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Great short film on the history and geography of the Israel-Palestine conflict by David Barsamian.
The battle over Palestine is one of the most intensely geographic conflicts in the world. Yet most people know nothing of the area and what factors make it so intensely important to the imperialist powers. David Barsamian takes a look at the maps to provide a sweeping history of the current and historic forces that are shaping the so-called “Holy Land,” sacred to three of the worlds great religions, a land drenched not with holy water but holy oil.
1991 Documentary on JNF’s Illegal “Canada Park”
Illan Pappe on the JNF in Canada
It was the Jewish National Fund (JNF) that planted these pine trees, to wipe out the memory of the place and Europeanize it. I was bewildered in Toronto, seeing signs for the JNF, asking for support for the JNF as if it was some kind of ecological organization dedicated to protecting whales. It is not. It is a colonialist agency of ethnic cleansing.
Jonathan Cook, as I said before, is one of my favourite journalists and this has to be the best argument for a resolution to the Israel Palestine conflict that I’ve come across. Start reading it and finish it - you won’t be disappointed.
One State or Two? Neither.
The Issue is Zionism
Editors’ note: On Monday we ran Michael Neumann’s argument against the so-called “one state” solution for Israel and Palestine. This is the second of three replies. AC / JSC.
If the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the world’s most intractable, much the same can be said of the parallel debate about whether its resolution can best be achieved by a single state embracing the two peoples living there or by a division of the land into two separate states, one for Jews and the other for Palestinans.
The philosopher Michael Neumann has dedicated two articles, in 2007 and earlier this week, for CounterPunch discrediting the one-state idea as impractical and therefore as worthless of consideration. In response, Kathy Christison has mounted a robust defence, neatly exposing the twists and turns of Neumann’s logic. I will not trouble to cover the same ground.
I want instead to address Neumann’s central argument: that it is at least possible to imagine a consensus emerging behind two states, whereas Israelis will never accept a single state. That argument, the rallying cry of most two-staters, paints the one-state crowd as inveterate dreamers and time-wasters.
Jonathan Cook is one of my favourite reporters on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Yet again his analysis is sharp and harrowing - Israel’s plan to ethnically cleanse all of Gaza.
Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai’s much publicized remark last week about Gaza facing a “shoah” — the Hebrew word for the Holocaust — was widely assumed to be unpleasant hyperbole about the army’s plans for an imminent full-scale invasion of the Strip.
More significantly, however, his comment offers a disturbing indication of the Israeli army’s longer-term strategy towards the Palestinians in the occupied territories.
Vilnai, a former general, was interviewed by army radio as Israel was in the midst of unleashing a series of air and ground strikes on populated areas of Gaza that killed more than 100 Palestinians, at least half of whom were civilians and 25 of whom were children, according to the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem.
The interview also took place in the wake of a rocket fired from Gaza that killed a student in Sderot and other rockets that hit the center of the southern city of Ashkelon. Vilnai stated: “The more Qassam fire intensifies and the rockets reach a longer range, they [the Palestinians of Gaza] will bring upon themselves a bigger shoah because we will use all our might to defend ourselves.”
His comment, picked up by the Reuters wire service, was soon making headlines around the world. Presumably uncomfortable with a senior public figure in Israel comparing his government’s policies to the Nazi plan to exterminate European Jewry, many news services referred to Vilnai’s clearly articulated threat as a “warning,” as though he was prophesying a cataclysmic natural event over which he and the Israeli army had no control.
Nonetheless, officials understood the damage that the translation from Hebrew of Vilnai’s remark could do to Israel’s image abroad. And sure enough, Palestinian leaders were soon exploiting the comparison, with both the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, and the exiled Hamas leader, Khaled Meshaal, stating that a “holocaust” was unfolding in Gaza.
Within hours the Israeli Foreign Ministry was launching a large hasbara (propaganda) campaign through its diplomats, as the Jerusalem Post reported. In a related move, a spokesman for Vilnai explained that the word shoah also meant “disaster”; this, rather than a holocaust, was what the minister had been referring to. Clarifications were issued by many media outlets.
However, no one in Israel was fooled. Shoah — which literally means “burnt offering” — was long ago reserved for the Holocaust, much as the Arabic word nakba (catastrophe) is nowadays used only to refer to the Palestinians’ dispossession by Israel in 1948. Certainly, the Israeli media in English translated Vilnai’s use of shoah as “holocaust.”
