Malam tadi air mata gugur lagi menuruni pipi. Sayu suasana diiringi zikir taubat.

Dalam hati saya berdoa. Cuba berbisik pada Allah, memohon kekuatan. Biarpun sebak, semacam ada ketenangan yang menyusup perlahan.

Jelas hidup tersepit, menghimpun rasa terhimpit.

Rupanya kita tiada pilihan; jika matlamatnya redha Tuhan.

Kalau saya tidak sampaikan bererti saya manusia paling zalim.

…katakanlah, ” Kamukah yang lebih tahu atau Allah, dan siapakah yang lebih zalim daripada orang yang menyembunyikan kesaksian dari Allah yang ada padanya?” Allah tidak lengah terhadap apa yang kamu kerjakan.

(Surah Al-Baqarah 2:140)

Saya paksa-paksakan jua, berjuang atas nama keikhlasan.

Mulut boleh saja bicara segala kebenaran. Itu ini. Begitu-begini. Namun telinga orang yang berkata adalah yang paling dekat dan paling jelas mendengarkan setiap kalimahnya.

Peringatan itu untuk diri saya. Peringatan itu saya dahulu mesti beriman dan beramal dengannya sehabis daya.

Wahai orang-orang yang beriman! Mengapa kamu mengatakan sesuatu yang tidak kamu kerjakan? (Itu) sangatlah dibenci di sisi Allah jika kamu mengatakan apa-apa yang tidak kamu kerjakan.

(Surah As-Saff 61:2-3)

Allahuakbar! Takut sekali diri ini. Memetik pesan seorang ukhti, alang-alang berdoa, pintalah yang terbaik.

Alang-alang mengharap syurga, marilah mengejar syurga Firdaus.

” Jangan (ya Allah) Engkau biarkan nasib kami ditentukan oleh diri kami sendiri; walaupun sekadar sekelip mata atau sekadar masa yang lebih pendek dari itu. “

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Last week I interviewed Wesam Ahmad, a program officer with Al Haq, in Ramallah. Al Haq is a Palestinian NGO that documents violations of international law in the Occupied Territories, promotes the rule of law, and advocates for human and humanitarian rights. The organization was founded in 1979, and is an affiliate of the International Commission of Jurists.

I spoke with Wesam about the challenges of using international law to promote human rights, and why he thinks it’s worth the struggle.

So, do you think that the international law that exists today is adequate?

Yes, we have no problem with the laws; in fact we find the law to be our most valuable asset, because the law is clear, in our view, and adequate to protect the rights of the Palestinians. The main problem, with the law, particularly international law, and those that stem from it like international human rights and humanitarian law, is the lack of enforcement, and enforcement of international law only comes through the will of states to enforce it, and this involves political will, and unfortunately, that is lacking gin our situation. So as long as there isn’t going to be political will to enforce the law, and assure its implementation, then the law will continue to be violated because there’s no punishment for its violation.
And Palestinians will continue to be more and more frustrated with the law. Palestinians are very aware of the law, and you can go on the street and ask people if they understand the Geneva Convention—they will tell you yes. Then you ask them what it means, and they’ll say, not much, because its not being enforced and its not being applied. And this is the main problem.

So do you feel like you’re fighting a losing battle—fighting with a tool that doesn’t work?

No. Well, it’s not a losing battle, it’s a very difficult and challenging battle. We have to maintain the movement, because we know justice is on our side. The law is supposed to symbolize what justice should be. And we feel it does so—we have to continue to strive for it, and push for that justice to be achieved. So as Palestinians, we have two options—we can either give up and succumb to the will of the occupying power, or continue to fight for our rights and for justice.

In a legal context?

In a legal context. From our perspective as human right defenders, the main tool for the struggle of justice and the rights of the Palestinian people is the utilization of the law. And, again, sometimes it gets really frustrating because we cite the law and raise the issues, and people will tell you ‘yes, we know that’s the law, but for political reasons, we are not going to act this way or that way.’ So the challenge is on us to continue to find creative ways to make them act.

To make it a legal requirement for them to act.

Yeah, exactly. And in essence it is a legal requirement. If you look at the fourth Geneva Convention, the signatories to that convention have obligations to ensure compliance with that convention, to seek out violators of that convention—but they are not doing so, this is the problem. It requires that states act to take the political decision to move and seek implementation, and this is what’s lacking, and this is what, from our perspective, is one of the major challenges, and is also a new avenue to direct our work. We know the main challenge is political will, so we are now trying to effect that political will, by challenging those states directly for their inaction in the situation, in their relation with Israel.

So now you’re not only legally challenging Israel, you’re also challenging every country in the world that’s not doing something to stop Israeli violations of international law?

Absolutely. I mean, theoretically, all the states that are signatory to this convention have this obligation.

Of course, you’re not going to say that, like, Djibouti has the same requirements.

Right. But we have taken a symbolic step in challenging the UK for the failure of the UK to meet its obligations under international law, as well as UK domestic law. And this is a landmark case—al Haq vs. the UK government—that was filed in June of this past year. The hearings were heard in June. All the details are on our website with regard to this case. This is an example of challenging the government’s inaction.
Now, even with these sorts of challenges you still run into politics. Unfortunately, the judicial system in any country in the world still has political influence on it, even though we’d like to think the judiciary is completely independent. And one of the things that we’ve seen is that when it comes to questions of the government, particularly the executive and legislative actions, the judicial branch is unwilling or unable, more likely unwilling, to rule on their actions, in their capacities as executives and legislators. And this is unfortunate, because what their decision has meant is that even if the government clearly is acting in contravention of the law, we will not do anything to stop them. It is their requirement to change their legislation and their executive actions to meet the requirements of the law, and this is a political decision that we will not venture into.
And this is a similar thing that we’ve seen in the US. The US has a provision called the political question doctrine. I see it as basically a get out of jail free card for the judicial branch to not address issues that are politically sensitive.
We’ve seen this in the case against Caterpillar, in the US. After a long battle, eventually the court said ‘well this is an issue of foreign policy, therefore it’s a political question, and we’re not going to give judgment.’ And this is very unfortunate for us, but it is a step, at least, towards challenging directly.
Now, we continue to meet with frustration but there are also some successes. We’ve seen, for instance, in our case in the UK, that even though in the preliminary hearings the judges ruled against us, during the time from the filing of the case to the hearing, and decision, there was actually some progress made. There was a review of all the import-export licensing agreements with Israel, by the UK secretary of state. There was an actual decision to issue a partial arms embargo on Israel, cutting off some of the supplies that would have been coming before our case was filed. And also the UK government did not cave into Israeli pressure to modify their legislation regarding war crimes. So these are small successes but they’re not enough, but the fact that we’re moving some steps forward is a good sign. This is what gives us the hope to keep pushing forward, because you feel like knowing that you have the law, that you have justice on your side, eventually, justice will prevail. And those that agree will be the ones to sit in that judgment day, and make the right decision. But you have to continue to knock on the door.

Some might say that because of the political influence, the courts’ ruling on international law, the political influence makes the court’s method, or the court itself, illegitimate. Do you think that’s true, and if so do you have a problem with working within that framework?

Well, I wouldn’t say that it’s illegitimate. It has the power as well, and again, the judicial branch is supposed to be independent; it should not be succumbing to political influences. And here, it comes down to people. It comes down to individuals, to judges. The judicial system is made up of judges who are people. So, are these people willing to take those courageous steps to move forward? And this is a question we’ve seen actually, in Spain, a case where the judge was very brave and continued to push forward a case for investigation against Israeli war criminals, despite political pressure in Spain not to do so. Now, what happened in Spain is again the judge is supposed to sit in judgment of the law, the legislature makes the law, so the legislative branch caved into political pressure and Israeli pressure, and modified the legislation itself, therefore tying the hands of the judicial branch, even though the judge himself wanted to move forward. So it s this constant battle of trying to put out what the law is and how it should be implemented, but at the same time being able to resist the political challenges and pressures that want to prevent the law from being enforced.
So this is why we work not only on the legal, judicial level, we also work on the advocacy level, with decision makers. We meet parliamentarians and various diplomats to also raise these issues, because you have to attack from different fronts, and at the same time, not just at the governmental level. We also work with civil society organizations, we have a very good relationship with various human rights organizations around the world that we also send our message to and ask them to pressure their decision makers, because they are the constituency of the decision makers. So if it’s coming from them, it has even more impact.
So its constantly juggling how you want to send your message, and who do you want to deliver it to—it’s always a challenge. But that’s what keeps things exciting.

So you were saying it’s a slow process, but you’ve seen some successes. One thing that people have said to me is that they sensed a change after Operation Cast Lead, in the way the international community viewed the Israeli military’s actions and the way people in the region took a stronger stance against it. Did you find that?

Well, we felt two things, really. One was a great deal of frustration, because you know what is being done is wrong but the international community is not acting to prevent it, and this was very frustrating to Palestinians in general, and particularly us as human rights defenders, knowing what the law is and watching it being violated on live TV. So in that sense it was very frustrating.
What was encouraging was the movement on the streets in the world, condemning the actions of Israel and calling on their governments to act. And we actually saw a lot of strong condemnation come out—the problem is that a lot of it was just rhetoric and words. It has to be followed up by action, and until now we haven’t seen action. There ahs been some slight progress in the sense that, for example, the European Union delayed movement towards upgrading relations with Israel, but these words of ‘delay,’ and ‘freeze,’ and things like that, are just ways to let things settle down, but they are not a manner that actually punishes Israel for its violations. And this is one of the more frustrating things—when you see the discussion of relations with Israel, and the desire to upgrade them with Europe, for example, what message does that send? That you can act the way that you want, but we’ll continue to act with you as business as usual. This is very frustrating for us, because again, the international law is tied into relations between states, and unless Israel feels something because of its actions in its relations with other states, it won’t have the incentive to change.

And do you think that eventually working through law alone will create political will?

We hope so. I mean, its going to take more than the law itself, but the law, coupled with movement on the streets by solidarity groups and grassroots movements, that can be empowered to act when they have concrete law that supports their actions.
For example when someone goes to protest in front of number 10 Downing street, they can protest on emotion, but by having something tangible as well saying ‘the way you’re acting, my government, is in violation of this law, and you’re acting contrary to my interests as a UK citizen,’ then it gives it even more force, to force the decision makers to act because their constituency wants them to act.

So it gives a language to the protest, or to the grassroots movement.

Exactly.

So I spoke to an Israeli representative the other day, who said that while the laws are fine in principle, they need to be developed to fit the context of terrorism. Do you think that that is a valid complaint, or a valid call on the Israeli side?

Well this is not just an Israeli call, it’s an American call, as well…it’s an issue that I think—the law can always be developed. From our perspective, we think that the law is adequate but could be developed to address our situation of prolonged occupation, with elements of colonialism and apartheid, which are things that have never really come together in a way that they have here. So it’s our job to take the law that exists in different places and apply them in a way that allows us to make the strongest argument. The argument that it needs to be changed or modified in order to deal with issues of terrorism, we see it more as a desire for those that want to loosen the law, and make it much weaker—this is their justification, is that there’s a new issue of terrorism, so that the law needs to be put aside sometimes. And this is very dangerous—when you are willing to put aside the laws that are put in place to protect our rights for fears that you have, and also for keeping in mind the root causes of these issues. And your unwillingness, as politicians, to deal with them. It’s easier to place a band-aid on the wound than to heal it properly.
And, I mean, this is an issue that I think the law is capable of dealing with, as well, but it’s a question of whether or not you want to be working within the confines of law, or do you feel you need to be above the law in order to deal with issues as you see fit.
This is the question—when you have the power to act above the law, as the US does, as Israel does, then you do so and then you try to push for modification of the law to meet your actions and justify them. But when you look at it from the perspective of those that are not superpowers able to operate above the law, they operate within the confines of the law, and they find ways to make those laws meet their needs, and we see that more I think when we look at how Israel and the US deal with issues, as opposed to, for instance, the UK and Europe. Israel and the US, and Israel more than any, is far reaching in that they push the law so far that it almost has no meaning because of the exceptions that they want to impose into it. And this is very dangerous.

I mean, surely there are legal violations on both sides.

Absolutely. But the law deals with violations on both sides, its there to deal with armed conflict between two parties.

So, Israel claims that there’s a double standard by the international community. They’re not allowed to act in self-defense, because the world, and particularly the Arab region, is on the side of the Palestinians. So they feel that law ties their hands. What would be your response to that?

Well the law should tie their hands. Unfortunately, it doesn’t.
And the issue of double standard is an issue that we continue to raise as Palestinians. When you look at the way the international community deals with states that act in contravention of the will of the international community, you see sanctions imposed on North Korea, on Iran, but you don’t see sanctions imposed on Israel even though the international community says what Israel is doing is wrong. There are Security Council resolutions saying as such. This is the double standard.
Now the issue of Israel wanting to defend itself, I mean, we have again a paper that addresses this issue of self-defense. Israel, as the initial aggressor, is not put in the same boat as states that are not occupying another people, another state, and you can’t be the aggressor and at the same time argue self-defense, in international law in general. So this is an issue that Israel refuses to acknowledge. They just throw out the words self defense and expect everyone to take it wholeheartedly. Now Israel as a state has its rights, but it doesn’t have a right to secure its illegal acts. And this is what Israel is doing. So when it takes Palestinian land, and then puts a wall around it and says ‘this is a wall for our defense,’…It’s defending what? It is defending the crime that you’ve committed. And no criminal can ever sit back and feel like ‘I am secure in the crime that I’ve committed.’ Justice will always be following you to hold you to account for that crime. And this is what Israel is doing now, it is continuing with its crimes, it is continuing with its occupation, it is continuing to deny the Palestinian people their rights.
So if it’s continuing to try to defend its illegal acts, it will never feel secure. No criminal ever feels secure—they always have to look over their shoulder.
If Israel really wants to be secure, then it implements the law, and then it acts as its own sovereign state, not a state that is occupying other people. And then, if it is attacked by other sovereign states, it can use the justification of self-defense to retaliate. But while it is acting in the manner that it is, in violation of international law, and continuing this occupation, it can’t use the argument of self-defense. You can’t have your cake and eat it too.

So as far as the case that Ocampo has said that he’ll consider—are you optimistic? Do you think that will go anywhere? Some people point out that non-states don’t have the power to bring a case in front of the ICC. Do you think he’ll take the case?

Well, there have been some good arguments for him to take the case, and we support him pushing forward with the case.
Now, there are a lot of legal challenges that need to be addressed, but some very eminent scholars have made the argument that it is possible for him to move forward with such a case. And it’s the law—in the sense that the law is always open to interpretation. And the fact that Palestine is still under occupation, does that prevent it from being able to make this challenge? We think not, because it is a fact that Israel is occupying it that is preventing it from acting in this capacity. And it is always within the power of Ocampo to be able to say ‘for the purposes of the ICC, we will deal with the Palestinian jurisdiction.’ Now, this again requires some courageousness on the part of Ocampo, but also on the part of those that would need to move it forward—all Ocampo can do is bring it to the pre-trial chambers. Now that consists of other judges, from other countries, that are signatories to the Rome statute in that they will have the final decision as to whether or not the investigation will proceed. There come in some more political influences, potentially, and this is a fear that we keep in mind, that even if Ocampo has the courageousness to move the case forward, the question is how far forward will it go. But we’ve seen that again, it comes back to political will. Even states, for example the Sudan, that isn’t a signatory, the security council is capable of asking the ICC to prosecute people from states that are not signatories to the Rome Statute. So, it is within the realm of possibility that the Security Council could act.

With America on the Security Council?

Well, again, this is where the obstacles of political will come into play, and this is the constant challenge that we’re going to face.

But you think that balance between politics and law is sort of a necessary evil, something to work within the confines of?

I mean, we have to work within their confines. Is it necessary that politics will always be able to trump the law? I don’t think so. I think that if the law is set up properly, then it should be used as a shield to prevent political influence that seeks to act in contravention of the law. But, unfortunately, the law is not that powerful because it doesn’t operate in a vacuum. The law is made by lawmakers, and only interpreted and applied by the judiciary.

So, you said earlier that people here know what the Geneva Conventions are but they’re not enforced. Do you think that the understanding of international law—the knowledge of it, idea of it, the discourse of it—is growing?

Yes, absolutely. I mean, we as al Haq have a lot of work that we do on raising awareness of the law and what our rights are as Palestinians. We conduct training and workshops throughout the West Bank and have field workers in Gaza. We are constantly delivering this message in the work that we do, and that’s why it’s so prevalent in Palestinian society—international law in general. If you go to the states and ask people about international law, they’re not going to know. But here, you have a very strong understanding of it but a lot of frustration with it.

So just one more question—are you optimistic about the role that law can play in creating social or political change?

Yes, absolutely. Because the social and political change that is sought is always sought for the benefit of society; at least, we’d like to think so. Some people obviously will act contrary to the betterment of society for their own individual benefit, but in general, society seeks to improve, and improvement is always moving towards a more equitable society, a more just society, and this is what the spirit of the law is—to set forth that justice, and what it should be. And if it’s dealt with properly, then you will achieve justice. So the law is this mechanism that we should use to be able to achieve social and political justice. The question is how far, how long it will take to get there.

