Category: Palestine

Starving Gaza

Killing Sheikh Yassin and a half-dozen innocent bystanders was not enough for Israel, which is also intensifying its efforts to starve the population of Gaza. After the UN Special Rapporteur for food last year warned that a fifth of the children in Gaza are malnourished and that the situation is getting worse, a BBC story of a few days ago describes how “the UN Relief and Works Agency (Unrwa) said an Israeli ban on moving empty containers out of Gaza had forced it to suspend delivering 11,000 tons of food.” Why? Because, according to an (unnamed) Israeli spokesman, suicide bombers might be hiding in the food containers… this after UNRWA had already cut rations from 60% to 40%, where unemployment is total, 2/3 of the families are below poverty, and the town of Rafah is being razed to the ground. And that’s not all…

The UNRWA spokesperson, Peter Hansen, said “If the new restrictions in Gaza continue, I fear we could see real hunger emerge for the first time in two generations”. The Israeli spokesman said that “At the moment we cannot trust anything, especially since the death of Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin.”

To clarify: because Israel engaged in a major attack against Gaza, killing civilians by dropping a bomb in the middle of a city, Israel is now forced to starve the population of Gaza.

An Israeli professor, Lev Greenberg of Ben Gurion University, has accused the state of Israel of genocide. Greenberg was imprisoned as a refusenik. The Minister of Education for Israel, Limor Livnat, was not impressed: “I am not authorized to interfere in academic affairs”, she said, “but I call on the president of the university and the academic community to take issue with and denounce anyone who attacks and opposes the government of Israel”.

And last, while we’re on the topic, it turns out that Israel believes that the BBC is biased — against Israel!

“Natan Sharansky, Israel’s minister for diaspora affairs, complained that Guerin had portrayed the army’s handling of the arrest of Hussam Abdu, who was captured with explosives strapped to his chest, as “cynical manipulation of a Palestinian youngster for propaganda purposes”. He said this revealed “a deep-seated bias against Israel”.”

ZNet published an article by Tim Llewellyn a few months back on the BBC’s coverage of the Israel/Palestine conflict that rather disagrees with Sharansky.

The pieces on Gaza and Greenberg came via the News Insider, an indispensable source for any blogger.

Reports from the Ground…

If anyone was shocked by the horrific attacks in Fallujah recently, I would recommend Tim Wise’s blog as well as the UTS blog for some context. What I want to present, though, are some other reports…

here is a site I run in Toronto, with others, that I would like to serve as a kind of regional ZNet — helping organizations with similar politics link up with each other, give people opportunities to share information and analysis, and so on. The other thing we want to do at this site is some critique of Canadian media, and Canadian foreign policy. The last thing we want to do is present translations and reports from the ground, from places like Colombia, Palestine, Iraq. It’s ambitious, yes, but I’d like to call your attention to it. The site is called En Camino. That means ‘on the way’, in Spanish (I didn’t come up with the name, of course — I never come up with names or titles). ?A donde, one might ask? I’ll leave that one for now.

The things I wanted to present in this entry are two such types of reports, which we’ve arranged at En Camino in the form of — you guessed it — blogs. They are not as technologically advanced as these blogs here, lacking the brilliance of a Brian, but perhaps they will be, in time, and meanwhile they do have the graphical grace of Tyson — who will be helping me with a graphic for this blog. The one you see to the right is a photo I took in the zone of total destruction in Jenin in 2002.

So the first blog is by an activist named Misha Laban, who’s from Toronto, and who has been doing some very nice blogging from the Occupied Territories (As I said, please forgive the ‘retro’ format — I promise to improve it when I get a minute away from my shiny new blog). The last entry is a couple of weeks old, but there is more on the way.

The second blog is by an activist named Andrea Schmidt, who I know as a tireless organizer and radio journalist based in Montreal, but who is now in Iraq with the Iraq Solidarity Project. Her reports are here.

And finally, what this blog is about…

Last entry for the night, to explain, as promised, what the blog is about. It’s pretty simple. My process of writing articles involves receiving a lot of information, usually from friends in Latin America, in Spanish, and to a lesser extent from friends in other places, about what is going on. I collect all these things, and try to put them together in articles. But there is usually a great deal more material than can be put into articles…

So the blog will contain a lot of these kinds of things. Quick notes from the Latin American press, or reports from the International Solidarity Movement, or something noteworthy I saw on a fine site like the News Insider, or some other kind of report that would otherwise not see the light of day. Occasionally, I might add some commentary on something in the mainstream/corporate press (perhaps the Canadian press, since I have the (mis)fortune of being exposed to it here), although I expect there will be fantastic blogging on that here in the Z Blogging area — by Wise, Street, Petersen, UTS, Chomsky — and of course just outside of the Z Blogging area in Rahul Mahajan’s Empire Notes.

On the Anniversary of Rachel Corrie’s Murder

http://www.zcommunications.org/on-the-anniversary-of-rachel-corries-murder-by-justin-podur

On March 16, 2004, people will hold vigils and ralles in different parts of the world to remember Rachel Corrie, a young American woman, part of the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), who was murdered in the Gaza Strip by a bulldozer on the same day last year.

Continue reading “On the Anniversary of Rachel Corrie’s Murder”

Letter to a Zionist

http://www.zcommunications.org/letter-to-a-zionist-by-justin-podur

It’s been almost a year. Do you remember it? It was a speaking event like any other but it sticks out in my mind even now. A friend from the International Solidarity Movement had come back from the Occupied Territories and was giving his report. Others offered some analysis of the situation there. It was well attended. I was the moderator.

Continue reading “Letter to a Zionist”

Road Map Theatrics

http://www.zcommunications.org/road-map-theatrics-by-justin-podur

On August 3, 2003, the Associated Press reported on the progress of the road map. Some of the ‘wanted men’ of Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades were to be packed off to Jericho from Arafat’s compound in Ramallah. It is not always clear what a Palestinian has to do to make himself a ‘wanted man’.

Continue reading “Road Map Theatrics”