My eyes opened wide in amazement. A minister of a country that calls itself democratic seriously proposed a reduction in the birthrate of a specific ethnic group. And let us be exact: Agriculture Minister Yair Shamir was not proposing passing an amendment that would apply to all citizens, or even all groups with high birth rates in Israeli society. He wants to lower the birthrate of a single ethnic group. Concerned that the Bedouin community will constitute half a million people by 2035, Shamir suggests outlawing polygamy as a way to lower the number of births. It seems that such racist discourse has not come from any sane administration since the days of Pharaoh.
My nausea rose as my fingers continued to turn the pages of the newspaper, until I reached the last page. It was then that my revulsion turned into bitter laughter. These two headlines, together, created a spectacular unconscious irony, as newspapers do without intending to: “Swiss initiative to limit cat overpopulation. Switzerland has 1.48 million cats living there, as compared with 8.1 million human inhabitants. Over the past few months, several ideas for limiting cats’ freedom of movement have been proposed.”
In other words, we are not alone! Like Israel, Switzerland suffers from animals multiplying too rapidly. There it is cats; here it is Bedouin. A wonderful basis for strengthening the relationship between both countries, and exchanging information and ideas. Israel can import the methods accepted in Switzerland (spaying and neutering), and Switzerland can propose the ideas of Minister Shamir: only one mate per cat. And we can suggest another well-tried Israeli method as well: not constructing protected spaces for cats in case Switzerland should find itself under mortar fire.
I do support academic boycott, but only Israel's state institutions. To boycott Israel in the sense of not visiting it, not having contact with people there, I totally reject this. The reason is double. First, there is recently in Europe a new wave of anti-semitism. For example in countries like Hungary, Slovakia, Poland and others. So for a European who remembers the Holocaust, anything to do with boycotting the Jews brings out terrible memories. We are playing with fire here.
But nonetheless, the reason why I support a boycott, BDS and all that, is that it is a common project of Palestinians, and Jewish progressive critics of Zionism. This unity is absolutely crucial. The moment we abandon this unity and say oh no, Israel is so bad that we have to be directly against Jews, we all deserve to die. Life is over for me.
And another thing which is important and which people tend to forget: boycott is a non-violent measure. Better boycott than terrorism, than bombs. So although I am absolutely on the Palestinian side, I think we should be very careful to make Palestinian resistance into part of a modern universal emancipatory project. Without this we are lost.
Israeli police arrest a protestor during a demonstration by Palestinian citizens of Israel in the northern city of Nazareth, against the summer assault on Gaza, 21 July.
Jameela Asleh, better known as Um Aseel, witnessed the killing of her eldest son Aseel one October fourteen years ago when Israeli police opened fire on unarmed Palestinian demonstrators in Israel.
“I witnessed his execution with my own eyes,” the 62-year-old mother told The Electronic Intifada.
Just seventeen years old at the time, her son was among the thirteen Palestinian citizens of Israel killed during demonstrations that spread throughout present-day Israel in early October 2000.
Taking place in the Galilee towns of Nazareth, Sakhnin and Arrabeh, the protests were a response to Israel’s extreme military violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, particularly the killing of twelve-year-old Muhammad al-Dura in Gaza a few days earlier.
“My son was part of the protests that exploded suddenly due to the shock of Muhammad al-Dura’s murder and [also] when [then Israeli Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon stormed al-Aqsa mosque [in Jerusalem],” Um Aseel said, referring to the two events often cited as the triggers for the second Palestinian intifada at the end of September 2000.
Violent attitude
An estimated 1.7 million Palestinians carry Israeli citizenship and live in Palestinian areas of cities, towns and villages across the country. They face dozens of discriminatory laws that limit their access to state resources and muzzle political expression, says Adalah, a Haifa-based legal center.
Worse still, Palestinian activists and human rights groups say police brutality has continued unabated.
“During protests in the ‘48 territories [present-day Israel], especially recently, the violent attitude of police forces is clear from the start,” Farah Bayadsy, a Jerusalem-based lawyer and activist, told The Electronic Intifada.
“They always start with racist talk or pushing, but then it turns into harsh grabbing or hitting,” explained Bayadsy, who is originally from Baqa al-Gharbiyya, a Palestinian town in the Triangle region of present-day Israel.
“It doesn’t matter if you’re a male or female, elderly or a student — the police violate the law and basic human rights by taking advantage of their power given to them by their blue suits,” Bayadsy added.
Um Aseel said her son was passionate about “finding reconciliation” between Israelis and Palestinians.
In 1997, Aseel became active in Seeds of Peace. That group, which organizes summer camps for young Palestinians and Jewish Israelis, has been criticized by many Palestinians for promoting “normalization” of the injustices they face.
“He participated in many programs,” his mother recalled. “He went to Switzerland and Jordan for coexistence programs. He had been very active for the five years leading up to [his death].”
“He was a quiet, calm and smart child,” she said. “He had never been in a fight before because he got along with everybody. Though he participated in the Israeli-led Seeds of Peace delegations, he always asserted his Palestinian identity.”
When a bullet fired by an Israeli police officer struck Aseel in the neck during the October 2000 demonstration, he was wearing a Seeds of Peace t-shirt.
No justice in Israeli courts
As police began attacking the protests in Arrabeh, Um Aseel felt uneasy and rushed out of the house to bring her son home. “I saw him and yelled for him to come home,” she said. “I saw a police officer hit him on the head with a rifle, and then he shot Aseel at point-blank range.”
When asked what motivated her son to join the protests that day, Um Aseel said: “What are we supposed to do? Sit in the house and say this is the will of God? Our protests and efforts to resist are the way we refuse accepting this oppression.”
The Israeli government subsequently appointed a panel to investigate the killings of the thirteen Palestinian citizens of Israel, as well as a Jewish Israeli woman and a Palestinian from Gaza during the nationwide protests.
That panel, the Or Commission, failed to arrive at a conclusion about who was responsible for Aseel’s death. Though it “reprimanded” the police for a lack of preparation and Palestinian political leaders in Israel for alleged incitement, no indictments were ever issued for the killings.
Um Aseel said “there is no justice whatsoever” for her son or “Palestinians anywhere, especially not in Israeli courts.”
“There is no such thing as Israeli justice,” she added.
Coinciding with the fourteenth anniversary of the October 2000 massacre, Adalah released an alarming new report. Between 2011 and 2013, 93 percent of 11,282 “complaints filed against the police were closed by Mahash with or without investigation,” according to the report, referring to the police investigation unit that works under the auspices of Israel’s justice ministry.
Adalah’s report paints an image of the Mahash police investigation unit as incapable of seeking justice for the country’s Palestinian minority.
More than 72 percent “of the files were closed without an investigation based on one of three reasons afforded by [Israeli] law: lack of public interest, lack of guilt, and lack of evidence,” the report states.
The report also notes that Mahash, supposedly designed to ensure police accountability, repeatedly closed cases when the excessive use of force was evident, “undermining the primary purpose for which it is created.”
Police “willing to be brutal”
Salah Mohsen, a spokesperson for Adalah, said these statistics send a clear message to anyone who dissents in Israel. “The sheer number of complaints alone says that police are willing to be very brutal,” he told The Electronic Intifada.
In numerous cases when Adalah filed complaints to Mahash with “clear evidence, such as photos, videos and testimony,” the files were closed without investigation, he said.
“Many people don’t bother filing complaints anymore,” Mohsen concluded, adding that there is a “huge need for restricting Mahash as a body if the goal is genuinely to end police brutality.”
During Israel’s 51-day attack on the besieged Gaza Strip this summer, hundreds of Palestinians in present-day Israel were subjected to police violence and arrested in demonstrations in cities such as Haifa, Akka (Acre), Jaffa and Nazareth.
But the ever-present threat of police violence didn’t stop Palestinians from assembling in Sakhnin on Wednesday last week to commemorate the fourteenth anniversary of the October 2000 massacre.
Jamal Zahalka, leader of the Balad political party, said it was important for Palestinians in Israel to continue marking the anniversary each year because the slayings “are part of Israeli policy, showing that in a time of crisis we [Palestinians in Israel] are enemies and not citizens.”
The Israeli authorities have “failed to provide any results in serving justice by pursuing the police responsible for the killings or the decision to kill,” Zahalka told The Electronic Intifada. “Many questions are left unanswered until today. The investigation was used to cover up for the criminals responsible.”
Israel’s former attorney general Menachem Mazuz closed the investigation into the 2000 killings in 2008 without issuing indictments to any police officers or commanders involved. He was recently appointed a judge in Israel’s high court.
Meanwhile, back in her Arrabeh home, Um Aseel said she will never forgive Israel for taking her son’s life.
“Aseel’s martyrdom wasn’t just aggression against him or the other twelve people who died that day,” she said. “It was an attack on all Palestinians. Israel tried to kill our humanity and make us [Palestinians in Israel] forget we are part of the Palestinian people.”
Patrick O. Strickland is an independent journalist and regular contributor to The Electronic Intifada. His website is www.postrickland.com. Follow him on Twitter @P_Strickland_.
Posting pictures of terrorists getting harassed by police is actually uplifting.
Your people are archaic and detrimental to modern life and peace.
You should spend your efforts trying to rid yourself of the real problem ...Hamas. Your obsession with Israel is all to revealing about the nefarious goals of your people.
Why have you not littered this forum with your outrage for what Hamas is doing to Palestine? What Hamas is doing to good people of the world? About how Hamas is the greatest threat to palestine peace?
you know, a lot of people on this side of the globe aren't exposed to much of the situation in the middle east. it's not like watching cnn or fox every now and then is going to give you a very full picture of what's going on.
if an architect came to this site to learn from other architects and only had tammuz and orhan's defense of tammuz to go off, you might be able to see how a person could start to develop a viewpoint like subgenious is portraying here.
it would be much better if this situation was portrayed in a manner that encouraged a peaceful outlook rather than just trying to provide justification for why tammuz wants to escalate the conflict.
if the conflict is portrayed in such a manner that one side has to kill the other, which i think is part of tammuz's goal (or at least the goal of the people he's copying content from), then it's essentially the same racism regardless of which side you pick isn't it? the divisive picture being painted here encourages that kind of racism.
In Israel, Arabs constitute twenty percent, around 1.5 million, of the Israeli population. The marginalization and refugee crisis of Arabs in Israel began in 1948, with the creation of the state of Israel, based on Zionist ideologies that set to create a Jewish state in the Holy Land where a predominantly Arab and Muslim population was currently living under the British mandate. Theodor Herzl declared in 1897, that the aim of Zionism, or Jewish nationalism, “was to establish a national home for the Jewish people secured by public law.” The politics of Zionism were influenced by nationalist ideology and by colonial ideas about Europeans’ right to claim and settle other parts of the world. Ultimately though, the fundamental ideology of Zionism itself, is the idea of a legally ethnocentric Israel. Zionism depends on the notions of divine entitlement and civilizational superiority that justified previous colonialist settlement projects in South Africa, Algeria, and North America.
There are several forms of Zionism that evolved throughout the 1920 until the 1970s, the dominant form was Labor Zionism, which set to link socialism and nationalism. Later in the 1920s, and into the 1930s, the second form of Zionism emerged as the Revisionist movement. The Revisionist movement of Zionism supported a revision of the boundaries of Jewish territorial claims beyond Palestine to include areas east of the Jordan River. The Revisionists declared their objective was to establish a Jewish state in Palestine.
Following the Arab rejection of the 1947 partition plan (which provided for two, albeit not ethnically-cleansed, entities), the 1948 war and the ensuing flux of Palestinian refugees epitomized the crux of the identity-cased conflict. Today, these aspects relate to the fate of the Palestinian refugees as well as to the status of the Palestinian minority in Israel. Touching on the key issue of the nature of the State of Israel, they represent by far the most intractable issues of the conflict. With the 1967 war, the conflict acquired a distinct territorial aspect. Through the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the conflict became largely focused on territory: on the one hand, there is Israel’s construction of settlements, roads and walls and its seizure and destruction of land and property; and on the other hand, there is the Palestinians’ violent resistance, including the use of terrorism, against Israeli policies. “Consequently, Israel’s victory in 1967 gave rise to amore religious variation of Zionism. Some existing political parties representing orthodox Jews came to embrace religious nationalism, and new parties and movements forms to advocate Israel’s permanent control and extensive Jewish settlement in the West bank and Gaza” (http://www.merip.org/palestine-israel_primer/zionism-pal-isr-primer.html).
Since the Oslo Process, the territorial aspects of the conflict (concerning settlements, borders and water) have become a major focus of negotiations. Yet, paradoxically these represent the most amenable issues for compromise, with the exception of Jerusalem, which has both a territorial and religious meaning. The PLO’s 1988 effective acceptance of a two-state solution potentially meets the Zionist left’s priority to secure a ‘Jewish democratic state,’ and its consequent understanding of the need to withdraw from the Palestinian-inhabited occupied territories” (http://www.merip.org/palestine-israel_primer/zionism-pal-isr-primer.html).
Palestinians in Israel are politically marginalized and economically underprivileged, according to a recent International Crisis Group report (“Back to Basics: Israel’s Arab minority and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 14 March 2012 [PDF]). Adalah, an organization giving legal aid to Palestinians in Israel, stated last year that 30 laws in Israel discriminate either directly or indirectly against Palestinian citizens (“The Inequality Report: The Palestinian Arab minority in Israel,” March 2011 [PDF]). “That puts Israeli democracy under a big question mark,” said Mossawa’s Laham-Grayeb (http://electronicintifada.net/content/racism-pushing-palestinian-citizens-israel-ramallah/11664). Zionism is at the very core of the marginalization of Palestinian Arabs at the time of the British Mandate, and remains to be the at the very core of the continued marginalization of Palestinian Arabs today. The UN General Assembly Resolution 3379 determined on November 10th, 1975 that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination after the assembly recalled the multiple international laws that call for the elimination of forms of racism and racial discrimination, including the following: “First, the United Nations resolution 1904 proclaiming the United Nations Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, and in particular its affirmation that "any doctrine of racial differentiation or superiority is scientifically false, morally condemnable, socially unjust and dangerous" and its expression of alarm at "the manifestations of racial discrimination still in evidence in some areas in the world, some of which are imposed by certain Governments by means of legislative, administrative or other measures; Second, resolution 3151 G (XXVIII) of 14 December 1973, the General Assembly condemned, inter alia, the unholy alliance between South African racism and Zionism; Third, the Declaration of Mexico on the Equality of Women and Their Contribution to Development and Peace, proclaimed by the World Conference of the International Women's Year, held at Mexico City from 19 June to 2 July 1975, which promulgated the principle that "international co-operation and peace require the achievement of national liberation and independence, the elimination of colonialism and neo-colonialism, foreign occupation, Zionism, apartheid and racial discrimination in all its forms, as well as the recognition of the dignity of peoples and their right to self-determination", Fourth, resolution 77 (XII) adopted by the Assembly of Heads of State and Government of the Organization of African Unity at its twelfth ordinary session, hold at Kampala from 28 July to 1 August 1975, which considered "that the racist regime in occupied Palestine and the racist regimes in Zimbabwe and South Africa have a common imperialist origin, forming a whole and having the same racist structure and being organically linked in their policy aimed at repression of the dignity and integrity of the human being" (http://imeu.net/news/article005878.shtml).
The right of return for Palestinians has been endorsed by the United Nations General Assembly in the form of Resolution 194, has been reaffirmed every single year - bar one - since 1948. Israel’s founding ideology of Zionism has caused, and continues to cause today, the marginizaliation of Arabs in Israel and the continuation of the Palestinian refugee crisis. International law has found Israel’s founding ideology of Zionism illegal under international law due to the ideology’s racist, discriminatory behaviors that violate Arab Palestinians’, in Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, fundamental human rights. For further analysis of the Palestinian refugee crisis and Israel's multiple violations of human rights please see my previous article: "Escalation in the Israeli Assault on the Gaza Strip and the Upcoming Palestinian Bid at the UN: The Role of Human Rights and the Palestinian Refugee in the Palestinian-Israeli Peace Process"
The anti-Arab racism that increasingly pervades modern Israel surfaces in the non-human images applied to Palestinians, such as the metaphor “mowing the grass” when targeting militants in Gaza. This tragic development traces back to the attitudes of old European imperialism, argues Lawrence Davidson.
By Lawrence Davidson
By the middle of the 19th Century, the multi-ethnic empire was on its way out as the dominant political paradigm in Europe. Replacing it was the nation-state, a political form which allowed the concentration of ethnic groups within their own political borders.
This, in turn, formed cultural and “racial” incubators for an “us (superior) vs. them (inferior)” nationalism that would underpin most of the West’s future wars. Many of these nation states were also imperial powers expanding across the globe and, of course, their state-based chauvinistic outlook went with them.
Hungarian Theodor Herzl (1860-1904), considered the founder of modern Zionism.
Zionism was born in this milieu of nationalism and imperialism, both of which left an indelible mark on the character and ambitions of the Israeli state. The conviction of Theodor Herzl, modern Zionism’s founding father, was that the centuries of anti-Semitism were proof positive that Europe’s Jews could not be assimilated into mainstream Western society. They could only be safe if they possessed a nation state of their own.
This conviction also reflected the European imperial sentiments of the day. The founders of modern Zionism were both Jews and Europeans, and (as such) had acquired the West’s cultural sense of superiority in relation to non-Europeans.
This sense of superiority would play an important role when a deal (the Balfour Declaration) was struck in 1917 between the World Zionist Organization and the British Government. The deal stipulated that, in exchange for Zionist support for the British war effort (World War I was in progress), the British would (assuming victory) help create a “Jewish national home” in Palestine. It was no oversight that neither side in this bargain gave much thought to the Palestinian native population.
Years later, beginning in 1945 (at the end of World War II), the British were forced to officially give up the imperial point of view. They came out of the war with a population burdened by extraordinary high war taxes.
Retaining the empire would keep those taxes high and so the British voter elected politicians who would transform the empire into a commonwealth, granting independence to just about all the Britain’s overseas territories. One of those territories was Palestine.