Read more about the work of Al Haq here.

al jazeera not israeli terrorists outside day 2's venue for palestine festival of literature

day two of the palestine festival of literature was far less dramatic than day one, thankfully. of course, this is because it was held at the khalil sakakini cultural center in ramallah and not at the palestinian national theatre in al quds (though it is scheduled to return there for the closing night’s ceremony). when i walked up to the center yesterday evening i noticed no israeli terrorist forces out front (see photographs of them in the festival’s flicker slide show and the video that i blogged about yesterday). instead there was an al jazeera crew that broadcast the first hour live. the evening began with a reading of a mahmoud darwish poem because he was one of the poets who helped to start this festival and he also used to have an office at the center when he worked on the literary journal al karmel. the first panel spoke about family in their writing–the panel was called “family: separated by life, rejoined by literature.” i was struck by the fact that the panel–carmen callil, jamal mahjoub, jeremy harding–somehow didn’t discuss palestine at all. ahdaf soueif has an essay from 2004 in her collection mezzaterra: fragments from the common ground that addresses this issue:

Last October I read at the centre, a beautiful nineteenth-century Ottoman villa donated by the Khalil Sakakini family and standing in the heart of Ramallah. The hall was full; people had braved the closures and come in from Jerusalem, the eighteen-kilomtre journey taking up to three hours. “We so rarely see anyone from the outside,” they said. “We need to breathe the fresh air.” Nobody wanted to talk about the “situation” or about the Israeli incursion into the town earlier that day which netted a fighter believed to be responsible for killing two soldiers; they just wanted to talk about fiction. (323)

soueif later adds to this by reflecting on that previous reading at the sakakini wondering:

Can a novelist or a poet ignore the situation? Is there room to write outside of the situation? [Mahmoud] Darwich has famously asserted his right to write about things that are not Palestine, his write to play, to be absurd. Yet in his obituary of (Palestinian poet) Fadwa Touqan who died last Novemeber he asks what the poet should do at a time of crisis? A time when he has to shift his focus from his inner self ot the world outside, when poetry has to bear witness. (324)

perhaps this was the case last night as well–that people just wanted to listen to writers talking about literature. but i couldn’t help wondering how one can discuss the subject of family in palestine and not also compare and discuss palestinian families or writers who write about palestinian families. when the opportunity came to ask a question i asked about their thoughts on palestinian families–both in the context of an nakba and the way that it separated palestinian families and also about new laws that prevent palestinians from the west bank from marrying palestinians in 1948 palestine as jonathan cook wrote in electronic intifada:

In approving an effective ban on marriages between Israelis and Palestinians this week, Israel’s Supreme Court has shut tighter the gates of the Jewish fortress the state of Israel is rapidly becoming. The judges’ decision, in the words of the country’s normally restrained Haaretz daily, was “shameful”.

By a wafer-thin majority, the highest court in the land ruled that an amendment passed in 2003 to the Nationality Law barring Palestinians from living with an Israeli spouse inside Israel — what in legal parlance is termed “family unification” — did not violate rights enshrined in the country’s Basic Laws.

And even if it did, the court added, the harm caused to the separated families was outweighed by the benefits of improved “security”. Israel, concluded the judges, was justified in closing the doors to residency for all Palestinians in order to block the entry of those few who might use marriage as a way to launch terror attacks.

Applications for family unification in Israel invariably come from Palestinians in the occupied territories who marry other Palestinians, often friends or relatives, with Israeli citizenship. One in five of Israel’s population is Palestinian by descent, a group, commonly referred to as Israeli Arabs, who managed to remain inside the Jewish state during the war of 1948 that established Israel.

the answer i received was not particularly satisfying, although jeremy harding did mention elias khoury’s brilliant novel gates of the sun which is an amazing epic novel about an nakba and the lebanese civil war and details the many ways that palestinian families have been separated as a result of the zionist entity’s existence.

inside khalil sakakini cultural center

the second panel was on an entirely different subject. it was called “registering change: landscape and architecture.” this one featured rachel holmes, suad amiry, michael palin, and raja shehadeh. amiry, whose hilarious and amazing memoir sharon and my mother-in-law discussed her forthcoming book, murad murad, and read a bit from it (in a highly performative and entertaining fashion). the book is a about a treacherous journey she took, passing as a man, with palestinian workers who try to get work in the zionist entity. amiry is an architect and preservationist who founded riwaq and also talked about the accidental nature that led to her becoming a writer. likewise shehadeh is a lawyer most widely know as the founder of the human rights organization al haq. and because of his more recent book of essays, palestinian walks: forays into a vanishing landscape, he seems to increasingly be associated with these hikes he takes. he read from a chapter of that book last night. and this was fitting because yesterday the writers visiting here went on one of his hikes in the afternoon (click here to see photographs). i have been on one of these amazing hikes (these should definitely be called hikes not walks) for my birthday and photographed it and blogged it at the time. palin whose writing i’m not familiar with, although i am familiar with his work as an actor, also read one of his books, around the world in 80 days. the conversation on this panel was far more interesting, to me, given that it was more political and i prefer political art. i particularly thought it was interesting when amiry talked about time and space in palestine. she was speaking about it in real terms: the way that one often gets lost because every 10 or 20 days the roads, roundabouts, checkpoints all change. and shehadeh also talked about how much the area around ramallah has changed in the few years since he published palestinian walks because now 12 zionist colonies encircle ramallah on its palestinian land. amiry added to this the way that time is measured in relation to checkpoints, meaning that one thinks about distance by calculating how long it will take to get somewhere based on how many known checkpoints–and the flying checkpoints that might pop up that day–there are from point a to point b. the paragraph i quoted above from soueif makes use of this as a reference point, too. but also time and space are important elements in narrative so there thinking about this issue is doubly relevant in the context of this conference.

ahdaf soueif, carmen callil, jamal mahjoub, jeremy harding

on the way home last night two of my friends from al quds who drove me to the beit lahem checkpoint were talking about the fact that they wished different writers–and more palestinian writers–had been chosen. one friend was wishing sahar khalifeh was there in particular. i am actually just finishing up her novel the image, the icon, and the covenant, which is an amazing tale about a man, ibrahim, from al quds who leaves the old city, where he is from, to avoid marrying a woman his parents wish him to marry. he moves to a nearby village to work as a teacher with the dream of one day becoming a writer. he is muslim and he falls in love with a christian woman in the village, mariam, with whom he has a love affair. she becomes pregnant in the midst of an naksa and ibrahim winds up in jordan and then the united states, before coming back to al quds after oslo. the end of the novel is about his quest to reconnect with miriam and their son michael. but there are so many different writers who could be here, who might be here next year, and the point of this annual event is to bring new people every year as well as some, like suheir hammad and ahdaf soueif, who return each year. it also seems to me that one of the points of organizing this conference is to connect palestinian writers with all kinds of writers from around the world. and, hopefully, from my vantage point, these writers will speak and write about palestine until their last dying breath.

rachel holmes, raja shehadeh, suad amiry, michael palin

in one of soueif’s previous trips to palestine she wrote about meeting with various writers here (you can read part of the article by clicking on this link to download it as a pdf). she met with liana badr, one of my favorite writers and i blogged about her novel the eye of the mirror, which i read about a month ago. in it soueif also wrote about adania shibli, hassan khader, and mourid barghouti whose beautiful memoir i saw ramallah was translated into english by soueif. for me the most important part of the essay was when she discussed the issue of normalization with zionist terrorist colonist writers. the answers soueif got from her palestinian colleagues were revealing, i think. i think it is important to look at this discussion in her essay especially given the cultural boycott of the zionist entity. of course boycott is not the same as anti-normalization. but for me the two go hand-in-hand, which is why i refuse to meet, speak, participate in any activity with anyone who lives on palestinian colonized land whether in a colony in al quds or yaffa. still, there are those who seem to think that “dialogue” will lead to change. there are those whose heads are so high in the clouds that they think it is possible to be a zionist colonist and be a leftist (this is, however, an oxymoron). with these political opinions that i hold, here is what i found interesting in what soueif wrote:

[David] Grossman describes how in the early 1990s he organised a group which met for three years “secretly under the umbrella of some foreign embassies.” But, he says “there’s almost no contact now between Israeli and Palestinian writers’ because of “hints from Arafat” to the Palestinian writers “not to contribute to the normalisation of Israel.” He also believes that Palestinian writes thought Israeli writers “could change the politics here and when they saw what we couldn’t deliver…they despaired the possibility of doing something with us.”

This makes Palestinian writers into Arafat’s tools. It also makes them politically naive, first to meet with Israeli writers in “foreign embassies” then expect them to change the policies of their state. So I asked the Palestinian writers I spoke to how they viewed Israeli writers. Their immediate response was literary…. (326)

of course the ironic thing in the above part of this essay is the notion that ‘arafat pushed palestinian writers not to normalize when it is ‘arafat himself who produced the normalization known as oslo. but what is important here is the assertion that there have been meetings among zionist terrorist colonist writers and palestinian writers and nothing has ever changed. on the following page soueif’s writing about hassan khader’s non-fiction illustrates one reason why that is the case:

Khader has written a book about the crisis of identity in Israeli literature: “Their works tell you more about them than the statements they give to the press. [Amos] Oz, for example, is a declared lover of peace–maybe he really does love peace. But his works show a racist attitude to Arabs and Palestinians. [A.B.] Yehoshua transforms Jewish existential crises into narrative forms and looks for fictive solutions which are at odds with his declared political stands. (326)

importantly, it is mourid barghouti who addresses the serious problem with expecting anything from these zionist terrorist colonist writers and does so by comparing these writers to white south african writers:

Mourid Barghouti puts it more trenchantly: “They all carry a whiff of the establishment. Look at South Africa: the white writers who allied themselves with the liberation movement rejected apartheid, clearly and publicly. Some of them joined the ANC. As long as the Israeli artist subscribes to the official Israeli narrative, there is a great big hole in the heart of his ‘alliance’ with the Palestinians. You cannot hold on to your ideological position and then join the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Palestinians. The ones with the kindly hearts–there are many of those, we meet them, we talk to them. Politically, it leads nowhere. It does them a lot of good–the Israelis–it eases their consciences, it pays dividends, it plays well on the world stage. It does nothing for the Palestinians.” (328)

unfortunately, barghouti is mistaken in the fact that there so-called “kind” colonists who live on palestinian land and terrorize them on a daily basis. i don’t see how one can be a thief and a murderer and also kind. in any case, aside from that one problematic remark, what he shows here is essential: that normalization leads to the illusion that the zionist entity has a left, which it doesn’t, or that they will actually do something. they haven’t. they don’t. they won’t. soueif continues:

What comes across in many of the statements given by Israeli writers is that they are against the occupation for their own sakes; for the harm it is doing to Israeli society, to the Israeli image and to the Israeli psyche. While this is legitimate it does somewhat overshadow their concern for the overall inhuman injustice of the situation. It’s hard to imagine, say Nadine Gordimer, being more concerned for the image and psyche of South Africa’s whites than for the injustice of apartheid and the damage done to all the people of her country–white and black. (329-330)

to be sure, i feel the same way about many american writers and others in the anti-war movement. many of these people are far more concerned about what american imperialism and its related wars are doing to americans rather than how it is terrorizing and murdering iraqis, palestinians, afghans, and pakistanis. the same is true with the u.s. partner in crime. i would not be against normalization with some zionist colonists if they behaved like some white south africans who actively worked against apartheid on all levels, including in armed resistance. but there are no zionist colonists who are here working in that capacity to dismantle the jewish state. this is one of the huge differences between apartheid south africa and the zionist entity. soueif quotes khader again on other similar comparisons:

Israeli writers, Khader says, are facing more and more a situation similar to that of French writers at the time of the Algerian war of independence and American writers at the time of Vietnam: “Should they take a stand against colonialism or should they agree to be a cosmetic instrument for it? They have not yet made up their minds.

The problem is that the occupation–which Israeli writers are against and which they think is so bad for the Israeli soul–has now been shown (by Israeli historians among others) to be the natural continuation of the Zionist project in Palestine. If hundreds of Palestinian homes are being demolished today, entire villages were erased in 1948. Is it possible to be against the occupation and hold on to the idea of Israel’s noble origins? Well, yes, if the Palestinians will agree to subscribe to the liberal Israeli view that all was well until 2000, until 1993, until 1967–any date, really, apart from 1948. But the Palestinians cannot agree to that because it is a denial of their history and a betrayal of half their nation. (330)

on a related note, in an addendum to this essay, soueif poses a few statements by the leading israeli terrorist colonist writers and asks the palestinian writers in her article to respond to their statements. one of the statements posed is by david grossman who seems to think that the intifada has created more anti-semitism in the muslim world. barghouti’s response is telling:

If the original Zionist project had worked and they had colonized part of Uganda, you would not have heard anything about anti-Semitism in the Islamic world. If there had been a conflict it would have been characterized as white vs. black and we would have watched it on TV along with the rest of the world. (333-334)

these palestinian writers, like so many other palestinian writers, use their words to illustrate vividly that the situation in palestine is about colonialism. and this is what is being resisted. and this is why, personally, i think that we need boycott and anti-normalization completely. thankfully there is no normalization here, at least to my knowledge. there are no zionist colonist terrorist writers here speaking. and i do not believe any have been at the festival. but we also need resistance–more of it. i continue to be upset that the yabous sponsors of the event chose to be passive and move everyone to the french cultural center the other night rather than resisting and staying. i really think that staying would have made such an important statement and yielded important results for palestinians as people who resist on all levels. the final night of the festival is scheduled to be at al hakawati again. i hope that if the same thing happens, and i assume that it will, that the people choose to ignore yabous and remain in their theatre and assert their rights to have their culture, their land, their spaces at whatever cost.

certain words are in my mind and have particular connotations given my experiences. having spent a decade and a half in cincinnati, ohio, just a few miles down the road from dayton, ohio, the word dayton will forever be associated with this small ohio city. but that is is slowly starting to change. keith dayton is an american lieutenant who is based in palestine and who runs the palestinian authority polices forces, which were set up in the first place to do the dirty work of the zionist entity’s regime. when i see these palestinian police (which should really be called american-israeli police) and i think about the work they do here for the colonizer i cannot help but see this new layer of american imperialism layered on top of zionist colonialism. robert dreyfuss has a report on dayton in the nation this week outlining the american money invested in this imperial project and its context, to a certain extent:

Last Thursday, in what was billed as his very first on-the-record address, Lt. Gen. Keith Dayton, U.S. security coordinator for Israel and the Palestinian Authority, spoke to the 2009 Soref Symposium organized by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. WINEP, of course, is the chief think tank for the Washington-based Israel lobby.

And in his talk, Gen. Dayton delivered an important warning.

First, the background. For the past three and a half years, Dayton has lived and worked in Jerusalem and across the West Bank, overseeing the creation of three Palestinian battalions of troops, hand-picked in the West Bank, trained at an academy in Jordan, and then deployed in the occupied territory.

The three 500-man battalions are intended to grow, to as many as ten battalions. Their mission, he said, is to “create a Palestinian state.” Recognizing that many in the WINEP audience were not exactly enamored with the idea of an independent Palestine, Dayton told his audience: “If you don’t like the idea of a Palestinian state, you won’t like the rest of this talk.”

From the detailed description provided by Dayton, it’s clear that the Palestinian forces he’s enabling could certainly be accused of carrying out the self-policing of the West Bank for the Israelis. Because the West Bank is, after all, occupied by Israel and riddled with illegal settlements besides — plus beset by a surrounding wall, 600-plus intrusive checkpoints, and a network of Jews-only highways — the Palestinian troops are utterly at the mercy of the Israelis. Each recruit is vetted by US security forces (i.e, the CIA), then vetted by Shin Bet, the domestic intelligence arm of Israel, and then by Jordan’s super-efficient intelligence service, before they begin their training in Jordan. Dayton made it quite clear that the Palestinian units thus trained are primarily deployed against two targets in the West Bank: against criminal gangs, and against Hamas.

So far, they’ve received $161 million is US funding.

Dayton described how, during the Israeli assault on Gaza last December and January, the West Bank remained quiet — even though some analysts were predicting an upsurge of sympathy for Hamas, which controls Gaza, along with violence, even a third intifada. “None of these predictions came true,” said the general, who added that the Palestinian battalions allowed peaceful demonstrations of solidarity with Hamas, but kept the lid on violent actions. Israel, he said, “kept a low profile,” and not a single Palestinian was killed in the West Bank during the three-week carnage in Gaza.

Most of the work he’s done, Dayton said, occurred in the West Bank after the June, 2007, Hamas takeover in Gaza. “What we have created are ‘new men,’” he added.

Now for the warning. Recognizing that by organizing and training thousands of Palestinian troops, professionally led, he is creating in effect a nationalist army, Dayton warned the 500 or so WINEP listeners that the troops can only be strung along for just so long. “With big expectations, come big risks,” said Dayton. “There is perhaps a two-year shelf life on being told that you’re creating a state, when you’re not.” To my ears, at least, his subtle warning is that if concrete progress isn’t made toward a Palestinian state, the very troops Dayton is assembling could rebel.

Dayton was responding to a question from Paul Wolfowitz, the neoconservative former deputy secretary of defense, who now hangs his hat at the neocon-dominated American Enterprise Institute. “How many Palestinians see your people as collaborators?” Wolfowitz asked. In answering Wolfowtiz, the general acknowledged that Hamas and its sympathizers accuse the Palestinian battalions of being “enforces of the Israeli occupation.” But he stressed that each one of them believes that he is fighting for an independent Palestine. The unstated message: the United States and Israel had better deliver. Thus the two year warning. Which, to me, sounds spot on with the Obama administration’s timetable.

