Category: Palestine

Illuminated Pages

Michael Palin, Robin Yassin-Kassab and Jeremy Harding in a 'qasr' near Ain Qenya, Ramallah
Michael Palin, Robin Yassin-Kassab and Jeremy Harding in a 'qasr' near Ain Qenya, Ramallah

Another fine LRB diary piece by Palfest participant Jeremy Harding. A visit to the al-Khalidi library leads Jeremy to consider “the war for control of East Jerusalem that Israel has been waging, slowly but surely, by non-military means.” More pieces by Jeremy are here , here, here, and here.

Haifa al-Khalidi says that she’s not a librarian. Fine. But the al-Khalidi collection on 116 Bab al-Silsilah Street in the old city of Jerusalem doesn’t pretend to be anything other than a library so maybe Haifa simply means she’s not a scholar, even if she’s now acquainted with a thousand rare manuscripts and many more works in print that are housed here. One of the first she shows us is a beautifully decorated Arabic translation of a work on poisons and remedies by a 12th-century Indian physician. (Later I learn it contains a tale about metabolic resistance and how it’s possible, carefully and slowly, to administer a poison to a subject whose antibodies enable him to survive, even though someone else who touches him will die. Actually, that ‘he’ in the story is a her, tanked up to become a poison pie and set before a king.) 

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Ending Apartheid

A great piece by best-selling crime writer and Palfest participant Henning Mankell, originally published in the Swedish paper Aftonbladet. Mankell was tremendously moved by what he saw in Palestine, and we hope he is able to transmit this passion to his millions of readers. Mankell is informed enough to realise that the two-state solution is no solution. He concludes, “The fall of this disgraceful Apartheid system is the only thing conceivable, because it must be.”

Henning Mankell (right) responds to Banksy's wall art
Henning Mankell (right) responds to Banksy's wall art

About a week ago, I visited Israel and Palestine. I was part of a delegation of authors with representatives from different parts of the world.

We came to participate in the Palestinian Literary Festival. The opening ceremony was supposed to take place at the Palestinian National Theatre in Jerusalem.

We had just gathered when heavily armed Israeli military and policemen walked in and announced that they were going to stop the ceremony.

When we asked why, they answered: You are a security risk.

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Mohammed Omer correcting the record

Mohammed Omer, the great Palestinian journalist and recipient of the Martha Gelhorn prize, sets the record straight about the torture ordeal he suffered at the hands of the Israeli Shin Beth torturers.

June 26, 2008 is a day I will never forget. For the events of that day irrevocably changed my life. That day I was detained, interrogated, strip searched, and tortured while attempting to return home from a European speaking tour, which culminated in independent American journalist Dahr Jamil and I sharing the Martha Gellhorn Journalism Prize in London — an award given to journalists who expose propaganda which often masks egregious human rights abuses.

Mohammed Omer receiving the Martha Gelhorn Prize together with Dahr Jamail
Mohammed Omer receiving the Martha Gelhorn Prize together with Dahr Jamail

I want to address the denials from Israel and the inaccurate reporting by a few journalists in addition to requesting state of Israel to acknowledge what it did to me, prosecute the members of the Shin Bet responsible for it and put in place procedures that protect other journalists from such treatment.

Since 2003, I’ve been the voice to the voiceless in the besieged Gaza Strip for a number of publications and news programs ranging from The Washington Report on Middle East Affairs to the BBC and, Morgenbladet in Norway as well as Democracy Now! These stories exposed a carefully-crafted fiction continuing control and exploitation of five-million people. Their impact, coupled with the reporting of others served to change public opinion in the United States and Europe concerning the dynamics of Israel and its occupation of Palestine .

After receiving the Martha Gellhorn prize I returned home through the Allenby Bridge Crossing in the Occupied West Bank between Jordan and Israel. It was here I was detained, interrogated, and tortured for several hours by Shin Bet and border officers. When it appeared I may be close to death an ambulance was called to transport me to a hospital. From that day my life has been a year of continued medical treatments, pain — and a search for justice.

The article can be read in its entirety here

Fantasising Israel

Israels militarized liberalism
Israel's militarized liberalism

How can the supposed liberalism of Tel Aviv coexist with apartheid and occupation? In this excellent essay Yonatan Mendel considers the Israeli “fantasising project.” “It is the “positive, ‘normal’ and likeable characteristics of Tel Aviv,” Mendel argues, “that make it a paradigm of the moral and political blindness of Israeli society.”

