Have been under the weather lately, which is why you have had a few days vacation from the usual intros and large numbers of items. I was happy to see that compatriots kept you informed. Am getting back to normal, but not quite there yet. So, will make this intro brief.
The initial 3 items comment on or report aspects having to with academic freedom. The first of these relates that an ‘academic, community leader, author and journalist’ had been deported from Israel after hours of detention. The 2nd argues and shows that “As much of the West becomes increasingly Islamophobic – universities are assumed “breeding grounds” for radicalisation.” And the third, from Haaretz, contends that “Jews are dishonored by a blind defense of Israel.” It deals with 3 cases in the United States in which ‘liberal’ Jews did partake of defending persons unjustly kicked out of academia, but in which Jewish mainstream organizations kept silent.
Item 4 relates that “Nabil Shaath, a leader of Mr. Abbas’s party and a veteran negotiator, said that Mr. Obama’s speech had ‘contained little hope for the Palestinians,’ except for the one sentence,” which, as you can guess, was the one stating that the Palestinian state should be on the 1967 lines.
In item 5 Zeev Sternhell in Haaretz maintains that “Netanyahu’s Israel is on course to become a pariah state.” It should have been designated as one long ago. When will people begin pointing out to Israelis and others that if Hamas is a terrorist organization (as Netanyahu and also Obama hold), so also is Israel.
Item 6 is a brief report informing us that more marches to Israel’s borders can be expected.
If you still have energy, don’t forget to check the headlines and summaries in “Today in Palestine” www.TheHeadings.org
All the best,
Dorothy
1. Mondoweiss [forwarded by Ofer]
Shifting the occupation to the academic battlefield – South African academic Na’eem Jeenah detained and deported
Academic, community leader, author and journalist Na’eem Jeenah has been the latest academic to face detention by Israeli authorities. In his capacity as director AMEC: the Afro Middle East Centre, Jeenah was en route to Palestine to participate in research meetings. AMEC is a South African based think-tank which aims to maintain public discussion and shape public discourse on issues related to the Middle East. At its inception AMEC was headed by Waddah Khanfar, the present General Manager of the Al Jazeera network. AMEC has since established itself as a credible commentator in South Africa on Middle East issues.
This Tuesday, some hours after Mr Jeenah was first detained at Ben Gurion airport, AMEC staff received news of his detention via the South African Ambassador to Israel, H.E Ismail Coovadia. They were also informed about his pending deportation to Istanbul. On Tuesday evening, Israeli authorities were repeatedly refusing to disclose information about Mr Jeena’s location.
By Wednesday, Mr Jeenah was deported to Istanbul after ten hours of interrogation. According to Ambassador Coovadia, “his treatment (by Israeli officials) has been extremely bad”. Jeenah’s passport and personal possessions were not returned.
Na’eem is the latest casualty in the long list of influential personalities who have been denied access to Palestine. In 2008 Professor Richard Falk , the UN Special Rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territory was deported to Switzeland after a nightlong detention by Israeli authorities. Professor Falk was to collect information to be presented to the UN Human Rights Council. Israeli authorities reasoned that he was denied access because of his description of Israel’s blockade on the Gaza territory as being a “Holocaust in the making”.
In 2008 Archbishop Desmond Tutu was named as the head of a fact-finding mission to the Gaza strip. He subsequently cancelled this trip after his travel clearance was declined by Israeli officials, fearing that the report would cast a negative shadow over Israel.
A less unexpected refusal of entry was that of academic Norman Finkelstein in May 2008. Finkelstein has been an outspoken critic of Israeli policies and accuses Israel of misrepresenting the Holocaust towards furthering its nationalistic aims.
Another critic of Israeli policy is renowned linguist, Professor Noam Chomsky who was barred from accessing the West Bank in May 2010. Israeli authorities tried to brush this incident off as a logistical error, suggesting that if Mr. Chomsky attempted to re-enter, he would succeed.
With Freedom of Speech being a tenant of democracy ,this pattern of denying academics and dissenting voices access to Palestinian territories seems incongruous with Israel’s claim to being the only true democracy in the Middle East.
Academic tensions between South Africa and Israel have previously come under the spotlight in march this year with the landmark decision by the University of Johannesburg to sever ties with Israel’s Ben-Gurion university. In September 2010 a set of criteria were issued for BGU to comply with, within the following 6 months. BGU failed to meet these conditions which ‘ included a requirement that a Palestinian university must be included in the research relationship’.
