Being Pro-Humanity gets you fired in Israel

“Yad Vashem talks about the Holocaust survivors’ arrival in Israel and about creating a refuge here for the world’s Jews. I said there were people who lived on this land and mentioned that there are other traumas that provide other nations with motivation,” Shapira said.

“The Holocaust moved us to establish a Jewish state and the Palestinian nation’s trauma is moving it to seek self-determination, identity, land and dignity, just as Zionism sought these things,” he said.

For those not familiar: Yad Vashem is the “official” Holocaust memorial center in Israel. It is located not 150 yards away from the ruins of Deir Yassin. Deir Yassin was a nuetral village on international land in 1948. The Lehi and Irgun (terrorist groups that would form the foundation of the Israeli government) walked into the village and murdered 120 civilians. The village has since been destroyed and only the ruins of houses can be seen.

Shapira said Yad Vashem chooses to examine only some of the events that took place in the War of Indpendence. “It is being hypocritical. I only tried to expose the visitors to the facts, not to political conclusions. If Yad Vashem chooses to ignore the facts, for example the massacre at Dir Yassin, or the Nakba ["The Catastrophe," the Palestinians' term for what happened to them after 1948], it means that it’s afraid of something and that its historic approach is flawed,” Shapira said.

Isn’t the point of having an anti-war pro-life memorial to promote peace? Promote dialogue? I guess I should have known this wouldn’t be the case given its proximity to a massacre. The Israeli public seems split, many though fall back on their hatred:

Michael in Tel Aviv writes:

There was no such thing as a Palestinian nation..in those times, never was, nor a specific, distinct Palestinian people for that matter. The vast majority of those Arabs arrived in the land mostly during the British mandate. The ordeal of the Arabs, who had settled was self inflicted..they refused partition and chose war..who is to blame? Also the Deir Yassin didn`t turned out to be the so-called massacre the Arab`s narrative tells

Yishai Kohen says:

Deir Yassin Arabs Admitted It Was A Lie

Ron makes an easily refuted claim:

I watched a BBC program about Dier Yassin a few years ago. Elderly Arabs from the village admitted that the claims of a massacre were a fabrication. The local Arabs after agreeeing to a truce with the Israelis as they passed through, opened up fire from windows with the Arab men dressed as women.The Israelis returned fire at these gun firing “ladies” in that “massacre

April 28, 2009
Categories: discrimination, genocide, israel, nazionism, occupation, palestine, palestinians, racism, zionism . Tags: , , , , , , , , , . Author: Boulos . Comments: Leave a Comment

The Narcicyst

Narcy is once again bringing it hard for Arabs world wide. Support this man.

April 10, 2009
Categories: Arab Artists, Youtube, arab musicians . Tags: , , , , . Author: Boulos . Comments: 1 Comment

Israel is an Apartheid State

Palestinians in the occupied West Bank city of Hebron demonstrate against Israeli “apartheid,” 30 March 2009. (Mamoun Wazwaz/MaanImages)


In recent years, increasing numbers of individuals around the world have begun adopting and developing an analysis of Israel as an apartheid regime. This can be seen in the ways that the global movement in support of the Palestinian anti-colonial struggle is taking on a pointedly anti-apartheid character, as evidenced by the growth of Israeli Apartheid Week ( http://apartheidweek.org/). Further, much of the recent international diplomatic support for Israel has increasingly taken on the form of denying that racial discrimination is a root cause of the oppression of Palestinians. This has taken on new levels of absurdity in Western responses to the April 2009 Durban Review Conference, a follow-up to the 2001 World Conference Against Racism held in Durban, South Africa in which Palestinians were identified as victims of racism (the US, Israel, Canada and Italy have already announced that they will not participate because of the potential for criticism of Israel).

Many of the writings stemming from this analysis work to detail levels of similarity and difference with apartheid South Africa, rather than looking at apartheid as a system that can be practiced by any state. To some extent, this strong emphasis on historical comparisons is understandable given that boycott, divestment and sanctions is the central campaign called for by Palestinian civil society for solidarity with the Palestinian liberation struggle, and is modeled on the one that helped end South African apartheid. However, an over-emphasis on similarities and differences confines the use of the term to narrow limits. With the expanding agreement that the term “apartheid” is useful in describing the level and layout of Israel’s crimes, it is important that our understanding of the “apartheid label” be deepened, both as a means of informing activism in support of the Palestinian anti-colonial struggle, and in order to most effectively make use of comparisons with other struggles.

