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01/05/2011

• Stunner: Protesters in Tel Aviv call Barak ‘child murderer’ of Gaza!

• GQ story on Dubai job suggests Zionism is dumbing Jews down

• Good guys actually won this shootout at the Hasbara Corral

• ‘Charlie Rose’ transcript saves Hoenlein from on-air allegation he served as Netanyahu’s emissary

• If you can make it here–

• Rehabbin’ Rick Sanchez to rent his garments at NY synagogue, tickets $25 a pop

• ‘Democracy Now’ interviews two witnesses to the killing

• Another liberal Zionist endorses BDS– well, S anyway

• In Ramallah: ‘Today an orchestra, tomorrow a state’

• One family in Gaza

Stunner: Protesters in Tel Aviv call Barak ‘child murderer’ of Gaza!

Jan 04, 2011

Philip Weiss

 

Unbelievable.This fills my eyes with tears. Jews are coming home. Two years after Gaza, Goldstone is resonating and the blood can’t be washed away. A beautiful moment in the moral arc of the universe. Gaza can’t be forgotten. Israel will be changed by this, so will the lobby… Remember that the Defense Minister is the charming man who hoodooed Bill Clinton and whose knee Barack Obama sat at, months after the Gaza massacre, in which 300-400 children were killed and hundreds more maimed and every child in the strip terrorized/traumatized. From Ynet:

Defense Minister Ehud Barak spoke before an audience Tuesday as a guest speaker in an Iran seminar held in the Tel Aviv University. Barak discussed the Islamic Republic’s nuclear program and the Middle East’s political-security state but was repeatedly interrupted by protestors who waved pictures of Palestinian victims. The protestors shouted “You murder children in Gaza” and called Barak “a phony liar.”

The audience was mainly comprised of senior officials in the security establishment as well as Israeli and foreign academics. The protestors were quickly removed from the hall by Barak’s and the university’s security guards. The minister later said he did not see fit to respond to the claims.

 

GQ story on Dubai job suggests Zionism is dumbing Jews down

Jan 04, 2011

Philip Weiss

 

Ronen Bergman, an Israeli, has a big piece in GQ on the Dubai Job, and how Israel hurt itself with the hotel-room assassination of Mahmoud Al-Mabhouh last year. A glance at the piece tells me that it is written too much Inside the Israeli narrative (how did Mossad screw up?) and not inside the American one (our client is destroying our brand). But it touches on one of my favorite themes, are Jews smarter. Here’s the takeaway paragraph:

As one very senior German intelligence expert told me: “The Israelis’ problem has always been that they underestimate everyone—the Arabs, the Iranians, Hamas. They are always the smartest and think they can hoodwink everyone all the time. A little more respect for the other side—even if you think he is a dumb Arab or a German without imagination—and a little more modesty would have saved us all from this embarrassing entanglement.”

 

Good guys actually won this shootout at the Hasbara Corral

Jan 04, 2011

Philip Weiss

 

I hear that NPR had a very good report on Israel cracking down on dissent; you can see the Jawaher Abu Rahma Killed-by-Israel poster at the link. And the IDF already seems to be abandoning the claim that Abu Rahma wasn’t even at the protest in Bil’in. Hanan Greenberg, who offered the original report that “Palestinians lied” about her teargassing, now tries to walk the story back in Ynet:

Assessments made by IDF officials Monday determining that Jawaher Abu Rahma not only did not choke to death by tear gas but did not even attend the Bilin anti-fence protest prompted the outrage of activists who participated in the rally and saw the woman with their own eyes. On Tuesday, criticism was also leveled by IDF officers claiming that army elements were quick to make assumptions before all the facts had been checked.

“In these types of events, matters should be examined in a thorough and level-handed manner instead of rushing to conclusions based on mere thoughts,” an IDF officer said. He noted that unlike the manner in which the army conducts operational inquiries, the probe in this case was based on Palestinian documents which do not yield concrete conclusions but hypotheses at best.

