NOVANEWS
The reports about today’s events (many with killings and/or injuries) are many. Links to some are below, as well as one full report (on el-Wallaje). Stats on numbers killed and injured differ from one report to another, depending on the time each was written. My hopes for a bloodless Nakba Day commemorations did not help keep it bloodless, much to my regret.
Following the links and ISM report on el Wallaje is an item not specifically about today’s events, but on the subject of the Nakba in general. In the first of these, Gideon Levy insists that it is time for Israel to teach the Nakba. In the 2nd, Zvi Barel warns that Israel had better prepare, “for a Palestinian state is on the way.”
For my taste, Gideon Levy’s article below is overly Zionist, and I really don’t understand his intention in his concluding statement “Only on the day that the pupils in Israel also learn about the Nakba, will we know that the earth is no longer burning under our feet and that the Zionist enterprise has been completed.” What does he mean when he says that the “Zionist enterprise has been completed”? But the point of the op-ed that it is time to start teaching the Nakba in schools I fully agree with.
All the best,
Dorothy
==============================================
Reports on March 15, 2011 Nakba Day
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-13373006 (includes video)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/may/15/israeli-troops-kill-eight-nakba-protests
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/middle-east-live/2011/may/15/syria-libya-middle-east-unrest-live (video also)
http://www.latimes.com/la-fg-israel-border-clashes-20110516,0,2558128.story
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2011/05/2011515649440342.html
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4068829,00.html
http://www.jpost.com/LandedPages/PrintArticle.aspx?id=220647
May 15, 2011 From ISM
At 11 AM on al-Nakba remembrance day, 500 residents from the West Bank
village of al-Wallajeh and international supporters marched towards
the Israeli Apartheid Wall. The Wall was built to separate the
villagers from their original land from which they were expelled in
1948. The demonstration was violently attacked by the Israeli military
with rubber coated steal bullets, tear gas and protesters were beaten
with batons and rifles. One youth was hospitalized after being injured
by a rubber coated steal bullet .
Eight Palestinians including twins aged 11 and 6 internationals
(American, Dutch, German and Canadian nationals) were arrested. The
army proceeded to raid the village and invade each house, searching
for people who had participated in the demonstrations. The raids as
well as confrontations between the army and the village youth are
ongoing.
The Arrested Palestinians are:
Mazen Qumsiyah
Basel Al Araj
Ahmed Al Araj
Mohammad Al Araj
Allah And Mohammed Abu Tin 11 year old twins
Tarek Abu Tin
Adel Abu Tin
Al-Walaja is an agrarian village of about 2,000 people, located south
of Jerusalem and West of Bethlehem. Following the 1967 Occupation of
the West Bank and the redrawing of the Jerusalem municipal boundaries,
roughly half the village was annexed by Israel and included in the
Jerusalem municipal area. The village’s residents, however did not
receive Israeli residency or citizenship, and are considered illegal
in their own homes.
Once completed, the path of the Wall is designed to encircle the
village’s built-up area entirely, separating the residents from
Bethlehem, Jerusalem, and almost all their lands – roughly 5,000
dunams. Previously, Israeli authorities have already confiscated
approximately half of the village’s lands for the building of the Har
Gilo and Gilo settlements, and closed off areas to the south and west
of it. The town’s inhabitants have also experienced the cutting down
of fruit orchards and house demolition due to the absence of building
permits in Area C.
According to a military confiscation order handed to the villagers,
the path of the Wall will stretch over 4890 meters between Beit Jala
and alWallaja, affecting 35 families, whose homes may be slated for
demolition.
For more information call
Mahmud Zawahre 0599586004
—
The International Solidarity Movement (ISM) is a Palestinian-led non-violent resistance movement committed to ending Israel’s illegal occupation of Palestinian land. We call for full compliance with all relevant UN resolutions and international law.
For specific media inquires such as interview requests, photo usage, etc. please email the ISM Media Office atmedia@palsolidarity.org
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to ism-media-unsubscribe@googlegroups.com
=======================================
2. Haaretz ,
May 15, 2011
Israeli Jews should mark Nakba Day, too
It is possible and necessary to teach that this glory that is the establishment of Israel also has a dark side – so we can know our history, and understand the wishes of the Palestinians.
http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/israeli-jews-should-mark-nakba-day-too-1.361741
By Gideon Levy
Were Israel a little more confident of the righteousness of its case, and were its government a little more open, then all schools in Israel, Jewish and Arab alike, would today mark Nakba Day. A few days after the celebrations of our own Independence Day, in which we lauded the bravery and the achievements that we are rightly proud of, we could offer a lesson in citizenship. It would be a different heritage lesson, the kind that includes the story of the other side, the one that is denied and repressed. Not a single hair from our head would be lost were we to do this today. Sixty three years later,with the country established and flourishing, we can now begin telling the entire truth, not only the heroic, convenient part of the story.
On that day it would be possible to tell our pupils that next to us lives a nation for whom our day of joy is their day of disaster, for which we and they are to blame. We could tell the pupils of Israel that in the 1948 war, like in every war, there are also some acts of evil and war crimes. We could tell them about the expulsions and the massacres. Yes, there were massacres: All you have to do is ask the veterans of the war to tell you about the towns that were “cleared” and the villages that were razed, and the thousands of residents who were promised that they would be allowed to return in a few days, a promise that was never kept, and about the poor “infiltrators” who tried to return to their homes and their properties in order to collect remnants of their lives, and were killed or expelled by the IDF.
Not only is it possible to permit the Israeli Palestinians to commemorate the day of their heritage and express their national and personal pain, something that should be self-evident, but also to teach us, the Jews, the other narrative.
