May 17, 2013 at 06:33 (Collective Punishment, Ethnic Cleansing, Israel, Nakba, Occupation, Oppression, Palestine, Poetry)
May 16, 2013 at 11:37 (Associate Post, Collective Punishment, Corrupt Politics, Ethnic Cleansing, Hasbara, Israel, Land Theft, Nakba, Palestine)
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As Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims, our problem is not with Jews who believe in “live and let live” but is rather with this diabolical, fanatical and genocidal Zionism which has drenched this part of the world with blood, hatred and inequity.
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The Nakba revisited
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By Khalid Amayreh
Today marks the 65th anniversary of the Palestinian Nakba, the violent usurpation and occupation of Palestine by Zionist Jewish invaders coming from around the world. The seizure of Palestine can be considered as one of the greatest acts of theft in the history of mankind. Israel itself therefore is a gigantic war crime and a crime against humanity. Thanks to the infamous Balfour declaration of 1917, Palestine, an Arab country since the seventh century, was given by another country (Britain) to a third people (the Jews) without even consulting the native people of the country. According to the British Philosopher Bertrand Russell:” The tragedy of the people of Palestine is that their country was ‘given’ by a foreign power to another people for the creation of a new state.” In fact, it can be safely argued that the West, particularly Britain, committed the original sin by envisaging, planning and implanting Israel in the heart of the Arab world in order to protect its colonial and imperialistic interests. In 1905, Britain’s Prime Minister Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman invited the Western Imperial powers for conference which continued until 1907. The conference of the thieves recommended the establishment of ” a state on the lands of Palestine, to serve as an advanced base for the covetous colonialists, and protect their interests, implement their plans and schemes and ensure the outflow of natural resources from the region, as well as the import of their goods and products into the markets of the region.” The American Jewish writer Noam Chomsky described this evilness committed by these European powers, especially Britain: “When a man brings a snake and puts it in the bed of a child and it stings the child, the man is responsible for the child’s death, not the snake,”. The person who brings the snake into the child’s bed is the real criminal, not the snake. This person cannot claim innocence and say ‘I did not know that the snake is so poisonous!’” The famous British historian Arnold Toynbee, in his book “A Study of History” said that “while the direct responsibility for the calamity that overtook the Palestinian Arabs in A.D. 1948 was on the heads of the Zionist Jews who seized a lebensraum for themselves in Palestine by force of arms in that year, a heavy load of indirect, yet irrefutable, responsibility was on the heads of the people of the United Kingdom. But the “snake” (Israel) has acquired a life of its own, and it no longer depends on its erstwhile western benefactors for its survival and continuity.” None the less, there is no guarantee, historical, moral or religious that the “snake” will have an extended life, e.g. live longer than a century. In the final analysis, Israel is an immoral and illegal being that will have to go. Yes, Israel is a regional superpower, has a prosperous economy, is technologically advanced and tightly controls the government, Congress and media of the United States . But nations don’t live by modern fighter jets and nuclear bombs alone. The Soviet Union had a plenty of these. In order to have a sustained existence nations must possess a moral justification. Justice, not military might, is what guarantees the longevity and continuity of states. In 1948, Zionist leaders such as Ben Gurion thought that that the Palestinian people would go into oblivion, slowly but surely. Indeed, just as the genocidal invaders from Eastern Europe and elsewhere bulldozed and obliterated more than 500 Palestinian villages, Zionist elders thought that old Palestinians will die and young Palestinians will forget! But to the Zionists’ chagrin, the Palestinian cause is still as vivid and relevant in the minds and hearts of the Palestinian people today as it was in 1948. Thousands of Palestinians still retain the keys to their homes from which they were expelled at gunpoint when Israel was created 65 years ago. The trust is bequeathed by the older to younger generations. Today, even the least patriotic Palestinians who would rather reach “a peace deal” with Israel by hook or by crook wouldn’t even dare suggest that they would sell out the right of return even in return for a state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. To be sure, Palestinians and Muslims in general have no problem living with Jews. Jews lived side by side with Arabs and Muslims for close to 1400 years. Jews had never revolted against their Muslim rulers or demanded a state of their own. Indeed, the call for the return of Jews to Palestine did not come from Middle Eastern or Palestine Jews; it rather came from Western Jews. When the Hungarian Jewish leader Herzl convened the first Zionist Congress in Basle in 1897, which was attended by 196 delegates. Only four of the 196 delegates were Jews from Palestine . As Palestinians, Arabs and Muslims, our problem is not with Jews who believe in “live and let live” but is rather with this diabolical, fanatical and genocidal Zionism which has drenched this part of the world with blood, hatred and inequity. Israel claims to be Jewish and following ancient Jewish ideals of justice. But this is a hollow claim, bordering on wishful thinking. The truth of the matter is that Israel represents the antithesis of the prophetic ideals of the ancient Israeli prophets. What happened to “Thou shall not murder, thou shall not steal, and thou shall not lie”? Even Abraham, the purported common forefather of the ancient Israelites and northern Arabs wouldn’t accept to obtain a burial place for his dead wife Sara free of charge in Hebron. Today, one is really affronted by these fanatical Jewish settlers who terrorize and savage peaceable Palestinian villagers, poison and kill their livestock, burn down their fields and orchards. And when the unprotected helpless Palestinians seek redress at Israeli courts, they are told by the Jewish judges that the settlers have a point because “your homes and land once belonged to the settlers’ ancestors some three thousand years ago.”!!! Such a state where inequity and oppression are rampant can’t and will not live long, even if it possessed all the modern warplanes in the world. They killed the two-state solution Israel has already decapitated the two state solution. The intensive expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem , has really left no room for a viable and territorially contiguous Palestinian state. The U.S., EU and the helpless Palestinian Authority (PA) pretend that there is still a chance for reviving the two-state solution strategy. But we who live here in the West Bank know better. We just can’t betray our eyes. We also know rather well two other facts that further enforce our conviction that the chances for establishing a true Palestinian state have vanished rather irreversibly. The first fact is that the Israeli society is moving steadily toward Talmudic Jewish fascism, which makes it extremely unlikely that Israel would agree anytime in the predictable future to give up the spoils of the 1967 war, which would imply the inevitable dismantlement of hundreds of Jewish colonies built on the occupied Palestinian territory. The second fact is that the United States, Israel’s guardian-ally, is utterly unable, even if willing, to exert any meaningful pressure on Israel, which would force or convince the Jewish state to end its occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. The reason for this is the tight Jewish stranglehold on the American decision-making process. Thus, the Israeli control of the White House, Congress and other American political institutions is too overwhelming to allow for any U.S. maneuver outside the Jewish dragnet. The Demographic situation in Israel/Palestine Apart from the historical rights and moral high-ground, the Palestinians also have a strategic advantage over Zionism, namely the demographic asset. According to the prominent Israeli demographer Della Pergula, there are already more non-Jews than Jews between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean. “We have already reached the demographic critical mass, the establishment of a Palestinian state now is therefore more of an urgent Israeli need than a Palestinian need” But the possibility for establishing a viable Palestinian state no longer exists in light of the phenomenal expansion of Jewish settlements mentioned earlier. More to the point, the concept of a bi-national state is a kind of anathema for most Israelis as it would mean the end of Israel as a Jewish state. Hence, the problem. There are millions of Israelis who would think or probably are already thinking of unthinkable scenarios such as expelling large number of Palestinians. But expulsion can’t really be carried out without some sort of a genocide. None the less, the Palestinians have thoroughly learned and imbibed the lessons of 1948 and would never ever leave their country. They would rather die in their own homes, towns and villages rather than give Zionists the joy of watching them repeat the Nakba scenario. The Israeli Zionists have already committed huge and numerous crimes against the Palestinian people. Needless to say, committing still more crimes would be suicidal and fraught with grave consequences for Israel and Jews. In the final analysis, the repetition of what happened in 1948 could speed up the process of Israel’s demise and extinction.
