Australia has an Israel lobby with many shop fronts. There's the Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC), the Executive Council of Australian Jewry (ECAJ), the Zionist Federation of Australia (ZFA), the Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies (JBD), and so on.
There are Israeli dupes aplenty, on both sides of the political divide, in federal and state parliaments.
There are Israel-friendly journalists and columnists in the Australian press.
And then, in a class of his own, there's Greg Sheridan, who has been rooting for Israel in The Australian since, oh... time immemorial.
Needless to say, Netanyahu's success in Tuesday's Israeli election has him at his breathless, gushing best.
"Benjamin Netanyahu take a bow," opens his 'analysis' of the 'great' event.
Lost in admiration for this "giant of modern global politics," Sheridan goes to truly extraordinary lengths to play down Netanyahu's ideologically-fueled designs on the whole of Palestine:
"Netanyahu was widely criticised for statements during the campaign about possible future Israeli sovereignty over Jewish settlements in the West Bank. This led to some ridiculous headlines to the effect that Netanyahu had said he would annex the West Bank. He said nothing of the kind. His comments were, of course, ambiguous and could be criticised as irresponsible. But as with everything Netanyahu says, they must be evaluated carefully and in all their complexity. He was asked whether he would extend Israeli sovereignty to West Bank settlements and replied along the lines of: Who says we're not? This is a representative Netanyahu formulation, full of implications but with no specific commitment. He was also asked whether this would apply to isolated settlements or just the big settlement blocks, most of which are adjacent or almost adjacent to Jerusalem. These would then be part of Israeli sovereign territory. Therefore if you want to interpret Netanyahu's comments in the softest possible manner, he is merely restating orthodoxy. Making the same commitment for isolated settlements is much more problematic. Netanyahu specifically was not talking about the outposts or settlements that are illegal under Israeli law. The comments must also be understood in the context of Israeli electoral dynamics. Netanyahu was worried some of the smaller right-wing parties would fall under the 3.25% threshold for getting seats in the Knesset. These votes would then be wasted and Netanyahu might have fallen short of government. So for a while he was encouraging settlers and others to vote for non-Likud right-wing parties. But then he got worried that... " (Netanyahu remains Israel's hardball hero, The Australian, 11/4/19)
Is this kind of apologetic not unique in the annals of Australian journalism? Has any Australian msm journalist ever gone to greater lengths to ward off criticism of an Israeli land-thief? The expression 'bending over backwards' hardly begins to do Sheridan's cosseting of Netanyahu justice.
How is one to explain Sheridan's weird adulation of Netanyahu? While we may never get a satisfactory answer to that question, it is worth keeping in mind that his brain throngs with things he picked up long ago from his reading.
For example, Sheridan once revealed that he had been "seduced" by Morris West's 1968 wild eastern, The Tower of Babel.* More precisely, it seems that he was seduced by the novel's fictional hero, General Jakov Baratz:
"He had come to [Palestine] as a child, son of a landless trader from the Baltic, and he had never forgotten the splendour of his arrival: the furnace blaze of the sun, the blinding sky, the mountains hewn as if by wild axe-men, the desert where the air danced and cities and palm trees swam upside down and vanished at a glance. As a youth he had farmed it, building rock walls with his bare hands, carrying baskets of earth on his back, planting the vine twigs and the lemon-trees. As a man he had fought over it, using the military skills that the British had taught him, counting every bloody mile from Lydda to Ramle, to Abu Ghosh and the final foothold on Zion. And now his love for it was manifold: a dark passion that bound him closer to the soil than he ever had been to the body of a woman. He was jealous too, like all lovers; because his tenure in the beloved was always insecure - and no one knew better than he how strongly it was threatened." (p 30)
If, in fact, we are what we read, could the bookish Sheridan, perhaps, be projecting an indelible memory of Jakov Baratz onto Benjamin Netanyahu? Pure speculation, of course, but how else to explain what is going on here?
[*See my August 2009 series of posts, West's Wild East.]
Showing posts with label Israel/occupation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Israel/occupation. Show all posts
Friday, April 12, 2019
Saturday, March 23, 2019
Never Forget the Occupied Syrian Golan Heights
Now this:
"Syria has vowed to retake the Golan Heights as Donald Trump's call for the US to recognise the occupied territory as part of Israel elicited strong responses from Russia, Turkey and Iran. The president ended half a century of US foreign policy and broke from post-second world war international consensus that forbids territorial conquest during war with a tweet on Thursday that said it was time 'to fully recognise Israel's sovereignty over the Golan Heights'. Trump said the territory was 'of critical strategic and security importance to the state of Israel and regional stability'. Israeli troops took the volcanic plateau from Syria in the six-day war in 1967 and later annexed it, moves that were condemned by the UN security council and never internationally recognised." (Trump provokes global anger by recognising Israel's claim to Golan Heights, Oliver Holmes, theguardian.com, 23/3/19)
"Following the Israeli occupation of the #Syrian #Golan in 1967, approx. 95% of the population was forcibly transferred or displaced. The Israeli army then demolished their homes, destroying one city & 340 villages and farms. These were replaced by Israeli agricultural settlements." (Tweet @GolanMarsad, 22//3/19)
(Al-Marsad "monitors and documents violations of international humanitarian rights law and humanitarian law in the Occupied Syrian Golan.")
IOW, the Israelis did to the Syrian population of the Golan in 1967 what they'd already done to the Palestinians in 1948 and 1967 (West Bank). Serial ethnic cleansing.
"Syria has vowed to retake the Golan Heights as Donald Trump's call for the US to recognise the occupied territory as part of Israel elicited strong responses from Russia, Turkey and Iran. The president ended half a century of US foreign policy and broke from post-second world war international consensus that forbids territorial conquest during war with a tweet on Thursday that said it was time 'to fully recognise Israel's sovereignty over the Golan Heights'. Trump said the territory was 'of critical strategic and security importance to the state of Israel and regional stability'. Israeli troops took the volcanic plateau from Syria in the six-day war in 1967 and later annexed it, moves that were condemned by the UN security council and never internationally recognised." (Trump provokes global anger by recognising Israel's claim to Golan Heights, Oliver Holmes, theguardian.com, 23/3/19)
"Following the Israeli occupation of the #Syrian #Golan in 1967, approx. 95% of the population was forcibly transferred or displaced. The Israeli army then demolished their homes, destroying one city & 340 villages and farms. These were replaced by Israeli agricultural settlements." (Tweet @GolanMarsad, 22//3/19)
(Al-Marsad "monitors and documents violations of international humanitarian rights law and humanitarian law in the Occupied Syrian Golan.")
IOW, the Israelis did to the Syrian population of the Golan in 1967 what they'd already done to the Palestinians in 1948 and 1967 (West Bank). Serial ethnic cleansing.
Friday, March 8, 2019
Zionist Propaganda Fatigue
Yesterday's Sydney Morning Herald excelled itself, devoting half a page to Zionist propaganda.
"Spacecraft snaps epic selfie," reads the headline.
That was followed by this nauseous Zionist trumpeting:
"Organisers of a privately funded Israeli space mission released a striking photo on Tuesday, London time. It shows the spacecraft Beresheet, Hebrew for Genesis, orbiting some 37,500 kilometres away, with the entire Earth (including Australia) visible. A plaque includes the Hebrew inscription 'The People Of Israel Live'. It's scheduled to land on the moon on April 11."
And the "epic selfie" of the headline turns out to be a sticker (?), partly obscuring a distant planet Earth. It contains an Israeli flag and the words SMALL COUNTRY, BIG DREAMS - yes, in bold upper case letters.
Meanwhile, in yesterday's Australian, we find the screaming headline Israelis shoot Palestinians dead after car-ram attack.
When you read the report, however, the "car-ram attack" begins to look more like a road accident.
What appears to have happened is this:
1) Israeli troops were leaving a Palestinian village in the occupied West Bank after a routine terrorising of its inhabitants.
2) Their vehicle broke down near a bend in the road.
3) Three young Palestinian men in a small car, travelling in the opposite direction, rounded the bend and accidentally collided with the stationary Israeli vehicle, injuring 2 soldiers in the process.
4) Trigger-happy troops opened fire, killing two of the Palestinians and wounding a third.
5) The wounded survivor was forced to confess that he and his friends had intended to ram the troops and also that they had been driving around, "hurling firebombs."
6) Conveniently, the troops allegedly "found additional firebombs" in the Palestinians' car.
In short, the Israeli troops murdered two Palestinian civilians, spun their crime as a response to a terrorist attack, tortured a wounded Palestinian to extract a confession, and planted 'evidence' at the scene of the crime.
Mahmoud Habbash, "a Palestinian supreme [court] judge and adviser to Palestinian Authority President Mahmud Abbas," quoted in the AFP report, makes the bleeding obvious point: "It is inconceivable that three young men carry out an operation to run over the occupation soldiers in a car. One driver would be enough."
As it happens, we've seen this scenario before - in the Israeli film Foxtrot (2018), where troops manning a checkpoint shoot up a Palestinian car, killing those inside, and bury the vehicle with the bodies still inside as a cover-up.
Electronic Intifada's Maureen Clare Murphy provides the following context in her report of the incident:
"The Israeli newspaper Haaretz also noted: 'Veteran security figures who have been keeping watch on the West Bank for years can't recall a case of using a car to deliberately ram into people when there was more than one person inside the vehicle.' The paper added: 'Car ramming attacks generally involve one person, who may have acted on momentary impulse.' Israeli forces have opened fire on Palestinian vehicles in which more than one person was traveling in what Israel said were alleged attacks over the past few years, killing a brother in a car with his sister and a teenager travelling with his fiancee. Last year, Israeli forces and armed civilians killed 15 Palestinian assailants or alleged assailants in the West Bank." (Two Palestinians killed in alleged attack, 4/3/19)
But those details would be a bridge too far for Murdoch's Australian.
"Spacecraft snaps epic selfie," reads the headline.
