Lebanon on the Brink

Blindsided Hezbollah mulls its response

Franklin Lamb,
Outside Beirut’s closed Airport

“The question is no longer why, for the answer has become clear. However, what is the secret behind the timing of this? What is being prepared for the future stage and which coincides with US President George Bush’s tour of the region? Has internal dialogue gone without return, and if it takes place, then what is its agenda? What will Hezbollah and the opposition do to face the new challenges?”

– Hezbollah Deputy Secretary General Naim Qassim during a just completed May 8, 2008 interview

Hezbollah sources concede that they were taken by surprise and some were shocked by the intense, incendiary bombardment of the last few days by pro-government operatives. As Hezbollah studies ‘the situation’ and how to respond this beautiful spring Beirut morning, there is a real danger things may rapidly spiral out of control. Read the rest of this entry »

Graphic: Carlos Latuff.

That, of course, is the idea, the result of a deliberate strategy and as a direct consequence of Israel’s prevailing self-definition and worldview. As surely as our cosmology informs our sociology, the abhorrent siege of the Gaza Ghetto continues, the result of the internal logic of Israel’s continued existence as an apartheid expansionist state, producing policies of continued ‘low-intensity’ ethnic cleansing, divide and rule and genocide as Ilan Pappe and others have described. Zaid Khan’s words are worth quoting again:

Nearly 70 years ago, in a small eastern European city, an oppressed and occupied people were under siege, living under atrocious and brutal conditions, lacking food, medicine, electricity, water, and slowly being strangled in the hope they would just disappear.

Warsaw Ghetto 1941 - Gaza 2008. Israel, you are a disgrace.

Read the rest of this entry »

Anthony Arnove talks to Dahr Jamail, author of Beyond the Green Zone, at the Winter Soldier hearings in Silver Spring MD in a very worthwhile view (14 minutes).

See also this inspiring 2 minute clip of an Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW) action at the National Archives Building: Read the rest of this entry »

In response to PM Rudd’s Motion on Israel’s 60th Anniversary year, many Australians, including this blogger, supported and signed an advertisement that appeared prominently on page 7 of The Australian national broadsheet on Wednesday 12 March. The statement reads:

Not in Our Name

We, as informed and concerned Australians, choose to disassociate ourselves from a celebration of the triumph of racism and the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians since the al-Nakba (Catastrophe) of 1948. As we write, Israel continues to expand illegal Jewish-only settlements in the West Bank including Arab East Jerusalem.

Australia and Australians should not give the Israeli people and its leaders the impression that Australia supports them in their dispossession of the Palestinian people. Israel has poisoned our (the West’s) relations with the whole of the Arab and Muslim world. Rather than celebrating the creation of the State of Israel, we should be recognising the people of Palestine, those who were dispossessed, those who lived and died as refugees, those who continue to live and die and suffer at the hands of the State of Israel, and those who will continue to suffer and die in the future until justice is done. Read the rest of this entry »

Having first indicated Egypt as their choice, organisers of the Turin Book Fair in Italy postponed having Egypt as their international Guest of Honour for 2009. One would consider that in 2008, inviting Egypt’s neighbour Palestine as the Guest of Honour would have been inspired in this 60th anniversary of the Nakba, a powerful symbolic gesture to a peoples who have not experienced any let-up in blocked efforts towards justice.

Instead, the organisers chose Israel as book fair guest for this year. This decision is coupled with the choice of Israel as guest of honour for the Paris Book Fair and is ill-considered, coinciding as it does with the 60th Anniversary of the Naqba and the founding of the state of Israel, and at a time when the Israeli military occupation has only worsened.

Italian and international protests and calls for boycott have ensued, protesting the organisers decision that would serve to “commemorate” the Israeli occupation state and and its repressive policies in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT). The protest organisers are “appalled to see the world of culture take the side of those who methodically operate to annihilate Palestine and the Palestinians”.

