o boicote e a única maneira de salvar o nosso país

fonte:Palestine Chronicle




Boycotting Israel: The Only Way to Save Our Country

By Neve Gordon

Israeli newspapers this summer are filled with angry articles about the push for an international boycott of Israel. Films have been withdrawn from Israeli film festivals, Leonard Cohen is under fire around the world for his decision to perform in Tel Aviv, and Oxfam has severed ties with a celebrity spokesperson, a British actress who also endorses cosmetics produced in the occupied territories. Clearly, the campaign to use the kind of tactics that helped put an end to the practice of apartheid in South Africa is gaining many followers around the world.

Not surprisingly, many Israelis - even peaceniks - aren't signing on. A global boycott can't help but contain echoes of anti-Semitism. It also brings up questions of a double standard (why not boycott China for its egregious violations of human rights?) and the seemingly contradictory position of approving a boycott of one's own nation.

It is indeed not a simple matter for me as an Israeli citizen to call on foreign governments, regional authorities, international social movements, faith-based organizations, unions and citizens to suspend cooperation with Israel. But today, as I watch my two boys playing in the yard, I am convinced that it is the only way that Israel can be saved from itself.

I say this because Israel has reached a historic crossroads, and times of crisis call for dramatic measures. I say this as a Jew who has chosen to raise his children in Israel, who has been a member of the Israeli peace camp for almost 30 years and who is deeply anxious about the country's future.

The most accurate way to describe Israel today is as an apartheid state. For more than 42 years, Israel has controlled the land between the Jordan Valley and the Mediterranean Sea. Within this region about 6 million Jews and close to 5 million Palestinians reside. Out of this population, 3.5 million Palestinians and almost half a million Jews live in the areas Israel occupied in 1967, and yet while these two groups live in the same area, they are subjected to totally different legal systems. The Palestinians are stateless and lack many of the most basic human rights. By sharp contrast, all Jews - whether they live in the occupied territories or in Israel - are citizens of the state of Israel.

The question that keeps me up at night, both as a parent and as a citizen, is how to ensure that my two children as well as the children of my Palestinian neighbors do not grow up in an apartheid regime.

There are only two moral ways of achieving this goal.

The first is the one-state solution: offering citizenship to all Palestinians and thus establishing a bi-national democracy within the entire area controlled by Israel. Given the demographics, this would amount to the demise of Israel as a Jewish state; for most Israeli Jews, it is anathema.

The second means of ending our apartheid is through the two-state solution, which entails Israel's withdrawal to the pre-1967 borders (with possible one-for-one land swaps), the division of Jerusalem, and a recognition of the Palestinian right of return with the stipulation that only a limited number of the 4.5 million Palestinian refugees would be allowed to return to Israel, while the rest can return to the new Palestinian state.

Geographically, the one-state solution appears much more feasible because Jews and Palestinians are already totally enmeshed; indeed, "on the ground," the one-state solution (in an apartheid manifestation) is a reality.

Ideologically, the two-state solution is more realistic because fewer than 1% of Jews and only a minority of Palestinians support binationalism.

For now, despite the concrete difficulties, it makes more sense to alter the geographic realities than the ideological ones. If at some future date the two peoples decide to share a state, they can do so, but currently this is not something they want.

So if the two-state solution is the way to stop the apartheid state, then how does one achieve this goal?

I am convinced that outside pressure is the only answer. Over the last three decades, Jewish settlers in the occupied territories have dramatically increased their numbers. The myth of the united Jerusalem has led to the creation of an apartheid city where Palestinians aren't citizens and lack basic services. The Israeli peace camp has gradually dwindled so that today it is almost nonexistent, and Israeli politics are moving more and more to the extreme right.

It is therefore clear to me that the only way to counter the apartheid trend in Israel is through massive international pressure. The words and condemnations from the Obama administration and the European Union have yielded no results, not even a settlement freeze, let alone a decision to withdraw from the occupied territories.

I consequently have decided to support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement that was launched by Palestinian activists in July 2005 and has since garnered widespread support around the globe. The objective is to ensure that Israel respects its obligations under international law and that Palestinians are granted the right to self-determination.

In Bilbao, Spain, in 2008, a coalition of organizations from all over the world formulated the 10-point Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign meant to pressure Israel in a "gradual, sustainable manner that is sensitive to context and capacity." For example, the effort begins with sanctions on and divestment from Israeli firms operating in the occupied territories, followed by actions against those that help sustain and reinforce the occupation in a visible manner. Along similar lines, artists who come to Israel in order to draw attention to the occupation are welcome, while those who just want to perform are not.

Nothing else has worked. Putting massive international pressure on Israel is the only way to guarantee that the next generation of Israelis and Palestinians - my two boys included - does not grow up in an apartheid regime.

Neve Gordon teaches politics at Ben-Gurion University and is the author of Israel’s Occupation (University of California Press, 2008). He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. It was originally published in the Los Angeles Times. Visit: www.israelsoccupation.info.

Gays palestinianos sob a Hijab

fonte:SOLIDARIEDADE COM A PALESTINA

Por Nisreen & Dayna

Enquanto toda a gente está chocada pelo tiroteio contra o centro juvenil gay de Tel Aviv na semana passada, que resultou na morte de dois jovens, as lésbicas e os gays palestinianos vêem-se obrigados a enfrentar ao mesmo tempo a homofobia de rua e os dirigentes racistas da comunidade gay israelita, que recusam uma tribuna aos oradores palestinianos, incluindo o antigo deputado do Knesset Issam Machool e a representante da Aswat - Grupo de Mulheres Gays Palestinianas, sedeado em Haifa. Segundo os organizadores, e nas suas próprias palavras "eles não podem ir tão longe"!!!!

O que querem eles dizer com "ir tão longe"?!!!!

Enquanto no mundo a lenda do país democrático do Médio Oriente continua a apregoar-se a propósito da tolerante Tel Aviv que fornece refúgio aos gays palestinianos em fuga perante a sua sociedade e as suas famílias, acontece que a a comunidade gay palestiniana e os seus apoiantes são deliberadamente excluídos dos eventos públicos e especificamente da manifestação de solidariedade anti-homofóbica realizada na Praça Rabin.

Embora o palco estivesse cheio de políticos, alguns dos quais são conhecidos como homofóbicos, a maioria da comunidade gay em Israel acredita que a sua luta não tem nada a ver com "política", é isto que explica a necessidade premente da "paz social", sobre a qual falaram activistas gays e vítimas, por contraste com a outra paz, a paz supostamente "má", a paz proibida!!!

Viver numa zona de conflito em que pessoas matam e morrem todos os dias e onde a violência está por todo o lado torna as pessoas menos sensíveis à violência de género, ao assassínio de mulheres, à xenofobia, aos racismo e às vidas dos outros. É assim que mil pessoas ou mais podem ser mortas em menos de um mês em Gaza e toda a gente se cala.

Ao passo que a sociedade israelita, incluindo a comunidade gay, decidiu ignorar o agravamento do ódio e violência internos induzidos pela ocupação e pela sua violência, esta continuou a intensificar-se e a contaminar outros. Em vez de encarar esta situação complicada e problemática, os dirigentes da comunidade gay decidiram excluir os gays palestinianos e seus apoiantes e fechá-los num armário - é o processo mais fácil e anda de mãos dadas com a lenda que eles criam e promovem.

O ponto alto do evento foi a presença do presidente israelita Shimon Perez, em demonstração de solidariedade com a comunidade gay. Apesar do seu anterior curriculum homofóbico, ele veio reforçar, com a sua frase sobre "somos a nação do não-matarás", a cegueira pública sobre a matança em massa de palestinianos que frequentemente ocorre e frequentemente cometida por esta nação. Acresce que a sua mensagem publicamente enxovalha outras nações da região e do mundo.

Para os gays palestinianos que vivem e lutam pelas suas vidas sob a ocupação, Tel Aviv não é um refúgio alternativo ou seguro. Os poucos que conseguem chegar a Tel Aviv acabam a viver e a trabalhar nas ruas, depois de terem sido vítimas da propaganda israelita que usa os casos deles para promover esta imagem.

Na verdade, para a comunidade gay israelita e seus dirigentes, os gays palestinianos, incluindo os que são cidadãos de Israel, são excluídos e não são benvindos. Preferem mantê-los no armário, para continuarem a contar a lenda à sua maneira. Se dependesse deles, colocá-los-iam sob a Hijab, sendo que a imagem da Hijab no Ocidente é a falta de direitos humanos, de direitos das mulheres e de direitos dos gays nos países não-ocidentais. Assim, eles são os únicos que podem dizer como são os gays e lésbicas palestinianos e terão uma boa desculpa para atacar e ocupar os seus países e sociedades acreditando que são os protectores das liberdades!!!!!

Pelo nosso lado, acreditamos que a homofobia equivale ao racismo, que ódio é igual a ódio e assassínio igual a assassínio, mas a maioria da comunidade gay israelita preferiu não ver a ligação e ignorar outros tipos de violência que abundam na sociedade israelita. A matança quebrou a imagem idílica dos gays no Médio Oriente, e em consequência criou uma vaga de solidariedade internacional. Ao ver toda esta gente a sair à rua em solidariedade, interrogamo-nos sobre a mensagem desta reacção de solidariedade: chora-se a perda da imagem irreal do paraiso gay no Médio Oriente ou apela-se a levantar a voz contra a homofobia que infecta todas as socieades do mundo??!!!

