american in palestine

why would you want to live in....PALESTINE??!!

2006-12-11T00:57:00.000-08:00

sometimes people ask me, or wonder, why I would choose to live in palestine, given the violence and occupation.....why would anyone want to live in a place like that?? they ask....

but i think in such a question there is something missing - the value of the culture of the palestinian people is utterly negated when one equates the whole reality of palestine with the fact of the israeli occupation and ongoing illegal seizure of the land. and in fact, it is a rich, deep and beautiful culture, with a long history and a deep connectedness to this land.

i wake up in the mornings and open my door to the view of an ancient olive grove. occasionally a shepherd is there, grazing his sheep, in permanent timeless peace, in the midst of this war. if i look a little further, i can glimpse the church that is built on the spot where the shepherds were reputed to have seen the star of bethlehem some 2000 years ago.....it's easy to be transported to that time, with the ancient stone buildings, the shepherds and the olive trees.....how much has really changed in this spot since that time?

it's amazing to experience the kind of historical continuity that exists in a place like this, where people are connected to their land and to their ancestors, who are buried in the same ground that is now giving their children their roots.

it's something we don't really have in the US -- some native americans are making noble and somewhat desperate attempts to retain their continuity in ancestry and connection to the land -- but their efforts are often brutalized, beaten down and discarded by the federal government that now controls 99% of what was once their ancestors' land.

there is a kind of peace in this feeling of historical continuity. it's beautiful here, and ancient. all around me are my husbands' family - layers and layers of them - from the innermost circle, within the family's multi-layered home, where his brothers live, and his parents, each in their own section, but connected.....to the surrounding circle of uncles, aunts and cousins, and outward to the extended family that stretches on for kilometers. the family elders have a traditional governing system, which in many ways resembles the tribal system i saw and experienced when i lived in africa. if there is any disagreement or incident involving members of different families, the elders of those families will meet together with those involved to try to get to the bottom of the problem, and come to a fair resolution that is acceptable to all.

family is very important here - people usually live among their extended family, and siblings tend to be close with each other through adulthood. every day there are visits - i don't think a day has gone by without at least one relative or friend visiting. and there doesn't have to be a reason to visit, either.....if someone is passing in the area, they will inevitably stop by to say hello and have a cup of coffee.

there are lots of subtle, nuanced traditions in palestinian culture -- and LOTS of feasts (ie. celebrations/traditional holidays), and feasts leading up to feasts.....any excuse to get together with family....in a palestinian wedding, for example, there are traditionally five parties (sometimes more), and that's just for the wedding, it doesn't count the 2 or 3 parties that accompany an engagement! each of the wedding parties has a specific traditional significance -- there is the gathering at the groom's home, with the close relatives, in which there is drumming and singing, traditional song and dance. then a more formal, larger family party, usually in a hall.....there is the henna ceremony, in which the women gather at the bride's home in traditional dresses, perch the girl up on a table and sing traditional songs while they paint her hands with henna dye (a plant-based dye, used in the US for hair coloring). and for the groom, there is a ceremony where the men put him on a table and cut his hair and give him a shave, in preparation for the big day (which usually ends up in a big mess of shaving cream sprayed and smeared on the groom and all his friends). and the big post-wedding party is itself full of nuanced traditions - from the stop at the groom's home between the ceremony in the party, at which time relatives beat the man with sticks (symbolically of course), and the couple enters their home for the first time, with a sprig of basil stuck into bread dough stuck on the side of the door for good luck, to the brandishing of a sword to cut the wedding cake, to a candle ceremony where all the young women accompany the bride in a dance holding candles, while the bride herself holds two.

and it is not just in weddings and formal occasions that subtle and complex traditions exist. in the wearing of the kaffia (traditional headscarf, which most americans tend to associate with the late yassar arafat), there are a number of traditions. one that i find interesting is that if someone is in trouble, if they have made a problem with someone and are on the run, they can enter a household and tie a knot in the corner of the house elder's kaffia. if the man on the run manages to do that, he is then under that family's protection, and they will be obligated to take his case to the council of elders.

there are lots of small things like this - and many that are unknown to me, I'm sure. the culture of palestine is rich and dynamic. traditional dancing, dabke, is popular among young people, and is a beautiful and complex foot-stamping dance that is amazing to watch. traditional music, in the form of the oud (the precursor to the guitar) and flute, abounds as well.

palestinian culture is a trust culture, that is, relationships are built on trust -- another refreshing difference from the fear culture which characterizes the U.S. (although there are some subcultures within the U.S. that vary from this norm). In the U.S., relationships are based on fear - fear of being betrayed, fear of losing - people come up with complex contracts in order to protect themselves from loss, complex systems of laws and regulations that are all based on the basic premise that other people, and their motives, are to be feared and not trusted. small-town america is a bastion of the 'fear of the outsider' -- if you are _in_, then great, you're accepted and etc. .....but if an 'outsider' comes in, they are immediately suspect....and it takes a lot of work and time for that outsider to be accepted, and even when they are accepted, if something bad happens in that town, it is the 'outsider' who will be the first suspect -- no matter how long they've been in town and how well they have proven themselves.

here it is different. an outsider is a welcome sight -- people welcome the outsider into their homes, and consider it an honor for that person to drink coffee or tea, or eat food with them in their home. people trust each other (and in many cases, in the current circumstances, _have_ to trust each other, having been surrounded by this prison wall and forced into extraordinary suffering by the occupying force).

there are so many examples of the way this culture of trust differs from the culture of fear that permeates life in the US. today, for example, i had the rather annoying experience of having my bank card get eaten by the atm machine in ramallah. of course, it happened on a sunday evening, when the bank was closed. this is something that could easily happen in the united states. but here's what happened next, and how i believe this culture differs from that of the states. standing next to the machine, trying to get it to eject the card, other people who wanted to use the machine approached, and i told them what happened, pointing out the screen saying 'this machine is currently out of service'. they didn't just walk away when i showed them this, as people would have done in the states, they immediately tried to help me get my card out. and one of the guys who was nearby said, "hang on, i have a friend who works at the bank here, let me call him." so he got on his cell phone and within a few minutes, his friend the bank employee showed up to help. he wasn't able to get the card out either, and since it was a sunday, wouldn't be able to retrieve it until the bank opened monday morning. but he didn't just leave it at that. he withdrew money from his own account and gave it to me, with only his account number and name written on a piece of paper (so i could transfer it to his account monday morning) as assurance that he would get the money back. i never met the man before, and he didn't know me either. but he trusted that the situation was what i said it was, and lent me the money i was trying to withdraw from the machine, and i trusted that i would find him in the bank come monday morning, and get his assistance in retrieving the card from the machine.

now, even if something like this happened in the states, i'm afraid that i would be untrusting enough to consider it some kind of elaborate scam -- that somehow these guys had rigged the machine, and were giving me some money in order to rip me off for more......but here, that is not the way things work, and, whether cynical americans believe it or not (it took me awhile to get it through my own thick skull), most people here genuinely want to help, and are willing to help each other in this way, and many, many others.

sometimes american women ask me if i am not bothered by the sexism in the mainly muslim culture here. now, i will not deny that there is sexism, but it is a very different form of sexism than in the U.S. instead of being harassed by hoots and whistles, and glaring, hungry looks while walking down the city streets (as women in the U.S. often are), women here tend to be put on a pedestal by men -- you know, men opening doors for women, 'ladies first' in lines and etc., stepping back when a woman is approaching in the street to allow her to pass with dignity, looking down in deference when she goes by....that kind of thing. which for some reason doesn't bother me as much as the hooting and whistling. and, in my opinion at least, it is actually quite nice to not be surrounded by thousands of billboards that are all using women's bodies, usually scantily clad and looking lusty, to sell one product or another. women's bodies just aren't used in ads in that way here. and i appreciate that.

the rates of violence against women, and of rape, are much lower here than in the U.S., and there is no prostitution (and virtually no drug abuse, very little alcoholism -- which is quite an accomplishment, given the desperate poverty of much of the population). that said, of course, no misogynistic violence against women is justified, and there have been cases where women were killed by their spouses or brothers in horribly twisted logic that blamed the woman for being raped (when, in one case at least, the woman blamed for being raped proved to be a virgin, in the autopsy report). each time some horribly twisted sick incident like that occurs, it makes major media, and is publicized all over the world as an example of how sexist arab societies are. and yes, these men are sick, their actions irreparably reprehensible, disgusting and unspeakably cruel. but, unlike in the US, where 1 in 4 women are abused by their spouse during their lifetime, and 1 in 3 women are raped at least once in their lifetime (according to the department of justice statistics), here, these sick and sordid incidents of violence against women are rare, and are widely reported.

i'm not trying to over-glorify the culture of palestine, or other arab countries. i just want to point out that yes, believe it or not, there are many positive aspects to life here. there is a rich and beautiful culture, a deep connection to the land, uncommon respect for women, trust between strangers and a profound love for the family, all of which are rare in many other parts of the world.

post-election commentary: the lame duck massacres

2006-11-13T08:07:00.000-08:00

soooo...while the lame-duck congress in the US goes ahead with passing some of the most draconian laws yet, like the one they passed yesterday that makes protesting animal cruelty at a circus or an animal lab a terrorist act (!) -- which, by the way, goes right along with their stated priorities of 'who is a threat'......ie. not bin laden or the saudis who fund him.... but instead, as the FBI has stated publicly on multiple occasions, their 'Number One Domestic Terrorist Threat' is the 'animal liberation front', an organization that has never ever been charged with killing or hurting anyone, but whose only purpose is to rescue animals from cruel conditions (!)....

and while a bunch of afghanis who were swept up in U.S. raids during the brutal U.S. invasion of their country in 2002 sit rotting away, forgotten by the world, in Guantanamo Bay prison -- a prison built on foreign soil by the U.S. military explicitly so that torture could be practiced there.......most of those prisoners probably civilians, and even if not, still subject to international regulations regarding the treatment of prisoners-of-war.....

while the american public 'looks the other way', considering they've done their part by electing the democrats, despite the fact that it was the democrats that voted to give the executive branch unprecedented power, the democrats who voted to allow torture, the democrats who voted for the draconian 'PATRIOT' Act in direct violation of the Bill of Rights......a _democratic_ president (bill clinton) who signed the NAFTA free trade agreement into law (NAFTA, if you recall, being the impetus for the zapatista revolution....they called the agreement 'death to indigenous peoples')...

while the congress pushes through their U.S.-mexico border wall plan, which will result in the deaths of many more than the 3-400 who already die each year while crossing the border in a desperate search for jobs, as their local economy has been wiped out by free trade agreements like NAFTA....

while all this is going on north of the border, south of the border another lame-duck president, vicente fox in mexico, is using his last days in office to implement a massive crackdown on dissent. a massacre took place just two days ago, in the indigenous community of montes azules in chiapas. 3 children, 4 women, 2 men.....killed by paramilitaries, with mexican military weapons, and strangely enough, despite the presence of no less than one hundred forty (!) military bases in the immediate area, none of them seem to have any idea who might have carried out the massacre....

and in chiapas, the peaceful uprising of indigenous farmers, workers, and teachers in the indigenous communities is being violently repressed in the guise of 'law and order', using the murder of my friend brad as an excuse to further brutally repress the uprising.....and his murderers, positively identified as the local chief of police and other off-duty police officers, remain at large, with the federal government unwilling to take them in (although everyone knows where they are).....instead once again blaming the victims, and coming in with massive military force to violently repress a just and non-violent people's protest.

my question to the mexican government and millionaires (ultimately one and the same) is the same as my question to the israeli government in regard to the palestinians: How hard can it be to give these people equal rights and self-determination? I mean, how hard can it really be?

what have you got to lose?

i mean, ok, in mexico, the indigenous population, stripped of their rights and their land, become an easily-exploitable cheap labor force used by the industrial machine to produce cheap goods at slave wages for consumers in the U.S.A. ......so, ok, by giving them equal rights you lose the slave-like cheap labor force........instead you get a population who are willing to work for fair, negotiated wages, and to produce from their own land, on their own terms......

is that really so bad?

and in palestine, by giving the palestinians equal rights, you'd lose the justification for the massive military machine that makes up fully half of the israeli economy.......

but you'd end up with the next generation being fed, educated and trained in crafts and skills for life......instead of living inside the prison of occupation, with their resentment growing and growing, until some among them feel so resentful they are willing to blow you up for putting them in this prison since birth.

i mean.......is that really such a bad thing?

but the fear in israeli society is so pervasive -- ultimately, it reminds me of the fear of white south africans in south africa. knowing, deep down, what they'd done to the africans, they were so desperately afraid of taking their boot off the neck of the african people, for fear that the one held under the boot so long would sieze the opportunity to jump up and cut their throat in revenge.

it was a combination of that fear and their racism that kept apartheid going for so long.

but ultimately, in throwing off the yoke of their oppression, the african people in south africa showed their true colors of patience, forgiveness and a desire for peace and coexistence with the white south africans who had been oppressing them for so long.

and palestinians will do the same. having lived among them for several years now, on and off, i can say that these are truly the most patient people I have ever known. it's amazing, just how patient they are. if the world steps up to challenge israeli apartheid against the palestinians, demanding a truth and reconciliation commission like that in south africa, providing a mechanism for compensation for losses and for the right of return, i truly believe israel and palestine can resolve this in the way of south africa (though yes, I know, they are still working on it there).

the bloodbath can end. but it is up to israel, the occupier, to lift their boot from the neck of the occupied, and to give them equal rights.

it is NOT, as israel so often claims, up to the palestinians to 'choose to recognize israel', when in fact, Hamas (the majority Palestinian party) already did that, back in june, before the latest offensive, that killed 350 palestinians, began.

it is up to israel to decide to give palestinians equal rights......
is that really such a hard thing to do?

another fallen friend: brad will

2006-10-27T17:08:00.000-07:00

27 october 2006

three people were shot and killed in the streets of oaxaca mexico today. one of them was an old friend of mine, brad will, a videojournalist from new york. he was standing at the barricade filming the protest, when paramilitary troops in civilian clothes began firing, and hit him with a bullet right in the middle of his chest. he was killed.
(http://chiapas.indymedia.org/display.php3?article_id=137182)

another friend, another witness to injustice, becoming another victim to the violence. when will it end? and how many friends must i lose?

i sit in palestine, where my tears for my friend brad join a river of tears for the thousands of victims of violence here in this supposedly holy land. i am across the world from mexico, but my memories of oaxaca stand out strongly as i think of brad with his camera, the only 'weapon' he ever carried, standing there casual and relaxed, as always, prepared to face those who would kill him with a smile and a shrug, prepared to take on powerful empires armed only with his camera and his songs.

but the camera and the songs weren't enough to keep you safe this time, my friend.......the camera couldn't protect you from the forces wishing to restore their version of "order" upon the oppressed people of oaxaca......just as rachel corrie's american passport couldn't protect her from the israeli armored bulldozer and the forces behind it - forces prepared to rob the palestinians of their land at any cost...

i haven't seen brad since i was last in new york.....at a protest, of course. he was at every protest, big or small, he _had_ to be there. it wouldn't be a protest without him. when i met him we were part of a small group that determined to make new york indymedia a reality. we lived, breathed, sweated and slept indymedia. every second of our time was devoted to it....day and night, recording everything we could...brad....john tarleton, warcry, justin, madhava, ana, josh breitbart, arun, lee, madhava....devoting ourselves with such fury to the idea that 'all voices should be heard'. and brad was just about the most devoted devotee to that idea, that vision.

i hear his voice now, in my head, so matter-of-fact, so ready to face any force...but not to be a hero! no! just because (hear brad's voice now), well hey, there are people being oppressed, so _of Course_ we're gonna stand up and be there with them. of Course we're gonna tell their story, capture their struggle on our cameras, broadcast their voices to the world. i mean, that's what any reasonable person would do in such a circumstance.

and of course, he made sense.....it is reasonable, it is in fact the only logical and human way to respond to the forces of oppression. so why does he have to die a hero? why? why another martyr? is this what it will take to bring justice? more dead bodies?

in the american south there were 41 martyrs of the non-violent struggle for civil rights. if there had been a violent revolution, said one aging civil rights activist to me last year, there would have been many more deaths. 750,000 died in the civil war to end slavery....had there been another civil war, there would have been even more than that.

so now, in the movement for global justice, against corporate globalization, against colonialism....now we have our martyrs.....carlo giuliani killed by police in genoa, Lee Kyung-hae, who sacrificed himself in cancun at a protest against the world trade organization....
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/wto/article/0,2763,1039709,00.html)...and the thousands of unnamed campesino farmers killed by paramilitaries, or dying of starvation, the hundreds, if not thousands of indian, bangladeshi and south korean farmers who commit suicide when they see their land, their life's work, sold off for the profits of the global profiteers....

and now brad, whose commitment to giving a voice to the voiceless never wavered....even as they shot him down today in southern mexico.....with his video camera in his hand.

as bush & co. are pushing for world war III (or IV, depending on how you're counting), there is another movement growing, a movement of nonviolent, passionate resistance to oppression.

brad felt it, in his last missive from mexico, written october 17th, he felt it so strongly...
".... it is clear that this is more than a strike, more than expulsion of a governor, more than a blockade, more than a coalition of fragments -- it is a genuine peoples revolt -- and after
decades of pri rule by bribe, fraud, and bullet the people are tired -- they call him the tyrant -- they talk of destroying this authoritarianism -- you cannot mistake the whisper of the lancandon jungle in the streets -- in every street corner deciding together to hold -- you see it their faces -- indigenous, women, children -- so brave -- watchful at night -- proud and resolute"
http://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2006/10/17/18321064.php

...and now he has given his life for this struggle. the global struggle, not just in oaxaca...as one of the striking teachers in oaxaca said, 'this is not just for oaxaca, this is beyond oaxaca, beyond mexico....this is a challenge to the entrenched class system everywhere.'

it's the same story as here in palestine, the same as anywhere in the world where people choose to say ya basta! (enough already!) to the powers that oppress and keep them down.

oaxaca is a neighboring province to the region of chiapas, made famous by the zapatista revolt that has been building autonomous communities based on consensus since 1994, oaxaca is home to mountains, plains and beaches (read: coffee, cattle, and tourism). control over these markets has long been a colonial and post-colonial exercise in power, with the poor, indigenous, laborers and farmers getting treated like dirt for too long.

the popular resistance in oaxaca followed in the spirit of the indigenous rebellion in chiapas, with one important distinction: while in chiapas the people rising up were mainly farmers, in oaxaca it began with a teacher's strike. this was in may and june of this year, and when the governor brutally attacked the teachers in june, the people of oaxaca responded with a wide-scale popular movement in which they initiated a referendum voting out the corrupt, colonial-style governor in july, and shaming him and his party (the PRI) that have held power there since 1910.

but the governor wouldn't listen to the peoples' vote. so in august, the teachers and their supporters and compatriots decided to take over the corrupt, state-run media:
"On August 1, more than 3,000 women—all members of APPO (the Popular Assembly of the People of Oaxaca, Asamblea Popular de los Pueblos de Oaxaca)—marched through town, banging on pots and pans with spoons and meat tenderizers, chanting into the blanket of sound: “Whether he wants to go or not, Ulises is out of here!” The women went to the studio of the state television station, CORTV, and demanded an hour of live transmission to tell their version of what happened on June 14. The director of the station denied their request. But the women walked right past her, pots and pans in hand, took over the station, and broadcast live for over an hour. And they are still there, showing documentaries and broadcasting live daily."
http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/2795/

professor salzman in oaxaca explains:
"The real news consists of two salient facts: 1) the popular movement, which developed immediately following the attack on the striking education workers on 14 June 2006 has become a vast coalition of many different groups within Oaxacan society; and 2), which may be even more significant, nearly all adherent groups are strongly committed to a non-violent struggle based on militant civil disobedience. Of course, civil disobedience means ‘breaking the law’, as the perpetrators of the deadly ‘law ‘n order’ regime of the state governor and of the federal government are claiming while they prepare to crush the rebellion by military and para-military attacks. They [the governor and his paramilitaries] are itching to launch a ‘real clean-up operation’, a ‘clean sweep’ throughout the state of all ‘subversives’ who adhere to and support Section 22 of the Education Workers Union and/or APPO."

