NOVANEWS
- Many Afghan demos in ‘09 were about… Israel
- The Lebanese Army finally acts to protect Lebanon’s sovereignty
- Al-Walaja villagers stop construction of the Wall while soldiers attack protesters, including children
- Peace Now: 492 Israeli violations of the partial settlement freeze
- The Birthright equation: Jewishness + Community = I *heart* Israel
- Why I support the Olympia Co-op boycott
- Non-violent activist Qumsiyeh is ordered to appear ‘before a colonial officer’
- Olbermann won’t mention…
- Beinart gives Krugman permission to come out
- My daughter begs me not to go to Gaza
Many Afghan demos in ‘09 were about… IsraelPosted: 04 Aug 2010I’m poking around the Afghan war diaries from Wikileaks (inspired by Antony Loewenstein) and it looks like one element of our nationbuilding effort in Afghanistan is working: the people there have demonstrated a lot, and peacefully, against Israel.Judging by the cable traffic, many of the demonstrations in Afghanistan in 2009 seem to have been against Israel’s attack on Gaza. Here’s a demo in northern Baghlan on January 1, 2009: 1000 people. The same day an Israeli flag is burned at a demo in Konduz City. The next day in Kabul, 2000 people demonstrate. A day later, another 400 people demonstrate against air strikes. More on January 8. Another on January 15. On January 25, a “peaceful and organized demonstration” near Kabul. No target mentioned for this demo; but you’d guess from the date that it involved Gaza.(Oh, and here 350 university students conduct a protest in support of Palestinians, in 2007.)A few days back I showed that James V. Forrestal, the first Sec’y of Defense, was opposed to the establishment of Israel because it would create turmoil in the Muslim world all the way out to Afghanistan. And he died way before Wikileaks. |
The Lebanese Army finally acts to protect Lebanon’s sovereigntyPosted: 04 Aug 2010Israel has violated the ceasefire with Lebanon over 7,000 times since the end of the 2006 war on Lebanon.These violations include:
P.S. there were over a million cluster bombs dropped on Southern Lebanon. To this day, Israel refuses to tell the Lebanese where they were dropped and children are constantly getting maimed by them. The most recent incident was on July 26 of this year when 9 year old Yaqoub Youssef Zreiq was injured by an unexploded bomb. These bombs look like toys… those kid friendly Israelis.
Here is a compilation of other violations not captured above.
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Al-Walaja villagers stop construction of the Wall while soldiers attack protesters, including childrenPosted: 04 Aug 2010The village of al-Walaja continued its unarmed resistance to the creation of the Separation Wall on its lands today. Villagers along with Israeli and international supporters non-violently stopped construction of the wall for one and a half hours today. Israeli armed forces responded by arresting 12 protesters and using pepper spray on a majority of the non-violent group.The following is an account of Mazin Qumsiyeh, PhD who witnessed the event:
The post originally appeared on Joseph Dana’s blog here. |
Peace Now: 492 Israeli violations of the partial settlement freeze04 Aug 2010And other news from Today in Palestine:Land and Property Theft and Destruction/Ethnic CleansingPolice clash with Bedouin attempting to rebuild razed villageA number of injuries have been reported, among them MK Talab El-Sana, who apparently fainted while entrenched in a tent constructed to protest the village’s demolition.
