Ala Joradat, the program manager of Adameer, a Palestinian human rights organization that focuses primarily on prisoners, legal aid, and monitoring, meets with our delegation and tries to unravel the complex civil and human rights issues that face Palestinians, particularly those who choose to protest the conditions of the Israeli occupation. He explains that the prisoners are both a product of the conflict and a cause for the conflict. Since 1967, 800,000 Palestinians have experienced detention, representing more than 53% of the population over 18. Because mostly Palestinian males are targeted for arrest, 60-70% of adult males have been to prison.
Egypt and Israel impose a strict blockade on the Gaza Strip, which Israel says is aimed at weakening Hamas.
Ehab Ghussein, a Hamas spokesman, said frustration about Egypt's new underground wall was fuelling the protests. "There was anger, and that's because of what happened, especially about the wall and [Egypt preventing entry of] the people who are coming to stand with us," he said. Israel's strict blockade of Gaza, which has been in place for more than two years, prevents all exports and limits imports to a few humanitarian items. Egypt has also kept its one border crossing with Gaza, at Rafah, largely closed.
So it's Israel's blockade, with the Egyptians merely tagging along. Why? The Guardian explains:
Under pressure from the US and Israel, Egypt has started building a vast steel wall along its side of the Gaza border to prevent smuggling. Hundreds of smuggling tunnels dug by Palestinians reach into northern Egypt and supply Gaza with a wide range of products from food and clothing to animals and cars. Israel and the US have said they are concerned about weapons smuggling.
They Egyptians are puppets of the Israelis and Americans. Why a nation of 80 million debases itself in such a manner is unexplained, though there's the implication that the puppeteers have awesome powers; at least with the Americans this has a rational grounding. The Israelis, however? Do they control the world? And if so, haven't we seen that theme somewhere before?
The demonstration, organized by Hamas, protested Egypt’s refusal to allow international aid and solidarity missions into Gaza as well as Egypt’s construction of an underground barrier to obstruct smuggler tunnels. Those tunnels supply both goods and arms to Hamas and Gaza.
Egypt's stance does not arise from its desire to help the Israeli siege on Gaza or to respond to the United States' demand to prevent smuggling. It is intended to show both Hamas and Syria that just as it has the power to open the border crossings at will and relieve the siege, so it can twist Hamas' arm.
Egypt is interested in Palestinian reconciliation and wishes to set up a Palestinian unity government. Egypt has assured Hamas and Mahmoud Abbas of its support if such a government is formed, mainly because it does not want to be responsible for the Gaza Strip. But Cairo is fed up with Hamas' foot-dragging and Tehran's meddling. In this Egypt is assisted by Saudi Arabia, which gave Hamas politburo chief Khaled Meshal an ultimatum to decide whether he is running an Arab organization or is under the "patronage of a foreign power," i.e. Iran.
We saw field after field of olive tree stumps, 100 year old trees that once belonged to the Bedouins that had been cut down by the Israelis—insuring that Bedouins could not stay in or near East Jerusalem.
Most significantly, however, in both directions I looked at the two only fields that could possibly fit Borger's description of blackened olive trees. I stared at them, because they are indeed rather puzzling. Back in the 1970s, so far as I can remember, they weren't there at all: merely a parched and dusty hillside. Then in the 80s, as Jewish settlements were built nearby, someone planted them with some kind of desert crop - acacia, perhaps? I sort of thought it must have been the initiative of the new settlers, but maybe I was wrong. I didn't give it much thought - two fields out in the desert, nothing all that noteworthy. And then yesterday, I was struck by the fact that all the stumps look dead.
There was never an olive tree there, the stumps aren't blackened stumps of them, and anyway, what's the connection between Maaleh Edumim, some miles up the road, and those two fields? Maybe the acacia's all died of something? Maybe the owner, whoever he or she might be, stopped watering them and they died? Indeed, I don't know - but I do know that Borger's version is hogwash.
The question was like an electric shock to the six or so Palestine solidarity activists, including myself, as we were standing inside a classroom at a school in Gaza City.“Why the Palestinians? Why are we the only ones suffering?” asked a Palestinian girl who was probably about nine or ten-years-old. And then the enormity of what the people of Gaza go through every day hit me...
Although I didn’t have this reaction to the question of “why the Palestinians” right away, and I wouldn’t have said it out loud in front of a classroom of young Palestinian girls, I thought back to a story a professor at school told me. He is a Holocaust survivor, and was teaching a course I took on the culture and politics of Nazi Germany. One story that remains with me from that professor is when he described a scene in Hungary, where an Austrian friend, who came to stay with his family in Hungary after the Nazi invasion in 1938, repeatedly asked, “What have we done?” And someone in my professor’s family responded, “Your only crime is that you were born a Jew.”