That was followed by this nauseous Zionist trumpeting:
"Organisers of a privately funded Israeli space mission released a striking photo on Tuesday, London time. It shows the spacecraft Beresheet, Hebrew for Genesis, orbiting some 37,500 kilometres away, with the entire Earth (including Australia) visible. A plaque includes the Hebrew inscription 'The People Of Israel Live'. It's scheduled to land on the moon on April 11."
And the "epic selfie" of the headline turns out to be a sticker (?), partly obscuring a distant planet Earth. It contains an Israeli flag and the words SMALL COUNTRY, BIG DREAMS - yes, in bold upper case letters.
Meanwhile, in yesterday's Australian, we find the screaming headline Israelis shoot Palestinians dead after car-ram attack.
When you read the report, however, the "car-ram attack" begins to look more like a road accident.
What appears to have happened is this:
1) Israeli troops were leaving a Palestinian village in the occupied West Bank after a routine terrorising of its inhabitants.
2) Their vehicle broke down near a bend in the road.
3) Three young Palestinian men in a small car, travelling in the opposite direction, rounded the bend and accidentally collided with the stationary Israeli vehicle, injuring 2 soldiers in the process.
4) Trigger-happy troops opened fire, killing two of the Palestinians and wounding a third.
5) The wounded survivor was forced to confess that he and his friends had intended to ram the troops and also that they had been driving around, "hurling firebombs."
6) Conveniently, the troops allegedly "found additional firebombs" in the Palestinians' car.
In short, the Israeli troops murdered two Palestinian civilians, spun their crime as a response to a terrorist attack, tortured a wounded Palestinian to extract a confession, and planted 'evidence' at the scene of the crime.
Mahmoud Habbash, "a Palestinian supreme [court] judge and adviser to Palestinian Authority President Mahmud Abbas," quoted in the AFP report, makes the bleeding obvious point: "It is inconceivable that three young men carry out an operation to run over the occupation soldiers in a car. One driver would be enough."
As it happens, we've seen this scenario before - in the Israeli film Foxtrot (2018), where troops manning a checkpoint shoot up a Palestinian car, killing those inside, and bury the vehicle with the bodies still inside as a cover-up.
Electronic Intifada's Maureen Clare Murphy provides the following context in her report of the incident:
"The Israeli newspaper Haaretz also noted: 'Veteran security figures who have been keeping watch on the West Bank for years can't recall a case of using a car to deliberately ram into people when there was more than one person inside the vehicle.' The paper added: 'Car ramming attacks generally involve one person, who may have acted on momentary impulse.' Israeli forces have opened fire on Palestinian vehicles in which more than one person was traveling in what Israel said were alleged attacks over the past few years, killing a brother in a car with his sister and a teenager travelling with his fiancee. Last year, Israeli forces and armed civilians killed 15 Palestinian assailants or alleged assailants in the West Bank." (Two Palestinians killed in alleged attack, 4/3/19)
But those details would be a bridge too far for Murdoch's Australian.
Monday, August 27, 2018
Israeli War Criminals in the West Bank
"Most [Israelis] are not, like, evil and malevolent toward Palestinians": Yuval Noah Harari.
No, but there are enough who are to provide the subject matter of reports like this, from a Norwegian International Solidarity Movement (ISM) volunteer, Kristin Foss, who describes an Israeli army POGROM on the Palestinian village of Kafr Qaddum in the occupied/colonised West Bank. Note that I've reproduced here only the climactic part of Foss' testimony:
"The shooting had been going for about one and a half hours before it started to calm down. Apart from some tear gas inhalation there had been no injuries at this point. When things were calm, I was approached by a senior citizen, asking if we could help him. He had gone out to his driveway earlier. He was going to get into his car to pick up his wife. He hadn't noticed that his driveway was full of Israeli soldiers. The soldiers stole/confiscated his car and keys, and parked it in the middle of the road as a makeshift shield. As it was calm, we agreed to accompany him to speak to the soldiers and to ask for his car back. There was no shooting, nor stones being thrown at this point. The old man, Anna, and I started walking towards the soldiers with our hands in the air. I had my camera phone in one hand. The man walked surprisingly fast and was soon with the soldiers, whilst Anna and I stopped some 20 metres behind, still with our hands up. I am filming at this point.
"One of the soldiers shouts something at me in Hebrew, I don't understand, but I shout back that the man just wants his car back. Then he shouts that it is dangerous. I shout back that it is only dangerous because he is pointing a machine gun at me. One shot is fired as I am shouting, then another shot is directed at me, and hits me in the abdomen. I would say from approximately 20-30 metres. There is absolutely no doubt I was targeted and shot at deliberately." (A statement from the Norwegian ISM volunteer targeted and shot by an Israeli soldier in Kafr Qaddum, video included. palsolidarity.org, 21/8/18)
While the bullet penetrated her skin at an angle, Kristin lived to tell the tale. Incredibly, however, this appeared on her FB page mere days later: "Went back to Kafr Qaddum to show that solidarity is stronger than fear! Very nervous though, so kept right at the back, up against the wall. Thought I was safe-ish. But they shot me again!! The protest had been on for 2 minutes. Israeli activists at the front talking to the soldiers earlier... so yeah... I just got shot twice in a week." (24/8/18)
Israelis have no excuse. Their silence, referred to by Harari in my previous post, is tantamount to complicity in the war crimes committed by their offspring, most of whom willingly accept being drafted into the trigger-happy IDF at the age of 18.
No, but there are enough who are to provide the subject matter of reports like this, from a Norwegian International Solidarity Movement (ISM) volunteer, Kristin Foss, who describes an Israeli army POGROM on the Palestinian village of Kafr Qaddum in the occupied/colonised West Bank. Note that I've reproduced here only the climactic part of Foss' testimony:
"The shooting had been going for about one and a half hours before it started to calm down. Apart from some tear gas inhalation there had been no injuries at this point. When things were calm, I was approached by a senior citizen, asking if we could help him. He had gone out to his driveway earlier. He was going to get into his car to pick up his wife. He hadn't noticed that his driveway was full of Israeli soldiers. The soldiers stole/confiscated his car and keys, and parked it in the middle of the road as a makeshift shield. As it was calm, we agreed to accompany him to speak to the soldiers and to ask for his car back. There was no shooting, nor stones being thrown at this point. The old man, Anna, and I started walking towards the soldiers with our hands in the air. I had my camera phone in one hand. The man walked surprisingly fast and was soon with the soldiers, whilst Anna and I stopped some 20 metres behind, still with our hands up. I am filming at this point.
"One of the soldiers shouts something at me in Hebrew, I don't understand, but I shout back that the man just wants his car back. Then he shouts that it is dangerous. I shout back that it is only dangerous because he is pointing a machine gun at me. One shot is fired as I am shouting, then another shot is directed at me, and hits me in the abdomen. I would say from approximately 20-30 metres. There is absolutely no doubt I was targeted and shot at deliberately." (A statement from the Norwegian ISM volunteer targeted and shot by an Israeli soldier in Kafr Qaddum, video included. palsolidarity.org, 21/8/18)
While the bullet penetrated her skin at an angle, Kristin lived to tell the tale. Incredibly, however, this appeared on her FB page mere days later: "Went back to Kafr Qaddum to show that solidarity is stronger than fear! Very nervous though, so kept right at the back, up against the wall. Thought I was safe-ish. But they shot me again!! The protest had been on for 2 minutes. Israeli activists at the front talking to the soldiers earlier... so yeah... I just got shot twice in a week." (24/8/18)
Israelis have no excuse. Their silence, referred to by Harari in my previous post, is tantamount to complicity in the war crimes committed by their offspring, most of whom willingly accept being drafted into the trigger-happy IDF at the age of 18.
Sunday, August 26, 2018
More Blah for Your Bucks
Sound the shofers!
The latest BLAH from Israel's much-touted intellectual giant, Yuval Noah Harari, author of such ground-breaking tomes as Blah and Blah Blah. (Warning: there's now another such out and about - Blah Blah Blah).
Courtesy of the suitably worshipful (pro-Iraq War, pro-Blair, pro-Israel, anti-Corbyn) David Aaronovitch, in his puff piece, The BIG Thinker, in this weekend's Weekend Australian Magazine, here are some of Harari's undying utterances (commentary added), culled from same, to put you on your knees:
"My father... had a very big disbelief in any kind of authority... He fought in both the Six Day War of 1967 and the more existential Yom Kippur War of 1973."
Not bad for a guy who doesn't believe in authority, eh? Still, whenever things get down and existential in Israel, as they not infrequently do if you believe the hype, hey, you do what your Zionist masters tell you to, right?
"There are a lot of people today... who might actually look favourably on a scenario of creating a new race of superhumans and leaving ordinary Homo sapiens behind. And if you look at China, for example, today, it's out in the open. People speak of high-quality people and low-quality people."
So here's this bloke, YNH, in Israel, surrounded by folk who, while willingly 'serving' their country in the occupied West Bank and blockaded Gaza, regularly hammer Palestinians because they're inconveniently standing in the way of the 'Jewish' people's brutal quest for Arabrein lebensraum, and what does he do? He fingers... China!
Howzat for chutzpah?
"How optimistic is he about our dealing with this big stuff, when he lives in a country that can't deal with its own very local, very intimate problems? Isn't big-picture thinking also a distraction... from thinking about horribly complicated problems in the here and now? He admits that Israelis have become very good at the art of just not seeing. 'Most people, they are not, like evil and malevolent toward the Palestinians. They just don't care. They don't want to know what's happening there. The mental distance is immense'."
Israel's Palestine problem? Isn't it really Palestine's Israel problem?
Israelis are not evil and malevolent towards the Palestinians... So how does YNH explain the existence of watchdog groups such as B'Tselem, Breaking the Silence, and others? (He doesn't, and can't, of course.) And how does he explain the ongoing electoral success of Netanyahu and his Greater Israel cronies and allies, and Israel's inexorable march to the right? (He doesn't, and can't, of course.)
They just don't care, eh? Neither, we are often reminded, did the Germans of the Nazi era. If YNH were honest, he'd admit to not caring either. In an earlier post I documented a dinner he'd had with the Netanyahus. Aaronovitch's puff piece begins with him going, not an anti-occupation action, but to a gay rights rally in the Tel Aviv bubble.