It is possible to justify everything Israel did during its War of Independence, and it is also possible to ask difficult questions, but it is, first of all, essential to know – everything.
It is necessary to know that there were 418 villages here that were wiped off the face of the earth, and it should be remembered that there were more than 600,000 natives of this land who fled or were expelled not to return to their homes, and that to this day most of them, they and their offspring, live in terrible conditions, carrying keys to their lost homes. It is possible and necessary to teach our pupils that this glory which is the establishment of Israel also has a dark side. This must be taught so that we can know our history, and so that we can understand the wishes of the Palestinians, even if there is no intention of realizing them. We can call this, “know your enemy,” but to know we must.
We must know that under nearly every patch of Jewish National Fund forest rest the ruins that Israel was keen to erase, to ensure that they not serve as evidence of a different heritage. We can know that under our flourishing Canada Park hide the ruins of three villages which Israel razed after the Six Day War, putting its residents on a bus and expelling them. We can now turn our sights to the ruins of the homes that remained on the sides of the roads, from which we turn away, and remember that once there was life there. We can even put up memorial sites, in the land full of memorials, to commemorate the villages that are no longer there. We can ask how is it that along the coast, between Jaffa and Gaza, there is not a single village.
We must also ask why the mosque in the heart of Moshav Zechariya is surrounded by a fence with the sign, “Danger, unsafe structure.” It is not this holy structure of theirs that is dangerous. We can also ask where do the residents of Zechariya live today, on whose ruins the moshav was built (the answer: the poor Deheisheh refugee camp ). This does not constitute a breach of faith. It is not treachery against the Zionist ideal: it is historical and intellectual honesty, perhaps courageous, but certainly something which the circumstances require.
On the day of this Nakba, it is possible to begin telling the entire truth. If we are so proud of it, why hide it? And if we are embarrassed by it, the time has come to expose it and deal with it. Only on the day that the pupils in Israel also learn about the Nakba, will we know that the earth is no longer burning under our feet and that the Zionist enterprise has been completed.
===========================
3. Haaretz,
May 15, 2011
Israel better prepare, for a Palestinian state is on the way
Israel has always tried to convince that it is reaching out for peace into the void. But this policy is about to sustain a shock.
By Zvi Bar’el
Yuval Diskin is right. September always was a lousy month. Take September 1993, the cursed month when the the Oslo Accords were signed. Or 15 years earlier, the signing of the Camp David agreement between Israel and Egypt. The Nazi invasion of Poland took place in September, as did the Al-Qaida bombings in New York and the Second Intifada. James Dean was killed on September 30, and in September 1995 Israel agreed to hand over control of considerable parts of the West Bank to the Palestinians.
Lousiness, it transpires, is a matter of perspective. Whatever happens in September 2011, if anything does happen, will also be a matter of perspective.
Diskin’s text, which adorned the Friends of Tel Aviv University conference, shouldn’t particularly move or astonish anybody. Leaders of the Shin Bet security service and the Mossad, and former generals are not tested by their rhetoric. They are in charge of fear, and fear doesn’t need that many words or poetic phrasing. Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, terrorism, rockets and, of course, an independent Palestinian state – that’s all the vocabulary you need to phrase Israel’s strategy of fear.
The head of the Shin Bet doesn’t have, and apparently did not have, a peace conception. That’s not his job. He doesn’t create policy, he merely takes care of its ramifications. But the “policy” as he understands it is crystal-clear.
“Mahmoud Abbas, Salam Fayyad and the entire Palestinian Authority,” he ruled, “represent only themselves, and certainly not Hamas in the Gaza Strip.”
In other words, there was no point in talking to them from the outset, most certainly not now after they have reconciled with Hamas. The reconciliation may have shaken Diskin, he may not have expected it – or maybe he did and didn’t say so – but it doesn’t change the general picture. “Hamas did not change its ideas, ideology or policy,” while the reconciliation will be “tested over time.”
As if “time” was an independent factor unaffected by processes, policies, statements. As if neither Palestinians nor Israelis influence the content of this time and the manner in which changes will occur. And how much time are we speaking of, by the way? Are we now doomed to tear pages from a calendar until some deadline? Does the time run out in lousy September? Or maybe a year after the reconciliation agreement, when elections for the Palestinian parliament and presidency are supposed to take place? And when does that time even begin?
Diskin, of course, is but a metaphor. Maybe something will happen to him “over time” as well, and we will yet see him sign petitions or join to one of the peace initiatives. Many senior “security sources” experience such sudden enlightenment. But for now, he is unhesitatingly presenting to the public the fundamental assumptions that have shaped the Israeli government’s policy.
There is no Palestinian partner and now there won’t be, until the end of “time.” The government doesn’t even need to prove it. Reconciliation is an illusion, the Palestinian state will be a mirage, and neither of them obliges the government to change its vision. The government is already hacking away at the reconciliation, assuming that if it fails it will take Abbas with it, and if it survives it doesn’t have room for an Israeli partner anyway.
But it is the debate over the identity of the partner that is illusory. It successfully substitutes the need to determine a policy, to decide the country’s borders, to determine just how far it can reach into the occupied territories. It’s empty babble, leaning on the theory of “confidence-building steps” since exposed as confidence-destroying steps, but still managed to make the question of the Palestinian partner – not the Israeli partner, God forbid – into the main issue in every political discussion.
Netanyahu’s upcoming speech to Congress will spare no words from that absent partner; for this is the heart of a tactic masquerading as a policy. Israel has always tried to convince that it is reaching out for peace into the void. But this policy is about to sustain a shock in September. You can cancel out Mahmoud Abbas and Ismail Haniyeh. But a Palestinian state? One to which presidents and kings will suddenly start to arrive?