The only reason why these innocent girls, and all the innocent children and people of Palestine are suffering, is because they committed the “crime” of being born Palestinian. Had they been born Israeli, or in the United States, the crippling siege on Gaza would not be a reality for them. But it is. The Zionist movement had looked to Palestine as a place where Jews could create an state where only Jews would reside, and the children of Gaza continue to live with the indescribable effects of occupation, war, and death that came as a direct result of the Zionist move to establish a state in Palestine.
I've been around long enough to recognize that college students need the opportunity to take positions they'll later reject. I even did it myself, briefly. Yet this tolerance isn't open-ended. Saying that the Jews purposefully and intentionally have persecuted anyone to an extent without equal anywhere else is beyond the pale in my book. Kane lives in a democracy so he may say whatever he wishes, but the rest of us need to brand him for what he says. What he chooses to write, beyond being a simple pack of lies, is also stark hatred of Jews.
Hosted on a site owned by two Jews.
Originally posted by Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations
Over the last week, as the international marchers arrived in Egypt, the Egyptian Foreign Ministry made it very clear that it did not want them going into Gaza, and it would arrest them short of that goal. But these 1400 are not tourists or milquetoasts, they are activists; and they were not going to be stopped by any old Ministry, even the ministry of a police state.
Over the next 4 hours I witnessed agony and torment, and said a secret blessing that I had not tried to get on the buses last night. A crowd of those opposed to the 100 stood outside barricades set up around the buses and shouted "All or none!" and "Get off the Bus!" It turned out that they had many confederates among the 100 who boarded the buses– confederates who at a signal marched off the buses, some giving heroic speeches.
The people staying on the buses leaned out the doors to say that the Gazans wanted them to come so as to to join their march to the Israeli border on the 31st. But they wavered. Indeed, you saw some of the most resolute activists on the planet—Bernardine Dohrn, the law professor and former member of the Weather Underground; Ali Abunimah of Electronic Intifada; and Donna Mulhearn, an Australian woman who was a human shield during the beginning of he Iraq war, board the bus and get it off it, and then board it again and get off it, and on and on.
Weathermen, huh? Maybe these demonstrators are a wee bit more sinister than they let on. Here, I thought they were thoughtful people who've been carefully weighing the facts and trying to do the right thing in a complicated situation, while unfortunately reading too many counter-factual reports and so getting into the wrong positions.
Abunimah, who had been roughed up by security at the American Embassy yesterday, told me it was the hardest decision he’d ever had to make. It was an individual decision, he had no clarity on it, and no one could tell you what to do, and he respected the decisions of all parties. Mulhearn said that going to Iraq in 2003 had been easy compared to this; for that choice was in the face of physical danger and she would take that any day, this was in the face of moral doubt.
Moral doubt, yeah, that's hard. Fortunately most of us manage to get through life without much of it, and even then rarely on the level of actually getting on a bus to demonstrate. That must have been tough.
Dohrn said that the principle of "All or none" was a miserable one for activist politics. You always took what you could get and kept fighting for more. A European man in a red keffiyeh screamed at her that she was serving the fascisti. Her partner Bill Ayers gently confronted him and asked him why he was so out of control. Between getting on and off the bus, Dohrn, who wore a flower in her hair, said that she didn’t like the absolutist certainty of the people on the other side of the police barricades, and having been in the Weather Underground, she knew something about absolutist feeling.
Dohrn. Ayers. Now wait. I've seen those names somewhere. Israel must be doing something right if these are her enemies.
Yet I remind readers that good things are arising from this experience. The Americans, who are so conditioned to living with the Israel lobby, as an abused wife to her battering husband, are being exposed to a more adamant politics—we are having a rendezvous with the Freedom Riders. For another thing, our direct actions and demonstrations seem to be awaking Egypt, a little, and getting a lot of publicity. Helen Schiff told me that the front page of an official government newspaper today said, "Mubarak to Netanyahu: Lift the siege and end the suffering of the Palestinian people." We gave him that line! she said. A longtime civil rights activist, Helen told me it’s "fabulous" what happened, we are achieving more in Cairo than we would if we had gotten into Gaza.
Freedom Riders. Now that's an admirable role model, we can certainly agree on that. Young citizens willing to be arrested, beaten up, and indeed to risk their lives in a very real way, so as to heal their society of its worst affliction. That's quite a mantle Phil's claiming, isn't it. And note also that the demonstrators have been handing Mubarak his lines! (But not enough to have him let them travel to Gaza).
