Mazin Qumsiyeh of the excellent Wheels of Justice peace initiative has drafted this list furnishing facts about why good people of conscience everywhere will not be celebrating Israel at its 60th anniversary this month, just as apartheid-era South Africa was not accepted or celebrated. There are many more reasons, and he invites people to add to it.

Israeli psychologist and exile Avigail Abarbanel notes, “If a day comes, and I hope it does, when Israelis decide to stop living in denial, they will have to realise that real peace will only come through justice. Justice in this context means one thing, that the ideal of an exclusively Jewish state at the cost of an entire people might have to be abandoned. Only a bi-national state and a right of return for the Palestinian refugees will come close enough to rectifying some of the injustices committed in 1948 and since. Having been ethnically cleansed, this is also what the Palestinians are entitled to under international law and common human decency.“

• Ethnic cleaning and ongoing genocide: Between December 1947 and December 1950, over 530 Palestinian villages and towns were destroyed. Half of the Palestinians were ethnically cleansed by underground Zionist forces even before Israel was unilaterally declared a state. Palestinians call these events of the late 1940s the Nakba (Catastrophe).

• The Palestinian refugees are the largest remaining refugee population in the world. Seven million of the ten million Palestinians are refugees or displaced people. They are prevented from returning to their homes and lands even though International law and UN resolutions demand it. Read the rest of this entry »

Alan Ramsey provides an interesting write-up of Wednesday’s parliamentary motion ‘commemorating’ Israel (Blinkers off for the other side of story, SMH). “The whole affair”, he writes, “carefully orchestrated, carefully bi-partisan, lasted just 15 minutes.” Significantly, dissent came not just from a split Labor Party on this issue (most notably from MP Julie Irwin, pictured right, and others who absented themselves during the motion), but also came from the Opposition ranks, with Liberal (right-of centre party in Australia) MP Sussan Ley, pictured left, the only MP to speak up for the Palestinian people in Federal Parliament in this session. The motion was carried on voices and not put to a vote. Ramsey writes:

At 11.58am on Wednesday one half of the Australian Parliament “celebrated” the 60th anniversary of the state of Israel. More than a third of that one-half was absent, whatever their reasons. A number of MPs deliberately excluded themselves. Labor’s Kevin Rudd, as the host, did not. He spoke for eight minutes. “Celebrate” was the word Rudd used to begin his remarks. “Congratulations” was the word he used to end them. The Liberals’ Brendan Nelson spoke for seven minutes in supporting the Prime Minister. He concluded: “Shabat shalom forever.”

Nobody else spoke. The whole affair, carefully orchestrated, carefully bi-partisan, lasted just 15 minutes. The press gallery was almost empty. 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 »

On the 13th of March, at 9am Australian Eastern Standard Time (AEST), Prime Minister Kevin Rudd delivers the long awaited public apology to our indigenous Australians, and in particular the Stolen Generation as a central part of reconciliation with Australia’s past. This welcome landmark comes after his Prime Ministerial predecessor, John Howard, expressed regret but refused to say the word sorry. This simple yet powerful act means so much to indigenous Australians, traumatised by being stolen from their parents and for a whole raft of historical injustices. While there is a long way to go, with possible compensation, social indicators and federal intervention in remote central Australian Aboriginal communities still weighty issues, this is a good start.

It is fitting that the famous “If you have come to help me …” quote highlighted below is from an Australian Aboriginal woman, Lila Watson, who wishes it to be attributed collectively.

The PM tabled and subsequently delivered the following text of the apology in Parliament.

RESOURCES: Audio, video and transcript (.pdf here) of speech (just after the fold) Read the rest of this entry »

While the introduction and conclusion of the narration leaves something to be desired (it is not “democracy” that is being installed in the Middle East, it is being actively subverted and sabotaged in the OPT, for a start), this eight minute ChromoVision video is a very worthwhile production overall: it is a very good overview of what the illegal separation wall in Israel means in terms of partitioning off from Palestinians the most fertile agricultural land and water supplies for use by Israel.

The narration also is correct in noting that all the wall is not in fact along the 1967 Green Line: 157,800 acres2 - or about 11.5 percent - of West Bank land (excluding East Jerusalem) will actually lie between the Barrier and the Green Line, according to the revised route announced in 2004. 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 »

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 »

The blast that rocked Beirut yesterday—killing three and injuring scores more—sends a clear message to the Bush administration, Franklin Lamb writes:

It is doubtful that it was a failed attempt to assassinate Ambassador Feltman. Had they targeted him it is likely the Ambassador would be dead.