One more thing: General Dayton signed up for another stint in the West Bank. And how long did he agree to serve? Yes–two years.

the recruiting for dayton’s palestinian security forces is very specific. they target palestinian young men who are uneducated, who have not finished high school. they use the fact that people need salaries here, often desperately, to feed their families and to put other family members through school. this way the people who are in dayton’s security forces don’t have critical thinking skills. they don’t ask questions. they are easily influenced to think they are serving their country rather than the colonial occupying regime. or the american empire for that matter. they feed into this system that exists here that keeps people fixated on salaries rather than liberation. salaries, when they come from the palestinian authority, are a way of silencing people so that they don’t say anything that would jeopardize their income. and these fatah-dominated security forces are helping the americans and zionists in their divide and rule policy as a recent ha’aretz article makes clear:

The Palestinian Authority has established a special counter-intelligence squad in its security services to uncover agents working for Hamas and Hezbollah. To date the Palestinian Authority security services have arrested dozens of Palestinians suspected of collaborating with the two radical Islamic groups.

Israeli security sources said that the PA has made a focused effort to uncover foreign agents, noting that the new unit involves a large contingent of officers.

The new organization is part of a group of measures undertaken by the PA to counter Hamas . It is meant, among other things, to stanch information leaks from the various security groups in the PA to the Islamist groups, especially information about plans against them.

ben white had an article in electronic intifada last week that examined various aspects of the daytonization of the palestinian security forces. one of the victims of this has been my friend and colleague abdel sattar al qassim who ben writes about and whose trial is tomorrow morning. here are excerpts of ben’s article, but i strongly recommend clicking on the link and reading the entire thing about other aspects of daytonization of the pa:

Meanwhile, the Israeli military continues to invade PA-controlled areas, particularly at night, an arrangement which was actually a joint Palestinian-Israeli agreement. Moreover, while a weary Palestinian population is grateful for small economic upturns in their occupied cities, they are well aware that the PA’s law and order focus is a welcome part of Israel’s strategy in the West Bank; the BBC noted in December last year how the Israeli army was pleased with the “good job” Palestinian forces were doing.

One of the reasons for Israel’s complimentary report card is the extent to which PA forces have been arresting members of groups who oppose the official “peace process,” and in particular, detaining those who are either openly, or simply suspected, members and supporters of Hamas. According to the International Middle East Media Center, estimates give the number of detainees in Palestinian security forces’ custody at between 500 to 600, many of whom have had no trial.

The secretary general of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Ahmad Saadat, himself a prisoner in an Israeli jail, noted just last week in a public statement that it was “impossible” for the PA “to demand freeing the detainees [from Israeli prisons] while the Palestinian prisons are full of prisoners jailed for resistance background or internal disputes.”

On 4 December of last year, Reuters reported on the claims being made of torture at the hands of Mahmoud Abbas’ Preventive Security forces and General Intelligence. The article cited Ghandi Rabei, a lawyer from the Independent Commission for Human Rights (ICHR) in Hebron, who told the news agency that “hundreds of civilians have been transferred to military courts without legal procedures in breach of Palestinian law and international norms.” The ICHR’s annual report for 2008 recorded 111 complaints of torture or mistreatment in detention in the West Bank, according to Agence France-Presse.

On 31 January, the British Daily Mail ran a story under the dramatic headline: “Financed by the British taxpayer, brutal torturers of the West Bank.” The paper reported how the British government’s Department for International Development had given 76 million British pounds in 2008 to the PA for what it called “security sector reform.” Once the figure is broken down, 3 million pounds went directly to the PA police, while “17 million [pounds] pays the salaries of the PA’s array of security organizations — including the Presidential Guard intelligence service and the feared Preventive Security Organization.”

One of the most important factors shaping these developments is the US strategy as directed on the ground by Lieutenant General Keith Dayton. Dayton started work with the Palestinian security forces at the end of 2005. While ostensibly charged with general reform of the PA security forces, it became apparent that the US was intent on building up Abbas-loyal PA forces in order to directly confront Hamas should the need arise.

Dayton’s plan involved giving the PA forces an increase in funding, manpower, training and weaponry. In October 2006, The New York Times reported that the US intended to expand Abbas’ Presidential Guard at a cost of $26 million. At the time, it was clear that any such plan — which also included “the transfer of thousands of guns from Egypt” to the Presidential Guard — would only go ahead with a “positive response from Israel,” according to the Israeli daily Haaretz.

According to The San Francisco Chronicle, this “systematic effort to bolster Abbas and his Fatah loyalists to counter the political success of Hamas” suffered an embarrassing setback, of course, when Hamas forces easily triumphed over Fatah in the Gaza Strip in June 2007 and thus “inherited thousands of guns, equipment and vehicles supplied by the United States.”

The only lesson learned, however, seems to have been that the US, Israel and the PA could ill-afford a similar debacle in the West Bank — and therefore Dayton’s work was to be intensified, rather than reconsidered. This, then, is what has been happening with increasing fervor in the West Bank in recent months.

On 27 February 2009, The New York Times’ Ethan Bronner wrote about the 1,600 Palestinians who “have been through American-financed courses in Jordan.” Dayton, the article said, “hopes to have a well-trained battalion based in each of eight West Bank cities” (plans to expand the program were also reported by Reuters this week). The Israelis, needless to say, are content to cooperate: an Israeli officer “inaugurated the firing range” at one of the US-funded Palestinian training camps.

Whether it is the “top brass” training provided by the US for Palestinian security officials in Ramallah, or the special “SWAT” team organized by Dayton, Salam Fayyad and the Jordanians, it is clear that the primary purpose of these forces is not neighborhood crime-busting. As the World Tribune reported in the case of the SWAT team, the “elite” forces can be used against “Hamas squads” and help “protect the PA.” As one critic put it, the PA’s security agencies in the West Bank are trained to “persecute resistance elements and provide Israel with intelligence with which to arrest or assassinate resistance leaders.”

Shawan Jabarin, general director of the Palestinian human rights group Al-Haq, agrees that these training programs are more about internal suppression than “law and order”:

“If the senior officers who train them taught a respect for the rule of law, I’m sure we would feel that — but our feeling is completely different. I’m not saying they are training them how to torture people, but they don’t put any mechanism in place for monitoring these things. For political reasons, the Palestinians are trying to show that they are strong, that they are doing exactly what the others are asking them to do — this happened during [Yasser] Arafat’s time, and it’s also [happening] these days.”

If there was any doubt about the real purpose of these forces, one just needs to listen to Dayton himself. Dayton stressed to The Jerusalem Post in December that “the trainees are taught over and again that ‘you are not here to learn how to fight against the Israeli occupation.’” That’s why Dayton could affirm that he, the Israeli Ministry of Defense and his “IDF [Israeli army] colleagues” are of one mind: “something new is out there” and “it’s worth encouraging.”

It may not be new — one only has to go back to the mid-1990s to find something similar happening — but PA forces are certainly being encouraged to suppress dissent. While Israel was attacking Gaza in January, The Jerusalem Post described how the PA’s crackdown on the opposition in the West Bank was “being carried out in coordination with the IDF and under the supervision of US security experts.”

These were the very same police officers who had “received special training in Jordan and the West Bank as part of a security plan engineered by the US,” and were apparently reporting directly to Salam Fayyad. Israeli “security officials” “praised” Mahmoud Abbas’ “iron-fist policy” in the West Bank, reported The Jerusalem Post and “expressed satisfaction with the coordination between the PA security forces and the IDF and Shin Bet [Israel's internal intelligence agency].” Sometimes, “Hamas members were detained by the IDF only hours after they were released from PA detention centers.”

So why have key elements within Fatah and the PA decided to go down this path? It seems like the Ramallah-based political and intelligence elite are primarily driven by fear; fear of losing their power and privileges, and fear of Hamas. More specifically, there is a real sense that Hamas’ popularity has not suffered any kind of significant fall since 2006, and if anything, has been consolidated or increased.

At the same time as Hamas has emerged intact and uncompromising from Israel’s recent Gaza onslaught, the Fatah-dominated PA has nothing to show for its strategy of softly-softly negotiations; just an entrenched, apartheid-like Israeli occupation. The “peace process” has brought Israel a degree of peace, but left the Palestinians trapped between Israel’s colonies and wall. The PA’s only card is that it continues to pay the salaries of thousands of desperate Palestinians — money that is only forthcoming from the international community with strings attached.

Meanwhile in Nablus, Professor Qassem, who is considering a run for president in the future as an independent, feels like the PA “is reflecting its inner crisis against the population”:

“So instead of going back to their own people they are trying to punish their own people. Why? Because there is Dayton, and the money of the donor countries, which they cannot sacrifice. If they want to go back to their own people, they will lose their salaries, and the situation in the West Bank will be similar to that in Gaza.”

This is a deal that was made many years ago, but it has meant that there is a class of political leaders in the PA who are seemingly eternally wedded to the idea that the international community is directing the peace process in good faith. For reasons of self-interest, they are desperate to keep the PA, and all the assumptions of Oslo, alive — even while sometimes admitting that in terms of obtaining basic Palestinian rights, there is, and will continue to be, nothing to show for meeting the “benchmarks” and “roadmaps.”

If the US/Jordanian-trained PA security forces are the “stick” in the West Bank, then the manipulation of foreign aid is the “carrot.” This is beyond the scope of this article, but it is worth mentioning in passing two recent Reuters reports on how “ventures backed by President Abbas’s allies have received loan guarantees, grants and agricultural assistance.”

At a critical moment for the Palestinian people, and the prospects for the region as a whole, it is arresting that many in the Palestinian leadership can sound like they are reading from Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman’s speech notes, when he said that “the path forward” lay in “security” for Israel, an “improved economy” for the Palestinians, and “stability for both,” as reported by The Jerusalem Post. As Shawan Jabarin said to me, “for political reasons you make a compromise and sacrifice human rights. This is what is going on these days.”

These are dangerous developments, something that Professor Qassem was quick to highlight in an interview with the Palestinian Information Center after his recent arrest: “Freedom of speech and expression is a paramount issue over which there can be no compromise … If we tolerate violations of our human rights and civil liberties, then we will be jeopardizing our future as a people.”

in a nutshell the daytonization of the west bank means collaboration with the zionist colonizing terrorizing entity, silencing dissent for those who would disagree with this, squashing resistance that fights for the liberation of palestine, and using american-zionist tactics of torture and repression to carry this out. it helps to divide and rule the country and to extend, rather than limit, zionist-american control of the west bank. welcome to daytonstan.

i was rather shocked when this article by tim mcgirk from time magazine came across my news reader yesterday. it is a story about palestinian political prisoners through the vantage point of his family members left behind and the difficulty his young daughters have when visiting him in prison. here is how it begins:

Spending time with her dad requires that 6-year-old Jinan undertake a bizarre and arduous odyssey. Usually she travels alone, but last Monday, the Palestinian girl with the rosebud smile and bouncing energy was accompanied by her younger sisters Dania, 4, and Noor, 2, on the journey to the Israeli prison that holds her father.

At home in the beleaguered West Bank town of Qalqilya, as her mother dresses her before dawn in an almond-green blouse and jeans, Jinan asks the same question she always does: “Mommy, why does Daddy have to sleep on the Israeli side?” And her mother Salam Nazal comforts her by saying, “Because that’s where the best Palestinian men go to sleep, and your father is one of them.” The town, which has elected a Hamas mayor, is known as a center of Palestinian militancy, and Israeli security forces conduct raids there on average five times a week.

Salam cannot accompany her daughters because she is on an Israeli security watch list, although she has never learned why she’s on it. Her immediate family lives in Jordan, so she must put the girls on a bus bound for Chattah-Gilboa prison inside Israel and hope that one of the many Palestinian women on board will help Jinan wrangle her sisters. “I’m so worried about having them go without me,” says Salam, as she hoists her girls onto the bus, organized by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). “But what can I do? This is their only chance to see their father.”

Ali Nazal, 35, who sold clothes from a cart in the streets, is one of more than 10,300 Palestinian detainees currently inside Israeli prisons. Although he has yet to be tried, Nazal has been behind bars for the past two years. He faces up to 10 years in prison if convicted of possessing weapons and harboring a fugitive — charges the family insists are based on false evidence from anonymous informers working for the Israeli security services. Salam says no weapons were found in their home but says the Israeli military demolished it anyway. The Israelis maintain that Ali was an active member of a militant organization and part of a cell that had been planning a terrorist attack.

Under the Fourth Geneva Convention, Ali and his fellow detainees should never have been transferred to prisons outside the occupied territories. But since the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza began in June 1967, more than 650,000 Palestinians have passed through Israeli jails. Nearly every Palestinian family has someone who was locked up in Israel at some point. Prison has become a rite of passage for rebellious teens and, for families seeking to visit detained loved ones, a nightmare of permits, checkpoints and body searches. It’s not an easy journey for an adult, much less three unaccompanied tots carrying their lunch in a Barbie backpack.

my dear friend nora barrows-friedman did a similar story about amani khader a few years ago on flashpoints. amani is the daughter of husam khader, who was recently released from prison (last august). you can listen to her interview by clicking this link. amani describes similar hurdles she had to endure when she went to visit her father in prison and she reads one of her amazing rap songs at the end of interview. i have a special affection for amani because i’ve been tutoring her in balata refugee camp this year. she is one of the brightest and most beautiful people i’ve ever met. i know that if she were at my university now she would surpass even the seniors in college, although she is only a senior in high school. clearly she gets much of this genius from her father, husam, who i was very pleased to read made an important statement that was reported in ma’an news today:

A high-ranking Fatah official on Thursday proposed holding presidential and legislative elections as an alternative to the “useless” Cairo dialogue so that Palestinians can choose between a program led by Fatah and resistance agenda claimed by Hamas but which it “does not practice.”

Husam Khader, a Fatah legislator within the Palestinian Legislative Council, said during a visit to Ma’an News Agency in the West Bank city of Bethlehem that “without agreeing on a decent election program between Fatah and Hamas that will specify the future of the Palestinians, these elections will not be held and the state of division that is supported by western parties and Israel will deepen.”

“Palestinians are qualified more than others for such a situation since there is a geographical barrier between the West Bank and Gaza, which is the [Israeli] occupation,” he added.

Concerning Palestinian President Mahmoud Abass upcoming visit to the United States, Khader downplayed the visit, saying that it will not lead to anything because “the US administration will just assure the promises of previous administrations toward a two-state solution.”

He demanded that President Abbas present a draft to US President Barack Obama dismantling the Palestinian Authority in exchange for a commitment to end popular resistance against Israel. “President Abbas should present this solution, which is the right one, because “the PA useless on the ground and is represented solely by the salary [for public employees] at the end of the month.”

Regarding whether or not Fatah’s sixth conference will go on as planned, he said it was “a big lie,” noting that “there are persons inside Fatah who are afraid of democracy more than the [Israeli] occupation, because they fear for their interests, and will obstruct holding a conference using weak excuses and deceiving the movement’s affiliates.”

my only beef with the above statement is husam’s bit about giving up resistance against the zionist entity. but i highly doubt that this is what he said or that he really means this. i would be shocked if that were true. but the idea that the palestinian collaborationist authority can continue on its path of collaboration and repression is finally penetrating even fatah circles. it is refreshing to say the least.

ben white’s article in electronic intifada today details much of the corruption and collaboration with the zionist entity and its criminal ally the united states. it discusses my friend abdel sattar al qassem and his most recent imprisonment in a palestinian jail. white’s article makes it clear why the sulta (salata) must go:

Last week, less than two weeks after I had talked with him in his an-Najah University faculty office, Abdel Sattar Qassem was arrested by the Palestinian Preventive Security forces in Nablus, occupied West Bank.

Qassem is a 60-year-old professor of political science, and has been at an-Najah University since 1980. Imprisoned several times by the Israeli occupation, he is the author of dozens of books and papers, as well as hundreds of articles, on Palestinian politics and Islamic thought. But Qassem is also an eloquent and prominent critic of the Palestinian Authority (PA), and he has been arrested, and targeted by politically-motivated attacks, on a number of previous occasions.

The most recent of these was in January of this year, when his car was set alight. According to a news report from the Palestinian news agency, Ma’an, claim of responsibility was circulated by an unknown group who accused Qassem of being a “mouthpiece for the Iranian and the Syrian regimes.” As reported by Asharq al-Awsat, Qassem pointed out how the statement was a “hoax,” and thus a cover for individuals who did not want to openly identify themselves. The attack was condemned by a variety of public figures “in the harshest possible words,” according to Ma’an.

This time, the official line is that his arrest was a civil, criminal case, the result of litigation proceedings against Qassem by two figures within the PA’s security forces. The Palestinian Information Center reports that Qassem, who according to his family was arrested hours after he gave an interview to al-Aqsa TV to discuss the shooting of West Bank Hamas leader Hamid al-Bitawi, insists that the charges are groundless and politically motivated. Speaking to me on the telephone after his release, Qassem noted:

“It was evident that they didn’t want to arrest me on a political basis, so they decided to fabricate something against me. Last Thursday, in court, there were many lawyers trying to represent me, because they feel like this is a national issue. They see that this is intimidation, not a genuine civil case.”

