See also More guerilla graffiti in the Holy Land: Israel’s apartheid barrier as a canvas

Amid the illegal occupation and the murderous blockade of Gaza by the IOF, here’s some inspired dissent. Artist Peter Kennard meets members of a new generation of artistic dissenters in a movement spearheaded by artist Banksy, whose art has featured in Occupied Palestine as well as his native UK.

Art attack

by Peter Kennard | New Statesman | 17 January 2008

Banksy attracts the press attention, but around him is an increasingly influential movement of political artists operating outside the mainstream
The phone rings; the number is withheld. It’s Banksy. He wants to know whether I can go to Bethlehem over Christmas. He is putting on an exhibition, bringing together like-minded artists from all over the world to raise awareness of the situation in Palestine. Like the annual guerrilla art shows that have taken place in London for the past six years, it will be called “Santa’s Ghetto”. Two weeks later, I find myself involved in an experience that transforms my ideas about what artists can do in the face of oppression.

We are living through an exciting time for political art. I have been an artist for 40 years, and my work has always focused on political and social issues. In the 1970s, I started making photo montage work, drawing on imagery from the Vietnam War and the row over nuclear armaments (a retrospective opens at the Pump House Gallery this month). Since the build-up to the Iraq War in 2002, I have been collaborating with a younger artist, Cat Picton Phillipps, developing new techniques and using digital technology to expose the lies that led to the invasion and the subsequent humanitarian disaster.

Over this period, our work has become linked to a group of young artists who work outside the official art world. Most of them started out painting graffiti on walls. The central figure in this group is Banksy, but although he attracts most of the press coverage, he is surrounded by a growing band of talented, politically committed artists. Our associates come from Spain and Italy, the US, Britain and Palestine. Since the era of the Bush/Blair war in Iraq, this movement has become increasingly politicised, just as my generation was politicised by the war in Vietnam. These are artists who want to connect with the real world, rather than work for the market, which has more of a stranglehold on art than ever. They combine creativity with protest, insisting that art should be more than the icing on the cake for the super-rich. 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 »

Swedish diplomat, international human rights lawyer, weapons inspector and disarmament campaigner Dr Hans Blix is the 2007 recipient of the Sydney Peace Prize. He delivered the Sydney Peace Prize lecture this evening, Sydney time. You can also listen to the lecture’s podcast:

[audio http://www.spf.arts.usyd.edu.au/sound/Blix-sydney-peace-prize.mp3]

Read his UN biography here. Read previous Sydney Peace Prize addresses posted at Reclaiming Space: 2003 — Dr Hanan Ashrawi; 2004 — Arundhati Roy; 2005 — Olara Otunnu; 2006 — Irene Khan. The following address is also available as a .pdf here (opens in a new window; 13pp)

The Globalization of Peace, by Dr Hans Blix

7 November 2007 | Sydney Town Hall

It is a great honour to be awarded the Sydney Peace Prize and to be invited to lecture.

The subject of this lecture is globalization of peace. I shall tell you from the outset what my main messages are.

First, I believe that long term the interdependence of nations that has already led to peace in a growing number of areas in the world, will lead to a globalization of peace, to a continued growth of international law and of common global institutions.

Second, we must wake up to the troublesome current reality of new great power tensions, and incipient arms races. We must revive disarmament and further develop the multilateral system of co-operation, including the United Nations.

Third, there are short, medium and long term threats both to life and peace if we do not husband the use of the earth’s resources, restrain our use of fossil fuels and restrain the growth of the human population. Read the rest of this entry »

Celebrating two significant recent victories for justice.

1. Anthropologist Professor Abu El-Haj Granted Tenure At Columbia

Congratulations to Barnard’s Nadia Abu El-Haj for duly being awarded academic tenure. For this Beirut, Tehren and US-educated Palestinian-American and author of Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society, this is also a win against the desperate, McCarthyist and ideologically-driven attacks and smears of the Likudnik-Zios in the US of the kind that saw Norman Finkelstein denied tenure a few months ago. See:

• Columbia Columbia Grants Abu El-Haj Tenure by Richard Silverstein (Tikun Olam, 2 Nov)
• RELATED: The New McCarthyism by Larry Cohler-Esses (The Nation, 25 Oct)

2. LA8 Victory

A favourable closure on one of the US’s longest-running and most controversial deportation cases, one that tested whether immigrants have the same First Amendment rights as citizens. Phyllis Bennis, investigator with the National Lawyers’ Guild describes the victory in this now twenty-year-old Los Angeles Eight case:

This deportation effort by the U.S. government, starting in the Reagan administration and continuing through Bush I, Clinton, Bush II, tried to deport eight activists for Palestinian rights — 7 Palestinians and a Kenyan woman married to one of them — for First Amendment-protected activities. First they were tried under the old McCarthy-era McCarran-Walter Act, for being “members or supporters of an organization supporting world communism” and when that was overturned by congress, they were charged with supporting a terrorist organization. Their “deportable” activities were distributing a newspaper and raising money for hospitals, clinics and schools in the West Bank and Lebanon’s refugee camps, linked to one of the factions of the PLO. They were never accused of ANY illegal or violent activities, never accused of committing, supporting, aiding, talking or even dreaming about terrorist acts. (During a two-year FBI investigation, an FBI agent moved into an apartment adjoining that of two of the LA 8 and kept listening devices against their bedroom wall for six months… he heard nothing.)

Judge William Webster, former head of the FBI, said explicitly that if the Eight were citizens, there would have been no basis even to arrest them.

So twenty years later, vindication. I’ve been part of the legal team for 20 years, and it’s been a huge privilege.

See also:

• Judge Throws Out Charges in “Los Angeles Eight” Case (Center for Constitutional Rights)
• Victory for “L.A.8″: Case Dropped After 20-Years (ADC: American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee)
• ADC-ACLU-NLG Press Release (.pdf, 3pp, opens in a new window)
• Legal judgment (.pdf, 11pp, opens in a new window)