A short and succinct letter to the editor in today’s Sydney Morning Herald from Zaid Khan puts things into perspective:

Nearly 70 years ago, in a small eastern European city, an oppressed and occupied people were under siege, living under atrocious and brutal conditions, lacking food, medicine, electricity, water, and slowly being strangled in the hope they would just disappear.

Warsaw Ghetto 1941 - Gaza 2008. Israel, you are a disgrace.

Zaid Khan

What is to be done? Chances are that if you reading this, you already have a good grasp of what is happening. Also avail yourself to first hand accounts from residents in Gaza, such as Tabula Gaza, Raising Yousef–A Mother From Gaza and Dr Mona El Farra’s blog. Spread the word and discuss it with people who may not even know all this is happening or who may uncritically accept the Israeli neocon worldview propagated in some of the major media outlets. Israel is committing slow genocide and ethnic cleansing. A simple yet powerful letter like the one above can ricochet around the world.

Here are some other ways you can help: Read the rest of this entry »

Yossi Wolfson’s clear-eyed description of the hafrada regime’s policies in the siege of Gaza and the too-little mentioned exploitation of Gaza’s gas reserves: recommended read. Boldface emphasis is editorial. This article appears in the very worthwhile Challenge magazine, Issue 107, January/February 2008

Gaza City, January 8, 2008. Empty coffins symbolize 62 patients who have died since June because Israel denied them access to medical treatment outside Gaza. Photo by Wissam Nassar

Yossi Wolfson, Economic Warfare in Gaza

NO MORE LIES or twisted tongues. Israel is saying at last what, in the past, it always refused to acknowledge: its war is against the Palestinian population.Until now, in discussions about the separation wall, closures, blockades, house demolition, and other sorts of collective punishment, the State Attorney’s Office lacked the gumption to admit in court that the aim of such measures is to harm civilians. It always came up with convoluted security claims in order to present some vital military necessity for the sake of the War against Terror. Harm to the population was described as a regrettable side effect.

But now a Rubicon has been crossed. This happened after ten human-rights organizations petitioned the High Court on October 28, 2007 against cuts in the supply of electricity and gasoline to Gaza. The petitioners claimed that the cuts amount to collective punishment, which is forbidden under international law. The State might have answered that the cuts are a necessary military measure aimed at stopping the production of Qassam rockets. Or it might have tried some other tongue twister. But no. In their response to the petition, Dana Briskman and Gilad Shirman from the State Attorney’s Office announced openly, without blinking an eye, that the cuts’ main purpose is to exert pressure on the economy as a way of influencing Hamas.

Thus the State clamps the arteries of life for 1.5 million Gazans and describes its action as an economic war. Here it infringes a basic principle of the international laws concerning warfare, which distinguish between the civilian population and the armed forces. Read the rest of this entry »

It was JFK who said that “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.” Our thoughts are with Gaza, where GWB’s recent visit to the region has seen Israel only ratchet up its violence and airstrikes upon a territory from which it only nominally withdrew and in fact continues to choke, killing dozens of people in the space of a few days.

Let us recall that after maintaining a ceasefire or hudna for eighteen months, the democratically elected government of Hamas was subject to nothing but economic siege, divide and rule, sabotage and targeted killings. Let us also recall that Israel rejected the offer of a truce, instead continuing its collective punishment of a whole population already brutally repressed and assassinating leaders and civilians alike, including the son of Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar.

The criminal strangulation of a whole population of a million and a half people in one of the most densely populated places on the planet is being committed on the pretext of rocket attacks on Israel using primitive weapons like Qassams; with pretext being the operative word. As Uri Avnery recently observed in Help! A Ceasefire: “If the Qassams were really bothering our political and military leaders, they would have jumped at the cease-fire offer. But the leaders don’t really care … [it] has an important positive side: it provides an ideal pretext for the actions of the army. The Israeli strategic aim in Gaza is not to put an end to the Qassams. It would still be the same if not a single Qassam fell on Israel.” Israel’s policy is to deliberately destroy Gaza.