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The Birthright equation: Jewishness + Community = I *heart* IsraelPosted: 04 Aug 2010Last month, activist Rachel Marcuse spent 10 days in Israel as part of the Taglit-Birthright program — a fully sponsored trip for young North American Jews to learn more about the country. She went to bear witness and ask questions about the Israeli state’s treatment of Palestinians, and to learn about other complex issues in Israel today. After the program, she spent another 10 days elsewhere in Israel and the West Bank of Palestine talking to Israeli Jews, Palestinian citizens of Israel, international activists, and Palestinians in the occupied territories. This is the second of a seven-part series on what she found. You can read the first part here and the second part here. This series first appeared in rabble.ca and this story can be found here.Day 5We wake up at 6 a.m. and load the bus, still sleep-deprived, and head to the holy city of Tsfat, the ancient city of mystics and Kabbalah tucked away in the mountains almost due north of Tiberias, which sits on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. After visiting some very old synagogues and hearing stories about missiles destroying parts of the city in the Second Lebanese War, we have a precious two hours of free time and I walk around the town with my friend, Hannah. We wander back to Ronan, a Yemenite cook and mystic/bullshitter (depending on your perspective), who earlier wanted us all to yell “I love Israel!” at the top of our lungs. I passed on that, hoping that the white-robed Ronan wouldn’t open his eyes and notice me. We enjoy his pizza-like creation, made with a tasty Yemenite yeast bread called lechuch, and look out at the street. The place does have some crazy energy to it. Or maybe it’s just all the Hassidic kids running around.Things really get interesting after lunch when the Israeli soldiers and students join us for our mifgash or “encounter.” They will be with us for the next five days. After an awkward game of charades with “the Israelis,” we go to see a glass-blowing demonstration. Our glass-blowing artist/host is an articulate, hip Princeton-educated American-Israeli Hasid who tells us her story of making aliyah. As Or, one of the Israeli students, later jokes to me: “It was like ‘look into the fire and let’s be spiritual together.'” She is one of the many brilliant choices of presenters Taglit introduces us to — smart people, easy to relate to — and all coming across as incredibly reasonable.We head to the “eco-greenhouse” at Kibbutz Ein Shemer for our workshop on “coexistence.” This presentation is apparently why our Taglit experience will be different — we will get an Arab perspective! It turns out that one of the people scheduled to speak with us, who is described by our tour guide as “critical and very interesting” and who lives on this side of the separation wall, is unable to make it. We are instead hosted in the very beautiful but very noisy greenhouse — it’s impossible to hear each other without microphones — by a young Jewish program leader with curly hair and Birkenstocks who works in the greenhouse with Israeli Jewish and Arab youth from the area. She is joined by a 19-year-old Arab-Israeli woman who promotes a service program for Arab-Israelis (who, with the exception in some cases of Druze and Bedouins, aren’t allowed to serve in the army).So, as it turns out, we’re going to get the pro-Israel perspective of a Jewish Israeli and the pro-Israel perspective of an Arab-Israeli, who — while both seem to be lovely — don’t exactly represent the breadth of political opinion we had been promised in this “pluralistic” Birthright trip. Not that any of us are surprised.The greenhouse program leader tells us in English that she is about to address the soldiers and then switches to Hebrew. I wait for her to finish and then ask the soldier sitting beside me what she said. Essentially, it turns out, she told the soldiers to behave — that, as they represent the state, they should hold back on their views. I have a feeling that soldiers on previous Taglit trips may have heckled Arab presenters.The young Israeli woman switches back to English to tell us about her experience with the separation wall, describing it as “ethically bad,” but “practically good.” This was an argument I heard frequently — as the wall seems to many to have reduced the number of suicide bombings. From others, I heard how the wall divides villages, how it “provides a false sense of security,” and fails to address the root issues.Later, I learn that some 33,000 Palestinians with West Bank ID cards, residents of 36 communities, are located in a kind of limbo between the separation wall and the Green Line, the pre-1967 border, many of them cut off from the farms on which they depend.The young Arab woman is passed the microphone and provides a description of three categories of Arabs in Israel:1) Arab-Israelis who are pro-Israel. These individuals are the target population for her non-military service program to “give back” to Israel.2) Arab-Israelis who are anti-Israel. She tell us that it is this category that is very vocal in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament.3) Arab-Israelis who, she claims, don’t care either way or who don’t want to take a side. She suggests that this is in case there is a war so they aren’t caught up in it.During the question and answer session, I take the microphone and suggest that there might be a fourth group: Arab-Israelis who might not consider themselves pro-Israel, given their lived reality as second-class citizens, but who recognize the reality of the State and are interested in a constructive peace process. When I ask her about this speculation and wonder if she has any thoughts on a peace process, I don’t get much uptake on either question. (Later, I realize – of course! – that such a category exists; and I’m to learn much more about these complexities after the Taglit tour ends, when I interview the director of an Arab-Israeli advocacy organization.)Again, in this session there is no real dialogue and after the all-too-short Q and A, we are toured through the greenhouse. As one of my progressive friends later remarks sarcastically, “What makes more sense than to open up such a heated issue and then have us go to look at plants?!” Another participant is less than enthralled by the impressive greenhouse, inappropriately incorporated into our agenda, and engages with one of our new soldier friends about the recent events surrounding the international aid flotilla to Gaza.The flotilla, it turns out, is difficult to talk about with Israelis — especially with Israeli soldiers. While, in general, I was surprised at how progressive many of the soldiers’ positions were with regard to a peace process (they talked easily 1967 borders, land transfers, Jerusalem as an international city and so on), when the flotilla was discussed, it seemed to elicit automatic defensive reactions from otherwise thoughtful people.But perhaps none of this should have been a surprise to me. Earlier this year, in an article in the Palestine Chronicle called Indoctrinating Israeli Youths to Be Warriors, Stephen Lendman wrote:
