Feeling the Loyalty to the Jewish State of Israel
September 17th, 2010 § 3 Comments
By Max Blumenthal and Joseph Dana
The Israeli Knesset is debating a bill proposed by David Rotem of the extreme right Yisrael Beiteinu party that would require all Israeli citizens to swear loyalty to Israel as a “Jewish and democratic state.” This bill is targeted at increasing pressure on the twenty percent of Israelis who are Palestinian citizens while forcing the ultra Orthodox Jewish minority who reject the legitimacy of any state not based on Jewish biblical law to accept Zionism. If passed in its proposed form, citizens unwilling to take the loyalty oath would be at risk of losing citizenship.
Remembering Sabra and Shatila: On massacres, atrocities and holocausts
September 17th, 2010 § 3 Comments
by Sonja Karkar
The Massacre
It happened twenty-eight years ago – 16 September 1982. A massacre so awful that people who know about it cannot forget it. The photos are gruesome reminders – charred, decapitated, indecently violated corpses, the smell of rotting flesh, still as foul to those who remember it as when they were recoiling from it all those years ago. For the victims and the handful of survivors, it was a 36-hour holocaust without mercy. It was deliberate, it was planned and it was overseen. But to this day, the killers have gone unpunished.
Sabra and Shatila – two Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon – were the theatres for this staged slaughter. The former is no longer there and the other is a ghostly and ghastly reminder of man’s inhumanity to men, women and children – more specifically, Israel’s inhumanity, the inhumanity of the people who did Israel’s bidding and the world’s inhumanity for pretending it was of no consequence. There were international witnesses – doctors, nurses, journalists – who saw the macabre scenes and have tried to tell the world in vain ever since.
Each act was barbarous enough on its own to warrant fear and loathing. It was human savagery at its worst and Dr Ang Swee Chai was an eye witness as she worked with the Palestinian Red Crescent Society on the dying and the wounded amongst the dead. What she saw was so unimaginable that the atrocities committed need to be separated from each other to even begin comprehending the viciousness of the crimes. [1]
Resistance threads
September 17th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
On Saturday 18 September, the fifth, and most ambitious convoy leaves for Gaza. From London, Casablanca and Doha three simultaneous routes consisting of hundreds of vehicles to break the siege. Three times in the last eighteen months Viva Palestina has broken Israel’s siege, each time successfully delivering their aid, despite Israel’s murderous assault on the Freedom Flotilla , they fully intend to deliver this time too. Our VIVA PALESTINA 5 T-shirt will be worn by all drivers and crew. Sales of the shirt help fund the convoy. We can’t all be on this incredible journey to bring vital material aid and international solidarity to Gaza but by wearing this shirt we are all convoy members.
Courtesy of the team at Philosophy Football.
Eminent Scholar Ann Stoler Endorses Boycott of Israel
September 17th, 2010 § 8 Comments
Below is a statement released by Ann Stoler in support of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions movement aimed at Israel:
BY COLONIAL DESIGN
As someone who has worked for some thirty years as a teacher and student of colonial studies– on comparative colonial situations, colonial histories, and the violent and subtle forms of governance on which colonial regimes rely, it would be difficult not to describe the Israeli state as a colonial one. It would be difficult not to recognize Israel’s past and ongoing illegal seizure of Palestinian land, the racialization of every aspect of daily life, and the large-scale and piecemeal demolition of Palestinian homes, destruction of livelihoods, and efforts to destroy the social and family fabric, as decimation by concerted and concentrated colonial design. These are the well-honed practices of regimes that define colonialisms and have flourished across the imperial globe. As with other colonial regimes, the Israeli state designates and redraws geographic borders, suspends Palestinian civil rights and arbitrarily transgresses what for Israelis are recognized and guarded as private space.
Israel is particular but it is not unique. Its techniques of occupation are based on unfounded uses of the legal apparatus of Israeli law. These are the practices of a colonial state committed to replacing and displacing a Palestinian population, and committed to its own expansion. That expansion is persistent, both surreptitious and blatant everyday: room by room in the old city of Jerusalem, house by house in the spread of settler communities, meter by meter as the placement of the Wall in the name of “security” cuts through homes and fields, and divides neighborhoods while it infringes further into legally recognized Palestinian territories. At issue is both a confiscation of history and a confiscation of the future possibilities of those who today find their bedding thrown on the streets in the middle of the night by Israeli settlers.
If democracy is defined, as Hannah Arendt did, by “the right to have rights” for an entire population within the state’s jurisdiction, the Israeli state cannot be considered a democratic one. Nor can a democracy be founded on the principle of expulsion and the creation of a diasporic population shorn of its land, belongings and citizenship – a principle avidly embraced by Israel since l948. For these reasons, I confirm my support for the BDS international boycott of those Israeli institutions that actively or passively accept a status quo that condones and expands the occupation, violates international law, enforces military control and denies Palestinian rights to self-determination.