Evidence was presented to the UJ Senate (one of its highest decision making bodies) ‘showing clearly BGU’s active restriction and violation of political and academic freedom; its direct and deliberate collaboration with the Israeli Defence Force (an occupying military force in flagrant violation of international law); and its maintenance of policies and practices that further entrench the discriminatory policies of the Israeli state.’
BGU spokesperson Faye Bittker said ‘cancelling this agreement, which was designed to solve real problems of water contamination in a reservoir near Johannesburg, will only hurt the residents of South Africa.’ This was in reference to the joint project between UJ and BGU exploring efforts to reduce water contamination. IOL news quoted Palestine Solidarity Campaign spokesman Salim Vally’s response: ‘As UJ’s deputy vice-chancellor, Adam Habib, has pointed out, ensuring clean water in South Africa has nothing to do with Israeli research and assistance, and has everything to do with the South African government’s investment.’
This academic boycott by UJ of BGU was a pioneering move hailing an important victory for the International Boycott Divestment and Sanctions movement. The moral relevance of this call being made by a South African University is important considering the previous international pressure (including academic pressure) applied on institutions complicit in supporting apartheid structures.
The academic boycott of BGU and Na’eems deportation are some examples of the struggle against occupation being played out on the academic field. Na’eem Jeenah returned to South Africa this morning. In a statement issued on Wednesday afternoon, Na’eem’s wife Melissa expressed appreciation to family, friends and the Department of International Relations and Cooperation, the Deputy Foreign Minister Ebrahim Ebrahim and the Ambassador to Tel Aviv, HE Ambassador Ismail Coovadia for their ongoing support.
Ayesha Jacub is a freelance writer and medical Doctor from South Africa now living in Doha.
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2. Al Jazeera
21 May 2011 09:11
Academic freedom and ‘dangerous ideas’
As much of the West becomes increasingly Islamophobic – universities are assumed “breeding grounds” for radicalisation.
Universities have always been venues for discussion of ideas that change society – but self-serving managers now collude with state officials to criminalise academic research considered ‘dangerous’ [GALLO/GETTY]
There is this absurd idea that universities are somehow “ivory towers”, that they are separate from the real world, from the influence of politics and power. Nothing could be further from the truth, as the exponential growth of “terrorism studies” demonstrates.
Academics and universities are profoundly shaped by power. And they, in turn, shape politics and society. Anthropology developed alongside empire. Physics looks the way it does because of funding for nuclear weapons and nuclear energy research. Area studies was more or less a creation of the US department of defence, which sought knowledge of all the places threatened by communism.
Naturally, entrepreneurial academics and university administrators are on the lookout for whatever new knowledge power and money think they need – mostly science, technology, and medicine but also law schools, business schools, and public policy programs. Their efforts attract funding, which provides resources, which further develops these areas, shaping the very nature of the contemporary university.
The illusion that knowledge can be free from power is the supreme marketing advantage of universities. Free inquiry produces the best ideas, which then can be put to work in the real world for profit, comfort, health, and security. The great universities of the developed world grew under this illusion, and society and economy benefitted enormously from their research and teaching.
But ideas are also volatile and potentially threatening, and they can be untoward and inconvenient, especially when they concern politics and violence. I once was invited to a particularly inspired conference on a sub-industry in terrorism studies called “radicalisation”. This is the idea that one can study how people – Muslims, primarily – become “radicalised” and turn to violence.
‘Radicalisation’ as a dangerous theory
The conference was inspired because it was held in South Africa. Radicals who had fought body and soul against apartheid were present. They had a rather different appreciation of what it meant to be radical than the Western and Israeli security academics and officials in attendance.
Back in the West, “radicalisation” was concerned with identifying and combating dangerous ideas and their bearers. But the politics of “the War on Terror” determined the limits of thought. In Tony Blair’s Britain, radicalisation of British Muslims could not be blamed on the war in Iraq. As elsewhere in Europe, it was supposed to be about the failure of Muslims to properly integrate, the result of a multiculturalism that was too tolerant.
“Radicalisation” was indeed a dangerous idea and began to affect what was happening in both politics and in universities. Research councils in the UK funnelled money into “policy relevant” research on the topic. The imprimatur of academic research helped foster the belief that various texts and websites, personalities and forums were a threat to public security.
The universities now found themselves portrayed as sites of radicalisation, as places where dangerous ideas infected vulnerable Muslims. Indeed, University College London is apparently to blame for the bomb in Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s underwear.