The continued lobbing of these low-lethality weapons are in response to gross Israeli violations of airspace, terrifying sonic booms, the longest running illegal military occupation in modern history, Kafkaesque checkpoints which Israel closes with impunity, the indefinite holding of thousands of “administrative detainees” without charge or trial, and continued theft of Palestinian land. Add to that striking electricity generators and water treatment plants, and closing off Gaza crossings to aid and any free movement in or out, making life hell for ordinary people and truly spreading fear and terror.

As Yair Lapid, an Israeli journalist observes, while the outward objective of the IOF’s operation in Gaza is to prevent the Qassam fire, “[it is] the operation in Gaza [that] is causing Qassams to be fired. The Qassam fire will, in turn, bring about the next operation in Gaza, which will lead to the next round of Qassam fire.” Is this the way to end the cycle of violence? How would anyone feel if their home was bulldozed and their land stolen, with no hope of recourse in the courts? And so the cycle of violence continues, because Israel (thinks it) gains from it. Read the rest of this entry »

Dr Ibrahim Mousawi speaking at the World Against War international peace conference in London, December 2007 (10:13)

McCarthyism comes to Europe and the Levant: The Zionist Targeting of Lebanon’s Dr. Ibrahim Mousawi

by Franklin Lamb in Beirut and Ann El Khoury in Sydney

You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?
– Joseph Welch to Senator Joseph McCarthy, April 1954

In a US Senate hearing just over fifty years ago, Boston lawyer Joseph Welch famously rebuked Senator Joseph McCarthy with these now immortal words. They have been immortalized because they have helped furnish what we understand McCarthyism to mean: extreme, mean and unreasonable persecution of people by means of witch-hunts and other tactics including guilt by association or through simple prejudice. This is done in order to achieve a political objective of silencing dissent and preventing the public from learning inconvenient truths.

In the human drama of Middle East theaters and in the wider context of the current Bush administration-spearheaded endless war, the New McCarthyism involves the mobilization of the global ‘war on terror’, in which we see once again the manipulation of fear and the corruption of public discourse in pursuit of narrowly partisan gain – chief among them, the Likudnik Israel-first hawks of the neoconservatives in the US and Israel.

The foot-soldiers of the Likud lobby around the world are applying pressure to stop people from attending academic and activist conferences. As with the McCarthyism of half a century ago, today’s Middle East Studies McCarthyism perpetrated by the Likud Lobby is also a threat to our liberty, to academic freedom, and to basic, fundamental democratic rights and responsibilities. Read the rest of this entry »

Every Christmas this site has focused upon Bethlehem, birthplace of Christ, historically a beautifully polyglot community where Christians, Muslims and Jews coexisted peacefully before the founding of Israel in 1948. Open Bethlehem is a positive campaign to raise awareness around the world about the plight of Christian and Muslim Palestinians in this historic holy city, and the fate of the city itself. The presentations featured in the embedded videos are also available to be downloaded and viewed in powerpoint from the Open Bethlehem site—this is recommended for viewing the slides in full screen, enabling the reading of the text clearly and at one’s leisure.

Previous posts on Christmas and Bethlehem can be found here:

• Bush and Blair banned from Bethlehem’s Church of the Nativity
• Christmas in Bethlehem
• Occupation affecting Christians, too
• The Jerusalem Declaration on Christian Zionism
• Occupied Bethlehem: How children are faring behind the Wall
• Success! Bethlehem twins with local Sydney Council

Organisations

• Open Bethlehem
• The Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem
• Twinning with Palestine Network — International Page

Cartoon by Leunig

Caption: “Look at that! Brilliant! You kill the leader and you nip the whole movement in the bud.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Sonja Karkar is founder of Women for Palestine and her writing has been featured at Counterpunch, Electronic Intifada and many other good alternative press sites.

Picture credits: Banksy (many thanks Dave) and Polyp.

Christians and Muslims Weep Together
A Christmas Reflection on Palestine

By Sonja Karkar | December 19, 2007

As Christmas approaches this year, the thoughts of Christians all over the world will once again turn to Bethlehem, the holy town where Jesus was born over two millennia ago. Voices will be raised in joyful celebration and children everywhere will re-create the Christmas story to help us remember the circumstances in which the Christ child was born.