So there’s a tumultuous and ascendant feeling here tonight, in the little hotels that we have to meet in to make our plans. I can feel the spirit of the Freedom Riders and of the abolitionists, who fought the limits on freedom of movement of black people for so long in my country. As for the divisions, and bitterness, I think they will go away. A European friend advised me tonight that those who take the Palestinian side will find that they share somewhat in the Palestinian experience. They will experience isolation, division, bitterness, failure, contempt, manipulation. Surely not on the scale of the Palestinians; still, they will experience some of those things, and they will grow from them.
Freedom Riders move over, it's the abolitionists now. Of course, these brave folks will of course be called upon to endure great suffering in the little hotel rooms they've got to meet in, but that's how it is with the movers and shakers of history and justice.
There's something almost endearing, in a wistful sort of way, about the way Phil Weiss (and his readers) seek the confirmation of historical greatness. No, he's not Martin Luther King, of course (who is? Khaled Meshaal perhaps?). Yet if he can be a foot-soldier and chronicler of the Movement, that will satisfy him. As long as his grandchildren or theirs look back at him someday with awe for his far-sightedness and bravery.
Actually, I know the feeling, and that's what makes Phil Wiess so weird. He could easily join us.
Originally posted by Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations
We remember the more than 1,400 that were murdered. We remember the hundreds more who have died as a result of this horrific siege. We remember the tens of thousands who are still homeless, one full year later. And we remember our sisters and brothers on the other side of the Rafah border who have breathed life into this historic march every day for months, who have guided our feet to Cairo, and who light the shadowy path to Gaza. Most of all we remember that they will still be caged in Israel’s massive open-air prison long after we’ve safely returned home.
The Egyptian government taunts us, encouraging us to enjoy the tourist attractions Cairo offers during our mandatory stay in the city. And some of us do. We even take Gaza with us: Yesterday, Abdullah Anar, a Turkish Muslim, and Max Geller, an American Jew, raced up the face of one of the pyramids to unveil a 12 meter by 6 meter Palestinian flag. For about three minutes one of the most resilient structures on earth proudly called the name of one of the world’s most unbreakable people. We smuggle stories like this one through the tunnels connecting our hearts, exposing them in whispered reminders of the beauty and truth in this struggle, and the unending patience and flexibility we are slowly learning from our friends in Gaza.
No one here is talking about the two-state solution or land swaps. They know what the Goldstone report says–those missiles aimed at houses with sleeping children–and they are morally clear on the question. They reflect an international consensus: the end of patience for war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and an ideology of Jewish exceptionalism supported by western governments. Those governments have failed to act so we are speaking out as civil society
We didn’t do what the brave French did, and try to claim the UN plaza with sleeping bags and tents, but when we left we sang We Shall Overcome, mingling the American civil rights anthem with this international cause. Gaza will be free-ee-ee. No it doesn’t look like we will be getting into Gaza, still we are doing important work in Cairo, to transform ourselves and our presence on the world stage. (my italics)
It's all about ME, isn't it, Phil. At the end of the day, it's an exercise in narcissism.
Originally posted by Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations
. There's a lot of swooning going on about this book, which was quite popular when it came out in Hebrew, and has just been published in English. (Mondoweiss, for example, gushes here).
- a truly magnificent book. I'll review it when I finish it (it's almost 900 pages), but can already say it's my best read of this year. If only he'd stick to the things he truly knows about.Sand began looking for records of the exile from Israel, a constitutive event in Jewish history, but could discover no literature about the Jewish expulsion. His explanation is that no one exiled the people of the country. The Romans sometimes committed ethnocide but they did not exile peoples. Sand claims that mass exile was not logistically possible until the 20th century... The original Jews living in Israel, contrary to the accepted history, were not exiled following the Bar Kokhba revolt. Sand argues that most of the Jews were not exiled by the Romans, and were permitted to remain in the country. He puts the number of those exiled at tens of thousands at most. Many Jews converted to Islam following the Arab conquest, and were assimilated among the conquerors. He concludes that the progenitors of the Palestinian Arabs were Jews.
Although I'm a historian by training, it may be that the question of the ethnic origins and cohesion of the Jews needs to be determined not by reading old texts but young DNA. The New York Times ran an item about this nine years ago:
The analysis provides genetic witness that these communities have, to a remarkable extent, retained their biological identity separate from their host populations, evidence of relatively little intermarriage or conversion into Judaism over the centuries.
If you're better qualified than I, you might wish to read some original research on the issue here and here, for starters; there's more where that came from. The scientists seem to be saying the same thing the Jews have been saying all along. Yet what, precisely, have the Jews been saying all along? Judt spells it out as he sees it:
The story went like this. Jews, until the destruction of the Second Temple (in the First century), had been farmers in what is now Israel/Palestine. They had then been forced yet again into exile by the Romans and wandered the earth: homeless, rootless and outcast. Now at last “they” were “returning” and would once again farm the soil of their ancestors.