As often happens, when you spend time with other human beings and really hear their stories, your perspective can become much more nuanced; assumptions can dissolve. Don’t get me wrong — I met refuseniks and others who escaped military service by faking medical situations or what-have-you, but it took this trip for me to realize how much skipping military service would impact one’s life in terms of both career (as many employers just wouldn’t hire you) and community.These soldiers — kids, really, significantly younger than me — are under immense pressure since childhood to participate in a conflict that many of them found, at the least, problematic and sometimes despicable, like the soldiers formerly stationed in Hebron who now run the “Breaking the Silence” tour. (I’ll write more about them in the post-Birthright section of this series.) But, for most, the army creates an enveloping sense of obligation, of social cohesion, and of solidarity, which can make critical expression very difficult.This reluctance to criticize was especially evident in discussion around the Gaza flotilla — the soldiers who were on those ships and helicopters are the friends (literally or figuratively) of the soldiers who accompanied us on our trip. They were commanded by the State to be there in international waters; there was no question in the minds of the soldiers with whom I spoke that their comrades were “defending themselves” against pipes and in fear of a lynching. I pointed out the disproportionate force used — pipes vs. guns — but my arguments were useless in the face of this seemingly unshakable social cohesion. Every Israeli-Jew I talked with about the flotilla became immediately defensive. This reaction led me to realize how self-conscious Israelis are — many deeply care about what the international community thinks about them… and their country. Many even agreed that Israel policy had the (unintended?) consequence of increasing anti-semitism around the world, but there was still an overwhelming sense of social cohesion and national unity clearly tied to military service.I realized, too, that something similar was happening with us on Taglit — there was an attempt to create a similar sense of community and social cohesion in our group. We were sleep deprived, culture shocked and vulnerable. Taglit, it seemed, wasn’t really about convincing us about the politics, but about creating a sense of community that we would associate with Jewishness and then Israel. The sense of community was real, but the assumptions that followed weren’t necessarily so.Thinking about these things, I came up with what I call the Birthright equation: Jewishness + Community = I Heart Israel. Social cohesion was clearly manifest in our newly built community. Many on the trip, I speculated, would equate the genuine warmth and respect in the group with Jewishness — as opposed, let’s say, to humaneness. And these positive feelings would all connect back to Israel. My equation would become a little longer over the coming days as I heard the same chorus from Israeli after Israeli starting with: “It’s complicated….”Rachel Marcuse is a Vancouver-based activist, facilitator and apparatchick. The executive director of the Coalition of Progressive Electors (COPE), a municipal political party, she also freelances, focussing on facilitation skills, youth-engagement and strategic planning. Her views do not necessarily represent the positions of any organization whatsoever. |
Why I support the Olympia Co-op boycottPosted: 04 Aug 2010Dear friends,The Olympia Food Co-op boycott of Israeli products (except for fair trade olive oil) has generated much controversy and emotion. I do pray for healing and understanding among those who support and those who oppose such a boycott in the community of Olympia, Washington and around the world. All of us must stand together and mourn the loss of life generated by this conflict. May their memories be a blessing.The Food Co-op and many concerned citizens around the world have asked the question: How do we transform the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the use of nonviolence? What is meaningful action?While negotiations, lobbying and dialogue occur, those who have been directly impacted by occupation, the Palestinians, have called upon the world to engage in meaningful nonviolent action to apply pressure upon Israel so that Israel cannot conduct the business of occupation as usual. Have we all not seen and read about life in Palestine under occupation? The Goldstone report, B’tselem, Gisha and many other organizations and individuals have documented the systematic violation of Palestinian human rights in the past several years. How do we both construct peace and engage in non-cooperation with policies that systematically violate human rights on a daily basis?Boycott is a time honored method which was the catalyst that ended legal segregation in the United States. Boycott is the primary tool of those engaged in nonviolent resistance to systematic injustice. Boycott targets unjust policies. It is not about ‘the right to exist’; Everyone has the right to ‘exist’. Rather, boycott is a tool that focuses on the right to live a life free from a policy of land seizure, internal transfer, administrative detention and other forms of violent and harmful actions levied against people who do not want to give up their land.