Such a momentous occasion in such humble surroundings heralded a new way of thinking about people’s relationship with God and with each other. It shook the foundations of an unforgiving society presided over by an unforgiving God and proclaimed peace and goodwill on earth amongst all people. There was indeed much to hope for.

However, the tranquil pastoral scene so familiar to us is not at all evident in Bethlehem today. Bethlehem does not lie still, and peace on earth and goodwill towards all is as elusive as ever. The tyranny of Israel’s occupation and its colonial expansionism is crippling the lives of both Palestinian Christians and Muslims alike. Read the rest of this entry »

Images: Santa’s Ghetto

Meir Margalit recently declared that the zionist project was all but over. To be sure, this was not because of the moral bankruptcy of the occupation of Palestinian territories and the disaster this is causing. Rather, it was pronounced because the Israeli Hight Court recently handed down a response that the state is not responsible for providing absolute security to its residents (in this case Sderot) who filed a suit to have their houses fortified against low-lethality, relatively primitive Qassams.

Margalit connects the dots between this decision and its significance for sounding the clear death knell of the zionist project (editorial emphasis mine):

… after mountains of declarations stating and re-stating the need for a secure haven for the Jewish people, the State now declares: too bad, but we cannot provide that secure haven that the founders of Zionism promised in their time. … For a long time now it has been clear to us that the Zionist “conception” had collapsed. Jews in the Diaspora live in much greater security than the Jews of Israel, and paradoxically, in the Jewish state, which was created to defend us from various kinds of afflictions, more Jews are killed than any other place in the world.

The Zionist establishment is indeed alive and kicking, but that is the wont of giant institutions that refuse to dismantle themselves, especially as the Zionist idea is still a useful lever for mobilizing money in the Diaspora. The Zionist movement continued to stand on its foundations but it was devoid of substance, and it was only a matter of time until it collapsed in on itself. But in the surprising reply of the State lawyers, which was intended merely to save a little money for the State treasury, the State exposed the real truth in its full cruelty: we are not able to fulfill the promise of the Zionist movement to set up a corner of the world in which Jews can live in safety.

It was Martin Buber who said in 1948 that he feared that the success of Zionism would cause the failure of Judaism. In paraphrase of his words we can now add that the creation of the State has also caused the failure of Zionism.

… It does indeed appear that the leaders of the State have recently woken up to the dangers involved in perpetuating the occupation, but we have not yet seen any practical action to stop the deterioration. Read the rest of this entry »

The United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL)
Whose Mission is it fulfilling?

Franklin Lamb
UN Headquarters
Naquora, Lebanon
peoplesgeography.com

Ever since one of this student’s favorite Professors, Dr. Ruth Widmeyer, an accomplished and rare beauty still, who was the first woman to receive a PhD in Soviet Studies from Harvard nearly a half century ago, announced to our Political Science class at Portland State University that our class would be representing France at the Model United Nations Session in San Diego, Lamb was smitten: both with Professor Widmeyer and with the United Nations.

Straight out of high school, rarely having taken a step out of Clackamas County, Oregon, and never having been on an airplane or stayed in a hotel, the prospect of traveling more than 1,300 miles south to compete against the likes of Stanford and UCLA was exciting. Especially for a hayseed (city kids called us hicks in those days) whose main life achievements were a record-demolishing 6 years of perfect attendance at St. John’s Episcopal Church Sunday school and another record (at that time) at Milwaukie Union High School for a basketball free throw percentage of 89%. (I will never understand why Shaquille O’Neal can’t do better than he does at the foul line! Shaq! Habibee! Wear a blindfold for goodness sake and your percentage will surely improve!)

Responding to Professor Widmeyer’s Germanic discipline, our delegation took our work seriously. Between trips to the San Diego Zoo, the swimming pool at our El Cortez Hotel, and side trips to San Diego’s nearby sister city, Tijuana, Mexico, “to buy fresh street made Tacos”, PSU prevailed and we won the award for outstanding Model UN Delegation that year.

