed the idea of projecting the yellow star on to visitors, but came around to supporting it "as long as it's at the discretion of the guides." She mentions a study that examined children's responses to having a yellow star put onto their sleeves during educational trips about the Holocaust: "Some of the children spoke of a positive experience, a feeling of belonging to the same people. Some said it was humiliating. It's important to us that there isn't only experience here, because then it really does become Disneyland. We ask the children how it affected them."
"There's something exaggerated in walking around with the object itself," Gafni said. The same thing was true with the railroad car. Someone said that she was scared by the idea of people going into the car, that it would be creepy. That's why some of the doors don't close, and why we put in mirrors, so the experience won't be too difficult. Even in Yad Vashem they took a car, cut it and put it on the wall. For 15 years I worked in Beth Hatefutsoth, and eventually Israeli visitors stopped coming. If you want them to come, you have to excite them," Gafni said.
Barriers, then and now
The new Warsaw Ghetto Uprising exhibit is part of a larger program to redo all of the old Holocaust exhibits in the museum so that they relate to Mordechai Anielewicz, the Hashomer Hatzair youth movement member from Warsaw who became the leader of the uprising, and for whom the kibbutz is named. The exhibit will be dedicated tomorrow in a ceremony attended by senior representatives of the government and the Israel Defense Forces, including the chief of staff. The opening remarks will be made by Simha "Kazik" Rotem, one of the last surviving Warsaw Ghetto fighters, who rescued dozens of Jews via the ghetto sewers.
Although it is difficult to evaluate the exhibit without the docents' explanations, it is hard to shake off the feeling that the pyrotechnics, multimedia and special effects act to heighten the "Holocaust porn" aspects of the horrors of the period rather than teaching the humanitarian lessons that can be learned from it. When Bar Samakh is asked to respond to this and to explain the message that visitors are supposed to take away from the exhibit, she first discusses the technical aspects, and she seems uncomfortable with them.
"It depends mainly on the group," she says. "There are groups to which must explain what a ghetto was, what the Judenrat was. If it's a delegation going to Poland, I find out what they've already learned. I don't want to turn it into another school lesson. On the other hand, there isn't any point in turning the visit only into an audiovisual show."
Nevertheless, what's the message?
"First of all, for them to understand why the Jews couldn't fight. To understand how the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising made the Jewish people proud after the establishment of the state. In the past, Holocaust Remembrance Day was a memorial day for the Holocaust and the uprising. The visitors must understand that the uprising is part of the Holocaust. Today they already speak about Holocaust and heroism, but for me both those who survived and those who went like lambs to the slaughter are heroes.
"Second, they have to understand what the Ghetto Warsaw is, that the aim was not to win but to die with honor. The Jewish people have honor, and if they don't allow us to live with honor then we'll die with honor. That the point. They once asked Yitzhak Zuckerman, one of the commanders of the uprising, what the IDF can learn from the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. He replied that the IDF doesn't have to learn anything from the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, that the uprising belongs to the university of the human spirit, not that of the IDF."
Still, the fact is that the IDF sends soldiers here. It still wants to get something out of the visit.
"This is a historical chapter that should not be taken lightly, they never thought they would defeat the Germans temporarily, and that's said in the film that is screened in the restoration of the bunker - that the Jewish people is not something that can be wiped out in an instant. In addition, they wanted to lay the foundations for the proud new Jew, who was willing to fight for his life.
"We try to connect the soldiers to the present. I don't come and talk to them the way Holocaust survivors tell them: 'Guard our country, we must preserve the country because we have no other country.' I have a different problem. In the wake of everything that's happening in the country, we're going to prepare a guidance program dealing with racism and xenophobia. There's no value to sending groups to Holocaust study centers or to Poland if in the end they don't learn a lesson from that period and behave the way they do."
Don't you and the museum have a part in that?
"Of course we have to think about that too. Kibbutz Yad Mordechai was established on that basis: on the basis of the question of how to live in peaceful coexistence. Our plan is to see what lesson can be learned concerning today, you have to learn a lesson from everything. I don't want to get into it, but the abuse at the checkpoints of the Warsaw Ghetto bridge isn't far from what's happening today at our checkpoints in Judea and Samaria."
http://bit.ly/ejhiR6 18 jan 2011, 16:24 , Respect -
Maria p 21 jan 2011, 14:47 , Respect -
Maria 18 jan 2011
Israel's Actions Reflects the Arrogant Mentality of an Occupier
By Daoud Kuttab
Sometime over the weekend and somewhere within the Israeli military's decision making apparatus, a decision was taken. Thousands of decisions like this are taken daily. For sure no one thought much of it, after all, who cares about such insignificant decisions that affects the Palestinian population.