… For many in Lebanon, the American Embassy under the Bush administration has become an Israel Embassy in the way that John Bolton became a second Israeli UN Ambassador. Once an Embassy joins one side in an internal conflict as it did in 1982 it loses its diplomatic status and under international law can be targeted as if a participant in hostilities against the Country.

What little credibility the Bush administration had was lost when it intensified the US record of facilitating Israel’s destruction of Lebanon, a string of five wars armed and funded, largely unknowingly, by American taxpayers and without their consent during 1978, 1982, 1993, 1996 and 2006. The Bush performance this week in occupied Palestine erases any doubt about its objectivity.

Few in Lebanon, Palestine, or the wider Middle East take Bush for anything more than a dangerous zealot in the service of Israel, not America. Bush’s midlife crisis exhibited by his dancing around with a sword in Saudi returns him full circle to his alcohol fuelled toga fraternity parties.

What might be a sensible prescription to remedy this mess? Read on for the article in full, and click on image thumbnails for the often unabashedly provocative full-size cartoons by Latuff et. al. Read the rest of this entry »

Benjamin Heine

An assortment of I-P reading in your virtual Christmas stocking. The Qumsiyeh, Levy, Amayreh and Avnery articles are particularly highlighted:

• Mazin Qumsiyeh, Christmas 2007: Even as Shepherds got displaced, Santa attacked, Christmas pilgrims denied, Bethlehem land stolen; yet HOPE GROWS (27 Dec): The spirit of Palestine and its native people remain strong despite the intensified effort to erase its history and its culture. Thus, even under brutal occupation, Palestinian Christians and Muslims took to the streets to observe the traditional Christmas match in manger’s square. And the Christmas message from the highest Catholic representative in the Holy Land, a Palestinian Christian, is truly inspiring. And last Saturday, activists took to the streets of Manhattan in front of Leviev Jewelry store where they sung Christmas carols with new lyrics that expose the store for its support of colonization and ethnic cleansing.
• Maan News Agency, Israel Steals Christmas: Clergy Denied Entry to Occupied Territories, IMEU (27 Dec)
• AFP, ‘Father Christmas’ beaten in West Bank demo: organisers (21 Dec)
• Uri Avnery, Help! A Ceasefire, Gush Shalom (22 Dec): 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 about what’s happening to the Sderot population, out on the geographical and political “periphery”, far from the center of the country. It carries no political or economic weight. In the eyes of the leadership, its suffering is, all in all, tolerable. It also 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. Read the rest of this entry »

Every Christmas this site has focused upon Bethlehem, birthplace of Christ, historically a beautifully polyglot community where Christians, Muslims and Jews coexisted peacefully before the founding of Israel in 1948. Open Bethlehem is a positive campaign to raise awareness around the world about the plight of Christian and Muslim Palestinians in this historic holy city, and the fate of the city itself. The presentations featured in the embedded videos are also available to be downloaded and viewed in powerpoint from the Open Bethlehem site—this is recommended for viewing the slides in full screen, enabling the reading of the text clearly and at one’s leisure.

Previous posts on Christmas and Bethlehem can be found here:

• Bush and Blair banned from Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity
• Christmas in Bethlehem
• Occupation affecting Christians, too
• The Jerusalem Declaration on Christian Zionism
• Occupied Bethlehem: How children are faring behind the Wall
• Success! Bethlehem twins with local Sydney Council

Organisations

• Open Bethlehem
• The Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem
• Twinning with Palestine Network — International Page

Cartoon by Leunig

Caption: “Look at that! Brilliant! You kill the leader and you nip the whole movement in the bud.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Images: Santa’s Ghetto

Meir Margalit recently declared that the zionist project was all but over. To be sure, this was not because of the moral bankruptcy of the occupation of Palestinian territories and the disaster this is causing. Rather, it was pronounced because the Israeli Hight Court recently handed down a response that the state is not responsible for providing absolute security to its residents (in this case Sderot) who filed a suit to have their houses fortified against low-lethality, relatively primitive Qassams.

Margalit connects the dots between this decision and its significance for sounding the clear death knell of the zionist project (editorial emphasis mine):

… after mountains of declarations stating and re-stating the need for a secure haven for the Jewish people, the State now declares: too bad, but we cannot provide that secure haven that the founders of Zionism promised in their time. … For a long time now it has been clear to us that the Zionist “conception” had collapsed. Jews in the Diaspora live in much greater security than the Jews of Israel, and paradoxically, in the Jewish state, which was created to defend us from various kinds of afflictions, more Jews are killed than any other place in the world.