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Non-violent activist Qumsiyeh is ordered to appear ‘before a colonial officer’Posted: 04 Aug 2010Palestinian activist and scientist Mazin Qumsiyeh speaks about his detention for 12 hours at the Jordanian-Israeli-Palestinian border at Allenby Bridge last week before being allowed to enter. He says that he has been ordered to report to authorities at a West Bank settlement, Gush Etzion, on August 9, apparently because of his activities– the same day he is supposed to appear before another Israeli judge on a traffic violation. “I can appear before two colonial officers in one day, on August 9.”From his encounter with security at the border– Qumsiyeh had been in Turkey at a conference on nonviolence:“What do the Turks know about nonviolence?”Qumsiyeh: “Like everybody else, some people know about violence and some people know about nonviolence, and some Turks that I was talking to know about nonviolence….”“They beat our soldiers [on the Mavi Marmara]…”“I heard a different version of the story… That you guys came down shooting at them. Plus I wasn’t there and you weren’t there, and if you want the evidence, I am happy to send you some videos…” |
Olbermann won’t mention…Posted: 04 Aug 2010On Countdown last night, Keith Olbermann would not mention the scandal of Israeli racism–or, rather, what would be a scandal if people like him dared to talk about it.First Maria Teresa Kumar (of VotoLatino.org) and then Jonathan Turley attacked the Republican plan to deprive children born to illegal immigrants of automatic U.S. citizenship, comparing such an injustice with that of “stateless people,” as Turley said, in another country–Germany.Neither Turley nor Kumar can make the leap from U.S. nativism to the crisis in Israel over the government’s plans to deport children of migrant workers.Kumar commented, “That’s not what America is all about.” Why not at least talk about both Germany and Israel? Of course, doing so would raise troubling questions about the identity between Israel’s agenda and the U.S.’s agenda in the Middle East.Olbermann at least defended Christiane Amanpour against Tom Shales’s attack. Shales had walloped Amanpour for what he saw as her implied sympathy for the Taliban, when she spoke of mourning all the war dead. Shales exclaimed that, “If this were 1943, we would hardly think it appropriate to mourn Nazi casualties.”For once, an American corporate newsguy, Olbermann, had the guts to retort, “Well, it’s not 1943.” And Olberman showed some grit when he accused Shales of having “gone to the mourn-Nazi-casualties-card.” |
Beinart gives Krugman permission to come outPosted: 04 Aug 2010I underestimated Peter Beinart’s piece (and role) from the start. Well, it’s huge. Now, his latest thoughts on the ADL’s Islamophobia enable Paul Krugman to say that he has a problem with the politics of Israel/Palestine in the U.S., and how the pro-Israel agenda got hijacked by the Likudniks. The language is imprecise or I’d quote it. Again I say that Krugman is a lilylivered narrator on a subject that he should have broached long ago, but this is Beinart’s achievement, to talk to the Jewish liberal middle, to allow them to speak out, those people who deep down probably love Israel, and I infer that Krugman is in that company. Will it make a difference? Everything makes a difference. Beinart is some kind of gamechanger. He is participating most crucially in the Jewish-American divorce from Zionism, which will become the rage before too long, mark my word. It may be a couple of years, but it is taking place: Jews are discovering the Nakba and the Palestinian dispossession. Max Blumenthal and Julian Schnabel and Tony Judt and Jerry Slater and this website are all playing roles, as well as leading gentiles like Walt and Sullivan. But Beinart’s role is a big one. NYU new media guru Jay Rosen also cited Beinart, lately. He is a liberal Zionist, yes, but the contradictions between Zionism and liberalism will become overwhelming, for people who do not regard the west as unsafe for Jews. The awakening is happening. Will it affect Palestinian conditions? Of course. It is not long before young liberal American Jews say, Be a light unto the nations means be a multicultural democracy, and what is so terrifying about refugees who merely want to return to their homes? My grandfather was a refugee, etc. |
My daughter begs me not to go to GazaPosted: 04 Aug 2010Late last month, Lillian Rosengarten, a New Yorker born in Hitler’s Germany, explained why she is getting on the Jewish boat to Gaza, which is to depart from Europe one of these days. Today she has some more pre-trip thoughts re family and religion:As I prepare to leave at a moment’s notice, I know this is exactly what I need to do and am not sure why the force that guides me in this decision is so strong. My daughter begs me not to go. “There are so many other things you can do from here,” she pleads. Her agitated self is afraid. “You put yourself at risk mom, you could die.” My son has accepted my decision more or less as I shower him with articles to try to persuade him. My beloved grand girls emulate their mom’s fears. When the 7 year old asks, “Omi are you happy you are going on the ship?” and I respond “very happy,” she gives me permission, “okay Omi you can go.”My 16 year old accepts me despite reservations. Close friends worry. I understand but am not deterred.
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At the end of “The Wizard of Oz,” Dorothy comes to the revelation that if she ever goes looking for her heart’s desire again, “I won’t look any further than my own backyard.”President Obama is hoping that his visits to backyards around the country fulfill his heart’s desire: keeping Democrats in control of the House and Senate in the midterm election.To that end, he’s holding “backyard chats” this morning in Des Moines and this afternoon in Richmond, Virginia.”We’ve been trying to do more of these,”Mr. Obama said yesterday at a backyard event in Albuquerque.