An Ordinary Palm Sunday

On that same day, one of my good friends from the US was making his first visit to Israel and Jerusalem, discovering the city, its history, architecture, its smells and colors.

Funny thing -- did I say "funny"?--because he's Jewish, he could apply for citizenship and move to Jerusalem tomorrow. Birthright, some call it.

Those people--on the video below--are from the land; have been for generations.

On Palm Sunday, they tried to walk from the Church of the Nativity (Bethlehem) to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher (Jerusalem).

To my US friends, please tell me: how do you feel about paying taxes to turn Bethlehem into a prison?

Please watch. Listen to the comments after the first 4 minutes.

Elrig

Israeli Activist: There is a New Left in Town

There's a moment in history, when young idealists step up. The old crowd smirks - "kids! what do they know? they don't understand the real world." Then the smirk turns to a frown. Then the frown turns to a silent scream. Then the old guard walks away in silence with head bowed in embarrassment and shame. The real world has changed.

This is the first time I hear of Sara Benninga -- an Israeli activist, but she sounds like other young idealists I know. And she's speaking loud and clear. [Text of her speech in Sheikh Jarah pasted below. From coteret.com.]

Mazel Tov Sara. This old guy is smiling at you and your friends.

Elrig

******

Sheikh Jarrah, March 6, 2010

There is a new Left in town!

There is a new Left and it is a Left that is not satisfied with peace talks. It is a Left that fights!

There is a new Left that knows there are things you must fight against even when they are identified with the State and even when they enjoy the protection of the law!

There is a new Left that knows that this fight will not be won on paper but on the ground, in the hills, in the vineyards and in the olive groves.

There is a new Left that is not afraid of the settlers, even when they descend on it from the hilltops, blindfolded and armed.

This Left does not surrender to the police’s political repression, and does not care what they write about it in Maariv. There is a new Left in town!

This Left does not want to be loved, does not fantasize about town squares and does not bask in the memory of the 400,000. This Left is a partnership between Palestinians, who understand the occupation will not be defeated by missiles and bombs, and Israelis, who understand that the Palestinian struggle is their struggle.

The new Left joins hands with Palestinians in a cloud of tear gas at Bil’in and gets beaten up together with them by settlers at the South Hebron Mountain.

This Left stands by refugees and labor migrants in Tel Aviv and fights against the Wisconsin Plan.

The new Left is us — all of us!

Everyone who came here tonight. Everyone who dared cross the imaginary line between West and East Jerusalem, despite the threats and intimidation.

We are all the new Left that is emerging in Israel and Palestine.

We are not fighting for a peace agreement. We are fighting for justice. But we believe that injustice is the main obstacle to peace.

There will be no peace until the Ghawi and Hanoun and al-Kurd families return to their homes. Because peace does not grow on a soil of discrimination, oppression and theft.

There is a new Left in town and that Left stands with the people of Sheikh Jarrah tonight and will continue standing with them until justice defeats fanaticism.

But there is also a new Right in town.

A Right awash with fanaticism and racism that seduces the masses with nationalist rhetoric.

The new Right does not care about the welfare and well-being of human beings. The new Right only cares about ethnic, tribal, Liebermanistic loyalty.

For the new Right charity begins at home only for Jews. And what makes a person a Jew is the fact that they are not an Arab.

The new Right has nothing to offer except for endless war.

The new Right is the empty wagon that went off the rails: religious and secular Jews who have nothing but hatred of the other: the Arabs the refugee, the leftist.

That new Right manufactures the deluded settlers, because of whom we are demonstrating tonight.

Those settlers hate Jerusalem. They do not love the Jewish people and they do not love mankind. They love only themselves.

Among the settlers there are many with whom we should speak. But the settlers of Sheikh Jarrah, who sing canticles to Baruch Goldstein — they must be defeated.

The new Right created Nir Barkat. A technocrat who does not understand Jerusalem and does not care about Jerusalem. A mayor who uses administrative terror against the residents of East Jerusalem and neglects the residents of West Jerusalem, while reciting endless clichés.

If Jerusalem is a powder keg, the match that might light it is called Nir Barkat.

But we are not afraid of Barkat, nor are we afraid of the settlers, nor are we afraid of Lieberman.

We will keep coming to Sheikh Jarrah and to every place where justice is trampled by the forces of occupation and oppression.

Look around you. We are not as few as we thought! And we will win!

Reposting: Fear of Peace Will be the Death of Israel"

A thought provoking piece by Bradley Burston in today's Haaretz.
Conclusion from the Israeli Defense Minister?

"The lack of a solution to the problem of border demarcation within the historic Land of Israel - and not an Iranian bomb - is the most serious threat to Israel's future."

No comments.