The latest BLAH from Israel's much-touted intellectual giant, Yuval Noah Harari, author of such ground-breaking tomes as Blah and Blah Blah. (Warning: there's now another such out and about - Blah Blah Blah).
Courtesy of the suitably worshipful (pro-Iraq War, pro-Blair, pro-Israel, anti-Corbyn) David Aaronovitch, in his puff piece, The BIG Thinker, in this weekend's Weekend Australian Magazine, here are some of Harari's undying utterances (commentary added), culled from same, to put you on your knees:
"My father... had a very big disbelief in any kind of authority... He fought in both the Six Day War of 1967 and the more existential Yom Kippur War of 1973."
Not bad for a guy who doesn't believe in authority, eh? Still, whenever things get down and existential in Israel, as they not infrequently do if you believe the hype, hey, you do what your Zionist masters tell you to, right?
"There are a lot of people today... who might actually look favourably on a scenario of creating a new race of superhumans and leaving ordinary Homo sapiens behind. And if you look at China, for example, today, it's out in the open. People speak of high-quality people and low-quality people."
So here's this bloke, YNH, in Israel, surrounded by folk who, while willingly 'serving' their country in the occupied West Bank and blockaded Gaza, regularly hammer Palestinians because they're inconveniently standing in the way of the 'Jewish' people's brutal quest for Arabrein lebensraum, and what does he do? He fingers... China!
Howzat for chutzpah?
"How optimistic is he about our dealing with this big stuff, when he lives in a country that can't deal with its own very local, very intimate problems? Isn't big-picture thinking also a distraction... from thinking about horribly complicated problems in the here and now? He admits that Israelis have become very good at the art of just not seeing. 'Most people, they are not, like evil and malevolent toward the Palestinians. They just don't care. They don't want to know what's happening there. The mental distance is immense'."
Israel's Palestine problem? Isn't it really Palestine's Israel problem?
Israelis are not evil and malevolent towards the Palestinians... So how does YNH explain the existence of watchdog groups such as B'Tselem, Breaking the Silence, and others? (He doesn't, and can't, of course.) And how does he explain the ongoing electoral success of Netanyahu and his Greater Israel cronies and allies, and Israel's inexorable march to the right? (He doesn't, and can't, of course.)
They just don't care, eh? Neither, we are often reminded, did the Germans of the Nazi era. If YNH were honest, he'd admit to not caring either. In an earlier post I documented a dinner he'd had with the Netanyahus. Aaronovitch's puff piece begins with him going, not an anti-occupation action, but to a gay rights rally in the Tel Aviv bubble.
Sunday, July 29, 2018
A Class of Their Own
"Israel is to build hundreds of new homes in a settlement in the occupied West Bank where a Palestinian stabbed three Israelis, one fatally, Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman said yesterday." (Israel to build 400 units to avenge knife attack, AFP/The Australian, 28/7/18)
So Israel wouldn't have expanded its settlement otherwise? Was there ever a more cruel and casuistical colonisation in the annals of settler-colonialism than the Israeli?
So Israel wouldn't have expanded its settlement otherwise? Was there ever a more cruel and casuistical colonisation in the annals of settler-colonialism than the Israeli?
Sunday, July 1, 2018
Don't Give Me that 'Two States' Shit...
Extracts from an interview with Jamal Juma', coordinator of the Palestinian Grassroots Anti-Apartheid Wall Campaign, about the popular resistance in Gaza, the Trump administration's policy toward the question of Palestine, and Palestinian options to chart a new course ('A watershed moment in Palestinian history': interview with Jamal Juma', mondoweiss.net, 29/6/18):
"It is clear that the Wall was designed to isolate and lay siege to Palestinians... It closed off all the dynamic areas that Israel considered necessary to isolate various areas. 80% of the Wall is within the West Bank.
"The second part of the siege is reinforcement of the settlements. Each settlement has what Israel calls a buffer zone - a security apparatus consisting of barbed wire and roads that Palestinians are not allowed to use...Today, there are two road networks. One is for Israeli settlers, about 1,400 kms long, and its purpose is to connect all settlements to one another and to Israel in a kind of network... The other network, the alternative roads, is for Palestinians to use... The two road systems are separate. This is the basis of the racist, discriminatory system we talk about: isolating Palestinians and confining them in limited spaces, and controlling their resources through settlements, the road network, military installations, and the Wall, [all of] which takes up about 62% of the West Bank.
"With the extension of the settlements, we no longer talk about the Palestinians ghettoized in the north, south, and central region. There is more fragmentation of Palestinian residential areas. New settlement outposts are not being discussed in terms of whether they should be removed or not. They are being transformed into settlements. When you see 150 outposts, you are really talking about 150 new settlements. This project is intensifying, especially since Trump took office... This is a watershed moment in Palestinian history. Since Trump took office, US policy has fully adopted the Zionist project and embarked on a process of liquidating the Palestinian cause... It is a clear program. It began with the recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of the Zionist entity, the transfer of the embassy, and the targeting of the refugees by cutting aid to UNRWA... In addition, there is the use of Arab countries that are ready for normalization with Israel and eager to be aligned with the American project - Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the UAE and Egypt [are] pressuring the Palestinians to accept the US liquidation project.
"This has complicated things and taken [the Palestine cause] out of the sphere of international law and the UN... the US has dealt a blow to international law...
"On the formal political level, the Palestinian Authority is in crisis. It had placed its faith in the US, but the US is now clearly determined to liquidate the Palestinian cause. The only real option remaining to the PA is to cast its lot with the Palestinian people and on free people around the world, international solidarity and movements that support us...
"On the popular level, we see serious activity in search of an alternative to the status quo, the largest and most important of which is taking place now in Gaza with the Great March of Return... This has changed stereotypes about Gaza as a launchpad for rockets, a place of terrorism, hijacked by Hamas... Just as the first intifada emerged from Jabaliya in the Gaza Strip, today we have the beginnings of a mass civil disobedience movement. Gaza has a population that is resisting, and Hamas does not control this resistance... The Great March has returned focus on the refugee issue... despite all efforts to ignore and erase it. More than 70% of Gazans are refugees, and they are demanding the right to return to their homes...
"It is clear that the Wall was designed to isolate and lay siege to Palestinians... It closed off all the dynamic areas that Israel considered necessary to isolate various areas. 80% of the Wall is within the West Bank.
"The second part of the siege is reinforcement of the settlements. Each settlement has what Israel calls a buffer zone - a security apparatus consisting of barbed wire and roads that Palestinians are not allowed to use...Today, there are two road networks. One is for Israeli settlers, about 1,400 kms long, and its purpose is to connect all settlements to one another and to Israel in a kind of network... The other network, the alternative roads, is for Palestinians to use... The two road systems are separate. This is the basis of the racist, discriminatory system we talk about: isolating Palestinians and confining them in limited spaces, and controlling their resources through settlements, the road network, military installations, and the Wall, [all of] which takes up about 62% of the West Bank.
"With the extension of the settlements, we no longer talk about the Palestinians ghettoized in the north, south, and central region. There is more fragmentation of Palestinian residential areas. New settlement outposts are not being discussed in terms of whether they should be removed or not. They are being transformed into settlements. When you see 150 outposts, you are really talking about 150 new settlements. This project is intensifying, especially since Trump took office... This is a watershed moment in Palestinian history. Since Trump took office, US policy has fully adopted the Zionist project and embarked on a process of liquidating the Palestinian cause... It is a clear program. It began with the recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of the Zionist entity, the transfer of the embassy, and the targeting of the refugees by cutting aid to UNRWA... In addition, there is the use of Arab countries that are ready for normalization with Israel and eager to be aligned with the American project - Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the UAE and Egypt [are] pressuring the Palestinians to accept the US liquidation project.
"This has complicated things and taken [the Palestine cause] out of the sphere of international law and the UN... the US has dealt a blow to international law...
"On the formal political level, the Palestinian Authority is in crisis. It had placed its faith in the US, but the US is now clearly determined to liquidate the Palestinian cause. The only real option remaining to the PA is to cast its lot with the Palestinian people and on free people around the world, international solidarity and movements that support us...
"On the popular level, we see serious activity in search of an alternative to the status quo, the largest and most important of which is taking place now in Gaza with the Great March of Return... This has changed stereotypes about Gaza as a launchpad for rockets, a place of terrorism, hijacked by Hamas... Just as the first intifada emerged from Jabaliya in the Gaza Strip, today we have the beginnings of a mass civil disobedience movement. Gaza has a population that is resisting, and Hamas does not control this resistance... The Great March has returned focus on the refugee issue... despite all efforts to ignore and erase it. More than 70% of Gazans are refugees, and they are demanding the right to return to their homes...
Monday, June 25, 2018
Foxtrot? Tommyrot! 2
When I responded to Paul Byrnes' Herald review of the Israeli film Foxtrot (see my 21/6/18 post Foxtrot? Tommyrot!), I was under the impression that the grief-stricken Israeli parents of Act 1 were those of an Israeli soldier killed in Act 2. This, it seems, is not the case, as yet another review of the same film in the same paper (why?) indicates (A bloody legacy, Stephanie Bunbury, 23/6/18).
The parents who wake to a knock on their door one morning, only to be told by military officials that their soldier son, Jonathan, has been killed, apparently represent every Israeli parent: "In Israel, actor Lior Ashkenazi says, everyone knows exactly what has happened; in a country with compulsory national service, that morning knock is like a code. This woman's child must be dead. 'In Israel, everybody knows somebody in this position... It surrounds you: the grief'."
To which I can only add - Bunbury doesn't, of course - if the occupying Israelis are enveloped in grief, it is simply beyond imagining what the occupied Palestinians, whose death toll is infinitely higher, are going through. But when was the last time you saw a commercial release featuring Palestinians in a sympathetic light (not to mention getting TWO reviews in the same media outlet)? In fact, what this 'morning knock' business is really all about is hyping a supposed threat to the occupier by the occupied, and casting the occupiers as victims.
