Nakba day – يوم النكبة Yawm al-Nakba 2010
May 15th, 2010 § 3 Comments
By Mazin Qumsiyeh
Today is the day we actually commemorate Nakba Day, 14 May 1948, the date the state of Israel was declared. However, it is not the beginning of our Nakba (catastrophe) nor its end. Over 200 villages were ethnically cleansed in the six months before 14 May 1948. This simple fact illustrate that it is not the founding of the militarized state of Israel that began the Nakba but that it was a pivotal moment in it. After that date, the wave of ethnic cleansing was being done in a name of a nation-state established by and for Jews from Europe and not just the terrorist underground Jewish militias. The ethnic cleansing accompanying the foundation of this apartheid Jewish state and its maintenance meant the destruction of 530 villages and towns and meant that in the past 9 years alone over 10,000 homes were destroyed in the West Bank (including occupied Jerusalem), Gaza, and the Negev.
Today 7 million of the 11 million Palestinians around the world are refugees or displaced people. The Israeli population according to the Israeli central bureau of statistics is 7,510,000 of which 5,984,500 are “Jews and others” (presumably the others are Druze, Russian non-Jews, and similar categories) and 1,525,500 Palestinian Arabs (1). The population of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza is 4 million allowed to live on areas A & B, small parts of the 22% of Palestine occupied since 1967 (2). The total area allowed for Palestinian use is 2.5% of the area of pre-1967 Israel (3) plus areas A & B of the West Bank . In total this comes to 2.5% of 78% and 29% of the 22% that is the West Bank and Gaza (4). The total geographic access to all remaining Palestinians (5.525 million) is thus 1.95%+6.38%=8.33% while the Jewish and other population (Zionist preferred) consists of 5.5 million with access to the remaining lands comprising 91.67% of historic Palestine.
Pressured from all sides in Pakistan’s Swat Valley
May 15th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
by Kathy Kelly and Joshua Brollier
May 14th, 2010
Hindu Kush foothills on the road to the Swat Valley. (Photo: G. Simon Harak)
In May of 2009, under tremendous pressure from the United States, the Pakistani military began a large-scale military operation in the Swat District of Pakistan to confront militants in the region. The UNHCR said the operation led to one of the largest and fastest displacements it had ever seen. Within ten days, more than two million people fled their homes.
Now, a year later, our small delegation visited the Swat District. After a breathtaking ride through the Hindu Kush mountains, traveling in a pick-up truck from Shah Mansour in the Swabi district, we arrived in Swat’s capital, Saidu Sharif.
Saidu Sharif is a small town, ringed by mountains. The Swat River, a few hundred yards in width, runs through it. It’s easy to imagine a former time when tourists would flock to visit this scenic treasure. While we were there, the town seemed tranquil. Stores were open and the streets were bustling. Merchants, children, shoppers, bicyclists, goats, cars, donkey carts, rickshaws, and tractors jostled for space in the narrow roadways. But, we also saw dozens of uniformed men, carrying weapons, suggesting that tensions still prevail in Swat.
If it was all about oil, we’d have boots on the ground in Venezuela…
May 14th, 2010 § 3 Comments
Published on Mondoweiss.net
In his response to my criticism Stephen Maher oddly ends up repeating the same leaps of logic that I objected to in the first place. To wit: no one disputes the fact that the US covets Middle Eastern energy resources. The question I asked is how from this fact has he (or the people he is ventriloquising) inferred Israel’s strategic value? He offers the standard response that Israel confronted and defeated Arab nationalism on behalf of the US. This would seem a persuasive argument if one were to pick up history from an arbitrary point somewhere in the early 60s. He seems unaware that Nasser, who was seen as an anti-Communist modernizer, was assisted in his ascent to power by the CIA (specifically by Kermit Roosevelt of Operation Ajax fame); and the Arabs, who saw the US as a non-imperial–indeed anti-imperial power–only turned to the Soviet camp after the Eisenhower administration blocked aid to Egypt for the Aswan dam under pressure from the Israel, China, and cotton lobbies. Maher probably hasn’t heard of the Lavon Affair either. Arabs only turned against the US as a consequence of its support for Israel. If Israel defeated Arab nationalism, then it was merely vanquishing an enemy of its own creation. It was doing the US no favor. Even Nixon understood this, who in ’73 initially refused to support Israel against the Egyptians because he said US was obliged to protect Israel but had no obligation to protect its conquests (the Sinai).
When asked why he misrepresented quotes by Brzezinski and Kennan, Maher says he was merely trying to demonstrate that there is a broad consensus on the strategic importance of Middle East oil to the US (an uncontroversial claim). If there is such a consensus and yet there is none when it comes to how best to secure these resources, it should be obvious that there is no direct correlation between coveting the resources and wanting war. The relevant question then is who pushed for the Iraq war? He does not answer.
Lebanese government fails to channel World Cup fervor in friendly match
May 14th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Beirut apartment balconies suggest that conventional soccer teams are still favored. (Photo by Belén Fernández)
The other night while walking in Beirut’s Hamra neighborhood, I was informed by an impromptu escort that all of Lebanon’s problems were a result of foreign meddling and that I should not walk alone at night if I did not want to be harassed by:
- Syrian construction workers,
- Kuwaitis who had never interacted with a woman, or
- foreign-funded terrorists who nonetheless had Lebanese passports and who were to blame for all Israeli attacks on Lebanon.
I pointed out to the young man that no Syrian, Kuwaiti, or terrorist had ever approached me on an unlit street and asked to photograph my feet—as he had just done—and that a cursory review of history revealed that Israeli attacks on Lebanon had in fact prompted the formation of Hezbollah. Such disputes did not, however, put an end to requests that I take off my shoes.