The attempts to intimidate a critic of the Palestinian Authority into silence is disturbing, but is only one incident in a growing trend. The Ramallah-based political leadership, dominated by Fatah, and the PA security forces, are becoming increasingly authoritarian, encouraging a culture of militarized policing and a lack of respect for human rights and the rule of law. Now, nonviolent resistance leaders against the Israeli occupation like Sami Awad, based in Bethlehem, are saying that they “have to be ready to face any injustice even if caused by our own people, within the PA.”

One aspect of this phenomenon is an assault on the freedom of the press. Back in December of last year, the Ma’an news agency carried out an investigation into what it described as “an unprecedented campaign of censorship and intimidation against West Bank and Gaza Strip journalists,” carried out by the Palestinian Authority.

The report detailed how independent news agencies had become targets for “President Mahmoud Abbas’s security establishment, particularly the PA’s Office of the Attorney General.” The same month as Ma’an’s investigation, the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate demanded that the PA release journalists from West Bank prisons, noting that “some journalists had been in prison for more than three months.”

Criticizing the PA, or even affording Hamas coverage, now seems enough to get on the blacklist, or become a target for the PA’s security apparatus. In fact, a Nablus-based journalist “found himself in a prison cell” in January for reporting the torching of Professor Qassem’s car, according to The Jerusalem Post. In February, the Post reported that “the PA’s crackdown on the local media was aimed at intimidating Palestinian reporters and stopping them from reporting about financial corruption and human rights violations by Abbas’s security forces.”

Another worrying trend in the PA-administered areas is an increasing militarization of civilian policing. During my recent visit to the Occupied Palestinian Territories, one of the first things several of my friends told me about was an energetic campaign by the PA to clamp down on car-related crime. There were now impromptu checkpoints thrown up on the main roads where drivers’ licenses were checked and the special permission required to drive Israeli yellow-plated cars was requested.

Nobody minded, in theory, increased efficiency in law enforcement; what was troubling was the way the PA forces were going about it. It can seem like a small thing, a friend told me, but “it’s this militarization, this way of asserting a kind of domination over the people.” Many complained of the disrespectful behavior of the gun-toting men checking the cars.

This focus on “law and order” has become a repeated theme in the last few years, particularly in cities like Nablus and Jenin. Just recently, in a fairly typical episode, Ma’an news agency reported that PA forces conducted a “sweep” in a village three kilometers from Nablus, arresting apparent “fugitives” and checking the registration of some 250 cars.

Consistent, genuine complaints about lawlessness and corruption in Nablus had already emerged in 2004-05, but it wasn’t until the end of 2007 that the current campaign was launched by PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, appointed by Mahmoud Abbas, whose official term as PA president expired in January. Beginning in Nablus, the law and order drive was replicated in Jenin in the summer of 2008. Residents have undoubtedly welcomed the increased security, but the nature of the campaign — and the context — is not so straightforward.

For example, the PA’s infrastructure (largely destroyed by Israel in 2001-02) is completely ill-equipped. In April 2008 in Nablus, for example, Reuters reported that only 13 percent of the prison’s inmates had actually been convicted; the restrictions of occupation and the inadequacy of the PA’s legal system mean that many face a long wait before their guilt or innocence can be determined in a court of law.

Meanwhile, the Israeli military continues to invade PA-controlled areas, particularly at night, an arrangement which was actually a joint Palestinian-Israeli agreement. Moreover, while a weary Palestinian population is grateful for small economic upturns in their occupied cities, they are well aware that the PA’s law and order focus is a welcome part of Israel’s strategy in the West Bank; the BBC noted in December last year how the Israeli army was pleased with the “good job” Palestinian forces were doing.

One of the reasons for Israel’s complimentary report card is the extent to which PA forces have been arresting members of groups who oppose the official “peace process,” and in particular, detaining those who are either openly, or simply suspected, members and supporters of Hamas. According to the International Middle East Media Center, estimates give the number of detainees in Palestinian security forces’ custody at between 500 to 600, many of whom have had no trial.

The secretary general of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Ahmad Saadat, himself a prisoner in an Israeli jail, noted just last week in a public statement that it was “impossible” for the PA “to demand freeing the detainees [from Israeli prisons] while the Palestinian prisons are full of prisoners jailed for resistance background or internal disputes.”

On 4 December of last year, Reuters reported on the claims being made of torture at the hands of Mahmoud Abbas’ Preventive Security forces and General Intelligence. The article cited Ghandi Rabei, a lawyer from the Independent Commission for Human Rights (ICHR) in Hebron, who told the news agency that “hundreds of civilians have been transferred to military courts without legal procedures in breach of Palestinian law and international norms.” The ICHR’s annual report for 2008 recorded 111 complaints of torture or mistreatment in detention in the West Bank, according to Agence France-Presse.

On 31 January, the British Daily Mail ran a story under the dramatic headline: “Financed by the British taxpayer, brutal torturers of the West Bank.” The paper reported how the British government’s Department for International Development had given 76 million British pounds in 2008 to the PA for what it called “security sector reform.” Once the figure is broken down, 3 million pounds went directly to the PA police, while “17 million [pounds] pays the salaries of the PA’s array of security organizations — including the Presidential Guard intelligence service and the feared Preventive Security Organization.”

One of the most important factors shaping these developments is the US strategy as directed on the ground by Lieutenant General Keith Dayton. Dayton started work with the Palestinian security forces at the end of 2005. While ostensibly charged with general reform of the PA security forces, it became apparent that the US was intent on building up Abbas-loyal PA forces in order to directly confront Hamas should the need arise.

Dayton’s plan involved giving the PA forces an increase in funding, manpower, training and weaponry. In October 2006, The New York Times reported that the US intended to expand Abbas’ Presidential Guard at a cost of $26 million. At the time, it was clear that any such plan — which also included “the transfer of thousands of guns from Egypt” to the Presidential Guard — would only go ahead with a “positive response from Israel,” according to the Israeli daily Haaretz.

According to The San Francisco Chronicle, this “systematic effort to bolster Abbas and his Fatah loyalists to counter the political success of Hamas” suffered an embarrassing setback, of course, when Hamas forces easily triumphed over Fatah in the Gaza Strip in June 2007 and thus “inherited thousands of guns, equipment and vehicles supplied by the United States.”

The only lesson learned, however, seems to have been that the US, Israel and the PA could ill-afford a similar debacle in the West Bank — and therefore Dayton’s work was to be intensified, rather than reconsidered. This, then, is what has been happening with increasing fervor in the West Bank in recent months.

On 27 February 2009, The New York Times’ Ethan Bronner wrote about the 1,600 Palestinians who “have been through American-financed courses in Jordan.” Dayton, the article said, “hopes to have a well-trained battalion based in each of eight West Bank cities” (plans to expand the program were also reported by Reuters this week). The Israelis, needless to say, are content to cooperate: an Israeli officer “inaugurated the firing range” at one of the US-funded Palestinian training camps.

Whether it is the “top brass” training provided by the US for Palestinian security officials in Ramallah, or the special “SWAT” team organized by Dayton, Salam Fayyad and the Jordanians, it is clear that the primary purpose of these forces is not neighborhood crime-busting. As the World Tribune reported in the case of the SWAT team, the “elite” forces can be used against “Hamas squads” and help “protect the PA.” As one critic put it, the PA’s security agencies in the West Bank are trained to “persecute resistance elements and provide Israel with intelligence with which to arrest or assassinate resistance leaders.”

Shawan Jabarin, general director of the Palestinian human rights group Al-Haq, agrees that these training programs are more about internal suppression than “law and order”:

“If the senior officers who train them taught a respect for the rule of law, I’m sure we would feel that — but our feeling is completely different. I’m not saying they are training them how to torture people, but they don’t put any mechanism in place for monitoring these things. For political reasons, the Palestinians are trying to show that they are strong, that they are doing exactly what the others are asking them to do — this happened during [Yasser] Arafat’s time, and it’s also [happening] these days.”

If there was any doubt about the real purpose of these forces, one just needs to listen to Dayton himself. Dayton stressed to The Jerusalem Post in December that “the trainees are taught over and again that ‘you are not here to learn how to fight against the Israeli occupation.’” That’s why Dayton could affirm that he, the Israeli Ministry of Defense and his “IDF [Israeli army] colleagues” are of one mind: “something new is out there” and “it’s worth encouraging.”

It may not be new — one only has to go back to the mid-1990s to find something similar happening — but PA forces are certainly being encouraged to suppress dissent. While Israel was attacking Gaza in January, The Jerusalem Post described how the PA’s crackdown on the opposition in the West Bank was “being carried out in coordination with the IDF and under the supervision of US security experts.”

These were the very same police officers who had “received special training in Jordan and the West Bank as part of a security plan engineered by the US,” and were apparently reporting directly to Salam Fayyad. Israeli “security officials” “praised” Mahmoud Abbas’ “iron-fist policy” in the West Bank, reported The Jerusalem Post and “expressed satisfaction with the coordination between the PA security forces and the IDF and Shin Bet [Israel's internal intelligence agency].” Sometimes, “Hamas members were detained by the IDF only hours after they were released from PA detention centers.”

So why have key elements within Fatah and the PA decided to go down this path? It seems like the Ramallah-based political and intelligence elite are primarily driven by fear; fear of losing their power and privileges, and fear of Hamas. More specifically, there is a real sense that Hamas’ popularity has not suffered any kind of significant fall since 2006, and if anything, has been consolidated or increased.

At the same time as Hamas has emerged intact and uncompromising from Israel’s recent Gaza onslaught, the Fatah-dominated PA has nothing to show for its strategy of softly-softly negotiations; just an entrenched, apartheid-like Israeli occupation. The “peace process” has brought Israel a degree of peace, but left the Palestinians trapped between Israel’s colonies and wall. The PA’s only card is that it continues to pay the salaries of thousands of desperate Palestinians — money that is only forthcoming from the international community with strings attached.

Meanwhile in Nablus, Professor Qassem, who is considering a run for president in the future as an independent, feels like the PA “is reflecting its inner crisis against the population”:

“So instead of going back to their own people they are trying to punish their own people. Why? Because there is Dayton, and the money of the donor countries, which they cannot sacrifice. If they want to go back to their own people, they will lose their salaries, and the situation in the West Bank will be similar to that in Gaza.”

This is a deal that was made many years ago, but it has meant that there is a class of political leaders in the PA who are seemingly eternally wedded to the idea that the international community is directing the peace process in good faith. For reasons of self-interest, they are desperate to keep the PA, and all the assumptions of Oslo, alive — even while sometimes admitting that in terms of obtaining basic Palestinian rights, there is, and will continue to be, nothing to show for meeting the “benchmarks” and “roadmaps.”

If the US/Jordanian-trained PA security forces are the “stick” in the West Bank, then the manipulation of foreign aid is the “carrot.” This is beyond the scope of this article, but it is worth mentioning in passing two recent Reuters reports on how “ventures backed by President Abbas’s allies have received loan guarantees, grants and agricultural assistance.”

At a critical moment for the Palestinian people, and the prospects for the region as a whole, it is arresting that many in the Palestinian leadership can sound like they are reading from Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman’s speech notes, when he said that “the path forward” lay in “security” for Israel, an “improved economy” for the Palestinians, and “stability for both,” as reported by The Jerusalem Post. As Shawan Jabarin said to me, “for political reasons you make a compromise and sacrifice human rights. This is what is going on these days.”

These are dangerous developments, something that Professor Qassem was quick to highlight in an interview with the Palestinian Information Center after his recent arrest: “Freedom of speech and expression is a paramount issue over which there can be no compromise … If we tolerate violations of our human rights and civil liberties, then we will be jeopardizing our future as a people.”

meanwhile palestine hits the world record today for having the world’s longest political prisoner behind bars of the zionist usurping entity:

Former political prisoner, researcher and specialist in detainees’ affairs, Abdul-Nasser Farawna, has revealed that detainee Na’el Barghouthi now spent 31years behind bars. He was kidnapped by Israeli forces on April 4th 1978.

Farawna said that Barghouthi and other detainees who have spent many years in Israeli prisons and detention facilities have became the symbols of steadfastness, resistance and determination. Their continued imprisonment proves the criminal and immoral nature of the Israeli occupation, the Quds Net reported.

He also said that Palestinian resistance factions should insist on his release and the release of all detainees who have spent so many years behind bars for resisting the occupation and fighting for their country.

On August 25, 2008, detainee Sa’id Al Ataba was released from an Israeli prison after he spent 31 years and 26 days behind bars.

Detainee Barghouthi, born in the central West Bank city of Ramallah in 1957, was kidnapped by the army on April 4, 1978, when he was only 21 years old. He was sentenced by an Israeli military court to one life-term.

for further context on these crimes of the zionist apartheid regime listen to one of nora’s latest interviews with our friend hazem jamjoum on flashpoints. it is an amazing discussion of the apartheid regime.

On OpenDemocracy.net, Haidar Eid, Associate Professor in the Department of English Literature, Al-Aqsa University (Gaza Strip, Palestine) writes:

…The major problem for those countries was, then, the equation of Zionism with racism. So, what we have here is a complex issue: one seems to be dealing with a colonist who denies his colonialism and argues to the contrary, and with a victim whose victimisation has been denied for decades. This ought to be scrutinized…The conflict in Palestine is between a colonial party, Israel, and a weaker, colonized one, the Palestinians. The problem with what has been presented to us by those countries which boycotted the Durban Review Conference (DRC) is that it is done under the claim of ‘striking a balance.’

Obviously, goverments should be able to differentiate between ’striking a balance’ and ‘objectivity.’  In other words, we must be able to put the blame where it lies.  It isn’t by nature that conflicts are equal.

Just to further the successful shunning of the Palestinians as victims of racism at the Durban Conference, see the Al-Haq Press Release.

“Al-Haq further joins the voice of widespread dissatisfaction among NGOs that had travelled to Geneva from all regions of the world to find the outcome document adopted by states on the second day of a five-day conference in a quiet and hasty manner that lacked transparency, before the proposals and input of civil society and victims had been heard.

“…it is regrettable that references to certain victims of severe racial discrimination have been omitted from the outcome document, and that in many respects, the outcome document is but a weaker reformulation of the 2001 DDPA.

“Al-Haq further joins the voice of widespread dissatisfaction among NGOs that had travelled to Geneva from all regions of the world to find the outcome document adopted by states on the second day of a five-day conference in a quiet and hasty manner that lacked transparency, before the proposals and input of civil society and victims had been heard.

“Al-Haq raised all of the above points and concerns, as well as the proliferation of Israel’s unlawful institutionalised, systematic and oppressive system of racial domination over Palestinians in the OPT since 2001, in its oral statement to the plenary session of the conference this morning.”

Lazla and three other policemen threw Abu Hamdiya from a jeep moving at high speed after they had abducted, beaten, and abused him. His head struck the pavement with great force, killing him. The policemen also abused other Palestinians in Hebron. The entire affair was exposed by B’Tselem and the Palestinian human rights organization al-Haq.

It is questionable whether a sentence of 8½ years is compatible with the gravity of the offense. However, bringing the policeman to justice, even if only partially, is a rare instance in which the justice system in Israel has met its obligation to hold security forces accountable for illegally harming Palestinians. As a rule, the authorities refrain from enforcing the law on soldiers and police officers who commit crimes of violence against Palestinians. Presumably, the tragic results of this case, together with the high profile it was given by the media, led the authorities to deviate from their custom and prosecute the policemen.

For full article, visit http://www.btselem.org/English/Beating_and_Abuse/20090401_Abu_Hamdiyeh_Appeal_verdict.asp

The incident began on 30 December 2002, at about 8:00pm when a Border Police jeep stopped next to Imran Abu Hamdiyeh, who was with his friends outside his house in Hebron. Eyewitnesses told B’Tselem that border policemen got out of the jeep, put Abu Hamdiya inside the vehicle and drove off. A few of Abu Hamdiya’s friends headed toward Hebron’s industrial area, a place where they knew Border Police officers beat Palestinians. About forty minutes after the policemen grabbed Abu Hamdiya, his friends found his body at the industrial area, lying by the side of the road.

For full article, visit http://www.dubainews.net/story/485760

Testimony of Ra’id A-Rajbi, age 29, resident of area H2 in Hebron:

The door at the back of the jeep was open and one the officers sitting at the back called to us. Naim got to him first and then the three of us. There were four officers in the jeep. The officer who had talked to me had dark skin and his hair was combed sideways. He talked Arabic and asked, in a polite and calm manner, “Why are you standing here?” We said that there was no curfew and he confirmed. He then asked for our ID’s, looked at them quickly and asked us for our ages. We answered him, and then he ordered Naim, Falah and me to leave and told ‘Imran to stay and to take off his coat. I then tried to interfere and said that ‘Imran’s father had died two days ago. The truth is he died forty days ago. The officer said he won’t harm him and that he just wanted to talk to him. I tried to stay with him, but the policeman ordered me to go away. I turned and walked away and after about five meters I looked back and saw the jeep driving away. I couldn’t see ‘Imran and I’m sure he was on the jeep.