 

‘Charlie Rose’ transcript saves Hoenlein from on-air allegation he served as Netanyahu’s emissary

Jan 04, 2011

Philip Weiss

 

Watch this Charlie Rose episode from last night to hear Rashid Khalidi soberly explain reality: Palestinians were promised a state 63 years ago and the check is still in the mail; and meantime, there is only one sovereign political entity between the river and the sea and it is or will be majority Palestinian but ruled by Jews. Palestinian statehood without the ability to keep Israeli soldiers from entering any one’s home in the West Bank whenever they like is meaningless. Ramallah is an “excrescence” on Palestine, it is a bubble of prestige and sink of international dollars where, yes, you can get a cappucino for $12. 

Also watch it to see

Aluf Benn of Haaretz say at 11:00 or so that rumor has it that Malcolm Hoenlein of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Orgs went to Syria at the behest of Netanyahu to negotiate with the Syrians… Hoenlein has admitted going to Syria and meeting President Assad but said that it was not at the behest of Netanyahu, a humanitarian mission. I imagine there could be an issue of needing to register the Conference of Presidents under the Foreign Agents Registration Act?

Then read the official transcript at Charlie Rose, the name Malcolm Hoenlein does not appear in the transcript, though it’s in the interview. Nor the name Ron Lauder. Despite my headline, I don’t know if there’s a rat here. These transcripts are not all that great. Note that the transcriber dropped some other language later in the answer, of a trivial character. Transcript, with dropped words in [BRACKETS]:

CHARLIE ROSE: My understanding and my impression is notwithstanding everything you just said that very recently there’s been some suggestion that they’re prepared to do [Turkey is prepared to play intermediary role between Israel and Syria]–

ALUF BENN: They’re always prepared to do it. Israel is not so happy about that, but, again, unless there’s something secret going on that we don’t know about, Prime Minister Netanyahu to this day has not shown signs of taking the Syrian threat seriously. Every other week there’s a story about a messenger. Only tonight [IT WAS PUBLISHED THAT MALCOLM HOENLEIN] one of the American Jewish leaders went to Damascus and met Syrian officials and obviously the rumor is that he was sent by Netanyahu in a similar way to — an [THAT RONALD LAUDER, ANOTHER] American Jewish leader[,] mediated 12 years ago. But it takes time to see these things are serious. But there is strong voice, especially among the Israeli security establishment which says the [BEST WAY AND THE SHORTEST WAY AND] surest way around Israel’s strategic problems is making peace with Syria.

 

If you can make it here–

Jan 04, 2011

Philip Weiss

 

These folks from Existence is Resistance were carryingPalestinian flags through Times Square in remembrance of Jawaher Abu Rahma when they got on to TV, the Jumbotron, with love. Sweet moment. Watch the whole video. Thanks to Max B.

 

Rehabbin’ Rick Sanchez to rent his garments at NY synagogue, tickets $25 a pop

Jan 04, 2011

Philip Weiss

 

Memo to Helen Thomas. Rick Sanchez has a new p.r. guy, Ronn Torossian, and has announced a public confessional with Rabbi Shmuley Boteach for Jan. 13 at a synagogue in New York. “What did he really say? What did he really mean?” Tickets available here.  Per Wikipedia, Torossian is a big Israel supporter who has handled Girls Gone Wild, the Jerusalem mayor Nir Barkat, and other rightwing Israeli figures. Oh and the Hebron Fund. And you thought Sanchez was going to start talking about the Israel lobby? (Well, I did.)

 

‘Democracy Now’ interviews two witnesses to the killing

Jan 04, 2011

Philip Weiss

 

The great Amy Goodman had two witnesses to the killing of Jawaher Abu Rahma on today’s show, the second a doctor who was at the demo and says that CS gas is well known to cause deaths. Some excerpts:

Goodman: Jonathan [Pollak], we want to begin with you. Since unnamed sources in the Israeli military are denying that Jawaher was even at the protest, did you see her there?

