mudslinging

azspot:

The first revelation of the trip changed that. It was so obvious, so bound to be true, that I’m almost ashamed to admit what it was: Palestinians are normal people. Unlike the turbulent, vengeful individuals I had been expecting, I encountered warm, rational, intelligent human beings, concerned for their families and struggling with a difficult situation.

Moreover, I personally didn’t encounter a whiff of antisemitism. People spoke about the settlers or the army, never about “the Jews.” In fact, to my great surprise, some spoke about missing living together with Jews. In many places, Jerusalem and Bethlehem, for example, that had been the situation for centuries. To get over the invisible barrier of fear and find real people, great hospitality and humanity, was a wonderful discovery, one that filled me with hope. But increasingly over the following days what I was seeing caused anguish.

The great benefit of being there yourself is that it releases you from the endless to-and-fro of argument about the situation. You can see what is happening, the facts on the ground, facts that can’t be contradicted by any argument from either side. What you see is that there are a huge number of illegal settlements within Palestinian territory and that the wall is in the wrong place.

The settlements are shocking in their scale. They are easy to spot because they are always on the tops of hills and are reinforced. Some, like those in a ring around Nablus, are so far into territory necessary and promised for a viable Palestinian state as to make that future seem impossible.

What can be done with these armed fundamentalist inhabitants who would rather kill than move? Settler Judaism is hard for me to comprehend. It seems to lack all the moral and intellectual depth, the subtlety and sensitivity, of the Judaism I am proud to have grown up in. Full of messianic fervour, indifferent to pain, soaked in violence, it privileges the one commandment to settle over the other six hundred and twelve. That they have been tolerated and supported in pursuing this activity, which seriously damages the chances of a two-state solution, is mystifying to me.

In Bethlehem, you see the placement of the wall. Nine metres high it rises just beyond the last house, wrapped so tightly around the little town, severing it from the landscape, that natural population growth can be expected to produce extreme overcrowding. At certain points you can see over the wall to olive groves that formerly supported a large number of Bethlehemites and that now they can’t reach. An Israeli law states that land “abandoned” for seven years becomes state property. Trapped inside the wall, they wait for this to happen.

If the security rationale for the wall was the only one, it would be in a different place, running along the green line, and it would be continuous. It remains possible to get around the wall. Impoverished Palestinian labourers do this regularly to find manual work within Israel. Standing there, seeing where it is, it is plain that the construction of the wall has been in part a land-grab.

Seeing, too, the frightening checkpoints, and Hebron settlements built directly over the remaining Palestinians in the old city, over whom rubbish and urine are thrown down, I came away with a new understanding of why so many Jews within Israel and the diaspora are protesting against current Israeli government policies. For myself, the words of William Blake came to mind: opposition is true friendship.

vruz:

by Amos Oz, The New York Times

FOR 2,000 years, the Jews knew the force of force only in the form of lashes to our own backs. For several decades now, we have been able to wield force ourselves — and this power has, again and again, intoxicated us.

In the period before Israel was founded, a large portion of the Jewish population in Palestine, especially members of the extremely nationalist Irgun group, thought that military force could be used to achieve any goal, to drive the British out of the country, and to repel the Arabs who opposed the creation of our state.

Luckily, during Israel’s early years, prime ministers like David Ben-Gurion and Levi Eshkol knew very well that force has its limits and were careful to use it only as a last resort. But ever since the Six-Day War in 1967, Israel has been fixated on military force. To a man with a big hammer, says the proverb, every problem looks like a nail.

Israel’s siege of the Gaza Strip and Monday’s violent interception of civilian vessels carrying humanitarian aid there are the rank products of this mantra that what can’t be done by force can be done with even greater force. This view originates in the mistaken assumption that Hamas’s control of Gaza can be ended by force of arms or, in more general terms, that the Palestinian problem can be crushed instead of solved.

But Hamas is not just a terrorist organization. Hamas is an idea, a desperate and fanatical idea that grew out of the desolation and frustration of many Palestinians. No idea has ever been defeated by force — not by siege, not by bombardment, not by being flattened with tank treads and not by marine commandos. To defeat an idea, you have to offer a better idea, a more attractive and acceptable one.

