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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

Sonja Karkar is founder of Women for Palestine and her writing has been featured at Counterpunch, Electronic Intifada and many other good alternative press sites.

Picture credits: Banksy (many thanks Dave) and Polyp.

Christians and Muslims Weep Together
A Christmas Reflection on Palestine

By Sonja Karkar | December 19, 2007

As Christmas approaches this year, the thoughts of Christians all over the world will once again turn to Bethlehem, the holy town where Jesus was born over two millennia ago. Voices will be raised in joyful celebration and children everywhere will re-create the Christmas story to help us remember the circumstances in which the Christ child was born.

Such a momentous occasion in such humble surroundings heralded a new way of thinking about people’s relationship with God and with each other. It shook the foundations of an unforgiving society presided over by an unforgiving God and proclaimed peace and goodwill on earth amongst all people. There was indeed much to hope for.

However, the tranquil pastoral scene so familiar to us is not at all evident in Bethlehem today. Bethlehem does not lie still, and peace on earth and goodwill towards all is as elusive as ever. The tyranny of Israel’s occupation and its colonial expansionism is crippling the lives of both Palestinian Christians and Muslims alike. Read the rest of this entry »

UPDATE: See also Zionist Pressure Fails to Stop Overcoming Zionism Book

Dr. Joel Kovel is an author, editor, activist and former psychotherapist whose new book Overcoming Zionism is a contribution to the growing body of literature advocating a single democratic state in Israel/Palestine. It is also a biting critique of Zionism, and Kovel joins in the call to boycott the Israeli state that it may end its apartheid, as South Africa was pressured.

Following the video clips of Professor Kovel in Canada last month (thanks Ressentiment) is a message from Howard Zinn on behalf of the Committee for an Open Discussion of Zionism (CODZ). Zinn alerts us to the fact that certain ultra-zionist Israel Lobby groups are attempting to intimidate publishers and distributors of the book, and suggests what we can do to help.

Part 1 20-minutes

Read the rest of this entry »

The local Sydney council of Marrickville has now entered into a Sister City relationship with Bethlehem, occupied Palestinian city and birthplace of Christ.The Mayor of Bethlehem, Dr Victor Batarseh and a delegation from Bethlehem are currently in Sydney to seal the deal and it was a pleasure to help welcome them with Sydney’s Palestinian community and many others in the general Middle East community here. (Next campaign: twinning Hebron with Leichhardt –thanks Alex).

In addition to the links below, the excellent Coalition for Peace and Justice in Palestine (CJPP) Sydney has more on the Sister Cities campaign.

Relevant local links:

• Rashell Habib, Marrickville and Bethlehem sisters to sign, Inner West Courier, 21 Aug 2007
• Peter Manning, Impoverished Bethlehem needs all the support it can get, SMH Letters, 20 June 2007
• Sunanda Creagh, O little town of Marrickville what a fuss you’ve caused, Sydney Morning Herald, 20 Jun 2007

Bethlehem-specific and -related posts:

• Bush and Blair banned from Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity
• Christmas in Bethlehem
• Occupation affecting Christians, too
• The Jerusalem Declaration on Christian Zionism

Organisations

• Open Bethlehem
• Twinning with Palestine Network — International Page

Why are creating these people-to-people, community-to-community ties so important? They constitute direct links of friendship and solidarity and an opportunity to establish multiple cultural, civil and economic ties between towns that can often be independent of federal government policy.

And these exchanges are especially needed now. Bethlehem now has several — over 30 — such twinning arrangements around the world, in no small part due to its dedicated advocates impassioned about saving this beleaguered holy city. While Christians, Muslims and Jews have coexisted for centuries in Palestine, occupied Bethlehem is being subject to strangulation by the Israeli government: two thirds of the population in Bethlehem lives below the poverty line and unemployment is higher than 60%.

Last Christmas I noted the Mayor of Bethlehem’s words in his traditional Christmas season press conference, in which he said that

the birthplace of Jesus Christ is in its worst economic, political and tourist conditions in those 2,000 years. The dire situation is due to the procedures and practices of the occupation that continues to increase in severity in and around the city.

The so-called security fence on our land has forced large numbers of people to leave their homes and move. The conditions are so deplorable that the practices are clearly intended to vacate the land of its people. Read the rest of this entry »

Gazan children are being denied the right to learn — the Israeli government is currently obstructing shipments of textbooks and printing paper (along with foodstuffs, trading, aid, money, resources and other items). While the shameful starvation and economic strangulation of Gaza weighs in most heavily, the denial of textbooks to schoolchildren is one denial of a basic human right that is being addressed in a campaign by The Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information (IPCRI).

IPCRI are one of several grassroots examples of joint Palestinian-Israeli peace initiatives, successfully working together while some of their government official counterparts woefully bluster. The small but significant successes are often achieved within and despite the overwhelming structural violence of the Israeli occupation; they offer hope and a way forward at the important community and grassroots level. Groups are variously collaborations by profession, cultural and interfaith exchanges, women, youth, sporting, dialogue and confidence-building based, and are both one and two state advocates.