One of the invited Israeli writers, poet Aaron Shabtai, applied his conscience when he rsvp’ed the organisers. Here is his note to Edna Degon of the organising committee (from Tlaxcala):

Dear Edna,
Thank you for your letter.
I do not believe that a State that maintains an occupation, committing on a daily basis crimes against civilians, deserves to be invited to any kind of cultural week. That is, it is anti-cultural; it is a barbarian act masked as culture in the most cynical way. It manifests support for Israel, and even to France that sustains the occupation. And I do not want to participate.
Kind regards,
Aharon Shabtai
7 December, 2007

Born in 1939  in Tel Aviv, Aharon Shabtai’s life has been longer than the state of Israel. It is fitting that this elder statesman and poet should be one of its few voices of conscience. Read the rest of this entry »

Police with video cameras at rallies … overt in-your-face surveillance … this is not what a democracy looks like.
(Thanks Dave)

Thank you to the Palestinian-Dutch group Send-A-Message for helping to deliver one of the most memorable acts of symbolic dissent to engage in.

See also: More guerilla graffiti in the Holy Land: Israel’s apartheid barrier as a canvas

Also check out Ten Percent’s message on the wall.

Along with Banksy, we hope this illegal wall upon which this graffiti is written becomes rubble soon.

Read the rest of this entry »

A short and succinct letter to the editor in today’s Sydney Morning Herald from Zaid Khan puts things into perspective:

Nearly 70 years ago, in a small eastern European city, an oppressed and occupied people were under siege, living under atrocious and brutal conditions, lacking food, medicine, electricity, water, and slowly being strangled in the hope they would just disappear.

Warsaw Ghetto 1941 - Gaza 2008. Israel, you are a disgrace.

Zaid Khan

What is to be done? Chances are that if you reading this, you already have a good grasp of what is happening. Also avail yourself to first hand accounts from residents in Gaza, such as Tabula Gaza, Raising Yousef–A Mother From Gaza and Dr Mona El Farra’s blog. Spread the word and discuss it with people who may not even know all this is happening or who may uncritically accept the Israeli neocon worldview propagated in some of the major media outlets. Israel is committing slow genocide and ethnic cleansing. A simple yet powerful letter like the one above can ricochet around the world.

Here are some other ways you can help: Read the rest of this entry »

It was JFK who said that “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” Our thoughts are with Gaza, where GWB’s recent visit to the region has seen Israel only ratchet up its violence and airstrikes upon a territory from which it only nominally withdrew and in fact continues to choke, killing dozens of people in the space of a few days.

Let us recall that after maintaining a ceasefire or hudna for eighteen months, the democratically elected government of Hamas was subject to nothing but economic siege, divide and rule, sabotage and targeted killings. Let us also recall that Israel rejected the offer of a truce, instead continuing its collective punishment of a whole population already brutally repressed and assassinating leaders and civilians alike, including the son of Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar.

The criminal strangulation of a whole population of a million and a half people in one of the most densely populated places on the planet is being committed on the pretext of rocket attacks on Israel using primitive weapons like Qassams; with pretext being the operative word. As Uri Avnery recently observed in Help! A Ceasefire: “If the Qassams were really bothering our political and military leaders, they would have jumped at the cease-fire offer. But the leaders don’t really care … [it] has an important positive side: it provides an ideal pretext for the actions of the army. The Israeli strategic aim in Gaza is not to put an end to the Qassams. It would still be the same if not a single Qassam fell on Israel.” Israel’s policy is to deliberately destroy Gaza. Read the rest of this entry »

Dr Ibrahim Mousawi speaking at the World Against War international peace conference in London, December 2007 (10:13)

McCarthyism comes to Europe and the Levant: The Zionist Targeting of Lebanon’s Dr. Ibrahim Mousawi

by Franklin Lamb in Beirut and Ann El Khoury in Sydney

You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?
– Joseph Welch to Senator Joseph McCarthy, April 1954

In a US Senate hearing just over fifty years ago, Boston lawyer Joseph Welch famously rebuked Senator Joseph McCarthy with these now immortal words. They have been immortalized because they have helped furnish what we understand McCarthyism to mean: extreme, mean and unreasonable persecution of people by means of witch-hunts and other tactics including guilt by association or through simple prejudice. This is done in order to achieve a political objective of silencing dissent and preventing the public from learning inconvenient truths. Read the rest of this entry »

Indeed, Love–and art–Conquers (W)all — here’s some more creative culture-jamming that allows you to participate by sending a message to feature on the wall. All proceeds go to the Ramallah community.