It is interesting to note that in other European colonies, where large numbers of Europeans resided, the era following World War II saw their eventual evacuation as power shifted over to the natives. Kenya and Algeria are examples which show that this process was hard and bloody, but it happened.
And when it did happen, the official imperial mind set was defeated. That does not mean that all Europeans (or Westerners) saw the light and ceased to be racists, but that their governments eventually saw the necessity to stop acting that way.
Some Consequences
Unfortunately, in the case of Palestine, this process of de-colonization never occurred. In this case the European colonists did not want the imperial mother country to stay and protect them. They wanted them out so they could set up shop on their own. They got their chance after the British evacuated in 1947.
Soon thereafter, the Zionists began executing a prepared plan to conquer the “Holy Land” and chase away or subjugate the native population. And what of that imperial point of view which saw the European as superior and the native as inferior? This became institutionalized in the practices of the new Israeli state.
That made Israel one of the very few (the other being apartheid South Africa) self-identified “Western” nation states to continue to implement old-style imperial policies: they discriminated against the Palestinian population in every way imaginable, pushed them into enclosed areas of concentration and sought to control their lives in great detail.
If one wants to know what this meant for the evolving character of Israel’s citizenry who now would live out the colonial drama as an imperial power in their own right, one might take a look at a book by Sven Lindqvist entitled Exterminate All The Brutes (New Press 1996). This work convincingly shows that lording it over often resisting native peoples, debasing and humiliating them, regularly killing or otherwise punishing them when they protest, leads the colonials to develop genocidal yearnings.
There is evidence that the Zionists who created and now sustain Israel suffer from this process. For a long time Israeli government officials tried genocide via a thought experiment. They went about asserting that the Palestinians did not exist.
The most famous case of this was Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, who on June 15, 1969, claimed that “there were no such thing as Palestinians. … They do not exist.” One of the reasons she gave for this opinion was that the Arabs of Palestine never had their own nation state.
Others took a different approach by denying not so much the existence of Palestinians, but rather their humanity. At various times and in various contexts, usually in response to acts of resistance against occupation, Israeli leaders have referred to the Palestinians as “beasts walking on two legs” (Menachem Begin); “grasshoppers” (Yitzhaq Shamir); “crocodiles” (Ehud Barak); and “cockroaches” (Rafael Eitan).
Of course, these sentiments were not confined to the Israeli leadership. They soon pervaded most of the Zionist population because the old imperial superiority-inferiority propaganda had become a core element of their basic education. The Israelis have taught their children the imperial point of view, augmented it with biased media reporting, labeled the inevitable resistance offered by the Palestinians as anti-Semitism and took it as proof of the need to suppress and control this population of “Others.”
And, from the Zionist standpoint, this entire process has worked remarkably well. Today all but a handful of Israeli Jews dislike and fear the people they conquered and displaced. They wish they would go away. And, when their resistance gets just a bit too much to bear, they are now quite willing to see them put out of the way.
Thus, during the latest round of resistance rocket fire from Gaza and the vengeful killing that came from the Israeli side, we heard the following: “We must blow Gaza back to the Middle Ages destroying all the infrastructure including roads and water” (Eli Yishai, present Deputy Prime Minister); “There should be no electricity in Gaza, no gasoline or moving vehicles, nothing. … We need to flatten entire neighborhoods … flatten all of Gaza” (journalist Gilad Sharon in the Jerusalem Post); “There are no innocents in Gaza. Mow them down … kill the Gazans without thought or mercy.” (Michael Ben-Ari, member of the Knesset); Gaza should be “bombed so hard the population has to flee into Egypt” (Israel Katz, present Minister of Transportation); Gaza should be “wiped clean with bombs” (Avi Dichter, present Minister of Home Front Defense); Israeli soldiers must “learn from the Syrians how to slaughter the enemy” (prominent Israeli Rabbi Yaakov Yosef).
Finally, there were the numerous, spontaneous demonstrations of ordinary Israeli citizens, both in the north and south of the country, where could be heard chants and shouts such as “They don’t deserve to live. They need to die. May your children die. Kick out all the Arabs.”
If it wasn’t for the fact that the outside world was watching, there can be little doubt that the famed Israeli armed forces would have been tempted to do all that these ministers, clerics and citizens wished. After Prime Minister Netanyahu agreed to a cease-fire, a group of Israeli soldiers showed their frustration by using their bodies to spell out (in Hebrew) the words “Bibi Loser” (Bibi is a nickname for Netanyahu).
It was a pre-arranged photo-op and the picture can now easily be found on the Web. What seems to really irk the Israeli citizenry is not that Bibi killed and maimed too many innocent Palestinian civilians, but rather that he did not kill and maim enough of them to grant Israelis “safety and security.”
Throughout history it has been standard operating procedure to demonize those you fight and demote to inferior status those you conquer. But as Lindqvist’s work shows, there was something different about the way Europeans went about this business. The deeply racist outlook that underlay modern imperialism made it particularly perverse.
Now that apartheid South Africa is no more, the Israelis are the last surviving heirs to that dreadful heritage. So much for a “light unto the nations.” That proposition has quite failed. Wherever the Israelis and their Zionist cohorts are leading us, it is not into the light, it is to someplace very very dark.
(...) Another historical note attesting to the artificial partition and the lack of any consideration of the human rights of Palestinians – the original inhabitants of the country – refers to the formation of the Gaza Strip. It is an artificial compound where refugees were crammed from the Negev and the southern coastal plain up to Jaffa. As a result the Gaza Strip has a special status as that part of Palestine the Zionists don’t really want to hold, because of its big population, and don’t know how to get rid of.
The central historical part of the lecture dealt with the West Bank and focused on the importance the Zionists attach to its control, both from historical and religious perspectives and for geopolitical and security considerations. Pappe relied on historical knowledge uncovered with the recent opening of the archives of the Israeli government. (Most archives, such as protocols from government meetings, open after 30 years. Security archives usually open after 50 years.) He disproved the Zionist narrative according to which the occupation of the West Bank was the unforeseen side effect of “Arab aggression” or the “security threat” in 1967 and of Israel’s need to defend itself.
He relied on four main facts:
The existence from 1949 and until 1967 of a large lobby within the Israeli establishment which openly agitated for the occupation of the West Bank. This lobby included senior leaders from all Zionist parties, military officers and many members of the Zionist elite. Only the firm stance of Ben Gurion (despite being the biggest war criminal responsible for the ethnic cleansing of 48) against the occupation of the West Bank prevented this lobby from getting what it wanted earlier. As Ben-Gurion left the scene in 1963 the way opened for the realization of the plot.
In 1964, the military appointed an officer named Michael Shakham, who was previously in charge of the military government controlling the Arabs within the 1948 borders, to prepare the structure and policy for imposing Israeli military government in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.
The Israeli government’s discussions following its occupation of the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Sinai Peninsula and the Syrian Golan in 1967 indicate a determination never to return to the boundaries of the beginning of June 67 and to control the West Bank permanently.
The building of Jewish settlements in any “free” area in the West Bank that began under the Labor-led government soon after the 1967 occupation.
In 1967 Zionism achieved its goal of establishing a single state between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River – a Jewish, racist and anti-democratic state. This is the reality in which we live and with it we have to deal.
There is a whole system of lies and illusions making it difficult to cope and change the situation. They transfer the consciousness and political struggle to another dimension – a mock battle between the “pro-occupation” and “a peace camp”. Ilan Pappe characterizes this illusionary search for peace as “searching for the key under the lamppost” – not where we have lost it.
The deception of temporary occupation and forged peace process
A significant part of the lecture was devoted to explanations and evidence proving that “the lamppost” didn’t just happen to be where it is. It is the result of a carefully conceived policy aiming to perpetuate Israeli control of all parts of Palestine.
The ideal solution, from the Zionist point of view, was to complete the ethnic cleansing and control all of Palestine without any of its original inhabitants. Zionism continues to work towards this goal, but faces considerable constrains on its freedom of action. Even the fact that the ethnic cleansing in 1948 has not been completed should be attributed to the staying power, Somoud, of the Arab population and not to any good will on the part of Zionism. Since 1967, some 450,000 Palestinians were expelled from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. But even those who have not been physically deported are victims of ethnic cleansing of an indirect kind: denial of rights, restricting their freedom of movement, limiting personal and social development, preventing any real influence over laws or the government.
Referring to the internal discussions that took place within the Israeli government in 1967 just after the occupation, according to protocols that are now accessible, Pappe tells about proposals for immediate expulsion of the majority of the population. Those proposals found many supporters, mostly veterans of the ’48 ethnic cleansing. However, the Zionist leadership was fearful of active opposition from the population, many of them were already refugees from ’48. The presence of the international media, which was hardly considered in ’48, was another deterrent. Basically the war in ’67 ended quickly and it was difficult to organize and justify ethnic cleansing without the fog of war.
In this situation, out of conscious intention to control the area indefinitely and deny all the human rights of its people, Israel invented the magic formula of presenting the occupation as temporary. The status of the population will be settled “with the coming of peace”. This mode of operation allows Israel to continue to present itself as a “democratic state” and enjoy the many benefits attached to this status in the international arena.
Hence “the peace process” and talk about “two states for two peoples” are not in any contradiction with the occupation, not even the “temporary” occupation” of 1967, but a political and conceptual framework designed to enable and perpetuate the occupation.
Israel would find it hard to market this façade to the world if it was not being assisted by many others, some serving their self-interests and others out of misled good intentions. The leadership of the Palestinian national movement plays a key role in providing credibility for the fake peace process. It is followed by a large part of the leadership of the Palestinian Arab population within the green line. Many peace activists around the world have fallen into this trap.
Meanwhile, Israel has been working on the ground to perpetuate its control over the land, water, economy and all aspects of Palestinian lives. It creates a situation where even if a Palestinian state is announced, headed by Mahmoud Abbas as president, it will not have any practical significance.
ODS offering equality for all inhabitants and returning refugees
Against the reality of one racist state, tearing apart the façade of a fake peace process and “two-state solution”, Ilan Pappe suggests to “start looking for the key where we lost it”.
We need to start by correctly identifying the problem: expose Zionism as a colonialist movement and characterize Israel as an apartheid racist state. There is no other Zionism, nor another Israel. Exposure, by itself, may have huge effect: First of all because of the importance of international support in preserving Israel’s superiority against all local forces; but also due to internal conflicts within Israeli society.
Any solution should be derived from our understanding of the problem. It should start with a discussion among all residents of the country on how to live together within a framework where all enjoy full rights, equality and partnership. The Palestinian refugees should also take part in this discussion, as they have the right to return to Palestine and fully take part in shaping its/their future. It is essential to set the goal of establishing one state for all inhabitants and refugees of the country, because it defines who should participate in the discussion about this future.
Zionism has done, and continues to do, whatever it can to divide the Palestinian people and guide any part of them to get “stuck” in a different dead end. First came the distancing of the refugees outside Palestine’s borders and the isolation of the Palestinian population in the ’48 territories. Today we also witness the political separation between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Posing a new agenda, common to all sectors of the Palestinian people, is the beginning of the road toward a solution. Today’s technology can provide the basis for an open discussion across borders and checkpoints, forming a platform for more intense links and designing together the common path.
All this is not at all easy. There are problems in the relationship between different sectors of the public, between secular and religious folk, between the indigenous inhabitants and the third generation of settlers. A new distribution of resources is required to compensate for generations of dispossession and discrimination. It is not clear what will be the nature of the new society and what political framework we will build together; but it is essential that we start a serious discussion about all of it. Beyond that we face a hard struggle against an oppressive regime that regards any perspective other than a racist Jewish state as “Suicide” and “Existential Danger”.
This is our task and those are the problems we must solve. Until we look straight at this reality, we are wasting precious time. Understanding the problem and presenting a real solution can create strong dynamics for changing the balance of power.
Plan of Action
At the discussion with the audience Pappe tried to outline some chapters of a practical plan that one may work upon immediately for ODS:
Arab representation in the Israeli Knesset gives great propaganda advantage to Israel in presenting itself as a democracy to world public opinion. In practice, Arab MKs have no real impact on legislation and are not even considered for coalition politics. Waiver of Arab representation in the Knesset shall constitute an important and effective message to the world while it carries minimal practical cost.
One may search for an alternative to the Palestinian Authority that would not serve Israel.
One may establish frames for cooperation and work on building a movement that will unite the different parts of the Palestinian people.
We should open the way and call upon anti-Zionist Jews in Israel to become full partners in a unified political movement.
We must not assume that we are powerless and that there is some determinism assuring Israel’s superiority forever. A political activist should not ask “How long will it take until we win the fight?” but rather “What did I do today to bring the victory?”
Pappe mentioned his participation, in 1992, in a delegation which travelled to Tunis to request Arafat to raise the rights of Palestinian Arabs inside the Green Line in the Oslo negotiations with Israel. He recalled their disappointment as Arafat said that was an internal Israeli matter.
Divisions in the leadership of the Palestinian struggle and the lack of a clear political perspective prevent proper utilization of the support of the cause in world public opinion. Although Israel and its allies are working to strengthen these divisions, the responsibility for building the leadership of the Palestinian struggle falls ultimately upon Palestinians themselves.
Pappe finally predicts that when the Palestinian people will unite behind a clear democratic political perspective and clarify to the world that what Israel is fighting for is the perpetuation of racism, Zionism will fall. He says such a prediction was not possible in the past, but it is based on reading the dynamics of power relations and world politics today.
Positive change in the balance of power
Living in England and being involved in the international solidarity movement with the Palestinian people, Pappe describes how, despite the weakness of the Palestinian official position, international conditions are changing favorably. The Palestinian cause receives international awareness and support more than any other struggle for national liberation or democracy. The solidarity movement naturally starts as a popular protest movement, but it is acquiring recognition and support also within the elites and has already advanced and started to influence the decisions of governments and economic firms.
One of the factors that strengthen the solidarity with the Palestinian struggle is the ongoing crisis of the international capitalist system in the wake of the financial crisis that began in 2008. This crisis has led to a growing lack of trust in the political leadership and the governing elites in the global economy. New social movements see a direct connection between economic injustice “inside” and the oppression and exploitation toward third world nations. They are conscious of the direct link between the fate of blacks in the United States and the denial of rights of the Palestinian people. Insights that in the past were known only to a small minority of “rigid” Marxist are now common knowledge of the broader public.
The globalization of the international economy has led to the globalization of the protest movement. Today there is a broad sense of solidarity and commitment to protection of human rights.
He tells in detail about the achievements of the boycott movement (BDS) and the difficulties of Israeli Hasbara (propaganda). Israel is investing huge amounts of money in improving its image – especially in the United States, which many of us tend to consider “The Longest Yard”. Despite all of these efforts, Israelis speakers themselves admit their failure. They now consider campuses in the United States a lost cause.
The latest attack on Gaza, where Israel was not satisfied with ethnic cleansing but turned to outright genocide, led the solidarity movement to new heights. Law students in many faculties in England took over administrative offices in support of the Palestinians. Palestinian flags were raised on many municipal buildings across the UK.
Ilan demonstrates the potential of the solidarity movement by his recent experience. The BBC broadcasts during the attack on Gaza excelled in shocking lack of objectivity and blatant support for Israel’s position. When he heard about the preparations for a mass demonstration in London against the war, he called the organizers and suggested to change the route of the demonstration, pass by the offices of the BBC and stage a special protest there. Indeed, during the demonstration, hundreds of thousands participants rallied to protest outside the offices of the BBC.
Israeli society
When asked from the audience about the drift to the right and extremism in Israeli society, Ilan said that we all know how difficult things are but there is also some related advantage. In past times Israeli society could delude itself that there is a third way, “a Jewish and democratic state”. Today it is impossible to hide the contradiction, albeit with the vast majority of Israeli society choosing racism. This choice hurts Israel’s propaganda and will help us expose to the world the true nature of Israel.
The open choice by the majority of extremism and racism will also push more Israelis to look for alternatives. We witness the disappearance of “the Israeli left”, which will not return, but, in any case, it was a partner in all of Zionism’s crimes. It is necessary, and it is becoming more possible now, to explain to those Israelis whose conscience torments them or see the futility of occupation and racism that those vices stem directly from the Zionist ideology, on which they were educated from childhood.
We already see real signs that some Israelis draw conclusions from the situation. For example, whereas in the past the refusenik movement was mainly against army service in those territories occupied since ’67, now its mainstream is total refusal to serve in the Israeli army.
Zionist victory means perpetuating the character of Israel as a racist state. Even if Israel succeeds in suppressing the Palestinian people, it will only lead to more wars against the surrounding Arab world. In the end Israel as a Crusader state has no future and will be defeated in these wars (after the current internal conflicts in the Arab world are settled one way or another). In this respect, our program is also the only positive perspective proposed for the Israelis.
In turning to the Israeli public there is a division of roles and tasks between the Palestinian Arabs in the movement and anti-Zionist Jews. It is important that the Palestinian movement will explain to Israelis that anything less than full democracy for everyone and everywhere is unacceptable; whoever is opposed to it should be denounced as a racist. Anti-Zionist Jews have an important role in reaching out to the Jewish public. However, the main leverage for a broader change in Israeli society will come from the combination of international condemnation of Israel, the expansion of the boycott movement and a clear call from the joint ODS movement to anti-Zionist Jews to join the struggle for a common future.
Lessons from South Africa
The comparison with South Africa was repeated many times during the lecture, not always in the usual context of the characterization of Israel as an apartheid racist state or of the possibility of a solution based on the democratic principle of “one person, one vote.”
The main enemies against which Pappe spoke were despair and the perception that change is impossible. To this end, he recruited his own personal experience when he arrived in Europe in 1980 and joined the anti-apartheid movement. At that time there was gloom in the movement: many activists thought that popular struggle would never change the positions of governments and economic corporations which operate on self-interest and whose support enabled the continuation of apartheid. Britain was ruled by Margaret Thatcher, who defined Nelson Mandela as “arch-terrorist”.
