Nakba commemorations begin in Israel/Palestine, activists prepare for worldwide marches

In the name of Vittorio Arrigoni, the ‘Stay Human’ convoy has entered Gaza

by STAY HUMAN CONVOY on MAY 12, 2011
 

After leaving Cairo this morning at dawn, the 80 activists of the ‘Restiamo Umani’ convoy have entered Gaza at 4pm after crossing five Egyptian check-points.
The convoy, whose goal is to return to the place where Vittorio Arrigoni has spent his life, wrote a first report – posted on www.vik2gaza.org – “We are going to Gaza, Vittorio is with us”.

63 years of the Nakba

by ADAM HOROWITZ on MAY 12, 2011
 

From the video’s YouTube page: 
To reply to the Gaza youth Manifesto, and with no additional words to the ones spoken with true heart on this video, we give you, The Manifesto. A simple, true, self-explanatory, expression of what we’re sick of.
As these days mark the 63rd memory of the Nakba, our people all around the world, revolt, and object to the injustice and hatred we are met with on a day to day basis, just because we’re Palestinians and just because we exist.
I urge your humanity and your conscience, to spread on this video, so the 15th of May 1948, wouldn’t ever be forgot, and so Palestinians would once more have their freedom and rights back; especially the right of return.
Salamat,
Two randoms from Palestine.
 

Reporting from the perspective of 1948 – a profile of Jonathan Cook

by JON DILLINGHAM on MAY 12, 2011
 

Over a dozen innocent Palestinians had been killed by Israeli police, but The Guardian wasn’t interested.
It was 2001 and Jonathan Cook, a foreign desk editor at the paper, had just returned from from Israel reporting that police in Nazareth had murdered 13 non-violent Arab protestors during the second intifada the year before. Cook expected his editors at the “leftwing” paper to jump at the story, but he was sorely disappointed.
“I felt like I really grasped something,” says Cook, whose findings led him to conclude that the victims were unarmed and that police had essentially implemented a shoot-to-kill policy. His story went against the state’s official narrative — which was that armed Arabs in Nazareth had turned violent — but his conclusion was confirmed by a subsequent government inquiry. The Guardian, however, didn’t publish his investigation.
Cook, who holds an MA in Middle Eastern Studies, had long felt that mainstream coverage of the region missed key aspects of the story. The Guardian’s rejection of the Nazareth story disturbed him more deeply. He decided the problem required an out-of-the-ordinary solution.
“I suddenly thought I’ve got to do something radical here and go and test my views, immerse myself somewhere in the Middle East and really check if the problem is with me or with the newspapers.”
So he left The Guardian for Nazareth, taking a year’s leave to report on Palestinians inside Israel, a group largely ignored by the mainstream. Ten years and three books later (Blood and Religion, Israel and the Clash of Civilizations and Disappearing Palestine), he’s still here, he says, because here is where the story is.
“Being in Nazareth has allowed me to see things here in a different kind of light.”

I saw the same look in Fatima’s face as my grandparents’– the look of the Nakba

by YASMINE MOOR on MAY 12, 2011
 

On April 19th of this year, 43 families from Nahr al Bared, a refugee camp in north Lebanon, moved back to their newly constructed homes, after four years of displacement. 83 more families are expected to return in the coming weeks, as UNRWA (United Nations Relief & Works Agency) completes the final touches on the homes, and still 5,000 are hoping to return in the coming years as UNRWA seeks more funding to reconstruct the rest of the Palestinian refugee camp that was destroyed in 2007 by the Lebanese Armed Forces.
One woman will not return, however, Fatima, whose age I never knew but I guessed as I traced her life through the telling of her stories of exile from Palestine in ’48; to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon which lead to her 2nd displacement during the war of the camps in the 80’s; and finally to Nahr al Bared, her final resting place where she died, alone, waiting to return to Palestine. I never discovered her age, and it was never recorded in any of her UNRWA papers.
I first moved to Lebanon at the end of 2007, about 6 months after Nahr al Bared, Lebanon’s second largest Palestinian refugee camp, was destroyed. Over 3,000 buildings built over a period of 60 years were left in rubble, an entire city turned to a ghost town in less than a week. More than 5,000 Palestinian families, almost 35,000 persons were displaced, some for the 2nd and 3rd time, leaving behind their livelihoods, belongings, history and future. As in 1948, the people of Nahr al Bared were misled to believe that if they left their camp in order to allow the Lebanese Army to detain the Islamist group Fatah al Islam, they would return within days. But they discovered a little too late not only was their camp eliminated, but it was closed off for 4 months after it was destroyed, preventing the families from retaining their belongings, or what was left of their homes, pictures of dead mothers and fathers, books and stories from their history, and most importantly land and ownership papers to reclaim their lands lost in 1948. All was gone…disappeared…turned into dust.
I first met Fatima in one of the schools she was living in after she was displaced from Nahr al Bared.

