Haiti aid pledges still unfulfilled.
Category: Uncategorized
Israel: A Failing Colonial Project
by M. Shahid Alam
Increasingly, despite its early military and political successes, Israel cannot for long endure as a colonial project. It must choose between wars – and destruction – or transition to a state for all its peoples.
In order to firmly secure its existence – as firmly as that is possible for any state – a settler state has to overcome three challenges. It has to solve the native problem; break away from its mother country; and gain the recognition of neighboring states and peoples. It can be shown that Israel has not met any of these conditions.
Consider Israel’s native problem. In 1948, in the months before and after its creation, Israel appeared to have solved its native problem in one fell swoop. It had expelled 80 percent of the Palestinians from the territories it had conquered. In addition, with the rapid influx of Arab Jews, Palestinians were soon reduced to less than ten percent of Israel’s population.
So, had Israel licked its native problem for good? Not really.
The Palestinians inside Israel pushed back with a high natural rate of growth in their numbers. As a result, despite the continuing influx of Jewish immigrants, the Palestinian share in Israel’s population has grown to above 20 percent. Increasingly, Jews in Israel see Israeli Arabs as a threat to their Jewish state. Some are advocating a fresh round of ethnic cleansing. Others are calling for a new partition to exclude areas with Arab majorities.
The Palestinians expelled from Israel in 1948 did not go away either. Most of them set up camp in areas around Israel – the West Bank, Gaza, southern Lebanon and Jordan. In 1967, when Israel conquered Gaza and the West Bank, it could expel a much smaller fraction of the Palestinians from these territories. In consequence, with more than a million additional Palestinians under its control, Israeli had recreated its native problem.
The Images Israel Doesn’t Want You To See
Cultures of Resistance filmmaker Iara Lee, who was on board the Mavi Marmara, has just released previously unseen footage of the massacre that took place on the ship. This is a 15-minute clip of an hour long tape she managed to smuggle out. (At about 05:10 you see the target list being carried by the Israeli soldiers)
Warning: video contains very disturbing images
Continue reading “The Images Israel Doesn’t Want You To See”
British Writers in Support of Palestine
I’m proud to be a signatory to this letter published in shortened form in the Independent on Sunday.
June 4th 2010
Dear Editor
The murder of humanitarian aid workers aboard the Mavi Marmara in international waters is the latest tragic example of Israel’s relentless attacks on human rights. But while violently preventing the free passage of medical, building and school supplies to Gaza, Israel continues to pride itself as a highly cultured, highly educated state. In solidarity with Palestinian civil society and its call for a Boycott Divestment and Sanctions campaign against Israel, we the undersigned therefore appeal to British writers and scholars to boycott all literary, cultural and academic visits to Israel that are sponsored by the Israeli government, including those organised by Israeli cultural foundations and universities. (This boycott does not include courageous independent Israeli organisations who openly oppose the occupation.) We also ask that writers, poets and British funding bodies actively support Palestinian literary events, such as the Palestinian Literary Festival and the Palestinian Writing Workshop.
Avatar in the Real World – James Cameron on Indigenous Struggles
Ever since Bono declared his intention to “bring some sex appeal to the idea of wanting to change
the world” on the front pages of Vanity Fair, I’ve been suspicious of celebrity endorsements of struggles for social justice. James Cameron, the director of the brilliant Avatar, is an exception, however. In this interview on the Riz Khan show, Cameron speaks about his recent visit to Brazil and the resistance of local communities to the construction of the Belo Monte Dam, which threatens the destruction of the homeland of tens of thousands of people. In eminently sensible and respectful terms, he discusses his support for their struggle and his reaction to the way indigenous activists around the world have embraced the motif of the Navi struggle against corporate imperialism so masterfully depicted in Avatar. What is more, it seems his initial reluctance to acknowledge the parallels between the Navi and the Palestinian struggle is waning too.
Below the fold, you can find another recent IPS interview with Cameron where he further discusses the relationship between Avatar and and its appropriation by indigenous activists. (For previous PULSE posts on Avatar see the review by Kim Bizzari and Max Ajl’s response to Slavoj Zizek.)