Ten years later, under heavy international pressure, De Klerk announced the failure of the apartheid regime and in 1994 the liberation movement came to power in democratic elections.
Pappe also turned to the experience of South Africa to emphasise the principled position of the liberation movement there, under the leadership of the African National Congress (ANC), refusing any solution that is not based on full democracy for all residents. This position strengthened the boycott movement, which found a clear address for support and guidance. Today it is hard to find a clear address for the Palestinian liberation movement, nor for directing the struggle, neither for proposing a solution. The emergence of a movement of the inhabitants of Palestine struggling for ODS can fill this vacuum.
Another important lesson from South Africa relates to changing international conditions. The United States relied on South Africa, within the framework of the Cold War, both to counter leftist liberation movements and as a major supplier of uranium. As long as it needed SA, the US government was willing to ignore the crimes committed by the apartheid regime against the black population. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War (factors about which the liberation movement had no influence) abolished the usefulness of the apartheid regime and converted it from an asset into a burden.
Similarly, the Western powers support Israel today because it serves their interests. These interests are changing and the day will come when they will lose interest in supporting Israel. The important questions are who will fight until that moment so that the rights of the Palestinian people will not be forgotten in the meantime and who would be ready at the moment of truth to dismantle the Israeli apartheid regime?
Al-Muqawama – The Resistance
Referring to the Palestinian leadership crisis, Ilan Pappe told the youth: there are some issues you have to discuss between yourself. You can do it without me.
Nevertheless, some twenty youngsters stayed half an hour after the lecture to ask questions and discuss various topics.
One of the issues that many of them do not see eye to eye with Ilan was the subject of armed resistance. When asked about it, Pappe stressed, on the one hand, that the oppressed people have the right to struggle for their liberty by all available means, including armed struggle. On the other hand he said that if he was a Palestinian young man, and he had to choose between a laptop and a Kalashnikov, he would choose a laptop, out of consideration which is a more effective tool in the fight. He also mentioned that nowadays armed struggle doesn’t have the same potential as in the 60s, the days of Che Guevara and the rise of the Palestinian revolution.
As a political activist, it seems to me that Pappe the historian lost here for a moment the historical context. It is true that we witness a process of democratic change in South America, which allowed the liberation movements (most of which were defeated in the armed struggle in the sixties and seventies) to bring about a significant change through democratic means. However, it is difficult to ignore the fact that we live in the heart of the Arab world where still no change was made possible through democratic means. Armed militias of all stripes and types, ranging from the nuclear-armed “Jewish state” to the decapitators of the “Islamic state”, compete between them for power through violent means.
Many years of armed struggle brought independence to the people of South Sudan, which are now fighting each other. The people of divided Kurdistan, another seemingly lost historical struggle, could not defend their very existence today were it not for the armed militias of the Kurdish Workers Party, which is still defined by the Western powers as a terrorist organization.
Armed resistance led to Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000 after 18 years of occupation and stopped another Israeli aggression in 2006. Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip was only made possible thanks to two bloody intifadas. Even those democratic protesters from England, who showed up to protest against the BBC, would probably not leave their homes, or would demonstrate for the sake of another just cause, had it not been for the spilled Palestinian blood in Gaza.
Armed struggle and political struggle are not opposites but complement each other.
The heavy price paid by the Palestinian people in their struggle is but another reason to ask whether the political leadership of the struggle serves the masses faithfully, with the due devotion and efficiency, to achieve their aspirations for Return and Freedom? Are we, the political activists, protesters, laptop holders, doing our best to build a movement that will remove the rule of Evil and establish a just society?
10th October 2014 | International Solidarity Movement, Nablus Team |Burin, Occupied Palestine
Tuesday afternoon, the 7th of October, olive farmer Mahmoud Rga Mahoud Aid, his wife, and thei three children were attacked by a a group of settlers from the illegal settlement of Giv’at Ya’akov. The attack took place on the family´s land near the village of Burin, south west of Nablus. (continue reading)
Friday October 10, 2014 19:08 by IMEMC News & Agencies
Detention of MPs renewed without charge
Israeli authorities have kidnapped 88 Palestinian citizens since the beginning of October, according to the Palestinian Prisoners' Club. Additionally, the administrative detention orders of six Palestinian MPs have been renewed.
According to the Palestinian News Network, Prisoners Club officials announced Thursday that Israeli authorities have taken 88 Palestinian citizens into custody since the beginning of this month, with reference to legal records held by the club.
The highest percentage of imprisonment was accounted for in Hebron (25 prisoners), followed by Jerusalem (20 prisoners).
Also on Thursday, Israeli authorities renewed the administrative detention of six Palestinian Members of Parliament affiliated with the Hamas political movement, sources in the party told Ma'an News Agency.
The decision to keep the six lawmakers in detention without trial or charges reportedly comes after they already completed between three and six months each under similar conditions.
The MPs being held captive by Israel were identified as: Basim Zaarir, who will be held for six more months, Omar Abd al-Raziq, 3 more months, Azzam Salhab, 4 more months, Ibrahim Abu Salim, 4 more months, Fadil Hamdan, 3 more months, and former minister Issa Jaabari, 3 more months.
As of mid-September, 33 Palestinian MPs and two ministers were being held in detention by Israel.
Ma'an further reports that over 7,000 Palestinians are currently being held by Israel, including around 500 under the policy of administrative detention, in which prisoners are detained without charge or trial -- a colonial practice which dates back to the time of British Mandate borders.
Sunday October 12, 2014 00:12 by IMEMC News & Agencies
Israeli forces notified residents of al-Khader, to the south of Bethlehem, Saturday, of their intention to seize about 80 dunams of Palestinian-owned cropland, according to local activist Ahmad Salah. Also on Saturday, Israeli settlers assaulted Palestinian olive harvesters in Yasuf, near Salfit.
@Alternative - Palestine is not a 'race'...it is an archaic country with outdated philosophies on society and suffers from the inability to understand how civilized people solve problems without violence and intimidation. Palestine is a culture of intolerance and violence that serves only to eradicate people(s) that contradict its primitive existence.
So, i am not "racist", because (1) this is not a race issue; and (2) because expressing a dislike for a culture or philosophy that relies upon violence and intolerance is not the same as hating a person because of their immutable condition.
What is racist, are @tammuz's posts, clearly he hates Jews merely because they are Jewish....and furthermore, he obviously shares a similar hatred for America, even though he is afforded the luxury of being able to purchase his future bomb making supplies on ebay.
“The imperialist found it useful to incorporate the credible and seemingly unimpeachable wisdom of science to create a racial classification to be used in the appropriation and organization of lesser cultures. The works of Carolus Linnaeus, Georges Buffon, and Georges Cuvier, organized races in terms of a civilized us and a paradigmatic other. The other was uncivilized, barbaric, and wholly lower than the advanced races of Europe. This paradigm of imaginatively constructing a world predicated upon race was grounded in science, and expressed as philosophical axioms by John Locke and David Hume, offered compelling justification that Europe always ought to rule non-Europeans. This doctrine of cultural superiority had a direct bearing on Zionist practice and vision in Palestine. A civilized man, it was believed, could cultivate the land because it meant something to him; on it, accordingly, he produced useful arts and crafts, he created, he accomplished, he built. For uncivilized people, land was either farmed badly or it was left to rot.
This was imperialism as theory and colonialism was the practice of changing the uselessly unoccupied territories of the world into useful new versions of Europe. It was this epistemic framework that shaped and informed Zionist attitudes towards the Arab Palestinian natives. This is the intellectual background that Zionism emerged from. Zionism saw Palestine through the same prism as the European did, as an empty territory paradoxically filled with ignoble or, better yet, dispensable natives. It allied itself, as Chaim Weizmann said, with the imperial powers in carrying out its plans for establishing a Jewish state in Palestine.
The so-called natives did not take well to the idea of Jewish colonizers in Palestine. As the Zionist historians, Yehoshua Porath and Neville Mandel, have empirically shown, the ideas of Jewish colonizers in Palestine, this was well before World War I, were always met with resistance, not because the natives thought Jews were evil, but because most natives do not take kindly to having their territory settled by foreigners. Zionism not only accepted the unflattering and generic concepts of European culture, it also banked on the fact that Palestine was actually populated not by an advanced civilization, but by a backward people, over which it ought to be dominated. Zionism, therefore, developed with a unique consciousness of itself, but with little or nothing left over for the unfortunate natives. In fact, I would go so far as to say that if Palestine had been occupied by one of the well-established industrialized nations that ruled the world, then the problem of displacing German, French, or English inhabitants and introducing a new, nationally coherent element into the middle of their homeland would have been in the forefront of the consciousness of even the most ignorant and destitute Zionists.
In short, all the constitutive energies of Zionism were premised on the excluded presence, that is, the functional absence of native people in Palestine; institutions were built deliberately shutting out the natives, laws were drafted when Israel came into being that made sure the natives would remain in their non-place, Jews in theirs, and so on. It is no wonder that today the one issue that electrifies Israel as a society is the problem of the Palestinians, whose negation is the consistent thread running through Zionism. And it is this perhaps unfortunate aspect of Zionism that ties it ineluctably to imperialism- at least so far as the Palestinian is concerned. In conclusion, I cannot affirm that Zionism is colonialism, but I can tell you the process by which Zionism flourished; the dialectic under which it became a reality was heavily influenced by the imperialist mindset of Europe. Thank you.
“Actually—and this was where I began to feel seriously uncomfortable—some such divine claim underlay not just 'the occupation' but the whole idea of a separate state for Jews in Palestine. Take away the divine warrant for the Holy Land and where were you, and what were you? Just another land-thief like the Turks or the British, except that in this case you wanted the land without the people. And the original Zionist slogan—'a land without a people for a people without a land'—disclosed its own negation when I saw the densely populated Arab towns dwelling sullenly under Jewish tutelage. You want irony? How about Jews becoming colonizers at just the moment when other Europeans had given up on the idea?” ― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir
instead of false pseudo-science, you're now justifying racism by creating false pseudo-politics saying a certain group of people (romans, egyptians, syrians, turks, british, etc.) have always had a right to govern and have always owned a given piece of land, and that, for some reason, implies the other group of people does not have a right to exist on that land.
how do you tell one group from the other? is there something that might pop out if you just look at them? skin tone, or the shape of their nose or their hair style maybe? or do you need a deed of title established under the ottoman rule to tell which group has a right to govern? is a deed of title established under the british mandate acceptable, or if it was established after that? maybe you need to go back to the holy roman empire and prove a deed of title was established under that governing body?
remember the palestinians were granted a right to govern themselves as they saw fit, and a right to 'self-determination,' by the UN mandate that allowed israel to exists as it saw fit, but the palestinians rejected the partition.
so this is really about immigration policy right? if the palestinians chose to self-govern as was granted to them under the original partition plan and under the proposed 2-state solution you're opposed to, they could establish the right to return and an immigration policy that limits eruopean settlers.
your goal is just to get rid of the white people right? that would be more difficult under a single israeli state governed by white people. how do you see that being implemented in a practical way?
The cry for the national home for the Jews does not make much appeal to me. The sanction for it is sought in the Bible and the tenacity with which the Jews have hankered after return to Palestine.
Why should they not, like other peoples of the earth, make that country their home where they are born and where they earn their livelihood? Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs. What is going on in Palestine today cannot be justified by any moral code of conduct. The mandates have no sanction but that of the last war. Surely it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their national home. The nobler course would be to insist on a just treatment of the Jews wherever they are born and bred. The Jews born in France are French in precisely the same sense that Christians born in France are French.
Why should they not, like other peoples of the earth, make that country their home where they are born and where they earn their livelihood?
so are you canadian or what? there are immigrants on this forum that probably don't think people shouldn't be allowed to immigrate, or that people who are not born in a given country should not be made to feel welcome where they live.
having said that, i recognize immigration can be another very difficult subject, and open immigration is typically not practicable in most countries.
Israeli violence isn’t senseless — it follows a colonial logic.
(...)
But describing such violence as aimless misses the underlying logic of Israel’s conduct throughout Operation Protective Edge and, indeed, for much of its history.
As Darryl Li points out, “Since 2005, Israel has developed an unusual, and perhaps unprecedented, experiment in colonial management in the Gaza Strip,” seeking to “isolate Palestinians there from the outside world, render them utterly dependent on external benevolence,” and at the same time “absolve Israel of responsibility toward them.”
This strategy, Li goes on to argue, is one way that Israel is working to maintain a Jewish majority in the territories it controls so that it can continue to deny equal rights for the rest of the population.
The suppression of Palestinian resistance is crucial to the success of the Israeli experiment. But there is a corollary, which is a cyclical interaction between Israeli colonialism and US militarism. As Bashir Abu-Manneh explains, there is a relationship between American imperialism and Zionist policies. American policymakers believe that an alliance with Israel helps the US control the Middle East. So the United States enables Israeli colonialism and occupation, which in turn creates contexts for further US interventions in the region that can be used to try to deepen American hegemony.
He points out, furthermore, that the “United States has been determining major economic and political outcomes” in the region since at least 1967, and that Israel plays a “crucial role in their realization. In Israel-Palestine, this has meant that force and colonial peace have alternated as main instruments of policy.” Yet all the while the main objective remains “a constant: Jewish supremacy in Palestine — as much land as possible, as few Palestinians as possible.”
What both Li and Abu-Manneh highlight is Israel’s concern with keeping Palestinians in a state of powerlessness. Driven by both its own settler-colonial agenda and by its function as an American partner in the geopolitical system, Israel strives to balance its desire to maximize the territory it controls against the imperative of minimizing the number of Palestinians living in the territories it seeks to use for its own purposes.
One way to destroy any sign of Palestinian power has been on display during Protective Edge, during which Israeli violence has sought to stamp out signs of Palestinian independence — hence Economy Minister Naftali Bennett’s call for “defeating Hamas.”
The result is that Palestinians are not merely subject to extreme violence. Rather, their capacity to live autonomously in historic Palestine is being attacked. The destruction of infrastructure, as in the recent attack on the Gaza Strip’s lone power plant, is one index of that. Not only does the current Israeli onslaught end the physical existence of specific Palestinian individuals, it aims to obliterate Palestinians as a people with the capacity to live independently in their homeland.
While denying refugees their legally protected and natural right of return is the most overt tactic that Israel uses to maintain its desired demographic picture, creating conditions inhospitable to the autonomous existence of Palestinians can also in the long run secure for Israel “as much land as possible, [and] as few Palestinians as possible.”
Violence that abides by this logic is not unique to Zionism. It is central to settler-colonialism and finds historic parallels in, for example, the American Trail of Tears or in Canada, the clearing of the plains through the deliberate starvation of Aboriginal peoples. The meaning of Protective Edge is similar.
Preventing a people from providing for themselves is a way of sabotaging their ability to live autonomously. That is how we should understand Israel’s assaults on forty-six of Gaza’s fishing boats or its attacks on Day Sixteen of Protective Edge against agricultural sites in the Northern Gaza Strip, Gaza City, the Central Gaza Strip, Khan Yunis, and Rafah. That is how we should understand Israel rendering two-thirds of Gaza’s wheat mills inoperative and the need of 3,000 of Gaza’s herders for animal feed (to say nothing of the value of animal life itself). That is how we should understand this intensification of what Harvard’s Dr. Sara Roy describes as the long-running deliberate destruction and de-development of the Gaza Strip’s economy that, unless funding for UNRWA is increased, could cause mass starvation.
and one evil perpetrated on "one people" is not remedied by having certain self-assigned representatives of the latter (indeed, taking firstly the Jews a hostage of their Zionist rhetoric) perpetrate another evil on another people. nor is it justified, nor does it belong within a rational argument of whether Zionism is morally credible or not. Taking the Palestinian cause hostage by reverting by appealing to holocaust sympathy and guilt is a typical sleazy Zionist tactic.
(...) There is detailed evidence that some Zionists collaborated with the Nazis, that Zionists sabotaged anti-Nazi boycotts, and that Zionists interfered with efforts to rescue victims of Nazi oppression.
When facts first emerged in the 1950s about Zionist-Nazi collusion, it caused considerable scandal in Israel and led to the fall of the Israeli government of the time. A number of books are dedicated to this subject and it is discussed in numerous others, almost all by Jewish and/or Israeli authors. The topic inspired novels by well-known Israeli writers Amos Elon and Neil Gordon, was the subject of a 1987 British play, and was portrayed in a 1994 Israeli docudrama. It’s surprising that Steinberg and the Board of Rabbis make no indication of ever having heard anything about this.
Popular American playwright and fervent Zionist Ben Hecht wrote the first book on the subject, “Perfidy,” relating the history of a Hungarian Zionist leader who arranged for his family and several hundred prominent Jews to escape while facilitating the movement of the rest of Hungarian Jews to Nazi concentration camps.
Hannah Arendt, in her 1960 book “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report in the Banality of Evil,” writes: “To a Jew this role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest chapter of the whole dark story.”
In “The Transfer Agreement: The Dramatic Story of the Pact between the Third Reich and Jewish Palestine” (containing an afterword by ADL head Abe Foxman), pro-Israel writer Edwin Black reports that in 1933 Zionist leaders concluded a secret pact with the Third Reich that transferred 60,000 Jews and $100,000 to Palestine, Zionists promising in return that they would halt the worldwide boycott “that threatened to topple the Hitler regime in its first year.”
Author-researcher Lenni Brenner wrote of Zionist-Nazi collusion in “Zionism in the Age of Dictators,” of which the London Times stated: “Brenner is able to cite numerous cases where Zionists collaborated with anti-Semitic regimes, including Hitler’s.”
Brenner’s second book on the topic, “51 Documents, Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis,” includes a 1940 letter from underground Zionist terrorist leader Avraham Stern proposing that Jewish militias would fight on Germany’s side in exchange for Nazi help in creating an “historic Jewish state.”
In “What Price Israel,” American Council for Judaism member Alfred Lilienthal describes FDR’s efforts to set up a program to rescue refugees, only to find Zionists sabotaging it. Roosevelt explained: “The Zionist movement knows that Palestine is, and will be for some time, a remittance society. They know that they can raise vast sums for Palestine by saying to donors, ‘There is no other place this poor Jew can go.’”