JONATHAN POLLAK: I did see her at the beginning of the protest, and I did see the ambulance evacuating her. It’s important for me to say that these are completely unsubstantiated reports coming from, as you said, anonymous sources. We have numerous eyewitnesses all attesting to her being there or attesting to her being hurt by tear gas. We have the ambulance driver who evacuated her saying that he evacuated her from the area of the demonstration and that she was semiconscious when she got to him and told him she had breathed tear gas, that her injury was a result of tear gas inhalation. We also have the medical reports that suggests—that clearly say that she had died as a result of a cardiac arrest as—a cardiac arrest caused by tear gas inhalation. We also know that she died in the hospital, from the hospital reports. I also know it personally, because I spoke to people at the hospital all night long.

This is outrageous, basically. What the army—what the IDF is saying is outrageous. They’re spreading rumor without any fact. If you ask me, this is not even newsworthy. And yet, people keep on reporting it.

AMY GOODMAN: Reporting that unnamed sources are saying this?

JONATHAN POLLAK: Yes. Well, unnamed sources in the army, and they’re reporting it as news. This is the news that opened Israeli news last night. This is in all the Israeli newspapers, with front-page—in the front page, a version that is completely not based on any fact and is only based in rumor. And the only reason that they publish it is because the army says so. And we, on the other hand, our version is completely backed by fact and by evidence, but it is only provided as a response.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you tell us who Jawaher Abu Rahma was, her brother killed a year ago in a similar protest in a similar place, protesting the separation wall in Bil’in?

JONATHAN POLLAK: Well, they were actually both killed in pretty much the same place, near the separation barrier in Bil’in. Unfortunately, I didn’t know Jawaher herself very well. I knew the family pretty well. So I can’t tell you much about her. I can tell you that her family, her entire family, is very involved in the struggle. As you said, her brother was killed last year after an American-made tear gas projectile, high-velocity tear gas projectile, hit him in the chest, a tear gas projectile that was shot, in contradiction to manufacturer orders, directly at him from short distance—killed him on the spot…

DANIEL ARGO: this tear gas is well known, for the last 80 years, to cause—that it may cause severe injuries and even death. The Israeli army, the same anonymous officers in the Israeli army, claimed in the last several days that they are not aware of any significant injuries or deaths occurring because of tear gas. But the facts are against them. They are very well aware of the history of this tear gas.

AMY GOODMAN: Let me ask you about this issue, an Israeli official contending tear gas disperses rapidly in the air over open ground, it does not kill protesters, again questioning whether Abu Rahma was even at the December 31st demo.

DR. DANIEL ARGO: This is against—this is totally different from all the researches and all the reviews that are being made in the medical—in different medical journals. Just a year and a half ago, one of the best medical journals in the world, the British Medical Journal, published a big article about the dangers of using different tear gases, and especially put emphasis on CS gas, saying that it might cause severe injuries and even death. From what I heard and from evidence that we had about the death of Abu Rahma, it seems as if—that her injury and her death was the consequences of tear gas injury. And that would not be the first case, not in the medical history, and unfortunately not in Palestine, as well.

AMY GOODMAN: Dr. Argo, considering how much tear gas we see they used, why would only she die or be affected in this way?

DR. DANIEL ARGO:

I think we can somehow compare it maybe to, for example, for different medications or to different toxins that are being used. Not every person who is being exposed to any compound would react the same way. Some would develop some side effects; some might not develop any side effects at all. Even more, a person can develop side effects to a tear gas, very slight side effects, and in the next week develop a much harder reaction to a tear gas.