In this particular case, ICPRI are a two-state proponent think-tank tasked with helping to develop practical solutions to the conflict, with Palestinian and Israeli experts working together to produce detailed proposals about security, borders, Jerusalem, refugees, water, and, significantly, peace education textbooks.

As they write in their dispatches: “In light of the lack of confidence in peace on both sides of the conflict, we asked Israelis and Palestinians what would convince them that the other side was really interested in peace, the #1 answer was: when they begin teaching peace in their classrooms“.

Others include the PRIME curriculum project by the Peace Research Institute in the Middle East (PRIME). PRIME are history teachers—West Bank Palestinians and Israeli Jews—who develop texts for students presenting the Palestinian and Israeli narratives. 1948 is described both as the Israelis’ year of “independence” and the Palestinians’ “catastrophe,” or Naqba. This is a welcome improvement upon the fact that despite Israel having illegally occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem (in violation of international law) for 40 years, maps in its school textbooks show these as part of Israel.

Peace education is an important part of meaningful peace initiatives. While it is not a substitute for the work to be done at the level of “high politics” and statecraft, it is a crucial foundation to it.

***I very highly recommend this powerful piece by Nurit Peled-Elhanan: For the children: Education or mind infection? and invite you to consider contributing to these worthwhile actions listed below.

1. From IPCRI:

IPCRI LAUNCHES PUBLIC AND DIPLOMATIC CAMPAIGN TO ALLOW THE CHILDREN OF GAZA TO HAVE SCHOOL BOOKS

Tuesday, August 21, 2007

To the Ambassadors, Consul Generals and Representatives to Israel and to the Palestinian Authority

Dear Friends,

Since the Hamas takeover of Gaza most goods heading to Gaza from Israel or from abroad have been blocked as part of the policy of pressuring Hamas. One of the goods being blocked by the IDF is paper for the printing of text books for UNRWA schools in Gaza.

In the coming days the children of Gaza will return to school and they will not have text books in their school bags. Five truck loads of paper have been waiting for the Israeli Minister of Defense himself to decide that paper for the printing of text books for UNRWA schools is a “humanitarian need”.

Just imagine if it were your children who would be going to schools without text books! Read the rest of this entry »

UPDATED: many thanks to Jenny Tonge for kindly responding to a query about full Hansard transcript availability which has allowed me to feature more of her address. Parliamentary debate transcripts at both the House of Commons and House of Lords can be found on the Hansard link here by date and member name.

Liberal-Democrat peer Jenny Tonge spoke out for justice in Palestine in a House of Lords speech last month, predictably earning the ire of Israel-apologists (see J-Post)

Here’s an excerpt of her speech:

The Palestinians have been brought to their knees. A cultured and well educated society with high skill levels has been reduced to a third-world country. The statistics are there for all to see. If noble Lords do not believe me or any of the other speakers, the Select Committee for International Development in the other place produced a good report this year. I hope that noble Lords will read it. It tells of injustice—injustice to Palestinians.

The new Government talks of rebuilding the economy in Palestine and of getting the Palestinians back to work, which is very welcome. But how will they do that with road blocks, checkpoints and Bantustans divided by settler-only roads? How can an economy work in this situation?

Even education is being destroyed as children are terrorised by raids on their schools. Exams in Nablus, for example, were disrupted only last week by the IDF. An unskilled and illiterate generation will emerge, capable of very little except low-wage labour. The economy cannot be rebuilt unless Israel changes its policies.

Therefore, the problem remains—how do we persuade Israel to change? We want Israel to be a secure and prosperous state—and I say that sincerely. How can anyone in Israel believe that the present situation will give them what they want, long-term security. I am not anti-Semitic, but I am appalled by the racist, apartheid state of Israel. I use the word “apartheid” in its literal sense—it means separation—because that is what is going on.

Policies of the western countries towards Israel must change. Israel must be made to understand. We must consider trade sanctions and boycotts, if necessary, to make that country obey international law. The present situation is a disaster for Palestinians. It is a disaster for Israel. It is a disaster for the whole world. It has to change.

Thank you, Jenny Tonge. Hope you are holding up well with the usual character smears and pathetic denigration this kind of speaking truth to power elicits from the Likudnik ideologues. Of course, unlike them, Dr Tonge has actually been to Gaza and seen conditions for herself. Dr Tonge, who cites her proudest achievement in parliament since 2001 as “highlighting the plight of the Palestinians under occupation by Israel”, is a treasure.

German peace movement spurns settlement products

In other positive developments, Ha’aretz reports that Germans have protested the sale of food from West Bank settlements. Read the rest of this entry »

A mural on the apartheid wall imposed by Israel, courtesy http://bethlehemghetto.blogspot.com

Articles of interest

• Sami Awad reports on the latest non-violent actions in Bil’in in “…then they fight you, then you win…”:

As the nonviolent protests and demonstrations against the Apartheid wall continue to gain momentum and strength in the Palestinian community in general and in villages in particular we are seeing even greater violent response and threat by the Israeli army. This is not new, in villages like Bil’in, the army has for two years responded to almost every nonviolent action with appalling violence.