When New York attorney Morris Ernst joined this refugee effort, he was shocked: “I was thrown out of parlors of friends of mine who very frankly said ‘Morris, this is treason. You are undermining the Zionist movement.’” Ernst wrote that he found a fanatical movement of men “little concerned about human blood if it is not their own.”
In “The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust,” Israeli historian Tom Segev quotes Zionist leader and future Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion: “If I knew that it was possible to save all the Jewish children of Germany by transporting them to England, but only half of them by transporting them to Palestine, I would choose the second.”
Segev writes that Ben-Gurion worried that ‘the human conscience’ might cause various countries to open their doors to Jewish refugees from Germany and saw this as a threat, warning: ‘Zionism is in danger.’”
In the Bee’s report on the controversy, Sacramento’s Rabbi Alfi is further quoted as saying "there is no comparison" between the treatment of Jews in pre-war Germany and Palestinians. Yet, in 2002 the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz reported that the Israeli military was specifically studying Nazi Warsaw Ghetto strategies for use in the Palestinian Occupied Territories.
Also you are actually trying to convince me that the holocaust was part of a Zionist agenda. As the grandson of auschwitz survivors, I have no problem calling you a total moron. You're also perverting arendt's observations on the eichmann trial. You're ignorant.
The perverting Zionist bots should prove that I'm trying to convince that the holocaust was part of a Zionist agenda before making those accusations .
What I am trying to convince (certainly not to a Zionist bot, that tool...and I mean here literally a tool of propaganda and hasbara) is that self-serving Zionists did not have the Jews in best interest and would align themselves with the very real and concrete enemy of Jews at that time in order to colonize Palestine, over and above real Jewish interests which would have managed to save many Jews from otherwise certain death...and this shows how snide and hypocritical Zionist propaganda tools such as this Zionist bot here are when digging up the holocaust in order to justify the Nakba committed against the Palestinians. Of course, trust them, these Zionist bots, only in their capacity to misrepresent and lie.
It is an ugly lowlife tactic disrespecting both, the history of Jewish suffering at the hands of racist Europeans -using it as an alibi for the oppression and murder of another people- and the history of Palestinian suffering at the hands of racist Zionists.
Furthermore, the Zionist tool here does not negate the truth of both the collaboration and the, thereafter, precedence between Nazis and Zionists as noted in that article quoted above.
I appreciate the addition of more adjectives. hopefully this pejorative term will grow into a paragraph in and of itself.
is he referring to you alternative? or me? maybe both of us? are we supposed to work together to 'prove' whatever it is he's raving about? the group name he's using to describe what i assume is a singular person is confusing. and what's a 'bot' in this context?
technological advancement to the point of ai that could question hamas would be pretty incredible. wouldn't it be a compliment to say we were able to develop a program that sophisticated?
if the bots that tammuz is referring to actually existed, do you think they could work out a proof such as he's suggesting? seriously, that would be amazing. even if they couldn't, seeing an attempt would be pretty cool.
that's far more impressive than just linking posts from other people that are often irrelevant and unaware of other posts in the thread. that script would be easy to write.
see he takes what you say and asks the clever bot and then cut and pastey.
wonder how many lives tammuz has saved with this thread?
with that said curtkram you have to follow his logic. basically because the fastest growing religion is islam and the west isn't happy about this they made a double secret organization to give islam a bad name, basically tammuz is like 2nd double secret NSA employee....
Published Saturday 11/10/2014 (updated) 12/10/2014 21:05
SALFIT (Ma'an) -- A large group of Israeli settlers on Saturday morning violently beat a young Palestinian woman while she was picking olives from trees in an orchard in the village of Yasuf in the Salfit district in the central West Bank, a Palestinian official said.
The assault is the third such attack on Palestinian olive pickers in three days, creating concern about unchecked settler violence as the olive harvest kicks off across the West Bank.
Ghassan Daghlas, a Palestinian Authority official who monitors settlement-related activities in the northern West Bank, told Ma'an that 25-year-old Alaa Fathi Atiyani and her children were picking olives in a field in the al-Masamic area outside of Yasuf village at the time of the alleged assault.
He said that ten settlers arrived from the nearby Kfar Tappuah settlement and assaulted Atiyani, beating her "brutally."
(...)
Attacks on the fall harvest are a key way that Palestinians are forced out of their homes and their lands confiscated for settlement construction, as the loss of a year's crop can signal destitution for farmers with no other way to support themselves.
According to a 2012 report on Israeli settler violence released by the Palestine Center, a Washington-based nonprofit, every year the olive harvest period sees the highest peak in attacks on Palestinian civilians and property.
Over 7,500 olive trees were damaged or destroyed by settlers between January and mid-October in 2012, according to OCHA.
In 2013, there were 399 incidents of settler violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
With apologies to Emerson, appealing for “balance” in apportioning blame to “both sides” in Israel-Palestine is the hobgoblin of little minds. Yet this is the constant calling card of mainstream commentary on the conflict and its mode is, likewise, often evoked through another constituent of the pundit’s lexicon: “context.”
(...)
It is an eminently one-sided problem when you get to the root of it–to act as though there is some moral parity between the colonists who arrived employing systematic, terrorist violence on a civilization-shattering scale in order to forge their own sovereign entity against the desire of (and eventually upon the ruins of) indigenous communities, and the natives who fought back and may have employed terrorism themselves is absurd and curiously vulgar.
While condemning attacks on unarmed non-combatants is an easy moral call to make, who among us would mention Native American raids on European settlements without acknowledging the genocidal violence leveled against them? Who would speak of Nat Turner’s orgy of violence against white Virginians without mentioning the dehumanizing and obscene institution of slavery?
Something tells me that “contextualizing” Hamas’s rockets as falling in the vicinity of the ethnically cleansed and colonist-occupied birthplace of the group’s refugee co-founder would not find favor with Alterman or Goldberg. Same for contextualizing the threat that Hezbollah poses to the colonial-settler state, a state whose rapacious military adventurism in Lebanon–which, lest we forget, was originally prosecuted to quash the resistance of Palestine’s natives-cum-refugees–precipitated the group’s formation in the first place. And yet, without endorsing the methods or platforms of the aforementioned groups, this is the context that matters most.
SALFIT (Ma'an) -- A large group of Israeli settlers on Saturday morning violently beat a young Palestinian woman while she was picking olives from trees in an orchard in the village of Yasuf in the Salfit district in the central West Bank, a Palestinian official said.
I meant this was a hate crime.
What else you would call bunch of settlers ganging up and beating a Palestinian woman while harvesting olives?
tammuz missed columbus day. that's the day we american's celebrate when custer landed on plymouth rock and led the apache down the trail of tears into florida where the sioux were put on reservations with the iroquois. i'm sure someone will remind him to give thanks on thanksgiving.
speaking of, it was also candian thanksgiving yesterday wasn't it? another opportunity to rant about reaping the benefits of living in a country with european colonialism missed. maybe he should be telling us how canada should get rid of their non-european immigrants the same way palestinians should be getting rid of european immigrants?
I was thrilled to hear that the Swedish and then the British parliaments voted to recognize Palestine, or rather the State of Palestine. I think that this is a joyous day for all peace and freedom loving people.
So now we can expect to see the Israeli military pulling back, checkpoints being dismantled and that grey ugly and very costly wall come tumbling down at last. Soon Shuhada street in Hebron will be open for business and the settlers will vacate the homes they stole and return to wherever it was they they came from. Now there is no longer need for Palestinians in the old cities of Hebron, Jerusalem and Silwan to remain in their homes for fear that they be taken by armed Jewish settler mobs.
I can see the faces of the mothers and fathers of the thousands of prisoners who will now finally be released. The children who never saw their fathers, wives who had been alone for decades reunite with their husbands. Surely there will be celebrations in Ramallah, the flag of Palestine will be raised in Yaffa and in Haifa, in Akka and in Jerusalem.
Soon we can expect to see the long lines of people going to the polls to vote for the first real democratic elections, in the free State of Palestine. Posters of Palestinian leaders and campaign rallies will be seen all over the country. Surely posters with the faces of soon to be released Marwan Barghouti and Ahmad Saadat, along with other, lesser known names will be plastered everywhere.
Palestinian fathers like my friend Iyad Burnat, who for years could not explain to their young children why they are not allowed to go to the beach and why they are not free to travel to Jerusalem as I do, and visit the sacred Al Aqsa mosque will now be able to do so. Now millions of Palestinians can take their families to enjoy a day in Yaffa or Haifa and spend time on the beach, spend the night in a local hotel and then the next day they will be free to go to Jerusalem to shop and pray and then return to their villages in the West Bank. Surely now that Britain and Sweden both recognized the State of Palestine, Palestinians can travel as free people in Palestine without the need for permits.
One can expect a committee will urgently be formed to accommodate the return of Palestinian refugees to Palestine. The refugee camps will be dismantled, those who wish to return will soon be able to do so and those who do not wish to will receive appropriate compensation for their loss and their suffering, much like Jewish people did after the holocaust. This committee will discuss how restitution is to be distributed and where to house returning refugees whose villages have been wiped off the map.
Now that Sweden and Britain have spoken the Gaza strip will be open in no time and the forces that had destroyed it will now rebuild it. Surely there will be money set aside from the US foreign aid and money that is given to Israel and money from the UK and Germany all of whom supplied Israel with the money and weapons used to murder innocents in Gaza, this money will now go to rebuild Gaza and compensate the families who lost their bread winners. The families of the inured will be given the finest medical care in modern facilities in Be’er Sheba, Ashkelon, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. The state will pay for their medical expenses and care for them for as long as is needed.
Surely monuments can now be built to commemorate the thousands of innocents brutally murdered by the Zionist regime. A monument for the brave young Palestinians who fought and died in Gaza, who gave their lives to free their people will to be erected and the memory of their courage will be forever be etched in our minds, not to say the history books of the newly recognized State of Palestine.
Surely British and Swedish parliamentarians had all this in mind when they cast their courageous vote. Why, anything short of this would be hypocrisy. Anything short of a free State of Palestine, over all of Palestine would be merely an empty gesture. No member of parliament that respects themselves would vote for an empty gesture, a symbol with no meaning or content.
A vote that is any less than recognizing a free State of Palestine over all of Palestine, and calls for the Zionist regime to be removed, would merely be the Europeans once again trying to wash their hands of a problem they created and supported. One can hardly believe that they would cast such a meaningless, cowardly vote that makes not one iota of difference to anyone.
Surely before casting their vote they asked whether this vote will bring the urgent relief needed in Gaza, or whether it will male it easier for children in West Bank villages to go to school? Will it have an effect on the distribution of water, or lack their of, to Palestinians in the South Hebron Hills? Will the village of Nabi Saleh receive the same services and water as the brutally violent settlers who live in Halamish, a settlement built on Nabi Saleh land? Will the people of other Palestinian villages now have access to the roads and highways. Will they be able to travel freely to work, school and to their own leisure throughout all of Palestine? They must have asked if this vote of recognition in the State of Palestine will allow Palestinians of 1948 to live and work freely, marry whomever they wish, build their homes and their communities as free, independent people.
Sadly, however, Sweden and the UK have chosen the easy way out. Instead of dealing a real blow to the apartheid Zionist regime in Jerusalem, instead of sending a message that violence and racism will not be tolerated, they chose an empty gesture, they chickened out and voted for nothing.
As one wise Palestinian lady said: “They can keep their vote.”
I'm not fussed about what a Zionist bot "thinks" of me. Its obvious that they're going through their hasbara list, now at petty insults after pretentious posturing of wanting a serious debate or pretentious interest ("Dubai gay")...so visible and obvious, its actually stupid . It is of course exactly my bringing up the nakba of the Palestinians caused by the racist colonizing Zionists that the likes of this Zionist bot have summoned themselves here, subcontracted to counter; their so-called sympathy for the "plight of the Palestinians" (for which their Zionist racist ideology is responsible for) fake as press-on nails. What sort of individuals would stoop down to calling others "human garbage"? This shows you exactly the Zionist mind, how petty and vitriolically aggressive it is. This is the racist dehumanizing mind that throws families living in their ancestral homes, on properties that belong to them and that they belong to out off their homes and their lands, that punishes those who remain with the most extreme measures including mass murder.
This is the mind that should be boycotted with its Zionist bigotry and its outdated colonialist terrorism.
Hey, look at that! This idiot interacted for once, too bad his post contained no useful information... just another shopping list of adjectives to long for his simple mind to process.
Almost six months ago, in May 2014, B’Tselem cautioned that the number of Palestinians held by Israel in administrative detention was rising. In June and July 2014, over the course of Operation Brother’s Keeper, the military issued some 250 new administrative detention orders; at the end of August 2014, Israel was holding some 473 detainees in administrative detention – the highest number since April 2009. Within one year, the number of detainees had more than tripled.
According to Israel Prison Service (IPS) data, more than 60 percent of administrative detainees held at the end of August 2014 had been held for three months or less. Some 10 percent had been held for three to six months, some 13 percent from six months to one year, and some 13 percent from one to two years. Four detainees had been in administrative detention continuously for over two years.
Administrative detention is detention without trial, ostensibly intended to prevent people from committing acts that are liable to endanger public safety, rather than punishing them for offenses already committed, as is the case in criminal proceedings. As detention on the basis of potential conduct rather than past actions is problematic, international law permits its use only in the most exigent circumstances.
However, the Israeli security establishment uses administrative detention on a mass scale, in defiance of these restrictions. At no stage are the detainees told the reason for their detention or the specific allegations against them, nor do they know when they will be released: although each administrative detention order may not exceed six months, it can be renewed indefinitely.
Administrative detainees by duration (click to see the full chart)
Although detainees are brought before a judge to approve the detention order, the judicial review is merely a semblance of a just legal system: most of the material submitted by the prosecution is classified and not disclosed to the detainees or their counsel . Since the detainees do not know evidence there is against them, they are unable to refute it. Given the inherently inferior position of detainees in such proceedings, military judges and High Court justices presiding over these cases have a duty to serve as “temporary defense counsel” for the detainees, but they often shirk this responsibility and almost always accept the position of the security establishment.
Relying on the secrecy of the process, and with court approval , the security establishment illegally exploits administrative detention to incarcerate people for offenses allegedly committed in the past so as not to expose evidence against them.
Over the years, Israel has held thousands of Palestinians in administrative detention for periods ranging from a few months to several years. A number of Israeli citizens, including settlers, have also been held in administrative detention for periods of a few months. There were times during the second intifada when Israel held over a thousand Palestinians in administrative detention.
Some 70 percent of the administrative detainees held at the end of August 2014 were held in facilities located inside Israel – a violation of international law, which entails further violation of their rights, including denying some of them the right to visits, as the security establishment refuses to issue relatives permits to enter Israel.
The government of Israel must release all administrative detainees or prosecute them, in accordance with due process.
(...) For activists in solidarity with Palestinian desires for national self-determination, undermining the hegemony of the “innocent settler” narrative is imperative in order to counter the propaganda that justifies Israeli state and settler violence. To do so means centering colonialism and white supremacy as the grounding analytical categories and conceptual framework.
This is not necessarily a new argument or one that has not been embraced by some, but for various reasons, including bogus charges of anti-Semitism, many in the U.S. progressive and radical communities have eschewed this approach over the years.
The other challenge is that the “white supremacist” term has been domesticated and reduced to a crude and relatively simple notion of “racism.” In this context, white supremacists and white supremacy is represented by easy targets like Donald Sterling and Tea Party members, while racialized imperialism is overlooked.
In order to re-position Israel in the public imagination, activists must overcome both of these issues if movements for solidarity and justice such as the growing boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement have any chance of being effective solidarity mechanisms.
Liberated from the racist bias of the colonial/imperialist lens that casts Israelis as victims, Israeli state actions and policies in Gaza are then stripped of the obfuscating claims of self-defense and concerns for Palestinian civilians. And ending ethical double standards by applying one standard informed by the principles of human equality and the rejection of all forms of dehumanizing oppression would clearly identify the real victims in the ongoing drama of the Israel/Palestinian conflict – and it would not be the state of Israel.
Ajamu Baraka is a human rights activist, organizer and geo-political analyst. Baraka is an Associate Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) in Washington, D.C. and editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report. His latest publications include contributions to two recently published books: Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA and Claim No Easy Victories: The Legacy of Amilcar Cabral. He can be reached at info.abaraka@gmail.com and www.AjamuBaraka.com.
Archinect, please boycott Israel (its about time!)
From:
This, too, is genocide
My eyes opened wide in amazement. A minister of a country that calls itself democratic seriously proposed a reduction in the birthrate of a specific ethnic group. And let us be exact: Agriculture Minister Yair Shamir was not proposing passing an amendment that would apply to all citizens, or even all groups with high birth rates in Israeli society. He wants to lower the birthrate of a single ethnic group. Concerned that the Bedouin community will constitute half a million people by 2035, Shamir suggests outlawing polygamy as a way to lower the number of births. It seems that such racist discourse has not come from any sane administration since the days of Pharaoh.
My nausea rose as my fingers continued to turn the pages of the newspaper, until I reached the last page. It was then that my revulsion turned into bitter laughter. These two headlines, together, created a spectacular unconscious irony, as newspapers do without intending to: “Swiss initiative to limit cat overpopulation. Switzerland has 1.48 million cats living there, as compared with 8.1 million human inhabitants. Over the past few months, several ideas for limiting cats’ freedom of movement have been proposed.”
In other words, we are not alone! Like Israel, Switzerland suffers from animals multiplying too rapidly. There it is cats; here it is Bedouin. A wonderful basis for strengthening the relationship between both countries, and exchanging information and ideas. Israel can import the methods accepted in Switzerland (spaying and neutering), and Switzerland can propose the ideas of Minister Shamir: only one mate per cat. And we can suggest another well-tried Israeli method as well: not constructing protected spaces for cats in case Switzerland should find itself under mortar fire.