Nisreen Mazzawi – Activista feminista, pela paz e pela justiça social e ambiental

o bombardeamento de Gaza repetido no teatrode Edimburgo

fonte:EI



Gaza attacks replayed on Edinburgh stage
Neville Rigby, The Electronic Intifada, 21 August 2009

A scene from Go to Gaza, Drink the Sea. (Neville Rigby)

In the august surroundings of Rainy Hall in Edinburgh, Scotland with its wood-paneled walls, lofty beams and grey stone architecture, Israel's devastating attack on Gaza is being replayed.

The university dining hall has been reincarnated as a temporary theatre for the duration of Edinburgh's festival season with the drama, Go to Gaza, Drink the Sea, performed daily to a mixed audience of the concerned and the curious. Strangely, the curious have yet to include any of the major theatre critics who throng to the city every summer.

The production was first seen in London in February when it represented an immediate reaction to the revulsion felt by many over Israel's sustained onslaught of Gaza claiming the lives of hundreds of civilians. The play was created by writer, actor and director Justin Butcher, who enjoyed notable success on the eve of the invasion of Iraq with his satirical play, The Madness of George Dubya.

Butcher collaborated with Palestinian co-writer-director Ahmed Masoud in developing the play which had a modest run at Theatre Technis earlier this year, earning the praise of the Guardian's doyen of critics, Michael Billington, who described it "deeply felt, humane and vividly expressive" and also noted the "astonishing set" created by artist and theatre designer, Jane Frere, from a mountain of shoes.

The shoes were also seized upon by the London Jewish Chronicle, which railed against them as "anti-Semitic" because of the supposed comparison with the shoes of Auschwitz and an inferred reference to the Holocaust. Palestinian lawyer and award-winning writer, Raja Shehadeh, was drawn into the argument having to point out to the newspaper that there was no monopoly over the imagery of shoes.

The rubble of Gaza's bomb sites is also cleverly symbolized by shoes in the Edinburgh version -- cut down to fit the needs of the temporary space where the set has to be put up and brought down within minutes for each performance.

Actors and volunteer stage hands bustle to put up the set moments before the audience pours in. The play itself has been updated but still draws on contemporary reportage, combined with a personal narrative loosely derived from the experiences of Ahmed Masoud's family still in Gaza.

When the play opened at the beginning of the month, Masoud, who movingly described his return to Gaza bearing scarce medical supplies following his mother's operation for cancer in the New Statesman recently, found himself trapped there and unable to leave for the rehearsals. Eventually he managed to exit through Rafah to return to his pregnant wife in their London home and to see the production in Edinburgh.

The play's strength is to reveal at close quarters in very human terms the impact of cold-blooded military violence on ordinary civilian lives. It recalls the horror of the dead and injured, the collateral casualties even among those under United Nations protection, but it most trenchantly illuminates the imposition of human anguish and suffering on a whole people, an action which nevertheless fails to diminish the sheer will to survive and lead "normal" lives.

With some irony, it is the loss of the will to live by the central character, Sharaf (played by Amir Boutrous, a Palestinian actor who grew up in Israel) that provides the unifying thread running through a series of disturbing vignettes. The disorientated youth wanders through a war zone in search of his own death, encountering the miseries and misfortunes of others along the way.

Palestinian musician Nizar Issa, who also acts in the play, provides a series of haunting laments linking the flow of scenes, while newsreel images selected by film designer Zia Trench flicker overhead.

The cast take on various identities. Lebanese actress Alia Zougbi transforms from truculent teenager to terrified tot, but is particularly strong and convincing when she is the voice of Omer Goldman, the Israeli Schministim protester who defied her own father, then serving in the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, and preferred jail to being conscripted into the Israeli army.

Damian Kell takes on the roles of the UN agency for Palestine refugees' Gaza operations chief, John Ging and BBC reporter Christian Fraser with confident aplomb, while Fisun Burgess breaks hearts with her gut-wrenching appeal as Sharaf's mother. It is left to Rupert Mason, as tunnel trader Abu Mohammed, to provide much of the gallows humor that punctuates the darkness, and as the storyteller to guide Sharaf with his death wish through the unrelenting gloom.

The play comes together perhaps most poignantly in a moving ritual creating a circle of shoes while the actors recite the names of the dead of the Samouni family in Zeytoun, who lost 26 members, including 10 children and seven women.

If mass media coverage of tragedies and travesties such as Gaza no longer succeeds in touching the heart, perhaps we need more people to see plays like this one. I defy anyone to remain unmoved.

For more information about Go to Gaza, Drink The Seavisit www.assemblyfestival.com.

Neville Rigby is a London-based writer and strategy consultant covering a range of topics from culture to international health policy.

Uri Davis: um espinho no lado de Israel

fonte:EI


Uri Davis: perpetual thorn in Israel's side
Jonathan Cook, The Electronic Intifada, 21 August 2009

Uri Davis (Jonathan Cook)

If a single person deserves the title of serial thorn in the side of the Israeli state, Uri Davis, a professor of critical Israel studies at al-Quds University on the outskirts of East Jerusalem, might be the one to claim it.

The crowning moment for Dr. Davis arrived last weekend when he became the first Israeli Jew to be elected to one of Fatah's governing bodies, the Revolutionary Council.

It is a public relations breakthrough for Fatah -- which held its sixth congress last week, this time under occupation in the West Bank city of Bethlehem -- in which Dr. Davis clearly takes some pride.

His presence on the 120-member council, sometimes referred to as the Palestinian parliament, is unlikely to make a significant difference to Fatah's policies, which will continue to be largely dictated by Mahmoud Abbas, the president, and his inner circle. But it does have huge symbolic significance.

His polling in the 31st place for one of 80 seats contested by more than 600 Fatah members, he said in an interview, challenged Israel's suggestion that the Palestinian people and its leaders regard the Jews as their enemies.

Or as one local Palestinian pundit noted of the vote's message: "It is not Judaism that Palestinians are fighting, it is Zionism."

It also finally puts Dr. Davis in a position from which he hopes to shake up the complacency that has bedeviled the Fatah leadership and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in their neglect of supporters outside the Palestinian fold.

"In my view [Fatah] is conducting a struggle with one hand tied behind its back," he said, sipping Arabic coffee in the garden of St. George's cathedral in East Jerusalem.

"The PLO represents a democratic alternative for all, including the current colonizer people, the current perpetrator of war crimes and crimes against humanity," he said in reference to Israel and its Jewish population. "In the 25 years since my joining the Fatah and PLO, this message has been marginalized. The mainstream went another direction, the Oslo accords direction."

He is loath to discuss the current tensions between Fatah and Hamas, claiming it is "not my area of competence." However, he denounces Hamas for fanning the threat of civil war.

His chief task, he said, will be to push Fatah to become a broad-based resistance movement modeling itself on the African National Congress, which brought down apartheid in South Africa.

The reference to South Africa is not unexpected. Dr. Davis started describing Israel as an apartheid state in the early 1980s, long before it had become fashionable even on the far left.

His most recent book is Apartheid Israel: Possibilities for the Struggle Within, published in 2003, in which he argues that discrimination against Palestinians is embedded in Israeli law and sets out what he regards as the four classes of citizenship established by Israel's parliament.

The country's six million Jews, he said, occupied the most privileged place in this hierarchy, followed by the country's one million-strong Palestinian minority with its second-class citizenship. Lagging behind both are a quarter of a million refugees living inside Israel, who are stripped of their right to inherit property, and in final place come a further five million refugees who had their and their descendants' citizenship nullified after the 1948 war.

Over the years, Dr. Davis has experienced life in each of these categories.

He was raised an Ashkenazi Jew in Jerusalem and schooled in Kfar Shemaryahu, a wealthy suburb of Tel Aviv. He then spent a decade in exile from Israel starting in 1984, after his recruitment to Fatah by one of the founders of the PLO, Khalil al-Wazir, known as Abu Jihad.

He ran the party's London bureau until the mid-1990s, when he was allowed to return under the Oslo accords. He surprised friends by choosing to move to Sakhnin, a Palestinian community in northern Israel, from which he led a campaign against laws and practices that force Jewish and Palestinian citizens to live almost entirely apart.

He is more circumspect about discussing his current circumstances. His marriage to a Palestinian woman from Ramallah a year ago, his fourth, violated yet another Israeli taboo.

Before the ceremony he converted to Islam, though he continues to describe himself as a "Palestinian Hebrew of Jewish origin."

While he admits to no longer living in Israel, he is wary of saying more, possibly for good reason: it is against Israeli law for an Israeli citizen to be living in an area under the Palestinian Authority control. Equally, his wife, Miyassar, has been denied a permit to live in Israel, as is the case for almost all Palestinians in the occupied territories. A perfect illustration of the apartheid nature of the Israeli state, he said.

The plight of the Palestinians under occupation has come into much sharper focus since his marriage.