Bunbury then says of Michael, the father, that he "fought his own war in Lebanon. Of course he did: there is always a war on. Everyone carries the same burden." It seems she's blissfully unaware that all of Israel's wars have SFA to do with self-defence, and everything to do with acquiring more territory. Such land-grabs, of course, are always hyped as existential threats, and the "burden" in murder and destruction is borne exclusively by Israel's Arab victims.
Moving on to the second act (which, you'll recall from Byrnes' review, is set at a checkpoint in the desert), we're told that it's set at a "checkpoint near the Lebanese border." Here the confusion grows. The soldiers manning the checkpoint are described as lifting "the barrier for a lone camel passing through." There is, of course, no desert anywhere near the Lebanese border, and certainly no camels either. So what gives?
What Byrnes' in his review calls "an accident" is clarified in Bunbury's: "One of their number panics and shoots an entire car of young Palestinians. The solution presents itself: bury the car, including the bodies, in the ever-present mud." Which only leads to further confusion. Who are these mysterious Palestinian youths (over whom, it seems, no tears are shed)? If the checkpoint is "near the Lebanese border," then it's got to be in the Galilee, and the "young Palestinians" would therefore be Israeli citizens. If, on the other hand, they're Palestinians from the occupied West Bank, then all I can say is they're a bloody long way from home.
More confusion arises from the Israeli response to the gunning down of the Palestinians. As anyone familiar with the modus operandi followed by Israeli troops when they murder Palestinians will know, the invariable practice is simply to blame the victims, stick doggedly to the concocted story, and be hailed as heroes by the vast majority of Israelis. Burying the evidence with the help of a bulldozer that just happens to be nearby? I don't think so.
But Maoz, the film's director has an explanation. Bunbury quotes him as saying, "You don't have to be a genius to understand that there is not such a specific roadblock, not such a specific reality."
And you don't have to be a genius to understand that Maoz, quoted elsewhere in the review referring to Israel "a pathetic and anxious society with the distorted perception that comes out of a terrible past trauma," is playing the Holocaust card, a move designed to get Israel off the hook for its crimes against the Palestinians.
I'll let the Haaretz journalist Gideon Levy have the final say on this phony film:
"The film unit of the Israel Defense Forces spokesman's office would not have dared produce such a pro-Israeli and pro-army film like Foxtrot; they would have known that nobody would believe them. Neither could the unit have produced such an aesthetic film - poetic, symbolic and metaphorical. Nor is there a ship of fools that would accept such a demented level of ignorant assaults on the film by the culture minister without having seen it, she might not have realized what a PR treasure it is.
"Her colleague, a general in the war against the boycott, Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan, who is also information minister, should have instructed his ministry to immediately distribute the film worldwide as part of his battle. There's nothing like Foxtrot for beautifying the image of the state. Look how beautiful we are, we Israelis. What great cinema we have, what beautiful homes we live in and how beautiful are our Holocaust survivors; even our much maligned checkpoints are so beautiful.
"Sanuel Maoz made a beautiful film - and a deceptive, misleading film. The last thing it deserves is to be decried as harming the state. Its foxtrot is dirty dancing. Maoz says that the film is a metaphor for universal questions about fatalism, choice, fate and the individual's ability to shape his future. Those are worthy and fascinating subjects. Maoz could have dealt with them by means of a story line about a wrong diagnosis of cancer, a critical date that a couple never went on, or someone who was fatally late for a flight. Instead, he chose to focus the debate in the context of the Israeli occupation. And so he shouldn't play dumb and claim that this is an artistic and imaginary film, without context or obligation to reality and truth. The moment he chose the occupation as the arena for his film, he turned it into a political and current events film. Not only is that not the way to dance the foxtrot, as Maoz discovered too late, this is not the way the occupation looks - in fact, there's no resemblance at all.
"Beautifying the occupation is no less grave than tarnishing its image. Calling Israeli soldiers is a terrible thing, but presenting them at checkpoints the way Naomi Shemer described the soldiers in her iconic 1968 song At the Nahal Outpost, where she saw 'lots of beautiful things,' as well as 'small poetry books on shelves' - that was no less grave. A lie is a lie, no matter what direction it takes. There aren't lots of beautiful things at a checkpoint. Not even one. Maoz decided to embellish it. He has the artistic right to describe reality as he sees it, but he can't ignore the implications of his hallucinations. When an IDF checkpoint looks like a beautiful surrealistic scene in an old-time Italian movie - maybe they'll believe it in Venice. Here it's not possible. There are no beautiful checkpoints like that, with a camel passing silently by and an ice-cream truck with a blond girl painted on it.
"Neither can he shirk responsibility for the message or for the fact that the Palestinians are momentary extras, and even in that context, their depiction is so different from the reality. In Foxtrot, they ride in a collector's Chevy, with Israeli license plates, wearing their finery, on the way to a wedding or back from a party, erupting in wild joyful song.
"There aren't a lot of apartments designed like the one where Yonatan's parents live and there are no soldiers who sit at checkpoints drawing comics in their many hours of free time and checking the incline of the packing container, which is a metaphor for the extent of being stuck in the mud.
"The soldiers at the checkpoints simply don't look like that. They don't throw sorrowful looks and they're mainly busy with brutality, not comics. Most of them didn't grow up in House Beautiful apartments belonging to handsome architects who married their students; the ones that did go to the elite 8200 intelligence unit. They can be shown anyway one wants, but when an Israeli director with political awareness does that, he's making propaganda, not cinema.
"It's not the 'scene' that everyone is talking about that makes this film infuriating. Not the killing by IDF soldiers and not the concealing of evidence that followed. Foxtrot is trying to conceal something else entirely: It's trying to conceal the ugliness." (A beautiful film about the occupation, 1/10/17)
The parents who wake to a knock on their door one morning, only to be told by military officials that their soldier son, Jonathan, has been killed, apparently represent every Israeli parent: "In Israel, actor Lior Ashkenazi says, everyone knows exactly what has happened; in a country with compulsory national service, that morning knock is like a code. This woman's child must be dead. 'In Israel, everybody knows somebody in this position... It surrounds you: the grief'."
To which I can only add - Bunbury doesn't, of course - if the occupying Israelis are enveloped in grief, it is simply beyond imagining what the occupied Palestinians, whose death toll is infinitely higher, are going through. But when was the last time you saw a commercial release featuring Palestinians in a sympathetic light (not to mention getting TWO reviews in the same media outlet)? In fact, what this 'morning knock' business is really all about is hyping a supposed threat to the occupier by the occupied, and casting the occupiers as victims.
Bunbury then says of Michael, the father, that he "fought his own war in Lebanon. Of course he did: there is always a war on. Everyone carries the same burden." It seems she's blissfully unaware that all of Israel's wars have SFA to do with self-defence, and everything to do with acquiring more territory. Such land-grabs, of course, are always hyped as existential threats, and the "burden" in murder and destruction is borne exclusively by Israel's Arab victims.
Moving on to the second act (which, you'll recall from Byrnes' review, is set at a checkpoint in the desert), we're told that it's set at a "checkpoint near the Lebanese border." Here the confusion grows. The soldiers manning the checkpoint are described as lifting "the barrier for a lone camel passing through." There is, of course, no desert anywhere near the Lebanese border, and certainly no camels either. So what gives?
What Byrnes' in his review calls "an accident" is clarified in Bunbury's: "One of their number panics and shoots an entire car of young Palestinians. The solution presents itself: bury the car, including the bodies, in the ever-present mud." Which only leads to further confusion. Who are these mysterious Palestinian youths (over whom, it seems, no tears are shed)? If the checkpoint is "near the Lebanese border," then it's got to be in the Galilee, and the "young Palestinians" would therefore be Israeli citizens. If, on the other hand, they're Palestinians from the occupied West Bank, then all I can say is they're a bloody long way from home.
More confusion arises from the Israeli response to the gunning down of the Palestinians. As anyone familiar with the modus operandi followed by Israeli troops when they murder Palestinians will know, the invariable practice is simply to blame the victims, stick doggedly to the concocted story, and be hailed as heroes by the vast majority of Israelis. Burying the evidence with the help of a bulldozer that just happens to be nearby? I don't think so.
But Maoz, the film's director has an explanation. Bunbury quotes him as saying, "You don't have to be a genius to understand that there is not such a specific roadblock, not such a specific reality."
And you don't have to be a genius to understand that Maoz, quoted elsewhere in the review referring to Israel "a pathetic and anxious society with the distorted perception that comes out of a terrible past trauma," is playing the Holocaust card, a move designed to get Israel off the hook for its crimes against the Palestinians.
I'll let the Haaretz journalist Gideon Levy have the final say on this phony film:
"The film unit of the Israel Defense Forces spokesman's office would not have dared produce such a pro-Israeli and pro-army film like Foxtrot; they would have known that nobody would believe them. Neither could the unit have produced such an aesthetic film - poetic, symbolic and metaphorical. Nor is there a ship of fools that would accept such a demented level of ignorant assaults on the film by the culture minister without having seen it, she might not have realized what a PR treasure it is.
"Her colleague, a general in the war against the boycott, Public Security Minister Gilad Erdan, who is also information minister, should have instructed his ministry to immediately distribute the film worldwide as part of his battle. There's nothing like Foxtrot for beautifying the image of the state. Look how beautiful we are, we Israelis. What great cinema we have, what beautiful homes we live in and how beautiful are our Holocaust survivors; even our much maligned checkpoints are so beautiful.
"Sanuel Maoz made a beautiful film - and a deceptive, misleading film. The last thing it deserves is to be decried as harming the state. Its foxtrot is dirty dancing. Maoz says that the film is a metaphor for universal questions about fatalism, choice, fate and the individual's ability to shape his future. Those are worthy and fascinating subjects. Maoz could have dealt with them by means of a story line about a wrong diagnosis of cancer, a critical date that a couple never went on, or someone who was fatally late for a flight. Instead, he chose to focus the debate in the context of the Israeli occupation. And so he shouldn't play dumb and claim that this is an artistic and imaginary film, without context or obligation to reality and truth. The moment he chose the occupation as the arena for his film, he turned it into a political and current events film. Not only is that not the way to dance the foxtrot, as Maoz discovered too late, this is not the way the occupation looks - in fact, there's no resemblance at all.