OUTLAWING POLYGAMY AND IMPROVING LIVING STANDARDS FOR BEDOUINS = RACISM!
Slavoj Zizek is answering questions live.
Here is how he answered to the one about BDS. My views exactly.
--------------------------------------------------------------------
6h ago09:56
His thoughts on a boycott of Israel
jemurphy asks:
Is an academic boycott of Israel justified? Do you support a boycott?
SlavojZizek
08 October 2014 2:54pm
I do support academic boycott, but only Israel's state institutions. To boycott Israel in the sense of not visiting it, not having contact with people there, I totally reject this. The reason is double. First, there is recently in Europe a new wave of anti-semitism. For example in countries like Hungary, Slovakia, Poland and others. So for a European who remembers the Holocaust, anything to do with boycotting the Jews brings out terrible memories. We are playing with fire here.
But nonetheless, the reason why I support a boycott, BDS and all that, is that it is a common project of Palestinians, and Jewish progressive critics of Zionism. This unity is absolutely crucial. The moment we abandon this unity and say oh no, Israel is so bad that we have to be directly against Jews, we all deserve to die. Life is over for me.
And another thing which is important and which people tend to forget: boycott is a non-violent measure. Better boycott than terrorism, than bombs. So although I am absolutely on the Palestinian side, I think we should be very careful to make Palestinian resistance into part of a modern universal emancipatory project. Without this we are lost.
REMINDER: Tammuz is pro-violence.
Israel police brutality remains unchecked 14 years after massacre of Palestinian citizens
Patrick O. Strickland
The Electronic Intifada
Arrabeh
7 October 2014
Israeli police arrest a protestor during a demonstration by Palestinian citizens of Israel in the northern city of Nazareth, against the summer assault on Gaza, 21 July.
(Faiz Abu Rmeleh / ActiveStills)
Jameela Asleh, better known as Um Aseel, witnessed the killing of her eldest son Aseel one October fourteen years ago when Israeli police opened fire on unarmed Palestinian demonstrators in Israel.
“I witnessed his execution with my own eyes,” the 62-year-old mother told The Electronic Intifada.
Just seventeen years old at the time, her son was among the thirteen Palestinian citizens of Israel killed during demonstrations that spread throughout present-day Israel in early October 2000.
Taking place in the Galilee towns of Nazareth, Sakhnin and Arrabeh, the protests were a response to Israel’s extreme military violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, particularly the killing of twelve-year-old Muhammad al-Dura in Gaza a few days earlier.
“My son was part of the protests that exploded suddenly due to the shock of Muhammad al-Dura’s murder and [also] when [then Israeli Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon stormed al-Aqsa mosque [in Jerusalem],” Um Aseel said, referring to the two events often cited as the triggers for the second Palestinian intifada at the end of September 2000.
Violent attitude
An estimated 1.7 million Palestinians carry Israeli citizenship and live in Palestinian areas of cities, towns and villages across the country. They face dozens of discriminatory laws that limit their access to state resources and muzzle political expression, says Adalah, a Haifa-based legal center.
Worse still, Palestinian activists and human rights groups say police brutality has continued unabated.
“During protests in the ‘48 territories [present-day Israel], especially recently, the violent attitude of police forces is clear from the start,” Farah Bayadsy, a Jerusalem-based lawyer and activist, told The Electronic Intifada.
“They always start with racist talk or pushing, but then it turns into harsh grabbing or hitting,” explained Bayadsy, who is originally from Baqa al-Gharbiyya, a Palestinian town in the Triangle region of present-day Israel.
“It doesn’t matter if you’re a male or female, elderly or a student — the police violate the law and basic human rights by taking advantage of their power given to them by their blue suits,” Bayadsy added.
Um Aseel said her son was passionate about “finding reconciliation” between Israelis and Palestinians.
In 1997, Aseel became active in Seeds of Peace. That group, which organizes summer camps for young Palestinians and Jewish Israelis, has been criticized by many Palestinians for promoting “normalization” of the injustices they face.
“He participated in many programs,” his mother recalled. “He went to Switzerland and Jordan for coexistence programs. He had been very active for the five years leading up to [his death].”
“He was a quiet, calm and smart child,” she said. “He had never been in a fight before because he got along with everybody. Though he participated in the Israeli-led Seeds of Peace delegations, he always asserted his Palestinian identity.”
When a bullet fired by an Israeli police officer struck Aseel in the neck during the October 2000 demonstration, he was wearing a Seeds of Peace t-shirt.
No justice in Israeli courts
As police began attacking the protests in Arrabeh, Um Aseel felt uneasy and rushed out of the house to bring her son home. “I saw him and yelled for him to come home,” she said. “I saw a police officer hit him on the head with a rifle, and then he shot Aseel at point-blank range.”
When asked what motivated her son to join the protests that day, Um Aseel said: “What are we supposed to do? Sit in the house and say this is the will of God? Our protests and efforts to resist are the way we refuse accepting this oppression.”
The Israeli government subsequently appointed a panel to investigate the killings of the thirteen Palestinian citizens of Israel, as well as a Jewish Israeli woman and a Palestinian from Gaza during the nationwide protests.
That panel, the Or Commission, failed to arrive at a conclusion about who was responsible for Aseel’s death. Though it “reprimanded” the police for a lack of preparation and Palestinian political leaders in Israel for alleged incitement, no indictments were ever issued for the killings.
Um Aseel said “there is no justice whatsoever” for her son or “Palestinians anywhere, especially not in Israeli courts.”
“There is no such thing as Israeli justice,” she added.
Coinciding with the fourteenth anniversary of the October 2000 massacre, Adalah released an alarming new report. Between 2011 and 2013, 93 percent of 11,282 “complaints filed against the police were closed by Mahash with or without investigation,” according to the report, referring to the police investigation unit that works under the auspices of Israel’s justice ministry.
Adalah’s report paints an image of the Mahash police investigation unit as incapable of seeking justice for the country’s Palestinian minority.
More than 72 percent “of the files were closed without an investigation based on one of three reasons afforded by [Israeli] law: lack of public interest, lack of guilt, and lack of evidence,” the report states.
The report also notes that Mahash, supposedly designed to ensure police accountability, repeatedly closed cases when the excessive use of force was evident, “undermining the primary purpose for which it is created.”
Police “willing to be brutal”
Salah Mohsen, a spokesperson for Adalah, said these statistics send a clear message to anyone who dissents in Israel. “The sheer number of complaints alone says that police are willing to be very brutal,” he told The Electronic Intifada.
In numerous cases when Adalah filed complaints to Mahash with “clear evidence, such as photos, videos and testimony,” the files were closed without investigation, he said.
“Many people don’t bother filing complaints anymore,” Mohsen concluded, adding that there is a “huge need for restricting Mahash as a body if the goal is genuinely to end police brutality.”
During Israel’s 51-day attack on the besieged Gaza Strip this summer, hundreds of Palestinians in present-day Israel were subjected to police violence and arrested in demonstrations in cities such as Haifa, Akka (Acre), Jaffa and Nazareth.
But the ever-present threat of police violence didn’t stop Palestinians from assembling in Sakhnin on Wednesday last week to commemorate the fourteenth anniversary of the October 2000 massacre.
Jamal Zahalka, leader of the Balad political party, said it was important for Palestinians in Israel to continue marking the anniversary each year because the slayings “are part of Israeli policy, showing that in a time of crisis we [Palestinians in Israel] are enemies and not citizens.”
The Israeli authorities have “failed to provide any results in serving justice by pursuing the police responsible for the killings or the decision to kill,” Zahalka told The Electronic Intifada. “Many questions are left unanswered until today. The investigation was used to cover up for the criminals responsible.”
Israel’s former attorney general Menachem Mazuz closed the investigation into the 2000 killings in 2008 without issuing indictments to any police officers or commanders involved. He was recently appointed a judge in Israel’s high court.
Meanwhile, back in her Arrabeh home, Um Aseel said she will never forgive Israel for taking her son’s life.
“Aseel’s martyrdom wasn’t just aggression against him or the other twelve people who died that day,” she said. “It was an attack on all Palestinians. Israel tried to kill our humanity and make us [Palestinians in Israel] forget we are part of the Palestinian people.”
Patrick O. Strickland is an independent journalist and regular contributor to The Electronic Intifada. His website is www.postrickland.com. Follow him on Twitter @P_Strickland_.
@tammuz
Palestine sucks....Down with Palestine
Posting pictures of terrorists getting harassed by police is actually uplifting.
Your people are archaic and detrimental to modern life and peace.
You should spend your efforts trying to rid yourself of the real problem ...Hamas. Your obsession with Israel is all to revealing about the nefarious goals of your people.
Why have you not littered this forum with your outrage for what Hamas is doing to Palestine? What Hamas is doing to good people of the world? About how Hamas is the greatest threat to palestine peace?
doctor, heal thyself.
Sub, you're kinda racist.
you know, a lot of people on this side of the globe aren't exposed to much of the situation in the middle east. it's not like watching cnn or fox every now and then is going to give you a very full picture of what's going on.
if an architect came to this site to learn from other architects and only had tammuz and orhan's defense of tammuz to go off, you might be able to see how a person could start to develop a viewpoint like subgenious is portraying here.
it would be much better if this situation was portrayed in a manner that encouraged a peaceful outlook rather than just trying to provide justification for why tammuz wants to escalate the conflict.
if the conflict is portrayed in such a manner that one side has to kill the other, which i think is part of tammuz's goal (or at least the goal of the people he's copying content from), then it's essentially the same racism regardless of which side you pick isn't it? the divisive picture being painted here encourages that kind of racism.
Speaking of racism, since it so concerns those attempting to play, invainly and transparently, "good criminal" (good criminal, bad criminal...)
Zionism is Racism: How Israel's founding ideology, Zionism, is the basic obstacle for the full integration of minorities into its mainstream political systems
In Israel, Arabs constitute twenty percent, around 1.5 million, of the Israeli population. The marginalization and refugee crisis of Arabs in Israel began in 1948, with the creation of the state of Israel, based on Zionist ideologies that set to create a Jewish state in the Holy Land where a predominantly Arab and Muslim population was currently living under the British mandate. Theodor Herzl declared in 1897, that the aim of Zionism, or Jewish nationalism, “was to establish a national home for the Jewish people secured by public law.” The politics of Zionism were influenced by nationalist ideology and by colonial ideas about Europeans’ right to claim and settle other parts of the world. Ultimately though, the fundamental ideology of Zionism itself, is the idea of a legally ethnocentric Israel. Zionism depends on the notions of divine entitlement and civilizational superiority that justified previous colonialist settlement projects in South Africa, Algeria, and North America.
There are several forms of Zionism that evolved throughout the 1920 until the 1970s, the dominant form was Labor Zionism, which set to link socialism and nationalism. Later in the 1920s, and into the 1930s, the second form of Zionism emerged as the Revisionist movement. The Revisionist movement of Zionism supported a revision of the boundaries of Jewish territorial claims beyond Palestine to include areas east of the Jordan River. The Revisionists declared their objective was to establish a Jewish state in Palestine.
Following the Arab rejection of the 1947 partition plan (which provided for two, albeit not ethnically-cleansed, entities), the 1948 war and the ensuing flux of Palestinian refugees epitomized the crux of the identity-cased conflict. Today, these aspects relate to the fate of the Palestinian refugees as well as to the status of the Palestinian minority in Israel. Touching on the key issue of the nature of the State of Israel, they represent by far the most intractable issues of the conflict. With the 1967 war, the conflict acquired a distinct territorial aspect. Through the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the conflict became largely focused on territory: on the one hand, there is Israel’s construction of settlements, roads and walls and its seizure and destruction of land and property; and on the other hand, there is the Palestinians’ violent resistance, including the use of terrorism, against Israeli policies. “Consequently, Israel’s victory in 1967 gave rise to amore religious variation of Zionism. Some existing political parties representing orthodox Jews came to embrace religious nationalism, and new parties and movements forms to advocate Israel’s permanent control and extensive Jewish settlement in the West bank and Gaza” (http://www.merip.org/palestine-israel_primer/zionism-pal-isr-primer.html).
Since the Oslo Process, the territorial aspects of the conflict (concerning settlements, borders and water) have become a major focus of negotiations. Yet, paradoxically these represent the most amenable issues for compromise, with the exception of Jerusalem, which has both a territorial and religious meaning. The PLO’s 1988 effective acceptance of a two-state solution potentially meets the Zionist left’s priority to secure a ‘Jewish democratic state,’ and its consequent understanding of the need to withdraw from the Palestinian-inhabited occupied territories” (http://www.merip.org/palestine-israel_primer/zionism-pal-isr-primer.html).
Palestinians in Israel are politically marginalized and economically underprivileged, according to a recent International Crisis Group report (“Back to Basics: Israel’s Arab minority and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 14 March 2012 [PDF]). Adalah, an organization giving legal aid to Palestinians in Israel, stated last year that 30 laws in Israel discriminate either directly or indirectly against Palestinian citizens (“The Inequality Report: The Palestinian Arab minority in Israel,” March 2011 [PDF]). “That puts Israeli democracy under a big question mark,” said Mossawa’s Laham-Grayeb (http://electronicintifada.net/content/racism-pushing-palestinian-citizens-israel-ramallah/11664).
Zionism is at the very core of the marginalization of Palestinian Arabs at the time of the British Mandate, and remains to be the at the very core of the continued marginalization of Palestinian Arabs today. The UN General Assembly Resolution 3379 determined on November 10th, 1975 that Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination after the assembly recalled the multiple international laws that call for the elimination of forms of racism and racial discrimination, including the following:
“First, the United Nations resolution 1904 proclaiming the United Nations Declaration on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination, and in particular its affirmation that "any doctrine of racial differentiation or superiority is scientifically false, morally condemnable, socially unjust and dangerous" and its expression of alarm at "the manifestations of racial discrimination still in evidence in some areas in the world, some of which are imposed by certain Governments by means of legislative, administrative or other measures; Second, resolution 3151 G (XXVIII) of 14 December 1973, the General Assembly condemned, inter alia, the unholy alliance between South African racism and Zionism; Third, the Declaration of Mexico on the Equality of Women and Their Contribution to Development and Peace, proclaimed by the World Conference of the International Women's Year, held at Mexico City from 19 June to 2 July 1975, which promulgated the principle that "international co-operation and peace require the achievement of national liberation and independence, the elimination of colonialism and neo-colonialism, foreign occupation, Zionism, apartheid and racial discrimination in all its forms, as well as the recognition of the dignity of peoples and their right to self-determination", Fourth, resolution 77 (XII) adopted by the Assembly of Heads of State and Government of the Organization of African Unity at its twelfth ordinary session, hold at Kampala from 28 July to 1 August 1975, which considered "that the racist regime in occupied Palestine and the racist regimes in Zimbabwe and South Africa have a common imperialist origin, forming a whole and having the same racist structure and being organically linked in their policy aimed at repression of the dignity and integrity of the human being" (http://imeu.net/news/article005878.shtml).
The right of return for Palestinians has been endorsed by the United Nations General Assembly in the form of Resolution 194, has been reaffirmed every single year - bar one - since 1948. Israel’s founding ideology of Zionism has caused, and continues to cause today, the marginizaliation of Arabs in Israel and the continuation of the Palestinian refugee crisis. International law has found Israel’s founding ideology of Zionism illegal under international law due to the ideology’s racist, discriminatory behaviors that violate Arab Palestinians’, in Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, fundamental human rights.
For further analysis of the Palestinian refugee crisis and Israel's multiple violations of human rights please see my previous article: "Escalation in the Israeli Assault on the Gaza Strip and the Upcoming Palestinian Bid at the UN: The Role of Human Rights and the Palestinian Refugee in the Palestinian-Israeli Peace Process"
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- See more at: http://www.katiehuerter.com/2012/12/zionism-is-racism-how-israels-founding.html#sthash.JD0TinnL.dpuf
Origins of Israel’s Anti-Arab Racism
November 28, 2012
The anti-Arab racism that increasingly pervades modern Israel surfaces in the non-human images applied to Palestinians, such as the metaphor “mowing the grass” when targeting militants in Gaza. This tragic development traces back to the attitudes of old European imperialism, argues Lawrence Davidson.
By Lawrence Davidson
By the middle of the 19th Century, the multi-ethnic empire was on its way out as the dominant political paradigm in Europe. Replacing it was the nation-state, a political form which allowed the concentration of ethnic groups within their own political borders.
This, in turn, formed cultural and “racial” incubators for an “us (superior) vs. them (inferior)” nationalism that would underpin most of the West’s future wars. Many of these nation states were also imperial powers expanding across the globe and, of course, their state-based chauvinistic outlook went with them.
Hungarian Theodor Herzl (1860-1904), considered the founder of modern Zionism.
Zionism was born in this milieu of nationalism and imperialism, both of which left an indelible mark on the character and ambitions of the Israeli state. The conviction of Theodor Herzl, modern Zionism’s founding father, was that the centuries of anti-Semitism were proof positive that Europe’s Jews could not be assimilated into mainstream Western society. They could only be safe if they possessed a nation state of their own.
This conviction also reflected the European imperial sentiments of the day. The founders of modern Zionism were both Jews and Europeans, and (as such) had acquired the West’s cultural sense of superiority in relation to non-Europeans.
This sense of superiority would play an important role when a deal (the Balfour Declaration) was struck in 1917 between the World Zionist Organization and the British Government. The deal stipulated that, in exchange for Zionist support for the British war effort (World War I was in progress), the British would (assuming victory) help create a “Jewish national home” in Palestine. It was no oversight that neither side in this bargain gave much thought to the Palestinian native population.
Years later, beginning in 1945 (at the end of World War II), the British were forced to officially give up the imperial point of view. They came out of the war with a population burdened by extraordinary high war taxes.
Retaining the empire would keep those taxes high and so the British voter elected politicians who would transform the empire into a commonwealth, granting independence to just about all the Britain’s overseas territories. One of those territories was Palestine.
It is interesting to note that in other European colonies, where large numbers of Europeans resided, the era following World War II saw their eventual evacuation as power shifted over to the natives. Kenya and Algeria are examples which show that this process was hard and bloody, but it happened.