The Israeli army which is generally in charge of the occupied territories and specifically in charge of all declared military areas, decided to close a particular area off for security reasons. The area in question is the King Hussein bridge, the only crossing point in and out of the occupied Palestinian territories for three million Palestinians.
For the Israeli military, there is a justification. The president of the Russian Federation, Dimitry Medvedev is scheduled to attend a public event dedicating a Russian Orthodox Church overlooking the Jordan River, within a few kilometers of the bridge terminal on Tuesday. So as a security precaution the military declared a large area a closed military zone and because within this radius area, the King Hussein bridge or the Allenby Bridge, just happen to lay, the orders were made to prevent civilians from using this terminal crossing.
Even though President Medvedev is probably only going to spend a few minutes crossing the bridge (compared to hours that locals spend) and at most an hour or more at this remote Jordan Valley location, the orders were made to close the bridge an entire day. Until sometime late on Monday morning very few people knew about this decision.
I was in Copenhagen when I noticed in an email, an item on a daily security report that I get from AMAN, a Palestinian NGO, that the Allenby Bridge will be closed from 7am to 7 pm on Tuesday because of the visit of the Russian President. I called my office in Amman and asked a journalist to check the story out. Mohammad Khatib the vigil spokesman of the Jordanian police, whose office usually issues reports about such decisions, had no information.
The director of the Jordanian was unavailable in the morning but the head of the PR department at the Jordanian side said that he had heard something to the effect but that no declaration had been publicly made. Later in the day, General Jamal Badour from the Jordanian police and the director of the bridge confirmed that the Israelis were planning to close the bridge because of the visit of the Russian official. He stated that while Jordan's side is always open, that if the Israelis close their side, the bridge is in effect will be closed open only from 7am to 7 pm. An announcement made later in the day which appeared in some of the dailies noted that the bridge will be open from 7pm to 10pm.
A couple of thousand Palestinians and other cross the Jordan River daily. While Jordanians and foreigners can use other crossing points and can fly between Tel Aviv and Amman's Queen Alia Airport, Palestinians have no other outlet except this singular crossing point. Palestinians wishing to travel anywhere in the world have no choice but cross using this bridge. If you have an afternoon flight, for example, you would leave Tuesday morning thus having enough time to make your plane without having to stay another day. If you are arriving during the day from abroad you would take a taxi directly to the bridge.
For the Israeli army, this decision is rather insignificant. Who care about Palestinians and their travel plans. Had the Russian president or any other official wanted to visit Lydda, Ben Gurion Airport would not have been closed for 12 hours. If a visiting dignitary wanted to dedicate a location near the Haifa port, no one would think of closing the Haifa port for 12 hours. But this is not an internal Israeli issue where there is accountability of decisions. This is a decision by a military power affecting the affairs of a population under its control. Who care what they think?
Even neighbouring countries like Jordan, are only informed of such a decision at a very late state. No one in the Israeli army thinks of making a mutual decision. After all this is a decision regarding Israel's sacred cow, security!!!
The Russian federation which is part of the quarter (that also includes, the US, Europe and the UN) is the international group that is supposed to be leading the peace process in the Middle East.
Among the decisions that the quartet issued years ago was the Road Map for Peace. According to this important document, the Palestinians were asked to take care of internal security especially in regards of attacks against Israelis, while Israel was supposed to freeze its illegal settlement activities and to return the situation in the occupied territories to the pre October 2000 status.
In the last years of the 20th century, the Palestinian Authority officials were posted at the bridge and were involved in decisions regarding hours and conditions of the bridge. And while the Palestinian Authority has meticulously carried out its security obligations, the Israelis have refused to allow a return to the pre 2000 status throughout the occupied territories as well as on the bridge terminals leaving the Israeli army solely in charge.
Last week we saw an Arab population in Tunisia revolt against a leader of its own population after 23 years of civilian rule because they felt he has not allowed them to properly participate in how their country is being run.
For Palestinians it has been 44 years in which a foreign military occupation has been ruling over a Palestinian population. This foreign military power has also defended and protected an expansionist racist power that feels that the West Bank is the Biblical Judea and Samaria and that they have a God given right to it, irrespective of international law or the desires of the local population.
The last-minute decision by the Israeli army to close the King Hussein Bridge for 12 hours on Tuesday, might appear to Israeli generals to be an insignificant decision. But such a decision is yet one more reminder that the root problem is Israel's illegal military occupation. Perhaps President Medvedev whose presence has caused further suffering to Palestinians (without his knowledge), will impress on any Israeli official that he meets that this occupation must end immediately.
http://bit.ly/dP1Wxg 21 jan 2011, 14:48 , Respect -
Maria 17 jan 2011
How Many Photographs Will It Take to Make a Difference in the Middle East?