The Zionist establishment is indeed alive and kicking, but that is the wont of giant institutions that refuse to dismantle themselves, especially as the Zionist idea is still a useful lever for mobilizing money in the Diaspora. The Zionist movement continued to stand on its foundations but it was devoid of substance, and it was only a matter of time until it collapsed in on itself. But in the surprising reply of the State lawyers, which was intended merely to save a little money for the State treasury, the State exposed the real truth in its full cruelty: we are not able to fulfill the promise of the Zionist movement to set up a corner of the world in which Jews can live in safety.

It was Martin Buber who said in 1948 that he feared that the success of Zionism would cause the failure of Judaism. In paraphrase of his words we can now add that the creation of the State has also caused the failure of Zionism.

… It does indeed appear that the leaders of the State have recently woken up to the dangers involved in perpetuating the occupation, but we have not yet seen any practical action to stop the deterioration. Read the rest of this entry »

Even before “the Darkening” proposed by Ehud Barak in the Israeli regime’s criminal actions in Gaza, acute shortages of power—wilfully denied as a matter of occupation policy—are affecting not only electricity provision but also water and sewage treatment and creating a public health catastrophe in the Gaza Strip.  Israeli journalistic voice of conscience Amira Hass again relates how this affecting long-suffering Gaza residents, and this piece is important enough to reproduce in entirety. Another worthwhile glimpse is provided by this current UN report on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza (4pp, opens in a new window).

For whatever its worth, I can only impress upon people who care to contact their local representatives and register this as something they are concerned about. Blog, write letters to papers, make some noise where you can. 

Just a short note too that as I am currently travelling in the Middle East; posts and PG Picks links may be more irregular depending upon internet access. I hope to have some photos in the coming days.

Amira Hass: A moment before the lights go out 

Ha’aretz | 07 Nov 2007

Alan Johnston, the BBC corresponded kidnapped in Gaza, related in an interview that at a relatively early stage, he started suffering from all kinds of aches because of the water he drank. This was the same water that the kidnappers drank, but Johnston’s unaccustomed body sent warning signals: This is not water that is fit for drinking. And this is the water that reaches most of the taps in the Gaza Strip. Salty, in a few places brackish to contaminated, with an oily consistency. That is clearly felt when bathing.

The reason is an ancient one: overpumping because Gaza must make do with the waters from its aquifer alone. It is as if we were to say to the residents of Be’er Sheva: make do with the water that flows nearby. The water sources in the rest of the country are not for you.

Over the last few years, there have been some improvised private and public solutions. Private water purification plants in homes and commercial companies that sell purified water.

The municipalities, for their part, set up large brackish water desalination facilities and several central taps. Thousands of people go there daily to fill up jerry-cans with water that will not taste like it came from a puddle and will not cause diarrhea, infections, kidney problems and who knows what else.

The electricity and fuel supply to Gaza has already been reduced to below the level of basic human needs. An additional reduction will affect the above solutions to the water problem, and beyond. “To darken Gaza,” as some of the security experts among us have recently proposed, does not end merely with darkened homes at night. You don’t have to be an expert in public health to realize that it would create an endless chain reaction of public health problems and environmental blights.

Today, around a year and a half after Israel bombed the transformer station in Gaza, only 193 megawatts out of the 240 or so it needs is supplied to the Strip. Read the rest of this entry »

Joel Kovel, author of Overcoming Zionism:

“The notion of Zionism, as that there is this kind of destiny of the Jewish people to have their own state, is just the wrong idea. And it’s an idea that requires signing onto imperialism. It means signing onto ethnic cleansing. It means — despite everything that has been said about it, it means basically becoming a racist situation, where you’re oppressing an indigenous population and depriving them of their right to existence … I join hands with those people who feel that the time has come to basically think of Israel in the same category as South Africa, as a state that just has gone wrong and needs replacement … the comparison was interesting, because Tutu and other leaders of the freedom struggle in South Africa who visited Palestine have always been asked, well, how does it compare? And he says, well, it’s not the same thing, Israel is actually worse. He actually said, Israel is a worse place than Apartheid South Africa was.”

Thanks Tom Murphy. See also Joel Kovel, Overcoming Zionism video, and a Message From Howard Zinn