At this very moment, long queues are probably forming outside Tel Aviv’s latest culinary thing: the yoghurterias. Even in the middle of the night you have to wait in line to get a cold and refreshing ice-cream yoghurt from the busy shop on Rothschild Boulevard. Springing up like mushrooms after the rain, the ice-cream parlours have allowed the ‘white city’ of Tel Aviv to experience the white revolution of the yoghurt. It is sweet and sour, made of natural ingredients, both healthy and tasty, with only 1.6 per cent fat, and topped with pieces of fresh fruit freshly cut up. Mangoes and pineapples, kiwis, strawberries, pomegranates, dates, melons and watermelons, red, yellow and green, are generously placed on top of the thick white yoghurt. A small cup of the local delicacy costs 18 shekels (about £3), a medium-size cup is 21 shekels, and a huge cup is 27 shekels. This is the best gastronomic response to the humidity that prevails in Israel’s ‘first Hebrew city’.

You can read the rest here.

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Aid Agencies Slam Gaza Blockade

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Today marks the second anniversary of the criminal siege of Gaza. Here is a statement signed  by over 40 NGOs, humanitarian and UN organizations denouncing Israel’s blockade:

We, United Nations and non-governmental humanitarian organisations, express deepening concern over Israel’s continued blockade of the Gaza Strip which has now been in force for two years.

These indiscriminate sanctions are affecting the entire 1.5 million population of Gaza and ordinary women, children and the elderly are the first victims.

The amount of goods allowed into Gaza under the blockade is one quarter of the pre- blockade flow.  Eight out of every ten truckloads contains food but even that is restricted to a mere 18 food items.  Seedlings and calves are not allowed so Gaza’s farmers cannot make up the nutritional shortfall.  Even clothes and shoes, toys and school books are routinely prohibited.

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‘Israel is West’s first line of defense’

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Geert Wilders

The Dutch crypto-fascist MP Geert Wilders, who has been recently banned from the UK with the Home Office viewing his presence as a “threat to one of the fundamental interests of society“, says that the sequel to his first movie Fitna will focus on “how the forces of Islamization are specifically targeting Israel in a fight against all free societies.” In an interview with Haaretz, he not only commended Avigdor Liberman for his electoral succes and said he is “proud” of the similarities between his own Party for Freedom and Yisrael Beiteinu but calls the “two-state solution is an internal Israeli matter“. His “personal belief is that there is a two state solution for the Palestinians. One of those states is called Jordan.” Whilst such statements are nothing new from Wilders, the fact that he seized 15% (2nd place) of the vote in the Dutch European Parliament elections means that he’s becoming a political force to be reckoned with.

Israel will be a major part of Geert Wilders’ next film on Islam, the rightist Dutch legislator said last week in an interview for Haaretz. He praised Avigdor Lieberman, observing “similarities” between Yisrael Beiteinu and the Party for Freedom – a small movement which has grown to become Holland’s second most popular.

Wilders, a controversial anti-immigration politician, rose to international fame last year when he released a 14-minute film entitled Fitna, which attempts to portray what he considers as Islam’s “violent nature.” The film, which has been viewed by millions online, provoked mass protests throughout the Muslim world.

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More from Palfest

Palfest writer Deborah Moggach negotiates a checkpoint
Palfest writer Deborah Moggach negotiates a checkpoint

Jeremy Harding writes of the crossing into Palestine that I wrote about here. Then Rachel Holmes describes her impressions of the Palfest week, and is reminded of South Africa in the 70s. Jeremy first:

After the defeat of the Arabs in June 1967, many Palestinians who’d been driven east over the Jordan River by the fighting tried desperately to return to their homes by slipping back across. The bridges, including the Allenby Bridge, had been damaged, but the patched-up remains were serviceable. The Allenby Bridge crossing was closely guarded, however, and used by the soldiers on Israel’s newest frontier to put people out, rather than allow them in. Palestinian refugees trying to get home from Jordan, as well as groups of fedayeen, preferred to ford the shallow river at dead of night, although 50 IDF ambush parties were stationed along the west bank, instructed to fire on shadows in the water. By September, more than a hundred people had been shot dead trying to return and a thousand had been deported back to Jordan.