In the West Bank, Jewish settlers clash with Israeli authorities after attacking Palestinian farmers over a dispute about olive trees.
The farmers frantically picked their olives in the blazing hot sun. We were on a boulder-strewn hillside in Palestine, near the edge of a recently completed Jewish settlement.
Some of the farmers had started to carry their bags of olives to their carts, when suddenly a group of settlers came running down the hillside whooping and hollering, accompanied by a man blowing a horn. The settlers swooped into the grove of trees and grabbed for the olives, pushing and shoving the farmers.
Armed with Cameras
Jewish settlers film Israeli authorities who in turn film them during a dispute with Palestinian farmers.
Several of the settlers were photographing the confrontation as others tried to remove the bags of olives. Soon, police and soldiers arrived. One of the soldiers had a video camera to record the event. An officer from the border police had a camera, too, which he pointed at the settlers. The settlers, in turn, pointed their cameras at the border police.
I photographed a scuffle between a settler and the Israeli authorities while several settlers shot video and photos of me.
Here we were in the middle of a skirmish in one of the world's longest-running conflicts, all photographing each other. Documentary photographers each and every one of us and each with his own agenda.
Does Photography Really Make a Difference?
A Palestinian boy hurls stones from his slingshot at Israeli soldiers.
Over the past 70 years, more photographs and footage have been produced to document this small area of the Middle East than any other location in the world.
But, I wondered on that hot afternoon, has it made a difference?
Oh sure, photographers have won awards, become famous and changed the course of their careers because of the Palestinian/Israeli conflict. But what has it done for the people concerned?
All this photography decades of film and now a decade of pixels and the situation has only gotten worse.
So the question is, does photography really matter? Can it be a force for change?
The answer, as with many things, is yes and no.
During the Progressive Era, Lewis Hine's early 20th-century photographs of children working in sweatshops were used as part of a successful campaign to reform child-labor laws. Jacob Riis late 19th-century images of immigrants living in squalid conditions helped get the New York State Tenement House Act passed.
More recently, however, capital punishment in Texas continues despite Ken Light and Suzanne Donovan's amazing book, Texas Death Row http://bit.ly/eiz2cY . And there are more refugees today than when Sebastiao Salgado started showing the world their plight. http://bit.ly/gdIjZa
It's About the Audience
The difference in these cases is not the quality of the photography or passion of the photographers; it's the audience.
As Susan Sontag has put it:
A photograph that brings news of some unsuspected zone of misery cannot make a dent in public opinion unless there is an appropriate context of feeling and attitude.
The Vietnam War dragged on for 16 years despite a steady flow of memorable, award-winning images by photographers such as Don McCullin, Larry Burrows, Horst Fass, Nick Ut, Eddie Adams and Kyoichi Sawada.
Ultimately, though, Ut's powerful image of the Napalm-burnt little girl and Adams photograph of the execution of a Vietcong prisoner did have an impact. They helped create the climate for change.
To again quote Sontag:
Photographs cannot create a moral position, but they can reinforce one
Last of the Bedouin
A Bedouin tends to his flock of goats and sheep as an Israeli reconnaissance plane films his activities.
Meanwhile, back in Palestine, I lay on a mattress in a Bedouin camp in the Jordan Valley, looking at the stars and the moon and listening to the restless animals locked in their pens. At dawn, the headman invited me over to his tent so we could share a coffee and watch the sun rise.
Suddenly from the east, a monitor plane appeared and swooped down on the Bedouin camp photographing the movements of the tribe. The Israeli government is trying to drive the Bedouins away from their traditional grazing lands, because these areas have now been designated military zones.
Israeli military personnel were taking photographs to advance the government's agenda.
Who knows if their pictures, or mine, or those of the Israeli settlers or Palestinians, will ever make a difference here? One day, perhaps.
http://bit.ly/fgilQ2
22 jan 2011
The rabbis of the devil
Graffiti by extremist Jewish settlers in Hebron reads: Gas the Arabs .. JDL
By Khalid Amayreh
Imagine, just imagine, the outcry that would follow an imagined call by a European Muslim or Christian religious leader suggesting sending hundreds of thousands of Jews to concentration camps. The Sheikh or priest or bishop would be lambasted beyond imagination, and his denomination or church would immediately distance itself from his foolish remarks.
Political authorities would also declare that Nazi-minded Sheikh or bishop has no place in modern Europe and that governments would nip the hateful and racist elements in the bud. In short, he would be looked upon as a pariah, to say the very least. He even might be forced to commit suicide under public pressure.
As to Jewish circles, their protests would be clarion and omnipresent.