the professor wrote on october 18th that the governor was preparing for a bloodbath, and pleaded, just 10 days ago, for _someone_ to do _something_ to stop it. on that day he wrote, from oaxaca:
"As I walked in the bright sunshine into Sanchez Pasques Market and drank in with my eyes and ears the animated throngs of shoppers and vendors, children playing with little toys, the life of the market, the life of the people, I thought of other markets, of how everyday people pursue our lives as though normalcy, day after day, was what we could expect, other people in Sarajevo, in Beirut, in Baghdad. One can only hope that the confluence of social forces and consciousness in Oaxaca, in Mexico and in the world is such that there won't be a bloodbath, either large or small, and that a true milagro méxicano, a Mexican miracle, will begin to show the world how to move from an anti-civilization of death to a true civilization of life."
(see: http://site.www.umb.edu/faculty/salzman_g/Strate/2006-10-09.htm
http://www.infoshop.org/inews/article.php?story=2006101818495496&mode=print
http://site.www.umb.edu/faculty/salzman_g/Strate/2006-08-29.htm)

i'm sorry professor salzman, but it seems power is too entrenched....as is apathy....and the bloodbath, it seems, is beginning.

oh.....one other thing i just have to say....i just watched video footage of brad's death on a spanish satellite channel......and i know everyone was scared and just trying to help, but please!! don't ever pick up and start running with a severely injured person, jiggling their body all over the place. if you are ever in a situation where someone near you is shot or injured badly, especially in their midsection or back, do not move them. apply pressure, try to stop the bleeding....cpr if necessary, but don't move them until a medical team with a backboard who knows how to move them into the ambulance arrives to do it. when rachel corrie was run over by an israeli bulldozer three years ago, her last words were "my back is broken". she was conscious when she died. my husband, who was shot with eight bullets in his back and side in 1991, is sure he would have died if a bunch of people ran up and grabbed him and tried to carry him to the ambulance. i doubt that it would have helped brad, with the severity of his wound he probably would have died no matter what medical care he received. but i just have to say it....it hurts me whenever i see injured people being carried in that way by their comrades and friends who are trying to help, but are nearly always just making the injuries worse.

just married

2006-10-17T16:58:00.000-07:00

i just got married to the person i love...this is supposed to be a joyful moment.......the happiest in my life, right? ..but instead of feeling all the joy that occasion should bring, i feel dread, worry, uncertainty, fear.

not because of the marriage, no, that part is great....but because of the fact that our future together is in the hands of powers outside of our control. not knowing whether we will be able to live together, or for how long, due to visa restrictions, is an extremely worrisome thing.

our journey through visa-land is a long and frustrating story, and the source of all our worries can be summed up in a single word: israel.

in all my years of travelling, through dozens of countries throughout the world, i have never EVER seen a process so circular and confusing, so constantly changing, and so set up for failure as the Israeli process.

i feel like a rat in a cage. like everywhere i turn the options are cut off, the walls around me are growing higher and higher, and no one can give me any information as to what to do or how to respond to this situation i'm in.

we applied for a visa for my husband to come to the US, but that process takes several months. in the meantime, my 3-month tourist visa for israel was due to expire, and we had to either figure out how to get it renewed or leave the country and come back, as we did in july.

we opted to apply for renewal, but for a territory that is under complete military occupation by the neighboring country, and whose infrastructure is totally and completely non-operational since government workers stopped working in march due to a complete cutoff of the aid money that was meant to pay their salaries, well, such a thing is easier said than done.

i went to jerusalem (waking up at 5 am, because I had to pass through the checkpoint with all its uncertainty) with all my paperwork filled out, went through the massive security systems, multiple metal detectors, long lines behind concrete barriers and israeli soldiers with guns shouting orders in hebrew (this was the ministry of interior for 'arabs' in jerusalem - very different from the one in west jerusalem, for jewish israelis), i took a number and waited for my turn. well, i thought, there are only 20 numbers until mine, this shouldn't take long. five hours later, i finally had my turn, and was immediately told that I could not file for renewal at this office, I had to go through the palestinian authority, because my husband is palestinian.

well, i tried to explain to the woman that since israel has cut off relations with the palestinian authority, and choked their source of income, there IS no palestinian authority.....but she wasn't hearing it. when I asked for details on how to proceed with this process, specifically written instructions, or a written policy, she told me, "ask the palestinians, they will tell you how they do it" -- a common refrain i have heard many times from israelis in positions of power, who apparently consider the palestinian rumor-mill of 'he-said-she-said' and stories about so-and-so's aunt mary and what she did when she had to renew her visa, a more reliable source of information than any official policy issued by the israeli government. but there's a simple explanation, which is that the israeli government doesn't HAVE a set policy - that allows them the flexibility to change the rules quickly if they don't like your face, and never have to back it up with written documentation, they just make up rules on the spot and that is what governs your life if you happen to be a palestinian (I'll get back to this theme later).

so i left the fortressed high-security building and paid the taxi driver sixty dollars to get me back to bethlehem, blinking back tears of frustration as we passed back through the checkpoint (much easier to get IN to the west bank than to get OUT, I thought ironically, as the israeli soldiers waved us through with our israeli-license-plated taxi and my foreign face....).

and set about the arduous, and ultimately impossible process, of 'ask the palestinians how they do it'. we began this journey at the palestinian ministry of interior, which was, of course, closed. not just partly closed, but completely, totally, dust-on-the-shelves closed. the gates were welded shut (so no renegade employees would dare to go to work during the strike), and in the most classic and complete sense, we were S.O.L.

after a week of calling around, we finally managed to get the phone number of an employee of the interior ministry in ramallah, who agreed to come in for one hour the next day to help us and a couple other people in the same situation. so we got up at 5 and headed for ramallah.

i should point out here that ramallah is directly north of jerusalem, while bethlehem is directly south. so the quickest route would, of course, be to go through jerusalem. which is what palestinians have always done. until, that is, the last five years, when israel has declared jerusalem 'off-limits' to palestinians (despite the fact that 250,000 palestinians LIVE in jerusalem), and has systematically gone about closing off all access to jerusalem, splitting neighborhoods by the Wall, expanding 'jewish-only' settlements in east jerusalem, and cutting apart families, friends and neighbors in a blatant attempt to unilaterally SEIZE all of jerusalem to make it part of israel. since no international body has attempted to stop israel, this illegal takeover has progressed quite quickly, and palestinians caught in the middle have had no one to turn to for help.

Israel has always claimed that the 'question of Jerusalem' should be left to 'final-status negotiations' of any peace talk. whereas the palestinians have always demanded that jerusalem is a key issue that should be FIRST on the agenda of any peace talks. since there are no peace talks currently in the works, israel has seized the opportunity to take over east jerusalem (in violation of every signed agreement and UN resolution) and make it a de facto part of israel, so that if and when 'peace talks' ever start up again, they will use the fact of the existence of 140,000 israeli settlers recently moved into east jerusalem (with more construction being done every day) as a 'fact-on-the-ground' that indicates the 'jewish character' of east jerusalem, and demand that it be made part of israel. with no one on the palestinian side to argue (at least not from any type of position of power -- instead of 'bargaining' during peace talks, palestinians end up 'begging', because they have no bargaining power - no economic power, no political power, no social or societal power, they don't even have sovereignty, and certainly don't have military power)......well, israel will end up getting what they want.

for us, this meant that instead of a fifteen-minute drive (which is what it would take an israeli settler driving on 'jewish-only' highways), it took us three hours......driving over a one-lane road along cliffs and up and down canyons in the middle of the driest desert - a road called Wadi-Nar, which has become an infamous symbol among palestinians of their forced relocation by israel. the road is of course, full of traffic - massive trucks delivering goods, service taxis stuffed full of people.....no private cars are allowed (apart from the 200 'businessmen' licensed by israel to be able to drive between the different parts of the west bank).....precariously swinging around the curves of this dangerous road, honking, bouncing through potholes....eventually we make it to the first checkpoint, perched on the edge of a cliff in the middle of nowhere. it's known as the 'container' checkpoint to palestinians, as it was originally just a shipping container from a truck, with a few soldiers stopping traffic along the road. now it's a full-blown terminal, with metal detectors and a military building, huge concrete barriers and razor wire. and lots of palestinian taxis and trucks (no private cars) waiting, on both sides, to be allowed through.

i'll spare you the details of the rest of the trip - suffice to say that being forced to drive through residential neighborhoods (with over fifty speedbumps in one three-mile stretch), when there are perfectly good highways speeading by overhead, that you are not allowed to drive on because they are for 'jews only'......well, it's enough to make a person feel sick.

finally in ramallah, we discovered we had to drive from one office to another, to a bank and back again, to get a stamp then go to another office, get a signature and back to the original office -- all of these offices and banks of course being on opposite ends of town....and with it being, ironically enough, the day that condoleeza rice was meeting with the palestinian president in ramallah, well, the traffic was impossible, and half the roads were closed. but we finally managed to get through this dizzying array of stamps and forms and made it back to the original office just before our lone employee took off.

but lo and behold, all of our work was in vain.....one look at the form and my husband's id, and the employee told us that the visa renewal application would not be accepted by israel, because our marriage had not been added to my husband's (israeli-issued) id card.

and of course, id cards were a separate department altogether, and one which did not have a lone employee willing to step in and break the strike for an hour to help us through this.

discouraged and frustrated again, we headed back through the checkpoints and the long and winding wadi-Nar back to bethlehem. it was dark by the time we returned, and we were exhausted.

just a sidenote about the palestinian identity cards - every palestinian is issued one at birth by israel, and the card goes inside a plastic cover, and _must_ be carried at all times by palestinians (reminds me of south africa and the 'pass laws'). it used to be that anyone who had been to prison (that is, nearly half of all palestinian adult males) had to keep their id in a green cover, while palestinians who had not been to jail had an orange cover. so when there were round-ups of all men in a town or neighborhood (as there often are), those with green id cards were pulled aside and put in jail again. so once you were taken prisoner once, no matter if you were guilty or innocent (there's no court system for palestinians to argue their side, anyway, so no way to prove one's innocence), well, you were screwed for life. now, ALL palestinians have a green cover.....which strikes me as rather ironic, being that, with the apartheid wall now almost completed, all palestinians are in fact in an open-air jail.

so with our efforts for visa renewal at an impasse, we began making plans to go to jordan (the neighboring country) and return back again so I could get a new visa. recently, however, israel has been implementing a policy of denying entry to anyone with a foreign passport who they suspect will be visiting the palestinian territories (israel controls all palestinian borders). this possibility, that i would not be allowed back in, and would be stuck in jordan, is extremely worrisome, and very possible.
here's a washington post article about the issue:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/22/AR2006102200853.html
(sorry their stupid ad blocks the first paragraph. it is:
"Stricter Policy Splits West Bank Families By Scott Wilson
RAMALLAH, West Bank -- The last time Adel Samara saw his wife, Enayeh, was the morning in late May when she pulled away from their home in Beit Ur in a taxi bound for the border. Her trips to Jordan had become routine, never lasting more than a few days.")

a number of other articles and accounts of denials of entry are listed here:
http://electronicintifada.net/bytopic/443.shtml

if you want to get involved in trying to change this outrageous new policy that is essentially emptying palestine of foreigners, see:
http://www.righttoenter.ps

and sign the petition here:
http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/226243893

in any case, we went through a process equally as harrowing as the visa-renewal process in order to get permission for my husband to go with me to jordan (we didn't want to be separated, with the strong possibility that I wouldn't be allowed back in). but when the application came back, there, handwritten on it in some 18-year old Israeli soldier's handwriting: the dreaded words.....Mamnua Shabak (in hebrew - by the way, all forms filled out by palestinians must be in hebrew -- which means paying someone to fill it out for you, in most cases, as most palestinians don't know hebrew).

Mamnua Shabak = Forbidden by the Israeli Secret Service.

words that are very easy to have added to one's ID number, and very, very hard to have removed. my husband's cousin found out, after being denied passage a number of times at west bank checkpoints, that she had had these dreaded words added to her ID.....this was three years ago. she hired an israeli lawyer and has been working since then to have the dreaded words removed.....but to no avail. no reason was ever given, no accusation was made, she's never been arrested, shot or anything, but the words are now attached to her ID number....impossible to remove.

in a militarily-occupied territory that is ruled only by the arbitrary and always-changing flow of 18-year old draft soldiers, there is no legal procedure or process that one can turn to....there is only the latest whim of the latest shift of soldiers (half of whom, it seems, are incompetent, the rest either willfully aggressive or simply do not care).

in talking to an israeli activist from the group Machsom Watch (Machsom = Checkpoint in Hebrew), she revealed to us that through their research, they have found (though the military will not admit this openly) that every palestinian who has been shot or injured by the israeli military, under any circumstances, becomes 'mamnua shabak' for the rest of their lives (my husband, you may recall, was shot in 1991 in his spine). the victim cannot sue or hold his shooters accountable in any way, but instead, the person who is now handicapped for life is also punished with the dreaded words, which will pop up on any israeli military computer in connection to their ID number, for the rest of their lives. Not only that, the activist told us, but their family members are also punished, with their brothers, sisters, parents and children also receiving the dreaded words 'mamnua shabak' on their ID numbers as well.

which explains why my husband's brother was denied permission last year to visit their other brother who lives in germany, despite the fact that the german consulate had issued him a visa to visit. and also explains why my husband's mother was denied permission to go to jerusalem to pray at the church of the holy sepulchre (in accordance with her religious tradition as a christian) last christmas.

and now, to top it all off.....we just received a letter from the american consulate in jerusalem that my husband has an appointment for his visa........at the american consulate in jerusalem (yes, that's right, jerusalem, which is now 'off-limits' to palestinians). we applied to the israelis for a permit for him to be allowed to go to jerusalem for the appointment, expecting that it would be denied. it was.

the americans are complicit with israel in the unjust israeli restrictions on palestinians. they could easily set up an office in the west bank, and one in gaza, to allow palestinians to have access to their consulate. instead, due to politics, they refuse, and palestinians end up having to risk their lives crossing illegally into jerusalem in order to reach their appointments at the consulate. i asked at the consulate how they expect palestinians to reach them, and the response was, "some get permits, and some come over the hills and we don't know how" -- !!! that is to say, the _official_ line from the US consulate is "we refuse to provide a way for palestinians to reach their appointments with us. instead, we expect them to sneak past the military occupying forces, risking their lives, in order to reach their appointments."

I wrote a letter to the consulate, saying, in part,
"I must admit that I am rather surprised that the Israeli military should be allowed in this way to intervene in U.S. affairs - the Israeli military are, in this way, the de facto determinants of who is and who is not allowed to receive a U.S. visa."

so now we are stuck.... in indecision and uncertainty....like millions of others of palestinians and their spouses....who live without legal status in a world where sovereignty is everything, without recognized property rights for land they have lived on for centuries, and with no power to change their condition (no political, economic or legal power).....in the largest open-air prison on earth.

depressed yet? if you need more fuel for your depression, here are some links:

an op-ed i wrote about a poll showing that over half of israelis believe torture is acceptable:
http://www.imemc.org/content/view/22171/117/

---------------

israeli use of experimental 'mystery weapons' on palestinian civilians:
http://www.palestinechronicle.com/story-101906113427.htm
"Doctors in Gaza have reported previously unseen injuries from Israeli weapons that cause severe burning and leave deep internal wounds, often resulting in amputations or death."

----------------

Top CIA expert on radical Islam slams Bush 'anti-terror' program
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=34825
"Nakhleh said that the Bush administration's tactics had 'lost a generation of goodwill in the Muslim world' and its Middle East democratisation programme 'has all but disappeared, except for official rhetoric'."

----------------

Civilian deaths soar to record high in Iraq
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,,1878474,00.html
"Manfred Nowak, the UN's special investigator, said torture was 'totally out of hand' and might even be worse now than under Saddam Hussein. 'You have terrorist groups, you have the military, you have police, you have these militias. There are so many people who are abducted, seriously tortured and finally killed,' he told reporters at the UN's Geneva headquarters. "The US military had initially claimed a dramatic drop in the Iraqi death toll for August, but the estimate was revised sharply upwards after it revealed that it had inexplicably left out figures for people killed by bombs, mortars, rockets and other mass attacks."

So what did the UN find in their investigation? Seven THOUSAND civilians killed in the last two months, and that doesn't include the most violent regions, Ramadi and Falluja, where they were unable to get accurate counts.

--------------

After September 11, the U.S. threatened to 'bomb Pakistan to the stone ages' if they did not do exactly what the U.S. told them to do
http://www.guardian.co.uk/pakistan/Story/0,,1878619,00.html
---------------

a vision of a better world

2006-10-07T10:12:00.000-07:00

today, i feel like a little prose, or poetry...call it what you will. it's fiction, anyway (some would say, impossible)....

a vision of another world that's possible:

two kids spot each other across the ridge

the ridge where the wall used to stand

their eyes hold suspicion, fear....but it's the fear born from parental 'guidance', and kids are wont to ignore such things

one disappears from sight a moment

the other child looks around and

there, the child reappears again much closer

holding a lizard in his hand

the lizard suddenly becomes much more compelling than the parental-born notions of fear

and the child sidles closer, interested, studying

the little creature is quick, he knows, and hard to catch

that other child must be quite fast to have caught one like that

he wants to ask him how he did it

but he doesn't know the words

they don't speak the same language, see....

but the other boy hears the question anyway, and motions a distance away, trotting off

the boy follows, and in a small dusty gulley, sees the trick.....

a trap, made of a loop of string, to catch the lizard when he's lazing in the sun

ingenious! he thinks, and laughs aloud

the other boy joins in

they set about catching lizards

and soon they are joined by a couple of other kids....

this is the beginning, see.....

they don't speak the same language

yet

but they both speak the language of kids

they stay at it all afternoon

catching lizards

and letting them go

returning at dusk to their parents, whose faces are aghast when they find out where their children have been

but they're ready

they gulp, and try to swallow their fear

they are ready

to move on

from the fear

and the hate

that has governed their lives

for too long.

warrantless wiretaps, habeas corpus and terror..