Last month, he had to watch the indignities heaped on his wife after her brother, suffering from cancer, was transferred to a hospital in East Jerusalem, which is illegally annexed to Israel. She was denied a visitor's permit and could only hear about her brother's slow demise from Dr. Davis and friends.

"This situation is not unique to my family, of course. It is part of the cruelty perpetrated by the occupation authorities against the mass of the Palestinian people in the West Bank and Gaza."

Dr. Davis has yet to find out how Israel will respond to his regular attendance at Revolutionary Council meetings in Ramallah.

He said his election had been greeted with an outpouring of support both internationally and from the broader Jewish community that has surprised him. The main hostility has come during interviews with the Israeli media, which have taken offense at "my language referring to Israel as an apartheid state, to Zionism as a settler colonial project, to the criminality of the Israeli leadership."

His unpopularity among the majority of Israeli Jews is likely to grow as he uses his new platform at the Revolutionary Council to push for a campaign of boycotts, divestment and sanctions against Israel.

The ultimate goal, he said, was the enforcement of United Nations resolutions that would in practice bring about a one-state solution.

Dr. Davis concluded the interview with a story about the defining moment in his disillusionment with Israel and Zionism. He was doing alternative civilian service in the early 1960s guarding the perimeter fence of a kibbutz, one of Israel's collective agricultural communities, on the edge of Gaza. As a pacifist at that time, he refused to carry a gun.

After one of many shouting matches, an exasperated kibbutz member led him into a eucalyptus grove inside the fence and pointed to piles of stones. "Those aren't stones, they're the ruins of a village called Dimra. Our kibbutz is cultivating the lands of Dimra," he told the teenage Davis. "The families are refugees on the other side of this fence [in Gaza]. Now do you understand why all the Arabs must hate Jews and want to throw us into the sea?"

Dr. Davis says he understood better the look he was shot by the man when he replied that the kibbutz members should invite the refugees back to share the agricultural land.

That way, the young Davis suggested, the kibbutz could "turn an enemy into a friend."

Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.

A version of this article originally appeared in The National, published in Abu Dhabi.

Como Israel faz uma guerra de "Game Theory"

fonte:Palestine Chronicle




How Israel Wages Game Theory Warfare




As modeled by Zionist war planners, game theory is devoid of all values except one.

By Jeff Gates

In 2005, the Nobel Prize in Economic Science was awarded to Israeli mathematician and game theory specialist Robert J. Aumann, co-founder of the Center for Rationality at Hebrew University. This Jerusalem resident explains: “the entire school of thought that we have developed here in Israel” has turned “Israel into the leading authority in this field.”

Israeli strategists rely on game theory models to ensure the intended response to staged provocations and manipulated crises. With the use of game theory algorithms, those responses become predictable, even foreseeable—within an acceptable range of probabilities. The waging of war “by way of deception” is now a mathematical discipline.

Such “probabilistic” war planning enables Tel Aviv to deploy serial provocations and well-timed crises as a force multiplier to project Israeli influence worldwide. For a skilled agent provocateur, the target can be a person, a company, an economy, a legislature, a nation or an entire culture—such as Islam. With a well-modeled provocation, the anticipated reaction can even become a powerful weapon in the Israeli arsenal.

For instance, a skilled game theorist could foresee that, in response to a 911-type mass murder, “the mark” (the U.S.) would deploy its military to avenge that attack. With phony intelligence fixed around a preset goal, a game theory algorithm could anticipate that those forces might well be redirected to invade Iraq—not to avenge 911 but to pursue the expansionist goals of Greater Israel.

To provoke that invasion required the displacement of an inconvenient truth (Iraq played no role in 911) with what lawmakers and the public could be deceived to believe. The emotionally wrenching nature of that incident was essential in order to induce Americans to abandon rational analysis and to facilitate their reliance on false intelligence.

Americans were (predictably) provoked by that mass murder. The foreseeable reaction—shock, grief and outrage—made it easier for them to believe that an infamous Iraqi Evil Doer was to blame. The displacement of facts with beliefs lies at heart of how Israel, the world’s leading authority in game theory, induces other nations to wage their wars.

False but Plausible

To displace facts with credible fiction requires a period of “preparing the minds” so that the mark will believe a pre-staged storyline. Thus the essential role of a complicit media to promote: (a) a plausible present danger (Iraqi weapons of mass destruction), (b) a plausible villain (a former ally re-branded as an Evil Doer), and (c) a plausible post-Cold War threat to national security (The Clash of Civilizations and “Islamo-fascism”).

Reports from inside Israeli intelligence suggest that the war-planners who induced the 2003 invasion of Iraq began their psyops campaign no later than 1986 when an Israeli Mossad operation (Operation Trojan) made it appear that the Libyan leadership was transmitting terrorist directives from Tripoli to their embassies worldwide. Soon thereafter, two U.S. soldiers were killed by a terrorist attack in a Berlin discotheque. Ten days later, U.S., British and German aircraft dropped 60 tons of bombs on Libya.

The following is a senior Mossad operative’s assessment (published in 1994 in The Other Side of Deception) of that 1986 operation—five years before the Gulf War and 15 years before the murderous provocation that preceded the invasion of Iraq:

‘After the bombing of Libya, our friend Qadhafi is sure to stay out of the picture for some time. Iraq and Saddam Hussein are the next target. We’re starting now to build him up as the big villain. It will take some time, but in the end, there’s no doubt that it’ll work.’

Could this account by former Mossad case officer Victor Ostrovsky be correct? If so, Tel Aviv’s Iraqi operation required more pre-staging than its relatively simple Libyan deception.

America the Mark

From a game theory perspective, what is the probability of a violent reaction in the Middle East after more than a half-century of serial Israeli provocations—in an environment where the U.S. is identified (correctly) as the Zionist state’s special friend and protector?

During the 1967 War, the Israeli killing of 34 Americans aboard the USS Liberty confirmed that a US president (Democrat Lyndon Johnson) could be induced to condone murderous behavior by Israel. Two decades later, Operation Trojan confirmed that a US president (Republican Ronald Reagan) could be induced to attack an Arab nation based on intelligence fixed by Israel.

For more than six decades, the US has armed, financed, befriended and defended Zionism. This “special relationship” includes the US-discrediting veto of dozens of UN resolutions critical of Israeli conduct. From a game theory perspective, how difficult was it to anticipate that—out of a worldwide population of 1.3 billion Muslims—19 Muslim men could be induced to perpetrate a murderous act in response to U.S support for Israel’s lengthy mistreatment of Arabs and Muslims, particularly Palestinians?

Israeli game theorists operate not from the Center for Morality or the Center for Justice but from the Center for Rationality. As modeled by Zionist war planners, game theory is devoid of all values except one: the ability to anticipate—within an acceptable range of probabilities—how “the mark” will react when provoked. Thus we see the force-multiplier potential for those who wage war with well-planned provocations and well-timed crises.

Israeli behavior is often immoral and unjust but that does not mean it is irrational. For Colonial Zionists committed to the pursuit of an expansionist agenda, even murderous provocations are rational because the response can be mathematically modeled, ensuring the results are reasonably foreseeable. That alone is sufficient for a people who, as God’s chosen, consider it their right to operate above the rule of law.

- Jeff Gates is author of Guilt By Association, Democracy at Risk and The Ownership Solution. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. Visit: www.criminalstate.com.

hora certa para falar aberta e livremente

fonte:Palestine Chronicle


Time to Speak Openly and Freely



What was sorely missing from the conferees?

By George S. Hishmeh

The historic conference of Fateh, the Palestinian Liberation Movement, held in Bethlehem earlier this month, generated widespread optimism in the region, including Israel, due to the dethroning of the old guard that has been blamed for tolerating the cruel status quo imposed by Israel and its ineffectiveness since signing the inconclusive peace accord with Israel in 1993.

What was sorely missing from the conferees? Exchanges and the subsequent coverage by the various correspondents, regional and international, including some Americans who were in the region, is any mention of the consequences of the harsh Israeli policies.

Mazen Qumsiyeh, a Palestinian professor of biology at Bethlehem University, wrote in his blog (http://qumsiyeh.org) about the failure to expose the miserable conditions in the birthplace of Jesus Christ. He pointed out that the Bethlehem district lost more than 85 per cent of its land to the Israeli colonial settlements and the apartheid wall that snakes around us and captures most of the good natural resources, the agricultural lands, the water and more?

The professor, who had previously served on the faculties of the University of Tennessee and Duke and Yale universities, added that more than half of the "residents in this shrinking ghetto of Bethlehem are refugees or displaced people (and) nearly 35,000 are the refugees from the original frenzy of ethnic cleansing that happened between 1947-1949 and their descendants."

Another 30,000, he underlined, represent displaced people who moved into the remaining shrinking enclave when their lands were stolen by colonial settlements since 1967 or are the security and other Palestine Liberation Organization people that came to Palestine after the Oslo accords.

Unemployment, he noted, was 30 per cent. All eyes during the 10-day period were understandably focused on the Fateh conference, held for the first time in 20 years, but the disregard of the situation there was unpardonable - and, I dare say, typical of many reporters who neglect to take Israel to task over its condemnable actions.