Sands of Sorrow (1950); On the plight of Arab refugees from the Arab-Israeli war. Dorothy Thompson speaks on the refugee problem. Refugees live in tents in the Gaza Strip, are given blankets and food by Egyptian soldiers, and receive flour from UNICEF. A Lebanese priest conducts services. Refugees work as plumbers, carpenters, tailors, and shoemakers in the city of Jerusalem. Doctors vaccinate refugees against disease. Shows the squalid living conditions in refugee camps, starving children, and emphasizes the hopeless condition of the refugees. Producer: Council for the Relief of Palestine Arab Refugees; Creative Commons license: Public Domain.
| The facts of the Nakba (catastrophe) are now well documented and beyond dispute. Yet Nakba denial remains widespread, and is as vile as denial of any other historic crime. |
In the coming months, the same event will be commemorated by two different groups in starkly contrasting fashions.
May 15 sees the 60th anniversary of the birth of the State of Israel. In Britain, the programme of celebrations includes a gala fund-raising dinner at Windsor Castle in the presence of the Duke of Edinburgh (the Queen’s husband), a variety show at Wembley Stadium and street parades for Israel in London and Manchester.
Remembering a tragedy Meanwhile, Palestinians and their supporters will be recalling the same event in entirely different tones, and without the benefit of State support or vast sums of money. In meetings, conferences and exhibitions they will seek to remind the world of the Nakba — catastrophe in Arabic — that accompanied Israel’s birth in 1948.
In 1947, there were 12,93,000 Arabs and 6,08,000 Jews in Palestine. Though Jews made up 32 per cent of the population, the U.N. partition plan assigned them 55 per cent of the country, including the economically developed citrus growing plains. Israel’s Declaration of Independence was preceded by several months of civil war between Jewish and Palestinian forces, and followed by more months of war between the new State and its Arab neighbours. When the fighting finished in early 1949, the Jewish State had acquired 78 per cent of Palestine. 1,80,000 Palestinians found themselves a minority within the expanded borders of the Jewish State. 7,00,000 to 9,00,000 had been made refugees.
The following is from Global Research -
Freud would not have been surprised at the continuing conflict in the Middle East. He predicted as much 70 years ago.
We can predict Freud’s response because of a letter he wrote to Dr. Chaim Koffler in 1930.
In February 1930 Freud was asked, as a distinguished Jew, to contribute to a petition condemning Arab riots of 1929, in which over a hundred Jewish settlers were killed. This was his reply:
Letter to the Keren Hajessod (Dr. Chaim Koffler)
Vienna: 26 February 1930
Dear Sir,
I cannot do as you wish. I am unable to overcome my aversion to burdening the public with my name, and even the present critical time does not seem to me to warrant it. Whoever wants to influence the masses must give them something rousing and inflammatory and my sober judgement of Zionism does not permit this. I certainly sympathise with its goals, am proud of our University in Jerusalem and am delighted with our settlement’s prosperity. But, on the other hand, I do not think that Palestine could ever become a Jewish state, nor that the Christian and Islamic worlds would ever be prepared to have their holy places under Jewish care. It would have seemed more sensible to me to establish a Jewish homeland on a less historically-burdened land. But I know that such a rational viewpoint would never have gained the enthusiasm of the masses and the financial support of the wealthy. I concede with sorrow that the baseless fanaticism of our people is in part to be blamed for the awakening of Arab distrust. I can raise no sympathy at all for the misdirected piety which transforms a piece of a Herodian wall into a national relic, thereby offending the feelings of the natives.
Now judge for yourself whether I, with such a critical point of view, am the right person to come forward as the solace of a people deluded by unjustified hope.
Your obediant servant,
Freud
15/10/06
George Galloway talks about Israel and Palestine with the Israeli historian Ilan Pappe.
Hezbollahs resistance to Israeli aggression and occuaption reminds me of Scottish resistance to English domination. From the Declaration of Arbroath (1320) -
“as long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions be brought under English rule. It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom — for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself.”
The following is courtesy of the Fanonite - see Peoples Geography for more discussion (including Norman Finkelstein himself).
Israeli propaganda organization MEMRI posted the following interview in the hopes that it would discredit Norman Finkelstein. It seems they don’t realize that Finkelstein is airing views that have broad support around the world. “Israel Has to Suffer a Defeat“.