2006-09-29T18:31:00.000-07:00

ok....i'm really concerned now. first i hear the news item that congress just passed a bill suspending habeas corpus -- essentially taking away the right of a prisoner to challenge their imprisonment. this means that people can be held without charge, tortured, and essentially 'disappeared', legally, in the U.S. people who are innocent!! people who have done nothing wrong. and there will be no trial, no day in court where they can prove their innocence. and no way for them to challenge their imprisonment.
here's an oped from the new york times: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/28/opinion/28thu1.html

and now i hear that today the house has passed the 'warrantless wiretapping' act, and the senate is likely to soon follow. in this bill, the government can listen to anyone's phone, read anyone's email, demand records from telecom companies, and here, too, there is no legal way to appeal.

umm....now, i'm no legal expert (nor am i a big fan of a so-called 'democracy' built on genocide and slavery), but isn't there supposed to be something called 'checks and balances' in the american government? you know, that thing that I learned way back in grade school was 'the basis of american democracy'.

as a bumper sticker i once read said: "the constitution ain't perfect, but it's better than what we have now".

some american congressmen apparently have also just accused the United Nations Refugee and Works Association, currently the only provider of food and drinking water to over 80,000 Palestinian refugees, of somehow 'sponsoring terrorism'.......I guess because they give food and water to a starving civilian population that is a civilian population considered 'terrorists' by these guys.
http://www.ramattan.com/news/details.asp?Id_News=21534

I wonder......is every palestinian a terrorist? is that the reasoning behind this?

i guess that some people believe that.

it's strange though.....the population in palestine is a young population - nearly 40% of the population is under 18.....and so mainly what i see here is kids -- kids riding bikes, kids playing basketball, babies laughing and gurgling adorably in their mothers' arms.....toddlers waddling after their brothers to try to join in their games....young girls skipping down the street hand in hand to the neighborhood shop.....

and i wonder to myself, how could anyone look at the palestinian people, almost half of them kids, and see nothing but terrorists?

yes, there have been some isolated incidents of violence by palestinians against israeli civilians. but far more palestinian civilians have been killed by israelis than vice versa. so who is the terrorist? and what is terrorism really?

if living as palestinians do, under curfew, locked in one's home 24 hours a day for months on end, with electricity cuts that invariably mean aerial bombardments occurring night after night, with tanks invading one's neighborhood on a daily basis, with one's kids getting shot for coming too close to the 30-foot high concrete wall that surrounds their town -- if that is not living in utter terror, then I don't know what is.

but i guess that is what the new 'american dream' looks like. that's what it's beginning to look like in afghanistan and iraq anyway, the latest conquests of the american empire.

with these new laws (which it appears are being rushed through before the midterm elections), the u.s.a. (or, to begin with, its prisons) is very quickly going to look the same way.

and this new terror regime is not coming from some fetishized islamic culture that many americans seem to have developed a stupefied stereotyped view of.......no, this is a home-grown american regime of "look the other way and don't notice when they take your neighbor away".....a regime of "why would you refuse to let your government read your email, tap your phone, or install cameras in your bedroom? ...unless you've got something to hide. what are you hiding, hmm?" a regime of secret government lists and a mafia-run government waging resource wars throughout the globe to 'preserve the american way of life', while americans get microchipped and racially profiled, retinal scanned and blacklisted, and blindly put their faith in their consumer economics and the power of their property to protect them from the undercurrent of fear that is rapidly surpassing all other dreams they might have had.....ignoring the secret prisons and rumors of torture (rumors which are vehemently ignored by a media which prefers to focus on hollywood weddings and which star got a nosejob, while furiously feeding the frenzy of fear that keeps people suspecting their neighbors and scared to go out alone).....
because after all, as sinclair lewis so succinctly put it back in 1935: "it can't happen here". (or....... can it.................?)

you can buy his book (called, you guessed it: _it can't happen here_):
http://www.powells.com/biblio/1-045121658x-0

....or borrow it from your local library. if it is indeed worthy of being called a library, it will have this book......
here's a review:
"Surprisingly, Sinclair Lewis' darkly humorous tale of a fascist takeover in the US, "It Can't Happen Here," is not merely out-of-print, but also quite hard to find. As dated as it is (1935), its themes will be quite familiar to Americans today. It starts with the highly contested election of an oafish yet strangely charismatic president, who talks like a "reformer" but is really in the pocket of big business, who claims to be a home-spun "humanist," while appealing to religious extremists, and who speaks of "liberating" women and minorities, as he gradually strips them of all their rights. One character, when describing him, says, "I can't tell if he's a crook or a religious fanatic." After he becomes elected, he puts the media - at that time, radio and newspapers - under the supervision of the military and slowly begins buying up or closing down media outlets. William Randolph Hearst, the Rupert Murdoch of his times, directs his newspapers to heap unqualified praise upon the president and his policies, and gradually comes to develop a special relationship with the government. The president, taking advantage of an economic crisis, strong-arms Congress into signing blank checks over to the military and passing stringent and possibly unconstitutional laws, e.g. punishing universities when they don't permit military recruiting or are not vociferous enough in their approval of his policies. Eventually, he takes advantage of the crisis to convene military tribunals for civilians, and denounce all of his detractors as unpatriotic and possibly treasonous. I'll stop here, as I don't want to ruin the story -- I can imagine that you can see where all this is going."

dancing dabke in taybeh, hip hop and the pope

2006-09-18T15:01:00.000-07:00

well....here i am, still in this prison known as the west bank. we went to ramallah this weekend, and to a christian village outside ramallah called Taybeh, where there was an 'Octoberfest'.....the festival was well-attended (despite the anger among muslims over the pope's comments about islam last week, the festival in the christian town went fine...no christians in palestine have been attacked, but some churches were burned in a couple of places). at the festival, we watched young kids and teenagers performing the palestinian traditional dance known as 'dabke' - they were great! it reminded me of irish step dancing with the fancy footwork and stamping on the wooden stage. and the kids were all really excited about it, they loved doing it (unlike some of the kids in the irish step i used to do -- especially the boys -- who were just doing it because their parents made them).

then there was a performance by a palestinian hip-hop group from Lud, a town inside Israel.....and watching the villagers' reaction to the hip-hop - interested, entertained, but not really _jamming_ (like they were with the traditional music and dance), it made me think about the origins of hip-hop.....it is essentially, and at its core, an _urban_ music.....it began in the states, of course, but has been popularized as a form of expression in urban centers throughout the world - i've heard rappers from johannesburg, paris, london, hamburg with tons of talent, at least as much as many of the US-based rappers.....but it is a type of music that springs out of a people desperate to hold onto an identity that they feel being lost in the anonymous centralizing process of cities. kids from the village, stuck behind the israeli wall, but still strong in their culture and traditions, simply don't have the same type of experience as the kids from the villages-turned-urban-ghettoes that have come to typify the experience of palestinians inside israel. hip-hop just doesn't resonate as strongly for the villagers as it does for the kids lost in urban centers throughout the world.

in israel, the so-called 'arab-israeli' communities (which make up 20% of the population of israel) have a very different set of problems from palestinians in the west bank and gaza.

and those in the city of jerusalem have even a different set of problems than the other two groups. all of their problems are related, and all stemming from the same source (the state of israel), but the oppression takes different forms in the different communities.

Jack Persekian, a Palestinian with a 'Jerusalem ID' (this ID is different, btw, from a 'Palestinian-Israeli' with Israeli citizenship....it allows the bearer access only to the confines of the city of Jerusalem) writes of the three main areas in which Palestinians are discriminated against in Jerusalem.

"1) The law. Any Jew from anywhere on this earth can come, reside in Jerusalem and become a citizen of the State, while if the indigenous non-Jewish inhabitants of the city move out of the city for any reason (except for study and for a limited period) for more than three years they’ll never be able to go back and reside there. The only way they would be permitted to come back is as tourists, that is if given a visa. We are technically 'permanent residents' of our own birthplace, our own hometown, our own piece of land and property, until further notice. There is a stranglehold on building permits on the Palestinian side of the city with vast areas designated as either a ‘green zone’ or not part of the planning zone, not to mention of course the extremely costly process of construction on the Palestinian side in contrast with the readily available government sponsored housing on the Jewish side.

"2) The economy. The closure of Jerusalem has left its Palestinian inhabitants in dire straits, since they’re totally tied to the Palestinian standard of living of the West Bank, which stands at around $3,000 per capita income, on the one hand, and the fact that they’re completely entrapped by the Israeli economy, which stands at around $20,000 per capita income, on the other. Since more than ten years ago Israel has become the only supplier of goods and services to the Palestinian residents of the city, which means very low income linked to the Palestinian economy in comparison to very high prices linked to the Israeli standard of living. In addition to that, the scarcity of jobs in the city coupled with the imposed closure and the fear of losing one’s resident status if a move out of the city in pursuit of a job is opted for, is creating a desperate dead end and a kind of “you’re-better-off-if-you-leave” situation especially for the future of one’s kids. Well yes, this might be true. What kind of jobs are there for the Palestinian residents of Jerusalem? Not being able to work in the Palestinian territories and not able to get integrated into the Israeli system - not being a citizen and not having served in the army (which is clearly unthinkable) make it impossible to get into the system. The jobs that are available are very few and hardly ever inspiring (working for foreign aid or diplomatic missions as a driver, security personnel or clerk) or the easiest, least demanding of jobs: a taxi driver, a cleaner in west Jerusalem or tending a falafel stand.

"3) Society. The divide is so deep and the differences are so rooted that it is impossible to imagine that there could ever be any kind of social integration between the two sides. Israel was established as an extension of Europe and the Palestinians are part of the Middle Eastern culture. The Israelis saw, and up till now many see, that all the people from the third world, so to speak, are culturally inferior to them. Israel was since its establishment and for many years dominated and controlled by Ashkenazi Jews who defined the cultural face of Israel as Euro-western and obstructed any other form of cultural expression, particularly that from Arab/Middle Eastern/North African origins. Until the late seventies no oriental music would be heard on Israel’s radio or TV. Amy Horowitz who studied Israeli oriental music’s emergence and proliferation dubbed it “bus station music,” for only there, in bus stations, where workers and the lower middle class met, their kind of music was played, and not on the elite state-sanctioned airwaves, which in a way dictated the kind of music people should listen to and that which reflects Israel’s cultural identity and origins. No need to go further down this track. All I want to say is that Israel knew from the beginning the kind of society it wanted to be, and more-or-less the kind of mix between cultures it would tolerate. One thing is clear, and will be as long as Israel exists: its Jewish exclusivity.

"Palestine, on the other hand, is a mixture of backgrounds of those who happen to be there and/or want to be there. It does not prefer any religion over another and would rather be inclusive of all. Exclusivity is nice and has its advantages, but on the long run it is prone to deficiencies and breakdown. Rather than be left to the very end of negotiations, Jerusalem at this difficult moment in time can set an example for coexistence. Its liminal position can be transformed to an archetypal zone of tolerance."

------------
in other news....

mahmoud ahmadenijad, the president of iran, had an interview with time magazine in which he clarified some of his (oft-misquoted) positions on issues:
http://www.ynetnews.com/Ext/Comp/ArticleLayout/CdaArticlePrintPreview/1,2506,L-3305123,00.html

and a jewish rabbi living in a settlement on stolen palestinian land made a statement that all palestinian males should be killed, while israeli politicians call for ethnic 'transfer' of palestinians to other countries:
http://www.imemc.org/content/view/21527/1/

so the wagons are circling, the outright racism becoming less hidden and more blatant.....
palestinians are desperate for food and water, while the israelis use 'divide and conquer' tactics of giving palestinian christians more privileges and freedoms than they give to palestinian muslims (not much, and not often, but it does happen occasionally). ultimately, the christians and muslims are all in the same boat, and they know it.....but israel has tried hard to exacerbate the small differences.

and in the midst of all this, the pope has to come along and make some stupid comment that Islam was spread through violence, and was 'evil and inhuman', but that Christianity was not spread through violence. come on!!! how provocative can you get!! (despite the fact that christianity has at least as much violent 'crusading' in its history as does Islam)

It seems that Ratzinger went from hating Jews in his youth (as a Nazi youth, an association he has never publicly come out and disassociated himself from), to hating Muslims as an adult. ultimately, it is the same - hating a group of people based on their system of beliefs, their religion.

to those who are busy giving excuses for the man, saying 'he was referring to how spreading any religion through violence is evil', well, here is the full text of his speech:
http://www.cwnews.com/news/viewstory.cfm?recnum=46474

why does he take it on himself to suddenly become a scholar of islam, interpreting the texts of the Qu'ran and the many debates and theological discussions about their meaning, without giving any recognition or critique of his own religion's culpability in the massive 'spread of religion by force'?

yes, there should be a dialogue between muslim scholars and christian scholars. yes, there are many many things the two religions have in common. and yes, anyone can use either holy book to justify whatever he or she wants to justify, by taking it out of context. but let the muslim scholars, those who have spent their lives studying that religion, begin the critique (as many have) of that religion. the christian church should be looking within itself and its own history, getting its own house in order, before deigning to critique another religion, islam, which ultimately has a much less violent history than christianity.

what the pope has done, by presenting a speech that severely critiques islam at its base with no equivalent critique of christianity, which has a much more violent history than islam, is to demonize islam and tell the world, in as many words, that the stance of the catholic church is one that is against islam.

such a statement can only serve to burn bridges and increase tension. why not go the other direction.......build bridges, work toward peace and co-existence?

------------
while i was in ramallah, i read a book, a fiction book, about a boy in ramallah, written from his perspective as a 12-year old. it was called "a little piece of ground", and it is really wonderfully written, and, based on my experience here, i would say it is extremely accurate. the way the boy views the world, his aspirations (to be the world's greatest footballer, to be taller than his brother, to be the inventor of an acid formula that can dissolve the steel of israeli tanks), his daily life, his thoughts, really bring the reader into the life of a 12-year old in ramallah. I hope everyone can read it, to see what life is like under occupation for a kid:
http://www.powells.com/biblio/61-1931859388-0

after i finished the book, a friend said to me, "you know, there was a big attempt to ban that book in the US when it came out three years ago." I didn't know that, but the thought of it made me feel angry - that people would try to ban this perspective, simply because they disagreed with it. attempts to ban books, to me, come out of fear and ignorance.

The 'Chronology of Censorship' for 2003 said, about Elizabeth Laird, the author:
"Ms. Laird, who spent years in Palestine, was also quoted as saying, 'If anybody would like to write a book about the effects of suicide bombing on Israeli children, or what it's like for an Israeli child, I would very much welcome that. I think that would be an excellent thing to do. Because I think that all aspects of this truth should be understood.' So Ms. Laird, at least, seems to uphold the principle that the answer to free speech is more free speech."

if you're interested in an excellent book from an israeli perspective, try this one:
"picnic grounds: a novel in fragments" by oz shellach
http://www.powells.com/biblio/62-0872864197-0

a reviewer says: "The stories take place in modern Israel, but reflect back on the Palestinians who were displaced, the villages that were bulldozed, the hillsides that were razed, and the history that remains largely ignored. Through these stories, a picture of a modern state superimposed over the historical Palestine emerges. Furthermore, we begin to sense how modern Israel avoids this recent history, covers it over. A family picnic on the grounds of a former Palestinian village, or the dense pine forests covering the hillsides outside Jerusalem that once were covered with olive orchards - the stories all speak to the way modern Israel manages to exist in a state of near denial."

this denial is what must be overcome now, if there is to be peace in this land. no more burning bridges, no more building walls. it may be painful for some people move from denial into knowledge into acceptance, but it is the only way for justice to occur.

israeli ceasefire violations don't count

2006-08-24T16:35:00.000-07:00

"Twelve day ceasefire continues to hold" say the headlines. but what they really mean is that, in the twelve days since the UN-brokered ceasefire began, no rockets have been fired by Hezbollah into israel. what is left out is that in every single one of those twelve days since the "ceasefire", israeli forces have continued to launch raids deep into lebanon, and to drop missiles from airplanes onto the already-devastated ruins of lebanon.

amir peretz, israeli 'defense' (war) minister, said sunday "Our duty is to prepare for the next round".
http://palestinechronicle.com/story-08210691614.htm

but israel's 'next round' is simply a continuation of the last - for israel, the words 'ceasefire' mean nothing ....as proved by many many years of such attempted 'ceasefires' by occupied palestinians, who have time and again halted their piddling rocket fire over the border -- 90% of which hit open desert -- in the hopes that israel would also stop its attacks on palestinians. this has never happened. usually, during such attempted 'ceasefires', israeli attacks have only increased.

and lebanon is no exception.....

aug. 23 - an israeli soldier was killed when his jeep ran over an old land mine laid by his colleagues in the israeli army:
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/753992.html

aug. 21 violations:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,1855268,00.html

aug. 19 - baalbek raid (note: baalbek is nowhere near the israel-lebanon border. it is in the far north of lebanon, on the border with syria) - the UN head, kofi annan, said this raid clearly violated the ceasefire:
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/753196.html

jonathan cook, an analyst in israel, has this to say about the 'baalbek raid':
"Israeli special forces launched the covert operation to capture a Hizbullah leader, Sheikh Mohammed Yazbak, way beyond the Litani River, the northern extent of Israel's supposed 'buffer zone'. The hit squad were disguised not only as Arabs -- a regular ploy by units called 'mistarvim' -- but as Lebanese soldiers driving in Lebanese army vehicles. When their cover was blown, Hizbullah opened fire, killing one Israeli and wounding two more in a fierce gun battle.

"It is worth noting that, according to the later official version, Israel's elite forces were exposed only as they completed their intelligence work and were returning home. Why would Israel be using special forces, apparently in a non-belligerent fashion, in a dangerous ground operation when shipments of weapons crossing from Syria can easily be spotted by Israel's spy drones and its warplanes?

"It is difficult to see how this operation could be characterised as "defensive" except in the Orwellian language employed by Israel's army -- which, after all, is misleadingly known as the Israel Defence Forces. UN Resolution 1701, the legal basis of the ceasefire, calls on Israel to halt "all offensive military operations". How much more offensive could the operation be?"
see more: http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article5604.shtml

"Inside 1701: What the UN Security Council's Ceasefire Resolution Actually Says":
http://www.imemc.org/content/view/20998/0/
"A line-by-line analysis reveals that it is as full of pro-Israeli holes as a Swiss cheese....The loopholes also suggest that the present ceasefire, presently welcomed by two exhausted sides, may hold only a few weeks."

here's noam chomsky's analysis:
http://www.palestinechronicle.com/story-08250655609.htm

---------------------------------
meanwhile.....
back in palestine.....things are back to 'normal'. that means the daily killing of 1,2,3...7,10 palestinian civilians, the taking of prisoners by israeli forces from their homes each day and night, the 700 checkpoints, the nightly shelling of the gaza strip, the early morning invasions of refugee camps, the home demolitions, the settlement expansion, the wall construction......all of which were of course still going on during the lebanon war but were superceded by the massive casualties being inflicted by israeli forces on that beleagured nation during the last month of war. so ....that appears to be 'over' for now (except of course for what i wrote about above)

over 200 killed in israeli 'operation summer rains' that is ongoing in gaza....
http://english.wafa.ps/body.asp?id=7284

the wailing cries of the palestinians go out night after night, year after year, the heartfelt writing of blog after blog, tearful testimonies to the united nations human rights commission, to amnesty international, to anyone who will listen......

...reminding me, as i think about it, of the plaintive cries coming out of the congo at the end of the 19th century......mark twain, joseph conrad, and other articulate english writers took up the cause, appealing with desperate descriptions to the western world of the horrid reality of live in congo under the colonial occupiers.....and what good did it do? the european and american companies that profited off the murder of 15 million congolese people to make goodyear tires out of the rubber that congolese people were forced at gunpoint to collect until they fell down dead from exhaustion, not to mention those shot at gunpoint or tortured to death....the dozens of companies that STILL EXIST TODAY that made their fortunes off stealing the resources of a colonized and exploited people living in the cruelest conditions imaginable....the bankers, the investors, the company owners, the politicians that made their fortunes off that colonization and cruelty have not ceased the exploitation, and have passed their fortunes on to their children, who maintain the upper-class-crust that continues the parasitic culture of colonization.......an estimated 2 million people have died in the congo in the last three years in fighting that's a continuation of the genocide of rwanda - the resource wars that are the logical continuation of the colonial domination of the 19th and 20th centuries......the only elected leader, populist patrice lumumba, was murdered in 1961 by the CIA, to be replaced by the cruellest dictators imaginable - fully US supported and funded of course....
(read 'king leopold's ghost' for more on the congo: http://www.libertysearch.com/articles/2002/000022.html)

so what good are all these plaintive cries and descriptions of the conditions of oppression if THINGS DON'T CHANGE? if people in the west don't listen to those plaintive cries, read those descriptive writings and DO SOMETHING about it, NOTHING will change.

i mean....the 10,000 or more cluster bomb shells being found in southern lebanon, the ones that shatter on impact firing shrapnel in every direction, killing hundreds of civilians in lebanon - (ONE THIRD of the 1200 killed in lebanon were CHILDREN)....the cluster bombs were supplied by the US. THE US CONFIRMS that this is the case. the organization human rights watch, in the third week of the war, sent an urgent appeal to the US to STOP sending those cluster bombs, please!!! in plaintive tones, they cried, please! stop sending the cluster bombs!!! they're killing children!! instead, the US shipped off a rush shipment of more weapons, missiles and cluster bombs to israel.....and of course, more and more children were killed.

or could it be, as ward churchill asked after september 11th, that americans KNOW about the piles and piles of hundreds, thousands, millions of dead babies killed DIRECTLY in their name, for their lifestyle, with weapons they paid for and supplied, that they KNOW, but they just DON'T CARE. that they agree with madeleine albright's statement in 1996 that, yes, we know that half a million children have died in Iraq due to the US-led sanctions, but that, "We think the price is worth it."

i'm asking you: is the price really worth it? i mean to you, personally. are the millions of dead babies that have been, and continue to be killed in your name a price that you're willing to pay?

or is magan wiles of st. louis right in assessing, "I think you all are tired of this militaristic, war-driven, corporate-controlled society we live in. I think you all know that there is a better way to live. I think you ready for it to happen, and I trust the day is approaching when you will feel you have the power to make it happen, when we stand strong together and take back our country." when she says, "We have to take things into our own hands. We have to start working on the world's problems--and the problems within our own country-- as if they are are our own problems. It's the only way things will change. We have to be brave enough to say 'This is not who we want to be anymore. This is not the way we want the world to be anymore.'"
see: http://www.palestinechronicle.com/story-08250655142.htm

"after all, look at what they've put israel through...."