I was struck by Qumsiyeh’s comment when I read in The New York Times two columns by Thomas L. Friedman, probably the most prominent and influential American columnist who had earlier served as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East. He wrote two columns from Ramallah, the seat of the Palestinian government, where he found ‘some good cheer’ in the praiseworthy efforts of Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad to build ‘quality institutions’. He stressed: ‘Something quite new is happening here. And given he centrality of the Palestinian cause in Arab eyes, if Fayyadism works, maybe it could start a trend in this part of the world - one that would do the most to improve Arab human security - good, accountable government.’

But his columns, published on August 5 and 9, were void of any criticism of Israeli policies. Hopefully, he sounded off in his lecture, which the Israeli daily Haaretz said he gave to a number of the members of the Israeli Defence Forces general staff... about his impressions of his recent visits to Arab countries.

The paper revealed that he met with IDF Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi and his deputy, the head of military intelligence, the head of the Home Front Command and the head of the planning branch. Criticism of Israel, or what may appear as criticism of Israel, comes at a high price, especially for American Jews, as has especially been the case with Rahm Emmanuel, the chief of staff at the White House in the Obama administration.

A writer for Politico.com, a popular political website, reported that Israelis across the political spectrum were skeptical of Obama’s commitment to the Jewish homeland during the presidential campaign but many viewed Emmanuel as a guarantor of their interests, the best hope for continuing the US government’s favorable treatment of Israel.

He added: ‘Today, however, widespread unhappiness with their treatment at the hands of the Obama administration has led to feelings of betrayal - and Emanuel is bearing the brunt of it.’ He has been described as a ‘self-hating Jew’ or, nastier, as a ‘Kapo Jew’ - the name for Jewish police officers in Nazi concentration camps.

Robert Malley, former special assistant to President Bill Clinton for Arab-Israeli Affairs, whose father was an Egyptian Jew, was compelled to explain himself sheepishly for an op-ed that he co-authored last week with Hussein Agha in The New York Times. The column was titled ‘The two-state solution won’t solve anything’ and was interpreted by some ‘as an epitaph for the two-state solution and for the peace process’, David Halperin wrote in his blog.

‘Absolutely not,’ Malley wrote in reply to Halperin. ‘Our work over the years has consistently been about the two-state solution.’ He explained: ‘We are seeking to understand why, despite years of efforts, attempts to achieve it have failed. And we are suggesting that his has less to do with disagreements over the precise territorial boundaries than with something deeper that must be grappled with rather than ignored.’

But as criticism of Israeli policies is increasing nowadays in the US, even within some liberal segments of the American Jewish community, the interview that Fareed Zakaria, the American-Indian CNN anchorman and editor of Newsweek International, had with the new Israeli ambassador, Michael Oren, hit a new level this week. Zakaria had sharp exchanges with the evasive ambassador on many issues, ranging from Jerusalem to ethnic cleansing, and ended his interview with the pointed remark to the ambassador: ‘I am sure you are taking notes, because you are also a great historian and one day you will tell us what you really think when you were sitting here.’

It is about time that all will speak openly and freely. Certainly President Obama when he delivers his much-awaited statement on the Middle East next month at the opening session of the UN General Assembly.

- George S. Hishmeh is a Washington-based columnist. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. Contact him at: ghishmeh@gulfnews.com.

ANISTIA INTERNACIONAL DESISTE DE APOIAR CONCERTO DE LEONARD COHEN EM ISRAEL

fonte:Viva Palestina

Uma declaração confirmando a retirada da Anistia Internacional

deste projeto já foi colocada no site da instituição

A Campanha Palestina para o Boicote Acadêmico e Cultural a Israel (PACBI) emitiu um comunicado, em 18 de agosto de 2009, anunciando que a Anistia Internacional não vai mais se envolver com concerto de Leonard Cohen em Tel Aviv, bem como não mais terá participação em qualquer fundo beneficente financiado por rendas deste show.

A notícia sobre a participação da Anistia Internacional na gestão de um fundo caritativo a ser criado a partir das rendas do concerto do astro canadense chegou a ser noticiada em vários meios de comunicação. Fato que causou estranheza e críticas por parte dos militantes da Campanha Palestina para o Boicote Acadêmico e Cultural de Israel (PACBI) e de grupos de Direitos Humanos e ativistas da causa palestina.

A desistência da participação da Anistia Internacional no projeto foi um duro golpe para Leonard Chen e seus agentes que ficaram sem a cobertura de uma organização de prestígio e respeitabilidade que serviria para jogar uma cortina de fumaça para as constantes violações do direito internacional e dos direitos humanos praticadas por Israel contra o povo dos territórios ocupados da Palestina.

Grupos em todo o mundo exerceram pressão para que a Anistia Internacional desistisse de participar da gestão de um fundo que está sendo criado a partir da renda do concerto de Leonard Cohen, planejado para setembro de 2009. Organizações não Governamentais Palestinas( PNGO) apelaram à AI para não apoiar essa iniciativa. A aldeia de Bilin na Cisjordânia fez um apelo semelhante. Uma campanha internacional de cerca de 1.000 cartas à Anistia apelou para a retirada da instituição do concerto de Cohen.

Até o grupo israelo-palestiniano “Combatentes pela Paz”, que seria beneficiário de verbas advindas do concerto, informou, por escrito, à campanha do boicote a Israel, em Nova York, que o grupo tinha decidido não aceitar quaisquer fundos a partir deste show.

Quando o cantor anunciou que iria realizar um concerto em Israel, começou a receber imediatamente cartas de britânicos, israelitas e de organizações palestinas e protestos em seus concertos em Nova Iorque, Boston, Otava e Belfast, entre outras cidades, exortando Cohen respeitar a chamada internacional para um boicote acadêmico cultural a Israel. Em resposta aos protestos, Cohen tinha tentado agendar um pequeno concerto em Ramallah para "equilibrar" o seu concerto em Israel. No entanto, os palestinos rejeitaram o concerto em Ramallah, insistindo em que Cohen deve primeiro cancelar seu show em Tel Aviv para ser saudado, em Ramallah.

De Leonard Cohen não se poderia esperar nada diferente. Este cantor, compositor, poeta e escritor canadense de fama internacional já fez uma série de shows gratuitos para soldados israelenses na guerra do Yom Kipur em 1973. O que de fato pareceu estranho nessa história foi o anúncio da participação da Anistia Internacional neste evento, permitindo que seu nome e seu prestígio fossem utilizados para minimizar as atrocidades de Israel e seu notório e condenado mundialmente desrespeito aos direitos humanos. Leonard Cohen escolheu um fim de carreira melancólico, cuja fama, de agora em diante, estará mais ligada ao fato de ser um artista que apóia um Estado que comete genocídio e desrespeita sistematicamente as leis internacionais. Felizmente, a Anistia Internacional acordou a tempo de manter seu nome limpo e respeitado.

Beth Monteiro

Fonte : Anistia Internacional

Intifada Eletrônica

JCSER: "Israel forca os palestinianos de Jerusalém a demolir as suas próprias casas"

fonte:IMEMC

JCSER: "Israel is forcing Palestinians in Jerusalem to demolish their own homes"

The Jerusalem Center for Social and Economical Rights (JSCER) issued a press release stating that the Israeli authorities in Jerusalem are forcing Jerusalemite Palestinians to demolish their own homes.

The JCSER said that the Israeli authorities forced 18 Palestinians families to demolish their homes since last July rendering 136, mainly women and children, homeless.

The residents are forced to do so because if the Jerusalem municipality demolishes their homes using its equipment and workers it sends them the bill. Usually the bill mounts to dozens of thousands of Israeli Shekels.

In July, 10 Palestinians were forced to demolish their own homes and 70 Palestinians became homeless.

The center added that the areas that are the focus home demolitions in the Old City, Jabal Al Mukabber, Silwan and At Tour.

It further said that there are dozens of pending demolition orders in Jerusalem, in addition to hundreds of orders targeting additions to existing homes.

The Research and Documentation Department at the JCSER said that two families (16 persons) had to demolish their homes in the Old City of Jerusalem and Jabal Al Mukabber in May.

In April, the Israeli authorities removed a mobile home inhibited by a family living in Al Tour; eight family members became homeless.

The mobile home belongs to Ali Hasan Al Ja’ba, he and his family had to use a mobile home as the Israeli authorities demolished his home two years ago.

Also in April, the Israeli authorities demolished a commercial building located in Nablus Street, in Jerusalem. The building belongs to Mahmoud Al Shweiky, and was licensed by the Jerusalem municipality more than 20 years ago.

In March, the Israeli authorities forced one resident, identified as Mahammad Attoun, from Sur Baher, south of the Old City, to demolish his home. The home in question, 100 square-meters, was inhibited by 8 family members.

The JCSER added that such orders also targeted Jerusalemite Palestinians living in homes rented from the Greek Orthodox and the Armenian churches.

Some of the homes are even located inside ministries. Six families received the demolition orders, the JCSER reported.