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Disappearing Palestine, a powerful new infographic from Visualizing Palestine (visualizingpalestine.org).
May 15, 2013 at 19:47 (Collective Punishment, Ethnic Cleansing, Israel, Land Theft, Nakba, Oppression, Palestine, Refugee Camps, zionism)
يحمل رجل الأعمال الفلسطيني سام بحور الجنسية الأميركية وهو يسكن في مدينة البيرة في رام الله، فلسطين. ويعمل بشكل مستقل كمستشار ومنسق مشاريع كما يملك شركة لإدارة المعلومات التطبيقية (إيم) وهي تختص في تطوير الأعمال والمشاريع مع تركيز على الشركات الناشئة. ولعب سام دوراً أساسياً في تأسيس شركة الإتصالات الفلسطينية (بالتل)، ومركز بلازا للتسوق. وأصبح مؤخراً عضو فاعل في مجلس الأمناء في جامعة بيرزيت. ويشغل حالياً منصب عضو مجلس إدارة في البنك الإسلامي العربي، كما يشغل عدة مناصب أخرى في منظمات المجتمع المدني. ويركز سام كثيراً في كتاباته على الشؤون الفلسطينية، فتنشر مقالاته على نطاق واسع. ساهم سام في تحرير كتاب “الوطن: التاريخ الشفوي لفلسطين والفلسطينيين” ويمكن معرفة المزيد عنه والاطلاع على مقالاته من خلال تصفح مدونته على الموقع الالكتروني التالي: www.epalestine.com
September 4, 2012 at 11:31 (Collective Punishment, Hasbara, Illegal Evictions, Illegal Settlements, Israel, Nakba, Oppression, Palestine, Settler Violence, Status of Jerusalem, zionist harassment)
A room and a courtyard of a Palestinian family home in eastern Jerusalem were turned over to Jewish residents.
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On Sunday, the room was sealed off from the rest of the house with metal sheeting and barbed wire, according to reports.
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A Palestinian couple and their 2-year-old son had lived in the room. Seventeen other members of the family live in the rest of the house.
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The home is claimed by American millionaire Irving Moskowitz, who purchased the property from the Chabad Kollel, who bought it in 1886 from the occupying Ottoman. Chabad lost the land in 1948 when Jordan took over eastern Jerusalem and it was sold to the Hamdallah family, which has lived in the home since 1952.
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The Kollel regained its rights to the land after the Six-Day War, but the family remained in the home. Moskowitz has been working through the courts to evict the family for nearly two decades. He recently succeeded in getting a court’s permission to evict the family from additions made to the property. It is believed Moskowitz that wants to expand the Jewish enclave of Ma’aleh Hazeitim, which he helped to fund, on to the property.
August 14, 2012 at 10:28 (Civil Rights, Corrupt Politics, Hasbara, Israel, Nakba, Photography, Racism, zionist harassment)
Text by: Rami Gudovitch*
All photos by: Activestills.org
South Sudanese refugees board a bus taking them to Ben Gurion airport, where they will be deported to South Sudan. Arad, Israel, June 17, 2012. (Photo: Yotam Ronen/Activestills.org)
“Do you know, Rami, that I was in ‘Mustafa Mahmoud?’” Regina, a 12-year-old South Sudanese girl, asked me after she and her family were released from 27 days in an Israeli prison. Her father, a tall man with noticeable facial scars from the torture he underwent in Khartoum, affirms her words, handing me an old newspaper clipping from Egypt, dated 2005. I cannot read Arabic, but I can see her mother, laying on the ground, surrounded by police officers in one photo, and the little body of a child covered by a white sheet in another. “This was my cousin. He was killed by the police there,” adds Regina.
“Mustafa Mahmoud” refers to a massacre committed by the Cairo police during a peaceful demonstration by South Sudanese refugees near the UNHCR offices. The massacre sparked the first wave of African refugees fleeing to Israel, crossing the Sinai desert and reaching the promised land.
For many of the members of the community, the years in Israel were the only calm years in their lives. For many of the children, these years were happy childhood years, spent living in multicultural neighborhoods, going to schools, learning a new language, meeting school teachers and staff who care for the well-being of any child regardless of gender, color, or nationality.
A representative of the Authority of Population and Immigration checks South Sudanese people boarding a bus for Ben-Gurion Airport. The refugees were gathered in a raid conducted by Oz Unit. Arad, Israel, June 17, 2012. (Photo: Yotam Ronen/Activestills.org)
South Sudanese children board a bus taking them to Ben-Gurion Airport for deportation. Tel-Aviv, Israel, June 17, 2012. (Photo: Oren Ziv/Activestills.org)
In recent years, I found myself lucky enough to be part of a small multicultural community in south Tel Aviv, and some of my closest friends were members of the small South Sudanese community. I heard so many life stories that reminded me of tales often told to me as a child by old family members, who escaped Europe in the 30s—now told by children who fled to gain peaceful years in a country where they were beginning to feel at home in. Now, this little universe has been destroyed.
The government’s deportation order, following the referendum in South Sudan that led to the independence of the country, caught us all unprepared. It is not that the South Sudanese did not wish to return to their country. In fact, at the peak in 2009, there were around 1,900 members of community residing in Israel. By in July 2011, when the county’s independence was declared, only some 900 members remained in Israel. Most of the single young men returned to South Sudan, wishing to help build the new country.
The ones who remained in Israel were mostly families with children. News from South Sudan portrayed a harsh picture of a land unprepared to offer a future for children or for other weak groups in society. It has the highest mortality rate for newborn babies and nursing mothers in the world. A girl of 14 has a higher probability of dying while giving birth than of attending school. One million people suffer from food shortages, and the World Food Organization has warned that the country will continue to suffer major disasters in coming years.
A South Sudanese child in his home fills a bottle of water on the morning of his deportation. Tel Aviv, Israel, June 17, 2012. (Photo: Oren Ziv/Activestills.org)
South Sudanese refugees receive travel documents at Ben-Gurion Airport, Israel, June 17, 2012. (Photo: Oren Ziv/Activestills.org)
With this dreadful reality in mind, we—a small group of representatives from different human rights organizations—opened a public campaign against the deportation to South Sudan. We were successful in getting the facts to the media, and for awhile we were convinced that we could stop it. But after attorney Anat Ben-Dor’s appeal to the district court against the deportation order was rejected, nothing could stop it besides the good will of the government. And that was the last thing we could expect.
Indeed, the deportation order went into effect. On the very next day, after a public statement by Interior Minister Eli Yishai requiring all South Sudanese to register for a “voluntary return” within a week, the Oz Unit of immigration officers began arresting South Sudanese in the streets of major cities in Israel.
For us, the Israeli friends, teachers, and neighbors of the community, these days are beyond comprehension. The streets are being emptied out, racist Israelis commit daily attacks against refugees, more and more of our beloved friends are sent to a country with very low chances of survival.
Walking down the streets of the neighborhood these days I can see only voids—circles of missing people, people who were sent like animals, hunted by immigration police, forced to sign that they “want to leave” or else, then detained and pushed out.