The apartheid analogy

It is perhaps understandable that some advocates of Palestinian rights look at the “apartheid label,” in its comparative sense, as a politically useful tool. The struggle of the South African people for justice and equality reached a certain sacred status in the 1980s and ’90s when the anti-apartheid struggle reached its zenith. The reverence with which activists and non-activists alike look to the righteousness of the South African struggle, and the ignominy of the colonial apartheid regime, are well placed. Black South Africans fought against both Dutch and British colonization for centuries, endured countless hardships including imprisonment and death, and were labeled terrorists as the powers of the world stood by the racist apartheid regime. They remained steadfast in their struggle, raising the cost of maintaining the apartheid system until South African capital found it no longer profitable and white political elites found it impossible to maintain. The comparison is further enhanced due to the relationship between the respective Palestinian and South African liberation movements, the Palestine Liberation Organization and the African National Congress, as well as the unabashed alliance between Israel and the South African apartheid regime, which remained strong even at the height of the international boycott against South Africa.

A further impetus for confining the “apartheid label” to a comparison with South Africa is that the commonalities and similarities between the liberation struggles of South Africa and Palestine are quite stark. Both cases involved a process of settler-colonialism involving the forced displacement of the indigenous population from most of their ancestral lands and concentrating them in townships and reservations, dividing the colonized community into different groups with differing rights, strict mobility restrictions that suffocated the colonized, and the use of brutal military force to repress any actual or potential resistance against the racist colonial regime.

Both regimes have enjoyed the impunity that results from full US and European support. Accompanying these and countless other similarities are a host of uncanny details common to both cases: both regimes were formally established in the same year — 1948 — following decades of British rule; approximately 87 percent of the land was off limits to most of the colonized population without special permission, and so on. While we speak here in the past tense for South Africa, this still applies to present-day Palestine.

As the Israeli apartheid label has gained ground, some have adopted the approach of describing the differences between the two regimes, albeit for various purposes. In general, Israel has not legislated petty apartheid — the segregation of spaces such as bathrooms and beaches — as was the case in South Africa. However, Israeli laws form the basis of systematic racial discrimination against Palestinians. The 1.2 million Palestinian citizens of Israel (approximately 20 percent of Israel’s citizens) do indeed have the right to vote and run in Israeli elections while the Black community in South Africa, for the most part, did not. The South African version of apartheid’s central tenet was to facilitate the exploitation of as many Black laborers as possible, whereas the Israeli version, although exploiting Palestinian workers, prioritizes the forced displacement of as many Palestinians as possible beyond the borders of the state with the aim of eradicating Palestinian presence within historic Palestine. South African visitors to Palestine have often commented on the fact that Israeli use of force is more brutal than that witnessed in the heyday of apartheid, thus leading several commentators to adopt the position that Israel’s practices are worse than apartheid and that the apartheid label does not go far enough.

Israel and the crime of apartheid

In terms of law, describing Israel as an apartheid state does not revolve around levels of difference and similarity with the policies and practices of the South African apartheid regime, and where Israel is an apartheid state only insofar as similarities outweigh differences. In 1973, the UN General Assembly adopted the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid (General Assembly resolution 3068 entered into force on 18 July 1976 — the year of the Soweto uprising in South Africa and the Land Day uprising in Palestine). The resolution set forth that the definition of the crime of apartheid was not limited to the borders of South Africa. The fact that apartheid is defined as a crime under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, which entered into force in 2002 — long after the apartheid regime was defeated in South Africa — attests to the universality of the crime.

While the wording of the definition of the crime of apartheid varies between legal instruments, the substance is the same: a regime commits apartheid when it institutionalizes discrimination to create and maintain the domination of one “racial” group over another. Karine Mac Allister, among others, has provided a cogent legal analysis of the applicability of the crime of apartheid to the Israeli regime (see “Applicability of the Crime of Apartheid to Israel,” al-Majdal #38, Summer 2008). The main point is that like genocide and slavery, apartheid is a crime that any state can commit, and institutions, organizations and/or individuals acting on behalf of the state that commit it or support its commission are to face trial in any state that is a signatory to the Convention, or in the International Criminal Court. It is therefore a fallacy to ground the Israeli apartheid label on comparisons of the policies of the South African apartheid regime, with the resulting descriptions of Israel as being “apartheid-like” and characterizations of an apartheid analysis of Israel as an “apartheid analogy.”

Recognition by the international community of such universal crimes is often the result of a particular case, so heinous that it forces the rusty wheels of international decision-making into motion. The Transatlantic Slave Trade is an example where the mass enslavement of peoples from the African continent to work as the privately owned property of European settlers formed an important part of the framework in which the drafters of the 1956 UN Supplementary Convention on the Abolition of Slavery thought and acted. An even clearer example is the Genocide Convention (adopted in 1948, entered into force in 1951) in the wake of the Nazi Holocaust in which millions of Jews, communists, Roma and disabled were systematically murdered with the intention to end their existence. We do not describe modern day enslavement as “slavery-like,” nor do we examine the mass killing of hundreds of thousands of mainly Tutsi Rwandans through a Rwandan “genocide analogy.”