But how would things look like if such a call took place in Israel and was made by a popular rabbi, with hundreds of thousands of followers?
According to a weekly Hebrew magazine, several rabbis, including the rabbi of Safad, Shmuel Eliyahu, recently proposed the establishment of death camps for the Palestinians.
The magazine indicated that the creation of these camps would be the duty of all devout Jews.
The Yedeot Ahronot's YNet on Saturday, 15 January quoted the rabbis as stating that the Torah requires Jews to wipe out any trace of the so-called Amalek in Palestine . Many religious Jews refer to their perceived or real enemies as Amalek.
The YNet quoted Jewish intellectual Audi Aloni as saying that calls for the extermination of Palestinians are openly made in the synagogues as the genocidal idea has become a practical option.
"No one objected to Rabbi Shmuel Eliyahu, chief rabbi of Safad and Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, Chief Rabbi of Beit El, who undersigned the advisory opinion, which suggested approval for their opinion."
I realize that these evil men don't represent Jews everywhere, nor do they even represent the entire rabbinic community. There are many esteemed rabbis who reject outright the satanic mindset permeating through the landscape of the sick minds of people like Elyahu, his cohorts and evil colleagues.
The Torah, after all, was supposed to be a light upon humanity. But when it becomes, thanks to those rabbis of Satan, a tool for genocide, there is obviously a huge catch-22 hanging over Judaism's conscience.
Again, the fact that these nefarious rabbis don't represent the entirety of Judaism is no guarantee that their damage will be limited. A fool man's fire could frustrate a thousand wise men who wouldn't know how to put it off.
Isn't this the way the holocaust started? It didn't start with concentration camps, or even with Kristalnacht. Such death camps as Auschwitz , Treblinka, Mauthauzen and Bergen Belsen became only known much later.
The purpose of this small piece is not to vilify or demonize Jews. Nor am I particularly enthusiastic about hurling Nazi epithets at Jews. However, nothing should be further from truth.
The call for sending millions of Palestinians to concentration camps means that a sizeable segment of the Israeli Jewish society is capable, at least mentally, of embarking on the unthinkable. It means that a real Jewish holocaust against the Palestinian people is not outside the realm of imagination.
This matter is well known, even known too well for us who live in this part of the world. After all, Israel demonstrated two years ago, during its Nazi-like onslaught on the Gaza Strip, that it could do the unthinkable.
And that was not the first time Israel behaved manifestly nefariously. In 2006, during the Israeli aggression on Lebanon , the Israeli air force dropped more than 2,000,000 cluster bomblets on South Lebanon civilian areas, arguably enough to kill or maim at least 2 million Lebanese children.
The scant media coverage of the latest diabolic statements by the rabbis of evil in no way lessens their gravity and seriousness. After all, these are not marginal or isolated figures in society.
In fact, paying not sufficient attention to this phenomenon is tantamount to encouraging it. If Germans and others had not kept silence in the late 1920s and early 1930s, many things wouldn't have occurred.
I would want to be cautious drawing historical analogy between every thing happening in Israel today and everything that happened in Europe several decades ago. However, there are certain parallels that shouldn't escape our attention, and the latest outrageous statements by these diabolical rabbis are one of them.
Let no one say that words are innocuous and can't kill; nay, words can kill and do kill. A few years ago, a Jewish immigrant from France decapitated a Palestinian cabby from East Jerusalem after the taxi-driver gave the killer a ride to his home north of Tel Aviv. And when the murderer was eventually arrested and interrogated by the police, he said he heard his neighborhood synagogue rabbi say that the lives of non-Jews had no sanctity.
More to the point, it is abundantly clear that thousands of Israeli soldiers would rather heed and obey their respective rabbis' homilies than their army superiors' instructions when it comes to treating Palestinians. This fact was revealed during the Israeli onslaught on Gaza two years ago when Israeli soldiers knowingly and deliberately murdered innocent civilians, including children, by the hundreds.
But this is not the time for demonization; it is rather the time for action. Jewish leaders of all orientations should speak up as strongly as possible against those who are besmirching the good name of their religion.
The likes of Shmuel Eliyahu must be told that there is no place in Judaism for those who advocate genocide for non-Jews. In the final analysis, when Jews or anybody else think or behave or act like the Nazis acted, they simply become Nazis themselves.
Finally, Jews shouldn't keep silent in the face of these abominations just because the media and public opinion in the West are more or less keeping silent. Well, since when a moral stance was decided by other people's apathy or silence? In fact, the immoral silence of much of the west toward what is happening in Israel these days is bad and dangerous for Jews and their future.
Anything that causes moral desensitization to occur is definitely bad. This is to put it extremely mildly.
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