Em Gaza, so analgésicos para pacientes de cancro

fonte:EI



In Gaza, only cancer sufferers get only painkillers
Report, The Electronic Intifada, 20 August 2009

Ismail Ahmed, 66-years old from Shujayah, lies in the cancer unit of al-Shifa, Gaza's primary hospital. His catheter for urination flows into a wastebasket due to the lack of medical supplies at the hospital. (Erica Silverman/IRIN)

GAZA CITY, occupied Gaza Strip (IRIN) - Arafat Hamdona, 20, has been confined to the cancer unit of al-Shifa, Gaza's primary hospital, since he was diagnosed with maxillary skin tumors in June 2008. Red lesions protrude from his face, his features are distorted and his eyes swollen shut.

In April, Arafat was permitted to travel to Augusta Victoria Hospital in East Jerusalem where he received three series of chemotherapy and radiotherapy treatment. He was scheduled to return for further treatment, but has not been granted permission by the Israeli authorities to leave Gaza.

"He is only given pain killers," said Arafat's father, Faraj Hamdona, explaining that it is all al-Shifa has to offer.

According to a July 2009 report published by the World Health Organization (WHO) in Jerusalem, Gaza doctors and nurses do not have the medical equipment to respond to the health needs of the 1.5 million people living in the Gaza Strip.

Medical equipment is often broken, lacking spare parts, or outdated.

WHO attributes the dismal state of Gaza's healthcare system to the Israeli blockade of the territory, tightened in June 2007 after Hamas seized control. The poor organization of maintenance services in Gaza compounds the problem, reports WHO.

Medical equipment sits idle

Some 500 tons of donations of medical equipment which flooded the Strip after Israel's military offensive ended on 18 January sits idle in warehouses. Few donors consulted the health ministry or aid agencies working in Gaza to find out what provisions were needed. According to the health ministry, 20 percent of the donated medications had expired. WHO said much of the equipment sent was old and unusable due to a lack of spare parts.

WHO also said suppliers were unable to access medical equipment for repairs and maintenance and "since 2000, maintenance staff and clinical workers have not been able to leave the Strip for training in the use of medical devices."

The Israeli Defense Ministry says it is not obliged to allow into Gaza anything other than basic humanitarian supplies necessary for survival, and is concerned certain medical technology could be used for other more sinister means. Gaza's only other connection to the outside world is its border crossing with Egypt, which is closed most of the time.

The lack of proper medical care in Gaza can have dire consequences.

"The largest number of deaths due to the siege is among cancer patients," Gaza deputy health minister Hassan Halifa said. "Radiotherapy for cancer patients is not available due to the lack of equipment, and chemotherapy is generally not available due to the lack of drugs."

Lack of drugs, medical supplies

In July, 77 out of 480 essential drugs and 140 out of 700 essential medical supplies in Gaza's health ministry were out of stock, according to WHO.

Ismail Ahmed, a 66-year-old from Shejayiya, also lies in the cancer unit of al-Shifa, with a catheter for urination flowing into a wastebasket.

"We lack necessary equipment for the patients," Abdullah Farajullah, a nurse at the unit, said.

Suffering from bladder cancer, Ismail requires blood transfusions.

"There are not enough IV [intravenous] bags. The nurses put blood into plastic water bottles to transfer into my IV bag," Ismail said.

Due to a lack of equipment, he has been on a waiting list for over a month to have a CT (computed tomography) scan, and requires an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) -- although Gaza lacks a single working MRI scanner, according to WHO.

Al-Shifa lacks equipment for basic blood tests. Patients rely on family members to take their blood to certain clinics for testing.

Limited electricity

Another problem for medics in Gaza is the irregular electricity supply, which affects sensitive medical equipment such as incubators and kidney dialysis machines.

Hospitals in Gaza use uninterruptible power supply (UPS) systems as backups, but they require batteries which are often not available due to border closures with Israel and Egypt, according to WHO.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is funding and supplying 30 percent of medications and medical supplies in Gaza, said communications officer Mustafa Abu-Hassanain in Gaza.

"Most of the other 70 percent comes from the health ministry in Ramallah, paid for by the Palestinian Authority budget," said Tony Laurance, head of WHO's West Bank and Gaza Office in Jerusalem.

There is a dialogue between the health ministry in Gaza and the ministry in Ramallah (under Fatah's control). Deliveries must be approved by the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT), a unit of the Israeli Ministry of Defense, before being allowed into Gaza, explained Laurance.

This supply chain is unpredictable and exacerbated by the conflict between Fatah and Hamas.

This item comes to you via IRIN, a UN humanitarian news and information service, but may not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations or its agencies. All IRIN material may be reposted or reprinted free-of-charge; refer to the copyright page for conditions of use. IRIN is a project of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

o espírito inabalável de resistência de Bil'in

fonte:EI




Bilin's unwavering spirit of resistance
Jody McIntyre writing from Bilin, occupied West Bank, Live from Palestine, 20 August 2009

A Palestinian youth hurls a stone during a protest against the wall in Bilin, February 2009. (Oren Ziv/ActiveStills)

The Ofer military base is not an easy place to get into. But after most of my friends and the father of the family I was living with, Mohammed Khatib (also a leading member of the Bilin Popular Committee) were arrested in a brutal night raid on the occupied West Bank village of Bilin, I was determined to go to their court hearing.

Unfortunately, the taxi driver dropped me off at the wrong entrance. Four menacing Israeli soldiers faced me, and they did not look pleased at my presence.

"What are you doing here?" they demanded, "Don't you know that no one is allowed here?!"

"No," I replied, "I'm just here for a friend's court case."

"No you can't, you must leave, go home now!"

Fortunately, one of the soldiers unwittingly pointed me in the direction of the court, before reasserting, "but you can't go there." Nevertheless, I was not intending to follow his orders.

Sitting outside were the families of all seven men on trial -- although the term "men" would be misleading; five of the seven were aged 18 or younger. Also waiting to enter were a small group of international volunteers, hoping to observe the trial. But as usual with Israel's so-called "democracy," they would not be permitted to do so. Luckily for myself, I arrived at the same time as Lamia Khatib, Mohammed's wife, and her insistence that I was a member of the family secured my entrance.

Once inside, I felt like I was at the heart of apartheid. We sat out all day in a Shawshank Redemption-esque yard, feeling jailed ourselves, with the unbearable heat beating down on our heads. As I sat on the concrete floor, staring at the youthful soldiers patrolling the cage we sat in, I couldn't help but contemplate the occupation. When will the injustice stop? How can this be overcome?

At that moment, I could see it all around me. Right down to the Palestinians working for peanuts to repair the building behind us -- cheap Palestinian labor is hugely exploited inside the green line, the internationally-recognized boundary between Israel and the West Bank, while the workers are treated as third-class citizens in their own homeland.

We were finally called for the hearing at around 3:30pm, even though it was due to start at 9:30am. In the court, the system of apartheid was even clearer. Despite the guards demanding the shackled teenagers not communicate with visitors, 18-year-old Mustafa couldn't help but to shout out "HALA JODY!" when he saw my face. It was difficult seeing my adoptive family in brown uniforms, knowing they wouldn't be freed in this sham of a trial.

The evidence presented against the defendants is known as "secret evidence," meaning only the prosecution and the judge can see it, and hence no defense can be put forward. The whole process is conducted in Hebrew, a language most Palestinians don't understand. Translation is kindly provided by a young Israeli soldier -- yet another bitter irony considering the overwhelming force used to drag the boys from their homes in the dark of the night.

By the end of the day, there was no conclusion. No one was released.

Of course, the imprisonment of all the boys from Bilin is completely unjustified. After all, they are arrested for their participation in demonstrations against the wall, which defies not only international law, but also, in the case of Bilin, an Israeli high court order!

However, the arrest of Mohammed Khatib was particularly symbolic. As a senior member of the village's Popular Committee, the Israeli authorities' goal was clear -- arrest the leadership in an attempt to crush the nonviolent resistance. In addition, the only alleged evidence against Khatib is the testimonies of two 16-year-old boys from the village, both of whom were subjected to interrogation by the Israeli army.

A few days later, I was back in Ofer for another hearing. This time, the prosecution presented a photo of a man throwing stones as evidence, who the two youths had "confirmed" as Mohammed Khatib. The defense attorney asked for the date when the photo was taken, which was given as October 2008. The defense attorney then presented the judge with Khatib's passport.

Mohammed Khatib was not in the country in October 2008, he was in New Caledonia.

The prosecution's case had been exposed for what it truly was -- a political mission to put an end to the nonviolent resistance movement of Bilin, a mission in which they are doomed to fail.

The next day, a Friday, we marched to the wall again, as the residents of Bilin have been doing every Friday for the last five years. As usual, our peaceful protest was met with copious amounts of tear gas and sewage water.

After 15 days in prison without charge, we got a call from Mohammed's lawyer, letting us know that, at last, he was going to be released. As soon as I heard the news, I jumped in the car with Ahmad, Mohammed's brother, and their father, and we drove back to Ofer.

As usual, we waited outside for hours with no news. Finally, at around 7pm, we saw Mohammed's smiling face walking towards us through the fence. After walking out, he turned and bowed to God, before coming to embrace his family.

It was difficult to know what to say. So I just smiled.

All the way home he told stories and laughed. As he told me later, "There is no comparison to the feeling of freedom."

As we rounded the last corner coming into Bilin, we saw the flags which had been put up, the children running out onto the street with arms aloft, and Ahmad turned the music up full blast on the car stereo. When Palestinians are released from prison, it is tradition for their family to put up the flag of the political party they support. But for Mohammed, it wasn't Fatah or Hamas waving in the sky, it was the Palestinian flag.