2006-08-21T17:02:00.000-07:00

i, unfortunately, recently made the mistake of engaging a zionist in an online forum...big mistake. but there was one statement that she made in the course of the 'discussion' that i'd like to expand upon a little.

the statement was made in regard to the 'security procedures' at the allenby bridge border crossing between the west bank and jordan, which is tightly controlled by israeli security.....as I questioned the beatings, harassment, delays and etc. there, she said, basically, "palestinians should be expected to endure extra security procedures - after all, look at what they've put israel through...."

and this statement could be applied in a similar fashion to a number of different situations:
palestinians should be expected to endure X - after all, look at what they've put israel through....

at checkpoints, for example...
palestinians should be expected to endure 700 checkpoints that are built between villages, cutting families in half, preventing students from reaching school, preventing ambulances from reaching the hospital, they should be expected to give up their babies in miscarriages, as over 100 women have done, should be expected to wait, standing in the hot sun after gallbladder surgery, until they die, as happened to an old woman as I watched last year at a checkpoint, should be expected to wait for hours each day to go a couple of kilometers away to work (most of these checkpoints, remember, are NOWHERE NEAR any israeli areas or settlements, so no justification can be given that this is about 'protecting israelis'), should be expected to strip naked in front of hundreds of people, even if they are a woman, should be expected to wait all day, or for several days, at a gate that separates them from their farmland, until the moment when the soldier in charge of that particular gate takes a whim to open it to let them farm their land or tend their animals......palestinians should be willing to wait at the checkpoints for as long as the soldiers stationed there want them to, even if they are sick, or pregnant, or dying.....they should be willing to die, of thirst, illness, injury, after waiting hours or days at each checkpoint, with hundreds of others all waiting, waiting....so that some singular israeli settler can pass uninhibited, and without seeing any arabs, on some faraway settler road......- after all, look at what they've put israel through....

or in prison....
palestinians should be expected to be seized from their beds in the middle of the night without cause or explanation, and locked into prison with 10,000 others, many of whom have never even been charged. they should be expected to endure torture, techniques which israeli human rights groups have documented time and time again as being severe violations of international law....techniques like "palestinian hanging" from the ankles, which was used by U.S. soldiers trained by Israelis in the tortures at Abu Ghraib and other prisons in Iraq.....palestinians who have no association with any resistance group should be expected to be imprisoned and tortured in this fashion, after all, they should be willing to prove to israel that they are willing to go through whatever it takes to show that they are not opposed to the israeli occupation of their land, they should be expected, should be willing! to be tied to a chair with their back arched and pulled, to be stripped and harassed and beaten and abused (all of which have been documented on numerous occasions), should be willing to go without food and water for long stretches, to go without needed medical treatment, to be put into a windy dusty tent in the scorching heat of the Negev desert with thousands of other Palestinians being held there, many without ever being charged.....should be expected, if they are a pregnant woman in prison, to give birth in shackles, without proper medical care, to be imprisoned with their babies in tiny cells in which the baby has to learn prison procedures before they can walk or talk, palestinians should expect that they have no right to a trial, to a lawyer, to stand before a judge....they should expect that israel can lock them up for as long as it wants, for years and years, without ever charging them with anything, because 'security reasons' is reason enough (even if, as in many cases, there is absolutely no evidence that the imprisoned person has ever done anything at all)....they should expect to be tried, if they are tried, in a legal system that does not recognize them as people, and under which they have no legal jurisdiction or rights, as they have no citizenship in any country, having been deprived of the right to citizenship by israeli occupation of their land. in fact, they should expect to live in prison, happy in their knowledge that by doing so, they are helping to keep israel safe (despite the fact that no connection has ever been made between the massive imprisonment of palestinians and deterrence of attacks against israel), happy to live locked inside israeli prison walls with no way to appeal to any judge, court or body as they have no legal rights whatsoever....innocent or guilty, it doesn't (and shouldn't) matter to the imprisoned palestinians that they will not get their day in court, and have no right to expect it......
- after all, look at what they've put israel through....

or the land....
palestinians should be expected to give up their land for the israeli immigrants. like the farmers in hebron who were just issued military orders last night to give up 275 acres of their land so that the settlements in the hebron area can expand.....and no, they shouldn't expect to have a hearing or an appeal or any compensation for their land....they should give it voluntarily, they should give up their ancient olive trees, nearly one million of which have been cut down in the last six years by israeli forces and settlers. despite the fact that these olive trees provide the only source of income for over one-quarter of the palestinian population, they should voluntarily give them up, they should be happy to let the Israeli army come and chop up their trees, and give the wood to Israeli settlers for firewood, and then take over the land to build Jewish-only settlements which they and their families will be walled out of.....they should give up their family's age-old connection to the land so that immigrants from russia or poland or the USA can come and build walled-in housing developments with guards at the entrances and electric fences all around.....as 260,000 Israelis and Israeli immigrants have done in the last ten years in the West Bank. they should be expected to give up their claims to their land, even if their families have lived there a thousand years, even if they hold a title, even if the land is the only thing they have left on this earth.....they should be expected to watch their children go hungry, their animals starve, and their homes be demolished as the homes of 27,000 palestinians have been demolished in the last six years....they should be expected to endure the loss of their ancestral land so new settlements and military bases can be built there.....
- after all, look at what they've put israel through....

or the wall....
palestinians should be expected to accept this Wall, built 'for Israel's security', built deep within Palestinian territory, annexing up to half of the Palestinian West Bank to make it de facto part of Israel.....the children in Silwan who are protesting the Wall that is pushed up against their school building, separating the school from the schoolyard, and the daily shooting by soldiers into their schoolyard as the soldiers 'protect' the construction of the wall against the shouts, protests, and occasionally stones thrown by the kids - they should just stop that silliness, they should give up their right to an education, should give up their access to their school, they should accept that this Wall is being built 'for Israel's security', despite the fact that it is running right through the middle of their town....the farmers in the Salfit district, where the Wall is being constructed right now, should be expected to give up their land, so that the water wells, 70% of which are already controlled by Israel, can all end up on the Israeli side of the Wall....despite the fact that their district is 20 km from the supposed 'border' between the West Bank and Israel...no matter, let Israel annex those 20 km, it is, after all, 'for their security'.....and what about those silly Qalqilians? How dare they complain that their town of 40,000 has been completely surrounded by the 8-meter high concrete Wall with guardtowers every 200 meters? That the only way in and out of the city - for farmers to reach their farmlands, for villagers to reach their work in town - is through one, Israeli controlled gate, which is frequently closed. That townspeople have been shot and killed from the watchtowers, that mentally-handicapped people have been some of the most victimized, with a number of them having been killed for venturing too close to the Wall into what Israeli soldiers term 'the killing zone' (varies from 3-300 meters from the Wall, depending on which soldier you ask, and how they feel that day). They should be expected to make a few small concessions 'for Israel's security'...
- after all, look at what they've put israel through....

food and water....
how can palestinians really expect to be able to have access to food and water - these things are luxuries, after all, and they should be willing to give up some luxuries for the sake of israel's security. so what if 40% of Gazan children, according to united nations reports, are suffering from malnutrition.....so what if Israeli control of 70% (and growing) of the West Bank's water means that Israeli forces frequently cut off the water supply to Palestinians in the hottest part of the year - to redirect the water to Israeli settlements to fill their swimming pools and supply their air conditioning, while the Palestinians (on whose land the underground wells actually lie) are stuck without drinking water, let alone water to wash clothes, food or dishes, for days on end (as Shoa'fat refugee camp is being cut off right now)? Palestinians should be expected to give up their universally-recognized right to access to water so that a few nearby settlers who recently moved onto land that used to belong to the palestinians can have water for their swimming pools. these palestinians should expect to give up a few small things here and there - like food and water - for the sake of israel's 'security'...
- after all, look at what they've put israel through....

and what exactly have the palestinian people put israel through anyway? over 900 israelis have been killed by palestinians in the last six years - 2/3 of them civilians (in the same time period, over 4,000 palestinians have been killed, 2/3 of them civilians). these deaths are without a doubt unconscionable, inexcusable, and there should be justice for the families of those killed. but are _all_ palestinians to be held responsible for the killing of israelis?

israelis are, for the most part, living modern, normal lives - able to work, shop, sleep, travel, eat, drink, swim, pray....all things that most people take for granted, but things which palestinians are routinely denied.

the 'suicide attacks', which supporters of Israel often cite as the main reason for the occupation of palestine are obviously NOT the real reason for the occupation - as the Israeli occupation began in 1967, and the first suicide attack was in 1994. as israel continues constructing a wall of apartheid that encloses palestinian areas into ghettoes and annexes up to one half of the West Bank to make it de facto part of israel, the resentment, anger and frustration felt by palestinians only grows. there were no suicide attacks prior to the 'oslo accords' in 1993 - an agreement that had israelis dancing in the streets, but pushed palestinians into an apartheid regime. it was only after the apartheid that was the true reality of the 'oslo accord' began to be enforced that attacks on civilians became commonplace....and the first such attack was not a palestinian suicide attack against israelis, but a massacre of 29 palestinian civilians praying in a mosque in Hebron by dr. baruch goldstein, a right-wing zionist israeli, in april 2004 (each year israeli settlers in hebron, including children, celebrate this massacre - some dress up like baruch goldstein and fire weapons into the air). a month later, in may 2004, the first suicide attack against israeli civilians took place.

my point is not to justify such attacks - they are absolutely, undeniably unjustifiable. i just think that many people are not aware of the historical context in which such attacks have emerged. and i think it is important to realize that the reason given by israel ('security') for the measures taken against palestinians is NOT the real reason for such measures. the real reason, which is exceedingly clear to anyone on the palestinian side of the wall, is the expansion of the israeli state further and further onto palestinian land, using whatever means are necessary in order to do so.

patience....context......forgiveness....change?

2006-08-15T22:41:00.000-07:00

to me this picture has come to symbolize the war between israel and lebanon:
http://static.flickr.com/69/198404237_391b5287f2_m.jpg

it was taken within the first two days of the war....way back on july 14th or so, when people were fleeing for their lives from the hundreds of missiles raining down on southern lebanon....
and the people in northern israel were beginning to hunker down in shelters as hezbollah fired rockets in their direction....

the little girl, half-buried in rubble, was in one of the many vehicles of lebanese people fleeing north which were hit by the supposedly 'precision-guided' israeli missiles.

her face, covered in dirt, is peaceful.

in death, she can have, perhaps, what she never had in life: peace.

i have a question. perhaps it is rhetorical...you don't need to answer....but consider this: if the US objective is to 'bring democracy to the region', and to replace the 'dictatorships' of the region with 'democracies', WHY is the biggest ally of the US in the region the most brutal dictatorship: Saudi Arabia? (well, second to Israel, of course, which is the biggest recipient of US aid in the entire world, by far, and whose commitment to 'democracy' is questionable, as it does not apply to non-Jews).

and the other US allies in the region are also either dictatorships or very repressive monarchical systems. here's some background info...and i'm sorry if this is boring history, but I think it is important to understand:

Saudi Arabia: Saudi Arabia was an absolute monarchy, created by King Ibn Saud in 1906, until 1992, at which time the Saud royal family introduced the country's first constitution. The legal system is based on sharia (Islamic law). The Saud family rules with an iron fist- women are not to go outside without full head coverings, 'honor killings' of women are frequent - first (and only) 'elections' were 2005 municipal elections - women weren't allowed to vote. U.S. troops maintained massive bases from 1993-2003 in and around U.S.-controlled oil fields and refineries (there are still a number of troops there since the U.S. 'pulled out' just after Saudi bombers killed 34 U.S. soldiers in May 2003). This is one of the reasons that was given by Osama bin Laden for his attack on the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon in 2001: the presence of U.S. troops in the home of Islam's holiest sites, Medina and Mecca.

Jordan (The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan): monarchy - ruled by King Abdullah since independence post WW1, then, after his death in 1999, ruled by his son, King Hussein. People are afraid to even speak about politics, due to the infamous 'underground desert prisons' that many dissenters and communists have been sent to. Media is tightly controlled, government is appointed by King Hussein.

Bahrain: gained independence from Britain in 1971 - Prince Sheikh Isa bin Salman Al Khalifa, ruled until he died in 1999; His son, Sheikh Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa ascended to the throne. Popular protests brutally repressed, particularly in 1994, when a popular uprising almost overthrew the dictatorship.

Oman: Absolute monarchy - In 1970, the sultan, Sa'id bin Taimur, who had ruled since 1932, was replaced by his son, Qabus ibn Sa'id. Before 2003, only the elite were allowed to vote in municipal elections.

Qatar: Familial monarchy (Emirate) - in 2005 implemented first constitution. The World Trade Organization selected Doha, the capital of Qatar, for its 2003 world summit, due to the fact that protest is illegal there (having faced massive protests at prior summits). About 85% of Qatar's income from exports comes from oil. Its people have one of the highest per capita incomes in the world - that is, the 40% of the population who are Qatari. The majority of the population are low-paid immigrant oil workers. Qatar permitted U.S. forces to use Qatar as a base during the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

United Arab Emirates: Federation formed in 1971 by seven emirates (emirates are Islamic religious-ruled areas). After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the U.S., the UAE was identified as a major financial center used by al-Qaeda in transferring money to the hijackers. After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the U.S., the UAE was identified as a major financial center used by al-Qaeda in transferring money to the hijackers. The UAE remained a U.S. ally, and the U.S. has stationed troops in the UAE during the 2003 Iraq war.

Kuwait: constitutional monarchy, governed by the al-Sabah family since its founding in 1961. Kuwait has 20% of the world's known oil resources. Since 1946 it has been the world's second-largest oil exporter. The ruling sheik receives half of the profits. In July 1990, Iraqi president Saddam Hussein blamed Kuwait for falling oil prices, and claimed the Kuwaiti government had been tapping underground Iraqi oil reserves across the border. After a failed Arab mediation attempt to solve the dispute peacefully, and a go-ahead from the U.S. Ambassador to the region on Aug. 1, 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait on Aug. 2, 1990, and set up a pro-Iraqi provisional government. The U.S., in coalition with international military forces, declared war on Iraq, and drove Iraqi troops from Kuwait in a mere four days, from Feb. 23–27, 1991, ending the First Gulf War. In 1999, the emir gave women the right to vote and run for Parliament, but later that year Parliament defeated the ruler's decree. Kuwaiti society has grown increasingly conservative under the influence of Islamic fundamentalists. In 2003, traditionalists won a sweeping victory in parliamentary elections.

Turkmenistan: founded in 1922, then became a one-party republic after the Soviet breakup in 1991. Saparmurad A. Niyazov was voted president-for-life by his rubber-stamp Parliament in 1999, and the country is considered to be the most authoritarian of all of the former Soviet republics.

Uzbekistan: Since the Soviet break-up in 1991, 'President' Islam A. Niyazov has retained absolute dictatorial control over the country, and opposition of any kind is not tolerated. In 1999, after a bus hijacking, he declared, “I am prepared to rip off the heads of 200 people, to sacrifice their lives, in order to save peace and calm in the republic.”

Pakistan, another 'U.S. Ally', is supposedly a 'parliamentary democracy' - despite the fact that its current 'Prime Minister' Shaukat Aziz was not popularly elected, but hand-picked by the Parliament (with the help of the US), in 2004, and is the former Citibank Vice President, clearly representing US corporate interests in the region (but not necessarily the people....who have been having major protests and acts of dissent since his selection).

It is worth noting that the 'terrorist plot' uncovered several days ago was made up almost entirely of British Pakistanis. Pakistan's border with Afghanistan has seen quite a lot of US "mistakes" in which civilians were massacred by US airstrikes since US troops arrived in the area way back in 2002. This has led to growing support for the Taliban in that part of Pakistan, NOT due to the fact that the Taliban is a group espousing fundamentalist religious ideology, but because, as far as anti-US fighting in Afghanistan, they're the only game going......

And if you follow the news from Afghanistan at all, you can see that the Taliban have gained a lot of their strength back since the US decimated the country with airstrikes in 2002. As the US occupiers remain, resentment against them has only continued to grow, leading to widespread support for the various Taliban militia groups that have re-formed throughout the country, and in western Pakistan as well.

sigh.....
it seems that the Bush administration is following the same logic that Carter, Ford and Reagan followed in the 'Cold War' era in their policies toward Central and South America; supporting brutal dictatorships and crushing democratic popular movements because they were considered 'communist'. Now it seems the word 'communist' has simply been replaced by the word 'terrorist' (or, for the more racist and xenophobic among the Bush-ites, 'Muslim')....and the same policy continues to apply. haven't we, as people, learned the errors of our ways?? the 'cold war', while it may have preserved U.S. and Russian lives, cost hundreds of thousands if not millions of lives in central and south america, not to mention southeast asia.....all for the so-called 'war on communism'. but americans have short memories.....who even recalls what 'iran-contra' was about, or what it implied, or who was involved (despite the fact that many of the key players in that massive scandal are right up again in the driver's seat leading bush's 'war on terror' using the same tactics they used to terrorize the people of nicaragua in the early 80s).

three good articles:
Jonathan Cook in Nazareth: Suddenly, I'm an 'Islamic Fascist'
http://jkcook.net/Articles2/0273.htm#Top

Robert Fisk in Beirut: If you want the roots of terror, try here
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/fisk/article1218652.ece

Sandy Tolan (UC Berkeley, writing about Gaza): The catastrophe that never ends
http://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2006/07/18_gaza.shtml

ps. please read my fiance's article on this 'citizen journalism' site, and rate it with 5 stars (only if you think it deserves it, of course):
Saed Bannoura: A Moment that Changed My Life:
http://www.orato.com/node/746

there are some good articles on orato.com - one of them, by an argentinean who biked to alaska, describes "the dreadful working conditions and poverty of Bolivian silver miners of Potosi. I’ve heard about their plight before, but when I saw it with my own eyes I felt ashamed that such peril still exists on earth. It was and still is one of the most profoundly moving experiences of my life. It felt like going back in time to a medieval vision of hell on earth - the primitive, basic working conditions, the heat, dust and fumes. Witnessing people, many of them young children, forced to work with primitive means of protection and equipment was truly humbling. They toil with hammers and chisels in dark, dusty caverns for hours on end. To sustain energy and satiate hunger at an affordable cost, they usually forfeit meals and simply chew coca leaves. And to blunt the agony of their work, most miners smoke unfiltered cigarettes and drink nearly pure, 196 proof grain alcohol. If their lungs don't soon fail, their livers often do."

it humbles me, too, to think of the millions of people scrambling, scraping, dying in the mines to preserve the "diamond is forever" slogan sold to young brides or the coltan for cellphone microchips or the gold standard. every privilege americans have, and refuse to think about, comes at a tremendous cost. why are we so convinced that we deserve more than other people? how horribly, undeniably, unsustainably unfair of us. when will we ever learn? when will we eeeever learn?

remembering hiroshima: "into ploughshares turn your swords"

2006-08-06T08:00:00.000-07:00

the 6th of august is the anniversary of a day that changed the world in a really big way. an invention made by one of the world's most brilliant geniuses, albert einstein, was used as a weapon of mass destruction, as the first atomic bomb was dropped on the unsuspecting citizenry of the city of hiroshima, japan. einstein himself was opposed to the use of 'atom-splitting' as warfare, he tried to stand up to the development of the nuclear bomb....but he was unable to prevent the government scientists who were determined to turn his discovery into a tool of destruction.

now we live in a nuclear age - with eight confirmed nuclear powers: the United States, Russia, United Kingdom, France, China, India, and Pakistan. North Korea claims to have nuclear weapons, and Israel is suspected of having developed approximately 30 nuclear warheads (with photographic evidence leaked in the early 80s by Israeli scientist Mordechai Vanunu, who was imprisoned for treason for leaking the photos).

my friend bill quigley, a human rights lawyer from new orleans, has written the following piece about the actions of three men: two former soldiers and a priest, who took a symbolic action of 'turning swords into ploughshares' in North Dakota, to try to bring attention to the 1700 nuclear warheads stored there, and what it would mean for the world if these weapons were ever used again.

we need to move, as a planet, toward peace and disarmament.....instead of toward more war and destruction. right now, it seems we're moving in entirely the wrong direction.

Weapons of Mass Destruction Discovered Here: Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and North Dakota
By Bill Quigley
On August 6, 1945 the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Three days later, the US dropped another atomic bomb on Nagasaki. These nuclear weapons killed over 100,000 people, almost all civilians, and injured many tens of thousands more.

Fr. Carl Kabat, 72, Greg Boertje-Obed, 51, and Michael Walli, 57, sit in jail in North Dakota awaiting a federal criminal trial because of weapons of mass destruction and because of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I visited them last week.

Their crime? They tried to disarm one of the 1700+ nuclear weapons in North Dakota. On June 26, 2006, they went to the silo of a Minuteman III first-strike nuclear missile and wrote on it "If you want peace, work for justice." Then they hammered on its lock and poured some of their own blood over it. They waited to be arrested and have been in jail ever since. If convicted, they face imprisonment of up to ten years for criminal damage to federal property.