South Sudanese refugees board a bus in Tel Aviv’s Central Bus Station taking them to Ben-Gurion Airport, Israel, June 25, 2012. (Photo: Oren Ziv/Activestills.org)
South Sudanese refugees at Ben-Gurion Airport, Israel, June 25, 2012. (Photo: Yotam Ronen/Activestills.org)
Israeli activists support South Sudanese during the second deportation, Tel Aviv, Israel, June 25, 2012. (Photo: Oren Ziv/Activestills.org)
South Sudanese children board a bus for Ben Gurion Airport, Tel Aviv, Israel, July 2, 2012. (Photo: Oren Ziv/Activestills.Org)
South Sudanese women board a bus for Ben Gurion Airport, Tel Aviv, Israel, July 11, 2012. (Photo: Oren Ziv/Activestills.org)
In recent few weeks, I have experienced some of the most horrifying moments of my life. Among the refugees arrested was Regina’s family. Upon their release, while waiting for their deportation, Regina’s 7-year-old sister Mer described to me how “the guards were at first good, at least some of them. But as we asked more questions and they lacked answers, they become more and more evil.”
Local activists protest against the deportation and attempt to disrupt the departure of the bus, arguing that conditions in South Sudan are not safe enough for the refugees to be returned there. Tel Aviv, Israel, July 25, 2012. (Photo: JC/Activestills.org)
After failing at all fronts to stop the deportation, what we are left with are the voices of the recent deportees in South Sudan. Presently, dozens of children and adults from among the deportees suffer from malaria. Dozens of others suffer from typhoid. Many have been robbed—the property they gathered in Israel did not arrive. Many children are hungry, and every week we send, with the new deportees, pita bread, chocolate, and cereal to the families and children, at their request. The returnees have no water or electricity in their huts. The money they collected or received when they were deported is running out. There are no jobs, and schools are extremely expensive. In general, many just don’t see any future opportunities ahead of them.
The question many of us are left with is why did they—or rather we—have to do it? I witness the brutal pressure Israel is presently putting on the few families that still remain, mostly for serious humanitarian, medical or social needs involving many life threatening conditions. To me it seems like the State of Israel decided to carry out an ethnic cleansing campaign. Like a Passover house-cleaning, they decided not to allow a single South Sudanese to remain. The associations that this act brings to mind are dreadful. But that is the only explanation I can find for the systematic and obsessive persecution—carried out in seven well-planned deportations—of the South Sudanese community.
A woman holds a solidarity sign in Hebrew that reads: “The people demand to stop the deportations,” at the seventh deportation to South Sudan. Tel-Aviv, Israel, August 8, 2012. (Photo: Shiraz Grinbaum/Activestills.org)
A representative of the Authority of Population and Immigration checks the names of South Sudanese people that are being deported. Tel-Aviv, Israel, August 8, 2012. (Photo: Shiraz Grinbaum/Activestills.org)
woman trys to calm her child during the seventh deportation to South Sudan at Tel Aviv’s Central Bus Station, Israel, August 8, 2012. (Photo: Shiraz Grinbaum/Activestills.org)
A South Sudanese girl holds a sign she wrote in Hebrew to her classmates, who came to say goodbye. The note reads: “Axsosa you are my best friend in school.” Tel-Aviv, Israel, August 8, 2012. (Photo: Shiraz Grinbaum/Activestills.org)
And if this is accurate, then I deeply feel that the people involved, actively, or by simply closing their eyes, will be punished. In fact, they are already being punished by not being able to look in the mirror and see a human figure. I cannot imagine a worse punishment than that.
Rami Gudovitch, an Israeli activist, says goodbye to a child who was under his care in recent years. Tel-Aviv, Israel, August 8, 2012. (Photo: Shiraz Grinbaum/Activestills.org)
*Dr. Rami Gudovitch is a social activist working with migrant communities in southern Tel Aviv and a philosophy instructor at the Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya.
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RELATED….. (click on link to access report)
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June 12, 2012 at 07:23 (Deportations, Ethnic Cleansing, Israel, Just Plain Disgusting, Nakba, Naksa, Occupied West Bank, Oppression, Palestine, zionist harassment)
Since many of those who lost their residency rights from 1967 to 1994 in both Gaza and the West Bank were students or young professionals, their descendants today presumably number in the hundreds of thousands. Of the original people affected by the policy – nearly 250,000 – many have since died. But several thousands who were affiliated with the PA were granted the right to return in 1994; still other Palestinians have since been allowed to return for a variety of reasons.
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Israel stripped more than 100,000 residents of Gaza and some 140,000 residents of the West Bank of their residency rights during the 27 years between its conquest of the territories in 1967 and the establishment of the Palestinian Authority in 1994.
As a result, close to 250,000 Palestinians who left the territories were barred from ever returning.
Given that Gaza’s population has a natural growth rate of 3.3 percent a year, its population today would be more than 10 percent higher, had Israel not followed a policy of revoking residency rights from anyone who left the area for an extended period of time. The West Bank’s population growth rate is 3 percent. Many of those prevented from returning were students or young professionals, working aboard to support their families.
The data on Gaza residency rights was released by the Defense Ministry’s Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories this week, in response to a freedom-of-information request filed by Hamoked – The Center for the Defense of the Individual. In its letter, COGAT said that 44,730 Gazans lost their residency rights because they were absent from the territory for seven years or more; 54,730 because they did not respond to the 1981 census; and 7,249 because they didn’t respond to the 1988 census.
It added that 15,000 of those deprived of residency are now aged 90 or older.
In May 2011, Haaretz obtained the figures on West Bank residents who were stripped of their residency rights. The report noted that Israel had, for years, employed a secret procedure to do so. Palestinians who went abroad were required to leave their identity card at the border crossing. Unlike those from Gaza, who were allowed to leave for seven years, these Palestinians received a special permit valid for three years. The permit could be renewed three times, each time for one year. But any Palestinian who failed to return within six months after his permit expired would be stripped of his residency with no prior notice.
Former senior defense officials told Haaretz at the time of that report’s publication that they were unaware of any such procedure.
Today, a similar procedure is applied to East Jerusalem residents: A Palestinian who lives abroad for seven years or more loses his right to return to the city.
GOGAT’s letter to Hamoked regarding the Gaza natives said that there are various ways for Palestinians to get their residency restored, and in fact, some of those Gazans who lost their residency rights later regained them. However, it added, it lacks the resources to comply with Hamoked’s request to be told the specific reason behind each such restoration.
Since many of those who lost their residency rights from 1967 to 1994 in both Gaza and the West Bank were students or young professionals, their descendants today presumably number in the hundreds of thousands. Of the original people affected by the policy – nearly 250,000 – many have since died. But several thousands who were affiliated with the PA were granted the right to return in 1994; still other Palestinians have since been allowed to return for a variety of reasons.
Consequently, the number of Palestinians still listed today as having lost their residency rights is about 130,000.
Among the more prominent West Bank residents who have been barred from returning are the brothers of the PA’s chief negotiator, Saeb Erekat, who went abroad to study and subsequently lost their residency. They now live in California. Erekat said that having learned from their experience, he was careful to return to the West Bank periodically while he was studying abroad, so as to keep his residency permit valid.
Hamoked, which learned of the existence of this policy by chance while investigating the case of a West Bank resident jailed in Israel, charges that stripping tens of thousands of Palestinians of their residency – and thus effectively exiling them permanently from their homeland – is a grave violation of international law.
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The ‘luck’ of those that stayed at home….
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Vandals slashed the tires of seven cars in the Arab neighborhood Shuafat in East Jerusalem early yesterday – one car was sprayed with the word “Ulpana,” the part of the Beit El settlement where the High Court has ordered homes demolished.
“We got up in the morning and that’s what we saw,” said Ibrahim Salah, a resident of Shuafat. “The people here are simple folk who want to live in peace. I don’t understand why people are doing this. This country is becoming racist …. Now foreign laborers are being targeted as well. Racism is rife in Jerusalem because of radical Jewish groups.”
Late Thursday night, vandals slashed the tires of 14 cars and sprayed racist slogans on three of them at the Jewish-Arab village Neveh Shalom near Latrun. Graffiti was also scrawled on the entrance to the community’s bilingual Arab-Jewish school.