[For explanations about Sheikh Jarrah, the neighborhood of Jerusalem being forcibly ethnically transformed, see a report by Tony Davis, with pictures and maps, or a blog by Marijke Peters.]

Elrig
Picture source - Palestine Think Tank.

*******

Fear of Peace will be the Death of Israel - Bradley Burston

SHEIKH JARRAH, Jerusalem - As the grandson of anarchists, I've always had a soft spot in my heart for fanatics. Expressions of extremism, and passionately reasoned, exquisitely twisted world views make me feel, how shall I put this, at home.

So it was with a certain relish that I approached the cover story of a recent issue of Commentary, "The Deadly Price of Pursuing Peace," written as it was by a talented colleague and friend, Evelyn Gordon.

The thrust of the piece, which Commentary Editor John Podhoretz understandably calls "groundbreaking," is that Israel's international standing has plummeted to an unprecedented low - and the number of Palestinians killed by Israel has concurrently soared - specifically because of Israel's having done much too much for peace.

"The answer is unpleasant to contemplate, but the mounting evidence makes it inescapable," she writes. "It was Israel's very willingness to make concessions for the sake of peace that has produced its current near-pariah status."

The essay has the seamless, compellingly elegant, hyper-lucid, parallel universe logic of a hallucination - or a settlement rooted in the craw of the West Bank. Until I read it, it was difficult for me to comprehend the current runaway-freight recklessness of Israeli authorities and a certain segment of the hard right, bolstered by shady funding from abroad.

It was hard to fathom why Israeli police in this quiet hollow of the Arab half of Jerusalem, would choose to openly flout and violate the rulings of an Israeli court. I was unable to grasp why they would manhandle and arrest non-violent demonstrators - among them the executive director of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel - for protesting the official expulsion from their homes of more than two dozen Palestinian families here, driven out and into the street, so that subsidized and sheltered settlers could move in.

It was beyond my understanding why an Israeli government which views the idea of a Palestinian Right of Return as tantamount to annihilation of the Jewish state, would set a legal precedent that paves the way for just such a right.

Just as I was clueless as to why the Knesset was to vote Wednesday on a bill that would make aiding asylum seekers fleeing African genocide, granting them shelter, medical care, food, a crime subject to up to 20 years in prison.

Or why there were vigorous new campaigns to increase gender segregation at the Western Wall and on public buses, and why women have been arrested and interrogated on suspicion of having worn prayer shawls while praying on their side of a barrier raised so that they would no longer be able to watch their sons' bar mitzvah on the mens' side.

Or why a sudden and ferocious campaign against human rights organizations and charity work agencies in Israel is coinciding with new human rights outrages against Palestinians and foreigners, some of them unable to leave, others forced to.

It was not until I saw the title of the Commentary piece that it all made sense.

The right is terrified of peace. And, in the end, the right's fear of peace will be the death of Israel.

They are afraid of peace, in part, because it threatens the core of what has come to replace other values as the goal of Judaism: permanent settlement of the West Bank. But that is only a part of it.

They are afraid of peace because they are afraid of the world. They dismiss fellow Jews who want to see a two-state solution - a majority of Israelis - as unrealistic, as living in a bubble. The name of the bubble these moderates live in, however, is planet Earth.

The right, meanwhile, wants to wall off Israel as the world's last remaining legally mandated Jewish ghetto. A place where all the rules are different, exit and entry, citizenship and human rights, because the residents within are Jews. A place where non-Jews, dehumanized as congenital Jew-haters, are rendered invisible. A place which, if suffocating and insufferable, still seems safer than the scary world outside.

A place which, because of its walls and its politics and its cowardice, is losing its ability to function as a part of the world, reveling in cheap-shot humiliations of key foreign ambassadors, deliriously proud of its sense that of all the world, including most of its Jews and Israelis - only the right sees the real truth.

This braid of thought was venomously endorsed this week both by an uncharacteristically Kahane-sounding Alan Dershowitz, and the obscenely infantile Im Tirtzu movement. According to them, where Cast Lead was concerned, the real war criminals are Richard Goldstone and Naomi Chazan - two people who are open about their love of Israel, and who have worked their whole adult lives for its well-being.

The fears of the right are not mere devices of rhetoric. The risks of making peace are real. Every bit as real as the risks of failing to make peace.

It all comes down to belief. It comes down to the kind of country the believer wants Israel to be. And for that reason, there is a civil war going on for Israel's soul.

It will not be weaponry that decides this war, but courage. People who care about the direction that Israel is moving, and whose watchword is moderation, would do well to choose one facet of the fight, and join. One place to start, is to support the New Israel Fund and the groups it supports.