The Minuteman III is a first-strike intercontinental nuclear missile with a range of over 6000 miles and carries 27 times the destructive power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. There are over one hundred fifty Minuteman III missiles planted in the grounds in silos in just the northern part of North Dakota.

Fr. Kabat has been a Catholic priest for over forty years. Greg Boertje-Obed was a First Lieutenant in the US Army. Mike Walli served two tours in Vietnam. All three men were born in small towns or rural areas of the Midwest. Walli and Boertje-Obed are members of the Loaves and Fishes Catholic Worker community in Duluth, Minnesota. Together they are called the "Weapons of Mass Destruction Here Plowshares." The Plowshares movement seeks to follow the instructions of Isaiah (2:4) and Micah (4:3) to "beat your swords into plowshares."

At the time of their arrest, the three specifically linked their actions to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. "Two of the most terrible war crimes occurred on August 6th and 9th, 1945. On August 6th, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, Japan, killing more than 100,000 people (including U.S. Prisoners of war). Three days later the U.S. dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Nagasaki, Japan, killing more than 50,000 people. Use of these weapons of mass destruction on civilian populations were abominable crimes against humanity."

They went on to say "U.S. Leaders speak about the dangers of other nations acquiring nuclear weapons, but they fail to act in accordance with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty which commits the U.S. To take steps to disarm its weapons of mass destruction.

We act in order to bring attention to people’s responsibility for disarming weapons of state terrorism. We can begin the process of exposing U.S. weapons of mass destruction, naming them as abominations that cause desolation, and transforming them to objects that promote life."

Mike Walli enlisted in the army as a young man. With the experience of two tours in Vietnam, he said "This is not about our national defense. The hundreds of Minuteman III nuclear weapons are offensive weapons of mass destruction. Martin Luther King, Jr. preached that the United States is the chief purveyor of violence in the world. We must become a people-oriented society rather than a thing-oriented society. We must kick the war economy habit."

Greg Boertje-Obed, who, after his time as an officer in the military, married and is the father of an eleven year old daughter, told me "There is a sense of righteousness and harmony that comes from being in jail on August 6. When I was in the military, I was trained to fight and "win" a nuclear war. It became clear that all the preparations for a nuclear war were wrong. In contrast Jesus taught "Love your enemies, don't fear those who can kill the body, those who live by the sword will die by the sword." Now is the time to turn away from the ways of violence.

Treat others the way we want to be treated. Now is the time to take steps to help the starving, ill, orphaned, weak, war-oppressed, and down-trodden all over the world. It is time to turn away from the bomb and the possibility of ending all life on our planet and to end the nuclear nightmare.

Fr. Carl Kabat spent several years in the Philippines and Brazil. "August 6th and August 9th are appropriate times to be in jail," he reflected. "We are here to witness against the insanity of nuclear weapons. When these bombs were dropped on the Japanese I was too young to realize what had happened.

Those bombings were war crimes that we, even today, do not acknowledge. The indiscriminate killing of children, women, old people and everyone else certainly cannot be accepted under any just theory of war. Perhaps the fact that we are in jail can help us as a nation remember the criminality of those days in the past. None of us can make up for the killings in the past, but there is a possibility that our being in jail during this time might help stop such insanity from being repeated in the future."

North Dakota is home to more nuclear weapons than any other of the 50 states. The Bureau of Atomic Scientists estimated that the state contained more than 1700 nuclear warheads, not counting the ones planted in concrete silos in the ground.

A friendly cab driver in Bismarck told me "If North Dakota seceded from the Union, we would be the world's third most-powerful nuclear state."

'The Weapons of Mass Destruction Here' Plowshares hope their actions will invite the people of North Dakota, and the rest of the US, to do something about our nation's nuclear weapons of mass destruction in light of many issues of justice, including the deaths of tens of thousands of civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

[Bill Quigley is a human rights lawyer and professor of law at Loyola University New Orleans. Bill is a legal advisor with the 'Weapons of Mass Destruction Here' Plowshares.

You can write Fr. Carl Kabat, Greg Boertje-Obed, or Mike Walli c/o Southwest Multi-County Correctional Center, 66 Museum Drive, Dickinson, ND 58601.

You can find out more about the 'Weapons of Mass Destruction Here' Plowshares at:
http://www.jonahhouse.org
You can contact their community c/o Loaves and Fishes Catholic Worker Community at 218.728.0629.

You can email Bill Quigley at Quigley@loyno.edu ]

the fourth week of war, and nasrallah

2006-08-04T19:00:00.000-07:00

the war drags on........I didn't realize how war-hungry israelis could be, til this whole thing started..... wherever I look, there is that blood-lust in the eyes of the israelis.......smugly satisfied that their army has killed 50 times more lebanese civilians than hezbollah has killed israelis. and hungry for more. as if all jewish people who have ever been killed throughout history will be avenged if they can just be allowed to wipe out lebanon, once and for all.

(i've been reading a book of testimonies from former israeli soldiers who have served in the occupied palestinian territories, called 'breaking the silence'. here's one testimony, about a 'revenge killing' in the west bank: http://breakingthesilence.org.il/testimony_en.asp?full=413 . to me the most striking thing is where the soldier says, "It was... really... I really enjoyed it. It was the first time (in my experience) that we were in an ‘advance...storm...’ situation, like in our training exercises. And we acted flawlessly. We performed superbly.", while describing a brutal attack on two unarmed, middle-aged Palestinian Authority police.)

today the talmudic council (jewish religious judges) ruled that enemy children are allowed to be targets, that killing children doesn't violate jewish religious law:
http://www.palestine-info.co.uk/am/publish/article_19432.shtml

what a strange skewed interpretation of a religion.......
i know lots of jews who would disagree with this interpretation....
like my friend lora, who writes in her blog today:
"One of the most frustrating things for me as an American Jew is to see the vast majority of American Jews uncritically support the horrific and genocidal wars on Palestine and Lebanon. It betrays, not only racism, but extreme ignorance on their part - ignorance not only with regard to Israel's war crimes but to its own 'people.'"

check out the 'jews of lebanon' website:
http://lubnan-alkawi.com/jewsoflebanon/index.php
that gives the account of an israeli targeted airstrike on a synagogue where Jewish and Muslim refugees had taken refuge, in the israeli invasion of lebanon back in 1982:

and this article, 'middle eastern jews condemn israeli aggression':
http://ww4report.com/node/2278

there are even moroccan jewish lawyers who are filing a suit against the Moroccan-born Israeli defense minister Amir Peretz for 'war crimes' against the Lebanese people:
http://haaretz.com/hasen/spages/746169.html

......................
so as israelis line up behind the war (with a few thousand notable exceptions), palestinians are in a very different boat.

i'm noticing, more than ever, how war-weary palestinians are.....so sad, almost defeated.......just want this thing to be over - many palestinians are at that point in the struggle where they would say to israel, 'fine, take the land, take what you want, go ahead, make this whole place israel....just give me one night of peace.....'

a three-day old baby girl was killed today in the latest israeli rampage in rafah, in southern gaza:
http://www.maannews.net/en/index.php?opr=ShowDetails&ID=14033

a footnote....a number.....not even a blip on the media's radar.
but somebody's pride and joy, somebody's hope for the future. i remember when i saw my niece born, how amazing it was, to see this new life -- then imagine some army blowing her apart when she was just three days old.....how angry i would be at that army....
and imagine if there were no justice, no way to get a day in court even, to face her killer and make him realize what he'd done......no nothing, because palestinians are 'non-persons' with no right to even challenge her killing in court.....

so war-weary....after four decades of occupation, four decades of humiliation, dishonor, defeat......but in most palestinians, there is that little spark....that, 'hey, maybe we _can_ end this thing, get our land back, get some justice in this thing after all'....and that spark, in recent days, has come to be synonymous with 'nasrallah'. the one guy who dared to fight back against israel [nasrallah is the leader of hezbollah in lebanon].

kids have gone from chanting 'listen, listen, abbas, you were beaten by hamas'
to 'nasrallah, my dear, you managed to hit kiryat shmona'
(kiryat shmona is the furthest south that hezbollah has ever hit israel - each day hezbollah's rockets hit a little further south than ever before....and each day israel says they have completely destroyed the hezbollah arsenal of rockets...nasrallah keeps proving them wrong)

last night nasrallah gave an address on television, and you can bet it was widely watched in palestine (at least, in the parts where there is still electricity). here's an article I wrote about it:

Sheikh Nasrallah, Hezbollah leader, warns Israel that if they "hit Beirut", Hezbollah will "hit Tel Aviv"

"If you want to fight like an army, we will fight you army to army - but if you continue to hit our cities, killing innocents, we will strike back and hit your cities - though we would regret having to take this step", said Nasrallah in a televised statement on Al-Jazeera television Thursday night. He reiterated that from the beginning, Hezbollah has shown restraint, and been willing to negotiate with Israel for the return of two Israeli soldiers captured by Hezbollah in Lebanon on July 12th.

"An end of [Israeli] aggression means three things: firstly a ceasefire, secondly the return of those evicted, and third, the departure of Israel from any land it might have occupied", said Nasrallah, continuing, "We aren't an army - we are street fighters. When the Israeli army invades into Lebanon with ground troops, it is to our advantage. That is our terrain."

"The resistance can shell as far as we need to, whenever we need to. The current Israeli military invasion is incompetent, blind, cowardly and ignorant. They target children and the elderly. What has happened so far is massacres. The U.S. is responsible. What happened in Qana is a disgrace for Bush and Condoleeza Rice - the U.S. administration is a criminal administration, and they are trying to give us orders."

The reference that Nasrallah made to 'Qana' refers to an Israeli airstrike over the weekend that hit a home sheltering nearly 60 civilians, 38 of them small children, killing many of the inhabitants.

Nasrallah continued, "When the war stops, you should remember that the American administration, which claims that it loves Lebanon, wants Lebanon to be safe, that it cares about the Lebanese people - the only thing the U.S. wants is for Lebanon to be a new base for the U.S. military in the Middle East. I want everyone to remember this: that Lebanon will not be a base for the U.S. military."

He also addressed Arab leaders, saying, "You abandoned all of your morals and responsibilities, because you are afraid of losing power - you care for your positions more than anything - but you have to realize that the American administration wants you to be under their control. For just one day, you should stand with Lebanon instead of with Bush's plan for control of the Middle East.

The leader of Hezbollah warned that the group will launch rockets at Tel Aviv if Israel attacks central Beirut. Israeli forces dropped 23 tons of bombs on a neighborhood in Beirut on July 20th, claiming that it was attempting to kill Sheikh Nasrallah and his aides, but instead destroying nearly 20 city blocks of apartments and homes. Today the Israeli airforce dropped two bombs into the southern suburbs, an area that is especially crowded due to the influx of 750,000 evacuees fleeing from the south. The planes also dropped leaflets warning residents that there will be heavy bombing of their neighborhoods tomorrow, and that they should 'get out'. With all borders closed, the airport in ruins after being repeatedly bombed by Israel, and the port blockaded by the Israeli navy, many of the Lebanese residents of Beirut are at a loss as to where they are expected to go.

So far, Lebanese civilian casualties have outnumbered Israeli civilian casualties at a rate of 50 to 1. 19 Israeli civilians have been killed, according to the Israeli government, while over 900 Lebanese civilians have been killed, according to the Lebanese government. Christian towns and neighborhoods have been hit by Israeli airstrikes, and even the farthest northern villages have not been immune to the bombs dropped by the Israeli warplanes.

Israeli military spokespeople have repeatedly claimed that they have destroyed all of Hezbollah's long-range rocket launchers, but have been repeatedly been proven wrong, with Hezbollah fighters continuing to fire sporadic barrages of rockets into northern Israel, farther south than Hezbollah has ever struck before. 180 rockets were fired into Israel on Thursday alone - resulting in the deaths of eight Israeli civilians, including one teenager.

Israeli Defense Minister Amir Peretz last week promised to "destroy ten buildings in Lebanon for every rocket fired by Hezbollah", and over the weekend dropped hundreds of missiles into Lebanon from F16 jets and Apache helicopters. Rescue crews attempted to extract bodies on Monday and Tuesday, and managed to pull out over one hundred bodies of civilians before having to give up the searches due to ongoing Israeli shelling of the rescue effort.

As the war between Israel and Lebanon enters its fourth week, the Lebanese resistance movement has repeatedly shown its resilience, standing up to the vastly better-armed Israeli army with guerrilla tactics and anti-tank mines that have thus far prevented the Israeli army from establishing any bases within Lebanon. Thirty-seven Israeli soldiers have been killed in southern Lebanon in clashes with Hezbollah fighters.

About 10,000 Israeli troops have been deployed on the Israel-Lebanon border, and have received orders to to take control of southern Lebanon from the border to the Litani river, 30 km inside Lebanon. Thus far the Israeli army has been unable to advance farther than 3-4 kilometers, but with the new orders, analysts point out that the new Israeli offensive could be a repeat of the Israeli 'scorched earth policy' carried out during their invasion of Lebanon in the early eighties, in which much of southern Lebanon was flattened to rubble, and Israeli forces advanced to Beirut, occupying Lebanon for the next twenty years.

The Hezbollah resistance movement was able to push the Israeli forces back to their own border in 2000, in a humiliating defeat for Israel. Hezbollah remains the only force that has ever been able to claim victory over the Israeli army. The Israeli army is by far the best armed military force in the region, and is the only country in the Middle East with an airforce. The Israeli army is the fourth largest army (by per-capita spending) on earth, and the International Atomic Energy Agency has estimated that Israel has approximately 30 nuclear weapons in its arsenal, though Israel has never admitted that it is a nuclear power, and has never allowed inspections of its nuclear arsenal.

--------------------
please read:
"Why do they hate us? Qana (again)" by Jonathan Cook:
http://www.maannews.net/en/index.php?opr=ShowDetails&ID=14005

"Venezuela withdraws its ambassador to Israel":
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/758B61AA-7D24-470F-83D2-78633DA88019.htm

"The Israeli media offensive":
http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/news/archives/2006/08/02/the_media_offensive.html

Open letter to Fox News, from two Jordanian journalists who just quit the station, describing "inexperienced anchors with their racist comments, making Fox resemble the state-run Television networks in countries you despise in the Middle East"
http://www.palestinechronicle.com/story-08030644146.htm

and a commentary by the renowned British reporter and analyst who has reported from Beirut for the last thirty years...
"Hizbollah is killing more Israeli soldiers than civilians and the Israelis are killing far more Lebanese civilians than they are guerrillas."
http://www.palestinechronicle.com/story-08040695757.htm

"We write the news while crying" + bonus article: our president is an imbecile!

2006-08-02T15:20:00.000-07:00

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” -- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Here is a journal sent from Hanady Salman, editor of the Lebanese paper As-Safir.....
I feel I could have written it myself.
"We write the news while crying", she says.
hey, aren't we reporters supposed to be able to 'separate themselves' from their story....de-personalize it? I mean, we're supposed to be 'objective', "not take sides"....

somehow though.....we just can't keep from crying.

and the ambulance workers, trying their best to hold themselves together - they need to think straight, to mend bodies, to fix wounds.....
look at the pain in this picture:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/matrixofconfusion/203379480/
....as the ambulance worker cradles the head of the tiny child's body....pobably the twentieth he's pulled from the rubble that morning (yesterday in Qana)......he's trying so hard to hold it in, to be able to keep doing his job.......
imagine if that was your child.

here is hanady's journal:

Beirut , august the 1st , 2006
So July is over. Now it’s Beirut, August 2006.

I don’t know if any of you are reporters who covered wars in their homeland.

But it’s really weird, somehow “funny”.

Editors crying while reading their reporters’ stories, photographers breaking down, colleagues calling their kids in the middle of the night after seeing pictures from the south, weird sounds during editorial meetings ( you know how men like to hide their tears and emotions), women wearing black as a “natural reflex”, men growing the beards, even our publisher doesn’t wear suits anymore.
People are sleeping here [in the newspaper’s offices], somewhere in the basement. Women sleep in the nearby furnished apartment building.

In the morning, we don’t greet each other anymore; we just look deep into each other’s eyes. Some turn their faces away, some lecture about the necessity of being strong. We touch each other a lot. Hugs here, holding hands there, a mere tap on the shoulder.. you name it.

People stay around each other. No one likes to stay alone in an office. We order food and eat together. But we never talk about anything concerning what’s happening.

We watch the news together, we weep, we smile, but we don’t say anything and then we get back to work. Someone goes out , the only question I ask them when they get back is : how many words , and when will you be done. No details, no one wants to tell what they see, no one wants to hear it. We write while crying, we read it and cry, but we never talk about it.

Saada had tears in her eyes yesterday in her office. I came in and spoke to her and she answered back and her tears kept coming but we both behaved as if nothing was happening. I didn’t see her tears, and she wasn’t crying.

Zeinab called me from Tyre yesterday. She was in the hospital. She was telling me something about her story and then suddenly she started yelling “you can’t believe what’s happening here, you won’t believe what’s happening here, oh Hanady please khalas [enough], please I can’t take it anymore.” And then, suddenly also, she stopped, went back to her normal tone of voice and finished our “professional conversation”.

Yesterday Wajdi and Ali decided to take me out to the sea side. They almost dragged me out of the office, put me in the car and drove through Hamra to the Corniche. I was looking at the streets, the houses, the cars, the shops as if I see them for the first time.

I hadn’t been to Hamra ever since this had started. I go out to the southern suburb to check out the damages, I go to schools and parks where refugees stay, but otherwise I stay in the office and go home.

So, we went to the Manara Corniche, they got me coffee, we sat on a bench and they started making plans for when this will be over. They agreed they should take their families to Sharm El Sheikh, in Sinai, Egypt. There, the kids will swim, and they will get to rest. I told them that the whole newspaper should take a week off, when this is over, to rest. So they suggested we all go together to Sharm el Sheikh. I said I’m renting a whole floor in the hospital for psychiatric patients there, called “Assfouriyeh”. They suggested I make reservations now, because at the end of the war, room prices in Assfouriyeh will rise. They spoke as if they were certain this will end before the summer is over, as if they were certain Sharm el Sheikh still exists, as if they were certain that outside this country , life is still going on.

I always thought that I had a limited mind. For me life happens only here and now.

Hanady

----------------------------------
I want to add this article about Bush at the G8.....I received it by email, and I don't know the original source, so if you do, tell me so I can cite it.
I know, I know, I've already written about Bush's 'Yo Blair!' conversation captured by cameras at the G8 summit in Russia several weeks ago. But as I think of this nightmare scenario Israel is pulling the Middle East into, with the U.S. at their side, ready and willing to carry out whatever massacres are necessary to keep their foothold in the region, and keep on "bringin' home the oil" to preserve the "American way of life" at the expense of the rest of the world.......I just want to reiterate my call that somebody, SOMEBODY over there in the U.S. get their act together and impeach this guy, AND his cabinet....because.... The Emperor Has No Clothes.

it's weird, I was just reading today in the Israeli media how frightening Olmert [the Israeli Prime Minister] could turn out to be, as a political functionary with no military background, who has followed the term of a Mighty Military Man (Ariel Sharon - known in the Arab world as the man behind the massacre in Sabra and Chatila in Lebanon in the early eighties when he was a General in that war), and feels like he has something to prove (ie. that he can fight wars too)....

and I realized that Bush is that way too......not only does he have no military background (or brains, for that matter), but he feels he has to "outdo his daddy"....ie. He REALLY has 'something to prove' (and iraqis and afghanis have really been paying a heavy price...their lives. close to 40,000, at last count. but I guess, for a boost to bush's ego, 'the price is worth it').

read on...

07.18.2006
The Ugly Truth: Our President is an Imbecile

You know it, I know it and the American people know it. But everyone is afraid to say it. They say it privately, but people are afraid of saying it publicly because you will be branded as a liberal, elite, intellectual snob. But believe me, you don’t have to be an intellectual to see how painfully stupid our president is.

Just look at the conversation he is having with world leaders at the G-8 summit.

Mikes picked up the causal talk between the world leaders. Forget that Bush appears to have three sandwiches in his mouth while talking. Forget that he calls out to the Prime Minister of Britain as if he is Flounder in “Animal House.” Forget that he uses profanity. I don’t give a shit about those things.

I thought it was ridiculous that people made fun of George H. W, Bush for vomiting on the Japanese Prime Minister. What was he going to do? He had to puke, so he puked. It happens to the best of us, and more importantly, has nothing to do with his intelligence or how capable he is as a leader.