On the Jordanian side of the river journalists were counting up to 80,000 refugees in tents, with more being driven in from the west bank as Israeli soldiers fired over their heads to hurry them along. To avoid what was clearly an international scandal in the making, the Israeli government decided to stage a televised return of several thousand Palestinians. There was disagreement among the ministries about how to select the fortunate few. A Foreign Ministry official argued that the key point was demographic: children and women of childbearing age should be kept to a minimum; but in the prevailing view, the older refugees of 1948 were far more undesirable.

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The Green Still Resists

In one of the most contentious sections of his thoroughly contentious Cairo speech, Obama declared:

Palestinians must abandon violence. Resistance through violence and killing is wrong and does not succeed. For centuries, black people in America suffered the lash of the whip as slaves and the humiliation of segregation. But it was not violence that won full and equal rights. It was a peaceful and determined insistence upon the ideals at the center of America’s founding. This same story can be told by people from South Africa to South Asia; from Eastern Europe to Indonesia. It’s a story with a simple truth: that violence is a dead end. It is a sign of neither courage nor power to shoot rockets at sleeping children, or to blow up old women on a bus. That is not how moral authority is claimed; that is how it is surrendered.

It’s difficult to know where to start with this. Perhaps by registering just how insulting it is for the representative of the imperial killing machine – responsible directly and indirectly for millions of deaths in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Lebanon, Somalia – to lecture the dispossessed and massacred Palestinians on their occasional attempts to strike back. We can be sure that the sleeping children Obama is concerned with here are the Israeli children who live on the stolen land of Palestine, not the unsleeping, traumatised children of Gaza, several hundred of whom were burnt and dismembered six months ago. Then it’s worth remarking how the erudition and intelligence shown in Obama’s pre-presidential book ‘Dreams from my Father’ have been immediately crushed on his assumption of the presidency. How otherwise could his historical vision be so partial and simplistic? There was certainly a key non-violent aspect to the struggle for civil rights in the United States, but pretending that violence played no role in the process makes it necessary to ignore the American Civil War (half a million dead), Nat Turner, Malcolm X, the Black Panthers and rioting Chicago. Violence, or the threat of violence, was important in South Africa and India too, and certainly in Obama’s ancestral Kenya, and was the dominant anti-imperial strategy in Vietnam and Algeria.

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Inside Story: US-Israeli ties under pressure

Al Jazeera’s Inside Story features interviews on regional and US responses to Netanyahu’s US-pitched speech, though the episode has the somewhat overstated title ‘US-Israeli ties under pressure’ (would that they were!). Kamahl Santamaria talks to Abdul-Bari Atwan, Editor-in-chief of Al Quds Al-Arabi; Patrick Seale, veteran Middle East analyst; and Aaron Miller, former US State Department adviser. While Al Jazeera is not without its own editorial biases, Abdul-Bari Atwan’s views are well aired and merit attention here.

On the pretence of peace

Benjamin Netanyahu delivers a speech in Ramat Gan near Tel Aviv Sunday (AP Photo)
Benjamin Netanyahu delivers a speech in Ramat Gan near Tel Aviv Sunday (AP Photo)

A guest op-ed from Brenda Heard of Friends of Lebanon.

On Sunday 14 June 2009, hours before Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu delivered a statement announcing his expectations of the international community, Israeli F-16 jets dropped several bombs along the southern Gaza border.  The Israeli military said it was targeting underground tunnels.  Four Palestinians were wounded. (More on the exchange of hostilities here and here.)

As the Palestinians were being treated in hospital, Netanyahu proclaimed, “Peace has always been our people’s most ardent desire.”  In fact the speech was interwoven with Hallmark-Greeting-Card-messages of tranquil harmony.  “If we join hands and work together for peace. . . .”

Cut the violins.  In essence, Netanyahu stated that he expected the international community to support his desire to turn his holy land into his Disney land so as to regain the tourist trade needed to bolster an ailing Israeli economy.  We could make this whole Palestinian problem go away, he said, if we simply ignore those we forced out and bend those remaining into complete submission.  Lest anyone get the wrong idea, though, we’ll let them keep a flag and a song.  Just to prove how civilised we are.

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