And when it did happen, the official imperial mind set was defeated. That does not mean that all Europeans (or Westerners) saw the light and ceased to be racists, but that their governments eventually saw the necessity to stop acting that way.
Some Consequences
Unfortunately, in the case of Palestine, this process of de-colonization never occurred. In this case the European colonists did not want the imperial mother country to stay and protect them. They wanted them out so they could set up shop on their own. They got their chance after the British evacuated in 1947.
Soon thereafter, the Zionists began executing a prepared plan to conquer the “Holy Land” and chase away or subjugate the native population. And what of that imperial point of view which saw the European as superior and the native as inferior? This became institutionalized in the practices of the new Israeli state.
That made Israel one of the very few (the other being apartheid South Africa) self-identified “Western” nation states to continue to implement old-style imperial policies: they discriminated against the Palestinian population in every way imaginable, pushed them into enclosed areas of concentration and sought to control their lives in great detail.
If one wants to know what this meant for the evolving character of Israel’s citizenry who now would live out the colonial drama as an imperial power in their own right, one might take a look at a book by Sven Lindqvist entitled Exterminate All The Brutes (New Press 1996). This work convincingly shows that lording it over often resisting native peoples, debasing and humiliating them, regularly killing or otherwise punishing them when they protest, leads the colonials to develop genocidal yearnings.
There is evidence that the Zionists who created and now sustain Israel suffer from this process. For a long time Israeli government officials tried genocide via a thought experiment. They went about asserting that the Palestinians did not exist.
The most famous case of this was Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, who on June 15, 1969, claimed that “there were no such thing as Palestinians. … They do not exist.” One of the reasons she gave for this opinion was that the Arabs of Palestine never had their own nation state.
Others took a different approach by denying not so much the existence of Palestinians, but rather their humanity. At various times and in various contexts, usually in response to acts of resistance against occupation, Israeli leaders have referred to the Palestinians as “beasts walking on two legs” (Menachem Begin); “grasshoppers” (Yitzhaq Shamir); “crocodiles” (Ehud Barak); and “cockroaches” (Rafael Eitan).
Of course, these sentiments were not confined to the Israeli leadership. They soon pervaded most of the Zionist population because the old imperial superiority-inferiority propaganda had become a core element of their basic education. The Israelis have taught their children the imperial point of view, augmented it with biased media reporting, labeled the inevitable resistance offered by the Palestinians as anti-Semitism and took it as proof of the need to suppress and control this population of “Others.”
And, from the Zionist standpoint, this entire process has worked remarkably well. Today all but a handful of Israeli Jews dislike and fear the people they conquered and displaced. They wish they would go away. And, when their resistance gets just a bit too much to bear, they are now quite willing to see them put out of the way.
Thus, during the latest round of resistance rocket fire from Gaza and the vengeful killing that came from the Israeli side, we heard the following: “We must blow Gaza back to the Middle Ages destroying all the infrastructure including roads and water” (Eli Yishai, present Deputy Prime Minister); “There should be no electricity in Gaza, no gasoline or moving vehicles, nothing. … We need to flatten entire neighborhoods … flatten all of Gaza” (journalist Gilad Sharon in the Jerusalem Post); “There are no innocents in Gaza. Mow them down … kill the Gazans without thought or mercy.” (Michael Ben-Ari, member of the Knesset); Gaza should be “bombed so hard the population has to flee into Egypt” (Israel Katz, present Minister of Transportation); Gaza should be “wiped clean with bombs” (Avi Dichter, present Minister of Home Front Defense); Israeli soldiers must “learn from the Syrians how to slaughter the enemy” (prominent Israeli Rabbi Yaakov Yosef).
Finally, there were the numerous, spontaneous demonstrations of ordinary Israeli citizens, both in the north and south of the country, where could be heard chants and shouts such as “They don’t deserve to live. They need to die. May your children die. Kick out all the Arabs.”
If it wasn’t for the fact that the outside world was watching, there can be little doubt that the famed Israeli armed forces would have been tempted to do all that these ministers, clerics and citizens wished. After Prime Minister Netanyahu agreed to a cease-fire, a group of Israeli soldiers showed their frustration by using their bodies to spell out (in Hebrew) the words “Bibi Loser” (Bibi is a nickname for Netanyahu).
It was a pre-arranged photo-op and the picture can now easily be found on the Web. What seems to really irk the Israeli citizenry is not that Bibi killed and maimed too many innocent Palestinian civilians, but rather that he did not kill and maim enough of them to grant Israelis “safety and security.”
Throughout history it has been standard operating procedure to demonize those you fight and demote to inferior status those you conquer. But as Lindqvist’s work shows, there was something different about the way Europeans went about this business. The deeply racist outlook that underlay modern imperialism made it particularly perverse.
Now that apartheid South Africa is no more, the Israelis are the last surviving heirs to that dreadful heritage. So much for a “light unto the nations.” That proposition has quite failed. Wherever the Israelis and their Zionist cohorts are leading us, it is not into the light, it is to someplace very very dark.
From Ilan Pappe: A democratic state in all of Palestine is possible – The Palestinian movement should change direction
(...) Another historical note attesting to the artificial partition and the lack of any consideration of the human rights of Palestinians – the original inhabitants of the country – refers to the formation of the Gaza Strip. It is an artificial compound where refugees were crammed from the Negev and the southern coastal plain up to Jaffa. As a result the Gaza Strip has a special status as that part of Palestine the Zionists don’t really want to hold, because of its big population, and don’t know how to get rid of.
The central historical part of the lecture dealt with the West Bank and focused on the importance the Zionists attach to its control, both from historical and religious perspectives and for geopolitical and security considerations. Pappe relied on historical knowledge uncovered with the recent opening of the archives of the Israeli government. (Most archives, such as protocols from government meetings, open after 30 years. Security archives usually open after 50 years.) He disproved the Zionist narrative according to which the occupation of the West Bank was the unforeseen side effect of “Arab aggression” or the “security threat” in 1967 and of Israel’s need to defend itself.
He relied on four main facts:
In 1967 Zionism achieved its goal of establishing a single state between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River – a Jewish, racist and anti-democratic state. This is the reality in which we live and with it we have to deal.
There is a whole system of lies and illusions making it difficult to cope and change the situation. They transfer the consciousness and political struggle to another dimension – a mock battle between the “pro-occupation” and “a peace camp”. Ilan Pappe characterizes this illusionary search for peace as “searching for the key under the lamppost” – not where we have lost it.
The deception of temporary occupation and forged peace process
A significant part of the lecture was devoted to explanations and evidence proving that “the lamppost” didn’t just happen to be where it is. It is the result of a carefully conceived policy aiming to perpetuate Israeli control of all parts of Palestine.
The ideal solution, from the Zionist point of view, was to complete the ethnic cleansing and control all of Palestine without any of its original inhabitants. Zionism continues to work towards this goal, but faces considerable constrains on its freedom of action. Even the fact that the ethnic cleansing in 1948 has not been completed should be attributed to the staying power, Somoud, of the Arab population and not to any good will on the part of Zionism. Since 1967, some 450,000 Palestinians were expelled from the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. But even those who have not been physically deported are victims of ethnic cleansing of an indirect kind: denial of rights, restricting their freedom of movement, limiting personal and social development, preventing any real influence over laws or the government.
Referring to the internal discussions that took place within the Israeli government in 1967 just after the occupation, according to protocols that are now accessible, Pappe tells about proposals for immediate expulsion of the majority of the population. Those proposals found many supporters, mostly veterans of the ’48 ethnic cleansing. However, the Zionist leadership was fearful of active opposition from the population, many of them were already refugees from ’48. The presence of the international media, which was hardly considered in ’48, was another deterrent. Basically the war in ’67 ended quickly and it was difficult to organize and justify ethnic cleansing without the fog of war.
In this situation, out of conscious intention to control the area indefinitely and deny all the human rights of its people, Israel invented the magic formula of presenting the occupation as temporary. The status of the population will be settled “with the coming of peace”. This mode of operation allows Israel to continue to present itself as a “democratic state” and enjoy the many benefits attached to this status in the international arena.
Hence “the peace process” and talk about “two states for two peoples” are not in any contradiction with the occupation, not even the “temporary” occupation” of 1967, but a political and conceptual framework designed to enable and perpetuate the occupation.
Israel would find it hard to market this façade to the world if it was not being assisted by many others, some serving their self-interests and others out of misled good intentions. The leadership of the Palestinian national movement plays a key role in providing credibility for the fake peace process. It is followed by a large part of the leadership of the Palestinian Arab population within the green line. Many peace activists around the world have fallen into this trap.
Meanwhile, Israel has been working on the ground to perpetuate its control over the land, water, economy and all aspects of Palestinian lives. It creates a situation where even if a Palestinian state is announced, headed by Mahmoud Abbas as president, it will not have any practical significance.
ODS offering equality for all inhabitants and returning refugees
Against the reality of one racist state, tearing apart the façade of a fake peace process and “two-state solution”, Ilan Pappe suggests to “start looking for the key where we lost it”.
We need to start by correctly identifying the problem: expose Zionism as a colonialist movement and characterize Israel as an apartheid racist state. There is no other Zionism, nor another Israel. Exposure, by itself, may have huge effect: First of all because of the importance of international support in preserving Israel’s superiority against all local forces; but also due to internal conflicts within Israeli society.
Any solution should be derived from our understanding of the problem. It should start with a discussion among all residents of the country on how to live together within a framework where all enjoy full rights, equality and partnership. The Palestinian refugees should also take part in this discussion, as they have the right to return to Palestine and fully take part in shaping its/their future. It is essential to set the goal of establishing one state for all inhabitants and refugees of the country, because it defines who should participate in the discussion about this future.
Zionism has done, and continues to do, whatever it can to divide the Palestinian people and guide any part of them to get “stuck” in a different dead end. First came the distancing of the refugees outside Palestine’s borders and the isolation of the Palestinian population in the ’48 territories. Today we also witness the political separation between the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Posing a new agenda, common to all sectors of the Palestinian people, is the beginning of the road toward a solution. Today’s technology can provide the basis for an open discussion across borders and checkpoints, forming a platform for more intense links and designing together the common path.
All this is not at all easy. There are problems in the relationship between different sectors of the public, between secular and religious folk, between the indigenous inhabitants and the third generation of settlers. A new distribution of resources is required to compensate for generations of dispossession and discrimination. It is not clear what will be the nature of the new society and what political framework we will build together; but it is essential that we start a serious discussion about all of it. Beyond that we face a hard struggle against an oppressive regime that regards any perspective other than a racist Jewish state as “Suicide” and “Existential Danger”.
This is our task and those are the problems we must solve. Until we look straight at this reality, we are wasting precious time. Understanding the problem and presenting a real solution can create strong dynamics for changing the balance of power.
Plan of Action
At the discussion with the audience Pappe tried to outline some chapters of a practical plan that one may work upon immediately for ODS:
We must not assume that we are powerless and that there is some determinism assuring Israel’s superiority forever. A political activist should not ask “How long will it take until we win the fight?” but rather “What did I do today to bring the victory?”
Pappe mentioned his participation, in 1992, in a delegation which travelled to Tunis to request Arafat to raise the rights of Palestinian Arabs inside the Green Line in the Oslo negotiations with Israel. He recalled their disappointment as Arafat said that was an internal Israeli matter.
Divisions in the leadership of the Palestinian struggle and the lack of a clear political perspective prevent proper utilization of the support of the cause in world public opinion. Although Israel and its allies are working to strengthen these divisions, the responsibility for building the leadership of the Palestinian struggle falls ultimately upon Palestinians themselves.
Pappe finally predicts that when the Palestinian people will unite behind a clear democratic political perspective and clarify to the world that what Israel is fighting for is the perpetuation of racism, Zionism will fall. He says such a prediction was not possible in the past, but it is based on reading the dynamics of power relations and world politics today.
Positive change in the balance of power
Living in England and being involved in the international solidarity movement with the Palestinian people, Pappe describes how, despite the weakness of the Palestinian official position, international conditions are changing favorably. The Palestinian cause receives international awareness and support more than any other struggle for national liberation or democracy. The solidarity movement naturally starts as a popular protest movement, but it is acquiring recognition and support also within the elites and has already advanced and started to influence the decisions of governments and economic firms.
One of the factors that strengthen the solidarity with the Palestinian struggle is the ongoing crisis of the international capitalist system in the wake of the financial crisis that began in 2008. This crisis has led to a growing lack of trust in the political leadership and the governing elites in the global economy. New social movements see a direct connection between economic injustice “inside” and the oppression and exploitation toward third world nations. They are conscious of the direct link between the fate of blacks in the United States and the denial of rights of the Palestinian people. Insights that in the past were known only to a small minority of “rigid” Marxist are now common knowledge of the broader public.
The globalization of the international economy has led to the globalization of the protest movement. Today there is a broad sense of solidarity and commitment to protection of human rights.
He tells in detail about the achievements of the boycott movement (BDS) and the difficulties of Israeli Hasbara (propaganda). Israel is investing huge amounts of money in improving its image – especially in the United States, which many of us tend to consider “The Longest Yard”. Despite all of these efforts, Israelis speakers themselves admit their failure. They now consider campuses in the United States a lost cause.
The latest attack on Gaza, where Israel was not satisfied with ethnic cleansing but turned to outright genocide, led the solidarity movement to new heights. Law students in many faculties in England took over administrative offices in support of the Palestinians. Palestinian flags were raised on many municipal buildings across the UK.
Ilan demonstrates the potential of the solidarity movement by his recent experience. The BBC broadcasts during the attack on Gaza excelled in shocking lack of objectivity and blatant support for Israel’s position. When he heard about the preparations for a mass demonstration in London against the war, he called the organizers and suggested to change the route of the demonstration, pass by the offices of the BBC and stage a special protest there. Indeed, during the demonstration, hundreds of thousands participants rallied to protest outside the offices of the BBC.
Israeli society
When asked from the audience about the drift to the right and extremism in Israeli society, Ilan said that we all know how difficult things are but there is also some related advantage. In past times Israeli society could delude itself that there is a third way, “a Jewish and democratic state”. Today it is impossible to hide the contradiction, albeit with the vast majority of Israeli society choosing racism. This choice hurts Israel’s propaganda and will help us expose to the world the true nature of Israel.
The open choice by the majority of extremism and racism will also push more Israelis to look for alternatives. We witness the disappearance of “the Israeli left”, which will not return, but, in any case, it was a partner in all of Zionism’s crimes. It is necessary, and it is becoming more possible now, to explain to those Israelis whose conscience torments them or see the futility of occupation and racism that those vices stem directly from the Zionist ideology, on which they were educated from childhood.
We already see real signs that some Israelis draw conclusions from the situation. For example, whereas in the past the refusenik movement was mainly against army service in those territories occupied since ’67, now its mainstream is total refusal to serve in the Israeli army.
Zionist victory means perpetuating the character of Israel as a racist state. Even if Israel succeeds in suppressing the Palestinian people, it will only lead to more wars against the surrounding Arab world. In the end Israel as a Crusader state has no future and will be defeated in these wars (after the current internal conflicts in the Arab world are settled one way or another). In this respect, our program is also the only positive perspective proposed for the Israelis.
In turning to the Israeli public there is a division of roles and tasks between the Palestinian Arabs in the movement and anti-Zionist Jews. It is important that the Palestinian movement will explain to Israelis that anything less than full democracy for everyone and everywhere is unacceptable; whoever is opposed to it should be denounced as a racist. Anti-Zionist Jews have an important role in reaching out to the Jewish public. However, the main leverage for a broader change in Israeli society will come from the combination of international condemnation of Israel, the expansion of the boycott movement and a clear call from the joint ODS movement to anti-Zionist Jews to join the struggle for a common future.
Lessons from South Africa
The comparison with South Africa was repeated many times during the lecture, not always in the usual context of the characterization of Israel as an apartheid racist state or of the possibility of a solution based on the democratic principle of “one person, one vote.”
The main enemies against which Pappe spoke were despair and the perception that change is impossible. To this end, he recruited his own personal experience when he arrived in Europe in 1980 and joined the anti-apartheid movement. At that time there was gloom in the movement: many activists thought that popular struggle would never change the positions of governments and economic corporations which operate on self-interest and whose support enabled the continuation of apartheid. Britain was ruled by Margaret Thatcher, who defined Nelson Mandela as “arch-terrorist”.
Ten years later, under heavy international pressure, De Klerk announced the failure of the apartheid regime and in 1994 the liberation movement came to power in democratic elections.
Pappe also turned to the experience of South Africa to emphasise the principled position of the liberation movement there, under the leadership of the African National Congress (ANC), refusing any solution that is not based on full democracy for all residents. This position strengthened the boycott movement, which found a clear address for support and guidance. Today it is hard to find a clear address for the Palestinian liberation movement, nor for directing the struggle, neither for proposing a solution. The emergence of a movement of the inhabitants of Palestine struggling for ODS can fill this vacuum.
Another important lesson from South Africa relates to changing international conditions. The United States relied on South Africa, within the framework of the Cold War, both to counter leftist liberation movements and as a major supplier of uranium. As long as it needed SA, the US government was willing to ignore the crimes committed by the apartheid regime against the black population. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War (factors about which the liberation movement had no influence) abolished the usefulness of the apartheid regime and converted it from an asset into a burden.
Similarly, the Western powers support Israel today because it serves their interests. These interests are changing and the day will come when they will lose interest in supporting Israel. The important questions are who will fight until that moment so that the rights of the Palestinian people will not be forgotten in the meantime and who would be ready at the moment of truth to dismantle the Israeli apartheid regime?
Al-Muqawama – The Resistance
Referring to the Palestinian leadership crisis, Ilan Pappe told the youth: there are some issues you have to discuss between yourself. You can do it without me.
Nevertheless, some twenty youngsters stayed half an hour after the lecture to ask questions and discuss various topics.