For full testimony, visit http://www.btselem.org/english/Testimonies/20021230_beating_to_death_of_imran_abu_hamdiye_in_hebron_witness_raed_a_rajbi.asp

there was some really disturbing reporting on the situation of the tamils in sri lanka the past few days. here is an update from david chater on al jazeera:

i wish that al jazeera posted not only their reports in the field, but also the discussions that follow the reports live in the studio. because late last night they interviewed a woman from tamils against genocide. i couldn’t grab a pen to jot down her name, but she was really amazing. she mentioned a number of things that were particularly striking in terms of the way it resembles what israeli terrorists do to palestinians in gaza and in the past against lebanese. here are a few things she mentioned:

1. sri lanka is using cluster bombs
2. sri lanka is using white phosphorus
3. sri lanka has hired an american public relations firm to put out propaganda
4. sri lanka has trapped tamils and refuses to let them leave the war zone
5. sri lanka propaganda is now saying “there is no humanitarian crisis” (recall: tzipi livni)
6. sri lanka is only allowing journalists to be embedded with its army and will not allow them into the areas where tamils are trapped

to get an idea of what white phosphorus does here is a video from human rights watch on israeli terrorists’ use of the weapon in gaza:

the video is useful, but like cluster bombs i totally disagree with human rights watch that this weapon has a legitimate purpose in any context. they argue that there are legitimate uses of white phosphorus. i also have serious problems with human rights watch de-contextualizing palestinian resistance fighters’ use of qassam rockets. it is not the same. israeli terrorists have an army–and the fourth largest army in the world. palestinians have limited resources for its resistance. not unlike the tamil tigers in sri lanka.

there are, of course, historical parallels between palestinians and tamils, too, given the context of the british creating the problems in both places as well. suren surendiran wrote a great piece in the guardian this week that provides some historical context that will also resonate for those who know the history of palestine:

The Sri Lankan military is killing hundreds of Tamil civilians each day. On Sunday alone, a thousand people were killed by cluster bombs, artillery and machine gun fire. On Monday, hundreds died when Sri Lankan forces used them as human mine-sweepers and human shields to advance against the Tamil Tigers.

This “slaughter” of civilians, as Human Rights Watch has condemned it, has intensified since January. Over 5,000 Tamils have been massacred in the past three months alone.

Crucially, this genocide by the Sri Lankan state has been enabled by the international community, including Britain. This is why tens of thousands of British Tamils have been protesting outside Parliament here for several weeks.

We are British citizens, but our government is ignoring us and turning a blind eye to the ongoing massacres of our relatives and community in Sri Lanka.

Sri Lanka as a country was evicted from the UN human rights council last year for its gross violations of the human rights of its people. Sri Lanka does not let independent journalists report freely. The current government has been accused of being complicit in many abductions and killings of journalists and others.

The UK and other western states have suggested that by destroying the Tamil Tigers, Sri Lanka can be made peaceful. This is a profound misunderstanding of the state-racism and ethnic supremacy at the heart of the Sri Lankan crisis – a crisis that has now become genocide.

Britain is deeply implicated in this crisis.

When in 1948 Britain, the colonial power, granted independence to Sri Lanka, the Westminster-style democracy London set up allowed a pernicious Sinhala chauvinism to capture the state and begin the 60 years of violence and oppression the Tamils have now endured.

In 1977, after three decades of discrimination and state-backed mob violence, the entire Tamil political leadership united behind a demand for an independent state comprising the Tamil homeland as the only way to escape oppression.

The Sinhala-dominated state responded with violence, and a few years later, in 1983, a Tamil armed struggle emerged in response. This resistance to the Sinhala state is led by the Tamil Tigers or LTTE – Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. Until 1983 Tamils have tried through many of their democratically elected leaders and parties to resolve this injustice by negotiations and peaceful means. Even during the armed struggle, LTTE has many times attempted to negotiate with successive Sri Lankan governments. As recently as 2002, a ceasefire agreement was negotiated between the government and the LTTE by the international community. Just as before, the Sri Lankan state abrogated from this agreement unilaterally in January 2008.

Since 1983, the problem in Sri Lanka has been characterised by western states as conflict, rather than state chauvinism. They have sought to support the Sinhala-dominated state and pressure the LTTE to “make peace”.

The Tamils in Sinhala-dominated Sri Lanka face the same crisis as the people of Kosovo under Serbian rule. The international community could not make the Serbian state led by Milosovic cease its attempts to wipe out the people of Kosovo, and ultimately Kosovo was granted independence to assure their safety.

Having abandoned the Tamils to majoritarian tyranny, Britain has consistently ignored the Sinhala chauvinism deeply embedded in the Sri Lankan state. The UK has cynically sold weapons to the Sinhala military and tried to pass off the agitation by Tamils as one of poverty, merely requiring “development”.

We want Britain to compel the racist regime in Sri Lanka to cease its genocide. As a member of the UN security council, a close ally of the US and a member of the EU, Britain has the ability to do this. As the former colonial power that placed the Tamils at risk, and as a state that has sought explicitly to champion democracy and freedom, it has a moral obligation, too.

Remember, most British Tamils have direct relatives – mums, dads, brothers, sisters, nephews and nieces – left back in the war zone. They are genuinely concerned for their safety and whereabouts.

That is why Britain’s Tamils are protesting outside Parliament day and night.

i wonder if sri lanka will get off as easy for its massacre of tamils as israeli terrorists have been getting off. although the news from norway bodes well that perhaps there may be some justice as saed bannoura reports:

A group of lawyers in Norway have filed charges with the nation’s top prosecutor against former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, former Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Defense Minister Ehud Barak, accusing them of war crimes.

The charges stem from the Israeli government’s attack on the Gaza Strip beginning in late December 2008, which the lawyers say violated international law by illegally targeting civilians, using internationally-banned weapons and attacking hospitals and medical personnel.

In Norway, the tenet of ‘universal jurisdiction’ allows lawyers to file charges against people in other countries, including leaders and officials, if there is evidence of war crimes or other violations of international law.

The case is being brought on behalf of three people of Palestinian origin living in Norway and 20 families who lost loved ones or property during the attack, according to the lawyers.

The lawyers said they could not stand silent in the face of what they termed Israel’s ‘war crimes’ in Gaza. They said in their statement, “There can be no doubt that these subjects knew about, ordered or approved the actions in Gaza and that they had considered the consequences of these actions.”

Similar charges filed in Spain last month were later revoked after pressure from the Israeli government and lobbyists threatened to change the very nature of the Spanish judiciary. Lawyers backed down from the charges after the campaign, saying that the ‘universal jurisdiction’ in that country did not apply if an investigation is ongoing within the offending country. Although Israel has claimed that their military conducted ‘investigations’ into the military’s actions in Gaza, but no on-the-ground evidence was actually gathered during, leading many observers worldwide to question its legitimacy.

The Norwegian lawyers said that the potential for diplomatic problems between their government and Israel was outweighed by the severity of the crimes in the case.

here is a discussion about israeli terrorist soldiers absolving themselves on al jazeera’s “inside story” with kamahl santamaria. it features an israeli terrorist with the jerusalem post, yaakov katz, and wesam ahmad from al haq, and the amazing incomparable dr. mads gilbert from…norway. i love santamaria on this episode. he always keeps the discussion back to the original text. just like a literature professor. love it.

of course it is not just sri lankans or israeli terrorists who turn the truth on its head in order to get out of paying the price for their war crimes. it is also the americans. case in point: barack obama on prosecuting those who created a policy and culture of torture in the bush administration. al jazeera reports that obama may allow for the prosecution of a few mid-level people, but top folks seem to be absolved:

Barack Obama, the US president, has left open the possibility of prosecuting officials over the CIA torture memos released by his administration last week.

Obama on Tuesday reiterated his belief that US intelligence agents and interrogators who took part in waterboarding and other interrogation methods after acting on advice from superiors who defined such practices as legal should not face prosecution.

But Obama said it is up to Eric Holder, the US attorney-general, whether to prosecute lawyers under the administration of George Bush, Obama’s predecessor, who wrote the memos approving the tactics.

one of the key people who should be at the top of the list is, of course, dick cheney. david usborne reported in the independent quoted cheney in a way that shows he seems to be gloating:

Dick Cheney has returned to the fray to demand the CIA release documents that he says show “enhanced” interrogation techniques extracted crucial information from terror suspects.

The former vice president’s remarks follow Barack Obama’s decision to release top secret memos detailing controversial questioning methods used under the Bush administration.

“One of the things that I find a little bit disturbing about this recent disclosure is that they put out the legal memos… but they didn’t put out the memos that show the success of the effort,” Mr Cheney told Fox News.

of course obama is likely covering his own ass because he knows that when he leaves office, because he is continuing bush’s policies, he and his administration could be subjected to the same prosecution if he opens up this can of worms now (in theory he could be regardless but that would mean electing someone moral and someone who is invested in justice, which amerians are not capable of). jeremy scahill’s report on the prison at baghram airforce base in afghanistan is one place where if we had access to more information i’m sure it would be made clear that torture is going on there:

As the Obama administration faces mounting pressure to appoint an independent special prosecutor to investigate torture and other crimes ordered by senior Bush administration officials and implemented by CIA operatives and contractors, the ACLU is opening up another front in the battle for transparency. But this one is not exclusively aimed at the Bush era. Today, the ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act request seeking to make public records on the US-run prison at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan. The group is seeking documents from the Departments of Defense, Justice and State and the CIA.

As the ACLU states, “the U.S. government is detaining more than 600 individuals at Bagram, including not only Afghan citizens captured in Afghanistan but also an unknown number of foreign nationals captured thousands of miles from Afghanistan and brought to Bagram. Some of these prisoners have been detained for as long as six years without access to counsel, and only recently have been permitted any contact with their families. At least two Bagram prisoners have died while in U.S. custody, and Army investigators concluded that the deaths were homicides.”

in counterpunch scahill makes it clear why this is not a partisan issue in the u.s.: democrats and republicans alike are responsible for these american policies:

There are some powerful Democrats who certainly would not want an independent public investigation, particularly those who served on the House and Senate Intelligence Committees when Bush was in power and torture was being ordered and authorized. That’s because in the aftermath of 9/11, some in Congress were briefed on the torture methods in real time and either were silent or, in some cases, supported these brutal tactics or, as some have suggested, possibly encouraged them to be expanded.

perhaps we can get norway to add sri lanka and the united states to its list???

The Durban Review Conference exposed the difficulties of coping with colonial and racist history and accepting complicity in modern racism – in many ways, it was a success.

It is surprisingly laughable and absolutely dumbfounding how the absence of Western figures at the conference automatically means “failure.”

The BBC referred to it as a “public relations disaster” as the result of the 30-some walkout – mostly European State delegations – in response to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad’s speech at the Durban Review Conference. Yet as far as we know, there are 192 member states of the UN – the majority of which having been victims of colonialism’s racist policies. French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner said the meeting was “not at all a failure but the beginning of a success.”

So were they to have stayed put, would it have been deemed a failure? Perhaps – yet not in the position that the walkouts and their supporters would have considered it.

It would have been a failure based on the fact that, once again, the West could not engage its past.

The Countries that openly boycotted the Review Conference included: Australia, Canada, Germany, Israel, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, and the United States.

Of these countries, five have been, or are still, colonial States and have stopped short of engaging their pasts. Each of these countries, with the exception of Poland, has experienced a massive history of implementing racist and intolerant policies in their dominance over their minority populations and over the populations they colonized. This racism still exists today against immigrant, Roma, and other populations.

Which is what questions the exact cause of the walkout.

Here is the portion of the speech of President Ahmedinejad that resulted in a European-led walkout:

Following World War II, they resorted to military aggression to make an entire nation homeless under the pretext of Jewish suffering and they sent migrants from Europe, the United States and other parts of the world in order to establish a totally racist government in occupied Palestine. And, in fact, in compensation for the dire consequences of racism in Europe, they helped bring to power the most cruel and repressive racist regime in Palestine.

It was reported that the loud applause was intended for Ahmedinejad, and that it was primarily the Iranian delegation. Yet the large round of applause seemed to actually be in support of the speech itself.

Perhaps we need to look at the bigger picture. This was a forum to debate and combat racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia, and related intolerance – Ahmedinejad’s target was Zionism.

If we can analyze this specific text closely, we should notice one line in particular – “the dire consequences of racism in Europe.” There is no doubt of the fact of Jewish suffering in Europe and of its effects on the Palestinian population.

The walkout itself was not a statement, per se. It was the result of “Western” difficulties dealing with their respective histories.

Navenethem Pilly, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, responded to President Ahmedinejad’s speech by stating “I condemn the use of a UN forum for political grandstanding. I find this totally objectionable.” Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon stated that “I deplore the use of this platform by the Iranian President to accuse, divide and even incite.”

Even through the drama, the anti-racism Durban Review Conference adopted its final outcome document.

There were a number of harsh responses to President Ahmedinejad. French President Nicolas Sarkozy stated that it was “an intolerable call for racist hatred.” The Czech delegation threatened never to return.

Yet the truth is this – many of these States (not excluding non-Western States) have the topic of racism at the bottom of their agenda. It is a past that the West would like to forget – now that the legal institutionalization of racism has all but disappeared. It is both a societal and behavioral present that they do not view as a priority.

It is no question that the foundation of the Zionism is based on the establishment of a State for the Jewish people, and that the Palestinians were the obvious victims of this real ideology.

There are a number of universal human rights instruments pertaining to racism to which States are obligated to. To politicize such a conference, is absolutely questionable. From the onset, it is difficult to comprehend President Ahmedinejad’s statement at the conference when there are far more qualified individuals to speak on the topics related to racism.

Shouldn’t a victim of racism been one to speak in the first place? Would the delegations have walked out on a Palestinian speaking?

The truth is, the Palestinians, victims of racism since the creation of the State of Israel had no civil representation at the conference.

“One thing that we have noticed in this conference is that there has been a concerted effort to silence the voices of the Palestinian presence and raising the Palestinian issue,” said Wisam Ahmad of Al-Haq, a Ramallah-based advocacy group.

Ingrid Jaradat, director of the Badil Resource Center in Bethlehem, agrees. “We all knew he was going to come, we all knew that the European governments were going to wait until they just hear the key word and then they will all stand up and leave the hall and then the press comes in, they all would write about what he said or did not say and everybody would forget what is really written in the documents and what the conference is really about,” she said.

Secondly, the walkout proved nothing but a politicized move to stick to standards by supporting the policies of the Israeli State and avoid confrontation with their complicity.

In response, Arab League Secretary General Amre Moussa “rejected the racist idea of the Jewish State” and expressed regret at the no-shows. Palestinian Knesset Members Jamal Zahalka also voiced his opposition to “Israeli racist apartheid,” along with support from fellow lawmakers Said Nafa and Ahmed Tibi.

One Australian went so far as to call the boycott a “triumph of principle.” How? By not confronting the subject of your boycott head-on? Yet when Arab of African officials boycott a summit, it is looked at as ‘immature’  and ‘unprofessional‘.

Before the conference, a few Arab editorials had already expressed their dismay at the boycott of several countries. Some examples included the following:

“The boycott of the United States, Germany, Italy, Holland, Canada and Australia, of this conference, which is being organized by the U.N., on the pretext that it’s attacking Israel is unjustified,” an editorial in the Jordanian daily A-Dustour said.

“Why are they all avoiding fighting racism?” an editorial in the Palestinian daily Al-Quds asked. “It appears that some are trying to place Israel above the reach of criticism, not only in Israel but also in powerful Western capitals,” it said.

As one writer from the Copehagen University Middle East and Islam Network writes: The post-colonial states live with this historical experience in a whole other way that any of us in the West.

Of all the States that should have attended, it should have been the US. This year, the US experienced history when its first Black President, Barack Hussein Obama, was elected.

Civil rights groups in the US criticized the administration’s stance on boycotting the conference, including the US Human Rights Network (in conjunction with a number of partner organizations) and the NAACP.

The US boycotted the 1978 and 1983 Conferences as well, and this was during a time where they were sympathetic to a South Africa apartheid regime, while supportive of Israeli repression of the Palestinians, and when Countries were freshly removing itself from their repression of minorities in their countries and the countries they colonized. Yet the conference has been credited as being one of the few incentives which led to the formal discussion on South Africa’s apartheid policies.

This conference, is a constant reminder of this tainted history. They would just rather the colonized forget it and let it go.

No…it is time the West take responsibility and confront the ghosts of their past.

the other night kamal santamaria hosted a discussion of “obstacles to peace” in al jazeera’s “inside story” with david mack, mustafa bargouthi, and israeli terrorist shmuel sandler. the discussion is an interesting one, though i wish al jazeera would change the framework of their discussions to include concepts like justice and ideas like the one-state solution or liberating all of historic palestine. in any case, the program does a good job unpacking some of the basic bullshit issues that show once again how the zionist entity has never wanted peace, justice, or anything other than the theft of more land.

i was surprised the other night when marwan bishara spoke about those of us fighting for a single state which would enable all palestinian refugees to return home. i’ve never heard him discuss such things before, tough, of course, his brother azmi bishara has been fighting for this for years. oftentimes when people write about or speak about one-state solutions (as opposed to two-state disasters) they fixate on the impossibility of one-state, when in reality anyone who thinks two-states is feasible must be smoking some serious crack cocaine.

in the conclusion of jonathan cook’s brilliant new book disappearing palestine he addresses some of these issues in his chapter that is beautifully titled “two-state dreamers.” here is what cook argues:

In fact, the division of land demanded by the real two-staters, however equitable, would be the very moment when the struggle for Israel to remain a Jewish state would enter its most critical and difficult phase. Which is precisely why Israel has blocked any meaningful division of the land so far and will continue to do so. In the unimaginable event that Israel were to divide the land, a Jewish state would not be able to live with the consequences of such a division for long. Eventually, the maintenance of an ethnic Israeli state would (and will) prove unsustainable: environmentally, demographically, and ultimately physically. Division of the land simply “fast-forwards” the self-destructiveness inherent in a Jewish state.