"Beautifying the occupation is no less grave than tarnishing its image. Calling Israeli soldiers is a terrible thing, but presenting them at checkpoints the way Naomi Shemer described the soldiers in her iconic 1968 song At the Nahal Outpost, where she saw 'lots of beautiful things,' as well as 'small poetry books on shelves' - that was no less grave. A lie is a lie, no matter what direction it takes. There aren't lots of beautiful things at a checkpoint. Not even one. Maoz decided to embellish it. He has the artistic right to describe reality as he sees it, but he can't ignore the implications of his hallucinations. When an IDF checkpoint looks like a beautiful surrealistic scene in an old-time Italian movie - maybe they'll believe it in Venice. Here it's not possible. There are no beautiful checkpoints like that, with a camel passing silently by and an ice-cream truck with a blond girl painted on it.
"Neither can he shirk responsibility for the message or for the fact that the Palestinians are momentary extras, and even in that context, their depiction is so different from the reality. In Foxtrot, they ride in a collector's Chevy, with Israeli license plates, wearing their finery, on the way to a wedding or back from a party, erupting in wild joyful song.
"There aren't a lot of apartments designed like the one where Yonatan's parents live and there are no soldiers who sit at checkpoints drawing comics in their many hours of free time and checking the incline of the packing container, which is a metaphor for the extent of being stuck in the mud.
"The soldiers at the checkpoints simply don't look like that. They don't throw sorrowful looks and they're mainly busy with brutality, not comics. Most of them didn't grow up in House Beautiful apartments belonging to handsome architects who married their students; the ones that did go to the elite 8200 intelligence unit. They can be shown anyway one wants, but when an Israeli director with political awareness does that, he's making propaganda, not cinema.
"It's not the 'scene' that everyone is talking about that makes this film infuriating. Not the killing by IDF soldiers and not the concealing of evidence that followed. Foxtrot is trying to conceal something else entirely: It's trying to conceal the ugliness." (A beautiful film about the occupation, 1/10/17)
Thursday, March 1, 2018
Pulling Wings off Butterflies
It is difficult to imagine an occupying power more given to gratuitous acts of sadism against its victims than that of Israel. Like pulling wings off butterflies:
"Israeli forces detained a teenage Palestinian boy who has been missing part of his skull since December, when he was shot in the head by an Israeli soldier during a protest against the occupation of his West Bank village. The boy, Mohammed Tamimi, 15, was one of ten Palestinian residents of the village of Nabi Saleh arrested in a pre-dawn raid. Tamimi's 17-year-old cousin, Ahed, has been in an Israeli military prison since December, when she was filmed slapping an Israeli soldier outside her family home about an hour after Mohammed was shot." (In pre-dawn raid, Israel arrests badly wounded cousin of Ahed Tamimi, jailed protest icon, theintercept.com,
"Israeli forces detained a teenage Palestinian boy who has been missing part of his skull since December, when he was shot in the head by an Israeli soldier during a protest against the occupation of his West Bank village. The boy, Mohammed Tamimi, 15, was one of ten Palestinian residents of the village of Nabi Saleh arrested in a pre-dawn raid. Tamimi's 17-year-old cousin, Ahed, has been in an Israeli military prison since December, when she was filmed slapping an Israeli soldier outside her family home about an hour after Mohammed was shot." (In pre-dawn raid, Israel arrests badly wounded cousin of Ahed Tamimi, jailed protest icon, theintercept.com,
Sunday, December 24, 2017
Who'd Be an Occupier These Days?
"The heavily armed soldiers do not respond in the face of what appears to be an attempt to provoke rather than harm them." (Women's 'assault aims to provoke Israeli soldiers', AFP, The Australian, 23/12/17)
The 50-year-old Israeli occupation of Palestine is unique in the annals of military occupations.
Up to now, military occupations were always thought to consist of an occupying force, lording it over an occupied people.
The former was a strutting brute, armed to the teeth. A potential thug, or even killer.
The occupied, on the other hand, were essentially at his mercy, although, when sufficiently provoked by the inherent injustice of the occupation or by specific incidences of brutality on the part of the occupier, sometimes lashed out at the occupier. (Up until the Israeli occupation of Palestine, these were known as acts of resistance, and every right-thinking person understood them as such and applauded them.)
Not any longer, however.
These days, none of this received wisdom applies. These days, in occupied Palestine at least, it's the occupying forces, not the occupied population, one has to feel sorry for. Just imagine: Israel's occupying forces, innocent bystanders really, must go about their pure-as-the-driven-snow business, never knowing when they may be provoked or - God forbid! - harmed.
Given this paradigmatic shift in our understanding of these matters, maybe its time historians revisited the subject of, say, the French resistance to the Nazi occupation. What say you, Agence France Presse?
The 50-year-old Israeli occupation of Palestine is unique in the annals of military occupations.
Up to now, military occupations were always thought to consist of an occupying force, lording it over an occupied people.
The former was a strutting brute, armed to the teeth. A potential thug, or even killer.
The occupied, on the other hand, were essentially at his mercy, although, when sufficiently provoked by the inherent injustice of the occupation or by specific incidences of brutality on the part of the occupier, sometimes lashed out at the occupier. (Up until the Israeli occupation of Palestine, these were known as acts of resistance, and every right-thinking person understood them as such and applauded them.)
Not any longer, however.
These days, none of this received wisdom applies. These days, in occupied Palestine at least, it's the occupying forces, not the occupied population, one has to feel sorry for. Just imagine: Israel's occupying forces, innocent bystanders really, must go about their pure-as-the-driven-snow business, never knowing when they may be provoked or - God forbid! - harmed.
Given this paradigmatic shift in our understanding of these matters, maybe its time historians revisited the subject of, say, the French resistance to the Nazi occupation. What say you, Agence France Presse?
Thursday, December 21, 2017
Truly Vile Stuff!
What happens if Israel's occupation forces have just shot your 14-year-old cousin in the head and are hanging around your house like a bad smell?
What happens if you confront the bastards, and even slap their ugly faces?
Any decent human being would hail your courage and your spirit.
But not Ruth Eglash of the Washington Post:
"Israelis call her 'Shirley Temper' and say she epitomises 'Pallywood,' or Palestinian propaganda attempts to discredit Israel. Palestinians call her a hero, for fearlessly standing up to those who enforce the Israeli occupation of their land and those who terrorise her village. Her real name is Ahed Tamimi. And a video of her confronting or provoking Israeli soldiers - depending on how you look at it - has gone viral." (Israelis call her 'Shirley Temper.' Palestinians call her a hero, 19/12/17)
Truly vile stuff!
What happens if you confront the bastards, and even slap their ugly faces?
Any decent human being would hail your courage and your spirit.
But not Ruth Eglash of the Washington Post:
"Israelis call her 'Shirley Temper' and say she epitomises 'Pallywood,' or Palestinian propaganda attempts to discredit Israel. Palestinians call her a hero, for fearlessly standing up to those who enforce the Israeli occupation of their land and those who terrorise her village. Her real name is Ahed Tamimi. And a video of her confronting or provoking Israeli soldiers - depending on how you look at it - has gone viral." (Israelis call her 'Shirley Temper.' Palestinians call her a hero, 19/12/17)
Truly vile stuff!
Friday, September 29, 2017
Corbyn's Latest Foreign Policy Pronouncements
From Jeremy Corbyn's 2017 Labour conference speech in Brighton:
"[W]e also know that terrorism is thriving in a world our governments have helped to shape, with its failed states, military interventions and occupations where millions are forced to flee conflict or hunger. We have to do better and swap the knee-jerk response of another bombing campaign for long-term help to solve conflicts rather than fuel them. And we must put our values at the heart of our foreign policy. Democracy and human rights are not an optional extra to be deployed selectively.
"So we cannot be silent at the cruel Saudi war in Yemen, while continuing to supply arms to Saudi Arabia, or the crushing of democracy in Egypt or Bahrain, or the tragic loss of life in Congo. And I say to Aung San Suu Kyi - a champion of democracy and human rights - : end the violence now against the Rohingya in Myanmar and allow the UN and international aid agencies in to Rakhine state. The Rohingya have suffered for too long!
"We should stand firm for peaceful solutions to international crises. Let's tone down the rhetoric, and back dialogue and negotiations to wind down the deeply dangerous confrontation over the Korean Peninsula. And I appeal to the UN secretary general, Antonio Guterres to use the authority of his office and go to Washington and Pyongyang to kick start that essential process of dialogue.
"And let's give real support to end the oppression of the Palestinian people, the 50-year occupation and illegal settlement expansion and move to a genuine two-state solution of the Israel-Palestine conflict.
"Britain's voice needs to be heard independently in the world. We must be a candid friend to the United States, now more than ever. The values we share are not served by building walls, banning immigrants on the basis of religion, polluting the planet, or pandering to racism."
A genuine two-state solution of the Israel-Palestine conflict???
Meanwhile, back in occupied Palestine, in the illegal Gush Etzion settlement bloc, to be precise, Netanyahu and 5,000 guests have just celebrated 50 years of Israeli occupation... 'There will be no more uprooting of settlements in the land of Israel,' [Netanyahu] said to applause." (Israel holds controversial ceremony marking 50 years of settlement, Michael Blum, yahoo.com/news, 28/9/17)
"[W]e also know that terrorism is thriving in a world our governments have helped to shape, with its failed states, military interventions and occupations where millions are forced to flee conflict or hunger. We have to do better and swap the knee-jerk response of another bombing campaign for long-term help to solve conflicts rather than fuel them. And we must put our values at the heart of our foreign policy. Democracy and human rights are not an optional extra to be deployed selectively.