 

Another liberal Zionist endorses BDS– well, S anyway

Jan 04, 2011

Philip Weiss

 

Bernie Avishai is an influential Israeli-American columnist, embraced by liberal Zionists, a speaker at J Street’s conference. He goes to Sheikh Jarrah demonstrations.Here he approvingly cites Howard Sachar’s recipe (at Foreign Policy) for a US-imposed solution in Israel/Palestine, to create two states (thanks to Ofer):

More specifically, will U.S. President Barack Obama grasp the opportunity to jump-start a reasonable version of the Quartet’s master plan for the Holy Land? It is a formulation, after all, that reflects the weight not only of its sponsors’ best collective judgment and self-interests but also of their untapped collective powers of enforcement, including the selective bestowal or withdrawal of diplomatic, economic, or military support.

P.S. Avishai seems to favor gov’t sanctions, but not boycott and divestment. From the Nation last year:

Sanction the Israeli government for activities that obstruct peacemaking. Hurt the settlements. But boycott and divest from the private sector, and you may¨create an economic implosion. Israel’s ratio of debt to GDP looks eerily like that of the weakest EU economies. Unlike Greece, Israel has a rising class of cosmopolitan entrepreneurs who have been politically complacent, especially during the second intifada and Bush administration. But only they can lead the country out of political crisis—and only if they can hold on to their prestige, which is itself rooted in international commerce

 

In Ramallah: ‘Today an orchestra, tomorrow a state’

Jan 04, 2011

Alice Rothchild

 

A few tales from Ramallah: 

The dangerous qanun and the intoxication of power
 

We leave the taxi at Qalandia checkpoint and for 50 shekels grab a ride in the back of a truck with Israeli license plates. The truck doors advertise flooring and construction, three scruffy men sit in the front seat, and soon we are staring through dusty windows at the imposing separation wall, massive amounts of construction and garbage, new cream white apartment and office buildings, and a disarray of cars all heading in opposing directions. In Ramallah, people do not give you their addresses; we are in search of Supermarket Baghdad.

After a dizzying tour of the rainy, foggy city (it seems that men in this culture do not ask for directions easily), we find the supermarket and discover that Israeli Orange phone cards are no longer sold in the West Bank, (first sign of boycott). After a quick call on the one remaining functional phone, Ali Amr, a student at Berklee College of Music in Boston who is home to see his family after a year, meets us a block from the market.

The son of a Moroccan mother and Palestinian father and a talented musician, Ali’s journey home was infinitely more torturous than ours. 

He explains, as a Palestinian he has to enter through Jordan via the Allenby Bridge. He is required to renew his Jordanian Military service papers annually in Jordan, in order to enter Palestine or travel back to the US.

Arriving several days ago, he and his father headed to the border from Amman at 4 pm, got through the Jordanian border without difficulty after a brief interrogation. It seems that studying music in the US is not an entirely legitimate excuse for avoiding the military, but Ali was armed with paperwork from the music school. They then waited in line for an hour to get on a bus to the Israeli border.

Half an hour later, squeezed together with other travelers, “like they do for animals in a cage,” Ali and his father reach the line for the soldiers. I should mention that Ali’s father is a law professor at Al Quds University; he usually dresses formally in a suit and tie, and when I met him I was struck with his dignity as well as good humor. After half an hour, the soldiers checked Ali’s bags and threw his bags and qanun, an Arabic lap harp with 72 strings and delicate inlaid carvings, onto the x ray machine. Everyone was allowed to pass but Ali and he was separated from his father. 

Ali was interrogated for a second time, “Where they asked me just the same questions…Seems like they have a list of questions that if you answer one wrong, trouble.” Ali remembers his rising fear and nervousness, and finally stepped outside. ”It felt just like I got out of prison.” They let him go with papers that “me the 19 year old kid that’s coming from America is clean and not terrorist,” but then the terror began.

His luggage arrived, but no qanun. After endless waiting, Ali asked for his musical instrument and was told to come for further questioning. The soldiers knew the qanun was from Syria, (imported to the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music when Ali was a student there) despite no evidence on the instrument, and insisted that Ali pay a large tax to bring it back into Palestine. Ali and his father where shocked. Ali has traveled all over the world with his qanun and come back home and has never been asked to pay. 