Two points made by Mac Allister in her legal analysis of Israeli apartheid deserve to be reiterated because they are often confused or misconstrued even by advocates of Palestinian human rights. First, Israel’s crimes and violations are not limited to the crime of apartheid. Rather, Israel’s regime over the Palestinian people combines apartheid, military occupation and colonization in a unique manner. It deserves notice that the relationship between these three components requires further research and investigation. Also noteworthy is the Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Campaign National Committee’s “United Against Apartheid, Colonialism and Occupation: Dignity & Justice for the Palestinian People” position paper, which outlines and, to some extent, details the various aspects of Israel’s commission of the crime of apartheid, and begins to trace the interaction between Israeli apartheid, colonialism and occupation from the perspective of Palestinian civil society. [1]

The second point worth reiterating is that Israel’s regime of apartheid is not limited to the West Bank and Gaza Strip. In fact, the core of Israel’s apartheid regime is guided by discriminatory legislation in the fields of nationality, citizenship and land ownership. This discriminatory legislation was primarily employed to oppress and dispossess those Palestinians (refugees and internally displaced) who were forced from their land and property during the 1948 Nakba, or catastrophe, as well as the minority who managed to remain within the 1949 armistice line (referred to as the “green line”), who later became Israeli citizens. Israel’s apartheid regime was extended into the West Bank and Gaza Strip following the 1967 occupation of those territories for the purpose of colonization and military control over the Palestinians who came under occupation. Using again the example of South Africa, the crime of apartheid was not limited to the Bantustans — the whole regime was implicated and not one or another of its racist manifestations.

The analysis of Israel as an apartheid state has proven to be very important in several respects. First, it correctly highlights racial discrimination as a root cause of Israel’s oppression of Palestinians. Second, one of the main effects of Israeli apartheid is that it has separated Palestinians — conceptually, legally and physically — into different groupings (refugees, West Bank, Gaza, within the “green line” and a host of other divisions within each), resulting in the fragmentation of the Palestinian liberation movement, including the solidarity movement. The apartheid analysis enables us to provide a legal and conceptual framework under which we can understand, convey and take action in support of the Palestinian people and their struggle as a unified whole. Third, and of particular significance to the solidarity movement, this legal and conceptual framework takes on the prescriptive role underpinning the growing global movement for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel until it complies with international law.

Colonialism and the role of comparison

I have argued that the question of whether apartheid applies cannot be determined by means of comparison with South Africa, but rather by legal analysis. This, however, does not mean that comparative study is not useful. Comparison is in fact essential to the process of learning historical lessons for those involved in struggle. A central point of comparison with South Africa is the fact that it was, and for the indigenous people of Palestine and the Americas, continues to be a struggle against colonialism.

Focusing on the colonial dimension of Israeli apartheid and the Zionist project enables us to maintain our focus on the issues that really matter, such as land acquisition, demographic engineering and methods of political and economic control exercised by one racial group over another. Comparison with other anti-colonial struggles provides the main resource for understanding this colonial dimension of Israeli oppression, and for deriving some of the lessons needed to fight it.

One of the key lessons for Palestinians from the struggle against apartheid in South Africa was the pressure placed on the African National Congress leadership to compromise on its economic demands such as land restitution. Only a tiny proportion of white-controlled land in South Africa was redistributed to Blacks after 1994. As such, while the struggle of the South African people defeated the system of political apartheid, the struggle against economic apartheid continues in various forms including anti-poverty and landless peoples’ movements today. The centrality of the demand for land restitution should be highlighted as part of the demand for refugee return as Palestinians and those struggling with them work to reconstruct a political strategy and consensus on how to overcome the political challenges that have emerged since the launching of the peace process and the transformation of the Palestinian liberation movement leadership into a non-sovereign authority dependent on Israel for its international legitimacy and financial solvency.

A second key lesson is in response to the paradigm currently guiding most mainstream accounts of how to achieve the elusive “peace in the Middle East,” which is the idea of partition often referred to as the “two-state solution.” In the 1970s, South Africa tried to deal with its “demographic problem” — the fact that the vast majority of its population was Black but did not have the right to vote. The apartheid regime reconstructed South Africa as a formal democracy by reinventing the British-established reservations (the Bantustans) as independent states (British rule in South Africa established reserves in 1913 and 1936 on approximately 87 percent of the land of South Africa for the purpose of segregating the Black population from the settlers). These 10 “homelands” were each assigned to an ethnicity decided by Pretoria, and indigenous South Africans who did not fit into one of the ethnicities were forced to make themselves fit in order to become nationals of one of the homelands. Through this measure, members of the indigenous population were reclassified as nationals of a homeland, and between 1976 and 1981 the regime tried to pass the homelands off as independent states: Transkei in 1976, Bophuthatswana in 1977, Venda in 1979, and Ciskei in 1981.