When we returned to Campus some of us were surprised by the reaction of the Dean of Students who graciously invited us to his office. We thought perhaps some sort of accolade might be waiting for us but all the Dean cared about was the fact that three of our delegation returned to Portland from the Model UN Session and Tijuana with gonorrhea! Read the rest of this entry »

Lubricated by US taxpayer dollars that go to Israel each year, the Israeli hafrada regime has in turn been flogging arms to Burma’s military junta, responsible for shooting Buddhist monks and foreign journalists in pro-democracy marches in the past week. Amid the chorus of condemnations and sanctions from Bush, Brown and others, no corresponding condemnation is issued about how these peacefully demonstrating Buddhist monks are being murdered with Israeli arms — why shouldn’t sanctions properly be raised to apply to the military regime-supporting arms pusher?

Let’s be clear — Israel is not the only arms supplier to the military regime. Most countries buy arms from more than one country source, and China has traditionally been a large supplier and a significant trading partner (China is Burma’s third most important export destination, and its largest country of origin for imports– 2005 figures). A possible Indian sale of its Advanced Light Helicopter (ALH) to Myanmar also involves vital components sourced from six EU states (Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Sweden and the UK), also potentially — if the transfer goes ahead — circumventing an arms embargo in place since 1988.

The issue is not simply that of arms sales and hypocrisy however, but intelligence links and other ties, and the Israeli and Myanmar regimes have had a close history, and a strong military relationship that continued well after the 1962 coup as a Jane’s Intelligence Report from 2000, excerpted below, details.

Moreover, while European firms are under scrutiny and investigation for any possible transgression, there is no scrutiny of the key role the Israeli military and armaments have played. Israel, like the Myanmar regime, has a widely-documented record of egregious and systemic human rights abuses. In Myanmar-Burma, these abuses include summary executions, torture, and the recruitment of child soldiers. In Israel, they include ethnic cleansing, ongoing military occupation, starvation and deprivation of electricity and restrictions of movement, tens of thousands of detainees held without charge or trial, and much else besides. While the Chinese government is being pressured to use its influence with the Myanmar regime, no such demands are made of its other ally, whose official line is the claim that Israel “has no form of leverage to apply on Burma.” Read the rest of this entry »

Accompanied by the superlative cartoonists Andy Singer and Carlos Latuff, here is Pepe Escobar in a piece aptly entitled Welcome to Planet Gaza (Asia Times Online, 22 Sept 2007). For a related piece, see also Chris Marsden, Israel’s Collective Punishment of Gaza.

Just added: see also Sonja Karkar, The Quality of Mercy in Gaza, Counterpunch (25 Sept) and Chris Doyle, Life Behind the Wire, Guardian CiF (24 Sept)

Escobar reflects upon the recent decision by the apartheid Israeli regime to designate the occupied territory of Gaza, for which it has responsibility it is attempting to abrogate, a “hostile entity”, and rendering the region’s population as Unpeople in the service of neocon US and Israeli exceptionalism. He writes:

It is one of the most scandalous instances of collective punishment anywhere in the world in recent times. And what is the response of the high-minded “international community”? It’s the standard “three monkeys” - willfully deaf, dumb and blind.

This Thursday, the Israeli cabinet’s decision to declare the 8-kilometer-wide, 23km-long, arid Gaza Strip a “hostile territory” has started to be translated by facts on the ground. The Israel Defense Forces have begun “gradually” to cut the supply of fuel and electricity to the 1.5 million population, one of the highest densities on Earth, 50% of them already living under the poverty line, 50% of them under-15s, 33% of them refugees.

Gaza uses about 200 megawatts of electricity; 120 come from Israel; 65 are produced in Gaza; and only 17 come from Egypt. Israel says supply to generators at Gaza’s hospitals will not be affected.

There’s more to come: a trade ban, no freedom of movement, no visits to prisoners in Israeli jails, an overall hardcore financial squeeze, and sooner rather than later, another military onslaught. As the Israeli daily Ha’aretz so nicely put it, this is just a “plan to limit services to civilians”.

Nobody will get in. Few, if any, will get out. If someone wants to go to Gaza, the only way will be via Egypt.

This comes on top of other “restrictions” already in place. No fewer than 200,000 kids went back to school in occupied Palestine this September - just like millions of other kids around the world. But they had nothing apart from their textbooks because the State of Israel deems paper, ink, ballpoint pens and binding materials not to be “fundamental humanitarian needs”. Read the rest of this entry »