But his son’s verbal vomit does have a lot to do with his ability to lead this country and the world. What I found to be the most damning is the least quoted part of Bush’s comments. As you read this transcript, remember that this is not a small child talking, but the President of the United States of America: The camera is focused elsewhere and it is not clear whom Bush is talking to, but possibly Chinese President Hu Jintao, a guest at the summit.

Bush: “Gotta go home. Got something to do tonight. Go to the airport, get on the airplane and go home. How about you? Where are you going? Home? Bush: “This is your neighborhood. It doesn’t take you long to get home. How long does it take you to get home?”

Reply is inaudible.

Bush: “Eight hours? Me too. Russia’s a big country and you’re a big country.”

At this point, the president seems to bring someone else into the conversation.

Bush: “It takes him eight hours to fly home.” He turns his attention to a server.

Bush: “No, Diet Coke, Diet Coke.”

He turns back to whomever he was talking with.

Bush: “It takes him eight hours to fly home. Eight hours. Russia’s big and so is China.”

Russia’s big and so is China??????? This guys sounds like a third grader. Do you know anyone who would have a conversation like this with their neighbor, let alone a business associate, let alone a world leader? Who’s proud to know that Russia is big and so is China?

Can anyone now credibly claim that Bush is secretly working on a master plan behind the scenes and that he’s just playing cowboy for the cameras? I hope the master plan doesn’t involve figuring out how long it takes to get to China.

If someone is this ignorant, they’re usually embarrassed and try not to talk much. But this guy is so dumb he has no idea how dumb he is. This sounds like a conversation you might have with a child, a mentally challenged child. Johnny, do you know how big Russia is? How about China? This would all be unfortunate if George was your dentist, or worse yet, your accountant. But he is the leader of the free world. This man makes life or death decisions every day. If you say you’re not scared about that, you’re lying.

Would you let him do the books for your business? Would you trust your company in his hands for eight years? (No matter how Republican you are, you know you just said no to that question.) Would you trust him to be your kids’ guidance counselor and take his advice seriously? If your kids were in the Army and he was their field commander, would you feel good about putting their lives in his hands?

Come on, no one is crazy enough to say yes to that. Yet, he has all of our lives in his hands. The emperor has no clothes. The emperor has no clothes. It’s about time someone in the mainstream media said it.

In the old empires, there would be a lot of marriages between the royal families. And from time to time, these inter-family marriages would produce a mentally challenged son who would inherit the throne. This would set the empire back for hundreds of years. I’m not saying anything, I’m just saying. Russia is big and so is China.

The Democrats for a long time have felt embarrassed about pointing out the obvious. The emperor has no brain. This is what I can’t understand about the Democrats, they’re always playing patty cakes while the Republicans are ripping their face off. John Kerry should have stood at the lectern during the debates and pointed to George Bush and said, “The leader of this country has to be the best and the brightest. If any of you think that he is the best and the brightest America has to offer, go ahead and vote for him!” The theory is that people would be turned off by that. The theory assumes that people are also idiots and they love their cohorts. That is simply not true.

Everyone understands that they have a friend they’d like to go fishing with and a friend they can trust to look after their affairs – and they’re not necessarily the same guy. And that your fishing buddy might not be a great choice for President of the United States of America.

Kerry should have embarrassed Bush, made people feel sorry for him. It would have hurt in the short run and given him a temporary downward blip in the numbers, but in the end, when people went into that voting booth, they would have felt pity for Bush – in that scenario, Kerry wins easily. Nobody votes for someone they pity.

Unfortunately, right now we are in the position of being pitied by the rest of the world. We have third grader for a President. And worse yet, the Vice President has him convinced he is the second coming of Winston Churchill. Scared yet?

songs of sorrow

2006-07-30T15:18:00.000-07:00

the tragic songs are already available for those preparing reports about lebanon......no new writing needs to be done, the old lyrics continue to apply. just pick up a record of lebanese singer fairouz from 20 years ago, put it on the phonograph, and you will hear the words describing, in sorrowful, tragic tones, what is happening again today. even the towns and villages where the massacres occurred back then as israeli forces invaded, led by the 'fearless' general ariel sharon, who had no problem wiping out villages full of civilians for the sake of the 'security of israel'......are the same villages being wiped out today, over and over and over and over again.

piles of bodies.....children, parents, grandparents.......the images are not new, for the people of lebanon......1978, 1982, 1996, 2000....and now, 2006......

today's bombing of a house in Qana, Lebanon where 60 civilians were taking shelter, killing them all, 38 of them children, is being called the 'Qana massacre'. but this is not the first 'Qana massacre' - in 1996, Israeli forces in Lebanon attacked a United Nations compound in Qana where hundreds of civilians had taken refuge. According to the Israeli military, thirty eight shells were fired, two-thirds of them equipped with proximity fuses, an anti-personnel mechanism that causes the weapon to explode above the ground. 106 civilians were killed, with hundreds more wounded. Most of the casualties were residents of nearby villages who had fled the conflict, and four were U.N. troops.

At the time of the 1996 Qana massacre, investigations by the United Nations and human rights groups concluded that the bombing of the United Nations headquarters could not have been an accident. Amnesty International's report said, "The IDF intentionally attacked the UN compound, although the motives for doing so remain unclear. The IDF have failed to substantiate their claim that the attack was a mistake. Even if they were to do so they would still bear responsibility for killing so many civilians by taking the risk to launch an attack so close to the UN compound."

Lt.-Gen. Amnon Shahak, Israel's chief of staff, at a press conference in Tel Aviv defended the shelling: "I don't see any mistake in judgment...We fought Hezbollah there [in Qana], and when they fire on us, we will fire at them to defend ourselves...I don't know any other rules of the game, either for the army or for civilians..."

oh my fellow humans, haven't we learned anything yet?

is the way to peace through war, unending war?

it somehow doesn't seem that way to me.
to me, the way to peace is through dialogue and negotiation.

but the truth is, there are people who don't want peace.....people who actually WANT unending war....

because war is good for business.....and the bombs rarely fall on the rich. so they profit off of wars, and don't ever bother to find out or realize that the profits pouring in to their pockets are made possible by way of families whose limbs have been torn apart, whose bodies are in pieces and whose homes are destroyed on their heads.

and today....the second Qana massacre. as we watch on arabic television now the bodies of the children being pulled out of the rubble by the rescue crews......the tiny bodies, covered in dust and rubble, one after another after another...a little boy, clutching so tightly to his mother that the rescue crews are having to extract their two bodies together......38 children were killed by the israeli bomb dropped on them this morning, and 21 adults, mainly old men and women....

these civilians, scared for their lives, afraid to evacuate due to the ongoing israeli attacks on cars and vehicles headed north attempting to flee......or maybe too poor to have access to a car that could take them north......these 60 people huddled together, in a big house in Qana, hoping the Israeli bombs wouldn't hit them. they managed to make it through another terrifying night of bombing, but when morning came......the bomb hit the house, and every single one of them was killed.

israeli bombs, dropped many times by drones, unmanned aircraft whose computers track movement by motion sensors, or by soldiers using computers which do the same, do not distinguish between hezbollah fighters and kids. their motion sensors are high-tech enough to sense motion from a great distance away, thus providing protection for the soldier in the aircraft dropping the bomb......but none for the families and children whose 'motion' they are detecting.

but israel is allowed to get away with killing 700 people, only 8 of whom have been identified as fighters with hezbollah, because they say "hezbollah hides among civilian populations" or "hezbollah shoots rockets from hospitals"......allegations that have absolutely no evidence, but then.....who needs evidence, when you're israel.....you just do whatever you want, with complete impunity.

if you're israel, you can wipe out a United Nations Observer post, that has been in place for thirty years to try to maintain the peace of the border.....simply because you don't like the fact that the UN is present there. four UN peacekeepers were killed, and others injured, when israel bombed their headquarters last tuesday, just a day after israeli leaders said they 'didn't like' the fact that the UN observers were present in the middle of their self-created war zone.

"Prior to the attack that killed the four UN Observers, UN observers in Lebanon had telephoned the IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] 10 times in six hours to ask it to stop shelling near their position, and each time an army official promised to have the bombing stopped, according to a preliminary UN report on the incident. Once it became clear those pleas were being ignored, the force's commander sought the involvement of top officials in New York, a senior UN official in New York said. UN Deputy Secretary-General Mark Malloch Brown then made several calls to Israel's UN mission 'reiterating these protests and calling for an abatement of the shelling'."

"Even after the IDF attack, when the bunker was reduced to rubble, 'Firing continued during the rescue operation despite repeated requests to the IDF for an abatement.' Some assurances had been given over the phone by Israel while the rescue operation was in progress that rescuers would not be fired upon, a senior UN official said. But the firing did not stop, or even slow, despite these assurances.

"Twenty-one strikes by IDF forces within 300 meters of the patrol base occurred, as well as 12 artillery rounds that fell within 100 meters of the base, four of which hit the base directly."

"Why did they bomb the U.N. site? In my opinion those are precision-guided missiles; I believe then that it is intentional," said Cynthia Hess-von Kruedener, the wife of one of the four UN observers who were killed. "And that wasn't the only day they were firing on that base. My information from him (the major) is that week upon week they had been firing on there, bombing near it. The building was clearly marked, the vehicles were clearly marked, they're clearly marked as U.N. observers. So why were they (the Israelis) firing on that base?" said Hess-von Kruedener.

UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan condemned the "apparently deliberate targeting by Israeli Defence Forces of a UN Observer post in Southern Lebanon."

The United States then vetoed a UN resolution that "condemns any deliberate attack against UN personnel and emphasizes that such attacks are unacceptable"......presumably because the US believes that such attacks ARE acceptable.....or that they believe the Israeli account: that twenty-one strikes by laser-guided precision artillery fired directly toward the UN post were actually "an accident".

as ian williams wrote, in an article on 'reuters alertnet'
(article: http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/IRIN/1072e4ee2357277ee276ec84fdfca6a4.htm ):
"To accept it was yet another accident presupposes a level of incompetence or insubordination in the Israeli army that should result in some serious courts-martial but never does. That feeling was doubtless exacerbated when the IDF shelled the site and prevented a rescue operation.

"So what could be the motive? It is clear that there are many in the IDF with a profound contempt for the United Nations and all it stands for, and who would not shed many tears at such an accident. It may also rankle that UNIFIL has, with the dearth of Western reporters in much of southern Lebanon, provided independent corroboration of many incidents of IDF attacks on civilians. One only has to think of the fate of the USS Liberty in 1967 for being in a position to observe what the IDF was up to when the Israelis bombed and shelled an American ship for over an hour, killing 34 American sailors and wounding 170 more.

"And most sinisterly of all, there are many Israelis -- including the government only a few days ago, who do not want an international force between them and their targets in Lebanon, who would have no great scruples about bombing a U.N. compound 'accidentally on purpose.'

"This time, the "collateral damage" is not just four dead U.N. personnel. The bombing scotches any realistic chance of a reinforced U.N. or multinational peacekeeping force -- which it is worth remembering that Israel itself opposed until a few days ago, and which the war party in Israel sees as a potential obstacle to its attempts to emulate Ariel Sharon's disastrous invasion in 1982."

"These so-called precision attacks seem to be mainly targeting everyone else except the Hezbollah," said Finnish Foreign Minister Erkki Tuomioja, "The longer this continues, the more likely it is that there will be more similar victims."

jan egeland, the UN humanitarian official who toured southern lebanon, begged israel for just three days of truce to allow civilians to seek safety and get some food and water, but israel refused:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060728/ap_on_re_mi_ea/mideast_fighting_un_truce

the international committee of the red cross has cried out that civilians need protection, under international humanitarian law:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060728/wl_mideast_afp/mideastlebanonconflictaidicrc

but.....if you are israel, you can kill as many civilians as you like, you can expand your state onto the land of your neighbors, you can occupy palestine, controlling every movement of the civilian population, for forty years running, and NO ONE will dare to lift a hand to stop you.

sure, there will be condemnations, there may be some protests, the United Nations will even pass resolutions condemning your actions, and the international court of justice will call your actions illegal and 'strongly condemn' your attacks.

but no one will dare to try to stop you, because everyone is afraid of being sanctioned or attacked by your sole ally, the united states.

peter beaumont, a british reporter with 'the guardian' newspaper, stationed in southern lebanon, interviewed one of the thousands of Lebanese who have lost their families in the last three weeks:
"Alamida Ghaith, 22, is a student from the village of Shihin, 20km from Tyre. Last Sunday she was sitting down to lunch with her father, Mohammed, 60, her mother Mounira and her sister Raja. 'We could hear the helicopter all morning, but the atmosphere seemed calm and the helicopter seemed far away. I wasn't afraid and I was eating lunch when the helicopter fired and the building fell on us.

'My father and mother were in the kitchen. A large block fell on me. But God spared me. When I got to the rest of my family they were under blocks. My sister - she was going to be married at the end of this month - her head was destroyed.' The horror passes across Alamida's face. 'My mother looked so content. She reached up a hand to touch my face. I tried to put an arm under her to support her, but when I reached beneath her there was only a hole and a red-hot piece of shrapnel. But she touched my face and looked at me.

'My father does not know his wife and daughter have died. His ears have gone.' Alamida becomes angry. 'Do we look like fighters? Do we look like Hizbollah? Until Sunday all I lived for was my education. Now all of us are the resistance.'"
(the rest of that article is here: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,,1833341,00.html )

if all of this is making you feel helpless, perhaps one thing you can do to be proactive, and to act in solidarity with the people of lebanon, is to hold a fundraiser and send the money to this grassroots organization that is working with the refugees now flooding into beirut from southern lebanon:
http://tadamon.resist.ca/index.php/?p=50#more-50

daily updates -- the siege of lebanon blog:
http://www.siegeoflebanon.blogspot.com

and keep checking:
http://www.imemc.org for news

where were those two soldiers captured, anyway?

2006-07-28T15:16:00.000-07:00

as israel's dual invasions of lebanon and gaza continue to spiral out of control, several people have asked me, "where were those two soldiers captured, anyway?", referring to the capture of two israeli soldiers by hezbollah fighters on july 12th, the event that supposedly set this whole thing off......

well, the answer, for my part, is, it's really not clear. hezbollah and the lebanese government claim that the soldiers were captured inside lebanon, near Ayta al-Sha`b village 60 km north of the Israeli border. the israeli government says the two were captured near the israeli town zar'it, directly along the israel-lebanon border.

what IS clear, and what i know from personal experience, is that israel controls that border. and their 'routine patrols' very often venture quite deep into lebanese territory.

what i CAN tell you is a little story from when i went touring around israel some years ago, with what turned out to be a rather zionist tour group.....and we went to the border with lebanon, went on a cablecar ride to the top of a hill overlooking the border, and there were tall towers and balloons, monitoring across the border, monitoring every action of hezbollah along that border. and we went on a 'picnic', accompanied by israeli military jeeps, who led the way over hills and valleys, several kilometers into the hills, where we reached a waterfall with a swimming hole, and found the place already full of israelis 'out for a picnic'.........INSIDE lebanon. no one seemed to care that this 'picnic site' was a major violation of lebanese sovereignty....the only concern was to watch out for hezbollah.......that's what the israeli soldiers were there for. US-paid-for, israeli military protection for israelis willing to break international law, and even bring their children along with them.

in fact, there are israeli settlements that have been built across the internationally-agreed-upon border with lebanon, and whole 'kibbutzim' (co-op farms) constructed in the israeli-occupied sheba'a farms region, which is officially supposed to be part of syria.

but then, israelis have never cared much for internationally-agreed-upon borders (or internationally-agreed-upon peace terms, human rights conventions, rules of warfare, or anything else). the state of israel has never officially declared its borders, and has continually expanded further and further onto palestinian land since its creation in 1948. and yes, israeli patrols routinely venture across the lebanese border in their 'routine patrols'.

so it's very likely that the jeep which was ambushed on july 12th was on lebanese land.

jonathan cook, a british reporter living in nazareth, has this to say:
"So the chronology of war has been reorganized: now we are being told that Israel was forced to attack Lebanon to defend itself from the barrage of Hizbollah rockets falling on Israeli civilians. The international community is buying the argument hook, line and sinker. "Israel has the right to defend itself", says every politician who can find a microphone to talk into. But, if we cast our minds back, that is not how the "Middle East crisis", as TV channels now describe it, started. It is worth recapping on those early events (and I won't document the long history of Lebanese suffering at Israel's hands that preceded it) before they become entirely shrouded in the mythology being peddled by [David] Horowitz [a well-known American zionist, conspiracy nut, and opponent of free speech] and others.

Early on July 12 Hizbollah launched a raid against an army border post, in what was in the best interpretation a foolhardy violation of Israeli sovereignty. In the fighting the Shiite militia killed three soldiers and captured two others, while Hizbollah fired a few mortars at border areas in what the Israeli army described at the time as "diversionary tactics". As a result of the shelling, five Israelis were "lightly injured", with most needing treatment for shock, according to the Haaretz newspaper.

Israel's immediate response was to send a tank into Lebanon in pursuit of the Hizbollah fighters (its own foolhardy violation of Lebanese sovereignty). The tank ran over a landmine, which exploded killing four soldiers inside. Another soldier died in further clashes inside Lebanon as his unit tried to retrieve the bodies. Rather than open diplomatic channels to calm the violence down and start the process of getting its soldiers back, Israel launched bombing raids deep into Lebanese territory the same day. Given Israel's world view that it alone has a right to project power and fear, that might have been expected.

But the next day Israel continued its rampage across the south and into Beirut, where the airport, roads, bridges, and power stations were pummeled. We now know from reports in the US media that the Israeli army had been planning such a strike against Lebanon for at least a year.

In contrast to the image of Hizbollah frothing at the mouth to destroy Israel, its leader Hassan Nasrallah held off from serious retaliation. For the first day and a half, he limited his strikes to the northern border areas, which have faced Hizbollah attacks in the past and are well protected.

He waited till late on June 13 before turning his guns on Haifa, even though we now know he could have targeted Israel's third largest city from the outset. A small volley of rockets directed at Haifa caused no injuries and looked more like a warning than an escalation.

It was another three days -- days of constant Israeli bombardment of Lebanon, destroying the country and injuring countless civilians -- before Nasrallah hit Haifa again, including a shell that killed eight workers in a railway depot.

