Category: Palestine

Helen Thomas: The sin of silence

by Helen Thomas

Hats off to Richard Forer, who courageously and truthfully examines an alternate viewpoint in his book, Breakthrough: Transforming Fear Into Compassion — A New Perspective on the Israel-Palestine Conflict.

Forer, who grew up in a secular, unaffiliated Jewish home, is the identical twin of a prominent member of an ultra-Orthodox sect of Judaism, and was himself a member of AIPAC, America’s pro-Israel lobby. He knew where his allegiances used to lie — anything Israel did was justifiable in his mind.

During summer 2006, Forer visited the Middle East and underwent a profound spiritual transformation. He saw destroyed villages, displacement, land confiscation, imprisonment without trial, torture and other inhuman treatment of the Palestinians and knew he needed to share his truth.

So many Americans of Hebrew heritage cannot face the truth of the Israeli treatment of the Palestinians in the land they conquered and now occupy. Forer emerged from the struggle to realize that he could have been wrong. It takes brave people who are willing to abandon long-held beliefs that the Israelis could do no wrong. Somehow their victimhood justified their ruthless behavior toward the Palestinians.

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Helen Thomas and the Political Cleansing of America

by James Abourezk

You remember Helen Thomas?  She was the senior White House Correspondent who always opened Presidential press conferences and closed them by saying the magic words:  “Thank you Mr. President.”  Her Wikipedia entry cites her professional accomplishments:

“Helen Thomas (born August 4, 1920) is an American author and former news service reporter, member of the White House Press Corps and opinion columnist.[1] She worked for the United Press International (UPI) for 57 years, first as a correspondent, and later as White House bureau chief. She was a columnist for Hearst Newspapers from 2000 to 2010, writing on national affairs and the White House. She covered every President of the United States from the last years of the Eisenhower administration until the second year of the Obama administration. She was the first female officer of the National Press Club, the first female member and president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, and the first female member of the Gridiron Club. She has written six books; her latest, with co-author Craig Crawford, is Listen Up, Mr. President: Everything You Always Wanted Your President to Know and Do (2009).”

Helen was cashiered from her position as a Hearst columnist after she answered a question by a Rabbi with a video camera who asked her to talk about Israel.  She answered—honestly—that the Israelis should get the hell out of Palestine.  The Rabbi’s follow up question was, “Where should they go?”

“Back where they came from,” she answered, citing Germany, Poland, and elsewhere.

Now, we all know that those countries that were so murderous and cruel to European Jews are not what they were in the 1940s.  But, judging from the reaction of the media, and from Abe Foxman, head of the Anti-Defamation League, one would have thought that she was sending Israeli Jews back to the 1940s.  It was a media firestorm that engulfed her, sending a message to anyone else who might stray from the official party line on Israel.

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The ethnic cleansing of Lifta

Should this old Palestinian village be saved from Israeli development?

The clip is over the fold.
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Academic sanctions and global solidarity for Palestinian liberation: A view from South Africa

By Patrick Bond

Introduction

This panel is not only devoted to considering arguments about implementing the call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) against Israel, but also about broader problems of progressive political positioning and backlash in the academy. Although I do not deal with the April 2 case of Richard Goldstone’s unprincipled U-turn on the findings of the United Commissions commission into Israel’s 2008-09 Gaza invasion, the incident suggests the extent to which South African commentary on the oppression of Palestinians has become acutely politicized. For if Goldstone’s return to his Zionist past – recalling, too, his past as a minor apartheid-era judge (hence as a human rights ally, his zig-zag unreliability, reliability and now unreliability) – serves any purpose aside from empowering Israeli militarists, it will be to compel us to use South Africa as a base from which critical inquiry into the condition of Palestine must now be intensified. Fortunately, just such an opportunity arises in the case of the University of Johannesburg faculty Senate’s decision on March 23 to support the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) struggle by breaking ties with Israel’s Ben Gurion University of the Negev.

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New Who Profits Report: Forbidden Fruit- The Israeli Wine Industry and the Occupation

From the Who Profits Newsletter:

Vinyards and olive groves of the settlement of Giv'at Har'el on the lands of the Palestinian village of Qaryut. Photo: ETA new report by Who Profits maps the involvement of the Israeli wine industry in the occupation of the West Bank and the Syrian Golan Heights and traces some of the ways in which it masks this involvement. For this purpose, this report surveys the Israeli wine industry, maps the vineyards and wineries in the occupied territory and traces the connections between the main Israeli wine producers and this settlement industry.

The full report is available here: http://www.whoprofits.org/articlefiles/WhoProfits-IsraeliWines.pdf
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Israel’s new assault on Gaza

Israeli air strikes on Gaza killed five and injured dozens more on Thursday, 7 April. (Ismael Mohamad/UPI)

The densely populated Gaza enclave is once again under Israeli aerial attack. Five people have been killed and over 30 injured already. Max Blumenthal calls the assault ‘Operation Goldstone,’ since Israel seems to be taking encouragement from the Judge’s partial retraction of his earlier report. Over at the Electronic Intifada Rami Almeghari reports:

As Palestinians were preparing for their weekend this Thursday afternoon, all of a sudden barrages of Israeli artillery fire and air raids by warplanes struck several regions of the Gaza Strip. Five Palestinians were killed and about thirty more injured.

Israeli shells struck farm land, homes, a mosque and an ambulance, and the injured were evacuated to al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City, Kamal Adwan hospital in northern Gaza and the Abu Yousif al-Najjar hospital in southern Gaza…

Sources at the al-Shifa hospital in Gaza City said that they received six injuries earlier this afternoon; among them were two women and several children.

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Juliano Mer-Khamis, RIP

Palestinians mourn Julian Mer-Khamis

The great Juliano Mer-Khamis is no more. He was killed by masked gunmen in front of the theatre he established in Jenin to help Palestinian youth resist the occupation creatively. I was lucky enough to spend time with him when he visited Glasgow to raise funds for The Freedom Theatre. He was a charismatic, big-hearted, and compassionate man. He also had a great sense of humour. It takes a real coward to attack a man like that. I hope the murderers are brought to justice soon. (Mondoweiss has more on this, including statements from the Palestinian Popular Committee and Gideon Levy)

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‘Israel’s Five Star Occupation: Get Europe To Pay’: Ali Abunimah and David Cronin on Israeli Apartheid

As David Cronin also puts it in the second clip (over the fold), “The European Union is chastising Israel with one side of its mouth, and kissing Israel with the other.” This London talk by Ali Abunimah and David Cronin was chaired by Oxford academic Dr Karma Nabulsi and hosted by Palestine Solidarity Campaign and KCL Action Palestine.

Ali Abunimah

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The Enduring Palestine Land Day

by Brenda Heard

For nearly three decades the Palestinian people had been brutalised and belittled.  Then on 30 March 1976 they took a collective stand.  They were not the nomadic nuisance denounced by the Western Israeli Alliance.  They were a people with the same inalienable rights as any people.  And they would determine their own fate.

They held a general strike and demonstrated against the recently announced intention of the Israeli forces to further snuff out Arab viability in the Galilee region.  But the Israeli armed forces would not tolerate what they viewed as insubordination; they turned their weapons on the protestors, killing six outright, injuring dozens and arresting those who persisted in raising their voices.   The Western Israeli media quickly put down the fatal day as an outbreak of rioting Arabs.  But the estimated 400,000 Palestinian people who had participated in the strike knew better.

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