A conflict ensued between the university’s purpose-free inquiry and the politics of “the War on Terror”. Controls on reading lists, libraries, outside speakers, and student organisations were debated. In a delightful Catch-22, some of the very texts and websites used by teachers and researchers in terrorism studies were now considered “radicalising”.
Universities in the rosy blush of Enlightenment self-confidence would brush off the notion that they were supposed to restrict rather than foster debate about “national security”.
Even the cynical university manager would know that the brand of his enterprise was at stake. Give in to too many demands to control thought and adapt to the politics of the day, and it would be fatally compromised. The communists and homosexuals can be handed over to Senator McCarthy – but after that he will have to be stopped for the sake of freedom of thought.
But there is another domain in which universities are not separate from society: neoliberalism’s destructive management culture. There is little notion here of free thinking, but much desire to radically restructure everything existing in the cause of one’s own career and bank balance. The university version is astounding for its combination of incompetence and acute sensitivity to prevailing winds.
Freedom to think, just not about Islam
The result is beyond farce, as events at the University of Nottingham have demonstrated. A graduate student, Rizwaan Sabir, asked his friend to print off a document he was using for his research on terrorism. The document was originally called “Military Studies in the Jihad against the Tyrants” and the friend, Hicham Yezza, was an administrator in the modern languages department. Versions of it were in the University’s own library.
In the hysteria generated by fears of “terrorists” in our midst, the model citizen, channelling their inner Jack Bauer, is the one who turns in their neighbours in a timely fashion.
And so when a colleague discovered the document on Yezza’s computer, the police were called with undue haste, within hours. University officials did not pause to consult Sabir’s teachers or the University’s own terrorism experts, which included a former British army officer, Dr Rod Thornton. But an academic involved from the very beginning, a professor of literature no less, did assure police officers that the document in question was not “legitimate material” and was “illegal”. A University official announced the document had “no valid reason to exist” and was “utterly indefensible”.
Sabir and Yezza were sent off to six days of detention and interrogation, the beginning of a long saga for them and their families with counter-terror police and, in Yezza’s case, the immigration authorities. They were eventually cleared.
The University reacted like a company whose brand was under threat, but one which had forgotten its brand was academic freedom, not witch hunting. An apology and a campus-wide period of reflection and debate would have settled the matter. Instead, no mistake was to be admitted – lest harm come to the careers of university managers.
In the neoliberal era, when a company is publically criticised for good reason, managers seek redress in the courts over matters of libel, as in the McLibel affair. When their own employees speak out, they are disciplined, fired, or sued. In such ways does the cold grip of private power strangle public speech.
Accordingly, the University of Nottingham has used disciplinary procedures and harassment to silence any criticism of its actions from its own staff. Most recently, it suspended Dr Thornton for presenting details of the sordid affair at an academic conference. For good measure, it used legal threats to force the academic association that sponsored the conference to remove his paper from their website. Al Jazeera readers can find it here.
And so, in the twilight days of a war fought in the name of civilisation, a Western university has substituted logics of libel and defamation for free speech, and filed academic freedom away in some forgotten corner of its human resources department. A civilisation dying to the clank of filing cabinets closing and pens scribbling on the bottom line, so completely have neoliberalism and “the War on Terror” hollowed out the values of the West – even in its “ivory towers”.
Tarak Barkawi is Senior Lecturer, Centre of International Studies, University of Cambridge. He specialises in the study of war, armed forces and society with a focus on conflict between the West and the global South in historical and contemporary perspective. He is author of Globalisation and War, as well as many scholarly articles.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.
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3. Haaretz,
May 20, 2011
Jews are dishonored by a blind defense of Israel
‘Two Jews, three opinions,’ is the old adage. On ‘everything but Israel,’ is the present reality.
Now that the City University of New York board of trustees has reversed course and approved an honorary degree for Tony Kushner, it is time for the Jewish establishment to reflect upon its failure to speak out. Jewish history tells us that silence is complicity. While individual Jews and progressive Jewish organizations, such as Jews Say No!, Jewish Voice for Peace, Jews Against Islamophobia, Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, the Shalom Center, and J Street joined those protesting CUNY’s earlier decision to withdraw its initial offer of an honorary degree to Kushner, not one of the mainstream Jewish organizations seemed to think the trustees did anything wrong in punishing someone for his dissenting views on Israel. Neither the American Jewish Committee nor Congress, not the Anti-Defamation League, not the Jewish Community Relations Council, not Hillel.