The slogans included “Death to Arabs,” “Revenge,” and “Ulpana.” The secretary of the Neveh Shalom Association, Gideon Suleimani, sees the vandalism as “an attack on the idea of coexistence – the political idea on which the village was founded.” The police are investigating the incident.
“It’s a racist act directed against our community,” added Neveh Shalom resident Nava Sonnenstein.
“They did it so the children would see it when they went to school in the morning. We’ve been trying to bring Jews and Arabs closer for 33 years, but the waves of racism are stronger than we are.”
In recent months hate graffiti has been sprayed several times on the walls of the bilingual school near Jerusalem’s Beit Safafa neighborhood. The slogans have included “Death to Arabs” and “Kahane was right,” referring to the far-right American-Israeli rabbi who was assassinated in 1990.
The school is a symbol of coexistence in the capital, with an equal number of Jewish and Arab students.
June 4, 2012 at 15:39 (Action Alert, Activism, Associate Post, History, Israel, Nakba, Naksa, Occupation, Palestine, zionism)
May 17, 2012 at 09:24 (Cover Up, Ethnic Cleansing, Hasbara, History, Israel, Nakba, Palestine, zionist Slander)
Despite what Israeli Jews believe, on Nakba Day, this country’s Arab citizens aren’t mourning Israel’s creation, but rather what it cost them.
When left-leaning Haaretz explains in a news story that the Nakba Day events are “commemorating the ‘disaster’ of Israel’s formation,” this country has got a problem. If Haaretz doesn’t understand that Israeli Arabs are mourning what they and the other Palestinians lost in the 1948 war, not the state the Jews gained by winning it, then the attitude here toward the Nakba is worse than I thought.
It’s not just that right-wingers are deliberately distorting the Nakba’s meaning into something malevolent and traitorous, it’s that even well-meaning liberals have come by the same view innocently, from being bombarded by Israeli propaganda. (I don’t want to be too harsh on Haaretz; its editorial, “Commemorating the Nakba,” was a model of accuracy and fairness.) Yedioth Aharonoth’s news story said the day’s events “mark the ‘catastrophe’ of Israel’s inception.” This is the consensus view among Israeli Jews of what the Nakba is: a tale of grief over Israel’s birth, and an implicit wish for it to die, for the catastrophe to be reversed.
I’m sure this is what many Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza mean by it, and what many Arabs in foreign countries do, too. But for the most part, this is not what Israel’s Arab citizens mean. In 2008, Israel’s 60th year, I interviewed numerous Israeli Arabs about the Nakba - from supporters of Zionist parties to supporters of Arab parties to the then-mayor of Umm el-Fahm, a member of the Islamic Movement’s faction that supports no national party, and every single one of them told me that Israeli Jews have got it wrong. Arab citizens, they said, are not mourning Israel’s creation, they’re mourning what it cost them – the loss of their country, their fight for independence, over 400 villages that were destroyed and some 700,000 people who were exiled.
Mahmoud Abu Rajab, editor of Nazareth’s Al Akbar newspaper and a traditional Labor Party supporter, told me this: ”Yom Ha’atzmaut, when Israel was founded, was a time of nakba for Arab citizens. That’s something no one, not Jew or Arab, can deny.”
Ibrahim Shawahna, a physiotherapist and Hadash supporter from Sahknin, told me that on Nakba Day, he and his family visit the site of the former Galilee village where his wife’s parents lived. But he also said: “This is our country, and I won’t be part of any attempt to destroy it. What I want is equality.”
Where’s the contradiction? What does Israel expect from its Arab citizens – that they forget their history of only 64 years ago, that they banish all trace of sadness over it? And if they don’t, that means they’re spitting on this country, cursing its existence?
Yes, this is what Israel expects of its Arab citizens, and this is what Israel concludes about them if they don’t meet that expectation. The right-wing power in this country pounds away at this idea out of anti-Arab belligerence, while the mainstream and even many liberals simply absorb it from the atmosphere.
And it’s a lie. The Arab citizens of this country don’t burn Israeli flags, not on Nakba Day or any other day. They don’t call for the state’s destruction. With very rare exceptions, they don’t do anything subversive. In effect, they have accepted the loss of 1948. What they won’t accept, though, is the justice of that loss.
For Israeli nationalists, the proud winners, this is intolerable. If Israeli Arabs don’t agree that they and their fellow Arabs brought their suffering upon themselves, that they are to blame for the war, the destroyed villages, the refugees and everything else, then they’re saying Israel doesn’t have a right to exist. Then on Nakba Day, they’re “marking the ‘catastrophe’ of Israel’s inception.”
A lie, but one that most Israelis believe. The truth, rather, is that by demonizing Nakba Day, the winners of the War of Independence are telling the losers that they’re not even allowed to cry, not in public, anyway.
It’s cruel. It’s the way of the conqueror. I’m glad the Jews won the War of Independence, but in some ways it was a catastrophe for us, too.
Written FOR
May 15, 2012 at 14:30 (Associate Post, Cartoons, Israel, Nakba, Palestine)
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Israel’s Buffoon: The UN Nakba
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By Vacy Vlazna*
On May 15, 1948 the unilateral proclamation of the State of Israel which erupted into the brutal Palestinian Nakba or Catastrophe was also catastrophic for United Nations (UN) ringing the death knell for its stature and authority.
Like medieval kings, the US and Israel employed the UN to be its fool running around with a cap o’ bells and sceptre (rendered useless by US veto) beginning with the 1947 Resolution 181, passed on 29 February by members (under coercion) recommending the partition of the British Mandate of Palestine into Jewish and Palestinian states which was understandably rejected by Palestine but accepted by Israel as a step toward its Zionist expansionist goal for the full realisation of a Jewish Eretz Israel.
Ironically, on 30th February Menachem Begin, head of the terrorist gang, Irgun, brazenly announced the Zionist immutable dogma, “The partition of Palestine is illegal. It will never be recognised… Jerusalem was and forever will be our capital. Eretz Israel will be restored to the people of Israel. All of it. And forever.”
Disregarding Begin’s rant, apart from having no mandate to approve or enforce the partition, ‘the United Nations had no business offering the nation of one people to the people of many nations. Its General Assembly had neither the legal nor the legislative powers to impose such a resolution or to convey title of a territory; Articles 10, 11 and 14 of the UN Charter bestows the right on the General Assembly merely to recommend resolutions.’
The Nakba marks the onset of Israel’s systematic ethnic cleansing strategy with the destruction of over 500 Palestinian villages and the forced expulsion of over 700,000 Palestinian civilians fleeing Haganah, Irgun and Lehi units that carried out the savage and systematic military offensives codenamed Plan Dalet:
These operations can be divided into the following categories:
Destruction of villages (setting fire to, blowing up, and planting mines in the debris), especially those population centers which are difficult to control continuously.
Mounting search and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the village and conducting a search inside it. In the event of resistance, the armed force must be destroyed and the population must be expelled outside the borders of the state.
Forced to leave their cherished lands, the Palestinian exodus dispersed to 58 squalid refugee camps in Gaza and the West Bank as well as in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. All 4.9 million Palestinian refugees come under the authority of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNWRA). Its provision of health, education and humanitarian aid is vastly inadequate to the needs of the camps’ three generations of desperate people.
UNRWA is funded mainly by the USA, the EU Commission, UK and Germany. This cabal of collaborators which has ignored Palestinian human and political rights since 1948, are in fact, the camps’ prison guards perpetuating the normalisation of the Israeli occupation thus relieving Israel of its obligation to honour the Palestinian right of return set down in Resolution 194 (December 1948 ) of which Article 11 reads;
(The General Assembly) Resolves that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible.