Another place to start is this one. At the weekend, challenging the threats of rightist thugs and law-scorning police, the weekly demonstration on behalf of the Palestinian residents of Sheikh Jarrah doubled in size. The police backed down on their vow to break up the protest, and the Kahanists barely showed.

If non-violent peace activism scares the right to this extent, there must be a great deal of power in it.

After all, most Israelis can sense that if peace is to be the enemy, more dangerous even than the threat of war, this is one doomed ghetto.

Things have reached such a devastating point, that for the first time in recent memory, even Ehud Barak is beginning to get it: "The simple truth is, if there is one state" including Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, "it will have to be either binational or undemocratic," Barak told the Herzliya Conference Tuesday.

"If this bloc of millions of Palestinians cannot vote, that will be an apartheid state."

The fear of peace has left Israel as a country which is prepared for nuclear warfare but not for non-violent protest on behalf of Palestinians. The fear of peace, and the blackmail of the right on behalf of settlement, has contorted Israel into a body which, unable to countenance the perils of treating the sickness of occupation, will eventually be killed by it.

Israel's defense minister, for one, is convinced: "The lack of a solution to the problem of border demarcation within the historic Land of Israel - and not an Iranian bomb - is the most serious threat to Israel's future."

Les mots de la propagande.

Alain Gresh du Monde Diplomatique présente un résumé du manuel de communication pour les blogueurs et internautes recrutés par Israel pour avancer sa propagande. Blog très instructif à lire ici.

C'est vraiment the B-A-Ba de la propagande. Mais ça marche.

Le manuel "The Israel's Project 2009. Global Language Dictionary" peut être téléchargé également.

Elrig

In English - click here.

Words of Propaganda

Read about the Propaganda 101 Manual for bloggers and Internet debaters put together by the "Israel Project'. Very educational.

Dan Ephron writes a short analysis, which you can access here.

The manual itself can be downloaded here. You will find in it such innate wisdom as:

“The arguments about demolishing Palestinian homes because they are not within the Jerusalem building code tested SO badly that we are not even going to dignify them with a Word’s That Don’t Work box. Americans hate their own local planning boards for telling them where they can and can’t put swimming pools or build fences. You don’t need to import that animosity into your own credibility issues. Worse yet, talking about ‘violations of building codes’ when a TV station is showing the removal of a house that looks older than the modern state of Israel is simply catastrophic.”

Guess we all have problems eh?

Elrig

EN FRANCAIS - Cliquez ici.

Israeli Army attack on Village of At-tuwani

Samuel Nichols writes a direct witness of the events here.

See US Campaign update and call to action here.

Remember, today the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not in the news.
"Nothing" is happening.
Tomorrow, we'll wonder again why people are so hungry and what's wrong with them.
We'll have to wonder because "nothing" happened today.

"There was an army invasion in the village last night, and today there was this. It was the ugliest thing I have ever seen, yet that's a superlative, but so be it. It was evil I tell you, evil. Pushing old women, throwing tear gas at kids, concussion grenades at pregnant women, throwing men to the ground, hitting them in the back with rifles, breaking cameras. It was like a mob of angry "professional"-soldier-thugs. The soldiers were holding each other back from doing worse things. Why did they do this? Because Palestinians were trying to feed their goddamn sheep. Unbelievable.
This occupation has to end, it has to. People can't endure this forever."

Sam Nichols--

Elrig - voice in the desert? Cassandra?

Watch a little recent history about At-tuwani.

End of 2009 - Message from Other Voice in Sderot

Concluding the year with a voice of sanity from good friends in Sderot.
Shalom - Salam
Elrig

*** Their Lives = Our Lives ***

We, residents of the Sderot/surrounding Gaza region, wish to live with peace and quiet.

Our neighbors in Gaza, wish to live with peace in quiet.

Life for them = Life for us!

We, members of Other Voice, call for an end to the siege, an end to the collective punishment, that is harming innocent people. We call for the co-creation of good neighborly relations, that are built on mutual respect and non violence.

Life for us = Life for them!

Visit our website - www.othervoice.org - and share your support for ending the siege on Gaza.

Please forward this message to your email contacts

אנו, תושבי האזור, רוצים לחיות בשלום ובשקט.

שכנינו בעזה רוצים לחיות בשלום ובשקט.

חיים להם = חיים לנו!

אנו, חברי 'קול אחר', קוראים להסרת המצור על עזה ולהפסקת הענישה הקולקטיבית הפוגעת באזרחים חפים מפשע. אנו קוראים לבנייה משותפת של יחסי שכנות תקינים, המבוססים על כבוד הדדי ואי אלימות.

חיים לנו = חיים להם!!

תבקרו באתר שלנו - www.othervoice.org - והביעו תמיכה בהסרת המצור.

אנא - תשלחו מייל זה הלאה לרשימות התפוצות שלכם!