It is not the first time. Prior to the Kushner fiasco, two front-page controversies erupted in recent years over actions by New York public officials against persons believed to be critical of Israel. In each case, the major Jewish organizations were either actively complicit or, by their silence, tacitly complicit, reflecting a mindset that dissent on Israel is bad for Israel and bad for the Jews. The position is wrong as a matter of strategy. More important, it is wrong morally, and represents a profound betrayal of the Jewish ethical commitment to open inquiry and to justice.
The first controversy involved Debbie Almontaser, an esteemed educator who was selected by the city’s department of education in 2007 to head the new Khalil Gibran International Academy, the nation’s first Arabic dual-language school. Because she was an Arab and a Muslim, she was subjected to a relentless, bigoted smear campaign. Nevertheless, her supporters remained firm, until a front-page New York Post article appeared describing the sale of “Intifada NYC” T-shirts. Although it was clear that Almontaser had no connection to the T-shirts, she was pursued by a Post reporter, who asked her for the root of the word “intifada.” She said that its Arabic root is a word meaning “shaking off.”
The next day, August 6, 2007, the Post published an article headlined “City Principal Is ‘Revolting,'” which reported that Almontaser had “defended” the “pro-violence shirt.” The JCRC and the ADL, which had previously admired Almontaser’s work, weighed in against her. Teachers union president Randi Weingarten questioned Almontaser’s fitness to be a school principal because she had not condemned the intifada, an unprecedented suggestion that a New York City educator be required to take a pro-Israel loyalty oath. By the end of the week, the mayor and the schools chancellor had demanded her resignation.
A respected educator lost her job only because she was thought to be insufficiently supportive of Israel. No mainstream Jewish organization said a word in protest. To the contrary.
A footnote to that story: CUNY trustee Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, who led the opposition to the Kushner award, was an overwrought opponent of KGIA as well. When a KGIA supporter, a rabbi, angrily differed with him at a public rally, Wiesenfeld suggested that the rabbi “get yourself a suicide bomb and go blow yourself up.” So much for the man who thought Tony Kushner’s views on Israel were not rational.
Then earlier this year there was the case of Kristofer Petersen-Overton, a Brooklyn College adjunct professor hired by the political science department to teach a course on the Middle East. Although the department had approved Petersen-Overton’s credentials and the proposed course, NY State Assemblyman Dov Hikind wrote the college that Petersen-Overton was “an overt supporter of terrorism.” The college promptly canceled the course. After letters of protest poured in from around the world, it was reinstated. Although the college’s capitulation to Hikind represented a serious assault on academic freedom in the name of pro-Israel orthodoxy, not a single mainstream Jewish organization spoke out.
And now Tony Kushner’s honorary degree. The CUNY trustees, after a firestorm of criticism, have admitted error. But how did it happen in the first place? Wiesenfeld is only one vote. What accounts for the initial acquiescence of Benno Schmidt, CUNY’s board chair, who, as a former president of Yale and a First Amendment scholar, knows the stifling impact on academic freedom when universities capitulate to demands of political orthodoxy? There is a clue in his statement calling for the reinstatement of Kushner’s honorary degree. While acknowledging that a candidate’s political views are irrelevant to the awarding of honorary degrees, Schmidt gratuitously added, “If it were appropriate for us to take politics into account in deciding whether to approve an honorary degree, I might agree with Trustee Wiesenfeld, whose political views on the matters in controversy are not far distant from my own.” Having said that Wiesenfeld’s extremist political views are irrelevant, he proceeded to establish his own pro-Israel orthodoxy. That the board chair of a distinguished university is compelled to establish that he is “sufficiently pro-Israel” says that something is terribly wrong with the current climate of discourse about Israel and its policies.
Two Jews, three opinions, is the old adage. On “everything but Israel,” is the present reality. Despite its belief to the contrary, neither the Jewish community nor Israel is well-served by that reality. Mainstream Jewry is dishonored by having the likes of Wiesenfeld and Hikind be its public voice on such matters, and by insisting that unquestioning and irrational loyalty to Israel substitute for rational debate and a commitment to what is just.
Alan Levine, a New York civil rights lawyer, represented Debbie Almontaser in her suit against the NYC Department of Education.
