Category: Israel

Viva Palestina faced with 2,000 riot police in the port of Al-Arish

2,000 Egyptian riot police have reportedly besieged the Viva Palestina convoy. Here is a report and and appeal from convoy leader Kevin Ovenden.

UPDATE: Congratulations to Viva Palestina for breaking the siege despite Egypt’s attempt to violently thwart their efforts.

URGENT: Viva Palestina faced with 2,000 riot police in the port of Al-Arish!

To all friends of Palestine,

Our situation is now at a crisis point! Riot has broken out in the port of Al- Arish.

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Stephen Walt chooses five books on US-Israel relations

A few weeks back The Browser interviewed British author Ziauddin Sardar for its Five Books section. Among the books he selected on the theme of Travel in the Muslim World was one, The Road from Damascus, by PULSE editor Robin Yassin-Kassab. When Robin was in turn asked to choose his five on the theme of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, he chose among others John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s The Israel Lobby and the US Foreign Policy. In its current interview The Browser turned to Stephen Walt — one of PULSE’s 20 top global thinkers for 2009 — to present his selection of the five most important books on the US-Israel relationship. In the following interview Walt presents his selection and explains why he chose these particular books.

Stephen M. Walt

So, we’re trying to understand how the US has come to identify so closely with Israel in recent decades, and your first book is The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, which you wrote along with John Mearsheimer. Why is that on the top of your list?

The only way to understand the special relationship that now exists between the United States and Israel is to understand the critical role that a number of organisations have played in actively promoting that relationship over the last 60 years. The US has supported Israel since its founding in 1948, but it did not have the same sort of special relationship for the first 20 or so years after Israel’s creation. The US backed it in certain ways, but was also willing to put lots of pressure on it in other circumstances and didn’t provide a lot of economic or military assistance until after 1967. But today the US backs Israel no matter what it does and American politicians are careful never to say anything that is very critical of Israel, even when it is acting in ways that are contrary to US interests and values. The key to understanding this ‘special relationship’ is the operation of various groups in the Israel lobby, and our book lays out in great detail how that works, and why it’s not good for the US or Israel.

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Student Activism and Change in the Real World

by SU Ahmad and Z Rahim

With just days before the UK Viva Palestina convoy is due to arrive in Gaza, we look back at the remarkable recent history of activism at King’s College London (KCL).

On 18 November 2008, the Israeli President Shimon Peres was awarded an honorary doctorate by KCL, a move which sparked outrage amongst students of the college, and saw the beginning of a student movement for its revocation.

“Why the big fuss about the Israeli President?” many asked. Shimon Peres has to his name the sale of arms to the apartheid regime in South Africa and the bombing (twice) of the UN headquarters in Qana. He has directed various Israeli invasions of Lebanon, saw through the 1985 bombing of Tunis, and continues to support Israel’s murderous policies towards the Palestinians, sharing much of the blame for why Gaza has been described as  “the largest open air prison” on the planet by major Human rights agencies, UN and Vatican officials. He is also the father of Israel’s nuclear bomb. These are but a few of the highlights of Mr. Peres’s career. Both students and several members of staff felt that by honouring someone who is essentially a war criminal, KCL had dishonoured its own good name. A college-wide petition with close to a thousand signatures calling for the revocation of the doctorate was handed to the College’s Principal Professor, Rick Trainor.

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PULSE: 20 Top Global Media Figures of 2009

After we published our list of 20 Top Global Thinkers, we thought we would be remiss if we did not also honor those who bring these voices to us in the first place. With the goal of recognizing those individuals and institutions responsible for exemplary reportage and awareness-raising in 2009, we asked our editors and writers to name their choices for the top 20 media figures, be they journalists, publications or publishers.  We aggregated these nominations into the following list. Like our 20 Top Global Thinkers, our criteria for choosing media figures included individuals/publications/publishers who have shown a commitment to challenging power, holding it to account, highlighting issues pertaining to social justice and producing output that bucks conventional wisdom and encourages critical thinking.

Amy Goodman

A media institution in her own right, Amy Goodman has shown the true potential of independent media over the past 12 years by turning Democracy Now! into the largest public media collaboration in the US and around the world. Free of corporate sponsorship, DN’s hard-hitting daily broadcast rejects the soundbite format of mainstream media to provide in-depth coverage of the world’s most important issues. Unlike the MSM, Democracy Now! gives less emphasis to official voices than to those affected by the abuses of their offices. Goodman relentlessly pursues her stories, and often follows them long after the mainstream media has moved on to chase new headlines. Iraq and Afghanistan have therefore remained part of DN’s coverage for all the years that they were absent in the MSM. Policy-makers may have lost interest in the story, but for Goodman, the people on the receiving end continue to live the story. Her interviewees include voices that the MSM frequently excludes, including scholars, activists, heads of states out of favor with the United States, opposition leaders, and organizers. Through her journalism, writings and lectures, Goodman continues to set the bar for what every journalist should be aspiring to.