Let us examine just a few of the consequences for the Jewish state of a genuine two-state solution.

First, Israel inside its recognized, shrunken borders would face an immediate and very serious water shortage. That is because, in returning the West Bank to the Palestinians, Israel would lose control of the large mountain aquifers that currently supply most of its water not only to Israel proper but also to the Jewish settlers living illegally in the occupied territories. Israel would no longer be able to steal the water, but would be expected to negotiate for it on the open market. Given the politics of water in the Middle East that would be no simple matter. However, impoverished the new sovereign Palestinian state was, it would lose all legitimacy in the eyes of its own population were it to sell more than a trickle of water to the Israelis….

Second, with the labour-intensive occupation at an end, much of the Jewish state’s huge citizen army would become surplus to defence requirements. In addition to the massive social and economic disruptions, the dismantling of the country’s military complex would fundamentally change Israel’s role in the region, damage its relationship with the only global superpower and sever of its financial ties to Diaspora Jews. Israel would no longer have the laboratories of the occupied territories for testing its military hardware, its battlefield strategies and its booming surveillance and crowd-control industries. If Israel chose to fight the Palestinians, it would have to do so in a proper war, even if one between very unequal sides. Doubtless the Palestinians, like Hezbollah, would quickly find regional sponsors to arm and train their army or militias.

The experience and the reputation Israel has acquired–at least among the US military–in running an occupation and devising new and supposedly sophisticated ways to control the “Arab mind” would rapidly be lost, and with it Israel’s usefulness to the US in managing its own long-term occupation of Iraq and assisting the booming “homeland security” industry. Also, Israel’s vital strategic alliance with the US in dividing the Arab world, over the issue of the occupation and by signing peace treaties with some states and living in a state of permanent war with others, would start to unravel. With the waning of Israel’s special relationship with Washington and the influence of its lobby groups, as well as the loss of billions of dollars in annual subsidies, the Jewish Diaspora would begin to lose interest in Israel. Its money and power ebbing away, Israel might eventually slip into Middle Eastern anonymity, another Jordan. In such circumstances it would rapidly see a large exodus of privileged Ashkenazi Jews, many of whom hold second passports.

Third, the Jewish state would not be as Jewish as some might think: currently one in five Israelis is not Jewish but Palestinian. Although in order to realize a two-state vision all the Jewish settlers would probably need to leave the occupied territories and return to Israel, what would be done with the Palestinians with Israeli citizenship? These Palestinians have been citizens for six decades and live legally on land that has belonged to their families for many generations. They are also growing in number at a rate faster than the Jewish population, the reason they are popularly referred to in Israel as a “demographic timebomb.” Were these 1.3 million citizens to be removed from Israel by force under a two-state arrangement, it would be a violation of international law by a democratic state on a scale unprecedented int he modern era, and an act of ethnic cleansing even larger than the 1948 war that established Israel. The question would be: why even bother advocating two states if it has to be achieved on such appalling terms?

Assuming instead that the new Jewish state is supposed to maintain, as Israel currently does, the pretense of being a liberal democracy, these citizens would be entitled to continue living on their land and exercising their rights. Inside a Jewish state that had officially ended its conflict with the Palestinians, demands would grow from Palestinian citizens for equal rights and an end to their second-class status. Most significantly, they would insist on two rights that challenge the very basis of a Jewish state. They would expect the right, backed by international law, to be able to marry Palestinians from outside Israel and bring them to live with them; and they would want a Right of Return for their exiled relatives on a similar basis to the Law of Return for Jews. Israel’s Jewishness would be at stake, even more so than it is today from its Palestinian minority. It can be assumed that Israel’s leaders would react with great ferocity to protect the state’s Jewishness. Eventually Israel’s democratic pretensions would have to be jettisoned and the full-scale ethnic cleansing of Palestinian citizens implemented.

Still, do these arguments against the genuine two-state arrangement win the day for the one-state solution? Would Israel’s leaders not put up an equally vicious fight to protect their ethnic privileges by preventing, as they are dong now, the emergence of a single state? Yes, they would and they will. But that misses my larger point. As long as Israel is an ethnic state, it will be forced to deepen the occupation and intensify its ethnic cleansing policies to prevent the emergence of genuine Palestinian political influence–for the reasons I cite above and for many others I don’t. In truth, both a one-state and a genuine two-state arrangement are impossible given Israel’s determination to remain a Jewish state.

The obstacle to a solution, then, is not the division of the land but Zionism itself, the ideology of ethnic supremacism that is the current orthodoxy in Israel. As long as Israel is a Zionist state, its leaders will allow neither one state nor two real states. There can be no hope of a solution until the question of how to defeat Zionism is addressed. It just so happens that the best way this can be achieved is by confronting the illusions of the two-state dreamers and explaining why Israel is in permanent bad faith about seeking peace.

In other words, if we stopped distracting ourselves with the Holy Grail of the two-state solution, we might channel our energies into something more useful: discrediting Israel as a Jewish state, and the ideology of Zionism that upholds it. Eventually the respectable facade of Zionism might crumble. And without Zionism, the obstacle to creating either one or two states will finally be removed. If that is the case, then why not also campaign for the solution that will best bring justice to both Israelis and Palestinians? (247-251)

the issues that cook lays out above are necessary for those of us who wish to bring justice to palestinians. (of course i could care less about justice for israeli terrorists and would not be quite as even-handed as cook on that front.) but the core issue is that the discourse of two states is and has always been a distraction. it is just as much a distraction as the zionist entity’s demand that palestinians recognize that they are a “jewish state.” jerrold kessel and pierre klochendler reported on this very issue in ips today:

At their meeting Thursday night, Netanyahu told Mitchell that he would be ready to discuss a Palestinian state only if Palestinians recognise Israel as a Jewish state. A senior official in the Israeli leader’s bureau quoted the prime minister as saying: “Israel expects the Palestinians first to recognise Israel as a Jewish state before there could be talking about two states for two peoples.”

abu yusef writing for palestine monitor explains precisely why he objects to this new demand by the zionist entity for recognition as a jewish state:

To those unfamiliar with the conflict or the numerous attempts at its resolution, the idea of recognizing Israel as a Jewish State seems uncontroversial, even logical. Israel is seen, at home and abroad, as a home for Jews and a place where they enjoy universal citizenship. ‘What is wrong with recognizing that?’ people ask.

A much better question to ask is, ‘Hasn’t the Palestinian leadership, through the PLO, already recognized Israel’s right to exist for fifteen years? If so, why should they now be demanded to recognize a specific nature of the state?’

For its part, Israel is hoping the international community focuses on the first question while ignoring the second. The real consequences of recognizing Israel’s Jewish character are far more important than attaching a name or a word to the description of the state. Recognizing Israel as Jewish, in fact, has a major role to play in shaping the ongoing negotiations for a two state settlement.

To show you how, we have broken up the Palestinians who will be affected by such a move into four groups. Each of these will be asked to forsake or concede certain rights and capacities prior to returning to the negotiating table with a Jewish state of Israel.

1. Palestinians in the occupied Territories.

Recognizing Israel as a Jewish state will insure that race and ethnicity will be the main determinants of a future border – one which will inevitably legitimize Israel’s ‘facts on the ground’ in the form of the wall and settlements. The new border will not be drawn upon the internationally recognized ‘Green Line’, rather it will try to include as much of one group as possible while excluding the other. All of the land stolen for the wall and settlements will become Israel’s, most likely in exchange for a land in the Negev – or perhaps even land within Israel populated by Israeli-Palestinian citizens.

2. Palestinian citizens of Israel

It is difficult to imagine a state characterizing itself as Jewish when a full fifth of its population are Muslim and Christian – but this is what Israel aims to do. The consequences of this on Israel’s Muslim and Christian population are second citizenship and strict demographic control over their growth and development. They will be living in a state that does not grant them the full rights of citizenship based on their creed and, therefore, in a theocratic dictatorship dressed up as a democracy. This is a best-case scenario for Israeli-Palestinians. In the worst case, as suggested by Avigdor Lieberman and mentioned above, the Israeli government will actually transfer large parts of its ‘unofficial’ population into the future Palestinian state. This transfer, though illegal under international law and inconsistent with the principles of liberal democracy, will be legitimized in the quest to maintain the demographic character of the Jewish state.

3. Palestinians living in the occupied East Jerusalem

Palestinians living in East Jerusalem experience an entirely different reality than their brothers and sisters in Israel, the West Bank or Gaza Strip. They live in the center of the conflict to change the nature and identity of the Holy City while increasingly isolated from the rest of the occupied Territories. As they are not citizens of Israel, nor do they want to be, they do not enjoy the same protections as their Israeli-Palestinian counterparts, and therefore find their rights and dignity much more easily trampled upon. Over the last months for example, dozens of homes have been destroyed and families made into refugees in an effort by the Israeli government and settler organizations to Judaize Jerusalem by changing its demography and architectural identity and heritage so as to change the perception of ownership.

4. Palestinian refugees in the occupied Territories and abroad

Perhaps the most important consequence of Palestinian recognition of Israel as Jewish state would be felt by the millions of Palestinian refugees living in the occupied Territories or abroad. International law calls for these people to return to their homes inside of Israel. Recognition of the Jewish state makes it impossible to endanger the Jewish demographic majority inside of Israel by transplanting millions of Palestinians back into their former homes. In short, recognizing Israel as a Jewish state means giving up the right of return prior to sitting down at the negotiating table. Though this right may some day be surrendered or altered in the final status agreements establishing a Palestinian state, giving it up prior to negotiations severely weakens the Palestinian negotiating team by limiting the amount of tools at their disposal. This is the new reality Israel is hoping to engender before sitting back down at the negotiating table.

The list of consequences in recognizing Israel as a Jewish state is in no way comprehensive, but it does highlight the gravity of this seemingly innocent request. Israel, by returning to the Annapolis process after their initial refusal to do so, is acting as if they are making a concession. By doing so, and fooling the entire international community in the process, they are now asking Palestinians to make the gravest concession of all as a form of perverted reciprocity. Only then will Israel be able to return to a farcical Annapolis process which does not even pretend to lead to anything more than commitments, declarations and endless delay.

It is not a deal that we would accept…

thankfully ma’an news is reporting that the united states will not support this demand of recognizing the zionist entity as a jewish state:

A demand that Palestinians recognize Israel “as the state of the Jewish people” as a condition for resuming peace negotiations is unacceptable to the US, the State Department said this weekend.

The Israeli newspaper Haaretz, quoting statements from the State Department, indicated that the US would not back Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s demand for this recognition.

of course this demand for being recognized as jewish, and therefore somehow as validating their right to continue their oppression of non-jewish (read: palestinian) citizens living on their land under a brutal colonial regime, is also used to leverage their right to be free of all criticism because it better facilitates their conflation of anti-zionism or critiques of their state to anti-semitism. one example of that is the fact that in spite of removing all of the platform issues on palestine from the world conference against racism, the zionist entity, the united states, canada and now austria, and holland are boycotting the durban 2 conference in geneva this week. fabulous nora barrows-friedman explains the context of the removal of palestine from the conference agenda in electronic intifada:

However, two weeks ago, the UN High Commissioner’s office unilaterally cancelled all side-events pertaining to Palestine issues. Ingrid Jarradat-Gassner, director of the BADIL Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights in Bethlehem, one of several Palestine-based organizations attending the Durban Review conference, tells IPS that BADIL and the other NGOs had organized a side-event specifically about how and why they see Israel as a “regime of institutionalized racial discrimination on both sides of the Green Line.”

“As Palestinian NGOs and other NGOs working on the issue of Israel and its violations against the rights of the Palestinian people, we were expecting that there would be a possibility for us to organize these side-events during the official Durban review conference in Geneva,” Jarradat-Gassner says. “We were informed by the UN itself that this would be possible.”

Jarradat-Gassner says that on 3 April, less than three weeks before the Durban Review Conference, the UN High Commissioner’s office called BADIL’s representative in Geneva into a meeting at the UN, and verbally informed her that all side-events pertaining to the specific issue of Palestine and Israel had been banned.

“We were not even informed in any sort of direct of official way. In fact, we have no record of the decision of the UN not to let us work on such side-events,” says Jarradat-Gassner.

According to the UN’s Durban Review Conference agenda, other side-events focusing on indigenous rights, women’s rights and the link between racism and poverty will have an official platform.

Jarradat-Gassner says she knows there is a specific apprehension within the political UN body towards Palestine issues. In the draft document for the Durban Review Conference, she points out, there are particular recommendations for victims of HIV/AIDS, for victims of slave trade, Roma people, people of African descent, but, Jarradat-Gassner says, “there is not a single reference to Palestine, Palestinians or Israel in this whole document.”

BADIL, Al-Haq (a Palestinian human rights organization) and Adalah (the Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel) wrote a joint formal complaint to the UN OHCHR, but have not received any reply. The UN OHCHR did not respond to IPS’s request for a comment either.

Dr. Richard Falk, the United Nations Special Rapporteur for Human Rights in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, tells IPS he had not known about the disallowance of side-events pertaining to Palestine/Israel by the UN’s OHCHR. “One has to assume it was part of an effort to meet the objections of the United States that the event was discrediting to the extent it engaged in ‘Israel-bashing.’” However, Falk points out, “US leverage is probably greater than it has been because Obama is President and Washington has indicated its intention to rejoin the Human Rights Council.”

Palestinian organizations say that banning these side-events is a significant disappointment in pursuing Israel’s legal responsibility towards its actions in Palestine. Dr. Falk echoes this sentiment. “I believe that the strong evidence of Israeli racism during the recent Gaza attacks makes it strange to refuse NGOs organizing side-events to address the issue,” he tells IPS. “Also, the collective punishment aspects of the occupation seem to qualify the Israeli policy as a form of racism, combined with the rise of the extreme right, with [Avigdor] Lieberman as [Israeli] foreign minister.”

Jarradat-Gassner says that within the framework of the Durban Review Conference, the issue of Palestine and Israel should be prominent. “There is an obvious link between colonization and apartheid [in Palestine-Israel]. If you have a settler-colonial regime that comes here to stay, and codifies into law its relationship of domination over the indigenous population, you are entering the field of apartheid … We are talking about what Israel has been practicing over the last 60 years in Palestine.”

as cook mentioned it is zionism that is the thing that must really be defeated in order to really get to a just solution for palestinians. interestingly, the newly launched boycott campaign in lebanon is a campaign that is dedicated to boycotting zionism. antoun issa blogged about our campaign on global voices and a few israeli terrorists are rather perturbed about this, likely because, although they are not clear or honest about their concerns, the logical conclusion to such a campaign is to the destruction of the jewish state. while i won’t quote the israeli terrorists in question, i will quote the response that rania wrote and that i edited and posted. you can click on the link to read and respond further to this discussion:

(1) A visit by Lisa Goldman (illegal that it was) to Lebanon hardly gives her credibility to discuss what is mainstream and what is radical in the country. One can very confidently say that all those who support resistance in Lebanon, who are at least 50 per cent of the country, support “a radical rejectionist ideology about Israel.” We are not the minority, not according to political polls.

(2) Zionism is not too complex of a political ideology. It is the idea that people who adhere to the Jewish religion have a claim to a particular land. The problem, for Zionism, is that, for centuries, Palestinians – of Muslim, Jewish, and Christian faiths – have lived on that land. The predominant interpretation of Zionism is that that particular plot of land, known to Zionists as the land of Israel, belongs only to Jews, and therefore practicing Zionism involves (1) a unity of government and religion; and, much more importantly, (2) a belief in superior laws for one set of people. It is – as was stated in Durban – that Zionism is a form of racism. And indeed as it is practiced in Palestine it is racism. No different from racism in any other part of the world, except for the fact that the world’s 4th largest army is used to murder people and steal their land as a result of this racist ideology.

(3) The idea of boycotting Zionism rather than boycotting Israel is to stress that it is this ideology of racism and occupation that is opposed. Should Israel cease to be a zionist state, should Israel cease to treat Jews one way and non-Jewish Palestinians another way, then the boycott movement would cease as well. It is a similar concept to boycotting apartheid South Africa and not simply boycotting South Africa, a similar concept to opposing segregationist policies in Jim Crow US and not boycotting US.

(4) Boycotting institutions and companies that invest in and support Israel is one effective means to stand in solidarity with Palestinians, and thus stand in solidarity with the struggle for civil and human rights and liberation. It is not the only way, and alone, it does not suffice, but it is one effective method. It has been proven to be one effective method in the struggle for liberating South Africans from apartheid policies. It has already shown itself to be an effective public voice. [You may go to the link in the original post to see our statement for more on this.] Interestingly, Israeli professors like Tanya Reinhart and Ilan Pappe have publicly called for a boycott of Israel.

(5) Lisa Goldman is right to be concerned about a “respected international news agency is being put in a position of giving wide exposure to the views of a minority of bloggers who promote radical ideologies that are based on dubious information,” but she is incorrect about the bloggers themselves. The bloggers that do promote minority viewpoints are those that pretend to speak for peace while promoting racist policies and military occupation and lies and misinformation. So, we all should be concerned when an international news agency does not give equal and fair coverage and does not present the voices of the oppressed.