Each of these Bantustans was given a flag and a government made up of indigenous intermediaries on the Pretoria payroll, and all the trappings of a sovereign government including responsibility over municipal services and a police force to protect the apartheid regime, but without actual sovereignty. The idea was that by getting international recognition for each of these homelands as states, the apartheid regime would transform South Africa from a country with a 10 percent white minority, to one with a 100 percent white majority. Since it was a democratic regime within the confines of the dominant community, the state’s democratic nature would be beyond reproach. No one was fooled. The African National Congress launched a powerful campaign to counter any international recognition of the Bantustans as independent states, and the plot failed miserably at the international level — with the notable, but perhaps unsurprising, exception that a lone “embassy” for Bophuthatswana was opened in Tel Aviv.

Israel has employed similar strategies in Palestine. For example, Israel recognized 18 Palestinian Bedouin tribes and appointed a loyal sheikh for each in the Naqab (Negev) desert during the 1950s as a means of controlling these southern Palestinians, forcing those who did not belong to one of the tribes to affiliate to one in order to get Israeli citizenship (see Hazem Jamjoum, “al-Naqab: The Ongoing Displacement of Palestine’s Southern Bedouin,” al-Majdal #39-40, Autumn 2008/Winter 2009). In the late 1970s, the Israeli regime tried to invent Palestinian governing bodies for the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the form of “village leagues” intended to evolve into similar non-sovereign governments — glorified municipalities of a sort. As with apartheid’s Homelands, the scheme failed miserably, both because the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) had established itself as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people, and because Palestinians largely understood the plot and opposed it with all means at their disposal. The main lesson for Israel was that the PLO would have to either be completely destroyed or would have to be transformed into Israeli apartheid’s indigenous intermediary. Israel launched a massive campaign to destroy the PLO throughout the 1980s and early ’90s. With the demise of the PLO’s main backers in the Soviet bloc at the end of the Cold War and its strained relations with Saudi Arabia and Kuwait after the first Gulf War, Israel capitalized on the opportunity, and worked to transform the PLO from a liberation movement to a “state-building” project that was launched by the signing of the Oslo Accords, seven months before South Africa’s first free election.

The push for the establishment and international recognition of an independent Palestinian state within the Palestinian Bantustan is no different from the South African apartheid regime’s campaign to gain international recognition of Transkei or Ciskei. This is the core of the “two-state solution” idea. The major and crucial difference is that in the current Palestinian case, it is the world’s superpower and its adjutants in Europe and the Arab world pushing as well, and armed with the active acceptance of Palestine’s indigenous intermediaries.

Hazem Jamjoum is the editor of al-Majdal, the English language quarterly magazine of the Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights in Bethlehem, Palestine.

Endnotes
[1] This is the Palestinian civil society position paper for the April 2009 Durban Review Conference in Geneva, and can be downloaded at: http://bdsmovement.net/files/English-BNC_Position_Paper-Durban_Review.pdf (accessed 29 March 2009).

April 9, 2009
Categories: discrimination, gaza, genocide, israel, nazionism, occupation, palestine, palestinians, racism, zionism . Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Author: Boulos . Comments: 3 Comments

“Zionism is the Problem”

By Ben Ehrenreich  (LA Times 03/17/2009)

It’s hard to imagine now, but in 1944, six years after Kristallnacht, Lessing J. Rosenwald, president of the American Council for Judaism, felt comfortable equating the Zionist ideal of Jewish statehood with “the concept of a racial state — the Hitlerian concept.” For most of the last century, a principled opposition to Zionism was a mainstream stance within American Judaism.

Even after the foundation of Israel, anti-Zionism was not a particularly heretical position. Assimilated Reform Jews like Rosenwald believed that Judaism should remain a matter of religious rather than political allegiance; the ultra-Orthodox saw Jewish statehood as an impious attempt to “push the hand of God”; and Marxist Jews — my grandparents among them — tended to see Zionism, and all nationalisms, as a distraction from the more essential struggle between classes.

To be Jewish, I was raised to believe, meant understanding oneself as a member of a tribe that over and over had been cast out, mistreated, slaughtered. Millenniums of oppression that preceded it did not entitle us to a homeland or a right to self-defense that superseded anyone else’s. If they offered us anything exceptional, it was a perspective on oppression and an obligation born of the prophetic tradition: to act on behalf of the oppressed and to cry out at the oppressor.