Israel dismissed Resolution 194, then flagrantly legislated in 1950 The Law of Return that gives all Jews the right to emigrate to and settle in Israel (aliyah) and obtain citizenship. Billions of dollars are spent promoting aliyah, the zenith of Zionism, and spent establishing 200 illegal colonies for over 500,000 illegal, mainly thuggish, colonists on occupied Palestinian land protected by the nuclear might of the Israeli military.
Within days after Palestine’s failed bid to have its right to membership of the UN passed in September 2011, Israel insolently announced a further 1100 units to be built in the Gilo colony, and weeks later announced the future expansion of 50,000 illegal Israeli houses in Palestinian East Jerusalem. In April 2012, another three colony outposts, Bruchin, Rechelim and Sansana were approved flying in the face of Palestine’s prime condition for resuming the ‘peace process’ – that Israel stops colony expansion.
The end of November 2011, saw Israel’s houseboy, the Leader of the Free World and Honest Peace Broker, spit out his dummy summarily withdrawing the US and funding from UNESCO because it approved Palestinian membership to its organisation thereby jeopardising thousands of UNESCO’s humanitarian projects.
Since 1948, there have been over 105 General Assembly UN resolutions and over 224 Security Council resolutions passed against Israel in relation to Palestine, Lebanon and Syria condemning or deploring Israel for deportations of Palestinians, for refusal to cooperate with the UN, for assassinations, for killing Palestinian students, for denying human rights of Palestinians, for raids on Gaza, for Israel’s use of resources from occupied territories, for failure to abide by the Geneva Conventions, for repeated military interventions in Lebanon and Syria, reiterating Israel’s claim to Jerusalem is null and void, calling on Israel to cease building settlements in occupied territories, to comply with UN decisions, reaffirming the “inalienable rights of the Palestinian people”, including the right to national sovereignty and the right of return…to name a few.
Most have have been ignored and /or vetoed by the USA…..
8 years ago, the UN’s International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled on the matter of the Israeli Annexation/Apartheid Wall that ‘Israel is under an obligation to terminate its breaches of international law; it is under an obligation to cease forthwith the works of construction of the wall being built in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including in and around East Jerusalem, to dismantle forthwith the structure therein situated, and to repeal or render ineffective forthwith all legislative and regulatory acts relating thereto, in accordance with paragraph 151 of this Opinion”.
To this day, brave Palestinians demonstrate and struggle against the relentless encroachment of the Annexation Wall on their lands.
In 2009, Resolution 1860 calling for the full cessation of war between Israel and Hamas was passed on the 9th January – TWO WEEKS after the war began with 200 Palestinians slaughtered on the first day. Ignoring the resolution Israel leisurely prolonged its Operation Cast Lead against unarmed and trapped Gazan families with another 9 days of hellish attacks. It ended the war a discreet two days before Obama’s inauguration.
In March 2012, Michael Mandel, law professor at Canada’s York University stridently criticised the UN’s International Criminal Court (ICC) decision to refuse jurisdiction over Gaza war crimes:
“It’s disgraceful but not surprising that the ICC has dismissed Palestine’s complaint against Israel. It sat on the complaint for over three years, always proudly announcing that it was investigating it to give the appearance of impartiality. Meanwhile the ICC jumped to attention in less than three weeks when the US government, which is not a signatory to the treaty, wanted to go to war against Libya, justifying Western aggression with bogus charges against the Libyan regime…Ocampo [ICC prosecutor]and company have been busy putting Africa on trial for crimes aided, abetted and exploited by the rich countries, while the US government killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and tens of thousands of Afghans, and Israel has been committing Nuremberg’s ‘supreme international crime’ of aggression against the Palestinians for 45 years.”
Also on May 10, the Electronic Intifada reported that UNRWA’s Commissioner General, Filippo Grandi’s appeal “to the Israeli government to find an acceptable solution, noting that the [2000 Palestinian political prisoners] hunger strikers’ demands are generally related to the basic rights of prisoners, as stipulated in the Geneva Conventions.” was hastily removed from UNRWA’s website.
Israel’s impunity to commit war crimes, crimes against humanity, its 64 year defiance of UN resolutions amplify the UN’s lethal incompetence. 187 member nations, (not including Israel’s quislings and human rights hypocrites; USA, UK, Australia, Germany, France), are too gutless or subservient or self-serving to protect and enforce the international laws for which they are legally obligated;
International human rights law lays down obligations which States are bound to respect. By becoming parties to international treaties, States assume obligations and duties under international law to respect, to protect and to fulfil human rights. The obligation to respect means that States must refrain from interfering with or curtailing the enjoyment of human rights. The obligation to protect requires States to protect individuals and groups against human rights abuses. The obligation to fulfil means that States must take positive action to facilitate the enjoyment of basic human rights.
The 64 years of the uninterrupted Palestinian Nakba with its sweeping scale of tragic suffering challenges the UN’s moral and political credibility and its very existence as Israel’s buffoon.
* Dr. Vacy Vlazna is Coordinator of Justice for Palestine Matters. She was Human Rights Advisor to the GAM team in the second round of the Acheh peace talks, Helsinki, February 2005 then withdrew on principle. Vacy was coordinator of the East Timor Justice Lobby as well as serving in East Timor with UNAMET and UNTAET from 1999-2001. She contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.
It is true that the Palestinians and the rest of the Arab people resisted the establishment of a racist regime in Palestine. And they still do. It is only normal. If anyone comprehends the extent of the injustice that has been committed against the Palestinian people, they would not even ask why they are so determined in their pursuit of justice. And if anyone knows the history of the Palestinian struggle, they would realize that this people will continue to resist in every form until they see the justice they have so longed for restored.
On 15 May 2012, the world is invited to express its understanding, solidarity and support to a people that has resisted… and continues to do so, for Justice in Palestine.
May 14, 2012 at 08:10 (Collective Punishment, Hasbara, History, Israel, Nakba, Oppression, Palestine)
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Israel’s Buffoon: The UN Nakba
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By Vacy Vlazna*
On May 15, 1948 the unilateral proclamation of the State of Israel which erupted into the brutal Palestinian Nakba or Catastrophe was also catastrophic for United Nations (UN) ringing the death knell for its stature and authority.
Like medieval kings, the US and Israel employed the UN to be its fool running around with a cap o’ bells and sceptre (rendered useless by US veto) beginning with the 1947 Resolution 181, passed on 29 February by members (under coercion) recommending the partition of the British Mandate of Palestine into Jewish and Palestinian states which was understandably rejected by Palestine but accepted by Israel as a step toward its Zionist expansionist goal for the full realisation of a Jewish Eretz Israel.
Ironically, on 30th February Menachem Begin, head of the terrorist gang, Irgun, brazenly announced the Zionist immutable dogma, “The partition of Palestine is illegal. It will never be recognised… Jerusalem was and forever will be our capital. Eretz Israel will be restored to the people of Israel. All of it. And forever.”
Disregarding Begin’s rant, apart from having no mandate to approve or enforce the partition, ‘the United Nations had no business offering the nation of one people to the people of many nations. Its General Assembly had neither the legal nor the legislative powers to impose such a resolution or to convey title of a territory; Articles 10, 11 and 14 of the UN Charter bestows the right on the General Assembly merely to recommend resolutions.’
The Nakba marks the onset of Israel’s systematic ethnic cleansing strategy with the destruction of over 500 Palestinian villages and the forced expulsion of over 700,000 Palestinian civilians fleeing Haganah, Irgun and Lehi units that carried out the savage and systematic military offensives codenamed Plan Dalet:
These operations can be divided into the following categories:
Destruction of villages (setting fire to, blowing up, and planting mines in the debris), especially those population centers which are difficult to control continuously.
Mounting search and control operations according to the following guidelines: encirclement of the village and conducting a search inside it. In the event of resistance, the armed force must be destroyed and the population must be expelled outside the borders of the state.