One of the issues that many of them do not see eye to eye with Ilan was the subject of armed resistance. When asked about it, Pappe stressed, on the one hand, that the oppressed people have the right to struggle for their liberty by all available means, including armed struggle. On the other hand he said that if he was a Palestinian young man, and he had to choose between a laptop and a Kalashnikov, he would choose a laptop, out of consideration which is a more effective tool in the fight. He also mentioned that nowadays armed struggle doesn’t have the same potential as in the 60s, the days of Che Guevara and the rise of the Palestinian revolution.
As a political activist, it seems to me that Pappe the historian lost here for a moment the historical context. It is true that we witness a process of democratic change in South America, which allowed the liberation movements (most of which were defeated in the armed struggle in the sixties and seventies) to bring about a significant change through democratic means. However, it is difficult to ignore the fact that we live in the heart of the Arab world where still no change was made possible through democratic means. Armed militias of all stripes and types, ranging from the nuclear-armed “Jewish state” to the decapitators of the “Islamic state”, compete between them for power through violent means.
Many years of armed struggle brought independence to the people of South Sudan, which are now fighting each other. The people of divided Kurdistan, another seemingly lost historical struggle, could not defend their very existence today were it not for the armed militias of the Kurdish Workers Party, which is still defined by the Western powers as a terrorist organization.
Armed resistance led to Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000 after 18 years of occupation and stopped another Israeli aggression in 2006. Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip was only made possible thanks to two bloody intifadas. Even those democratic protesters from England, who showed up to protest against the BBC, would probably not leave their homes, or would demonstrate for the sake of another just cause, had it not been for the spilled Palestinian blood in Gaza.
Armed struggle and political struggle are not opposites but complement each other.
The heavy price paid by the Palestinian people in their struggle is but another reason to ask whether the political leadership of the struggle serves the masses faithfully, with the due devotion and efficiency, to achieve their aspirations for Return and Freedom? Are we, the political activists, protesters, laptop holders, doing our best to build a movement that will remove the rule of Evil and establish a just society?
Palestinian family attacked by settlers while harvesting olives
in Nablus, Reports October 10, 2014
10th October 2014 | International Solidarity Movement, Nablus Team | Burin, Occupied Palestine
Tuesday afternoon, the 7th of October, olive farmer Mahmoud Rga Mahoud Aid, his wife, and thei three children were attacked by a a group of settlers from the illegal settlement of Giv’at Ya’akov. The attack took place on the family´s land near the village of Burin, south west of Nablus. (continue reading)
88 Palestinians Kidnapped Since the Beginning of October
Detention of MPs renewed without charge
Israeli authorities have kidnapped 88 Palestinian citizens since the beginning of October, according to the Palestinian Prisoners' Club. Additionally, the administrative detention orders of six Palestinian MPs have been renewed.
According to the Palestinian News Network, Prisoners Club officials announced Thursday that Israeli authorities have taken 88 Palestinian citizens into custody since the beginning of this month, with reference to legal records held by the club.
The highest percentage of imprisonment was accounted for in Hebron (25 prisoners), followed by Jerusalem (20 prisoners).
In Bethlehem the number reportedly reached 11, in Salfit 10, while the remaining prisoners were from the Nablus, Ramallah, Al Bireh, Tubas, Qalqilya and Tulkarm districts.
Also on Thursday, Israeli authorities renewed the administrative detention of six Palestinian Members of Parliament affiliated with the Hamas political movement, sources in the party told Ma'an News Agency.
The decision to keep the six lawmakers in detention without trial or charges reportedly comes after they already completed between three and six months each under similar conditions.
The MPs being held captive by Israel were identified as: Basim Zaarir, who will be held for six more months, Omar Abd al-Raziq, 3 more months, Azzam Salhab, 4 more months, Ibrahim Abu Salim, 4 more months, Fadil Hamdan, 3 more months, and former minister Issa Jaabari, 3 more months.
As of mid-September, 33 Palestinian MPs and two ministers were being held in detention by Israel.
Ma'an further reports that over 7,000 Palestinians are currently being held by Israel, including around 500 under the policy of administrative detention, in which prisoners are detained without charge or trial -- a colonial practice which dates back to the time of British Mandate borders.
From Israel to Seize Some 80 Dunams of Farmland near Bethlehem, Settlers Assault Yasuf Olive Harvesters
Israeli forces notified residents of al-Khader, to the south of Bethlehem, Saturday, of their intention to seize about 80 dunams of Palestinian-owned cropland, according to local activist Ahmad Salah. Also on Saturday, Israeli settlers assaulted Palestinian olive harvesters in Yasuf, near Salfit.
@Alternative - Palestine is not a 'race'...it is an archaic country with outdated philosophies on society and suffers from the inability to understand how civilized people solve problems without violence and intimidation. Palestine is a culture of intolerance and violence that serves only to eradicate people(s) that contradict its primitive existence.
So, i am not "racist", because (1) this is not a race issue; and (2) because expressing a dislike for a culture or philosophy that relies upon violence and intolerance is not the same as hating a person because of their immutable condition.
What is racist, are @tammuz's posts, clearly he hates Jews merely because they are Jewish....and furthermore, he obviously shares a similar hatred for America, even though he is afforded the luxury of being able to purchase his future bomb making supplies on ebay.
“The imperialist found it useful to incorporate the credible and seemingly unimpeachable wisdom of science to create a racial classification to be used in the appropriation and organization of lesser cultures. The works of Carolus Linnaeus, Georges Buffon, and Georges Cuvier, organized races in terms of a civilized us and a paradigmatic other. The other was uncivilized, barbaric, and wholly lower than the advanced races of Europe. This paradigm of imaginatively constructing a world predicated upon race was grounded in science, and expressed as philosophical axioms by John Locke and David Hume, offered compelling justification that Europe always ought to rule non-Europeans. This doctrine of cultural superiority had a direct bearing on Zionist practice and vision in Palestine.
A civilized man, it was believed, could cultivate the land because it meant something to him; on it, accordingly, he produced useful arts and crafts, he created, he accomplished, he built. For uncivilized people, land was either farmed badly or it was left to rot.
This was imperialism as theory and colonialism was the practice of changing the uselessly unoccupied territories of the world into useful new versions of Europe. It was this epistemic framework that shaped and informed Zionist attitudes towards the Arab Palestinian natives. This is the intellectual background that Zionism emerged from. Zionism saw Palestine through the same prism as the European did, as an empty territory paradoxically filled with ignoble or, better yet, dispensable natives. It allied itself, as Chaim Weizmann said, with the imperial powers in carrying out its plans for establishing a Jewish state in Palestine.
The so-called natives did not take well to the idea of Jewish colonizers in Palestine. As the Zionist historians, Yehoshua Porath and Neville Mandel, have empirically shown, the ideas of Jewish colonizers in Palestine, this was well before World War I, were always met with resistance, not because the natives thought Jews were evil, but because most natives do not take kindly to having their territory settled by foreigners. Zionism not only accepted the unflattering and generic concepts of European culture, it also banked on the fact that Palestine was actually populated not by an advanced civilization, but by a backward people, over which it ought to be dominated. Zionism, therefore, developed with a unique consciousness of itself, but with little or nothing left over for the unfortunate natives. In fact, I would go so far as to say that if Palestine had been occupied by one of the well-established industrialized nations that ruled the world, then the problem of displacing German, French, or English inhabitants and introducing a new, nationally coherent element into the middle of their homeland would have been in the forefront of the consciousness of even the most ignorant and destitute Zionists.
In short, all the constitutive energies of Zionism were premised on the excluded presence, that is, the functional absence of native people in Palestine; institutions were built deliberately shutting out the natives, laws were drafted when Israel came into being that made sure the natives would remain in their non-place, Jews in theirs, and so on. It is no wonder that today the one issue that electrifies Israel as a society is the problem of the Palestinians, whose negation is the consistent thread running through Zionism. And it is this perhaps unfortunate aspect of Zionism that ties it ineluctably to imperialism- at least so far as the Palestinian is concerned. In conclusion, I cannot affirm that Zionism is colonialism, but I can tell you the process by which Zionism flourished; the dialectic under which it became a reality was heavily influenced by the imperialist mindset of Europe. Thank you.
-Fictional debate between Edward Said and Abba Eban.”
― R.F. Georgy, Absolution: A Palestinian Israeli Love Story
“Actually—and this was where I began to feel seriously uncomfortable—some such divine claim underlay not just 'the occupation' but the whole idea of a separate state for Jews in Palestine. Take away the divine warrant for the Holy Land and where were you, and what were you? Just another land-thief like the Turks or the British, except that in this case you wanted the land without the people. And the original Zionist slogan—'a land without a people for a people without a land'—disclosed its own negation when I saw the densely populated Arab towns dwelling sullenly under Jewish tutelage. You want irony? How about Jews becoming colonizers at just the moment when other Europeans had given up on the idea?”
― Christopher Hitchens, Hitch-22: A Memoir
instead of false pseudo-science, you're now justifying racism by creating false pseudo-politics saying a certain group of people (romans, egyptians, syrians, turks, british, etc.) have always had a right to govern and have always owned a given piece of land, and that, for some reason, implies the other group of people does not have a right to exist on that land.
how do you tell one group from the other? is there something that might pop out if you just look at them? skin tone, or the shape of their nose or their hair style maybe? or do you need a deed of title established under the ottoman rule to tell which group has a right to govern? is a deed of title established under the british mandate acceptable, or if it was established after that? maybe you need to go back to the holy roman empire and prove a deed of title was established under that governing body?
remember the palestinians were granted a right to govern themselves as they saw fit, and a right to 'self-determination,' by the UN mandate that allowed israel to exists as it saw fit, but the palestinians rejected the partition.
so this is really about immigration policy right? if the palestinians chose to self-govern as was granted to them under the original partition plan and under the proposed 2-state solution you're opposed to, they could establish the right to return and an immigration policy that limits eruopean settlers.
your goal is just to get rid of the white people right? that would be more difficult under a single israeli state governed by white people. how do you see that being implemented in a practical way?
From: The Jews In Palestine
By Mahatma Gandhi
Published in the Harijan
26-11-1938
The cry for the national home for the Jews does not make much appeal to me. The sanction for it is sought in the Bible and the tenacity with which the Jews have hankered after return to Palestine.
Why should they not, like other peoples of the earth, make that country their home where they are born and where they earn their livelihood? Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs. What is going on in Palestine today cannot be justified by any moral code of conduct. The mandates have no sanction but that of the last war. Surely it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their national home. The nobler course would be to insist on a just treatment of the Jews wherever they are born and bred. The Jews born in France are French in precisely the same sense that Christians born in France are French.
Why should they not, like other peoples of the earth, make that country their home where they are born and where they earn their livelihood?
so are you canadian or what? there are immigrants on this forum that probably don't think people shouldn't be allowed to immigrate, or that people who are not born in a given country should not be made to feel welcome where they live.
having said that, i recognize immigration can be another very difficult subject, and open immigration is typically not practicable in most countries.
from:
The Logic of Israeli Violence
by Greg Shupak
Israeli violence isn’t senseless — it follows a colonial logic.
(...)
But describing such violence as aimless misses the underlying logic of Israel’s conduct throughout Operation Protective Edge and, indeed, for much of its history.
As Darryl Li points out, “Since 2005, Israel has developed an unusual, and perhaps unprecedented, experiment in colonial management in the Gaza Strip,” seeking to “isolate Palestinians there from the outside world, render them utterly dependent on external benevolence,” and at the same time “absolve Israel of responsibility toward them.”
This strategy, Li goes on to argue, is one way that Israel is working to maintain a Jewish majority in the territories it controls so that it can continue to deny equal rights for the rest of the population.
The suppression of Palestinian resistance is crucial to the success of the Israeli experiment. But there is a corollary, which is a cyclical interaction between Israeli colonialism and US militarism. As Bashir Abu-Manneh explains, there is a relationship between American imperialism and Zionist policies. American policymakers believe that an alliance with Israel helps the US control the Middle East. So the United States enables Israeli colonialism and occupation, which in turn creates contexts for further US interventions in the region that can be used to try to deepen American hegemony.
He points out, furthermore, that the “United States has been determining major economic and political outcomes” in the region since at least 1967, and that Israel plays a “crucial role in their realization. In Israel-Palestine, this has meant that force and colonial peace have alternated as main instruments of policy.” Yet all the while the main objective remains “a constant: Jewish supremacy in Palestine — as much land as possible, as few Palestinians as possible.”
What both Li and Abu-Manneh highlight is Israel’s concern with keeping Palestinians in a state of powerlessness. Driven by both its own settler-colonial agenda and by its function as an American partner in the geopolitical system, Israel strives to balance its desire to maximize the territory it controls against the imperative of minimizing the number of Palestinians living in the territories it seeks to use for its own purposes.
One way to destroy any sign of Palestinian power has been on display during Protective Edge, during which Israeli violence has sought to stamp out signs of Palestinian independence — hence Economy Minister Naftali Bennett’s call for “defeating Hamas.”
The result is that Palestinians are not merely subject to extreme violence. Rather, their capacity to live autonomously in historic Palestine is being attacked. The destruction of infrastructure, as in the recent attack on the Gaza Strip’s lone power plant, is one index of that. Not only does the current Israeli onslaught end the physical existence of specific Palestinian individuals, it aims to obliterate Palestinians as a people with the capacity to live independently in their homeland.
While denying refugees their legally protected and natural right of return is the most overt tactic that Israel uses to maintain its desired demographic picture, creating conditions inhospitable to the autonomous existence of Palestinians can also in the long run secure for Israel “as much land as possible, [and] as few Palestinians as possible.”
Violence that abides by this logic is not unique to Zionism. It is central to settler-colonialism and finds historic parallels in, for example, the American Trail of Tears or in Canada, the clearing of the plains through the deliberate starvation of Aboriginal peoples. The meaning of Protective Edge is similar.
Preventing a people from providing for themselves is a way of sabotaging their ability to live autonomously. That is how we should understand Israel’s assaults on forty-six of Gaza’s fishing boats or its attacks on Day Sixteen of Protective Edge against agricultural sites in the Northern Gaza Strip, Gaza City, the Central Gaza Strip, Khan Yunis, and Rafah. That is how we should understand Israel rendering two-thirds of Gaza’s wheat mills inoperative and the need of 3,000 of Gaza’s herders for animal feed (to say nothing of the value of animal life itself). That is how we should understand this intensification of what Harvard’s Dr. Sara Roy describes as the long-running deliberate destruction and de-development of the Gaza Strip’s economy that, unless funding for UNRWA is increased, could cause mass starvation.
Gandhi's opinion piece was penned at the eve of the holocaust. It's completely divorced from the context of what happened thereafter.
Tammuz, it's also pathetic that you have to copy and paste arguments by others rather than independently articulate your own pro-violence agenda
and one evil perpetrated on "one people" is not remedied by having certain self-assigned representatives of the latter (indeed, taking firstly the Jews a hostage of their Zionist rhetoric) perpetrate another evil on another people. nor is it justified, nor does it belong within a rational argument of whether Zionism is morally credible or not. Taking the Palestinian cause hostage by reverting by appealing to holocaust sympathy and guilt is a typical sleazy Zionist tactic.
incidentally... From
Denying Nazi-Zionist Collusion
by ALISON WEIR
Zionist-Nazi Collusion
(...) There is detailed evidence that some Zionists collaborated with the Nazis, that Zionists sabotaged anti-Nazi boycotts, and that Zionists interfered with efforts to rescue victims of Nazi oppression.
When facts first emerged in the 1950s about Zionist-Nazi collusion, it caused considerable scandal in Israel and led to the fall of the Israeli government of the time. A number of books are dedicated to this subject and it is discussed in numerous others, almost all by Jewish and/or Israeli authors. The topic inspired novels by well-known Israeli writers Amos Elon and Neil Gordon, was the subject of a 1987 British play, and was portrayed in a 1994 Israeli docudrama. It’s surprising that Steinberg and the Board of Rabbis make no indication of ever having heard anything about this.
Popular American playwright and fervent Zionist Ben Hecht wrote the first book on the subject, “Perfidy,” relating the history of a Hungarian Zionist leader who arranged for his family and several hundred prominent Jews to escape while facilitating the movement of the rest of Hungarian Jews to Nazi concentration camps.
Hannah Arendt, in her 1960 book “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report in the Banality of Evil,” writes: “To a Jew this role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest chapter of the whole dark story.”
In “The Transfer Agreement: The Dramatic Story of the Pact between the Third Reich and Jewish Palestine” (containing an afterword by ADL head Abe Foxman), pro-Israel writer Edwin Black reports that in 1933 Zionist leaders concluded a secret pact with the Third Reich that transferred 60,000 Jews and $100,000 to Palestine, Zionists promising in return that they would halt the worldwide boycott “that threatened to topple the Hitler regime in its first year.”
Author-researcher Lenni Brenner wrote of Zionist-Nazi collusion in “Zionism in the Age of Dictators,” of which the London Times stated: “Brenner is able to cite numerous cases where Zionists collaborated with anti-Semitic regimes, including Hitler’s.”
Brenner’s second book on the topic, “51 Documents, Zionist Collaboration with the Nazis,” includes a 1940 letter from underground Zionist terrorist leader Avraham Stern proposing that Jewish militias would fight on Germany’s side in exchange for Nazi help in creating an “historic Jewish state.”
In “What Price Israel,” American Council for Judaism member Alfred Lilienthal describes FDR’s efforts to set up a program to rescue refugees, only to find Zionists sabotaging it. Roosevelt explained: “The Zionist movement knows that Palestine is, and will be for some time, a remittance society. They know that they can raise vast sums for Palestine by saying to donors, ‘There is no other place this poor Jew can go.’”
When New York attorney Morris Ernst joined this refugee effort, he was shocked: “I was thrown out of parlors of friends of mine who very frankly said ‘Morris, this is treason. You are undermining the Zionist movement.’” Ernst wrote that he found a fanatical movement of men “little concerned about human blood if it is not their own.”