As I have witnessed these actions grow, I remember the famous quote by Gandhi: “First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.”

• Ori Nur writes that in part as a result of its participation in illegal settlements, Heftzibah Construction, one of Israel’s largest contractors and a chief builder of West Bank settlements, is on the brink of bankruptcy - (Settlements are a risky investment, Common Ground News, 17 August 2007):

WASHINGTON - When West Bank settlers recently launched an ambitious campaign to sell homes in settlements to American Jews, Peace Now warned that investing in real estate across the Green Line was not only politically and morally wrong but also financially risky.

Little did we know that this real estate twilight zone would play a role in bringing Heftzibah Construction, one of Israel’s largest contractors and a chief builder of West Bank settlements, to the brink of bankruptcy.

Although the financial collapse of Heftzibah was due not only to its illegal building on privately owned Palestinian land, its story should serve as a red flag for anyone considering a real estate deal in a West Bank settlement. Ask the 430 fervently Orthodox families that paid Heftzibah $100,000 each for small apartments in the settlement of Modi’in-Illit. These homeowners are barred by court order from occupying their homes because Heftzibah built some of them on private Palestinian land. Read the rest of this entry »

Produced last year by Jewish Conscience, this video features a variety of Jewish voices speaking out.

Meanwhile -

Amira Hass reports that Gaza residents tell of demeaning practices by Shin Bet; and the WaPo reports that Patrick Syring, a State Dept employee, is facing charges over threats and slander against the Arab-American Institute.

If Not Now, When?

R/T 14 minues; H/T: Haitham Sabbah

Jewish American peace activist Anna Baltzer has been doing exemplary peacework in Palestine for awhile now, so it is wonderful to see dear friend Ben Heine, the brilliant Belgian artist, take up the great suggestion to draw Anna’s caricature-portrait. Ben drew an inspired portrait modeled on Michaelangelo’s famous Pietà and has just posted a great feature of Anna’s work here. Thanks to Ressentiment for the heads up on Anna’s work and website.

In these two video snippets from her DVD (available here), Anna speaks directly about her experiences and describes the situation in Palestine on the ground from first hand experience. Her testimony about the experiences of ordinary people and not simply that of statesmen is delivered in a clear and lucid manner with reference to her own photographs and visuals.

More:

Anna’s website | Blog | Book | DVD | Photo albums | Yahoo group-list

Roadblocks and Settlements (6.41)

Outposts, Israeli peace activists and refuseniks (10.07)

Anna’s website | Blog | Book | DVD | Photo albums | Yahoo group-list

Do petitions matter? Do they help to effect social progress? In this 2 minute video Amnesty answer with a resolute (perhaps romanticised to some) yes.

We do well to recall that Martin Luther’s 95 Theses apocryphally nailed to the church door of Wittenburg in 1517 practically launched the Reformation, and petitions and pamphlets have had an important effect in countless other events in history. Affixing our signatures to an important statement is often symbolic, but symbols can be powerful too. Signing a petition may not be a substitute for the full spectrum of actions we can take, but it can be a powerful start.

Hat-tip to Ben Heine, and like Steve, I am including a petition to Richard Silverstein’s petition on the first reading of the Israeli Knesset’s profoundly discriminatory Jewish National Fund (JNF) bill. It is encouraging to see some prominent Israelis speaking up against this possible further legislating of apartheid (see, for example, Yossi Paritzky, Our Apartheid State in Y-Net).

ADDENDUM: See also Richard Silverstein’s The ‘Right’ to Discriminate in Guardian’s CIF.

The petition reads:

We the undersigned express our profound disapproval and sorrow at the Israeli Knesset’s recent passage, on first reading, of the Jewish National Fund bill. The bill would prohibit Israel’s Arab citizens from leasing land owned by the Jewish National Fund (JNF) and managed by the Israeli Land Authority (which administers 93% of Israel’s land). The Israel High Court had earlier ruled that the ILA cannot discriminate against Arabs in leasing such land. This new legislation is an attempt to circumvent that ruling.

We applaud the High Court for putting an end to a discriminatory practice that should never have existed within a democratic state. We also applaud the Israeli MK’s, Jewish and Arab that voted against the amendment. If Israel is to be truly democratic, all its citizens must have the right to lease land held in trust by the government of Israel. Israel must not settle for anything less.

We call upon to the Knesset to defeat the amendment when it comes up for its next reading and to embrace values of equality and tolerance for all its citizens.

If you would like to sign, click HERE

On a related note, IHT reports on a small positive development in a significant number of US evangelical leaders stepping forward to voice support for Palestinian rights. Read the rest of this entry »