Two takes on the Hamas-Fatah unity agreement

by ADAM HOROWITZ on MAY 12, 2011
 

And here’s history professor Joel Beinin writing about the agreement on the Jewish Voice for Peace website about what it means for the peace process:
A unified Palestinian leadership will be more representative, hence more likely to be able to deliver on any agreement it might reach, and also in a stronger position vis a vis Israel in any peace negotiations that might be held. PM Netanyahu somberly intoned that President Abbas can either have peace with Israel or peace with Hamas. He seems incapable of understanding that in addition to responding to popular Palestinian and regional Arab pressures, it was necessary for Abbas to seek an agreement with Hamas because the Palestinian Authority could not reach a peace agreement with Israel on terms any Palestinian would accept.
No Israeli government has ever offered Palestinians a state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip with East Jerusalem as its capital and anything approaching sovereignty over its territory, its underground water resources, its borders, and its airspace. The 1993 Oslo Accords did not stipulate the establishment of a Palestinian state. Israel’s Labor Party introduced a plank in its platform accepting a Palestinian state only on the eve of its electoral defeat in 1996. The subsequent Likud government was too intransigent even for President Clinton. At Taba in January 2001 the two sides came “agonizingly close to reaching an agreement” including the issues of Jerusalem and refugees, as the lead negotiators for both sides – Yossi Beilin and Yasir Abed Rabbo – wrote in a New York Times op-ed (Aug. 1, 2001). Prime Minister Ehud Barak cut those negotiations off shortly before the Israeli elections that ousted him from power, claiming that he did not want to obligate the incoming government. Since opinion polls correctly predicted an overwhelming defeat for Barak and Labor, why didn’t he let the negotiators finish their job and turn the election into a plebiscite on the agreement? It isn’t necessary to discuss the entrenched opposition of Prime Ministers Sharon and Netanyahu to terms acceptable to any Palestinian leader. Netanyahu vehemently opposed a Palestinian state until June 2009. His settlement expansion policy since then has ensured that his words were even more deceitful than usual.
The abysmal performance of the Obama administration on Palestinian-Israeli peace has also encouraged the Fatah-Hamas reconciliation. Why would a president elected with a strong popular mandate based in part on repudiation of the Middle East policies of his predecessor not seize the opportunity to press for something that would have substantially repaired the grievous damage to the credibility and national security of the United States in the region of the world which is arguably most central to our national security? Yes, it would have expended a great deal of political capital. Obama would have been mercilessly attacked by the Zionist lobby, its acolytes in Congress, and the birthers, who would have taken this as proof-positive that he is a foreign-born Muslim. But many American Jews, who overwhelmingly voted for Obama, would have strongly defended a serious effort to end the conflict. Aren’t presidents elected to lead?

‘Freedom Flotilla 2- Stay Human’ to set sail in late June

by DARYL MEADOR on MAY 12, 2011
 

The international steering committee for Freedom Flotilla 2 recently released a statement announcing that its sail date has been pushed back to the third week of June, at least partly because of the June 12 Turkish elections. The committee also announced the addition of a Swiss-German boat to the flotilla, making the total number of boats 15, more than twice as big as last year’s flotilla. Countries participating will include France, USA, UK, Ireland, Italy, Spain, Switzerland, Greece, Turkey, and other countries
The flotilla is sailing despite a recent Israeli Defense Forces broadcast that reported that the country would prevent the second freedom flotilla from reaching Gaza “at all costs.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently called on UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon as well as the European Union to put pressure on groups to stop the impending flotilla. In response, the flotilla Steering Committee released a statementon April 11 that called on governments, the international community and the United Nations not to succumb to Israel’s intimidation.