"So we cannot be silent at the cruel Saudi war in Yemen, while continuing to supply arms to Saudi Arabia, or the crushing of democracy in Egypt or Bahrain, or the tragic loss of life in Congo. And I say to Aung San Suu Kyi - a champion of democracy and human rights - : end the violence now against the Rohingya in Myanmar and allow the UN and international aid agencies in to Rakhine state. The Rohingya have suffered for too long!
"We should stand firm for peaceful solutions to international crises. Let's tone down the rhetoric, and back dialogue and negotiations to wind down the deeply dangerous confrontation over the Korean Peninsula. And I appeal to the UN secretary general, Antonio Guterres to use the authority of his office and go to Washington and Pyongyang to kick start that essential process of dialogue.
"And let's give real support to end the oppression of the Palestinian people, the 50-year occupation and illegal settlement expansion and move to a genuine two-state solution of the Israel-Palestine conflict.
"Britain's voice needs to be heard independently in the world. We must be a candid friend to the United States, now more than ever. The values we share are not served by building walls, banning immigrants on the basis of religion, polluting the planet, or pandering to racism."
A genuine two-state solution of the Israel-Palestine conflict???
Meanwhile, back in occupied Palestine, in the illegal Gush Etzion settlement bloc, to be precise, Netanyahu and 5,000 guests have just celebrated 50 years of Israeli occupation... 'There will be no more uprooting of settlements in the land of Israel,' [Netanyahu] said to applause." (Israel holds controversial ceremony marking 50 years of settlement, Michael Blum, yahoo.com/news, 28/9/17)
Sunday, September 17, 2017
Rambamming Works Wonders
John Lyons, former Middle East correspondent for The Australian has reported in his new book that:
"Soon after I arrived in Israel, I asked an Israeli military commander, Lieutenant Colonel Eliezer Toledano, the operations officer for the Israeli Army in the West Bank, whether he regarded the West Bank as 'occupied'. He looked puzzled. I explained that for years the pro-Israel lobby in Melbourne had insisted to me that the West Bank was not 'occupied'. 'If this is not occupied then the media has missed one of the biggest stories of your time, our withdrawal from the West Bank,' the commander responded, laughing." (Balcony Over Jerusalem: A Middle East Memoir, 2017, p 279)
The aforementioned "pro-Israel lobby in Melbourne" is, of course, the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC), organisers of the 'Rambam study visit' to Israel in which Anne Aly and several other federal Labor politicians (Meryl Swanson (NSW), Milton Dick (QLD), Julian Hill (VIC), Steve Georganas (SA) and SA senator Alex Gallacher) participated in March this year.*
Just how successful the visit was in Rambamming home AIJAC's 'not occupied' propaganda line is particularly evident in the report-back responses of Rambamees Meryl Swanson, MP (Paterson, NSW) and Milton Dick (Oxley).
Here's Swanson:
"Like a lot of people, I had watched documentaries and read things and thought, these people [Palestinians] are occupied. I've come home feeling that [view] has somewhat shifted, and that my perspectives are far broader now... I'm now thinking about what I can do in my electorate to form [agricultural] linkages with Israel." (Israel trip empowered MPs, The Australian Jewish News, 4/4/17)
And here's Dick:
"I think terms that are often bandied about - like settlements, occupation, apartheid and the wall - these are all easy catchphrases and cliches to use, and often there isn't a counterbalance given to a lot of those arguments." (ibid)
[*For the record, in addition to the above flock of Labor sheep, AIJAC was also shepherding around, at the same time, a flock of their Liberal counterparts: Tony Pasin (SA) ("Sadly... too much of what we read [in newspapers] is written through a villain and victim prism, and not through the prism of peace."), Nicole Flint (SA), Andrew Hastie (WA), Andrew Wallace (QLD) and SA state shadow minister Corey Wingard.]
"Soon after I arrived in Israel, I asked an Israeli military commander, Lieutenant Colonel Eliezer Toledano, the operations officer for the Israeli Army in the West Bank, whether he regarded the West Bank as 'occupied'. He looked puzzled. I explained that for years the pro-Israel lobby in Melbourne had insisted to me that the West Bank was not 'occupied'. 'If this is not occupied then the media has missed one of the biggest stories of your time, our withdrawal from the West Bank,' the commander responded, laughing." (Balcony Over Jerusalem: A Middle East Memoir, 2017, p 279)
The aforementioned "pro-Israel lobby in Melbourne" is, of course, the Australia/Israel & Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC), organisers of the 'Rambam study visit' to Israel in which Anne Aly and several other federal Labor politicians (Meryl Swanson (NSW), Milton Dick (QLD), Julian Hill (VIC), Steve Georganas (SA) and SA senator Alex Gallacher) participated in March this year.*
Just how successful the visit was in Rambamming home AIJAC's 'not occupied' propaganda line is particularly evident in the report-back responses of Rambamees Meryl Swanson, MP (Paterson, NSW) and Milton Dick (Oxley).
Here's Swanson:
"Like a lot of people, I had watched documentaries and read things and thought, these people [Palestinians] are occupied. I've come home feeling that [view] has somewhat shifted, and that my perspectives are far broader now... I'm now thinking about what I can do in my electorate to form [agricultural] linkages with Israel." (Israel trip empowered MPs, The Australian Jewish News, 4/4/17)
And here's Dick:
"I think terms that are often bandied about - like settlements, occupation, apartheid and the wall - these are all easy catchphrases and cliches to use, and often there isn't a counterbalance given to a lot of those arguments." (ibid)
[*For the record, in addition to the above flock of Labor sheep, AIJAC was also shepherding around, at the same time, a flock of their Liberal counterparts: Tony Pasin (SA) ("Sadly... too much of what we read [in newspapers] is written through a villain and victim prism, and not through the prism of peace."), Nicole Flint (SA), Andrew Hastie (WA), Andrew Wallace (QLD) and SA state shadow minister Corey Wingard.]
Saturday, September 9, 2017
Things That Go Bump in the Night
Zionists and their fellow-travellers (think here of Turnbull/Shorten, for example) are always banging on about Israel's alleged lack of security. They discourse endlessly about its need for 'secure borders,' 'security fences,' and about 'living in a tough neighbourhood.'
All bullshit, of course, designed to mask a genocidal reality.
The simple fact of the matter is that ever since the predatory, European settler-colonial movement known as Zionism was introduced into historic Palestine by the British after World War I, it has turned the lives of its indigenous Arab population into a living hell of insecurity and fear.
When next you hear a Zionist droning on about Israel's alleged need for security, spare a thought for the utterly defenceless inhabitants of the tiny West Bank village of Umm al-Kheir:
"Spent the last two days at Umm al-Kheir, a Bedouin village in the South Hebron Hills, enjoying the wonderful hospitality, generosity, and loving kindness. This was not my first trip there. And as much as I hate to say it, as with most things in Palestine, things are so much worse than my last visit. The illegal colonial settlement of Carmel belonging to the entity called Israel surrounds the village on almost every side. Some of the tents and housing units are less than 20 feet from the 'security fence'. Housing units in the illegal settlement have increased and more are being built, with plans to take more of the land owned by the village to continue expansion.
"The villagers sit day after day waiting for the illegal occupation soldiers to come with their bulldozers to demolish more of their housing. People speak openly about their discouragement for their future but still stand steadfast, [saying] that they will not be moved or defeated. Our tent was one of those closest to the fence and for two nights we sat up most of the night while Zionists threw stones over the fence at the tent or at anything that appeared to move. The village leader says the violence is increasing all the time and fears that one of these nights something much worse than stones will be thrown. Fortunately, no one was hurt (physically) the past two nights but there was little or no sleep for us or any of the men of the village who sat up keeping an open eye and ear to try to spot the thugs doing this. The commotion would wake up many of the villagers and you could hear the crying of many frightened small children throughout the night.
"This is an every night occurrence and everyone is exhausted, all of the time, and can only catch a few hours of sleep after sunrise. Phone calls to the police of the entity called Israel Police as well as the Palestinian Authority Police are a waste of time. No one will respond to the calls for help to make the settler violence stop. Many Internationals, such as ourselves, go for a few nights (when we have the people to do so) to help with a protective presence but it doesn't stop the ever-increasing settler violence. The Bedouin are a very peaceful people and are committed to nonviolence but they are called terrorists by the Zionists and most of the Zionist-supporting governments of the world (such as the United States). More International presence is needed, and more of the world needs to know the truth." (Two nights in Umm al-Kheir: a journal, palsolidarity.org, 5/9/17)
All bullshit, of course, designed to mask a genocidal reality.
The simple fact of the matter is that ever since the predatory, European settler-colonial movement known as Zionism was introduced into historic Palestine by the British after World War I, it has turned the lives of its indigenous Arab population into a living hell of insecurity and fear.
When next you hear a Zionist droning on about Israel's alleged need for security, spare a thought for the utterly defenceless inhabitants of the tiny West Bank village of Umm al-Kheir:
"Spent the last two days at Umm al-Kheir, a Bedouin village in the South Hebron Hills, enjoying the wonderful hospitality, generosity, and loving kindness. This was not my first trip there. And as much as I hate to say it, as with most things in Palestine, things are so much worse than my last visit. The illegal colonial settlement of Carmel belonging to the entity called Israel surrounds the village on almost every side. Some of the tents and housing units are less than 20 feet from the 'security fence'. Housing units in the illegal settlement have increased and more are being built, with plans to take more of the land owned by the village to continue expansion.
"The villagers sit day after day waiting for the illegal occupation soldiers to come with their bulldozers to demolish more of their housing. People speak openly about their discouragement for their future but still stand steadfast, [saying] that they will not be moved or defeated. Our tent was one of those closest to the fence and for two nights we sat up most of the night while Zionists threw stones over the fence at the tent or at anything that appeared to move. The village leader says the violence is increasing all the time and fears that one of these nights something much worse than stones will be thrown. Fortunately, no one was hurt (physically) the past two nights but there was little or no sleep for us or any of the men of the village who sat up keeping an open eye and ear to try to spot the thugs doing this. The commotion would wake up many of the villagers and you could hear the crying of many frightened small children throughout the night.