It is this narrative that the historian Shlomo Sand seeks to deconstruct in his controversial book The Invention of the Jewish People. His contribution, critics assert, is at best redundant. For the last century, specialists have been perfectly familiar with the sources he cites and the arguments he makes. From a purely scholarly perspective, I have no quarrel with this. Even I, dependent for the most part on second-hand information about the earlier millennia of Jewish history, can see that Prof Sand – for example in his emphasis upon the conversions and ethnic mixing that characterise the Jews in earlier times – is telling us nothing we do not already know.
The question is, who are “we”? Certainly in the US, the overwhelming majority of Jews (and perhaps non-Jews) have absolutely no acquaintance with the story Prof Sand tells. They will never have heard of most of his protagonists, but they are all too approvingly familiar with the caricatured version of Jewish history that he is seeking to discredit. If Prof Sand’s popularising work does nothing more than provoke reflection and further reading among such a constituency, it will have been worthwhile.
Neve Gordon and his partners in this effort have despaired of the Israelis. They have reached the conclusion that there is no chance of changing Israeli public opinion. According to them, no salvation will come from within. One must ignore the Israeli public and concentrate on mobilizing the world against the State of Israel. (Some of them believe anyhow that the State of Israel should be dismantled and replaced by a bi-national state.)I do not share either view - neither the despair of the Israeli people, to which I belong, nor the hope that the world will stand up and compel Israel to change its ways against its will. For this to happen, the boycott must gather worldwide momentum, the US must join it, the Israeli economy must collapse and the morale of the Israeli public must break.How long will this take? Twenty Years? Fifty years? Forever?
I’m always perplexed by this attitude people have about Avnery. He’s a venerable
force, truly an inspiration. But he’s still a zionist, and zionism is racism. So
OF COURSE he doesn’t support sanctions. Of course he doesn’t support the idea
that Israel should abide by international law. Of course he believes that jews
are special, that Israel is special, that Israel should be permitted to act
outside the law in whatever way it likes, provided that it declares to be in the
racial interests of Jews. Of course he rejects the right of return. His entire
life of incredibly courageous political advocacy was dedicated not to human
rights, but to Jewish rights, and to zionism. He’s a racist in the way that
every advocate of zionism is a de facto racist, and he speaks to and for
racists, which is why people like Richard Witty declare “Avnery makes sense.”
I’m not saying that in a shallow, flaming way. We have to be able to make these
distinctions which allow us to see the whole spectrum of Jewish racism, which
includes the Israeli “left” and much of what passes for the “extreme left”, and
not just the hideous mess on the far right, which is so patently, horrifically
racist that it boggles the mind. Jewish exceptionalism is the problem. I am a
great fan of Avnery and think of him as something of a hero, but the fact
remains that Avnery, and Avnery’s zionism, are part of the problem. Zionism is
not going to produce the solutions and answers to Zionism – they are just going
to perpetuate zionism by iterating a superifically prettier version of this ugly
ideology: Something like “ethnic cleansing Lite.” (Comment 14, posted by
anamalous NYC, whoever that may be).
Can we say all this of Mondoweiss? No, we cannot. Not really. For while Mondoweiss may at times espouse these positions, none of them are the end it seeks to serve, not even the ultimate end of a just settlement and a lasting peace. In conflict, a just settlement recognizes the legitimate desires of all parties, not the moral claim of only one. But the active agents behind Mondoweiss do not believe that Israel, or the Jewish people in relation to Israel, has just desires. Horowitz does not support the existence of a Jewish state. Blumenthal, like him, believes that Zionism (Jewish nationalism) – in apparent contradistinction to any other nationalism – is inherently racist. Weiss, a deeply anti-Semitic work in progress, in his haziest, most narcotic fantasy of peace, envisions as its ecstatic end not the peace, but the end of Israel.
taken from Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations
Matt Yglesias, in a recent post about the administration's "debate" over whether
to bomb Iran, wisely included a random photograph of an Iranian street with
civilians walking on it. These are the people Norm Podhoretz and his comrades
want to slaughter.
Mean-spirited in the extreme, he emphasized on Israel's god-given
right to the "Land of Israel" (euphemism for Israel Plus--plus Judea and
Samaria, i.e., the West Bank, aka Palestine). And on Israel's right to all of
Jerusalem. There was not a generous word about the Palestinians. Only the usual
tone of threat. There was no surprise in this, of course, but the nasty,
supercilious, and hypernationalist tone even took my breath
away.
Lest you think it was all negative, he did offer to cooperate
with the Palestinians on solar panels.
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