Regarding the Lebanese tendency to act as a venue for the settling of regional disputes, a friend in Beirut recently characterized the country as a soccer field, although this was presumably not the reason for the government’s decision last month to stage a friendly soccer match to commemorate the 35th anniversary of the start of the Lebanese Civil War.
Myth and Memoricide: Shlomo Sand’s “Invention of the Jewish People”
May 14th, 2010 § 6 Comments
Denise Buonanno's "Le Juif Errant"
This review essay was published at The Drouth.
A nation is “a group of persons united by a common error about their ancestry and a common dislike of their neighbours.” Karl Deutsch.
“I don’t think books can change the world, but when the world begins to change, it searches for different books.” Shlomo Sand.
Our Assumptions About Israel
Here is what we in the West, to a varying extent, whether we are religious or not, assume about the Jews and Israel:
The Jews of the world, white, black and brown, are the sons of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Moses, after leading the Jews out of Egyptian enslavement, gave them laws. Emerging from the desert, the Jews conquered the promised land of Canaan, which became Judea and Israel, later the mighty kingdom of David and Solomon. In 70CE the Romans destroyed the temple at Jerusalem and drove the Jews from their land. A surviving Jewish remnant was expelled when Muslim-Arab conquerors colonised the country in the 7th Century. And so the Jews wandered the earth, the very embodiment of homelessness. But throughout their long exile, against all odds, the Jews kept themselves a pure, unmixed race. Finally they returned, after the Holocaust, to Palestine, “a land without a people for a people without a land.”
This story has been told again and again in our culture. Today we find bits of it in Mark Twain and Leon Uris, in Hollywood’s output and in church pulpits, and of course in the mainstream news media. American Christian Zionists – devotees of the Scofield Bible – swear by it, and swear to support Israel with all the power of their voting block until the Risen Christ declares the apocalypse.
Born in Gaza
May 14th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
They say nothing is worse than outliving your own child. In Gaza, children die because they are unable to receive adequate medical care which should be just within reach but is often impossibly far away due to Israel’s siege and occupation. Walls guarded by armed occupiers don’t only separate Gazans from their land, they also prevent people from accessing the fundamental human right of health. This is the hidden and therefore most disturbing result of the brutality of Israel’s occupation.
Firas Mazloom’s story below recently featured on Al Jazeera isn’t an exception to the rule as the Israelis claim. What justifies knowingly producing conditions in which babies die preventable deaths in front of their parents?
Israel’s Lobby and Nuclear Diversions
May 13th, 2010 § 1 Comment
Lyndon Johnson and Abraham Feinberg
Scott Horton interviews Grant F. Smith, director of the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy in Washington, D.C., about the newly declassified 1978 GAO report released by IRmep on May 10, 2010. They cover the diversion of US nuclear material to Israel, marginal investigations and possible cover-ups by the FBI and CIA, prosecutorial immunity for high-profile Americans who commit crimes for Israel’s benefit, and billionaire Haim Saban’s considerable influence on the Democratic Party. They review new information about why LBJ’s political debt to fundraiser Abraham Feinberg (designated by David Ben Gurion as the US funding coordinator for Israel’s nuclear weapons program in 1958) probably explains his disdain for the NUMEC investigation and applying nuclear nonproliferation to Israel.
Elena Kagan and the Supreme Court: A Barnyard Smell in Chicago, Harvard and Washington
May 13th, 2010 § 2 Comments
By James Petras
President Obama has nominated Elena Kagan for Justice of the United States Supreme Court on the basis of an academic publication record which might give her a fighting chance for tenure at a first rate correspondence law school in the Texas Panhandle.
A review of her published scholarship after almost two decades in and out of academia turns up four law review articles, two brief pieces and several book reviews and in memoriam. There is nothing even remotely resembling a major legal text or research publication.
Her lack-luster academic publication record is only surpassed by her total lack of any practical experience as a judge: zero years in adjudication, unless one accepts the line of her exuberant advocates, who point to Kagan’s superb ability in adjudicating among the squabbling faculty at Harvard Law School when she served as Dean. No doubt Kagan had been very busy as the greatest fundraising Law School Dean in Harvard’s history ($400 million), which may account for the fact that she never found time to write a single academic article during her nine year tenure (2001-2009).
Jeremy Scahill on Media Matters
May 12th, 2010 § 1 Comment
On April 18 award-winning investigative journalist and author Jeremy Scahill was interviewed by Bob McChesney of Media Matters. You can listen to their fascinating discussion on the current state of investigative journalism below.
Stephen Zunes and the Zionist Tinderbox
May 12th, 2010 § 6 Comments
By Michael Barker
“[A]nti Zionism may be a ‘fool’s anti-imperialism,’ where Jewish nationalism itself is erroneously seen as the problem rather than the alliance its leaders have made with exploitative Western interests.”
–Stephen Zunes, 2006.1
Who is Stephen Zunes? Well according to his web-site, he is a Professor of Politics and International Studies at the University of San Francisco, who in 2002 won recognition from the Peace and Justice Studies Association as Peace Scholar of the Year. Although Zunes describes himself as a committed peace loving, anti-imperialist activist, by reviewing just one of his books this article will demonstrate that in actual fact his scholarly actions belie such intent. The book in question is Tinderbox: U.S. Middle East Policy and the Roots of Terrorism (Zed Books, 2003), a popular text that received glowing accolades from Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn, Richard Falk, and Saul Landau (amongst others). This essay will illustrate how Zunes’ proclivity for defending Zionism ultimately leads hims to promote a “fool’s anti-imperialism.”
That is not to say that Zunes is uncritical of U.S. foreign policy, far from it, just that his work serves as a smokescreen for understanding the real drivers of U.S. foreign policy vis-a-vis the Middle East.