Our hero was home.

That same evening, Mohammed told me that being locked up as a political prisoner was something he felt proud of.

"Yes, the conditions were terrible, but I knew that the resistance was still alive in the village. I told the officer in charge of the operation, if you think that by arresting me, you will stop the demonstrations, you are completely wrong."

Bilin will never, ever give up.

Jody McIntyre is a journalist from the United Kingdom, currently living in the occupied West Bank village of Bilin. Jody has cerebral palsy, and travels in a wheelchair. He writes a blog for Ctrl.Alt.Shift, entitled "Life on Wheels," which can be found at www.ctrlaltshift.co.uk. He can be reached at jody.mcintyre AT gmail DOT com.

exército israelita rapta quatro civis de Hebron

fonte:IMEMC

The Israeli military kidnaps four civilians from Hebron

The Israeli military kidnapped on Thursday morning four Palestinian civilians during an invasion targeting the southern West Bank city of Hebron.

Israeli troops in the west Bank- Photo by Ghassan Bannoura 2008

Local sources reported that troops stormed a number of homes in the city then took the four men and left.

The military announced that the men were taken to military detention camps fr questioning and that all four on the army wanted List.

Podemos falar? a "indústria da paz" no Médio Oriente

fonte:EI



Can we talk? The Middle East "peace industry"
Faris Giacaman, The Electronic Intifada, 20 August 2009

Attempts to establish "dialogue" while Israel continues to oppress Palestinians only undermine the call for boycott. (ActiveStills)

Upon finding out that I am Palestinian, many people I meet at college in the United States are eager to inform me of various activities that they have participated in that promote "coexistence" and "dialogue" between both sides of the "conflict," no doubt expecting me to give a nod of approval. However, these efforts are harmful and undermine the Palestinian civil society call for boycott, divestment and sanctions of Israel -- the only way of pressuring Israel to cease its violations of Palestinians' rights.

When I was a high school student in Ramallah, one of the better known "people-to-people" initiatives, Seeds of Peace, often visited my school, asking students to join their program. Almost every year, they would send a few of my classmates to a summer camp in the US with a similar group of Israeli students. According to the Seeds of Peace website, at the camp they are taught "to develop empathy, respect, and confidence as well as leadership, communication and negotiation skills -- all critical components that will facilitate peaceful coexistence for the next generation." They paint quite a rosy picture, and most people in college are very surprised to hear that I think such activities are misguided at best, and immoral, at worst. Why on earth would I be against "coexistence," they invariably ask?

During the last few years, there have been growing calls to bring to an end Israel's oppression of the Palestinian people through an international movement of boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS). One of the commonly-held objections to the boycott is that it is counter-productive, and that "dialogue" and "fostering coexistence" is much more constructive than boycotts.

With the beginning of the Oslo accords in 1993, there has been an entire industry that works toward bringing Israelis and Palestinians together in these "dialogue" groups. The stated purpose of such groups is the creating of understanding between "both sides of the conflict," in order to "build bridges" and "overcome barriers." However, the assumption that such activities will help facilitate peace is not only incorrect, but is actually morally lacking.

The presumption that dialogue is needed in order to achieve peace completely ignores the historical context of the situation in Palestine. It assumes that both sides have committed, more or less, an equal amount of atrocities against one another, and are equally culpable for the wrongs that have been done. It is assumed that not one side is either completely right or completely wrong, but that both sides have legitimate claims that should be addressed, and certain blind spots that must be overcome. Therefore, both sides must listen to the "other" point of view, in order to foster understanding and communication, which would presumably lead to "coexistence" or "reconciliation."

Such an approach is deemed "balanced" or "moderate," as if that is a good thing. However, the reality on the ground is vastly different than the "moderate" view of this so-called "conflict." Even the word "conflict" is misleading, because it implies a dispute between two symmetric parties. The reality is not so; it is not a case of simple misunderstanding or mutual hatred which stands in the way of peace. The context of the situation in Israel/Palestine is that of colonialism, apartheid and racism, a situation in which there is an oppressor and an oppressed, a colonizer and a colonized.

In cases of colonialism and apartheid, history shows that colonial regimes do not relinquish power without popular struggle and resistance, or direct international pressure. It is a particularly naive view to assume that persuasion and "talking" will convince an oppressive system to give up its power.

The apartheid regime in South Africa, for instance, was ended after years of struggle with the vital aid of an international campaign of sanctions, divestments and boycotts. If one had suggested to the oppressed South Africans living in bantustans to try and understand the other point of view (i.e. the point of view of South African white supremacists), people would have laughed at such a ridiculous notion. Similarly, during the Indian struggle for emancipation from British colonial rule, Mahatma Gandhi would not have been venerated as a fighter for justice had he renounced satyagraha -- "holding firmly to the truth," his term for his nonviolent resistance movement -- and instead advocated for dialogue with the occupying British colonialists in order to understand their side of the story.

Now, it is true that some white South Africans stood in solidarity with the oppressed black South Africans, and participated in the struggle against apartheid. And there were, to be sure, some British dissenters to their government's colonial policies. But those supporters explicitly stood alongside the oppressed with the clear objective of ending oppression, of fighting the injustices perpetrated by their governments and representatives. Any joint gathering of both parties, therefore, can only be morally sound when the citizens of the oppressive state stand in solidarity with the members of the oppressed group, not under the banner of "dialogue" for the purpose of "understanding the other side of the story." Dialogue is only acceptable when done for the purpose of further understanding the plight of the oppressed, not under the framework of having "both sides heard."

It has been argued, however, by the Palestinian proponents of these dialogue groups, that such activities may be used as a tool -- not to promote so-called "understanding," -- but to actually win over Israelis to the Palestinian struggle for justice, by persuading them or "having them recognize our humanity."

However, this assumption is also naive. Unfortunately, most Israelis have fallen victim to the propaganda that the Zionist establishment and its many outlets feed them from a young age. Moreover, it will require a huge, concerted effort to counter this propaganda through persuasion. For example, most Israelis will not be convinced that their government has reached a level of criminality that warrants a call for boycott. Even if they are logically convinced of the brutalities of Israeli oppression, it will most likely not be enough to rouse them into any form of action against it. This has been proven to be true time and again, evident in the abject failure of such dialogue groups to form any comprehensive anti-occupation movement ever since their inception with the Oslo process. In reality, nothing short of sustained pressure -- not persuasion -- will make Israelis realize that Palestinian rights have to be rectified. That is the logic of the BDS movement, which is entirely opposed to the false logic of dialogue.

Based on an unpublished 2002 report by the Israel/Palestine Center for Research and Information, the San Francisco Chronicle reported last October that "between 1993 and 2000 [alone], Western governments and foundations spent between $20 million and $25 million on the dialogue groups." A subsequent wide-scale survey of Palestinians who participated in the dialogue groups revealed that this great expenditure failed to produce "a single peace activist on either side." This affirms the belief among Palestinians that the entire enterprise is a waste of time and money.

The survey also revealed that the Palestinian participants were not fully representative of their society. Many participants tended to be "children or friends of high-ranking Palestinian officials or economic elites. Only seven percent of participants were refugee camp residents, even though they make up 16 percent of the Palestinian population." The survey also found that 91 percent of Palestinian participants no longer maintained ties with Israelis they met. In addition, 93 percent were not approached with follow-up camp activity, and only five percent agreed the whole ordeal helped "promote peace culture and dialogue between participants."

Despite the resounding failure of these dialogue projects, money continues to be invested in them. As Omar Barghouti, one of the founding members of the BDS movement in Palestine, explained in The Electronic Intifada, "there have been so many attempts at dialogue since 1993 ... it became an industry -- we call it the peace industry."

This may be partly attributed to two factors. The dominant factor is the useful role such projects play in public relations. For example, the Seeds of Peace website boosts its legitimacy by featuring an impressive array of endorsements by popular politicians and authorities, such as Hillary Clinton, Bill Clinton, George Mitchell, Shimon Peres, George Bush, Colin Powell and Tony Blair, amongst others. The second factor is the need of certain Israeli "leftists" and "liberals" to feel as if they are doing something admirable to "question themselves," while in reality they take no substantive stand against the crimes that their government commits in their name. The politicians and Western governments continue to fund such projects, thereby bolstering their images as supporters of "coexistence," and the "liberal" Israeli participants can exonerate themselves of any guilt by participating in the noble act of "fostering peace." A symbiotic relationship, of sorts.

The lack of results from such initiatives is not surprising, as the stated objectives of dialogue and "coexistence" groups do not include convincing Israelis to help Palestinians gain the respect of their inalienable rights. The minimum requirement of recognizing Israel's inherently oppressive nature is absent in these dialogue groups. Rather, these organizations operate under the dubious assumption that the "conflict" is very complex and multifaceted, where there are "two sides to every story," and each narrative has certain valid claims as well as biases.

As the authoritative call by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel makes plain, any joint Palestinian-Israeli activities -- whether they be film screenings or summer camps -- can only be acceptable when their stated objective is to end, protest, and/or raise awareness of the oppression of the Palestinians.