— read more —

From Mondoweiss:

The following press release was sent out this morning:

We Gaza based Palestinian Civil Society Organizations and International activists call on the international community and civil society to pressure their governments and Israel to cease the abductions and killings in Israel’s attacks against the Gaza Freedom Flotilla sailing for Gaza, and begin a global response to hold Israel accountable for the murder of foreign civilians at sea and illegal piracy of civilian vessels carrying humanitarian aid for Gaza.

We salute the courage of all those who have organized this aid intervention and demand a safe passage through to Gaza for the 750 people of conscience from 40 different countries including 35 international politicians intent on breaking the Israeli-Egyptian blockade. We offer our sincerest condolences to family and friends who have lost loved ones in the attack.

By sailing directly to Gaza, outside of Israeli waters, with cargo banned illegally by Israel, such as the 10,000 tonnes of badly needed concrete, toys, workbooks, chocolate, pasta and substantial medical supplies, the flotilla is exercising international law and upholding article 33 of the Geneva Convention which clearly states that collective punishment is a crime against humanity.

The hardships of Israel’s closure of Gaza have been well documented by all human rights groups operating, most recently by Amnesty International in their Annual Human Rights Report concluding that the siege has “deepened the ongoing humanitarian crisis. Mass unemployment, extreme poverty, food insecurity and food price rises caused by shortages left four out of five Gazans dependent on humanitarian aid. The scope of the blockade and statements made by Israeli officials about its purpose showed that it was being imposed as a form of collective punishment of Gazans, a flagrant violation of international law.” The United Nations continuously states that only a fraction of the required aid is entering the Strip due to what it calls ‘the medieval siege’, with John Ging the Director of UNRWA in Gaza specifically expressing the need for the Flotilla to enter Gaza. The European Union’s new foreign affairs minister Catherine Ashton has just reiterated its call for, “an immediate, sustained and unconditional opening of crossings for the flow of humanitarian aid, commercial goods and persons to and from Gaza.”

The people of Gaza are not dependent people, but self sufficient people doing what they can to retain some dignity in life in the wake of this colossal man-made devastation that deprives so many of a basic start in life or minimal aspirations for the future.

We, from Gaza, call on you to demonstrate and support the courageous men and women who went on the Flotilla, many now murdered on a humanitarian aid mission. We insist on severance of diplomatic ties with Israel, trials for war crimes and the International protection of the civilians of Gaza. We call on you to join the growing international boycott, divestment and sanction campaign of a country proving again to be so violent and yet so unchallenged. Join the growing critical mass around the world with a commitment to the day when Palestinians are entitled to the same rights as any other people, when the siege is lifted, the occupation is over and the 6 million Palestinian refugees are finally granted justice.

 

Signatory Organisations:

The One Democratic State Group

University Teachers Association

Arab Cultural Forum

Palestinian Students’ Campaign for the Academic Boycott of Israel

Association of Al-Quds Bank for Culture and Info

Popular Committee against the Wall and Settlements

International Solidarity Movement

Palestinian Network of Non-Governmental Organisations

Palestinian Women Committees

Progressive Students Union

Medical Relief Society

The General Society for Rehabilitation

Gaza Community Mental Health Program

General Union of Palestinian Women

Afaq Jadeeda Cultural Centre for Women and Children

Deir Al-Balah Cultural Centre for Women and Children

Maghazi Cultural Centre for Children

Al-Sahel Centre for Women and Youth

Ghassan Kanfani Kindergartens

Rachel Corrie Centre, Rafah

Rafah Olympia City Sisters

Al Awda Centre, Rafah

Al Awda Hospital, Jabaliya Camp

Ajyal Association, Gaza

General Union of Palestinian Syndicates

Al Karmel Centre, Nuseirat

Local Inititiative, Beit Hanoun

Union of Health Work Committees

Red Crescent Society Gaza Strip

Beit Lahiya Cultural Centre

Al Awda Centre, Rafah

pragmatism:

The Israeli government (not the Israeli people, and certainly not Jewish people) decided this morning that it would attack an unarmed convoy of activists who were attempting to deliver aid to what most countries in the world and the United Nations consider to be the world’s largest prison, Gaza….

Probably the fairest assessment I’ve read on the situation thus far.  It is these kinds of situations that really irk me and my sensibilities towards International Law.

caraobrien:

areza:

He was born on July 5th, 1988 in Tehran, Iran. He had two siblings… an older sister [Soraya] and an older brother [Mostafa], and loving parents. But he wasn’t just a cousin to me, he was more like a little brother to me. Unfortunately, his life was cut short on May 22nd, 2010.