Continue reading “Avatar in the Real World – James Cameron on Indigenous Struggles”
Heading in the ‘Right’ Direction?
With speculation growing over who President Obama will nominate to replace the retiring Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, three top contenders have emerged: Solicitor General Elena Kagan, US Appeals Court Judge Merrick Garland and US Appeals Court Judge Diane Wood. In an interview with Democracy Now! legal analyst and contributor for Salon.com, Glenn Greenwald discusses the nominees, focusing in particular on why the nomination of Elena Kagan threatens to shift an already conservative judiciary further to the right.
Particularly alarming about Kagan’s track record is that when Bush-Cheney were abusing inherent executive power, Kagan was a robust defendant of the admnistration’s claim that the entire world was a battlefield and that executive had the right to indefinitely detain….well…anyone!
The Screen
There were no classes. Instead we marched down to the square and began to shout slogans. At first the teachers led us but soon we got into a group with no teachers and we could shout what we wanted.
Ya Blair Ya haqeer
dumak min dum al-khanzeer
O Blair, you are mud
Your blood is swine’s blood
It was hard to say the words because I was laughing so loud. Muhannad squashed his nose with his finger and oinked like a pig.
Ya Clinton Rooh Amreeka
Hal mushkiltak ma’ Moneeka
O Clinton Get to America
Solve your problem with Monica
That was the funniest one. Muhannad screamed in my ear about Clinton’s cigar and the Jewish woman, which was bad because a girl was next to me. He told me the story almost every day, but it was funnier this time, or maybe it felt like that because the tall girl was there and such a crowd was in the square. The sky was bright, although it was a cloudy day.
Unequal Before the Law
Two weeks before Israel planned to withdraw from Gaza, 19-year-old Eden Natan-Zada boarded a bus en route to Shafr’ Amr and opened fire on Arab passengers, killing four and injuring a dozen before he was attacked and killed as news of the shootings spread, creating an angry mob. Currently, 12 Arab men are being prosecuted by the Israeli state for the murder of Natan-Zada. This case has become a point of entry into a larger debate concerning what many feel is an existing double standard in the application of the law between Jews and Arabs in Israel.
Film-maker Tony Stark’s One Law for All, examines how Israel’s Arab citizens have been and are currently being subjected to an institutional form of racism through the unequal application of the law. The Israeli state’s reticence in recognizing the attack by Natan-Zada as an act of terrorism is just one of the many ways in which Stark reveals this legal imbalance. Segments from Stark’s documentary, which references multiple cases in which the Israeli state has neglected incidents in which Palestinians have been killed by Jewish Israelis, were aired on Al Jazeera’s People & Power earlier this week:
Guantanamo: So much for Change
According to a recent poll by CNN, public support for closing down GTMO has dropped 12 points over the past 14 months. Shortly before Obama’s inauguration, 51 percent of Americans said they thought the facility in Cuba should be closed. Now this number is down to 39 percent, and six in ten believe the United States should continue to operate Guantanamo.
This drop in numbers might indicate the public’s aversion to the idea of having alleged ‘terrorists’ on U.S. soil or may be due to a general fear of the return of legal rights that it is assumed would accompany such a shift. To this end, the public appears to overestimate the government’s intentions, for even if Guantanamo detainees were transferred to the United States, this shift cannot be assumed as indicative of a change in detention policies. The upcoming trial of Syed Fahad Hashmi, who has been detained in the United States since 2007, indicates that this administration does not consider it unlawful to hold U.S. citizens with ‘alleged’ links to Al Qaeda under unconstitutional conditions. Bill Quigley, the legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights, has recently written the following concerning the treatment, legal conditions, and upcoming trial of Hashmi in the Huffington Post: Continue reading “Guantanamo: So much for Change”
Keep America Scared
Earlier this month, a bumbling Liz Cheney embarked upon a campaign to “Keep America Safe.” According to this latest attempt at fear mongering, Cheney claims that 9 lawyers who are currently working for the Justice Department and who have previous experience with representing Guantanamo detainees, are basically ‘terrorist’ sympathizers…if not worse. As usual, one of the best responses to this brand of lunacy comes from the inimitable Rachel Maddow, the great belier of absurdity.
P U L S E 