Any Israeli seeking to interact with Palestinians, with the clear objective of solidarity and helping them to end oppression, will be welcomed with open arms. Caution must be raised, however, when invitations are made to participate in a dialogue between "both sides" of the so-called "conflict." Any call for a "balanced" discourse on this issue -- where the motto "there are two sides to every story" is revered almost religiously -- is intellectually and morally dishonest, and ignores the fact that, when it comes to cases of colonialism, apartheid, and oppression, there is no such thing as "balance." The oppressor society, by and large, will not give up its privileges without pressure. This is why the BDS campaign is such an important instrument of change.

Faris Giacaman is a Palestinian student from the West Bank, attending his second year of college in the United States.

Pink Floyd na Cisjordânia

fonte:Palestine Chronicle




Pink Floyd

The United Nations on Wednesday (August 19) premiered a film narrated by former Pink Floyd front man Roger Waters on the plight of Palestinians living in the shadow of Israel's controversial separation barrier. The 15-minute film entitled "Walled Horizons" was made in honor of the fifth anniversary of the International Court of Justice's (ICJ) opinion that the barrier's meandering route through the occupied West Bank is illegal. The filmmakers interview a Palestinian farmer who has lost several dunams (hectares) of land to the wall and a family caught in the "seam line" between the wall and the 1967 Green Line separating Israel from the West Bank. The film concludes with a shot of scores of Palestinians packed into a fenced-in corridor waiting to pass through an Israeli checkpoint. Organizers of the project said they made the film out of concern that international awareness of the barrier's effect on Palestinians may be waning five years after the court's decision. (Reference for text: AFP. Photo: Via Google/file)

A escolha "Hobson" do Hamas

fonte:Palestine Chronicle


The Hobson's Choice of Hamas



The Palestinian people's choice: Stick to their guns or watch their homeland evaporate.

By Terrell E. Arnold

In late 2005, the Bush administration, along with the Israeli government of Ariel Sharon, promoted parliamentary elections in Palestine. The goal, obvious if unstated, was to provide a popular credential for the government that would be run by the expected to be victorious candidates, members of the Fatah party of Mahmoud Abbas. Since Abbas had won with a decisive 62% of the votes in a January 2005 election to succeed the late Yasser Arafat, the parliamentary election of January 2006 looked like a slam dunk. Hamas, participating for the first time in a national election, along with five or six small parties stood against Fatah. The results, however, surprised most observers by giving the parliamentary majority to Hamas. Fatah won only 45 seats in the new parliament, while Hamas won an absolute majority of 74 in the 132 seat assembly.

Various pundits agonized over why this occurred. The conventional wisdom was that, after all, Hamas was nothing but a terrorist group. It had no political experience and ran no candidates of known political caliber on the Palestinian scene. As often happens with conventional wisdom, however, this batch was false.

Since its formation in the aftermath of the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982-some say as an Israeli-designed counter to Fatah-Hamas had been busy in the countryside. In both the West Bank and Gaza it had developed effective networks for community support. In a manner of speaking, Hamas emulated the performance of Hezbollah in Lebanon, effectively embedding itself in the towns and villages it served. By the election of 2006, Hamas had more than two decades of community support experience under its belt. The people of those communities knew it well. They knew who unceasingly helped them, who had a well-deserved reputation for integrity, and who shared their thoughts on the future of Palestine. Rudely put, it was not Fatah.

At this point, outside forces designed the future evolution of Palestinian politics.

Palestine's government became a triumvirate. While Hamas was legally empowered to form a new government and did so, the United States and Israel refused to do business with it. Rather they encouraged other governments to ignore Hamas and they set about helping Abbas and Fatah to arrange a takeover, essentially a palace coup. Being better organized in its home base territory of Gaza, Hamas frustrated the 2007 Fatah takeover, retained power in a few pitched battles, while Abbas decided-with US and Israeli help-to take his remaining chips to the West Bank. Thus, the freely elected and street fight winner of an effort to rule Gaza was left to its own devices.

In the West Bank, Abbas and Fatah were pretty well imprisoned by Israel and the United States. Abbas had a security force that was being enhanced-and effectively controlled-by a US general whose job ostensibly was training. The West Bank was surrounded, infiltrated and controlled by Israel Defense Forces who kept dissidents (especially Hamas members) in line, controlled all entry and exit points to and from the West Bank, and did not hesitate to shoot or confine anyone who looked possibly threatening. The name of this game was to keep the imprisoned dwellers in the open air prison of the West Bank moderately comfortable, but unable or disinclined to do anything about their circumstances.

The game plan for Gaza was radically different. Refusing to recognize the Hamas government, the US and Israel, with spotty help from others, set out to harass and starve the Gaza Strip into submission. In late 2008, it was clear that this plan was either working too slowly or not working at all. Hamas had continued to govern and find ways to avert starvation as the US/Israeli boycott of Gaza grew ever tighter. While some Fatah members had filtered out of the region to the West Bank, the people had not deserted Hamas.

US and Israeli assistance policies were used mercilessly to undermine Hamas and bring the people of Gaza to heel. All assisting governments were more or less successfully encouraged to avoid passing any assistance through Hamas. By late 2008 it was apparent that scarcity and near starvation tactics were working but too slowly, and more brutish measures were needed to get the already beleaguered Gaza Strip folk in line. With the best and some of the latest US tools of military destruction freely supplied to them, Israel Defense Forces set out to destroy both Gaza and the will of its people. By the end of January 2009, Israel had virtually demolished Gaza with the IDF "Operation Cast Lead" invasion. More than 1,300 Palestinians had been killed and nearly 5,000 had been wounded. The rest of the world may have been appalled by Israeli brutality, but it chose not to condemn a major war crime.

The grim curtain that shields this atrocity is the charge of anti-Semitism. Under the rule set for this curtain, no one can criticize the murderous work of Israeli forces in Gaza without being called anti-Semitic. A major effort of Israel support groups in the US is now under way to pass so-called hate crime legislation that would make any criticism of Israel a crime under US law. Any Jewish person in the United States who might choose to oppose such a repressive law would be labeled a "self-hating Jew." White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, a respected American Jew, has been labeled self-hating because he chooses to serve the interests of his own country, not those of Israel.

Plotting a clear path through this political, spiritual, intellectual, and legal jungle is not easy for a Palestinian. It is excruciatingly difficult for a Palestinian politician who stands up in defense of the basic right of the Palestinian people to live and work freely in the country of their ancestry. Hamas does that more precisely and indeed more forcefully than any earlier Palestinian politicians. That is its political appeal.

In Israeli and US views up to this point, that has been the undoing of Hamas. The ostensible problem is that the charter of Hamas calls for the destruction of Israel. While that might be acceptable in any other case as a way to get rid of an invading army that is followed by people who take without giving, Israel has worked hard at keeping itself immune from such considerations.

Israel uses the war crime of the Holocaust to justify the war crime of the Naqba and sixty years of Palestinian repression. Jews who were not killed were driven out of Germany. Palestinians who were not killed or imprisoned in 1947-48 and following years have been driven out of most of Palestine. The Israelis portray this process as restitution. Clearer heads call this a war crime against Palestinians who had nothing to do with the crimes of Hitler's Germany. The Israeli crimes continue today as Israeli settlers grab more land in the West Bank and Israel Defense Forces eject Palestinians from their ancestral homes in Jerusalem.

The Palestinian problem is that people movements in historic Palestine are too generally interpreted as one way. In the worst sense, Bush codified this pattern when in his September 2005 meeting with Sharon he referred to new Israeli settlements as "facts on the ground" that needed to be taken into account. Sharon and his successors have seized on this concept with every new settlement. Currently, Netanyahu is accelerating new "facts on the ground" around East Jerusalem in order to foreclose any prospect of East Jerusalem as a future capital of a Palestinian state.

The Hamas flaw-as defined by Israel and the US-is that it stands for halting and in some ways reversing the Israeli takeover of Palestine. It has updated its agenda to the extent that it no longer expects to drive Israel into the sea. However, Hamas seeks (a) stopping the continuing takeover of Palestinian lands by settlers; (b) withdrawing Israelis back to the Green Line established at the end of the 1967 war-with perhaps some swaps to even out respective territories to Green Line equivalents, (c) recognition of the right of Palestinians to return; (d) compensation for those who are not allowed to return to their homes and farms; and (e) establishment of the Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem. This is basically the Palestinian aim as embodied in a 2002 Arab League proposal that is promoted currently by King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia.

Recognizing that the Hamas position is close to the centerline of Palestinian thinking, Fatah held a conference in early August in which Mahmoud Abbas was confronted by an effort of Fatah members to recapture the Palestinian lead from Hamas. That involved the conferees taking a final position that moved close to the terms of the Arab League proposal. The problem with this position for Fatah, frankly, is that the masters of Mahmoud Abbas are not the Palestinians, but the Israelis and Americans who reject the Hamas position. The US/Israeli position defines a Palestinian moderate as someone unwilling to fight back against Israel's continuing takeover of the country. Thus, anyone who would fight to keep significant and clearly defined parts of Palestine for its historic peoples is viewed as a "radical".