Ann Laura Stoler
Willy Brandt Distinguished University Professor
Of Anthropology and Historical Studies
The New School for Social Research
New York, New York 10003
10 September 2010
Pakistan: Between Drones and a Deluge
September 16th, 2010 § 2 Comments
by Tariq Ali
As if everyday life in Pakistan weren’t dispiriting enough, last month the swift and turbulent Indus burst its banks and swathes of the country disappeared under water. Divine punishment, the poor said, but they were the ones who suffered. Allah rarely targets the rich. As the floods came and the country panicked, its president fled the bunker and went on a tour of inspection to France and Britain.
The floodwaters have now receded in many parts of the country, leaving 20 million people homeless. The province of Sindh, however, is still under threat and 800,000 people are marooned without food. Aid agencies estimate the bail-out costs for the country at between seven and ten billion dollars, but only $800 million has been pledged by foreign donors, in total contrast to the support given after the devastating earthquake of 2005. The rebuilt towns and villages are proof that not all the money was stolen that time. But despite this, little help has been forthcoming from abroad, the result of a combination of Islamophobia and distrust of the Zardari government on financial matters.
Did the rulers of Pakistan treat the worst natural disaster to hit their country as an emergency, and pull out all the stops without thinking of themselves or drooling at the prospects of foreign aid pouring in? Like hell they did. For the whole of August the plutocracy floundered hopelessly as the catastrophe grew. The army did its best, but was hindered by the war on terror. As nearly a million people came under threat from the floodwater in Jacobabad, the local authorities were informed that the nearby Shahbaz airbase could not be used for rescue operations. In response to a parliamentary question from the opposition, the health secretary, Khushnood Lashari, explained: ‘Health relief operations are not possible in the flood-affected areas of Jacobabad because the airbase is controlled by the United States.’ It was not necessary to add that those on the base were busy arming and dispatching drones to hit villages in northern Pakistan. In Swat, closer to the AfPak war zones, a detachment of marines was made available to airlift tribal elders to safety, in an attempt presumably to win hearts and minds. Some hope.
Zelaya chills in Dominican paradise while supporters attempt sabotage of Independence Day
September 16th, 2010 § 1 Comment
Civic celebration in Honduras
Today’s top story in the Honduran paper El Heraldo, one of the mouthpieces of last year’s coup against President Mel Zelaya, proclaims that Honduras celebrated 189 years of independence from Spain yesterday “in peace and tranquility” and that “every Honduran heart beat stronger” with love and pride for the land. These rosy characterizations are difficult to reconcile with news from other venues, such as the communiqué from the Honduran band Café Guancasco—pillar of the anti-coup Resistance and source of political compositions like “Club of Idiots”—according to which their peaceful concert in San Pedro Sula was attacked with tear gas and water cannons courtesy of the police and military with no regard for the presence of children and the elderly. A band member was also severely beaten.
El Heraldo acknowledges that the Resistance was also involved in Independence Day celebrations but stresses that these centered around praise of Hugo Chávez and Che Guevara, which is presumably intended as proof that anti-coup Hondurans are not in fact in favor of national independence. Additional care is taken to specify that Chávez also led a coup in the past; other relevant news provided is that Zelaya is in “self-imposed exile in the paradise of the Dominican Republic”, followed by a discussion of the crown worn by a member of a gay and lesbian organization at yesterday’s Resistance march in Tegucigalpa.
On Gaza, Artists Speak Out
September 16th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Terry Jones, Annie Lennox, Thandie Newton, Alexei Sayle, Mike Figgis, Katharine Hamnett and Jason Flemyng, voice their support for Amnesty International’s ongoing efforts to secure justice for both Palestinians and Israelis and make an impassioned plea for Israel to cease its illegal siege of Gaza. Find out more here.
José Saramago: ‘we should not die blind’
September 16th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
José Saramago passed away this June. An unabashed communist and anti-Zionist, he was a rare example of a writer whose masterful literary talent overshadowed those who would have preferred to silence him because of his politics. In Blindness, which was published in 1997 and made into a film more than decade later, Saramago writes:
the world is full of blind people, I think we are all going to die, it’s just a matter of time, Dying has always been a matter of time, said the doctor, But to die just because you’re blind, there can be no worse way of dying, We die of illnesses, accidents, chance events, And now we shall also die of blindness, I mean, we shall die of blindness and cancer, of blindness and tuberculosis, of blindness and AIDS, of blindness and heart attacks, illnesses may differ from one person to another but what is really killing us now is blindness, We are not immortal, we cannot escape death, but at least we should not die blind,
Jamal Juma: The real obstacle to peace in the Levant is the presence of a criminal, racist state
September 15th, 2010 § 1 Comment
Illegal settlements on Palestinian land are one of the biggest stumbling blocks for these talks. The Palestinians have warned that they will walk out of talks if a freeze on settlement construction, which is set to expire at the end of the month, is not extended. Danni Dayan, Chairman of the Settlers Council in Jerusalem, and Jamal Jumaa, a Palestinian activist in Ramallah, debate the issues facing their leaders.