The soldiers insisted that he planned to sell it in the West Bank, despite the certificate confirming Ali as a student at Berklee College of Music, his work as a professional musician, and his instrument. He pleaded, he argued, the soldiers started threatening him. “You wanna pay to take it or we take it.” They took his ID and told him to wait. More pleading and arguing and then the soldier yelled, “It’s your decision.” He grabbed the qanun and threatened to smash it if they did not pay. At this point, Ali’s father said, “Wait!” He asked for the bill and the soldiers came back, 866 shekels ($220). Ali remembers sweating with fear and then took out his emergency money that was supposed to pay for his travel expenses and for repairs on the qanun, and handed it all over.

The two hour incident left Ali shaken, fearful, and crying. “But the situation is that there is no way we can get the money back from them…There is no one to talk to. No one to sue. The only paper I have is the receipt that they will never consider when I visit again and they will make me pay again and put it in their pockets and go get drunk with it in some Israeli bar. They are all 19 – 20 years old kids…holding guns.” And so one of Ramallah’s most talented young musicians is welcomed home.

Today an Orchestra tomorrow a State
 

We are warmly received by Ali’s parents, but the family is in a bit of a frenzy. Ali’s older brother Mohammad has just arrived from Switzerland to play viola in the first performance of the Palestine National Orchestra. Classically trained professional Palestinian musicians from all over the world had converged on Ramallah, often requiring special visas from Arab countries, and after three days of rehearsals, the concert was starting in an hour. Would we like to come? 
We found ourselves in a massive traffic jam in front of the impressive Ramallah Cultural Palace where hundreds of Palestinians had come to witness the historic birth of this orchestra, a tribute to the arts and cultural identity of the city.

The concert logo featured a cello with a red flower in the center and the profile of a woman’s face wrapped in a keffeya. The program announced: Today an Orchestra tomorrow a State. The hall must have held 1500 people, and young people sat on the stairs down to the stage. As the orchestra played a very respectable Ligeti, a Mozart Exsultate featuring a Japanese/Palestinian soprano, an Allegretto by Arnita for oboe and strings, and Beethoven’s 4th Symphony, dark suited VIPs arrived surrounded by heavy security.

Although cell phones rang, people whispered in hushed conversations, and clapped between movements, Ali said later, “People need to be educated.” For me the most moving response was the tears, probably a mix of pride and pain, a palpable yearning to be whole, to be able to live normally like cultured people all over the world, to celebrate national aspirations without the accompaniment of tanks and apache helicopters. Ramallans were holding their heads high and I could see it on their faces.

Dancing in the prison
 

There is something uncomfortable for me about having too much fun in a place where there is so much suffering, but it was New Year’s Eve and a friend from the Kennedy School at Harvard who had returned home to Ramallah to do his field work, invited us to a party. We couldn’t resist this opportunity and found ourselves in a lovely apartment near the Bank of Palestine with his gorgeous sister who is studying at Swarthmore, an Israeli friend from University of Pennsylvania, and his aunt, a brilliant sociologist (among other things) with a wildly irreverent tongue.

After tea, the aunt went to her party and we traipsed to a local restaurant hired for the evening. Long tables were set with humus and baba ganoush, rows of party hats, blowers, masks, and a smattering of Christmas decorations. Crowds of 20 and 30 somethings arrived. The women in tight slinky dresses and dizzying high heels, movie star beautiful, shimmered and danced with handsome young men. (My fashion statement tended towards “haute schlep,” but I was old enough to be everyone’s mother and for the record, I held my own on the dance floor). The DJ blared music way beyond my auditory comfort level, but the throbbing beat was inspirational and the hookah smoke mixed with the fog machine creating an other worldly sensibility.