Forced to leave their cherished lands, the Palestinian exodus dispersed to 58 squalid refugee camps in Gaza and the West Bank as well as in Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan. All 4.9 million Palestinian refugees come under the authority of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNWRA). Its provision of health, education and humanitarian aid is vastly inadequate to the needs of the camps’ three generations of desperate people.
UNRWA is funded mainly by the USA, the EU Commission, UK and Germany. This cabal of collaborators which has ignored Palestinian human and political rights since 1948, are in fact, the camps’ prison guards perpetuating the normalisation of the Israeli occupation thus relieving Israel of its obligation to honour the Palestinian right of return set down in Resolution 194 (December 1948 ) of which Article 11 reads;
(The General Assembly) Resolves that the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbours should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date, and that compensation should be paid for the property of those choosing not to return and for loss of or damage to property which, under principles of international law or in equity, should be made good by the Governments or authorities responsible.
Israel dismissed Resolution 194, then flagrantly legislated in 1950 The Law of Return that gives all Jews the right to emigrate to and settle in Israel (aliyah) and obtain citizenship. Billions of dollars are spent promoting aliyah, the zenith of Zionism, and spent establishing 200 illegal colonies for over 500,000 illegal, mainly thuggish, colonists on occupied Palestinian land protected by the nuclear might of the Israeli military.
Within days after Palestine’s failed bid to have its right to membership of the UN passed in September 2011, Israel insolently announced a further 1100 units to be built in the Gilo colony, and weeks later announced the future expansion of 50,000 illegal Israeli houses in Palestinian East Jerusalem. In April 2012, another three colony outposts, Bruchin, Rechelim and Sansana were approved flying in the face of Palestine’s prime condition for resuming the ‘peace process’ – that Israel stops colony expansion.
The end of November 2011, saw Israel’s houseboy, the Leader of the Free World and Honest Peace Broker, spit out his dummy summarily withdrawing the US and funding from UNESCO because it approved Palestinian membership to its organisation thereby jeopardising thousands of UNESCO’s humanitarian projects.
Since 1948, there have been over 105 General Assembly UN resolutions and over 224 Security Council resolutions passed against Israel in relation to Palestine, Lebanon and Syria condemning or deploring Israel for deportations of Palestinians, for refusal to cooperate with the UN, for assassinations, for killing Palestinian students, for denying human rights of Palestinians, for raids on Gaza, for Israel’s use of resources from occupied territories, for failure to abide by the Geneva Conventions, for repeated military interventions in Lebanon and Syria, reiterating Israel’s claim to Jerusalem is null and void, calling on Israel to cease building settlements in occupied territories, to comply with UN decisions, reaffirming the “inalienable rights of the Palestinian people”, including the right to national sovereignty and the right of return…to name a few.
Most have have been ignored and /or vetoed by the USA…..
8 years ago, the UN’s International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled on the matter of the Israeli Annexation/Apartheid Wall that ‘Israel is under an obligation to terminate its breaches of international law; it is under an obligation to cease forthwith the works of construction of the wall being built in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including in and around East Jerusalem, to dismantle forthwith the structure therein situated, and to repeal or render ineffective forthwith all legislative and regulatory acts relating thereto, in accordance with paragraph 151 of this Opinion”.
To this day, brave Palestinians demonstrate and struggle against the relentless encroachment of the Annexation Wall on their lands.
In 2009, Resolution 1860 calling for the full cessation of war between Israel and Hamas was passed on the 9th January – TWO WEEKS after the war began with 200 Palestinians slaughtered on the first day. Ignoring the resolution Israel leisurely prolonged its Operation Cast Lead against unarmed and trapped Gazan families with another 9 days of hellish attacks. It ended the war a discreet two days before Obama’s inauguration.
In March 2012, Michael Mandel, law professor at Canada’s York University stridently criticised the UN’s International Criminal Court (ICC) decision to refuse jurisdiction over Gaza war crimes:
“It’s disgraceful but not surprising that the ICC has dismissed Palestine’s complaint against Israel. It sat on the complaint for over three years, always proudly announcing that it was investigating it to give the appearance of impartiality. Meanwhile the ICC jumped to attention in less than three weeks when the US government, which is not a signatory to the treaty, wanted to go to war against Libya, justifying Western aggression with bogus charges against the Libyan regime…Ocampo [ICC prosecutor]and company have been busy putting Africa on trial for crimes aided, abetted and exploited by the rich countries, while the US government killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and tens of thousands of Afghans, and Israel has been committing Nuremberg’s ‘supreme international crime’ of aggression against the Palestinians for 45 years.”
Also on May 10, the Electronic Intifada reported that UNRWA’s Commissioner General, Filippo Grandi’s appeal “to the Israeli government to find an acceptable solution, noting that the [2000 Palestinian political prisoners] hunger strikers’ demands are generally related to the basic rights of prisoners, as stipulated in the Geneva Conventions.” was hastily removed from UNRWA’s website.
Israel’s impunity to commit war crimes, crimes against humanity, its 64 year defiance of UN resolutions amplify the UN’s lethal incompetence. 187 member nations, (not including Israel’s quislings and human rights hypocrites; USA, UK, Australia, Germany, France), are too gutless or subservient or self-serving to protect and enforce the international laws for which they are legally obligated;
International human rights law lays down obligations which States are bound to respect. By becoming parties to international treaties, States assume obligations and duties under international law to respect, to protect and to fulfil human rights. The obligation to respect means that States must refrain from interfering with or curtailing the enjoyment of human rights. The obligation to protect requires States to protect individuals and groups against human rights abuses. The obligation to fulfil means that States must take positive action to facilitate the enjoyment of basic human rights.
The 64 years of the uninterrupted Palestinian Nakba with its sweeping scale of tragic suffering challenges the UN’s moral and political credibility and its very existence as Israel’s buffoon.
* Dr. Vacy Vlazna is Coordinator of Justice for Palestine Matters. She was Human Rights Advisor to the GAM team in the second round of the Acheh peace talks, Helsinki, February 2005 then withdrew on principle. Vacy was coordinator of the East Timor Justice Lobby as well as serving in East Timor with UNAMET and UNTAET from 1999-2001. She contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com.
It is true that the Palestinians and the rest of the Arab people resisted the establishment of a racist regime in Palestine. And they still do. It is only normal. If anyone comprehends the extent of the injustice that has been committed against the Palestinian people, they would not even ask why they are so determined in their pursuit of justice. And if anyone knows the history of the Palestinian struggle, they would realize that this people will continue to resist in every form until they see the justice they have so longed for restored.
On 15 May 2012, the world is invited to express its understanding, solidarity and support to a people that has resisted… and continues to do so, for Justice in Palestine.
May 7, 2012 at 05:51 (DesertPeace Editorial, Ethnic Cleansing, Hasbara, Intolerance, Israel, Nakba, Occupation, Palestine, zionist harassment)
July 12, 2011 at 07:34 (Activism, Book Review, Human Interest, Israel, Land Theft, Nakba, Occupation, Oppression, Palestine, Poetry)
Remi Kanazi performs live. (Valerian Mazataud)
It’s early June, a few days after Gil Scott-Heron’s death. There’s something about the passing of an icon like him that makes the search for new, vibrant rebel art all the more urgent. In a strange twist of serendipity, I just happen to be sitting down to read Poetic Injustice by Remi Kanazi. The first lines hit me like a punch in the gut:
I never saw death
until I saw the bombing
of a refugee camp
craters filled with
dismembered legs
and splattered torsos
but no sign of a face
the only impression
a fading scream
I’m hooked. Without gilding the lily, it’s safe to say that there are a lot of parallels between the works of Scott-Heron and those of Remi Kanazi. Both of their bodies of work are a simultaneous expression of identity and a puncturing of borders — real and imagined. Both frequently blur the line between poetry and music. And both rely on a kind of plain-spoken articulation that dodges between pleasure and pain, drama and humor, vicious oppression and inspiring resistance.