Setiap makhluk hidup pasti akan mengalami yang namanya mati.

Jika kematian datang menjemput, tentunya adalah harapan dan cita-cita kita semua untuk dapat diterima di sisi Allah SWT.

Tapi hanya manusia yang memiliki hati yang selamat ( qolbun salim ) yang akan diterima di sisi Allah SWT, adapun ciri-ciri hati yang selamat adalah :
1. Hati yang selalu menerima Al Haq ( kebenaran ) yang datang dari Allah SWT tanpa syarat.
2. Hati yang lapang , artinya menerima dengan segala kerelaan / keridoan, apapun yang terjadi, karena semuanya adalah kehendak Allah SWT.
3. Hati yang penuh dengan keimanan, artinya menjalankan segala sesuatu karena keimanan, bukan karena nafsu atau hal yang lainnya.

( dari khutbah Jum’at oleh khotib Ust. Jenal )

Sono bastati due colpi di vernice arancione per scrivere quattro parole: Un muro non basta. La scritta, semplice eppure carica di significati, si vede da lontano, sul Muro di Betlemme. Chi ha lasciato questa traccia non ha aggiunto altro. Parole che aprono domande, che invitano a riflettere, che uniscono e dividono. Parole che sono diventate il titolo di un progetto. Alla fotografia di quella scritta, scattata nel Febbraio 2005, ne sono seguite altre seicento: decine di metri di pellicola fotografica che raccontano centinaia di chilometri del  Muro che divide Israele e Palestina.

Le fotografie raccolte lungo il tracciato del Muro, in un viaggio che ha toccato otto località, dal nord al centro-sud della Cisgiordania sono diventate il punto di partenza del progetto “Un muro non basta” e saranno visibili a Venezia, accompagnate da documenti e testimonianze, da sabato 18 aprile a mercoledì 29 aprile presso la Sala San Leonardo-Canaregio 1584, con la promozione di VIS (volontariato internazionale per lo sviluppo), Città di Venezia (Assessorato per le politiche giovanili e di pace) e Rete Tuttiidirittiumanipertutti.

Sul sito http://unmurononbasta.bethlehem.edu si possono leggere le motivazioni e la storia del progetto:

Durante l’estate [del 2005] il progetto è stato presentato a numerose organizzazioni non governative palestinesi, italiane, israeliane e internazionali, allo scopo di raccogliere un sostegno quanto più ampio e diffuso possibile. Alcune organizzazioni palestinesi hanno deciso di sostenere la campagna con un contributo economico oppure con materiale documentario, che possiedono un valore estremamente significativo. Il contesto palestinese è stato abituato, negli anni, a ricevere dalla comunità internazionale un sostegno economico inversamente proporzionale al sostegno giuridico e politico. Il progetto “Un muro non basta”, nei limiti delle sue possibilità, tenta di muoversi in direzione opposta, coinvolgendo la società civile palestinese nell’allestimento di una campagna che vuole contribuire a documentare i fatti sul terreno con chiarezza, rigore e, soprattutto, buona fede.

Il progetto cerca di arricchire il dibattito sul conflitto israelo-palestinese con un punto di vista che appare decisamente trascurato dai canali d’informazione principali, in occidente. Le violazioni del diritto umanitario prodotte dal Muro sulla vita di centinaia di migliaia di persone – oltre al suo impatto devastante sulle prospettive di formazione di uno Stato palestinese – debbono essere percepite in tutta la loro gravità, anche alla luce del parere consultivo rilasciato dalla Corte Internazionale di Giustizia.

Il progetto parla del Muro senza alcuna pretesa di stabilire torti o ragioni universali, senza farsi offuscare da una passionalità rabbiosa. Ne parla per affermare il diritto ad un’informazione completa, per gettare luce su uno dei nodi che alimentano la tensione moderna tra oriente e occidente, per rivendicare il potere della società civile di essere partecipe e consapevole.

Un muro non basta per risolvere il conflitto, non è la chiave giusta. Sono in tanti, da una parte e dall’altra, a trovarsi d’accordo su quelle quattro parole arancioni. E allora, forse, potremmo partire da loro per costruire un vero dialogo di pace .

L’invito all’inaugurazione della mostra, che si terrà sabato 18 aprile alle ore 18.00, è aperto a tutti; interverrà Grazia Careccia, ricercatrice presso la ONG AL-HAQ per i diritti umani nei territori occupati. A seguire cous-cous e thé alla menta e altri prodotti palestinesi a cura del Mercato Equo e Solidale. La mostra, ad ingresso gratuito, sarà aperta tutti i giorni con il seguente orario: dalle ore 15.00 alle ore 19.00. Per le scuole c’è anche la possibilità di una visita guidata alla mostra e di percorsi di educazione alla pace al mattino. Per informazioni e prenotazioni: Centro Pace 041.2747645/329.2105581. Vedi la locandina della mostra.

Un muro non basta
per decidere chi ha ragione e chi ha torto
per tracciare un confine arbitrario
per dettare la legge del più forte.

Uno muro non basta
per nascondere un orizzonte alla sua terra
per costruire una gabbia attorno a una nazione
per dimenticare quello che c’è dall’altra parte.

Un muro non basta
a cancellare il diritto all’autodeterminazione dei popoli
per impedire a due volti di incrociare lo sguardo
per sbarrare il passo a chi ha voglia di conoscere.

Grazie a bugaz per la foto.

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ethan bronner, the tool of the israeli terrorist regime, who writes propaganda pieces supporting their terrorism for the new york times, did a profile on the israeli terrorist mayor of al quds the other day. here is how bronner characterized the massive land confiscation creating new palestinian refugees:

In several East Jerusalem neighborhoods these days, demolition orders are being issued. The result is that while Mr. Barkat is bringing a sense of modern renewal and entrepreneurial spirit to City Hall, he is also infuriating those who wish to see Jerusalem shared as the capital of two states.

Mr. Barkat speaks of his efforts in East Jerusalem as if they were in any normal city. He wants to expand public areas for both Jews and Palestinians, make room for schools and generally clean up what he calls the “wild East.”…

The houses Mr. Barkat plans to tear down were built illegally, and that, he says, is his sole motive. He is doing the same for illegal construction in predominantly Jewish West Jerusalem and offers numbers to prove it. About a third of the tearing down is indeed in the West.

Palestinians and their advocates say they can build only illegally because Israel almost never grants them legal permits, to keep their numbers down and make sure there remains a strong Jewish majority in Jerusalem. The city has nearly 800,000 inhabitants, about 270,000 of them Palestinian.

The biggest controversy involves Silwan, the area just southeast of the walled Old City where some 7,500 Palestinians live, mostly in buildings without permits. Mr. Barkat wants to turn the area into an archaeological park, the City of David and the Garden of King Solomon, where he says King David wrote poetry, and other great historical figures wandered quietly.

“For 3,000 years, that area has been green,” he asserts. “Now there are 100 buildings that are illegal there. We want to return it to being a park.”

Palestinians see it otherwise.

“They start with one building and then they take away a whole neighborhood,” asserted Nafez Ghith, a 39-year-old souvenir shop owner whose family homes in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood are under demolition order. “He has been in office only a few months, and we see what he wants to do. They leave us no legal alternative.”

Mr. Barkat has appointed an old friend, Yakir Segev, to be in charge of East Jerusalem. In an interview with a local newspaper, Mr. Segev said: “Jerusalem is a laboratory. If we succeed in solving the conflict with the Arabs of Jerusalem, it will also be possible to solve it everywhere in Israel.”

What Mr. Segev, like Mr. Barkat, means is both improving services for the Palestinians and ending any ambiguity about Jewish dominance. And to that end, they have expressed strong support for more Jewish building to the east of the city, which Palestinians say could end any prospect for a two-state solution.

i think that perhaps bronner doesn’t understand barkat. when israeli terrorists say “clean up” what they mean is “transfer,” ethnic cleansing, forced removal of the indigenous population. thus, his comment about “cleaning up the wild east” is a direct allusion to how white americans “cleaned up” what they called the “wild west,” a place that used to be populated with many american indian tribes, but that cowboys “cleaned up” (read: massacre and forced removal) in order to colonize the land. what barkat is doing in al quds is exactly the same. who do you think the israeli terrorists learned it from? likewise, bronner doesn’t get it when he talks about al quds as a laboratory. what he means there is not about literally cleaning up the city: he means that if they succeed in forcing out the indigenous population of palestinians they will continue until there are none left.

to be sure, mondoweiss posted something on their blog the other day that makes it abundantly clear what barkat and his terrorist cohorts are up to as they are actively recruiting colonizers from the united states:

The JTA is reporting that Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat is coming to the US to drum up support among American Jews for his plans for the city. He hopes to find Jewish “shareholders” for several special economic zones that will focus on culture, life sciences and tourism.

The JTA article doesn’t make it clear whether any of these economic zones will be in East Jerusalem. However it is widely known that one of the areas that Barkat wants to “develop” is the Palestinian neighborhood Silwan, which he is currently threatening with a series of home demolitions to force at least 1,000 Palestinians out of the area. Hillary Clinton criticized him for this plan on her last visit to the region. Here is how he is responding to the criticism on his trip:

Barkat, who favors settling Jews in Silwan — several dozen families have moved into the largely Arab area in recent years — rejects such criticism and says the people who live there will be relocated.

“If you have a group of people trying to plan housing in Central Park, what do you think Mayor Bloomberg would do?” Barkat asked rhetorically. “And this park has more importance than Central Park because of its historical significance.”

…This site often brings up the issue of how American Jews are implicated in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This is often thorough their tacit ideological support for Israeli expansionism and militarism, but sometimes it is explicit participation. One example is the new settlement Nof Zion, which is located in the East Jerusalem neighborhood Jabal Al Mukabir, and is being marketed as a luxury destination for diaspora Jews. The website http://www.nofzion.co.il was set up to sell the settlement to American Jews, and gives the contact information for Gita Galbut, the US sales representative based in Miami. The image above (click to enlarge) is from that website. Nof Zion is located between Silwan and Jabal Al Mukabir, severing a crucial point of continuity between Palestinian communities in East Jerusalem. This continuity is essential if East Jerusalem is ever to become the capital of a Palestinian state next to Israel in a two-state solution.

when you read mondoweiss’ report you begin to understand what it is happening is the ethnic cleansing operation that bronner white washes. if you can’t read bronner’s writing and see how he covers up the agenda (which clearly is also his agenda and the agenda of the new york times) then read this report by ghassan bannoura about the house demolitions in al quds that took place last wednesday:

One house, two bedouin huts and an animal shed owned by Palestinians near Jerusalem city were demolished on Wednesday by the Israeli authorities.

All the demolitions took place in al-Eziryiah, a Palestinian town just outside East Jerusalem.

The home, owned by Rabie’ al-Qamari, was demolished on Wednesday midday. Rabie’ told IMEMC that he had all the necessary papers for his home. “They came today with bulldozers and demolished my home. When my son asked them about the demolition order, they attacked him and beat him up. I have all the required papers for my home; the area is under Palestinian control so they have no right to demolish my home.”

Witnesses said that municipality bulldozers from the nearby Israeli settlement of Ma’ali Adomem demolished the house. The municipality told al-Qamari that his home is in an Israeli controlled area. “I have maps showing that my house is located in the Palestinian controlled area; it is not even close to the settlement, so they have no right to do this,” Rabie’ al-Qamari said.

“Before building the house I went to the Israeli army civil administration and they told me the area is controlled by the Palestinian authority and not by them,” al-Qamari added. Earlier on Wednesday morning, the Israeli Army demolished two bedouin huts and an animal shed that belong to Palestinians from al-Eziryiah.

The army told the owners that it was built in an area where the separation wall will be built. The owner, Kaled al-Jahaleen, told IMEMC that the army gave him no warning. “They came today without any warnings and demolished the structures. They did not allow us to move our stuff first.” al-Jahaleen said.

In related news, Hateem Abed al-Qader, Jerusalem Affairs Adviser to the Palestinian Prime Minister, announced on Wednesday that Israelis have handed out 80 new demolition orders for homes owned by Palestinians in Jerusalem city. On Tuesday, bulldozers belonging to the Israeli municipality demolished a Palestinian owned home, located in the Beit Safafa neighborhood of the city.

The flat is part of a seven story-high building owned by Abu Khalaf, a Palestinian from Jerusalem. Israeli troops arrived at Beit Safafa on Tuesday morning and surround the building. Shortly after, troops forced everyone out and demolished the seventh floor. The Israeli municipality says the flat was built without the necessary permission.

Israel has intensified its campaign of demolishing Palestinian-owned homes in the city since the start of 2009. The Jerusalem municipality handed out demolition orders to 96 Palestinian families in the first week of March. In February, demolition orders were issued for 88 homes in the al-Bustan neighborhood, located immediately south of the Al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem’s old city. If these orders are carried out, thousands more Palestinians will become homeless.

this week ma’an news reported that barkat is determined to keep his pledge to create new palestinian refugees:

The Israeli mayor of Jerusalem said he would press forward with a plan to raze an entire Palestinian neighborhood and “relocate” more than 1,000 residents to make way for a park on Thursday.

Mayor Nir Barkat told the Israeli Jerusalem Post newspaper that the Bustan area near Jerusalem’s Old City “must be an open public area.” The Israeli-controlled municipality has handed down demolition orders to 88 houses in the neighborhood.

“It is very fair to assume that [in the end] there will not be residential housing,” in the Bustan area, Barkat said.

According to the Post, Fakhri Abu Diab, a member of the committee organizing opposition to the demolitions, said that he had been approached by a member of the Jerusalem municipal council with an offer to move Bustan’s inhabitants en masse to another area of East Jerusalem.

Residents of Bustan say that they are not going to give up their land. Many homeowners in the area have documents dating back decades that prove ownership of their land.

of course we know who really has been on this land for thousands of years and who it belongs to, but it seems as if there are new layers of evidence and proof in turkey as ha’aretz reports:

A document recently uncovered in Ottoman archives in Ankara confirms that Palestinians are the owners of disputed land and houses in East Jerusalem.

If an Israeli court accepts the document’s validity, Palestinian families’ could be saved from eviction from their homes.

Turkish officials recently helped to trace the document which could end a 30-year-old dispute over the ownership of around 30 buildings in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood.

The Palestinians’ attorneys said they were granted access to the archives following the recent souring of the relations between Israel and Turkey.

“Until half a year ago the Turks didn’t want to spoil their relations with Israel and were unhelpful,” attorney Hatam Abu Ahmed said. “They would put us off with all kinds of excuses. Today their attitude has changed. We felt this change especially after the Gaza operation. Now senior Turkish officials are helping us.”

In January, attorney Salah Abu Hussein traveled to Turkey and with the help of local officials found a document proving that the Jews demanding the Palestinians’ eviction are not the compound’s rightful owners.

The present residents had lived in West Jerusalem before the War of Independence and after becoming refugees were moved to Sheikh Jarrah. In the ’70s the Sephardic Leadership in Jerusalem claimed they had purchased the land before the war and produced Turkish documents to that effect.

The courts eventually recognized the Sephardic Leadership’s ownership but granted the Palestinians protected tenants’ status.

However, the Sephardic Leadership and a group of settlers who moved into the nearby compound have been demanding the Palestinians’ eviction, claiming they violated their rental terms.

Over the years, several Palestinian families were evicted and other families moved into their houses. The last eviction took place in November 2008 when the al-Kurd family was evicted from its home and moved into a protest tent near its sealed house. Shortly afterward the father, Mohamed al-Kurd died of an illness.

Throughout the years, the Palestinians claimed that the Jews’ ownership documents were forged, but due to the Turks’ lack of cooperation they could not prove this and the courts rejected their suits.

Now the attorneys say the Ottoman document proves that the Sephardic Leadership never purchased the compound but only rented it. Another Ottoman document confirms that the document presented by the Jewish party is not authentic.

“There is no trace of the Jewish document in the archive,” said Abu Hussein.

The attorneys Wednesday asked the court to withhold eviction procedures against two Palestinian families, on the basis of the Turkish document.

The about face in Turkish policy could have far-reaching implications regarding lands in Israel.

“Now it will be possible to issue ownership deeds. The Turks are very well organized and helpful,” Abu Ahmed said.

Attorney Ilan Shemer, who represents the Sephardic Leadership, dismissed the Palestinian attorneys’ claims regarding Palestinian ownership of the land.