No one should have been surprised. Nasrallah was doing exactly what he had threatened to do if Israel refused to negotiate and chose the path of war instead. Although the international media quoted his ominous televised message that "Haifa is just the beginning", Nasrallah in fact made his threat conditional on Israel's continuing strikes against Lebanon. In the same speech he warned: "As long as the enemy pursues its aggression without limits and red lines, we will pursue the confrontation without limits and red lines." Well, Israel did, and so now has Nasrallah.

read the rest of Cook's article here:
http://www.palestinechronicle.com/story-07260651404.htm

what does it mean to be a refugee

2006-07-26T14:46:00.000-07:00

in new orleans last fall, people in the US got a taste of what millions of people around the world experience daily, mainly in areas where the US and allies are involved in resource wars: the experience of becoming a refugee.

now, in new orleans, the rich have come back, and are busy putting their houses on stilts, getting lucrative federal contracts and buying up properties once owned by black people. the black people, many of them middle-class, having owned homes for generations, and the poor people, most of them black, have felt the other side of the post-katrina government response. residents of public housing have been locked out of their homes, unable to return even as their apartments were looted - months after the hurricane - by out-of-state contractors who had free reign to roam into their homes and take whatever they wanted. residents of the ninth ward, one of several areas where water levels reached 20 feet in some places, have been kept out of their homes and neighborhoods by federal troops and police, who are working hand in hand with developers to create a 'new vision' of the ninth ward in which the historically black population is 'disappeared' and replaced by casinos and 'jazzworld'.

coming from new orleans straight to palestine, the parallels are so clear they are impossible to ignore. here, in the name of judaism, israeli settlers have moved into palestinian homes, cut down palestinian olive groves, destroyed whole villages, and taken over with their 'new vision' of who should be allowed to live on this land. so the people who have lived here for hundreds of generations, whose connection to this land and place is so palpable you can feel it in their handshakes, see it in their eyes, and sense the depth of their connection to the land by entering their homes or land......have been pushed aside, moved away, disenfranchised or killed, if they try in any way to resist.....in order to make room for the new inhabitants: jewish immigrants from various places in the world.

when i used to live in new orleans, i knew the people of the ninth ward, eighth ward, seventh ward as true, solid people with unique traditions grounding them to new orleans like no other place in the US. new orleans is its own country, different from the rest of louisiana (but with plenty of cajuns), and totally different from the rest of the country. where else would you find mardi gras indians, the zulu krewe, and a completely irrationally zealous commitment to crawfish, voodoo and jazz? only new orleans. that is why the people of new orleans, in being displaced and dispersed, are never going to find a place that is 'home' like new orleans.

but now, many new orleanians are being kept out of their homes. deliberately, intentionally, being displaced to make room for a new 'corporate vision' of new orleans that does not include, but attempts to take credit for, a culture of resistance, beauty and celebration of life built of dozens of generations of black leadership, black resistance to slavery and jim crow, black music, black culture.

now, the white leadership (and some well-fed black lackeys) are trying to keep out the very people who made new orleans what it was. and worse, trying to CLAIM that culture and build a disney-ified version of it that is clean, tourist-friendly, and oh-so-very-white.

cultural cooptation is a staple of the israeli takeover of palestine as well. an ad often seen on israeli tv talks about 'falafel and humus - traditional israeli foods' ....falafel and humus are age-old staples of middle east cooking....and since most israelis moved into the middle east from eastern europe and other places in the latter half of the twentieth century, i'm not sure just how 'traditional' these foods could be....

the 'development' vs. 'preservation' models are also very much a part of the converging dichotomies of new orleans and palestine.

here's an analogy: once my parents had a problem neighbor: he moved into the middle of their historical neighborhood, built a huge modern house on a lot that was way too small to hold it, and then proceeded to call my parents' house, and the other houses in the neighborhood, 'an eyesore'. when i confronted him about it, he said, 'your parents are for preservation, i'm for progress'. well, if this guy is what 'progress' represents, i'd much rather not have it at all.

and this 'problem neighbor' is in many ways like the country of israel: the country that just sets itself down in 1948 in the middle of the arab world, and starts imposing a totally unsustainable western-style development in a very arid climate, taking up not only the land that was allotted to it by the united nations, but ever expanding outward, to pull in more and more land for its 'state'.

in israel, 'development' and 'progress' have been key concepts from the outset. draining the wetlands in the north, near lebanon, to put in massive agriculture and tree farms, have later proven to be massive mistakes....as the sea of galilee gets lower and lower, and the water consumption of the average israeli gets higher and higher -- well, it's an unsustainable model of 'development', to say the very least. not to mention that all the israeli tree farms, which jewish kids in america went door to door to raise money for, are completely out of place in the desert ecosystem, and have been burning up like tinderboxes in a series of brush fires this spring. now that northern israel is being hit by rockets from lebanon, lots more of these douglas fir plantations are going up in smoke.

while in the bayous of southern louisiana, 'wetlands restoration' is something only a few lonely voices are advocating for, when every bit of evidence points to the destruction of the wetlands by unsustainable development along the mississippi river corridor as the cause for the massive destruction of hurricane katrina: with the 'buffer zone' wiped out, and the water level steadily rising, along with utter neglect from the federal government when it came to maintaining the dykes that prevent new orleans from flooding with every storm that hits, the hurricane was able to rush in with no wetlands to slow its progress......and of course the dykes didn't hold, and of course new orleans flooded.....anyone could have seen it coming, and many people did, and voiced warnings......but the federal government proved, for the umpteenth time, that it truly DOES NOT CARE about the suffering and deaths of poor people, particularly poor people who are black.

and now, condoleeza rice has the AUDACITY to come here to the middle east and voice absolutely no concern about the deaths of over 500 civilians, the massive destruction of the entire infrastructure of southern lebanon, the carpet bombing of towns, villages and refugee camps by a massively well-armed israeli military....instead calling the bombings the 'birthing pangs of a new middle east'! how dare she come here and say that to people who are wading through the rubble of what used to be their homes, searching for the bodies of their mothers or babies or sisters or brothers, fleeing from the bombing only to be hit in their cars as they flee.....

"Everyone who is still in south Lebanon is linked to Hizbullah, and is thus a target", said Israeli Justice Minister Haim Ramon today, despite overwhelming evidence from human rights groups and the United Nations that at least 80,000 civilians remain trapped in their homes, unable to evacuate from southern Lebanon.

as i look at the pictures from lebanon, and from gaza as well.....the cars smashed under rubble, the homes collapsed, the stunned looks on the faces of people emerging from the scenes of utter destruction.....i can't help but think about new orleans....the massive, heartbreaking amount of destruction, the absolute pain in the peoples' eyes as they see what used to be their homes.....

please, look at these pictures, if you can bear it:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/matrixofconfusion/sets/72157594209362817/

as i read more of the neo-conservatives' literature, i realize that when condoleeza rice says these are the 'birth pangs of a new middle east', she is actually serious - she, and those around her, who view human beings and whole populations as mere pieces on a chessboard of world power, are trying to implement a 'plan' for the middle east in which the united states attempts to build free-market capitalist economies on the ruins of what used to be islamic states. so when chaos becomes the norm, as it has in afghanistan and iraq (the first two targets of this neo-conservative 'plan'....but not the last), this means the plan is succeeding....that these countries' economies will collapse and then be subject to the implementation of free-market capitalism by the USA. so Bush, Cheney, their friends and colleagues will profit, and pretend that they have brought 'democracy' to the middle east.....patting themselves on the back while burnt children look for the ashes of their mothers in the rubble of what's left of the middle east.

see: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0304.marshall.html (written in 2003)
and: http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0340,schanberg,47436,1.html (also from 2003)

i will write more on this later. there is, as always, much to say, but the israeli training camp just over the hill, with the constant 'bang-bang-bang' of their tests of latest weaponry, make it exceedingly hard to concentrate....especially knowing that the soldiers and reservists training there will tomorrow, or the next day, head off to lebanon to use this latest weaponry against civilian populations there. sigh.

but not all is lost! though things are looking and feeling quite grim right now in the middle east, i am reminded by friends that there is another campaign being waged, in another part of the world, where, despite brutal governmental repression, the popular movement of the zapatistas is steadily gaining ground in bringing about their vision of a better world in mexico and beyond.
see: http://www.globalexchange.org/countries/americas/mexico/dispatches/3730.html
(i know, i know, this entry is from february...but 'the other campaign' continues.....despite the crackdowns in atenco and the massively corrupt elections in mexico last month....la lucha continua)

Israel to establish 'killing zone' on Lebanon border

2006-07-25T16:49:00.000-07:00

I haven't got time to write a more personal journal today....but here is an article i just wrote.

also, please look at these photos from lebanon:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/matrixofconfusion/sets/72157594209362817/

----------------------
Israel to establish 'killing zone' on Lebanon border
http://www.imemc.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=20342&Itemid=173

With many Lebanese civilians still hiding in their homes in refugee camps and villages in southern Lebanon, afraid to flee after hearing of convoys of evacuees being hit by Israeli airstrikes, Israeli military officials announced that they are establishing a 'kill zone' across many of those villages, in which anything that moves will be killed.

"We have no other option ... We will have to build a new security strip, a security strip that will be a cover for our forces until international forces arrive," Amir Peretz, the Israeli defence minister said on Tuesday.

Peretz said Israel would maintain control of the security zone by firing at anyone who enters it. Israeli government sources estimated a zone 3-4km in width. Western diplomats briefed by Israel said it could be as wide as 5-10km in some places. Israeli officials have previously stated they plan to "push Hezbollah 20 km back from the border".

The Israeli military has a history of 'killing zones', particularly in the southern part of the Gaza Strip, where several kilometers full of Palestinian homes were flattened by Israeli forces over the last three years to create a 'buffer zone' along the Gaza-Egypt border.

Thirteen-year old Iman al-Hams was one of hundreds of Palestinian victims of the "killing zone" -- in June 2004, Iman was shot while cowering behind a stone in Rafah refugee camp. The soldier who shot her had positively identified her as a child before she was shot, and then was shot multiple times to 'confirm the kill', according to the Israeli military transcript of the incident. The commander who gave the order to kill said, "anything that moves in this zone, even if it's a three year old, must be shot", and was later promoted and compensated $15,000 for the incident.

As many as 80,000 residents of southern Lebanon have been unable to evacuate, local sources reported, and many are seeking refuge in local hospitals and even in Palestinian refugee camps, trying to avoid the constant Israeli bombing, particularly now that the Israeli military has promised to kill "anything that moves".

"The most difficult thing to think about is that our children could be killed. So many children have been killed already. But we are too afraid to leave", said a local woman living in Tyre, in southern Lebanon, on Tuesday.

Nearly 400 Lebanese people have been killed by Israeli attacks over the last 14 days, 90% of them civilians, over 130 of them children, according to the Lebanese government. In the same time period, 17 Israeli civilians have been killed by Hezbollah rockets into Israel, three of them children, and 25 Israeli soldiers have been killed, according to the Israeli government.

-----------------------------------
Also, here is an article written thursday by Marc J. Sirois , Daily Star:

Western media fail to tell the real story in Lebanon

The fury of Israel's offensive in Lebanon has more than a few observers shaking their heads. The vast majority of Western media reports do not accurately portray the fact that the vast majority of the dead are civilians, most of them women and children.

A Reuters dispatch this week described Israel's choice of targets as "puzzling," but for the most part Western television viewers, newspaper readers, and Web surfers are reading highly sanitized versions of the news, spun in such a way as to dilute the brutality of the Israeli onslaught and especially to ensure that blame is placed squarely on Lebanon in general and Hizbullah in particular.

Of course there are brave and honorable Western journalists working here, and many of them are determined to tell the truth about what is happening. One has to assume, therefore, that what the decent ones report is being heavily edited somewhere along the line before it gets to the consumer. This is presumably intended as a prophylactic against the inevitable charges of "anti-Semitism" and resultant drops in advertising revenues that will follow unvarnished coverage of Israeli brutality. The product of this regime of fear has been a generation of biased reporting that portrays the Jewish state as weak when it is very strong, moderate when it is frequently extremist, democratic when it is often theocratic, liberal when it is commonly draconian - in short, "Western" when it is anything but.

Coverage of the current conflict is a case in point. The two most commonly watched English-language news channels available in Lebanon are CNN and the BBC. With few exceptions, their reports are filed by reporters standing in the relatively safe and comfortable confines of Downtown Beirut, the picturesque showcase of Lebanon's now-aborted recovery from its 1975-90 Civil War. There has been no damage in this part of the city thus far (although there are concerns that that step in the escalation process is rapidly approaching), so the very background is highly misleading about what is happening. Just a few kilometers away in Beirut's Dahiyeh Junubiyyeh (southern suburbs), Israeli air strikes and naval gunfire have reduced entire neighborhoods to rubble. No one knows how many people are buried in these piles of shattered concrete and twisted steel, only that local residents would have had far less warning than Hizbullah members did about the beginning of so many ends - and that most of their escape routes were cut off by the destruction of roads and overpasses before the Dahiyeh itself became a target.

A similar situation exists in the southern third of the country, usually a half-hour bus ride from Beirut. Now it can take hours in either direction because vehicles cannot get through. Instead, people are shuttled from one giant crater to the next, where they walk across debris-strewn holes in the ground or wade through rivers once spanned by wrecked bridges to reach another taxi or mini-bus that will take them to the next impasse. Throughout the journey, their vehicles are subject to Israeli attacks, so many people stay home and try to "ride it out." But a considerable number are subsequently convinced to run the gauntlet when the Israeli military warns them that they have "two or three hours" to leave their villages. On numerous occasions, such warnings have been followed less than an hour later by air or artillery strikes on civilian vehicles leaving the village. They keep leaving, though, because those who stay in their homes have frequently found out that the Israelis mean it when they say an area is about to become "unsafe" for civilians: Dozens of civilians have been killed in their own homes - with and without warnings beforehand. The message for these unfortunate people is that "nowhere is safe." In fact, that is precisely what an Israeli general said in the opening stages of the offensive.

Why has the Israeli military singled out these two areas for punishment? Because they are populated primarily by the impoverished and largely disenfranchised Shiites who make up Hizbullah's constituency. Multiple ironies are at work here. For one thing, the Dahiyeh's 500,000-strong population consists largely of Shiites from the South Lebanon who have fled successive waves of Israeli "retribution" (i.e. collective punishment). When Palestinian militias attacked northern Israel from South Lebanon in the 1970s, one of Israel's answers was indiscriminate bombardment. This drove tens of thousands of local villagers to Beirut, where they established the Dahiyeh.

For another, when Israel first invaded Lebanon in 1978 (not 1982, as typically reported in the Western media), many Shiites greeted them with rose petals. Life under the de facto rule of unruly Palestinian militias had not been easy, so despite the damage and casualties inflicted by Israeli ripostes, it was commonly believed that Israeli occupation might not be so bad. Then came 1982, when the Israelis rolled all the way to Beirut after promising Washington that they meant only to establish a 25-kilometer "buffer zone." The carnage in the South was horrific, and the ensuing occupation included measures like the dismissal of local village elders in favor of appointed stooges and provocations timed to coincide with sensitive religious dates. The Shiites revolted, and Hizbullah was born.

Subsequent spasms of violence (the worst in 1985 and 1996), usually caused by tit-for-tat exchanges between Hizbullah and the Israeli military that spun out of control, displaced more and more Shiites, filling the Dahiyeh with an understandably resentful generation of young men determined to run no more.

All of this goes unmentioned on CNN. Its idea of "balance" is to make sure that each report about a new massacre of innocents in Lebanon is aired alongside one about civilian injuries or deaths from Hizbullah rocket strikes in Israel, even if the incident is 36 hours old. Only rarely do the reports in question mention that while the Dahiyeh is for all intents and purposes a giant refugee camp, northern Israel and the nearby settlements in occupied Palestine are prosperous areas with a substantial contingent of immigrants from places like the United States and Canada, many of whom voluntarily live illegally on occupied Palestinian land.

Hizbullah's decision to snatch two Israeli soldiers evinced poor judgment and even worse timing, but the Israeli response has been out of all proportion to the original incident. The numbers speak for themselves. As of Wednesday evening, Israeli attacks had killed at least 292 civilians in Lebanon, while Hizbullah rockets had killed 13 noncombatants in the Jewish state. Lebanon has approximately 3.5 million people. On a per-capita basis, that means that as of Wednesday, the rough equivalent of 9/11 has happened every day here for eight days.

turning names into numbers

2006-07-25T09:16:00.000-07:00

"Did you get the five killed in beit hanoun?"
"who's verified that?"
"WAFA just reported another two in Nablus!"
"Names, names - call Majdi, see if he can get confirmation from the hospital on those names."
"Another two in Maghazi - get Rami on the phone! What?? The phone line is out, again??!!"

These are the conversations of our tiny newsroom in Palestine....trying to keep up with the onslaught....we want to report the number of deaths accurately, so we find out the name and age of each person killed, so we don't accidentally report it twice (with reports coming in so quickly, it can get confusing)....we don't count numbers, we count names.

it's the continual process of turning human beings into names into numbers, in the ongoing compilation of statistics that add up to hundreds.....hundreds of human beings, each one of them with their own lives, stories and struggles.....one a seven-year old who just learned to ride a bike, one a grandmother who was almost finished embroidering a pillow for her daughter.....each person, each story, is lost in this barrage of numbers....

the following was written today by nora, an american woman who has been volunteering in a refugee camp in bethlehem:

There will be no statistics in this journal entry because what difference does 10 shredded children in Gaza, or 15 sliced children in Lebanon, or 40 smashed children in Iraq make to the international community anyway? What difference does it make when the twisted and sick US corporate media doesn't even mention their names, or their ages, or their favorite color --
something to put a human face on the mangled mess made by the latest US-manufactured, Israeli-fired missile that destroyed what used to be a nose, a mouth, two eyes, freckles, cheek, or forehead?

Yes, there were "escalations" today in Gaza and Lebanon. There were "military strikes" and "retaliatory attacks" and "intensifications" and "deaths." there were "officials" and "spokespeople" and "leaders" joining in the finger-pointing and the name-calling. Meanwhile, Arab people are burning. Numbers and statistics become, therefore, irrelevant. Language loses its meaning on the tongue, becomes sludge and dribbles down one's chin. My dear friend Siham said today, "What does the term 'civilized society' mean when they are killing people like this?"

What becomes of a language that has lost its original meaning? Does it shrivel up and slink into an abyss to mingle with the ghosts of these headless, armless, forgotten brown-skinned kids? And as we watch the footage, as we hear on the phone from friends witnessing the carnage in their backyards, as we read the articles, how many times can we use the words "unbelievable," "disgusting," "horrific?" They have lost all meaning as well.

We need a new language to describe these nightmares. We need a new vehicle to convey the disbelief and the disgust and the horror as Gaza burns, as Lebanon smolders, as Iraq collapses.

As we rub our eyes tonight, bleary from thick cigarette smoke and too many hours of being glued to the television, my friend Mustafa says, "No one notices, no one cares. We are alone in this world." This is the aloneness. The isolation. Gazan and Lebanese and Iraqi children are huddled in their beds tonight, screaming out to the wall of silence in a sore-throated language, isolated in their terror.
------------------------------------------------------

Is it possible, I ask you, to see Palestinians as people - to see them as your brothers, your sisters, your children. Is it possible to see Iraqis that way?

Look closely at the pictures of burned and bombed children. Look closely, and for long enough at the pictures, until you begin to realize that this child is the same age/size as your daughter/nephew/granddaughter/cousin/neighbor. Look close enough, and long enough, until you see that these are humans.

Not numbers.

But people.

And only Americans truly have the power to make all this violence stop. But people see it as far away, disconnected from their own lives. If only people in the USA knew just how connected the "preservation of the American lifestyle" is with wars all over this earth.

A Lebanon diary: "Every night the bombing starts at ten past one":
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article5148.shtml

A Gaza diary: "Killing for the sake of killing":
http://www.imemc.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=20223&Itemid=1

"Why Is Israel Back in Gaza" (good analysis):
http://palestinechronicle.com/story-07210633355.htm

pictures and blog from Lebanon:
http://www.sabbah.biz

some pictures of Beirut before the current bombings:
http://www.galenfrysinger.com/beirut.htm

interview with former israeli general about the difficulties israel is having in its operations in southern lebanon:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060721/pl_afp/mideastconflictisraeli

lebanese support for hezbollah:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,1825551,00.html

israeli helicopters collide:
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/0DA31A7B-26FA-44EC-A53E-D525A9E4E2CB.htm

hit on UNIFIL post (head of the post says it was an israeli hit, but israel says it was hezbollah):
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1153291965660&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
info on UNIFIL: http://www.un.org/Depts/DPKO/Missions/unifil.htm

so many civilians killed in southern lebanon:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060721/ap_on_re_mi_ea/mideast_fighting_devastated_south
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/80A6775F-5AF3-425B-B86F-9497378249E5.htm
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/3D2487E0-32C8-4C57-8291-BBE2977EBF29.htm

the lebanese prime minister says if israel carries out ground invasion, the lebanese army will stand against them, and with hezbollah:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,1825917,00.html

nasrallah's speech last night:
http://www.maannews.net/en/index.php?opr=ShowDetails&ID=13505

israeli takeover of palestinian radio station:
http://www.maannews.net/en/index.php?opr=ShowDetails&ID=13491

after being questioned by international federation of journalists, israel quits the organization rather than respond:
http://www.maannews.net/en/index.php?opr=ShowDetails&ID=13530

today is my birthday, yay....

2006-07-25T09:07:00.000-07:00

20 july 2006

i was awoken by a phone call from my friend rami, in al-maghazi refugee camp, asking if i would type something for him, because he has no electricity or internet.

here is what he told me:
A story from Maghazi Refugee Camp, central Gaza
by: Rami Almeghari

Less than one hour after the Washington Based Pacifica had phoned me about doing a live interview about Maghazi camp, where I live, I laid down my head on the pillow, under darkness because of the electricity cut, in order to have some peace of mind before the live interview the next day. It was just after one am when the Israeli army, backed by war planes, invaded Maghazi, telling the story of palestinian refugees anew -- not only to pacifica radio, but to all of us who live in Maghazi and know this story already, having seen it repeated again and again. War planes began shooting heavily overhead. Abruptly, i rushed to my children beside me, waking them up and taking them downstairs in case of any stray bullet hitting from above.

My mother was crying, my father was worried, my sister listening to newscasts.

In the darkness, everybody has been anxious, with kerosene lamps showing their wary faces and hushed voices.

My six year old son asked me, "Dad, will i be able to be in the second grade at school?", as we got the news that Israeli war planes had dropped a missile on his school.

My eight year old daughter sat on the sofa, awake all night looking at me with frightened eyes, her face yellow and pale.