Norman Finkelstein: I was of course happy to meet the Hizbullah people, because it is a point of view that is rarely heard in the United States. I have no problem saying that I do want to express solidarity with them, and I am not going to be a coward of a hypocrite about it. I don’t care about Hizbullah as a political organization. I don’t know much about their politics, and anyhow, it’s irrelevant. I don’t live in Lebanon. It’s a choice that the Lebanese have to make: Who they want to be their leaders, who they want to represent them. But there is a fundamental principle. People have the right to defend their country from foreign occupiers, and people have the right to defend their country from invaders who are destroying their country. That to me is a very basic, elementary and uncomplicated question. (more…)
French President Nicolas Sarkozy on Wednesday announced plans to visit Israel in May for the celebrations marking the 60th anniversary of the country’s creation.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy is to celebrate the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in May.
The experiment in famine began on January 18, 2008. Israel hermetically closed all of Gaza’s borders, preventing food, medicine and fuel from entering the Strip. Power cuts, which had been frequent for many months, were extended to 12 hours per day. Because of the electricity shortage, at least 40 percent of Gazans have not had access to running water (which is channeled through electric pumps) for days and the sewage system has broken down. The raw sewage that has not spilled onto the streets is being poured into the sea at a daily rate of 30 million liters. Hospitals have been forced to rely on emergency generators, leading them to cut back, yet again, on the already limited services offered to the Palestinian population. The World Food Programme has reported critical shortages of food and declared that it is unable to provide 10,000 of the poorest Gazans with three out of the five foodstuffs they normally receive.
After five days of extreme suffering, a group of Hamas militants took the lead and blew-up parts of the steel wall along the Egyptian border. Within hours, more than 100,000 Gazans crossed the border into Egypt. They were hungry, thirsty, and sick of being locked up in a filthy cage. Once in Egypt, they bought everything they could get their hands on and waited patiently for the international community to intervene on their behalf. Yet the world leaders failed them again, and on January 28, after a five-day respite, the iron wall was re-erected and the Palestinians were pushed back into the world’s largest prison—the Gaza Strip.
Ehud Barak, Israel’s Minister of Defense, did not stammer when he justified his decision to experiment with famine; he had no qualms about introducing a policy that only the most brutal leaders have adopted historically.His argument seems rational. Barak said that no government in the world would tolerate the ongoing bombardment of its citizens from across the border. Since other measures—harsh economic sanctions, extra-judicial executions, the ongoing barrage of northern parts of the Strip as well as the bombardment of several critical infrastructure sites, like the electric power plant and Palestinian government offices—did not do the job, Israel had no other option.
This ostensibly rational argument conveniently ignores the fact that since its victory in the January 2006 democratic elections, Hamas has proposed several cease-fire agreements, the latest emerging in recent weeks. In these proposals, Hamas agrees to stop launching missiles at Israeli citizens, in exchange for Israel ending its incursions into Gaza, the assassinations of militants and political leaders, and the economic blockade.
Hamas’ offers underscore two important facts. First, despite what Barak says, the use of force is not the only option Israel has: The government could decide to open a dialogue with Hamas based on a cease-fire agreement. Second, it emphasizes, as Israeli critic Uri Avnery cogently observes, that Israel is cynically using the assaults on its own citizens as a pretext for attempting to overthrow the Hamas regime in Gaza and for preventing a Hamas takeover in the West Bank.
Ultimately, though, even the courageous Avnery does not spell out Israel’s main objective. The central issue for Israel is not Hamas yes or no, but rather Palestinian sovereignty yes or no. The recent crisis reveals, once more, that Israel’s August 2005 unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip was not an act of decolonization but rather the reorganization of Israeli power and the implementation of neo-colonial rule. Israel realized that in order to maintain sovereignty, all it would have to do is preserve its monopoly over the legitimate means of movement. Very different from the withdrawal of British forces from the various colonies of old, it accordingly continued to dominate Gaza’s borders, transforming the Strip into a container of sorts whose openings are totally controlled by Israel.
The experiment in Gaza is, in other words, not really about the bombardment of Israeli citizens or even about Israel’s ongoing efforts to undermine Hamas. It is simply a new draconian strategy aimed at denying the Palestinians their most basic right to self-determination. It is about showing them who is in control, about breaking their backs, so that they lower their expectations and bow down to Israeli demands. The Palestinians understood this and courageously destroyed their prison wall while crying out into the wilderness for international support. Instead of the expected outrage, the only response they received was a weak echo of their own cry for help.
Neve Gordon teaches politics at Ben-Gurion University, Israel, and is the editor of From the Margins of Globalization: Critical Perspectives on Human Rights.
An excellent look at Muslim history and science in Europe. I didn’t know that the first Scottish scientist, Michael Scott, traveled to Spain to study Arabic and translate all the greatest works of science of his time. Apparently some historians attribute the creation of whisky to Scott, if so Scotland owes Islam an enormous debt of gratitude!