For the last several decades, though, it has been all but impossible to cry out against the Israeli state without being smeared as an anti-Semite, or worse. To question not just Israel’s actions, but the Zionist tenets on which the state is founded, has for too long been regarded an almost unspeakable blasphemy.

Yet it is no longer possible to believe with an honest conscience that the deplorable conditions in which Palestinians live and die in Gaza and the West Bank come as the result of specific policies, leaders or parties on either side of the impasse. The problem is fundamental: Founding a modern state on a single ethnic or religious identity in a territory that is ethnically and religiously diverse leads inexorably either to politics of exclusion (think of the 139-square-mile prison camp that Gaza has become) or to wholesale ethnic cleansing. Put simply, the problem is Zionism.

It has been argued that Zionism is an anachronism, a leftover ideology from the era of 19th century romantic nationalisms wedged uncomfortably into 21st century geopolitics. But Zionism is not merely outdated. Even before 1948, one of its basic oversights was readily apparent: the presence of Palestinians in Palestine. That led some of the most prominent Jewish thinkers of the last century, many of them Zionists, to balk at the idea of Jewish statehood. The Brit Shalom movement — founded in 1925 and supported at various times by Martin Buber, Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem – argued for a secular, binational state in Palestine in which Jews and Arabs would be accorded equal status. Their concerns were both moral and pragmatic. The establishment of a Jewish state, Buber feared, would mean “premeditated national suicide.”

The fate Buber foresaw is upon us: a nation that has lived in a state of war for decades, a quarter-million Arab citizens with second-class status and more than 5 million Palestinians deprived of the most basic political and human rights. If two decades ago comparisons to the South African apartheid system felt like hyperbole, they now feel charitable. The white South African regime, for all its crimes, never attacked the Bantustans with anything like the destructive power Israel visited on Gaza in December and January, when nearly1,300 Palestinians were killed, one-third of them children.

Israeli policies have rendered the once apparently inevitable two-state solution less and less feasible. Years of Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem have methodically diminished the viability of a Palestinian state. Israel’s new prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has even refused to endorse the idea of an independent Palestinian state, which suggests an immediate future of more of the same: more settlements, more punitive assaults.

All of this has led to a revival of the Brit Shalom idea of a single, secular binational state in which Jews and Arabs have equal political rights. The obstacles are, of course, enormous. They include not just a powerful Israeli attachment to the idea of an exclusively Jewish state, but its Palestinian analogue: Hamas’ ideal of Islamic rule. Both sides would have to find assurance that their security was guaranteed. What precise shape such a state would take — a strict, vote-by-vote democracy or a more complex federalist system — would involve years of painful negotiation, wiser leaders than now exist and an uncompromising commitment from the rest of the world, particularly from the United States.

Meanwhile, the characterization of anti-Zionism as an “epidemic” more dangerous than anti-Semitism reveals only the unsustainability of the position into which Israel’s apologists have been forced. Faced with international condemnation, they seek to limit the discourse, to erect walls that delineate what can and can’t be said.

It’s not working. Opposing Zionism is neither anti-Semitic nor particularly radical. It requires only that we take our own values seriously and no longer, as the book of Amos has it, “turn justice into wormwood and hurl righteousness to the ground.”

Establishing a secular, pluralist, democratic government in Israel and Palestine would of course mean the abandonment of the Zionist dream. It might also mean the only salvation for the Jewish ideals of justice that date back to Jeremiah.

Ben Ehrenreich is the author of the novel “The Suitors.”

March 17, 2009
Categories: discrimination, gaza, genocide, israel, occupation, palestine, palestinians, zionism . Tags: , , , , , , , , . Author: Boulos . Comments: 7 Comments

Every Arab MUST be a security threat

Straight from Haaretz:

Israel is preventing the director general of the Palestinian human rights organization Al-Haq, Shawan Jabarin, from travelling to the Netherlands to accept a prize. The Supreme Court has been asked to review Jabarin’s petition to reverse the Shin Bet’s decision.

The Geuzenpenning Prize for Human Rights Defenders will be given at a ceremony next week. The country’s royal family is scheduled to attend, and Israel’s refusal to allow Jabarin to travel to the Netherlands is straining relations with the European country.

The travel restrictions have stirred a series of protests by human rights organizations around the world, and has become the subject of high-level exchanges between the Dutch and Israeli foreign ministries. The Foreign Ministry refused to comment, and the Shin Bet argued it could not comment since the matter had been brought before the Supreme Court.

For the past three years, the Shin Bet has prevented Jabarin from traveling abroad, arguing he is a member of the People’s Liberation Front for Palestine, and “his travel may endanger regional security.”