“It’s usually the other side that uses false documents. The document we have is the only authentic ownership deed. Since the hearings began, 50 to 60 judges have heard the case and they all ruled that their claims are false.”

of course if laws and legality matter to israeli colonists then they wouldn’t be here in the first place, but it is important nevertheless for palestinians to have access to these documents. and of course for now it seems the documents are only for one area of al quds, but who knows what else exists in the turkish files.

but it is not only homes that israeli terrorists are intent on destroying. they have also been actively intent on destroying palestinian culture. this weekend was the beginning of the festival for al quds as a capitol of arab culture. and israeli terrorists stopped not only these celebrations, but also the mother’s day celebrations on saturday as al jazeera reported:

it seems that it is dangerous for children to not only celebrate their culture, but also their mothers. i guess this makes sense when you see the tshirts that israeli terrorists wear here. ayman mohyeldin reported on the tshirts for al jazeera today and you can see the tshirts in the report, including the one that brags about killing 2 people with 1 bullet (meaning they especially enjoy murdering palestinian women who are pregnant):

this is “israeli culture” as you can see in mohyeldin’s report. palestinians, who actually have a very rich culture which you can see in every square inch of palestine, even those areas israeli terrorists are intent on destroying, is threatening for these colonizers. what they don’t steal, they destroy. nevertheless, palestinians are continuing with their celebrations, albeit many of the activities cannot be in al quds because most palestinians are not allowed to go there. but those who do celebrate are finding themselves injured and kidnapped by israeli terrorists as ghassan bannoura reports:

During Israeli police forces crackdown on an activity organized in East Jerusalem on Monday after noon celebrating “Jerusalem Capital of Arab Culture 2009″, five were injured and eight kidnapped.

The activity was a press conference to announce the continuation of the events for the rest of this year, after the Israeli Interior Ministry announced on Friday that it will stop the event from taking place in Jerusalem city.

Local organizations and community leaders gathered at a protest tent, originally erected at the Shikh Jarah, a Palestinian neighborhood, outside the walls of the old city. The tent was in protest of Israeli diction to demolish Palestinian owned homes there.

Rima Awwad, from the Jerusalem Collation, a group of local NGOs, was their at the press conference, she told IMEMC that” the press conference was about to start, Israeli police stormed the tent and attacked everyone including journalists, they took right people among them on critically injured.”

” Abber Abu Khader, a local organizer, was badly beaten up, she was bleeding from her head and face with the police took her, we were only making a pres conference.” Awwad added.

Among those injured were Hamza Al Na’jee, a Cameraman for Pal-media press, and among those kidnapped were Raed Salah, head of the Islamic Movement inside the green line.

the crackdown on palestinians’ culture is not limited to al quds–it is also happening in 1948 palestine as al jazeera reports:

Israeli police have prevented Palestinians in occupied East Jerusalem from holding events to mark the city’s designation as “capital of Arab culture” for 2009.

About 20 Palestinians were detained in and around East Jerusalem on Saturday, but there were no reports of violence, Shmulik Ben-Ruby, a police spokesman, said.

Police reinforcements were deployed around the city and barricades were set up on routes to the al-Aqsa mosque, Islam’s third holiest site.

Witnesses said that flags and banners associated with the event were confiscated.

At one school, police and soldiers burst balloons in the colours of the Palestinian flag that the children were trying to release to mark the event.

Hatem Abdel Qader, who handles Jerusalem affairs for the Palestinian Authority, was reportedly among those arrested.

Ben-Ruby said the crackdown had been ordered by Israel’s internal security ministry because the celebrations violated understandings with the Palestinian Authority.

Celebrations in Nazareth, Israel’s largest Arab city, were also cancelled by the police.

“This measure is yet another example of the many extreme policies that the various ministries in the Israeli government impose on us,” one event organiser told Al Jazeera.

“These measures are imposed on all artists and people who care about culture. This is a form of prevention of our freedom of expression.

imran garda is on al jazeera’s “inside story” right now discussing this issue and i will post that later when it becomes available. they are showing the palestinian balloons that israeli terrorists were very worried about and didn’t want them released, and once they were they shot many of them down.

al haq released a statement on this and published it in electronic intifada, which reads, in part:

The decision to interfere with the Palestinian cultural events was taken by the Minister of Internal Security at the behest of the head of the Legal Forum for the Land of Israel, Nachi Eyal, who described the planned events as an “attempt to demonstrate Palestinian sovereignty in Jerusalem in an illegal manner,” and asserted that Palestinians are obliged “to respect the sovereignty of Israel within the boundaries of the State of Israel, including East Jerusalem.” This patently contradicts clear international legal norms which provide that an Occupying Power is prohibited from extending its sovereignty over the territory it occupies. It is on this basis that the UN Security Council has held Israel’s annexation of occupied East Jerusalem to be “invalid,” and “null and void.” This position has been repeatedly affirmed by the international legal community, including the International Court of Justice, the International Committee of the Red Cross and the High Contracting Parties to the Geneva Conventions.

Indeed, East Jerusalem is incontrovertibly recognized under international law as an integral part of the occupied territory over which the Palestinian people is entitled to exercise its right to self-determination. A foundational principle of international human rights law, the right to self-determination includes the right of peoples to freely pursue their cultural development. The individual rights to freedom of expression, freedom of association and peaceful assembly are also firmly embedded in the lexicon of international human rights law, and have all been violated by the actions of the Israeli authorities in East Jerusalem.

The Israeli authorities have also issued orders preventing related cultural events in Nazareth from taking place, a decision which stands in stark contrast to the permission recently granted by the Israeli High Court of Justice to extremist Israeli settler Baruch Marzel, from the illegal settlement of Tel Rumeida (Hebron), to lead a march through the Palestinian town of Umm al-Fahm on 24 March.

Such double standards show a clear intent on the part of the Israeli authorities to stifle Palestinian cultural identity and expression, while at the same time fomenting provocative manifestations of extremist Israeli ideology.

Al-Haq calls on the international community to:

* Strongly condemn Israel’s illegal measures aimed at altering the status of occupied East Jerusalem and denying the exercise of Palestinian cultural and political rights towards fulfillment of the right to self-determination; and

* Take concrete action towards ending the illegal situation created by Israel’s policies in regard to East Jerusalem, including by refraining from providing any direct or indirect assistance to Israeli violations of international law therein

the white washing clearly extends to far more than forced removal of palestinians from their land. it is a full on erasure of a people, a culture, a land. the is pure zionism. is there any doubt that zionism = racism?

view of ramallah's manara square at 6 am

in 30 minutes, if i go by palestinian time, i will be 40 years old (probably before i finish writing this). if i go by my home town of los angeles i’ve still got about 10 hours left. in any case i suppose it is a milestone. i’m not really one to celebrate my birthday. but it does seem strange to turn 40 especially when i don’t look like i’m 40 (and often still get carded in the u.s.) and when i don’t feel like i’m 40. though today i remembered one of the ways that one knows one is getting older: you think your body can do the same things it did when you were 20 or even 30 and it just doesn’t quite work the same. you’ll see what i mean below as i explain. i went down to ramallah last night and friends took me out to dinner at darna and i had all kinds of kibbe and other yummy food, including a lovely chocolate birthday cake. i had asked an old friend of mine in ramallah if he would do something with me for my birthday (not the cake and dinner actually): i wanted him to get up at 5:30 in the morning with me to go on a hike. anyone who knows this friend (hint, hint laila) knows that it is a huge sacrifice for him to do this (he is like me, normally up until 3 or 4 am working, often falling asleep on the couch after/while working. we had been talking about doing this for a while.

in beit rima

raja shahedeh, the writer and lawyer who founded al haq, wrote a book a couple of years ago called palestinian walks. since writing this book–or actually before it–he started taking groups on these “walks” (having been on one now i think the name should be changed to palestinian hikes. since he is based in ramallah they seem to do these hikes around this area so they meet on friday mornings at 6:30 am in the center of ramallah. he doesn’t always come, and he did not come today, but many of his friends were there guiding us who, like shehedeh, have been hiking in these hills for at least 25 years. here is shehedeh sharing some photographs and narrating his love of hiking in palestine:

and here is an interesting report from jacky rowland on al jazeera from a couple of years ago when the book came out. she went on one of these walks with him and they encountered israeli terrorists along the way (something that happens frequently, though we did not encounter them today):

i was especially happy that we chose today to go on the hike because my birthday happens to be on the first day of spring and we have already seen a number of signs of spring in the lovely wildflowers all over palestine. but of course i knew that on foot we would see so many more varieties. after meeting up with the rest of the group in manara square we got into two services and drove for about 20 minutes to beit rima where we would begin our journey. (last night sami told me that this village is a very famous village for its communism, something one could happily glean from the graffiti on the walls.) like most of palestine the hike meant moving down into the valley and then circling around and climbing up to the top again to reach kufr ‘ain.

the hiking begins!

i had imagined that some of it would be a bit treacherous because of the rocky terrain. but little did i know how challenging some of this would be. initially it was a lovely stroll and all of us constantly stopping to take photographs of the beautiful flowers and herbs along the hillside. hanan ashrawi’s husband, emile, was on this trip with us and he is a professional photographer so he was cataloging everything. the olive trees were also amazing, of course, on so many levels as you can see from some of the shots here. one of my students is writing her research paper on the symbolism of the olive tree in palestine and something so simple struck me today as i saw some of these ancient, sturdy trees clinging to the land: one of the reasons they are such an important symbol is because they embody the steadfastness of the palestinian people. no matter what these trees are here to stay. the israeli terrorists can continue to uproot them, but palestinians will replant them again and again. and in the end the olive trees will outlive these colonists just as they outlived the british and the ottomans.

a view of the valley

because of all the picture taking at some point our group broke into two. but our group didn’t realize it because we had a couple of the group leaders in our group. and we actually thought that we were in the middle and that part of the group was behind us. we had to catch up with them which is when the real hiking and climbing began. a lot of the time when hiking in these hills you can manage, most of the time, by doing so in an s-shape so that you follow the slope and you don’t have to climb. but because we were rushing now to catch up, we had to cut across the landscape in a way that meant we had to do some climbing. and i mean some really steep climbing. (this is when i knew my body was not quite the same any more in terms of being able to just jump or reach and climb easily with all my joints cooperating.) all of these hills are terraced with stones, as you can see in the shots showing a view. this is how palestinians have kept their olive groves for centuries. but i have a new found respect for the difficulty of doing such work now. especially since some of those terraced stones helped us climb up some very steep hills.

samidoun zeitoun

it took us a while to find the rest of the group. we actually had to do some extra climbing up to another mountain top to try to see the rest of the group and also to see if our voices would echo across the valley so we could find them that way. we finally found them and they had built a fire and laid out a lovely picnic spread and served tea. (the teapot was amazing–all charred and black as it has obviously been used on these hikes quite a bit.) after a rest we continued our hike. it seemed like the more we hiked the more beautiful wildflowers we discovered. and, of course, lots of za’tar and marimiyya dotted the landscape. most of us picked some to bring home to eat and drink.

flowers blossoming in an olive tree

the rest of the hike was not quite as treacherous as the first part–even the climb into kufr ‘ain was not too bad, not too steep. when we arrived we walked to the center of town where families were out working in their fields and on their land, where children were playing, and we caught services back into ramallah. the weather was so perfect today–not quite warm, but just right for hiking. really a beautiful day. i saw the best that spring has to offer. and despite our exhaustion (i forgot to mention that we were up until 2 am last night and woke up at 5:30 am this morning) we had an amazing time.

when hiking turns to climbing (straight up from below)

so now it is midnight. if i count by a palestinian clock i am 40. i did not get to celebrate my birthday with all my friends thursday night and today. mostly because even in the west bank travel is too difficult so everyone stays in their own bantustans (i actually found out that one of my students has never been to or through huwara checkpoint in her twenty years of life in nablus). if i had had birthday candles on my cake last night instead of one of those sparkler things i would have wished what i always wish for: haq al awda. for the right of return of palestinian refugees and for the liberation of their land 100%. part of this wish, i must confess, i selfish, however. i want to be able to be here in palestine with all my friends, with all the people i love from lebanon and palestine in the same room. that would be a beautiful birthday beyond my wildest dreams. to that end i have asked that if people want to give me anything for my 40th birthday i would love it if they would make a donation to the middle east children’s alliance to continue its work in refugee camps and also for the rebuilding the islamic university of gaza. to donate, please click on this link. their work to fight for the rights of refugees is unparalleled and their work is based on complete solidarity with the people; unlike most such organizations they do not treat palestinians as if they are some charity case whom the white man needs to save.

break for tea

but today is not just my birthday. it is mother’s day in the arab world. it is also norooz in iran. it is also the anniversary of the american invasion of iraq. and it is also the anniversary of the sharpeville massacre in apartheid south africa:

But whatever doubts there may be of the sequence of events in those fateful minutes, there can be no argument over the devastating consequences of the action of the police on March 21, 1960, in Sharpeville. Sixty-nine people were killed, including eight women and ten children, and of the 180 people who were wounded, thirty-one were women and nineteen were children. According to the evidence of medical practitioners it is clear that the police continued firing after the people began to flee: for, while thirty shots had entered the wounded or killed from the front of their bodies no less than 155 bullets had entered the bodies of the injured and killed from their backs. All this happened in forty seconds, during which time 705 rounds were fired from revolvers and sten guns. But whatever weapons were used the massacre was horrible. Visiting the wounded the next day in Baragwanath Hospital near Johannesburg, I discovered youngsters, women and elderly men among the injured. These could not be described as agitators by any stretch of the imagination. For the most part they were ordinary citizens who had merely gone to the Sharpeville police station to see what was going on. Talking with the wounded I found that everyone was stunned and mystified by what had taken place. They had certainly not expected that anything like this would happen. All agreed that there was no provocation for such savage action by the police. Indeed, they insisted that the political organisers who had called for the demonstration had constantly insisted that there should be no violence or fighting.

haidar eid reminds us that this massacre, however, was a significant turning point to end apartheid and he connects this with the savagery in gaza, which he sees as a turning point as well (i have quoted this before a few times, click the link to see the connections between the two):

The horror of the racist apartheid regime in South Africa was challenged with a sustained campaign of boycott, divestment and sanctions initiated in 1958 and given new urgency in 1960 after the Sharpeville Massacre. This campaign led ultimately to the collapse of white rule in 1994 and the establishment of a multi-racial, democratic state.

an old palestinian home in the hills close to kufr 3ain

one can only hope that the end is near of the zionist entity. i just hope it is not another 30 years as it was from sharpeville to the end of apartheid. because of this anniversary it seems that my birthday is also something else that is pretty cool as outlined in this email i received from badil today:

March 21 was selected as the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination because it is the day in 1960 when police forces killed 69 people at a peaceful demonstration against the apartheid “pass law” system in Sharpeville, South Africa.

Today an equal if not more extensive pass law system dominates the Occupied Palestinian Territory. It is briefly described in a February 2009 UN report, which attests to the existence of 626 checkpoints and obstacles to movement throughout the West Bank. Israel additionally disregards the 2004 Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice calling for the dismantlement of Israel’s illegal wall, which snakes over 700 kilometers through the West Bank, stealing its natural resources and dividing Palestinian communities from one another.

Indeed, Israel’s system of racial discrimination is fundamental to the regime it has imposed on the Palestinian people. It denies the return of over seven million Palestinian refugees to the homes and lands from which they were expelled over the past sixty years despite the fact that return is a right enshrined in international law and affirmed by UN General Assembly Resolution 194 (1948) and UN Security Council Resolution 237 (1967). Meanwhile, Israel grants full citizenship to any Jewish individual through its discriminatory ‘Law of Return.’ This same regime relegates Palestinian citizens of Israel to an inferior status as the ‘non Jewish’ citizens of ‘the Jewish state.’ The effects of this discrimination include ongoing forced displacement, land confiscation, and denial of essential services such as health and education.

The UN’s Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of racial discrimination, Mr. Githu Muigai recently noted that “History speaks for itself. Genocide, ethnic cleansing and other war crimes have been traditionally linked to the emergence of exclusionary ideologies based on race or ethnicity.” Zionism, the movement to create and maintain a
Jewish state on the land of Palestine, is such an ideology, systematically relegating non-Jewish Palestinians to an inferior status.

The recent brutality inflicted upon the Gaza Strip resulting in over 1,400 deaths, 5,000 injuries and 14,000 homes damaged and destroyed, is the latest manifestation of the contempt with which Palestinian life is regarded by Israel.

Perhaps more important than recollecting the extensive evidence incriminating Israel’s discrimination and its disastrous affects on the Palestinians is to shed light on the popular mobilizations fighting to counter it.

Governmental inaction towards Israel’s crimes is increasingly being met with a determined and growing popular campaign to build an international Boycott, Divest and Sanction (BDS) movement against Israel, based upon a 2005 call by broad sectors of Palestinian civil society. Consciously using the tools of the South African anti-apartheid struggle, this
campaign seeks to make important advances at the Israel Review Conference being organized by the BDS National Committee, to be held in Geneva, Switzerland on 18-19 April, two days before the launching of the UN Durban Review Conference (See: http://israelreview.bdsmovement.net).

Now is the time for people of conscience to join arms through the struggle of BDS to ensure Israel is held accountable for its violation of Palestinian human rights. This is part of the tradition of the Montgomery Bus Boycott for civil rights in the U.S south, and the dock workers of Denmark and the U.K, who refused to handle South African cargo as an act of protest against Apartheid. From these previous people’s victories we gain inspiration knowing that no serious effort to
eliminate racial discrimination can take place on a global scale without progress on this front.

me at 40

so i feel no different at 40 than 39, not that i thought i would. but as with every year of my life i feel more committed to a liberated palestine as my sole desire. i want the beauty of this land that i walked on today to be enjoyed, inhabited by the people i love in the camps in lebanon. i want all these colonies to go away, to be dismantled, including those we had to drive by on our way home (see below–including the last one, which is an “outpost,” meaning a new and growing colony for israeli terrorists). i want this land to be theirs again. from the river to the sea.

chickens in kufr 'ain

israeli terrorist colony near kufr 'ain

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