It’s difficult to believe that poetry and spoken word were things that Remi more or less stumbled into. “I grew up in a small town in Western Massachusetts,” he says to me over the phone, “and for me, growing up on lefty hip-hop, to have the voice of spoken word really filled a huge void. My brother and sister had just taken me to see Def Poetry Jam on Broadway, and that was the transformational trigger point. I started writing every day after that.”
No doubt that this voice has been honed over time. By now, as Poetic Injustice indicates, Remi has achieved a deft power, vividly versatile and completely unafraid while never drifting into sentimentality. Throughout this short, 50-page book, the author travels through a variety of settings; pompous American mouthpieces are humorously rebuked (“The Dos and Don’ts of Palestine”), solidarity powerfully invoked (“From Rikers to Bagram”), the horrors of US-Israeli imperialism graphically depicted (“A Poem for Gaza”). These are only a sampling.
Reinventing art as identity
Tying it all together are the 48 three-line poems peppered throughout the book — 48 symbolizing the year of the Nakba (catastrophe) when approximately 750,000 Palestinians were kicked off their land by Zionist militias. Divided into four parts (each dedicated to one of his four grandparents, all among that original displaced generation), each short verse provides a snippet of emotional truth of existence and resistance under occupation:
From my rooftop I can see an Israeli sunbathing
on the balcony my grandfather built…
A pregnant woman dies at a checkpoint
Sometimes a hand in the face is as powerful as a pistol…
Kids slingshot hip-hop, mix beats and break
in refugee camps. Reinvent art as identity
and tag the wall with the footsteps of their future…
As rewarding as reading Remi’s words can be, it’s little substitute for seeing him perform. His energy seems boundless, the humor and vigor of his words coming to life in the performer’s animation. To that end, Poetic Injustice comes with an audio CD of Remi reading fifteen of his favorite selections. It’s a perfect complement, adding immeasurable weight to the book itself.
Over the past several weeks, I’ve had the pleasure (albeit via email) of working with Remi on the Punks Against Apartheid petition urging Jello Biafra to cancel his show in Tel Aviv — a push that we can thankfully now say was successful.
Given the circumstances, it’s near-impossible not to think of another parallel to Gil Scott-Heron, namely the 2010 efforts that successfully convinced him to do the same. There’s also something of an irony — namely that even though the most powerful tool an artist has is his or her voice, what the movement for the cultural boycott of Israel demands is the withholding of that very same voice.
Stand on the right side of history
Nonetheless, Remi believes that an artist’s power is enhanced by his or her refusal to play Israel. “The most effective thing we can do is use our voice in an ethical way,” he tells me. “I think the most prominent and positive thing an artist can do is stand on the right side of history and stand with oppressed peoples. So rather than just staying silently on the sidelines or going and whitewashing apartheid in Tel Aviv and talking maybe one or two lines about peace, we have the opportunity to use our voices in a more general sense.”
In fact, the push for a cultural boycott is taking place at a time when rebel poets like Remi have the potential to reach a wide audience. The revolutions across the Arab world have been accompanied by a flourishing of art, music and culture. Politically charged groups like DAM and Arabian Knights have never been more popular. And while right-wing pundits like Pam Geller still insist that Arab culture consists of little more than camels and scimitars artists on both sides of the pond may still go a long way to countering this racism.
“I think that what some of the artists are doing today is brilliant because they’re refusing to be tokenized. If you listen to the music of Omar Offendum or The Narcycist or, in Arabic, the music of DAM, they completely shatter this notion that they’re going to be this post [11 September 2001] image of what is Arab or Muslim or Palestinian.” In other words, it’s this insistence on humanity despite all obstacles that makes these artists so potent.
The same goes for Remi’s book. And that’s precisely why it would be wrong to simply call this work “poems about Palestine.” Much like Scott-Heron’s portrayals of an oppressed black America inspired people well beyond the borders of Watts and Harlem, so do Remi Kanazi’s words speak toward a struggle that is, for lack of a better term, universal.
“The reason I become a poet was to educate, inspire, to act,” he says. “I’m not a nationalist, I’m not an ethnocentrist. This isn’t about me being a Palestinian or me being an Arab. It’s about a system of oppression and what’s being done to a people. So whether you’re talking about police brutality or the US-Mexico border or Afghanistan or the war in Iraq or the plight of Palestinians, what they’re going through and the injustice that’s being perpetrated against them is what matters. And that’s what we’re working against — systems of oppression, what’s being done to a people.”
This subtle yet dynamic interplay between art and struggle is what makes Poetic Injustice such a crucial contribution. It’s the feeling that for all its specificity, we’re reading not just about the Palestinians but about ourselves. And indeed, every struggle has its own art, it’s own poetry. As Remi Kanazi well knows, it’s this ability for beauty that makes the fight worth it:
I’ll exist in a world that
fights against racism
like Martin and Malcolm bleeds ghetto tales of Steve Biko
as a song that never dies
no matter what apartheid
makes of our bodies
feeds mouths in Belfast streets
and resurrects Bobby Sands’ message
so that we will never
be hungry again
Remi Kanazi’s Poetic Injustice can be purchased on Amazon.com.
*Alexander Billet is a music journalist and activist living in Chicago. He runs the website Rebel Frequencies and is a columnist for SOCIARTS. He has also appeared in Z Magazine, CounterPunch and PopMatters.com.
Written FOR
July 11, 2011 at 19:20 (Collective Punishment, Deportations, Hasbara, Human Rights, Israel, Land Theft, Nakba, Palestine, Refugee Camps, Right of Return, Videos)
June 14, 2011 at 18:56 (Academic Freedom, History, Israel, Nakba, Oppression, Palestine)
When Shira (not her real name ), a history teacher at a junior high school in the center of the country, mentioned “nakba” in a class three years ago, none of her students had any idea what it referred to.
Today, she says, the word just surfaces naturally among the students. They know about it and talk about it. According to her, the reason is clear – Amendment 40 to the Budget Foundations Law, more commonly known as the “Nakba Law.”
Shira is one of around 100 teachers and educators who teach the Nakba (“catastrophe” – the Palestinians’ term for the loss of their land to Israel in 1948 ) to their students with the help of a unique study kit called “How do you say Nakba in Hebrew?”
The kit was developed by Zochrot, a small Tel Aviv-based organization seeking to raise public awareness of the Palestinian Nakba, especially among Jews in Israel.
Zochrot is distributing the kit to teachers at a time when the Nakba is recurring in headlines as a subject that is not to be touched – especially not in schools. But over the last two years Zochrot has distributed 300 copies of the study kit.
It covers pre- and post-1948 Palestinian settlements; Israeli and Palestinian recollections of the conquest and destruction of villages; and the refugees’ flight and their expulsion. The kit did not receive the ministry’s approval and most of the teachers using it conceal their source.
Eitan Bronstein, the founder of Zochrot, stresses that the kit’s goal is not to present the Palestinian narrative. “For me, the Nakba is part of our history,” he says, “just as it is part of Palestinian history.”
‘Dafna,’ a history and citizenship teacher in northern Israel, uses a section of the kit that presents three competing theories on events in the village of Ein Azael (along the eastern slopes of the Carmel ).
Students are asked to present the different versions of events and discuss them.
In the Palestinian narrative, the emphasis is on “Zionist gangs” that bombed the triangle of villages Aghzam, Jaba and Ein Azael, in violation of the cease-fire. On the other side, there is a passage from the book “The War of Independence,” printed by the IDF, whereby the villages were attacked after their residents fired on the Tel Aviv-Haifa road, thereby effectively blocking it.