In “The Seventh Million: The Israelis and the Holocaust,” Israeli historian Tom Segev quotes Zionist leader and future Israeli Prime Minister David Ben Gurion: “If I knew that it was possible to save all the Jewish children of Germany by transporting them to England, but only half of them by transporting them to Palestine, I would choose the second.”
Segev writes that Ben-Gurion worried that ‘the human conscience’ might cause various countries to open their doors to Jewish refugees from Germany and saw this as a threat, warning: ‘Zionism is in danger.’”
In the Bee’s report on the controversy, Sacramento’s Rabbi Alfi is further quoted as saying "there is no comparison" between the treatment of Jews in pre-war Germany and Palestinians. Yet, in 2002 the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz reported that the Israeli military was specifically studying Nazi Warsaw Ghetto strategies for use in the Palestinian Occupied Territories.
That doesn't even come close to responding to the point I was making about the Gandhi quote.
Also you are actually trying to convince me that the holocaust was part of a Zionist agenda. As the grandson of auschwitz survivors, I have no problem calling you a total moron. You're also perverting arendt's observations on the eichmann trial. You're ignorant.
The perverting Zionist bots should prove that I'm trying to convince that the holocaust was part of a Zionist agenda before making those accusations .
What I am trying to convince (certainly not to a Zionist bot, that tool...and I mean here literally a tool of propaganda and hasbara) is that self-serving Zionists did not have the Jews in best interest and would align themselves with the very real and concrete enemy of Jews at that time in order to colonize Palestine, over and above real Jewish interests which would have managed to save many Jews from otherwise certain death...and this shows how snide and hypocritical Zionist propaganda tools such as this Zionist bot here are when digging up the holocaust in order to justify the Nakba committed against the Palestinians. Of course, trust them, these Zionist bots, only in their capacity to misrepresent and lie.
It is an ugly lowlife tactic disrespecting both, the history of Jewish suffering at the hands of racist Europeans -using it as an alibi for the oppression and murder of another people- and the history of Palestinian suffering at the hands of racist Zionists.
Furthermore, the Zionist tool here does not negate the truth of both the collaboration and the, thereafter, precedence between Nazis and Zionists as noted in that article quoted above.
And what I am saying is that your claim is a crock of horseshit.
The perverting Zionist bots should prove . . .
I appreciate the addition of more adjectives. hopefully this pejorative term will grow into a paragraph in and of itself.
is he referring to you alternative? or me? maybe both of us? are we supposed to work together to 'prove' whatever it is he's raving about? the group name he's using to describe what i assume is a singular person is confusing. and what's a 'bot' in this context?
Anyone who questions Hamas or defends Israel is a mindless robot, in Tammuz's imaginary world of good-and-evil, copy-paste.
technological advancement to the point of ai that could question hamas would be pretty incredible. wouldn't it be a compliment to say we were able to develop a program that sophisticated?
if the bots that tammuz is referring to actually existed, do you think they could work out a proof such as he's suggesting? seriously, that would be amazing. even if they couldn't, seeing an attempt would be pretty cool.
that's far more impressive than just linking posts from other people that are often irrelevant and unaware of other posts in the thread. that script would be easy to write.
no no no curtkram you have it all wrong. tammuz noctilucent was an Ernst and Young employee according the googly goo. he is a made up sentient bot.
now you might ask what is a sentient bot? http://www.cleverbot.com/
see he takes what you say and asks the clever bot and then cut and pastey.
wonder how many lives tammuz has saved with this thread?
with that said curtkram you have to follow his logic. basically because the fastest growing religion is islam and the west isn't happy about this they made a double secret organization to give islam a bad name, basically tammuz is like 2nd double secret NSA employee....
From Settlers beat woman picking olives with her children near Salfit
Published Saturday 11/10/2014 (updated) 12/10/2014 21:05
SALFIT (Ma'an) -- A large group of Israeli settlers on Saturday morning violently beat a young Palestinian woman while she was picking olives from trees in an orchard in the village of Yasuf in the Salfit district in the central West Bank, a Palestinian official said.
The assault is the third such attack on Palestinian olive pickers in three days, creating concern about unchecked settler violence as the olive harvest kicks off across the West Bank.
Ghassan Daghlas, a Palestinian Authority official who monitors settlement-related activities in the northern West Bank, told Ma'an that 25-year-old Alaa Fathi Atiyani and her children were picking olives in a field in the al-Masamic area outside of Yasuf village at the time of the alleged assault.
He said that ten settlers arrived from the nearby Kfar Tappuah settlement and assaulted Atiyani, beating her "brutally."
(...)
Attacks on the fall harvest are a key way that Palestinians are forced out of their homes and their lands confiscated for settlement construction, as the loss of a year's crop can signal destitution for farmers with no other way to support themselves.
According to a 2012 report on Israeli settler violence released by the Palestine Center, a Washington-based nonprofit, every year the olive harvest period sees the highest peak in attacks on Palestinian civilians and property.
Over 7,500 olive trees were damaged or destroyed by settlers between January and mid-October in 2012, according to OCHA.
In 2013, there were 399 incidents of settler violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.
From Settler colonialism — and liberal Zionist denial Israel/Palestine
Austin Branion on November 2, 2013
With apologies to Emerson, appealing for “balance” in apportioning blame to “both sides” in Israel-Palestine is the hobgoblin of little minds. Yet this is the constant calling card of mainstream commentary on the conflict and its mode is, likewise, often evoked through another constituent of the pundit’s lexicon: “context.”
(...)
It is an eminently one-sided problem when you get to the root of it–to act as though there is some moral parity between the colonists who arrived employing systematic, terrorist violence on a civilization-shattering scale in order to forge their own sovereign entity against the desire of (and eventually upon the ruins of) indigenous communities, and the natives who fought back and may have employed terrorism themselves is absurd and curiously vulgar.
While condemning attacks on unarmed non-combatants is an easy moral call to make, who among us would mention Native American raids on European settlements without acknowledging the genocidal violence leveled against them? Who would speak of Nat Turner’s orgy of violence against white Virginians without mentioning the dehumanizing and obscene institution of slavery?
Something tells me that “contextualizing” Hamas’s rockets as falling in the vicinity of the ethnically cleansed and colonist-occupied birthplace of the group’s refugee co-founder would not find favor with Alterman or Goldberg. Same for contextualizing the threat that Hezbollah poses to the colonial-settler state, a state whose rapacious military adventurism in Lebanon–which, lest we forget, was originally prosecuted to quash the resistance of Palestine’s natives-cum-refugees–precipitated the group’s formation in the first place. And yet, without endorsing the methods or platforms of the aforementioned groups, this is the context that matters most.
^ The real haters. A lot of this is hate crime.
SALFIT (Ma'an) -- A large group of Israeli settlers on Saturday morning violently beat a young Palestinian woman while she was picking olives from trees in an orchard in the village of Yasuf in the Salfit district in the central West Bank, a Palestinian official said.
I meant this was a hate crime.
What else you would call bunch of settlers ganging up and beating a Palestinian woman while harvesting olives?
...anyone contact PETA yet, this dead horse is seriously getting beaten to a pulp here.
Maybe that piece of trash Tammuz should stop posting articles saying that the Holocaust was a consequence of a Zionist conspiracy.
Ah, and here I thought TAMMUZ could not sink any lower on the bat-shit crazy scale.
tammuz missed columbus day. that's the day we american's celebrate when custer landed on plymouth rock and led the apache down the trail of tears into florida where the sioux were put on reservations with the iroquois. i'm sure someone will remind him to give thanks on thanksgiving.
speaking of, it was also candian thanksgiving yesterday wasn't it? another opportunity to rant about reaping the benefits of living in a country with european colonialism missed. maybe he should be telling us how canada should get rid of their non-european immigrants the same way palestinians should be getting rid of european immigrants?
From
Sweden and Britain Have Spoken. By Miko Peled
By Miko Peled
I was thrilled to hear that the Swedish and then the British parliaments voted to recognize Palestine, or rather the State of Palestine. I think that this is a joyous day for all peace and freedom loving people.
So now we can expect to see the Israeli military pulling back, checkpoints being dismantled and that grey ugly and very costly wall come tumbling down at last. Soon Shuhada street in Hebron will be open for business and the settlers will vacate the homes they stole and return to wherever it was they they came from. Now there is no longer need for Palestinians in the old cities of Hebron, Jerusalem and Silwan to remain in their homes for fear that they be taken by armed Jewish settler mobs.
I can see the faces of the mothers and fathers of the thousands of prisoners who will now finally be released. The children who never saw their fathers, wives who had been alone for decades reunite with their husbands. Surely there will be celebrations in Ramallah, the flag of Palestine will be raised in Yaffa and in Haifa, in Akka and in Jerusalem.
Soon we can expect to see the long lines of people going to the polls to vote for the first real democratic elections, in the free State of Palestine. Posters of Palestinian leaders and campaign rallies will be seen all over the country. Surely posters with the faces of soon to be released Marwan Barghouti and Ahmad Saadat, along with other, lesser known names will be plastered everywhere.
Palestinian fathers like my friend Iyad Burnat, who for years could not explain to their young children why they are not allowed to go to the beach and why they are not free to travel to Jerusalem as I do, and visit the sacred Al Aqsa mosque will now be able to do so. Now millions of Palestinians can take their families to enjoy a day in Yaffa or Haifa and spend time on the beach, spend the night in a local hotel and then the next day they will be free to go to Jerusalem to shop and pray and then return to their villages in the West Bank. Surely now that Britain and Sweden both recognized the State of Palestine, Palestinians can travel as free people in Palestine without the need for permits.
One can expect a committee will urgently be formed to accommodate the return of Palestinian refugees to Palestine. The refugee camps will be dismantled, those who wish to return will soon be able to do so and those who do not wish to will receive appropriate compensation for their loss and their suffering, much like Jewish people did after the holocaust. This committee will discuss how restitution is to be distributed and where to house returning refugees whose villages have been wiped off the map.
Now that Sweden and Britain have spoken the Gaza strip will be open in no time and the forces that had destroyed it will now rebuild it. Surely there will be money set aside from the US foreign aid and money that is given to Israel and money from the UK and Germany all of whom supplied Israel with the money and weapons used to murder innocents in Gaza, this money will now go to rebuild Gaza and compensate the families who lost their bread winners. The families of the inured will be given the finest medical care in modern facilities in Be’er Sheba, Ashkelon, Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. The state will pay for their medical expenses and care for them for as long as is needed.
Surely monuments can now be built to commemorate the thousands of innocents brutally murdered by the Zionist regime. A monument for the brave young Palestinians who fought and died in Gaza, who gave their lives to free their people will to be erected and the memory of their courage will be forever be etched in our minds, not to say the history books of the newly recognized State of Palestine.
Surely British and Swedish parliamentarians had all this in mind when they cast their courageous vote. Why, anything short of this would be hypocrisy. Anything short of a free State of Palestine, over all of Palestine would be merely an empty gesture. No member of parliament that respects themselves would vote for an empty gesture, a symbol with no meaning or content.
A vote that is any less than recognizing a free State of Palestine over all of Palestine, and calls for the Zionist regime to be removed, would merely be the Europeans once again trying to wash their hands of a problem they created and supported. One can hardly believe that they would cast such a meaningless, cowardly vote that makes not one iota of difference to anyone.
Surely before casting their vote they asked whether this vote will bring the urgent relief needed in Gaza, or whether it will male it easier for children in West Bank villages to go to school? Will it have an effect on the distribution of water, or lack their of, to Palestinians in the South Hebron Hills? Will the village of Nabi Saleh receive the same services and water as the brutally violent settlers who live in Halamish, a settlement built on Nabi Saleh land? Will the people of other Palestinian villages now have access to the roads and highways. Will they be able to travel freely to work, school and to their own leisure throughout all of Palestine? They must have asked if this vote of recognition in the State of Palestine will allow Palestinians of 1948 to live and work freely, marry whomever they wish, build their homes and their communities as free, independent people.
Sadly, however, Sweden and the UK have chosen the easy way out. Instead of dealing a real blow to the apartheid Zionist regime in Jerusalem, instead of sending a message that violence and racism will not be tolerated, they chose an empty gesture, they chickened out and voted for nothing.
As one wise Palestinian lady said: “They can keep their vote.”
I have sympathy for the plight of Palestinians, Tammuz, and I do want peace, but I still think you're a piece of human garbage.
I'm not fussed about what a Zionist bot "thinks" of me. Its obvious that they're going through their hasbara list, now at petty insults after pretentious posturing of wanting a serious debate or pretentious interest ("Dubai gay")...so visible and obvious, its actually stupid . It is of course exactly my bringing up the nakba of the Palestinians caused by the racist colonizing Zionists that the likes of this Zionist bot have summoned themselves here, subcontracted to counter; their so-called sympathy for the "plight of the Palestinians" (for which their Zionist racist ideology is responsible for) fake as press-on nails. What sort of individuals would stoop down to calling others "human garbage"? This shows you exactly the Zionist mind, how petty and vitriolically aggressive it is. This is the racist dehumanizing mind that throws families living in their ancestral homes, on properties that belong to them and that they belong to out off their homes and their lands, that punishes those who remain with the most extreme measures including mass murder. This is the mind that should be boycotted with its Zionist bigotry and its outdated colonialist terrorism.
Hey, piece of shit, why don't you post some more articles about how Zionists were responsible for Jewish genocide in the Holocaust?
Hey, look at that! This idiot interacted for once, too bad his post contained no useful information... just another shopping list of adjectives to long for his simple mind to process.
Israel holding more than 470 Palestinians in administrative detention – highest number in 5 years
Published:
7 Oct 2014
Almost six months ago, in May 2014, B’Tselem cautioned that the number of Palestinians held by Israel in administrative detention was rising. In June and July 2014, over the course of Operation Brother’s Keeper, the military issued some 250 new administrative detention orders; at the end of August 2014, Israel was holding some 473 detainees in administrative detention – the highest number since April 2009. Within one year, the number of detainees had more than tripled.
According to Israel Prison Service (IPS) data, more than 60 percent of administrative detainees held at the end of August 2014 had been held for three months or less. Some 10 percent had been held for three to six months, some 13 percent from six months to one year, and some 13 percent from one to two years. Four detainees had been in administrative detention continuously for over two years.
Administrative detention is detention without trial, ostensibly intended to prevent people from committing acts that are liable to endanger public safety, rather than punishing them for offenses already committed, as is the case in criminal proceedings. As detention on the basis of potential conduct rather than past actions is problematic, international law permits its use only in the most exigent circumstances.
However, the Israeli security establishment uses administrative detention on a mass scale, in defiance of these restrictions. At no stage are the detainees told the reason for their detention or the specific allegations against them, nor do they know when they will be released: although each administrative detention order may not exceed six months, it can be renewed indefinitely.
Administrative detainees by duration (click to see the full chart)
Although detainees are brought before a judge to approve the detention order, the judicial review is merely a semblance of a just legal system: most of the material submitted by the prosecution is classified and not disclosed to the detainees or their counsel . Since the detainees do not know evidence there is against them, they are unable to refute it. Given the inherently inferior position of detainees in such proceedings, military judges and High Court justices presiding over these cases have a duty to serve as “temporary defense counsel” for the detainees, but they often shirk this responsibility and almost always accept the position of the security establishment.
Relying on the secrecy of the process, and with court approval , the security establishment illegally exploits administrative detention to incarcerate people for offenses allegedly committed in the past so as not to expose evidence against them.
Over the years, Israel has held thousands of Palestinians in administrative detention for periods ranging from a few months to several years. A number of Israeli citizens, including settlers, have also been held in administrative detention for periods of a few months. There were times during the second intifada when Israel held over a thousand Palestinians in administrative detention.
Some 70 percent of the administrative detainees held at the end of August 2014 were held in facilities located inside Israel – a violation of international law, which entails further violation of their rights, including denying some of them the right to visits, as the security establishment refuses to issue relatives permits to enter Israel.
The government of Israel must release all administrative detainees or prosecute them, in accordance with due process.
From: From Victim to Colonial Settler: Shifting the Paradigm on Israel
(...) For activists in solidarity with Palestinian desires for national self-determination, undermining the hegemony of the “innocent settler” narrative is imperative in order to counter the propaganda that justifies Israeli state and settler violence. To do so means centering colonialism and white supremacy as the grounding analytical categories and conceptual framework.
This is not necessarily a new argument or one that has not been embraced by some, but for various reasons, including bogus charges of anti-Semitism, many in the U.S. progressive and radical communities have eschewed this approach over the years.
The other challenge is that the “white supremacist” term has been domesticated and reduced to a crude and relatively simple notion of “racism.” In this context, white supremacists and white supremacy is represented by easy targets like Donald Sterling and Tea Party members, while racialized imperialism is overlooked.
In order to re-position Israel in the public imagination, activists must overcome both of these issues if movements for solidarity and justice such as the growing boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement have any chance of being effective solidarity mechanisms.
Liberated from the racist bias of the colonial/imperialist lens that casts Israelis as victims, Israeli state actions and policies in Gaza are then stripped of the obfuscating claims of self-defense and concerns for Palestinian civilians. And ending ethical double standards by applying one standard informed by the principles of human equality and the rejection of all forms of dehumanizing oppression would clearly identify the real victims in the ongoing drama of the Israel/Palestinian conflict – and it would not be the state of Israel.
Ajamu Baraka is a human rights activist, organizer and geo-political analyst. Baraka is an Associate Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) in Washington, D.C. and editor and contributing columnist for the Black Agenda Report. His latest publications include contributions to two recently published books: Imagine: Living in a Socialist USA and Claim No Easy Victories: The Legacy of Amilcar Cabral. He can be reached at info.abaraka@gmail.com and www.AjamuBaraka.com.
But I want more holocaust revisionism!
Surely tide is changing. (I have been telling you so.) http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/10/14/world/europe/british-parliament-palestinian-state.html?referrer=
Good for the UK and Sweden.
Times sure are changing in Turkey, too: http://m.wsj.com/articles/turkish-warplanes-bomb-kurdish-pkk-in-turkey-1413296160?mobile=y
What was that about Turkey being light years ahead of Israel?
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