Send.a.message–the website mentioned in the video–is HERE, check them out.

Related:

• ‘Art Attack’: meet the new creative dissenters
• Global messages cover Israeli-Palestinian wall

These two short video clips are around 2 and a half minutes each and are sourced from the BBC and Al Jazeera.

Painting peace on Israel’s concrete canvas - 18 Jan 07

Mystery Graffiti Artist *Banksy* Tags Birthplace Of Jesus

Amid the illegal occupation and the murderous blockade of Gaza by the IOF, here’s some inspired dissent. Artist Peter Kennard meets members of a new generation of artistic dissenters in a movement spearheaded by artist Banksy, whose art has featured in Occupied Palestine as well as his native UK.

Art attack

by Peter Kennard | New Statesman | 17 January 2008

Banksy attracts the press attention, but around him is an increasingly influential movement of political artists operating outside the mainstream
The phone rings; the number is withheld. It’s Banksy. He wants to know whether I can go to Bethlehem over Christmas. He is putting on an exhibition, bringing together like-minded artists from all over the world to raise awareness of the situation in Palestine. Like the annual guerrilla art shows that have taken place in London for the past six years, it will be called “Santa’s Ghetto”. Two weeks later, I find myself involved in an experience that transforms my ideas about what artists can do in the face of oppression.

Read the rest of this entry »

Please click on image to visit the website and consider joining this excellent campaign

Celebrating two significant recent victories for justice.

1. Anthropologist Professor Abu El-Haj Granted Tenure At Columbia

Congratulations to Barnard’s Nadia Abu El-Haj for duly being awarded academic tenure. For this Beirut, Tehren and US-educated Palestinian-American and author of Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society, this is also a win against the desperate, McCarthyist and ideologically-driven attacks and smears of the Likudnik-Zios in the US of the kind that saw Norman Finkelstein denied tenure a few months ago. See:

• Columbia Columbia Grants Abu El-Haj Tenure by Richard Silverstein (Tikun Olam, 2 Nov)
• RELATED: The New McCarthyism by Larry Cohler-Esses (The Nation, 25 Oct)

2. LA8 Victory

A favourable closure on one of the US’s longest-running and most controversial deportation cases, one that tested whether immigrants have the same First Amendment rights as citizens. Phyllis Bennis, investigator with the National Lawyers’ Guild describes the victory in this now twenty-year-old Los Angeles Eight case:

This deportation effort by the U.S. government, starting in the Reagan administration and continuing through Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, tried to deport eight activists for Palestinian rights — 7 Palestinians and a Kenyan woman married to one of them — for First Amendment-protected activities. First they were tried under the old McCarthy-era McCarran-Walter Act, for being “members or supporters of an organization supporting world communism” and when that was overturned by congress, they were charged with supporting a terrorist organization. Their “deportable” activities were distributing a newspaper and raising money for hospitals, clinics and schools in the West Bank and Lebanon’s refugee camps, linked to one of the factions of the PLO. They were never accused of ANY illegal or violent activities, never accused of committing, supporting, aiding, talking or even dreaming about terrorist acts. (During a two-year FBI investigation, an FBI agent moved into an apartment adjoining that of two of the LA 8 and kept listening devices against their bedroom wall for six months… he heard nothing.)

Judge William Webster, former head of the FBI, said explicitly that if the Eight were citizens, there would have been no basis even to arrest them.

So twenty years later, vindication. I’ve been part of the legal team for 20 years, and it’s been a huge privilege.

See also:

• Judge Throws Out Charges in “Los Angeles Eight” Case (Center for Constitutional Rights)
• Victory for “L.A.8″: Case Dropped After 20-Years (ADC: American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee)
• ADC-ACLU-NLG Press Release (.pdf, 3pp, opens in a new window)
• Legal judgment (.pdf, 11pp, opens in a new window)