The Netherlands jointly awarded the prize to Al-Haq and B’tselem, an Israeli human rights group. The prize commemorates the activities of the Dutch resistance under Nazi occupation.

The Supreme Court is scheduled to deliberate Jabarin’s petition today. The petitioners stress that the refusal to permit Jabarin to travel abroad suggests he is being targeted for securing human rights for his people. Moreover, Jabarin maintains that human rights activists must enjoy added protection in areas “where there is no democracy – like the occupied territories.”

Previous petitions to the court requesting that Jabarin be allowed to exit the country have been rejected on the basis of classified information that the Shin Bet presented the justices.

“How can it be that my stay in the Netherlands constitutes a higher security threat than my being in Ramallah?” Jabarin told Haaretz.

“For the past 22 years, the Shin Bet has argued that I am an active member in the Popular Front. During this entire period, I was never tried for this and obviously was never given an opportunity to defend myself against such a charge. Their evidence is secret and classified and is hidden from me and my lawyers. I have been an activist in Al-Haq since 1987, and I am not an activist for the Popular Front,” Jabarin said.

Ten Israeli human rights groups sent a letter of protest to Defense Minister Ehud Barak, demanding that Jabarin be allowed to travel to the Netherlands to receive the prize.

“The blatant blow to the freedom of movement of one of the best-known human rights activists in the West Bank is contrary to the basic principles of a state that is governed by the rule of law,” they wrote.

What does the average Israeli reader think of this?

“P” people don`t have rights `cos they do not exist. Jabarin belongs to an organisation that aims to destroy Israel. Jabrin himself is a Jordanian who was disenfrachised by his government in 1988 and now calls himself “Palestinian” as a tactical ploy to claw back land that Israel recaptured in the 6 day war.

Non-existent nations cannot have “rights”. Jabrin and his friends must suffer occupation until they surrender to Israel unconditionally.

Loving people they are.

March 15, 2009
Categories: discrimination, israel, nazionism, occupation, palestine, palestinians, racism, zionism . Tags: , , , , , , , , . Author: Boulos . Comments: Leave a Comment

“Aim for the face”

Do we need to elaborate?

March 15, 2009
Categories: israel, nazionism, occupation, palestine, zionism . Tags: , , , , , . Author: Boulos . Comments: 1 Comment

IDF shoots American citizen in the head with tear-gas canister

JERUSALEM – An American demonstrator was critically wounded Friday in a clash between protesters and Israeli troops over Israel’s West Bank separation barrier.

Peace activists with the International Solidarity Movement said Tristan Anderson, of the Oakland, Calif., area, was struck in the head with a tear gas canister fired by Israeli troops. The military and the Tel Aviv hospital where Anderson was taken had no details on how he was hurt.

“He’s in critical condition, anesthetized and on a ventilator and undergoing imaging tests,” said Orly Levi, a spokeswoman at the Tel Hashomer hospital. She described Anderson’s condition as “life-threatening.”

The protest took place in the West Bank town of Naalin, where Palestinians and international backers frequently gather to demonstrate against the barrier. Israel says the barrier is necessary to keep Palestinian attackers from infiltrating into Israel. But Palestinians view it as a thinly veiled land grab because it juts into the West Bank at multiple points.

The military says the area where the protests take place is a closed military zone off-limits to demonstrations.

About 400 protesters turned out in Naalin on Friday, the military said. Some of them hurled rocks at troops, who used riot gear to quell the unrest, it added, without elaborating.

Ulrika Jenson, an International Solidarity Movement activist, said troops fired tear gas canisters into the crowd from a hill above.

“Tristan was hit and fell to the ground,” Jenson was quoted as saying in an ISM statement. “He had a large hole in the front of his head, and his brain was visible.”

In 2003, another ISM activist, 23-year-old American Rachel Corrie, was crushed to death in Gaza by an Israeli bulldozer as she tried to block it from demolishing a Palestinian home.

The driver said he didn’t see her, and the Israeli military ruled her death an accident.

Copyright 2009 The Associated Press
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29680577/

March 13, 2009
Categories: discrimination, israel, nazionism, occupation, palestine, palestinians, racism, west bank, zionism . Tags: , , , , , , , , . Author: Boulos . Comments: Leave a Comment

Closed Zone

The man behind “Waltz with Bashir”  (a film that attempts to make you feel bad for the people committing the crimes) came out with a short film on Gaza.

Has he grown a conscience since 1982 when he “only lit flares” ?

While he tries to make himself seem like he actually cares, he fails. Perhaps I am just a cynic, but when making a video about innocent civilians who were killed because Israel broke the ceasefire (its a fact) doesn’t seem wrong to show them responding to an attack instead of the truth?