Richard Achi should not exist (but he does, in Cote d’Ivoire)

by JAMES NORTH on MAY 12, 2011
 

When you see a picture of an African man in the news, he is often carrying an automatic rifle. So the remarkable life story of my friend Richard Achi, a social worker in his mid-30s who guided me around during my recent trip to a Cote d’Ivoire on the edge of a brief civil war, may come as something of a surprise.
Most press accounts leave the entirely misleading impression that the brave Western reporter is alone in Africa, or scouring Baghdad by himself. In fact, nearly always the visiting journalist relies on a “fixer,” sometimes a local journalist, who is especially vital when there is violence. (Once in a while, certain American newspapers, to their credit, do let the local person share the byline.)
Richard Achi proved his worth within an hour of my arrival at the Abidjan airport. The police stopped our Peugeot 505 shared taxi at a roadblock, and minutely inspected every single item in my backpack while making the other passengers wait. Off to the side, I could see Richard quietly negotiating. “I gave them 2000 francs (about U.S. $4),” he said afterward. “And I persuaded them not to take any of your stuff.”
We spent the next week and a half in traveling around southeastern Cote d’Ivoire, as a disputed election moved the country closer to full-scale fighting. One of the sides, those supporting the corrupt and undemocratic former president Laurent Gbagbo, had violently attacked French expatriates in the past, so my American passport might not provide immunity. The remaining handful of Western journalists actually left the most conflicted areas later because it got too dangerous.
Richard used his cellphone every hour or so to call ahead, to establish which were the “hot” areas we should avoid. I speak French, but I still could not have understood much of what was going on around me. I looked around and saw “Africans,” (all of whom were perfectly friendly). Richard looked around and interpreted the complex ethnic and political differences that I could never have perceived, and we acted accordingly.
The informal roadblocks set up by the rival factions could be especially tricky. On my last day, we had to negotiate a dozen or more of them on our way to the airport, careful not to provoke the young men, who were as yet only armed with sticks and clubs.
What is vital to remember here, as the writer Graham Greene never stopped emphasizing about his own travels to dangerous zones, is that we visitors have “a round trip ticket.” I jumped on Air France flight #709 and I was gone. Richard Achi remains in Cote d’Ivoire, when in the weeks or months or years to come someone may still aggressively come up and ask him why he was guiding that foreigner around back in March 2011.

Peace demands challenging Israel’s exceptionalism

by OMAR BARGHOUTI on MAY 12, 2011
 

Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League repeats the mantra that by advocating comprehensive Palestinian rights, including full equality for Palestinian citizens of Israel and the UN-sanctioned right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes from which they were forcibly displaced, the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement is “de-legitimizing” Israel and threatening its very “existence.” This claim is frequently made by Israel lobby groups in an obvious attempt to muddy the waters and to push beyond the pale of legitimate debate the mere statement of facts about and analysis of Israel’s occupation, denial of refugee rights, and institutionalized system of racial discrimination, which basically fits theUN definition of apartheid.
Specifically, what is often objected to is the demand for full equality for Palestinian citizens of Israel. One can only wonder, if equality ends Israel’s “existence,” what does that say about Israel? Did equality destroy South Africa? Did it “delegitimize” whites in the Southern states of the U.S. after segregation was outlawed? The only thing that equality, human rights and justice really destroy is a system of injustice, inequality and racial discrimination.
The “delegitimization” scare tactic, widely promoted by Israel’s well-oiled pressure groups, has not impressed many in the West, in fact, particularly since its most far-reaching claim against BDS is that the movement aims to “supersede the Zionist model with a state that is based on the ‘one person, one vote’ principle” — hardly the most evil or disquieting accusation for anyone even vaguely interested in democracy, a just peace, and equal rights.
In this vein, right after Israel’s occupation of Gaza and the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) in 1967, the great Jewish-American writer I.F. Stone presciently wrote:

“Israel is creating a kind of moral schizophrenia in world Jewry. In the outside world, the welfare of Jewry depends on the maintenance of secular, non-racial, pluralistic societies. In Israel, Jewry finds itself defending a society in which mixed marriages cannot be legalized, in which non-Jews have a lesser status than Jews, and in which the ideal is racist and exclusivist.”

Had he lived long enough, Stone would have seen far more damning evidence of this “schizophrenia” in the everyday discourse of Israel’s apologists in the U.S. With every racist law that passes in the Israeli Knesset, they go into high gear to stifle awareness and any possible denunciation of it in the public arena, leading to an absurd situation where, compared to most U.S. media sources, major Israeli papers have become much more tolerant of opinions that sharply criticize Israeli policies.

Vittorio Arrigoni, Onadekom (Calling You)

by ADAM HOROWITZ on MAY 12, 2011
 

The above video was made by the Gaza-based rap groug DARG Team. They say the song that it being sung during the chorus was Arrigoni’s favorite Arabic resistance song.