JERUSALEM — After President Obama’s high-profile speech on Thursday in which he laid out broad principles for reaching an Israeli-Palestinian deal, the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, called an emergency meeting at his headquarters in Ramallah in the West Bank. He advised his associates not to comment on the speech, according to a senior Palestinian official who attended the meeting, but to wait instead for Mr. Obama’s meeting with the prime minister of Israel in the White House “and see if there are any positive signs.”
By the end of that meeting, judging by the statements of Mr. Abbas’s associates, the prospects of renewed negotiations leading to a swift agreement appeared at least as distant, if not more, than before.
The official, Nabil Shaath, a leader of Mr. Abbas’s party and a veteran negotiator, said that Mr. Obama’s speech had “contained little hope for the Palestinians,” except for the one sentence that spoke of the borders of a future Palestinian state being based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed land swaps, a shift in American diplomatic language that addressed a long-held Palestinian demand.
But sitting alongside Mr. Obama after a two-hour meeting in the Oval Office, Mr. Netanyahu publicly and forcefully shot down that notion. Ignoring the element of land swaps, which would afford negotiators some flexibility, the Israeli leader totally rejected the idea of withdrawing to the pre-1967 lines, reiterating that they are “indefensible” and do not take into account the “demographic changes,” meaning the large Israeli settlement blocs that have taken hold in the West Bank over the last 40 years.
Yet Mr. Netanyahu is “continuing to make that demographic change through settlement and colonization,” fumed Mr. Shaath in a telephone interview from Ramallah. He noted that Mr. Obama made only passing reference to the continuing construction in his speech and did not mention it at all in his statement on Friday.
In a world of nuclear weapons, rocketry, and powerful air forces like Israel’s, Mr. Shaath added, it was irrelevant to speak of borders as indefensible, especially, he said, when applied to “a tiny country like Palestine.”
Adding to the sense of Palestinian outrage, Nabil Abu Rudeineh, the official spokesman of Mr. Abbas, issued a statement after the Obama-Netanyahu meeting saying that Mr. Netanyahu’s position was “an official rejection of Mr. Obama’s initiative, of international legitimacy and of international law.”
It was the Palestinians who walked out of the last round of peace negotiations last September after a partial Israeli moratorium on building in the settlements expired. In order to return to talks, Palestinian officials say, they want to hear Mr. Netanyahu agree to the 1967 lines as the basis for negotiations and a renewed, if temporary, settlement freeze.
In the absence of negotiations, the Palestinian leadership plans to seek international recognition of a Palestinian state in the United Nations General Assembly in September, an idea that is opposed by the United States and that could isolate Israel.
Mr. Shaath said that Mr. Obama’s speech conceded most issues to the Israelis, including viewing Israel as a Jewish state, opposing the plans for United Nations recognition and criticizing the Fatah faction for its recent reconciliation pact with Hamas, which the United States designates as a terrorist organization.
On the refugee issue, one of most delicate and intractable in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Mr. Obama managed to upset both sides. Mr. Shaath criticized the president for suggesting that refugees could be left, like the status of Jerusalem, for discussion at a later stage after the subjects of borders and security. The Israelis were critical that Mr. Obama failed to spell out that the solution for Palestinian refugees of the 1948 war and their descendants lay not in Israel, but within the borders of a future Palestinian state.
Mr. Netanyahu said Friday that it was time to tell the Palestinians that any return of refugees to Israel proper was “not going to happen.”
Mr. Shaath, the veteran Palestinian negotiator, said that any idea that the positions articulated in Washington might induce the Palestinians to abandon their march toward the United Nations was “utterly ridiculous.”
Palestinian officials brushed aside the statements by Mr. Obama and Mr. Netanyahu that the recent pact between Fatah and Hamas raises serious problems and requires answers from the Palestinian leadership. Fatah leaders said that the reconciliation was an internal affair that had nothing to do with the peace process.
In Israel, the news channels broadcasted the statements at the White House in real time, but there was little immediate reaction since the meeting ran late into the Sabbath eve. Channel 2 News, which generally has the highest ratings, extended its Friday news program to cover the event, but minutes later the commercial channel reverted to its usual programming — a local singing contest that is the Israeli equivalent of “American Idol.”
But the Palestinians were not alone in their view that the recent developments in Washington had not helped the peace process. In a critique of Mr. Obama’s speech, Robert Satloff, executive director of The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which is widely seen as pro-Israel, said that the approach to Israeli-Palestinian peace enunciated by Mr. Obama had “within it the seeds of deepening tension and perhaps even rift between the two sides.”