I have a lot of good memories of Mohammad. There is one that will always stick out the most to me. It was when he was 10 and I was 15. His mother finally wanted to teach him English the summer I was in Iran. I was going to have fun with this and help him learn English. I wanted to give him a good word to have as his first word in English, I wanted it to be the word “dumbass.” I taught him to say this and it amused me. The first word that he ever said in English was in fact, “dumbass.” He just kept saying that word over and over. He said it around his mother and once he did, my thought was, “I’m in trouble now.” I was. She grabbed the newspaper and smacked me on the back of my head, and yelled at me “What on earth are you teaching my son to say? Why are you teaching him words like that?” Then she smacked me on the back of the head again a third time after she said that to me. It wasn’t as amusing to her as it was to me. I was actually proud of the fact that I taught him his first word in English, even though it was that. But then again, he hardly called me by name after that, and my name to him became “Dumbass.”

I talked to him a lot when I was still in Iran, before he was arrested. He told me that he had plans on going to graduate school in the U.S. to do something like get a Ph.D in Environmental Engineering. He talked to me about all these plans that he was setting for his life and how he was going to make sure that he accomplished all of these things he wanted to do. He would mention all these little ideas that he would have for the field of work that he wanted to go into. His words to me were “I’m going to do all of this. I’m not going to accept failure at any time in my life in this. I won’t let anyone tell me I’m crazy for something I want to do and I’m setting my hopes too high. I’m not. I know what I want. I’ll accomplish it.” I believed it when he said that to me. I know how Mohammad was. I know how determined he was to do the things he wanted to do in life. I knew that he had all the potential in the world to accomplish anything he put his mind to doing. He always would put everything that he had into whatever it was that he was doing and never settled for anything less than what his idea of perfection was for him.

I talked to him more about the things he wanted to do and why he wanted to do those things. I would believe everything he would say about the goals he was making for himself. I actually enjoyed listening to him talk about things like that. He was one of the smartest people that I knew — high IQ, common sense, a lot of potential, cared about the people in his life [even people that he didn’t know, he would always show some kindness to], cared about the world around him and wanted to find ways to improve things like the environment in some way. Some people in our family called him ridiculous for all these things he wanted to do, but I never once said that to him. I told him that whatever he wanted to do in life to go for it and to never take “No” for an answer when it comes to anything. I knew that he never would just because of the mentality that he always had in life.

The last talk I had with him, it was a long talk, after taking a trip to a part of the Alborz Mountains — overlooking the city. We sat out there for a few hours or more. I remember everything he talked about, from random things he was thinking or I was thinking about, to him going back to his goals he wanted to accomplish in his life. I listened more than I talked that afternoon. I told him that I was proud of him, very proud of him. I don’t always say that I’m proud of people unless it’s something that I truly mean… so I really don’t say it that often [I’ve said it to maybe a few or so people.] But I really was proud of him. I was proud of him for the way he was set on doing these things, the kind of goals that he was putting in place for his life. I was just proud of him for everything and proud to call him not just a cousin, but someone that was like a younger brother. I was just proud to call him family.

People like my cousin Mohammad aren’t always the easiest kind of people to find in this world. He’s one of those people that are hard to come across — the kind of person that you’re glad you met and came into your life in some way. He was one of those people that once you met, were in his life, that he would always impact your life in some kind of way with something that he would say or something that he would do. He was one of those people that would always leave some kind of lasting impression in your life the moment he became a part of it. He was one of those people that you could honestly be proud to say that you even knew.

He was full of potential, full of dreams and goals, and would have made this world a better place. Now those things he wanted to accomplish won’t happen at all. But then in some way, just be being on this Earth, by being one of those people that impacted however many lives he did that he met, by standing up for something he believed in [and eventually paying with his life because of it] — in some way, he’s already made at least some lives better by being a part of their lives [like he did with mine] and left some kind of impact in this world, even if it was just through his family, friends and people that he had met during his lifetime.

Take the time to read this, and all of Reza’s posts. The people we’re trying to help are just that: people. It isn’t about the Islamic Republic, it’s about the innocent people who are suffering under this regime, who are being tortured to death and executed just because of their political beliefs and affiliations. 

You may think all of us are naive to want to make a difference, but you know what? At least we’re trying. These crimes must stop, and we should all be doing everything we can to stop them.