March 7, 2009
Categories: discrimination, gaza, genocide, israel, nazionism, occupation, palestine, palestinians, racism, zionism . Tags: , , , , , , , , , , . Author: Boulos . Comments: 2 Comments

Haaretz exposes how the IDF treat civilians

GAZA – We had already visited this house, belonging to the Abu Eida family. It is the only one of the family’s nine large houses that remained standing at the eastern edge of the city of Jabalya following Operation Cast Lead. The demolition of the family’s houses and its four cement factories spells the loss of 40 years of hard work.

One Hebrew word scrawled on a wall tells the story of the 10 days when young Israeli soldiers became the ostensible prison wardens of five people. The youngest is Suheila Masalha, 55; the eldest is her mother Fatma, who is perhaps 85 or 90 or older. The only man is her brother Mohammed, 65, who is paralyzed and dependent on the women of his family. And there were two more women from the Abu Eida family – Rasmiya, 70, who owns the house, and her sister-in-law Na’ama, 56, who is blind.

“Jail” (”mikhla’a” in Hebrew), wrote the soldiers on the wall of the room where they kept the man and the four women. They did not allow them to use the toilet, but forced them to use all kinds of plastic containers kept in the room, for nine of the days.

From other graffiti you can conclude that it was the soldiers of the Golani Brigade – who were drafted in August 2007, and in January and March of 2008 – who sketched orientation maps on the walls of nearly every room. For example, “Position: entry. Direction: southeast,” and a few squares that indicated the houses in the area. “Us,” or “We are here,” or just an X marked on square No. 5 – Rasmiya Abu Eida’s house that became an Israel Defense Forces base.

The soldiers kept kosher, judging by the words “meat” and “dairy” scrawled in red on the kitchen cabinets. Maybe someone was kidding around, or maybe someone thought this was going to be their base for several more months, because they also wrote “Kosher for Passover” on one of the cupboards. Also in red.

White flags

The Masalha family lived in a kind of tin shack and raised their sheep near the Abu Eida family (the shack and the sheep were destroyed). On the evening of Saturday, January 3, when the Israeli ground incursion began, they fled the shelling and sought refuge with the neighbors in concrete houses that seemed safer. But the shells and shooting from close range only increased and the children were scared; they cried and screamed and members of the extended family decided to head west, on foot, with white flags.

The adults carried the children – without suitcases and clothing, and even without ID cards. There was no one to carry Fatma Masalha and her son Mohammed, who remained behind. Na’ama and her sister-in-law Rasmiya decided to stay with the guests who had sought shelter. That was on Sunday, January 4, at around 3 P.M.

A spacious, well-kept, generously furnished home awaited the soldiers on the following morning, when they arrived. There are other houses like this in Gaza, especially on the agricultural lands in the outskirts, which over the years have become bourgeois areas. These are exactly the places where the signs of shelling and the fires caused by the phosphorous bombs made clear to the civilians that they should leave if they held their lives dear.

On January 18, when the forces pulled out, similar sights awaited people whose homes had become military bases in their absence. There were bullet-pocked walls, ripped-up sofas and armchairs, smashed televisions and computers, shards of glass and porcelain dishes and broken wooden thresholds. Clothing was ripped up. And there were mountains of very Israeli garbage – empty tin cans, cardboard boxes, empty bags of potato chips and chocolate, and full bags of sugar and raspberry-flavored drinking powder. Everything was kosher for Passover under the supervision of the Chief Rabbinate. And there were Hebrew newspapers, including the January 9 issue of the army magazine Bamahane.

In one house they left behind lots of unopened canned goods. The local people assumed that commanding army officers had stationed themselves there, as well as in other houses where there was no racist graffiti and family belongings hadn’t been vandalized. Remnants of ammunition and IDF equipment were also found in and around many houses, as well as books of Psalms, the “Wisdom of the Sages” and “Hafetz Chaim,” which is about rabbinical laws concerning slander and gossip.

Like ants

In the midst of all of this were plastic bottles of urine and many closed bags – in some houses, olive-colored ones – of excrement. People assumed that the commanders stayed there. There are houses where excrement was smeared on the walls, or where dry piles of it were found in corners. In many cases, the smells indicated that soldiers had urinated on piles of clothing or inside a washing machine. In all the houses the toilets were overflowing and clogged, and there was filth all around. When the Abu Eidas returned to house No. 5 in Jabalya, they discovered pots of urine and excrement in the refrigerator.

“Like ants, so many of them,” says Na’ama, an Arabic teacher, of the soldiers who came into their home on January 5. She recalls that the soldiers had to be told that Mohammed could not put his hands up, and that they ordered the residents to strip. (Na’ama refused and one soldier made do with prodding and probing; they told Suheila to strip because they thought she was wearing an explosives belt.) The soldiers were amazed that the house was so large – “For just five people” – and kept saying that “this is Hamas money.” They also asked, “Where are the tunnels, where is Hamas, if everyone left why didn’t you leave?”