“This opened up our eyes, because the contradictions between the different versions were really crazy. Nowhere [before] did I hear the Palestinian narrative,” says Michal, an 11th-grade student in Dafna’s class. She adds: “It was very interesting to see not just the Israel side, and to go beyond the point of view that we learn in Israel – that we are heroes and they are always trying to oppress us.”
Both Dafna and Shira were concerned about being interviewed using their full names, for fear of sanctions from the Education Ministry. The ministry said: “Teachers are not permitted to teach content, in any subject, that was not approved by the relevant professionals at the Education Ministry.”
May 22, 2011 at 09:05 (Activism, Collective Punishment, Ethnic Cleansing, Israel, Nakba, Nonviolent Resistance, Occupation, Palestine, Photography, Soldier Brutality)
May 19, 2011 at 15:53 (Blogging, Corporate Media, From The Media, Israel, Nakba, Palestine)
By Bradley Burston
As this month began, Israel marked Yom Hashoa, the annual day of remembrance for the victims of the Holocaust. At the sounding of air-raid sirens, the nation shut down and stood in honor.
Who was it for, this day of remembrance? If you ask those Israelis who lost parents, sisters and brothers, grandparents to the Nazi genocide, if you ask people whose parents survived Auschwitz to somehow raise families and resurrect something of a life, they will likely tell you that Yom Hashoa is not for them.
The survivors and their families don’t need a day like this. For them, every single day is Yom Hashoa.
The commemoration is for the rest of us, those of us fortunate to be able to go about our lives most of the time without thinking about the unfathomable tragedy embodied in the concept of the Shoa and the loss, the grief, the sacrifice that it conferred on its survivors and their descendants.
Exactly a week after Yom Hashoa, the country stunned itself once more, as Yom Hazikaron marked the fallen of the nation’s wars and the victims of terror murders. And once again, the bereaved families invited to official memorial services will tell you that this is not for them. They have no need of a day like this. Their wounds, no matter how old, are still too fresh. For them, every single day is Yom Hazikaron.
This year, a third day of remembrance fell exactly a week later. It was Nakba Day, commemorating the displacement and dispossession of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs from their homes in the 1948 war that established the state of Israel, and the ensuing loss of hundreds of their villages effectively erased by the Jewish state.
It may be fair to assume that Nakba Day is not for the millions of Palestinian refugees and their descendents in Gaza, in West Bank camps, in Lebanon and Syria and Chile and San Francisco. For them, every single day is Nakba Day.
No, Nakba Day is for the rest of us, who go through our lives thinking that we can afford not to give it a second thought. And so it is that Israel’s government – in its zeal to blot out the very concept of the Nakba, in its paralysis in the face of an unprecedented Palestinian drive for statehood, in its inability to anticipate a Facebook-organized mass march past minefields and razor wire and assault-rifle bullets on a northern border – has inadvertently but irrevocably established 2011 as the Year of the Nakba.
And so it was that this month, large numbers of Israelis – many of them for the first time, many of them against their will – found themselves marking Nakba Day.
It’s about time. Just as many Palestinians are now beginning to study the Holocaust and the broader realities of the Mideast conflict, and are studying the challenges of a two state Holy Land based on 1967 lines.
What we stand to learn from the three memorial days, each of them singular but all three intertwined, is that we remain, both Arab and Jew, prisoners of our own narratives. In an understandable drive to forge their national and cultural identities, Israelis and Palestinians have ethnically cleansed their own narratives, expelling and erasing that which is messy, morally indefensible, tactically self-defeating. If there is ever to be a solution to the conflict, we must free ourselves from the narratives that rest in part on the lies we like and the truths we don’t.
There will be those in Israel who will immediately dismiss the Nakba Day march as a stunt, a diversion. Just as there is a new chorus of voices on the right citing the resurgence of interest in the Nakba as proof that Arabs will never make peace with Israel.
But a recent poll of Palestinian public opinion coinciding with Nakba Day, indicates a willingness for compromise and a rejection of violence as a means for ending the conflict. The survey, by pollster Nabil Kukali, shows that more than 60 percent said that to a certain degree they expected a peace agreement with Israel in the coming year, and that nearly 70 percent oppose launching Qassam rockets against Israel.
There will be those who argue that Jews owe Palestinians nothing in connection with the Nakba. Not true. At the very least, on Nakba Day and every other, Jews owe Palestinians what Jews demand of Palestinians:
Acknowledgment and compassion for the depth of their grief, the magnitude of their loss. Respect.
We owe Palestinians an honest recognition of their history. We owe Palestinians an apology. We owe Palestinians admission of wrongful acts committed at a time of terrible events.
We owe Palestinians what we demand of them: recognition of our right to an independent state, and compromise for the sake of a shared future. A just and mutually agreed peace. We owe Palestinians, in short, what we owe ourselves.
May 19, 2011 at 08:26 (Corporate Crime, Hasbara, Israel, Media Lies, Nakba, Palestine)
After Israel declared independence on May 14, 1948, armies from neighboring Arab states attacked the new nation; during the war that followed, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled or were driven from their homes by Israeli forces. Hundreds of Palestinian villages were also destroyed. The refugees and their descendants remain a central issue of contention in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Whatever the degree of their superiority complex, however, the Jews are certainly confident of their ability to bring the Arabs to terms – by persuasion if possible, by might if necessary. The program of the largest terrorist group, the Irgun Zvai Leumi, is to evacuate the British forces from Palestine and declare a Zionist state west of the Jordan, and “we will take care of the Arabs.”
[Villages] taken yesterday were Dabiat er Ruha, Rihania and Kuteinat. Previously they had occupied Kufrin, Abu Sureik, Abu Shusha, Zerain, Naamieh, Ghubyat at Tahta and Ghubyat al Fauqha. Several bridges blown up by Haganah squads between Jenin and Lajjun are hampering Arabs [sic] communication.
A stream of Arab refugees is moving eastward across the Jordan river. Many of the refugees passing Jericho en route to Trans-Jordan, a few miles away, are from Jerusalem and Jaffa. They say they fear that Jewish offensives are crashing through weakened Arab volunteer resistance. Haifa was described as almost a ghost town, with its population having dwindled to less than 20,000 from a normal figure at least five times that.
It is believed that possibly 50,000 Arabs left Jaffa, thousands of them by sea. Other thousands have fled inland, large numbers of them to become cave dwellers in the historic caves of Beit Jibrin, northwest of Hebron…at least 40,000 Arabs left Haifa when the combined Haganah and Irgun Zvai Leumi force stormed the Arab market place and conquered all of the city except the British-held waterfront. From Jerusalem wealthy Arabs have fled to near-by countries, the poorer ones into the hills and villages.
According to reports telephoned from Nablus, that town and Jenin are crowded with refugees, among whom the rumor is circulating that the Jews are driving on Jenin. The Haganah said it had killed 130 Druse [sic] tribesmen yesterday when it seized Usha, a village east of Haifa.
Nobody knows its full strength, let alone its membership rolls. But it is no amateur army. It has a nucleus of 30,000 men who served in the British forces. Three thousand of them served in the RAF, including more than forty pilots. More than 300 served in the Commandos and 4,000 in the Jewish Brigade in action in Italy. The British estimate Haganah’s active membership at anywhere from 60,000 to 80,000.
May 17, 2011 at 10:40 (Collective Punishment, Cover Up, DesertPeace Editorial, Hasbara, Israel, Land Theft, Nakba, Oppression, Palestine)
May 16, 2011 at 09:34 (Collaboration, Collective Punishment, Corrupt Politics, DesertPeace Editorial, Ethnic Cleansing, Human Rights, Israel, Nakba, Oppression, Palestine)