Mr. Satloff’s article was recommended to reporters by Mr. Netanyahu’s media department as “one of the best analyses of the situation.”
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5. Haaretz,
May 20, 2011
Netanyahu’s Israel is on course to become a pariah state
Netanyahu heads for Washington as Israel to stop Israel’s collision course with all our allies, who are no longer prepared to listen to his arguments about the country’s security.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is going to Washington at what may be the last chance to turn the establishment of a Palestinian state from a global anti-Israel campaign into a joint Israeli, American and European project. The establishment of a sovereign Palestinian state is today a necessity, just as Zionism was a necessity. And about half of Israeli society apparently agrees with Western public opinion and Western governments on the principle that Palestinian Arabs have the same right to independence and sovereignty as do Israeli Jews.
Were Netanyahu a leader worthy of the name, one who understood the deep processes taking place under his nose and tried to make the most of them, he would not think and speak like a leader of the Betar youth movement. But on his upcoming trip to the United States, Netanyahu will prefer to rely on AIPAC, an organization that represents the right-wing minority of American Jews and symbolizes the Jewish community’s disappearing past. There, just as in the Likud Central Committee, it is still possible to talk about the Land of Israel as belonging to the Jews alone.
It is precisely this approach, which ignores the rights of the Palestinians, that drives young people, intellectuals and liberals away. At universities, in the media and in the cultural world, these groups are already displacing the conservatives. The extent to which the Jewish right has lost its sway even in its stronghold, New York, can be gathered from its failure to prevent American playwright Tony Kushner from getting an honorary doctorate from the City University of New York.
Another incident, which was not publicized in the media but is even more significant, involved an attempt to prevent a young pro-Palestinian lecturer from getting a position at Brooklyn College. Under pressure from the pro-Israel right, the planned appointment was canceled by the school’s president. But when the academic staff rose up in arms, the lecturer was given the job. If the right is unable to get the results it wants even in Brooklyn, it is easy to imagine its plight in other places.
To this must be added the international pressure for an academic and economic boycott of Israel, which has been generated by the recognition that there is no other way to force Israel to end the occupation. Closer to home, Deutsche Bahn’s withdrawal from the project to lay a railway line between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem should have caused a shock. But here, we prefer to avoid reality.
Because of its blindness and imperviousness, Israel is gradually turning from a source of pride and an object of admiration into a nuisance, if not an object of outright hostility.
This is how, with our own hands, we turned the problem of the occupation into an issue for the entire Western world, and the Palestinians into the West’s proteges: Faced with an occupying power that is simultaneously unresponsive and self-righteous, the West feels moral and political responsibility for the Palestinians’ fate, just as in the past, Western public opinion felt deep sympathy for the Jewish state.
This feeling of responsibility has increased in recent years, after it became clear that the Israeli right has no intention of responding to Palestinian demands for freedom and independence. Under the guise of security considerations and the war on terror hides the real, ideological reason: In the right’s view, recognizing the equal national rights of the Palestinians means forgoing exclusive Jewish ownership of the Land of Israel. From the point of view of members of the Israeli rejectionist front, recognizing the equality of Jewish and Arab rights on both sides of the Green Line is tantamount to betraying Jewish history.
But since the number of people who are still prepared to buy an argument of this kind is diminishing worldwide, Israel is on a collision course with all our allies and supporters. And at the end of this road, it is liable to become a pariah state.
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6. Haaretz Saturday, May 21, 2011
Latest update 17:01 21.05.11
Report: Palestinian group calls for renewed border demonstrations
Group that organized Nakba Day protests has called on Palestinian refugees to march to Israel’s borders on anniversary of Six Day War on June 5, Maan news agency reports.
The Palestinian group that organized Nakba Day demonstrations last week is calling on Palestinian refugees to stage peaceful marches to Israel’s borders on June 5, the Palestinian news agency Maan reported on Saturday.
June 5 will mark the 44th anniversary of the start of the Six Day War in 1967, during which Israeli forces took control of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
According to the report, the group said that refugees will hold demonstrations in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, as well as in Syria, Lebanon and Jordan.
Last Sunday, clashes erupted during Nakba Day protests in the Palestinian territories and along Israel’s borders with neighboring states.
A total of 14 demonstrators were killed in incidents on the Lebanese and Syrian borders.
The group organizing the demonstrations reportedly said on Saturday that the May 15 protests were “just the beginning”.