The soldiers ordered the five people to go into one room and stay there. They let them take some food: bread, olives, oil, water. They confiscated the mobile phones when they saw Na’ama holding one: “You want to call your brother to come with Hamas, to shoot at us,” said one of the soldiers. “Liar,” they said a lot, as well as “shut up, you donkey,” in broken Arabic. They imitated her mockingly when she said “Ya Rab” (”Oh God”). The five prisoners could not pray, as they were not allowed to clean themselves up before prayer and were forbidden to stand up. They were given two blankets, which were not enough, especially because the windows were smashed and the door was always open. A soldier always sat next to the door aiming his rifle at them. All five still have colds.

“You’ll come out when we leave,” was the answer given to Na’ama after she asked them to contact the Red Cross. Apparently, one soldier spoke fluent Arabic, another could speak some and others knew a phrase or two.

Was there anyone among the soldiers who was a little bit nice? “To my regret, no,” Na’ama says. In a number of other houses or neighborhoods people who preferred not to flee encountered some soldiers who were somewhat courteous. In none of the other houses were people forbidden to use the toilet, but the men’s hands were bound for two or three days. There are houses where the captives had no food for two or three days or no water for hours. “We don’t have food either,” said the soldiers in Izbet Abed Rabbo.

Soldiers broke down doors of grocery stores and helped themselves to candy and snacks. There were some who handed out candy to children; sometimes soldiers asked a child whom they forced to accompany them, as a human shield, to hand it out.

On the morning of January 14, the Red Cross came to pick up the five inhabitants of the “jail” in house No. 5. A short while beforehand, the soldiers had brought a portable gas burner in so Rasmiya could make hot tea, which they had not let her do before. “Maybe because the officer came,” Na’ama says.

The IDF Spokesman’s Office said in response that soldiers in Gaza were instructed in advance not to harm personal property unless there was a need to do so for operational purposes.

March 6, 2009
Categories: discrimination, gaza, genocide, israel, nazionism, occupation, palestine, palestinians, racism, zionism . Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Author: Boulos . Comments: 1 Comment

Shahar Peer has it easy

By now every media outlet has most likely shoved the story about Shahar Peer being denied a VISA into Dubai ( if you live in the “West”). We are somehow supposed to feel bad for her and be enraged at the “A-rabs” for being so prejudice. Anyone with a knowledge of the truth would feel quite the opposite.

During Peer’s last tournament participation in Australia there was widespread protesting and violence outside the event. The UAE raised these concerns stating that they would not be willing to endanger the well being of an athlete in light of recent events in the region. Now you have to ask yourself which is worse: telling someone they cannot come in for security reasons or letting them in and potentially become seriously injured.

Now the fun begins. In every article and every interview Peer suggests that politics and sports should be two seperate arenas. I mean all these countries go to the Olympics and get along quite well without any politics involved right?

But lets move on to individual grievences imposed by Israel and other lovely nations.

  1. November 2007 Israel forbids 18 members of the Palestinian National soccer team from leaving the country. The team is forced to forfeit their matches.  Haaretz
  2. September 2004 Israel forbids 5 members of the Palestinian National soccer team from participating in a World Cup qualifying match.  Guardian.co.uk
  3. August 2007 Great Britain in collaboration with Israel prevent an entire youth soccer team from going to soccer camp in Britain. “tell them they would not be allowed to enter the United Kingdom because they were unable to produce Israeli assurances that they could return home at the end of the trip” Javno
  4. June 2003 “It was confirmed yesterday that a 21-year-old Down’s syndrome athlete from Palestine, who was unable to cross the Israeli-controlled border, will not be attending the Games.

    Mr Lyad Abuelkheir, who was due to compete in the handball competition, was not allowed to cross the border between Gaza and Egypt despite holding an Irish visa.

    The chairman of the host town committee in Kinsale, Co Cork, expressed frustration at the actions of the Israeli authorities.”
    The Irish Times June 18th 2003

So what is the situation? Israel can dish out unjust bannings but is unable to comprehend when it happens to them? In all these situation no action was taken to punish Israel for its transgressions against the “purity of sport.”

But what should we expect from the Israeli government? During the aforementioned ‘recent events’ Israel managed to bomb the Olympics headquarters in Gaza as well as carpet bomb the adjacent soccer field (pitch).

February 17, 2009
Categories: Sports, discrimination, gaza, genocide, israel, nazionism, occupation, palestine, palestinians, racism, tennis, zionism . Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , . Author: Boulos . Comments: 15 Comments

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