Hamas learned some time ago that fighting to preserve Palestine for the people of that historic territory was both bad for its reputation and harmful to its health. However, that Hamas idea resonated with most Palestinians. The US/Israeli goal ever since the 2006 parliamentary elections has been to make the Palestinians pay for such bad political judgment.

The punishment has not worked. Most Palestinians still side with Hamas, as the Fatah conference demonstrated. What Fatah leadership saw was that the position led by Abbas since the 2006 election invites increasing political irrelevance. There is for the Palestinian people only one choice: Stick to their guns or watch their homeland evaporate into progressive Israeli settlements, while their much sought after capital gets turned into Israeli parks and condos for wealthy Israel supporters. Predicting the future is a risky undertaking, but the prospects are most likely that Hamas will not budge. After sixty years of repression, neither will the Palestinian people.

- Terrell E. Arnold is the author of the recently published work, A World Less Safe, now available on Amazon, and he is a regular columnist on rense.com. He is a retired Senior Foreign Service Officer of the US Department of State whose overseas service included tours in Egypt, India, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, and Brazil. His immediate pre-retirement positions were as Chairman of the Department of International Studies of the National War College and as Deputy Director of the State Office of Counter Terrorism and Emergency Planning. He contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. Contact him at: wecanstopit@charter.net. (This article was originally published in rense.com)

África do Sul inicia um boicote às tamaras israelitas este Ramadã

fonte:Palestine Chronicle


SA Calls to Boycott Israeli Dates This Ramadan


Medjool Dates produced in the illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank. (inminds.co.uk)

By Aisha Mouneimne – Cape Town

Following a campaign launched this week by Friends of Al Aqsa calling on the boycotting of Israeli dates this Ramadan, the Cape Town based Muslim Judicial Counsel (MJC) on Wednesday urged the community to heed this call.

“It is important for the community to take cognisance during this month, while dates are an important part of our culinary needs during Ramadan, dates are increasingly being imported from occupied Palestine and we need to be aware of this,” said Nabaweyah Malick, spokesperson for the MJC.

Malick said most Muslim take it for granted that dates come from the Arabian Peninsula, but she said, with Israel’s leading fruit export being dates, South Africans need to become proactive in “checking their labels”.

According to the MJC these labels include product marked with the names Israel, West Bank or Jordon Valley as well as any product that’s barcode begins with 729. She added that while she did not want to name particular supermarket chains known for stocking Israeli produce, she urged the community to become vigilant with checking labels, as “the majority of supermarkets do stock Israeli products.”

Another issue of concern, said Malick, is the increase of Israeli goods imported via Namibia or Italy; meaning labeling could change in the process.

“The only answer here is for consumers to do constant research on where their products are coming from,” she said.

She noted that the date farms-like many other Israeli occupied farms, usually employ Palestinian children- forced by the dire economic climate to leave school and work on these farms. She said this should deter consumers in boycotting products, thinking it will hinder the cause.

“Israelis sometimes say that by boycotting Israeli goods, we are harming the Palestinian labourers. However, it is important to note that these farmers are only working the farms out of pure desperation, if the occupation was brought to an end, these Palestinians would once again work their own farms and export their own goods- and boycotting products is a way to end the occupation.”

Malick added that as South African- seeing the power of boycotts during the fall of Apartheid, we have an “added responsibility to add our voices to this cause.”

“As South Africans we have proved that when the determination and commitment is there, the fall of an injustice can be achieved. We need to show Israel that the world is awake and conscious of the international crimes that being committed by Israel.”

- Aisha Mouneimne is a journalist and freelance writer currently working for a Cape Town based Muslim radio station. She contributed this article to PalestineChronicle.com. Contact her at: ashiamouneimne@gmail.com.

a calma ocupação da Cisjordânia e a paz obscena

fonte:The Guardian

Quiet slicing of the West Bank makes abstract prayers for peace obscene

Condemnation of 'illegal' settlements and violence only blurs the reality of what the Israeli state is sanctioning, day by day

by Slavoj Zizek

On 2 August 2009, after cordoning off part of the Arab neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah in east Jerusalem, Israeli police evicted two Palestinian families (more than 50 people) from their homes; Jewish settlers immediately moved into the emptied houses. Although Israeli police cited a ruling by the country's supreme court, the evicted Arab families had been living there for more than 50 years. The event – which, rather exceptionally, did attract the attention of the world media – is part of a much larger and mostly ignored ongoing process.

Five months earlier, on 1 March, it had been reported that the Israeli government had drafted plans to build more than 70,000 new homes in Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank; if implemented, the plans could increase the number of settlers in the Palestinian territories by about 300,000 Such a move would not only severely undermine the chances of a viable Palestinian state, but also hamper the everyday life of Palestinians.

A government spokesman dismissed the report, arguing that the plans were of limited relevance – the construction of homes in the settlements required the approval of the defence minister and the prime minister. However, 15,000 have already been fully approved, and 20,000 of the proposed housing units lie in settlements that Israel cannot expect to retain in any future peace deal with the Palestinians.

The conclusion is obvious: while paying lip-service to the two-state solution, Israel is busy creating a situation on the ground that will render such a solution impossible. The dream underlying Israel's plans is encapsulated by a wall that separates a settler's town from the Palestinian town on a nearby West Bank hill. The Israeli side of the wall is painted with the image of the countryside beyond the wall – but without the Palestinian town, depicting just nature, grass and trees. Is this not ethnic cleansing at its purest, imagining the outside beyond the wall as empty, virginal and waiting to be settled?

On the very day that reports of the government's 70,000-home plan emerged, Hillary Clinton criticised the rocket fire from Gaza as "cynical", claiming: "There is no doubt that any nation, including Israel, cannot stand idly by while its territory and people are subjected to rocket attacks." But should the Palestinians stand idly while the West Bank land is taken from them day by day?

When peace-loving Israeli liberals present their conflict with Palestinians in neutral, symmetrical terms – admitting that there are extremists on both sides who reject peace – one should ask a simple question: what goes on in the Middle East when nothing is happening there at the direct politico-military level (ie, when there are no tensions, attacks or negotiations)? What goes on is the slow work of taking the land from the Palestinians on the West Bank: the gradual strangling of the Palestinian economy, the parcelling up of their land, the building of new settlements, the pressure on Palestinian farmers to make them abandon their land (which goes from crop-burning and religious desecration to targeted killings) – all this supported by a Kafkaesque network of legal regulations.

Saree Makdisi, in Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation, describes how, although the Israeli occupation of the West Bank is ultimately enforced by the armed forces, it is an "occupation by bureaucracy": it works primarily through application forms, title deeds, residency papers and other permits. It is this micro-management of the daily life that does the job of securing slow but steady Israeli expansion: one has to ask for a permit in order to leave with one's family, to farm one's own land, to dig a well, or to go to work, to school, or to hospital. One by one, Palestinians born in Jerusalem are thus stripped of the right to live there, prevented from earning a living, denied housing permits, etc.

Palestinians often use the problematic cliché of the Gaza strip as "the greatest concentration camp in the world". However, in the past year, this designation has come dangerously close to truth. This is the fundamental reality that makes all abstract "prayers for peace" obscene and hypocritical. The state of Israel is clearly engaged in a slow, invisible process, ignored by the media; one day, the world will awake and discover that there is no more Palestinian West Bank, that the land is Palestinian-frei, and that we must accept the fact. The map of the Palestinian West Bank already looks like a fragmented archipelago.

In the last months of 2008, when the attacks of illegal West Bank settlers on Palestinian farmers became a regular daily occurrence, the state of Israel tried to contain these excesses (the supreme court ordered the evacuation of some settlements) but, as many observers have noted, such measures are half-hearted, countered by the long-term politics of Israel, which violates the international treaties it has signed. The response of the illegal settlers to the Israeli authorities is "We are doing the same thing as you, just more openly, so what right do you have to condemn us?" And the state's reply is basically "Bde patient, and don't rush too much. We are doing what you want, just in a more moderate and acceptable way."

The same story has been repeated since 1949: Israel accepts the peace conditions proposed by the international community, counting on the fact that the peace plan will not work. The illegal settlers sometimes sound like Brunhilde from the last act of Wagner's Walküre – reproaching Wotan and saying that, by counteracting his explicit order and protecting Siegmund, she was only realising Wotan's own true desire, which he was forced to renounce under external pressure. In the same way the settlers know they are realising their own state's true desire.

While condemning the violent excesses of "illegal" settlements, the state of Israel promotes new "legal" building on the West Bank, and continues to strangle the Palestinian economy. A look at the changing map of East Jerusalem, where the Palestinians are gradually encircled and their living area sliced, tells it all. The condemnation of anti-Palestinian violence not carried out by the state blurs the true problem of state violence; the condemnation of illegal settlements blurs the illegality of the legal ones.

Therein resides the two-facedness of the much-praised non-biased "honesty" of the Israeli supreme court: by occasionally passing judgment in favour of the dispossessed Palestinians, proclaiming their eviction illegal, it guarantees the legality of the remaining majority of cases.

Taking all this into account in no way implies sympathy for inexcusable terrorist acts. On the contrary, it provides the only ground from which one can condemn the terrorist attacks without hypocrisy.

Slavoj Zizek is international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities szizek@yahoo.com