Sherine Tadros/Ayman Mohyeldin

Al Jazeera has long set the bar for war reporting; Sherine Tadros and Ayman Mohyeldin have raised it even higher with their coverage of the conflict in Gaza in 2008- 2009. Tadros and Mohyeldin were the only two journalists working for an international English-language television network reporting from inside Gaza. They braved the dangers of Israel’s indiscriminate assault to bring hour-by-hour reporting the tragedy as it unfolded. Their courage was matched by the quality of their journalism. In 2009, Tadros continued to report from the region, covering the creeping ethnic cleansing of occupied Palestine.  Mohyeldin, likewise, continues to report on issues such as the network of tunnels between Egypt and Gaza which are vital for the transfer of food, medicine and fuel supplies into Gaza.

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How Egypt does Israel’s bidding

Here are the thuggish Egyptian police harassing senior citizens and children on Israel’s behalf. It appears Egyptians are better at fighting for Israel than they were fighting against it.

Video clip from Thursday morning demonstration in Cairo, Egypt. Egyptians and internationals in the Gaza Freedom March assembled to protest Egypts crackdown on their freedom of movement. Police attempted to blockade some activists in their hotels, and allowed only a small number to travel to the border with Gaza. Video by Kayvan Farchadi with Sam Husseini.

More at http://husseini.posterous.com/

Richard Falk on Gaza

One year after Israel’s war on Gaza, Al Jazeera talks to the UN special rapporteur Professor Richard Falk on Palestine and asks him about his views on that war, the impact of the Obama presidency and the future of the peace process.

Mark Regev and the BBC: It’s a love story

Mark Regev in one of his frequent BBC appearances

Revolted by the BBC’s frequently obsequious attitude toward the Israeli spokesman Mark Regev, Anne Key, a friend of PULSE, sent the following letter of complaint. We encourage readers to also register their complaints (Please copy us in at editor@pulsemedia.org when you write).

Dear Sir, Madam,

I am writing to complain about the BBC’s persistently subservient attitude when interviewing Mark Regev, the spokesman for the Israeli government.

Marking the first-year anniversary of Israel’s war on Gaza (“Operation Cast Lead”), in which 1,417  Palestinians were killed (including 313 children and 116 women), Mr Regev was once again given free reign to “explain” Israel’s motives for Operation Cast Lead. The interviewer barely challenged Mr Regev throughout the interview.

Contrary to what Mr Regev asserts, the Israeli Army did not attack “key Hamas targets”. Conducting an estimated 2,300 air strikes, Israel indiscriminately targeted schools (including a school run by the UN), homes, hospitals, mosques and even flourmills. 8,000 homes were completely destroyed, 33,767 families had their houses damaged, 200,000 people were displaced, among them 112,000 children.

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Roger Waters in solidarity with the Gaza Freedom March

Roger Waters is an outspoken critic of Israel's apartheid wall

UPDATE: A video message by Waters added below.

27 December 2009 — My name is Roger Waters. I am an English musician living in the USA. I am writing to express my great admiration for and solidarity with the 1360 men and women from 42 different countries around the World who are gathering in Egypt, preparing for The Gaza Freedom March. We all watched, aghast, the vicious attack made a year ago on the people of Gaza by Israeli armed forces and the ongoing illegal siege. The suffering wrought on the population of Gaza by both the invasion and the siege is unimaginable to us outside the walls. The aim of The Freedom March is to focus world attention on the plight of the Palestinian people in Gaza in the hope that the scales will fall from the eyes of all, ordinary, decent people round the world, that they may see the enormity of the crimes that have been committed, and demand that their governments bring all possible pressure to bear on Israel to lift the siege.

I use the word ‘crimes’ advisedly, as both the siege and the invasion have been declared unlawful by United Nations bodies and leading human rights organizations. If we do not all observe international law, if some governments think themselves above it, it is but a few short, dark, steps to barbarism and anarchy.

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The Real Road Map: Violent Reactions to the Struggle for Equal Rights

Photo by Eric Gaillard/Reuters

by Yaniv Reich

You possess the world’s fourth most powerful military according to your own estimates, yet find yourself delegitimized in the international arena, unable to impose control over either your perceived enemies, or your internal settler-anarchist “brothers”.  You are desperately arresting nonviolent leaders that resist your military occupation while also fearing for the travel plans of your leaders implicated in war crimes.  It would seem current events are spiraling out of your grasp.  How do you reverse this worrying order of events? 

A hint was provided Saturday morning when a joint Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Shin Bet raid killed three alleged members of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigade, one of two groups that claimed responsibility for the recent murder of a settler near Nablus in the occupied West Bank.  According to the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem,  two of the three shooting deaths by the IDF were carried out like executions, and eyewitness testimony alleges the two victims were executed from close range once identified, despite putting up no resistance.  A senior IDF official lent support to these testimonies when he told Israel Radio that the militants had not fired on the IDF troops and that two of the dead were known to have been unarmed at the time.  However, he explained that they were assassinated because they were believed to be responsible for the settler’s death.  In response B’Tselem called for an army investigation into the allegations of extrajudicial execution.

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Gaza Never Forget

One year ago, this pro-Israel rally took place in New York City. American independent journalist Max Blumenthal was there to get people’s responses to the attacks on Gaza. Watch for yourself.

As boxing promoter Don King always says: “Only in America!”