"This is an every night occurrence and everyone is exhausted, all of the time, and can only catch a few hours of sleep after sunrise. Phone calls to the police of the entity called Israel Police as well as the Palestinian Authority Police are a waste of time. No one will respond to the calls for help to make the settler violence stop. Many Internationals, such as ourselves, go for a few nights (when we have the people to do so) to help with a protective presence but it doesn't stop the ever-increasing settler violence. The Bedouin are a very peaceful people and are committed to nonviolence but they are called terrorists by the Zionists and most of the Zionist-supporting governments of the world (such as the United States). More International presence is needed, and more of the world needs to know the truth." (Two nights in Umm al-Kheir: a journal, palsolidarity.org, 5/9/17)
Wednesday, August 23, 2017
At Last, Plain Speech on Israel
A MUST-WATCH video from The Empire Files' Abby Martin: Abby Martin exposes Zionism and Israel on Joe Rogan Podcast at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rBRxt5ufnGg&feature=youtu.be
Here's the opening:
Martin: You showed me that Dennis Prager video. It was an argument about Israel where he was talking about why Israel deserves to exist. After being there, man, holy shit. I feel like people have no idea... I didn't even know what the hell was going on till I went to Palestine and saw how crazy it was, but, man...
Rogan: What was it like? Give me your thoughts.
Martin: So everyone mistakenly thinks that Hamas controls Palestine. That's not true at all. There's 3 different areas that were drawn up with the original partition. There's the West Bank, which is totally under military rule by Israel, and then there's the Gaza Strip, which is, like, the open-air prison which they bomb the shit out off like every couple of years, and Hamas controls that area. And then there's Jerusalem which is an international city centre that both Arabs and Jews live in, but the West Bank has been occupied militarily since 1967, and it's complete martial law. There's checkpoints, all political parties are illegal, you can't... having a gun is like the least of it. You can't hold a flag, you can't belong to a political party, you literally can't do shit. If you're a Palestinian you just have to sit there and submit, and even if you share a photo of someone who's like been killed by an Israeli soldier, you go to jail for the amount of months...
Rogan: Whaat?
Martin:... based on the shares and likes of the photo... they'll penalise you more and put you in prison for longer and longer. I mean, I'll just tell you one thing... like you put something on Facebook, and it'll be a photo of someone who died, and it'll be like you're sharing a martyr and inciting people, like, to commit suicide, like, on behalf of Palestinians, and you go to jail, and they put them in jail. There's a 99.7% conviction rate, kids are tortured, kids are imprisoned. It is absolutely insane. We went to a funeral... some guy, some farmer who was shot by Israeli forces, and we went to the funeral. All the women are wailing, crying, and as we're leaving the Israeli forces had set up a checkpoint right outside the home. So they're tear-gassing and shooting rubber bullets at people who are simply attending a funeral. We went to a girl's house named Aya who got shot in the vagina for peacefully protesting at some protest and they shot her. They shot 200 people that day. One guy next to her died and another guy was paralysed. They have a policy of shoot to cripple where they shoot guys in their dicks.
Rogan (inhaling audibly)
Martin: Yeah, it's fucking nuts, man. The West Bank is no joke. I thought that I was gonna die several times...
Watch it... and spread it around.
Here's the opening:
Martin: You showed me that Dennis Prager video. It was an argument about Israel where he was talking about why Israel deserves to exist. After being there, man, holy shit. I feel like people have no idea... I didn't even know what the hell was going on till I went to Palestine and saw how crazy it was, but, man...
Rogan: What was it like? Give me your thoughts.
Martin: So everyone mistakenly thinks that Hamas controls Palestine. That's not true at all. There's 3 different areas that were drawn up with the original partition. There's the West Bank, which is totally under military rule by Israel, and then there's the Gaza Strip, which is, like, the open-air prison which they bomb the shit out off like every couple of years, and Hamas controls that area. And then there's Jerusalem which is an international city centre that both Arabs and Jews live in, but the West Bank has been occupied militarily since 1967, and it's complete martial law. There's checkpoints, all political parties are illegal, you can't... having a gun is like the least of it. You can't hold a flag, you can't belong to a political party, you literally can't do shit. If you're a Palestinian you just have to sit there and submit, and even if you share a photo of someone who's like been killed by an Israeli soldier, you go to jail for the amount of months...
Rogan: Whaat?
Martin:... based on the shares and likes of the photo... they'll penalise you more and put you in prison for longer and longer. I mean, I'll just tell you one thing... like you put something on Facebook, and it'll be a photo of someone who died, and it'll be like you're sharing a martyr and inciting people, like, to commit suicide, like, on behalf of Palestinians, and you go to jail, and they put them in jail. There's a 99.7% conviction rate, kids are tortured, kids are imprisoned. It is absolutely insane. We went to a funeral... some guy, some farmer who was shot by Israeli forces, and we went to the funeral. All the women are wailing, crying, and as we're leaving the Israeli forces had set up a checkpoint right outside the home. So they're tear-gassing and shooting rubber bullets at people who are simply attending a funeral. We went to a girl's house named Aya who got shot in the vagina for peacefully protesting at some protest and they shot her. They shot 200 people that day. One guy next to her died and another guy was paralysed. They have a policy of shoot to cripple where they shoot guys in their dicks.
Rogan (inhaling audibly)
Martin: Yeah, it's fucking nuts, man. The West Bank is no joke. I thought that I was gonna die several times...
Watch it... and spread it around.
Friday, August 4, 2017
Israeli Brutality from the River to the Sea
As I said in a previous post, all of Palestine, from the River to the Sea, is Israeli-occupied land. If you think that the crimes of the occupation are confined to the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and that the law of the jungle only applies east of the fabled Green Line, think again:
"According to Adalah, Israel's Police Investigation Unit (Mahash), which operates under the Ministry of Justice, disregards the majority of complaints filed against Israeli police. In a 2014 report, Adalah found that between 2011 and 2013, the Mahash closed 93% of complaints without laying charges... At least 50 Palestinian citizens of Israel have been killed by police since 2000." ('They killed him because he was an Arab', Zena Tahhan, aljazeera.com, 31/7/17)
"According to Adalah, Israel's Police Investigation Unit (Mahash), which operates under the Ministry of Justice, disregards the majority of complaints filed against Israeli police. In a 2014 report, Adalah found that between 2011 and 2013, the Mahash closed 93% of complaints without laying charges... At least 50 Palestinian citizens of Israel have been killed by police since 2000." ('They killed him because he was an Arab', Zena Tahhan, aljazeera.com, 31/7/17)
Wednesday, July 26, 2017
John Lyons Lifts the Lid on the Israeli Occupation of Australia's MSM
I picked up a copy of John Lyons' memoir, Balcony Over Jerusalem yesterday. Just a scan is enough to show that, despite its deficiencies (which can be left to another post), this is an important book. Lyons, of course, was The Australian's Jerusalem-based Middle East correspondent from 2009 to 2015. Tellingly, The Australian, like the Fairfax press, has no such job category these days.
If Bob Carr's 2014 Diary of a Foreign Minister is the first book published in this country to blow the whistle on the malign impact of the Israel lobby on Australia's Palestine/Israel policy, Lyons' book is the first to do so on the lobby's equally malign impact on Australia's journalistic coverage of the Palestine/Israel conflict. As such it should be read (as should Carr's book) by every Australian with any pretensions to political awareness.
In addition to exposing this largely under-the-radar aspect of the Australian mainstream media, Balcony Over Jerusalem is also a chronicle of the quotidian barbarities inflicted on the Palestinian people by Israel's military machine on behalf of its vile and expanding settler ultras.
To quote an example of each of these strands, a) the lobby's corruption of journalism, and b) the cruelty of the Israeli occupation:
a) "As SMH Deputy Editor, I found my phone began ringing with requests for meetings with leaders of the Jewish community... Usually the caller was Robert Klarnet, the public affairs director of the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies. The board would later coordinate tours in partnership with the Melbourne-based Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC). It has become almost a rite of passage for deputy editors of an major Australian news outlet to be offered a 'study trip' to Israel. Colin Rubenstein, the head of AIJAC, told me that AIJAC has sent at least 600 Australian politicians, journalists, political advisers, senior public servants and student leaders on these trips over the last 15 years. It is my assessment that by 'educating' rising media executives, the Israeli lobby has in place editors who 'understand' the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Today, I barely know an Australian newspaper executive who has not been on one of these trips." (pp 16-17)
b) "So much of this conflict happened quietly. From our balcony, if we looked really carefully at the rolling hills between us and Jordan, we could see a tiny Palestinian house 300 metres in front of us, in East Jerusalem. It had a single light, and two or three goats in the yard. From a distance, we got to know this family - its habits, its movements, its celebrations. We'd see the children head off to school each morning. During the day their father herded goats on the hill.
"The oldest child was doing his final year at school, and there's a Palestinian tradition that if a student graduates the family lets off fireworks. It's a way of letting the neighbourhood know the news. We knew what day the results of the final exams were due so we watched to see whether fireworks were let off that night. We saw several other homes in the valley celebrating - then came fireworks from the little house. The boy had passed.
"Then one morning the little house was gone. The Israeli Army had come while we were asleep and bulldozed it, claiming it was an illegal structure. The little house had been part of our lives. Sylvie, Jack and I decided to walk down the valley to speak to the family. The army had demolished everything except the stairway. When we arrived we found the owner sweeping it.
"It was one of the saddest things I've ever seen. A broken man sweeping his stairway to nowhere." (pp 9-10)
Buy it!
If Bob Carr's 2014 Diary of a Foreign Minister is the first book published in this country to blow the whistle on the malign impact of the Israel lobby on Australia's Palestine/Israel policy, Lyons' book is the first to do so on the lobby's equally malign impact on Australia's journalistic coverage of the Palestine/Israel conflict. As such it should be read (as should Carr's book) by every Australian with any pretensions to political awareness.
In addition to exposing this largely under-the-radar aspect of the Australian mainstream media, Balcony Over Jerusalem is also a chronicle of the quotidian barbarities inflicted on the Palestinian people by Israel's military machine on behalf of its vile and expanding settler ultras.
