Category: Palestine

The most succinct bit of commentary about the US/Israel/Palestine talks at Annapolis come from a piece by Laila el-Haddad who is based some of the time in Gaza. She quotes a mother of eight saying:

“We’re already dead, the only thing we need is to be buried, to be pushed into the grave and buried. It’s already been dug up for us.”

Chomsky’s enraged too, though he notes that he’s trying to keep his composure:

“Before saying a word, I’d like to express some severe personal discomfort, because anything I say will be abstract and dry and restrained. The crimes against Palestinians in the Occupied Territories and elsewhere, particularly Lebanon, are so shocking that the only emotionally valid reaction is rage and a call for extreme actions. But that does not help the victims. And, in fact, it’s likely to harm them. We have to face the reality that our actions have consequences, and they have to be adapted to real-world circumstances, difficult as it may be to stay calm in the face of shameful crimes in which we are directly and crucially implicated.”

I was in Gaza five years ago now and was amazed by the horror that the Israelis have created there. Every single year it has gotten far worse. It is a complete nightmare. And that makes these sham talks a complete farce.

They would be funny if they were not so tragic. The Toronto Star had a little chart yesterday, with four key issues for the talks – Refugees, Jerusalem, Settlements, Borders. It stated Israeli and Palestinian positions on each of the issues, and “possible solutions” – the possible solutions were the most amusing – each “possible solution” involved the Palestinians giving everything up.

The way the discussion plays out in the media is like an advertisement for the benefits of bad-faith bargaining. Seven years ago the discussion at Camp David was about the same issues, trying to get Palestinians to declare they are happy with their ongoing destruction. Today the destruction is seven years more advanced and the Israelis don’t even have to pretend to give up as much.

Nothing will come out of this summit. Israel doesn’t want anything from it. The US doesn’t want anything from it. The Palestinians can’t get anything from it. Everyone understands that what matters is what the US/Israel do and what they are doing is the same genocidal program that has been unfolding for years. It might help if the media would stop insulting everyone’s intelligence covering this as if it were anything but a sham.

It might be better to wait until I know more, but I wanted to say something about what occurred in Gaza on Monday, when a demonstration organized by Fatah to commemorate Arafat was fired upon by the Hamas-controlled police, with seven people killed including one child.

The police claim the shooting was started by someone in the crowd. But this is what police everywhere say when they fire on demonstrators and kill people, so there is no reason to automatically believe it. The stories I read or have seen do not have any explanation of what happened by Hamas.

Knowing a bit of the context might help understand what is going on. Remember that until earlier this year, there was an armed conflict between Hamas, which had won parliamentary elections in 2006, and Fatah, which had traditionally led the Palestinians under Arafat and which was now getting support by the US/Israel to try to oust Hamas. Hamas won the confrontation in Gaza but Fatah won in the West Bank, which caused many remarks about a “two-state solution”, “Gazastan/Hamastan” and “Fatahland”, that would have been clever if they weren’t talking about an unfolding tragedy. The confrontation at the time took the form of an contest between two armed bands.

What might be happening now is that Fatah may have changed its tactics and is trying to topple the Hamas government using political mobilizations and demonstrations, invoking Arafat’s memory and, now, provoking repression which will reveal Hamas to be callous to people’s suffering and to be acting like a repressive government rather than the leaders of a liberation movement. Such tactics could be much more successful, especially if Hamas responds as it has been doing, with not only firing on the demonstrations, but also arresting Fatah members, etc.

What makes this so much more painful to witness is that it is all going on at the same time as Israel’s tortures, destruction of villages, arrests, kidnappings, all continue without any interruption, as a glimpse at IMEMC will show.

Khaled Mishal of Hamas in the foreground, and a Nazi swastika in the background. Click on the story and you won’t see anything Nazi. That’s because there’s nothing to do with the Nazis, other than the desire by the BBC and so many others to link the travails of the starving, besieged, imprisoned, tortured, slaughtered Palestinians with the genocidal Nazi regime, the better to continue starving, besieging, imprisoning, and torturing them. To do so subliminally, through disgusting and crude photos like this one, might or might not be what one expects of the BBC. Certainly I will expect much less of them in future. As sick as it is to have this picture on my blog, I want readers to see what the BBC is peddling on its website today. One hopes they are forced to take it down, but it should be here so they can’t erase the memory of what they’ve done. Did some British skinhead Nazi working at BBC just want to put a swastika on the website, and think he could get away with it if he put it behind an Arab?

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I received news that Tanya Reinhart died suddenly in New York. She was always one of my guides on Israel/Palestine. When I went there in 2002 she was very helpful to me, personally, and I only didn’t get to visit her in person because I fell sick. It is far too soon for her to be gone – we all needed her for a lot more years.

Here’s her university page

Her wikipedia page

Continue reading “Tanya Reinhart”

It’s true. In his talk, “Debunking the Myth of Israeli Democracy”, Jamal Zahalka quoted Hannah Arendt. I think. He might or might not have quoted Hegel, I can’t remember. He definitely quoted Hannah Arendt. He also quoted Spiro Agnew, which was weird. He definitely didn’t quote Hitler though, which is apparently what they’ve started saying about him back in Israel. The group that brought him, “Students Against Israeli Apartheid”, are in the process of getting the video of his talk ready and available on the internet so everyone can see for themselves that the vicious and all-too unsurprising rumors that are being spread about him are not true. The real message, I suppose, is that Palestinians shouldn’t be given platforms to speak. They should be denied any opportunity to tell their story, from any platform. Having been pretty thoroughly shut out of the media (you might see one interview with this member of the Israeli parliament published besides the one on ZNet, and that other one will be in a small alternative news magazine in Toronto), Palestinians like Zahalka can’t even talk invited by small campus groups to audiences of a few hundred without being subjected to vicious campaigns of defamation. It isn’t enough to dispossess them, starve them, imprison thousands of them, kill hundreds of them. We also have to prevent them from talking about it.

So in the spirit of letting Zahalka’s words speak for themselves, here is the interview I did with him the day after his talk in Toronto, in which we recap many of the issues he raised in his talk.

http://www.zcommunications.org/a-state-of-all-its-citizens-by-jamal-zahalka

Jamal Zahalka is a member of the Israeli Knesset as part of the Balad Party list that includes Wasil Taha and Azmi Bishara. He was in Toronto delivering the keynote address at Israeli Apartheid Week at the University of Toronto on February 16, 2007. His talk, “Debunking the Myth of Israeli Democracy”, discussed discrimination against Palestinians living inside Israel. I interviewed him the following day in Toronto.

Continue reading “A State of all its Citizens: an interview with Jamal Zahalka”