Although I got fairly tipsy on a few sips of Arak, I knew I was rubbing shoulders and hips with the educated upper class of Ramallah, graduates from the Friends School, many schooled in the US, sophisticated, upwardly mobile, famous fathers and high expectations. To add to my general confusion, in between the celebrating I had intense conversations with journalists and activists about Gaza and BDS and one state solutions and getting tear gassed in Bi’iln. My friend spent much of the evening dancing, laughing, and enjoying himself with an exuberance I rarely experience.

He explained the contradiction: we must never forget we live in a prison, but we cannot behave like we do. We have to put on our clothes and clean our houses and dance with abandon on New Year’s Eve.

Bullets in the kitchen
 

New Year’s day, Ali’s parents, his father a law professor and his mother a practicing lawyer, take us for a tour of Ramallah. I am struck by the amount of construction, the huge mansions next to empty lots, the roller coaster hills, the fascination with English: “Henny Penny Fried Chicken,” “Yummy Mummy Pastries,” “Birth Café.” His parents came from Morocco for better opportunities for their children who would have been unable to work because they are Palestinian.

From 1997 to 2001 they lived in an apartment on the edge of Ramallah and experienced shelling from a nearby Jewish settlement, from 9 pm til morning. “I didn’t see bullets until I came here,” his mother remarked. A bullet through the kitchen window forced them to move to a safer place. 

The most striking stories that emerged were from the invasion in 2002. When the invasion started all the children were at the Edward Said National Conservatory of Music and Ali’s mother ran to bring them home. The family experienced 28 days of total curfew followed by 2 months where they were allowed to leave the house for 2 hours once a week to buy food. Ali’s mother was sure they would be killed so she stayed close to her children at all times so they would die together.

Men slept at night fully clothed as they could be awoken at any time and hauled off to prison. At one point 60 neighbors in Al Bireh were placed in one house while soldiers occupied the others. 
After the invasion, soldiers were still very present. In 2003 when Ali’s paternal grandmother died in Hebron, the family traveled for seven hours in five different cars, changing at each checkpoint before they got to the funeral. They described Ali’s sister studying at Al Quds University, getting up at 4 am to get to school “before the soldier’s opened their eyes,” running through the hills to get there unnoticed.

One time she slept at Al Quds for 2 weeks rather than risk returning home. Before an exam in mathematics, soldiers confiscated her calculator. 

For me, the most painful moment came when we drove along a city road and looked down a hill at Area C, to the Jewish-only settler roads, and a settlement looming on the nearby hilltop. At another point, the barbed wire, guard towers, and rows of caravans came right up against the road and Palestinian homes, some now abandoned. Ali’s usually cheerfully gracious mother became clearly anxious and upset as his father’s voice rose with exasperation and frustration, the past merging with present as painful memories filled the car. Even the mythical city of Ramallah cannot escape the fact of occupation. 
 

 

One family in Gaza

Jan 04, 2011

Jen Marlowe

 

 

One Family in Gaza from Jen Marlowe on Vimeo.

Just months after the Israeli assault that killed 1,390 Palestinians, I visited Gaza. Among dozens of painful stories I heard, one family stood out. I spent several days with Kamal and Wafaa Awajah, playing with their children, sleeping in the tent they were living in, and filming their story.

Wafaa described the execution of their son, Ibrahim. As she spoke, her children played on the rubble of their destroyed home. Kamal talked about struggling to help his kids heal from trauma.

What compelled me to tell the Awajah family’s story? I was moved not only by their tragedy but by the love for their children in Wafaa and Kamal’s every word.

It is now the two-year anniversary of the assault on Gaza, and today, January 4th, is the two-year anniversary of what the Awajah family (and so many other families in Gaza) lived through. The 23-minute film is complete. Their story will now be told.

Palestinians in Gaza are depicted either as violent terrorists or as helpless victims. The Awajah family challenges both portrayals. Through one family’s story, the larger tragedy of Gaza is exposed, and the courage and resilience of its people shines through.

For more information, schedule a screening, purchase a DVD, or support this project through a tax-deductible donation please contact donkeysaddle@gmail.com.