To quote an example of each of these strands, a) the lobby's corruption of journalism, and b) the cruelty of the Israeli occupation:
a) "As SMH Deputy Editor, I found my phone began ringing with requests for meetings with leaders of the Jewish community... Usually the caller was Robert Klarnet, the public affairs director of the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies. The board would later coordinate tours in partnership with the Melbourne-based Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council (AIJAC). It has become almost a rite of passage for deputy editors of an major Australian news outlet to be offered a 'study trip' to Israel. Colin Rubenstein, the head of AIJAC, told me that AIJAC has sent at least 600 Australian politicians, journalists, political advisers, senior public servants and student leaders on these trips over the last 15 years. It is my assessment that by 'educating' rising media executives, the Israeli lobby has in place editors who 'understand' the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Today, I barely know an Australian newspaper executive who has not been on one of these trips." (pp 16-17)
b) "So much of this conflict happened quietly. From our balcony, if we looked really carefully at the rolling hills between us and Jordan, we could see a tiny Palestinian house 300 metres in front of us, in East Jerusalem. It had a single light, and two or three goats in the yard. From a distance, we got to know this family - its habits, its movements, its celebrations. We'd see the children head off to school each morning. During the day their father herded goats on the hill.
"The oldest child was doing his final year at school, and there's a Palestinian tradition that if a student graduates the family lets off fireworks. It's a way of letting the neighbourhood know the news. We knew what day the results of the final exams were due so we watched to see whether fireworks were let off that night. We saw several other homes in the valley celebrating - then came fireworks from the little house. The boy had passed.
"Then one morning the little house was gone. The Israeli Army had come while we were asleep and bulldozed it, claiming it was an illegal structure. The little house had been part of our lives. Sylvie, Jack and I decided to walk down the valley to speak to the family. The army had demolished everything except the stairway. When we arrived we found the owner sweeping it.
"It was one of the saddest things I've ever seen. A broken man sweeping his stairway to nowhere." (pp 9-10)
Buy it!
Monday, July 24, 2017
The Dead Weight of Israel Lobby Censorship
From the Australian's former Middle East Correspondent, John Lyons:
"Through my six years in the Middle East I'd come under constant pressure from Israel lobby groups to pull my punches. I realised from many discussions with other foreign journalists that this pressure was applied in many countries. Of the many hours of discussion I had with my colleagues in the foreign media, one comment shocked me. It was when I asked Phillipe Agret, the bureau of Agence France Press, a question. AFP is one of the most powerful news agencies in the world. It is highly regarded as credible and independent. It is famous for resisting pressure in whichever country it operates. Agret and I were discussing how some media groups censored their reporting out of Israel in a way that they did in no other country. I asked him who he thought was self-censoring out of Israel. Without hesitation, he replied: 'Everybody'." (From Man in the middle: For a Jerusalem correspondent, the truth is always hard won, The Weekend Australian Magazine, 22/7/17)
Errr... any of you guys ever heard of resistance?
"Why do the supporters of Israel want to prevent stories like this [Four Corners: Stone Cold Justice (2014)] from spreading overseas? When we arrived we did not realise the prize that many political factions in the country coveted: formalising the occupation of the West Bank into official annexation and achieving Greater Israel... In order to continue pursuing its endgame of annexing the West Bank, [the Israeli right] can't allow the international community to form the view that the occupation is unacceptable. So reports of brutality in the West Bank are minimised so that international opinion does not turn against it." (ibid)
NB: The TWA's piece, Man in the middle, is an edited extract from Balcony Over Jerusalem, by John Lyons and Sylvie Le Clezio, released today.)
"Through my six years in the Middle East I'd come under constant pressure from Israel lobby groups to pull my punches. I realised from many discussions with other foreign journalists that this pressure was applied in many countries. Of the many hours of discussion I had with my colleagues in the foreign media, one comment shocked me. It was when I asked Phillipe Agret, the bureau of Agence France Press, a question. AFP is one of the most powerful news agencies in the world. It is highly regarded as credible and independent. It is famous for resisting pressure in whichever country it operates. Agret and I were discussing how some media groups censored their reporting out of Israel in a way that they did in no other country. I asked him who he thought was self-censoring out of Israel. Without hesitation, he replied: 'Everybody'." (From Man in the middle: For a Jerusalem correspondent, the truth is always hard won, The Weekend Australian Magazine, 22/7/17)
Errr... any of you guys ever heard of resistance?
"Why do the supporters of Israel want to prevent stories like this [Four Corners: Stone Cold Justice (2014)] from spreading overseas? When we arrived we did not realise the prize that many political factions in the country coveted: formalising the occupation of the West Bank into official annexation and achieving Greater Israel... In order to continue pursuing its endgame of annexing the West Bank, [the Israeli right] can't allow the international community to form the view that the occupation is unacceptable. So reports of brutality in the West Bank are minimised so that international opinion does not turn against it." (ibid)
NB: The TWA's piece, Man in the middle, is an edited extract from Balcony Over Jerusalem, by John Lyons and Sylvie Le Clezio, released today.)
Monday, June 12, 2017
Deathbed Visions
Deathbed visions in general:
"In 1926, deathbed visions crossed from superstition to science with a book by British physicist William Barrett. He collected stories such as this one from a nurse who wrote about a woman suffering an aggressive and painful cancer. 'Suddenly her sufferings appeared to cease,' she said. 'The expression on her face, which a moment before had been distorted by pain, changed to one of radiant joy. Gazing upwards, with a glad light in her eyes, she raised her hands and exclaimed, 'Oh mother dear, you have come to take me home. I am so glad!' And in another moment, her physical life ceased.' Deathbed visions, as described by Sir William and others who came after him... are a comforting vision, often of friends or relatives, reassuring the patient that they will not be alone, and need not be afraid." (The very last thing we see before we die, Jordan Baker, Sunday Telegraph, 4/6/17)
Deathbed visions in OCCUPIED Palestine:
"That night, Jamal said his wife [dying of cancer] suddenly stirred and spoke to him. She seemed frightened and confused. She asked her husband why her grandchildren had come to the Israeli checkpoint alone. Of course, they had not, this was just a dream or a delusion. The grandchildren were toddlers. They were at home. 'I was surprised by this,' Jamal said. 'I didn't imagine this would be on her mind. But she kept going on about the checkpoint, the checkpoint, over and over.' Jamal said his wife, at her last moments, was not seeing angels but Israeli soldiers." (Mid East ironies, William Booth and Sufian Taha, Washington Post/ Australian Financial Review, 2/6/17)
"In 1926, deathbed visions crossed from superstition to science with a book by British physicist William Barrett. He collected stories such as this one from a nurse who wrote about a woman suffering an aggressive and painful cancer. 'Suddenly her sufferings appeared to cease,' she said. 'The expression on her face, which a moment before had been distorted by pain, changed to one of radiant joy. Gazing upwards, with a glad light in her eyes, she raised her hands and exclaimed, 'Oh mother dear, you have come to take me home. I am so glad!' And in another moment, her physical life ceased.' Deathbed visions, as described by Sir William and others who came after him... are a comforting vision, often of friends or relatives, reassuring the patient that they will not be alone, and need not be afraid." (The very last thing we see before we die, Jordan Baker, Sunday Telegraph, 4/6/17)
Deathbed visions in OCCUPIED Palestine:
"That night, Jamal said his wife [dying of cancer] suddenly stirred and spoke to him. She seemed frightened and confused. She asked her husband why her grandchildren had come to the Israeli checkpoint alone. Of course, they had not, this was just a dream or a delusion. The grandchildren were toddlers. They were at home. 'I was surprised by this,' Jamal said. 'I didn't imagine this would be on her mind. But she kept going on about the checkpoint, the checkpoint, over and over.' Jamal said his wife, at her last moments, was not seeing angels but Israeli soldiers." (Mid East ironies, William Booth and Sufian Taha, Washington Post/ Australian Financial Review, 2/6/17)
Thursday, June 8, 2017
The 50-Year Rape
Today is the 50th anniversary of the fourth day of the June/Six-Day war of 1967, which of course led directly to the now 50-year old OCCUPATION of the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza Strip and Syria's Golan Heights.
Today, 50 years ago, Israel completed what it had failed to do in 1948 - seize control of, and OCCUPY, the remaining 22% of historic Palestine, namely the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
Today, 50 years ago, Israel RAPED the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
Is 'raped' too harsh a word for you? Don't blame me, I'm just echoing the words of then Israeli 'defence' minister, Moshe Dayan:
"The situation between us is like the complex relationship between a Bedouin man and the young girl he has taken against her wishes,' Dayan told the Palestinian poet Fadwa Tukan. 'But when their children are born, they will see the man as their father and the woman as their mother. The initial act will mean nothing to them. You, the Palestinians, as a nation, do not want us today, but we will change your attitude by imposing our presence upon you'." (Tom Segev, 1967: Israel, The War & the Year that Transformed the Middle East, 2007, p 478)
Typically, this Israeli rapist cannot be honest about his crime. See how he projects it onto his victim?
If truth be told, the rape of the West Bank has been going on for the past 50 years.
Today, 50 years ago, Israel completed what it had failed to do in 1948 - seize control of, and OCCUPY, the remaining 22% of historic Palestine, namely the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
Today, 50 years ago, Israel RAPED the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
Is 'raped' too harsh a word for you? Don't blame me, I'm just echoing the words of then Israeli 'defence' minister, Moshe Dayan:
"The situation between us is like the complex relationship between a Bedouin man and the young girl he has taken against her wishes,' Dayan told the Palestinian poet Fadwa Tukan. 'But when their children are born, they will see the man as their father and the woman as their mother. The initial act will mean nothing to them. You, the Palestinians, as a nation, do not want us today, but we will change your attitude by imposing our presence upon you'." (Tom Segev, 1967: Israel, The War & the Year that Transformed the Middle East, 2007, p 478)
Typically, this Israeli rapist cannot be honest about his crime. See how he projects it onto his victim?
If truth be told, the rape of the West Bank has been going on for the past 50 years.
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