I was worried about my brother and his children (like many refugee families, we all live together in one house), so i went upstairs to wake them up. I found my brother sleeping on the roof, due to the hot weather under darkness.

Unfortunately, i was sorry to break his rest, because the sky was raining in such a summer night, but, an Israeli-made 'Summer Rain' [The Israeli military code-name for their ongoing Israeli invasion in the Gaza Strip is 'Operation Summer Rains'].

Now, the whole family has been crowded in one small, much safer room, listening quietly to the summer rains and to my mother's cries, which i tried to dry, but in vain. Because she was so worried, lest her other son, who was out with friends, seeking summer breeze and summer air, get wet by the 'summer rains' that have started to fall on Maghazi.

From 1 am to 9:30 am as I write this, the 'summer rains' have been falling, making a flow that has swept away six lives, wounded several others, devastated the camp's transformer, hit a wall of my son's elementary school, and inflicted damage to many homes and buildings.

My fear, as well as my family's, is the same as that of thousands of palestinian refugee families throughout the past six decades starting from 1948, 1956, 1967, and ending with 2006's latest invasion of Maghazi and other refugee camps since june 27th.

However, Palestinians in the past century have found safe shelters to which they have fled. It now seems we have only one choice -- staying in our homes under candlelight. This is the story of Palestinian refugees. Now, in the 21st century, I ask Israel -- where else do you want us to go? It seems that you just want us all to die, and no one in the world seems to care.

I am writing this by pencil, on used paper, I can no longer type on my computer. The electricity is fully gone, the backup systems have all been hit. I have to dictate my writing by cell phone to a friend in the West Bank who can type it up - but soon, most likely, my cell phone reception will be gone as well. Now I have heard that two of my relatives were killed in the ongoing attack.....I'll have to attend their funerals this afternoon. Will Israeli forces attack the funeral? Lately every time there is a funeral, their warplanes buzz overhead, dropping bombs on the attendees and making more funerals necessary. I just hope the next one will not be my own, or that of my dear, dear children.

--------------------
and here is an article I just wrote about the Israeli targeting of the media. Contact the Israeli Government Press Office at +972-2-500-7502, gpo@pmo.gov.il
and the Foreign Press Association (organization representing foreign media serving in Israel/Palestine):
+(972-3) 691-6143, fpa@netvision.net.il
to tell them you are dismayed at these incidents, that indicate a pattern of the direct targeting of journalists by Israeli forces.

also see:
http://www.ramattan.com/read.asp?newsID=2748
about the targeting of Ramattan News Agency staff in Beit Hanoun, Gaza.

Two reporters shot by Israeli forces, making seven reporters attacked in 10 days
IMEMC & Agencies - Wednesday, 19 July 2006, 16:09
http://www.imemc.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=20180&Itemid=1

A cameraman for Al-Jazeera television was shot in Nablus, and a reporter with Al Hurrah television was also shot by Israeli forces today in separate incidents. These attacks follow a late-night attack by Israeli forces on the headquarters of the main Palestinian News Agency, WAFA, in which media equipment was destroyed and one reporter was injured by gas.

Wail Tanous was filming Al-Jazeera anchorwoman Guevara Albudeiri live in the northern West Bank city of Nablus early Wednesday afternoon when an Israeli military jeep pulled up and rammed the anchorwoman in the middle of her broadcast. The soldiers then proceeded to shoot the cameraman, Wail Tanous, in the leg. He was taken to a nearby hospital and is currently being treated, local sources reported.

Faten Al-Wan, a reporter with Al Hurrah television, was also shot Wednesday by Israeli soldiers in Nablus. Dr. Ghassan Handa, head of the Medical Relief in Nablus, reported that Al-Wan was injured by a rubber-coated bullet and transferred to a hospital in Nablus.

Earlier on Wednesday, Israeli soldiers ransacked the offices of the main Palestinian News Agency, WAFA, damaging equipment and injuring reporter Mona Al Fares when they fired tear gas into her office.

Today's incidents are merely the latest in at least seven incidents in which Israeli forces directly targeted reporters covering the ongoing conflict in the last several weeks.

In Lebanon, at least seven journalists have been seriously wounded, and Israeli bombs directly targeted the headquarters of Al-Manar television, a station which Israeli spokesmen said was 'marked for death', as the television station funded by the Hezbollah resistance group.

One of the injured journalists, with the Lebanese station New TV, said that the well-marked New TV vehicle sustained more damage than any other, “which suggests to us that it was a targeted attack against our vehicle.”

Three employees with Al-Manar, the TV station operated by the Lebanese branch of Hezbollah, sustained minor injuries when its premises in the Shiite suburb of Haret Hreik in south Beirut were struck by a missile during an Israeli air raid. The station said its antenna was not destroyed and broadcasting was not interrupted. “This flagrant and barbaric aggression is targeted at all the Lebanese media,” the station said.

An Al-Manar correspondent was meanwhile hit during the bombardment of Qasmiye bridge in the south of the country several days ago.

Said 'Reporters Without Borders', an international press freedom organization based in France, “It is unacceptable that journalists should be treated as combatants when they are covering clashes. We point out that this would not be the first time the Israeli army has deliberately targeted journalists.”

And in Gaza, attacks against journalists have been ongoing and deliberate, with a number of journalists pointing out the fact that Israeli soldiers pointed guns directly at them and fired, even while the journalists were clearly marked and in close range.

Two days ago, a news crew from the U.S. based 'Fox' News station were shot at by Israeli forces while reporting live from Dir al Balah, Gaza, leading one of the U.S. based commentators to refer to the Israelis as 'bad guys with guns' -- a rare twist of events for a station that has often been accused by media analysts of being biased toward Israel in its coverage of the Middle East.

Reporters of Maan, AFP, Reuters and other stations have been repeatedly attacked by Israeli soldiers while covering the weekly non-violent anti-Wall protests in the West Bank village of Bil'in, and reporters also report being barred from reporting on the event.

Walid al-Umari, the bureau chief for the Qatar-based Al-Jazeera television, known to many as 'the CNN of the Middle East', was taken prisoner by Israeli forces twice on Monday as he was reporting on the latest developments in the crisis with Lebanon from a village in northern Israel.

After being released late on Monday, al-Umari, in a live telephone interview broadcast on the satellite channel, accused Israel of "interfering with Aljazeera's work".

Reporters Without Borders recently issued a condemnation the action of the Israeli troops who shot and wounded Palestinian news photographers Hamid Al Khur and Mohammad Al Zaanoun on 7 and 8 July while they were covering clashes between Israelis and Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

“Khur and Zaanoun were both wearing yellow vests that clearly identified them as journalists, so there was no way they could have been mistaken for combatants,” Reporters Without Borders said, calling on the Israeli authorities to carry out investigations to establish how they came to be shot.

Khur, a photographer with the Turkish news agency Ihlas, was shot twice by Israeli soldiers on 7 July while covering clashes between Palestinian militants and the Israeli army in Beit Lahiya, in the north of the Gaza Strip. Khur, who was wearing a bullet-proof vest at the time, was hit first in the chest and then in the right arm. He was initially taken to Kamal Adwan hospital, and from there to a hospital in Jerusalem the next day.

Zaanoun, a photographer with the Palestinian online news agency Ma’an, was working in the district of al-Zaitoun, south of Gaza City, when Israeli tanks arrived on the morning of 8 July. He was wounded while photographing the bodies of two Palestinian militants who had been killed in the course of the Israeli incursion. He continued to take photographs until shot in the leg and stomach by an Israeli sniper. He was taken to an Israeli hospital where he is said to be in a critical condition.

hi everyone!!

2006-07-25T09:05:00.000-07:00

19 july 2006

listen, i know i only wrote to you yesterday....but this whole thing is happening so fast.....things could easily spiral out of control.

so many people are writing so much.....I wanted to include letters sent by two women in Lebanon. I hope folks in the US will take what i suggested yesterday and get Bush impeached so we can move ahead with dialogue and diplomacy, instead of more, expanding war.

and check these links:
http://sabbah.biz/mt/archives/2006/07/17/photo-of-the-day-israeli-kids-sends-gifts-of-love-to-arab-kids/
http://www.electroniclebanon.net

here's an interview I did with the head of the UN Refugee Agency in Gaza:
http://radio.indymedia.org/news/2006/07/10630.php

in a rather unnoticed development, israel has started denying entry for people known to sympathize with the palestinian cause, and those of palestinian origin:
http://electronicintifada.net/v2/article4859.shtml
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/736360.html

and badly beat an american woman and her son at the allenby bridge border crossing (the same one I wrote about crossing a couple weeks ago!):
http://www.imemc.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=20108&Itemid=1

Yesterday, Israeli forces arrested the Bureau Chief of Al-Jazeera television. Two journalists have been shot and severely wounded covering the invasion of Gaza, and today, the Israeli military censor's office issued an order for journalists based in the area to self-censor their reports about the ongoing Israeli invasions and Lebanese response.

These developments have led a lot of Palestinians to believe that their suffering will once again be made invisible to the eyes of the world.

Fox News has tried really hard to be a cheerleader for Israel - even when Israeli forces fire at their crews (leading one of the commentators to call them 'Bad guys with guns'):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ar0jRu5fDZw

and, of course, keep checking:
http://www.imemc.org for constant updates

Letter from Lebanon: LEBANON IS KIDNAPPED!

Dear Family and Friends,

Ha! I think I am becoming a reporter now! First, we are still safe, but hardly anyone sleeps. The bombing has been continuous, day and night with no reprieve. We are in the mountains and we are awakened by the sound of the explosions. And it’s not as if you can just fall back asleep after hearing a bomb land. You can imagine what it is like if you are in Beirut. The situation is extremely serious.

I want to reiterate that we need your help in disseminating this information and hopefully getting it to the press. The news you are receiving is skewed. This is a well orchestrated war that Israel is carrying out. This is not a reaction to Hizbullah’s apprehending two of its soldiers. It becomes clearer by the day that there is a master plan that Israel is executing.

Israel has literally kidnapped the entire country. One by one they are destroying every single road that leads out of the country. Just this evening around 8:00 p.m. We heard Israeli planes flying overhead only to hear a few minutes later on the radio that they destroyed a mountain road that leads to the Bekaa valley. This road is further up the mountain from where we live, in a primarily Christian village.

On the news earlier we heard that of the 93 Lebanese killed, only 3 were soldiers. As of 8:30 p.m. More than 120 Lebanese are dead and over 500 wounded.

Yesterday they bombed a small port in Amchit, a Christian village about one hour north of Beirut. Why? The Israelis got wind that a French ship carrying medical supplies was arriving. Damaging the port they prevented these critical medical supplies from reaching their destination.

Yesterday, my niece was attending a wedding-poor couple-could they really delay their wedding after months of planning? The wedding was held not too far from Jounieh, a major port about 25 minutes north of Beirut, a Christian town (and definitely not a Hizbullah stronghold). Everyone was on the terrace celebrating when Israel repeatedly attacked the Jounieh port. My niece said that everyone ran into the church and prayed. The bride was crying. The groom was crying. My niece left the wedding flying down the main highway while bombs whistled by. Nice memories for the newlyweds.

This afternoon, the Israelis decimated a small Christian village, Ain Ebel in the south of Lebanon. The mayor was pleading with the UN for a cessation of the Israeli bombing so they could evacuate women and children, and eventually to get food and medical supplies. Again, Ain Ebel is far from being a Hizbullah basis.

In the southern suburb of Beirut, Israelis knocked out all telecommunications-both land and mobile.

They just struck the airport again, as I have been writing this. This must be the sixth or seventh time, I lost count!

Over 1 million Lebanese, that’s nearly one third of the entire population has been displaced! Hotels, homes in the mountains are packed to the brim trying to accommodate these people made refugees in their own country.

Are you still convinced that Israel is attacking only Hizbullah targets? Are you still convinced that Israel has a right to defend itself-and if so, in this way?

Even during the 15 years of war, never ever were all roads, ports, and airports simultaneously blocked. When I was in Saudi, we would fly to Cyprus
then take the boat to Jounieh to visit my husband’s family. Now there is no way out. Israel has kidnapped and trapped the entire country. There are more than 17, 000 French citizens, more than 10, 000 English, more than 25, 000 Americans and many more other foreign nationals trapped because Israel has blown up all major roads, bridges, airports and ports. Their actions are barbaric. The British Ambassador made a public announcement on television telling his compatriots that the roads are not safe enough to travel on for
an evacuation and urged them to just remain at home. How reassuring! You hear news of evacuations, but we are all wondering how anyone can get out when roads, bridges and ports have been damaged so severely.

Now, to end with a little story. A news item that I am sure did not make big news in the American press:
On June 21, 2006, about three weeks ago, The Daily Star, the local English newspaper published an article about Lebanon expecting complete support from the UN Security Council about a complaint the Lebanese government was presenting to them. The Lebanese were following proper international protocol. What was discovered? The Mossad, the Israeli secret service (like the U.S.’s CIA), has a network in Lebanon and has assassinated at least 3 Lebanese citizens which the Israelis believed to be “terrorists.”

I ask you:
What is worse? Hizbullah’s kidnapping two Israeli soldiers or Israeli agents coming onto Lebanese territory and assassinating its citizens? It’s like having a North Korean secret service cell in the U.S. Killing American citizens. Would the U.S. Sit back and do nothing? It’s an outrage. Yet, Israel destroys Lebanon with impunity and no one pays attention to the infractions that Israel does. And what right does Lebanon have to defend itself? If Lebanon, dared to do what Israel is doing to it now, it would be
labeled “terrorist.”

I once again plead with you to get this news out. Israel is destroying Lebanon while the United States puts its head in the sand! These atrocities must stop!
10:10 p.m. The bombs are exploding. Another sleepless night ahead..
Rosie AKL.

From Zena el-Khalil:
I have started coughing, but I don’t know why. I am not sick. I don’t have a cold. I think it’s a reaction I’m having to stress. My body feels weak. My mouth is always dry, no matter how much water I drink. And I’m afraid to drink too much water because I don’t want it to run out!

Last night was probably the most frightful night I have ever experienced in my whole entire life. I was so tired and exhausted... have not slept in days. When there is finally a quiet moment, the tension in my stomach and heart prevents me from falling asleep.

Last night we counted at least 15 bombs falling into Dahiyeh (Beirut Suburbs).. and these were just the ones we heard. At some point during the night, I said to myself that if I didn’t at least try to get some sleep that I was going to go crazy from fatigue; and that that was what was going to kill me. Haven¹t been able to eat either, so am losing physical strength.

It's all psychological at this point. I know I have to be strong, and I will
be, but I can’t deny what I¹m going through. And I think it’s important that people hear about the downside as well as the bravery. So many of us are already working hard to fix things, we are running around Beirut trying to get food and water and medicine to people, we are doing things online, etc, but it doesn’t mean we are not scared, sick or tired.

So, last night amidst the worst shelling we’ve had so far, I realized that I was not afraid of the noise anymore; how quickly you get used to it. I realized what was hurting the most was the “UNKNOWN”. What is going to happen tomorrow? When will this all end? How are we going to start re-building again? Are the refugees going to be ok? How are the people in the south? And why punish a whole country? What is the real plan behind all
of this? How much worse is it going to get?

My husband and I have been housing foreign “refugees” helping them to find their way out of the country. Two managed to leave this morning, a German and Swiss. The other two are British and American. The craziest thing is that out of all people, the American embassy has been the LEAST helpful to its citizens here. The phone line to the embassy has been practically out of service. My friend, Amanda, (whom I just met a few days ago, by the way) had to hire a cab to take her to the embassy (which is a ride out of Beirut) and all they could tell her was that they didn¹t know what they were going to do and to keep checking the website. Only thing she has gotten on the website is that she now knows that there is going to be an evacuation (5 days later), but when it happens, she is going to have to pay for it! Yes, they are saying to their citizens that they are going to bill them for their ride out! Can you believe that?!

Trying to evacuate people has put me under stress. The question is what am I to do if I had the opportunity to leave? Would I leave? What do I do with my friends? My family? My art studio? I have a British passport; I could be evacuated with my husband. But what would happen to my best friend Maya? She has a very rare and bad case of CANCER! I have been taking care of her since she was diagnosed a few months ago and I know that my care for her is what has helped her do so well. Her type of cancer is “untreatable”, but ironically, the day the shelling started, her doctor told us her tumors had shrunk! Unbelievable- a true miracle. I can’t leave Maya!

What about art work in my studio? What about all my brushes and paints and glitter and books! All my books! Again- the crazy things that cross your mind.

What about our photo albums? All our family pictures? The memories...

What about the doodles I drew on my balcony a few summers ago when I was suffering from a bad break up?

What about all the love letters I have saved? Letters that document my youth that I wanted to some day give to my daughter.

What about my other best friend? My dog, Tampopo? My beautiful Jack Russel Terrier who has never let me down. Who has always been a source of purity and compassion... Who has eyes of an angle... Dogs are not allowed to evacuate. My American friend Christine is going to have to leave her dog with me; a black pug named Baousi (means Kiss in Arabic). She is heartbroken! She almost didn’t want to evacuate. She went to so many embassies to try and register with them and see if they would take her dog. Don’t worry Christine, I will take great care of Baousi.

My sister has been volunteering to help the refugees who are being sheltered in public schools. Right now they are calling on Lebanese citizens to help out with money, medicine, food, water, blankets and mattresses. She has been going to people and asking for money and then going out to buy medicines for refugees- her own initiative! My mom has joined in too. A friend has put together a website for accepting donations:
http://atrissi.com/helplebanon/

Biggest cynical statement of the day:
Israel has told people to evacuate from the south because they are going to annihilate the south of Lebanon. However, the people can not leave because all the roads have been destroyed/blocked. And yesterday when people did try and leave, the Israelis opened fire on them! A massacre is happening!

Update on the attacks, as of yesterday:
• Israelis have been bombing the south of Lebanon with phosphorus and other chemical bombs.
• Israelis have bombed all ports along the coastline of Lebanon.
• Israelis have bombed all our local army radars and some outposts
• Israelis have bombed/attacked the fire fighting brigade and the Search and Rescue Brigade in the South. Innocent civilian lives were lost. It was a
massacre- the buildings were also housing refugees.
• Israelis have continued to bomb the suburb of Beirut, Dahiyeh & Haret Hreik
• Israelis have now killed over 100 civilians and there are several hundreds wounded and they continue to bomb the south
• Israelis have started hitting roads that lead to the mountains. They hit a main one leading to the Shouf. -Israelis have hit a gas plant in the mountains
... I can’t keep up with what they have hit.

*** Israel has begun to target Lebanese army outposts. They have killed Lebanese soldiers. They are no longer just targeting Hizbullah. They mean to kill all of Lebanon.

The reality:
Israel is trying to bring Lebanon to its knees. Israel is trying to destroy Lebanon and the Lebanese spirit. Israel is trying to turn Lebanese against each other. Israel is trying to turn us into animals scrounging for food, water and shelter. Israel and the United States of America are trying to drag Syria and Iran into this too. They are using Lebanon as bait. Lebanon is stuck in the middle. The Americans and Israelis are trying to launch a regional war!!

Please help in any way you can. Please pass on the message, this email- reprint if you wish. Please tell people what is going on. Please put pressure on your respective governments to step in and do something.

Lebanon is a peaceful country. We are the only country in the region in which people of all religions co-exist peacefully.

It is unbelievable how biased the news is. They are not reporting the real Damage being caused. They don¹t report that the Israelis are killing innocent civilians. It seems from this end that all they are focusing on is G8!

Are the Israeli & US government really just trying to wipe us all out?? Well, you can tell them that I'm not leaving. And there are many of us who are not leaving. We love Lebanon. We love what we have spent our lives building.

Tell them about people like me.. who build culture and tolerance. Who work for peace and understanding. Who work to educate. Who work to promote love and compassion. There are thousands like me here. What about us?

Tell them about people like me, that despite all of this, I have still not learnt to hate. They can take everything from me, but not my dignity. Not my morals and beliefs. They will never never break my spirit.

Tell the Israeli citizens what their government is doing to us. Tell them that violence begets violence. Remind them that Lebanon is their neighbor and that co-existence is possible. How are we going to ever reach an understanding through violence? We were so close... We were so close...

Please stop this brutality!
Still with love,
Zena el-Khalil

By the way, did I mention Maya’s tumors are getting smaller? Did I mention there was a wedding across the street yesterday?

i don't like fireworks....

2006-07-17T18:03:00.000-07:00

17 july 2006
palestine

i don't like fireworks....
i remember, a month after september 11th, 2001, I went to see my parents, and the town was having an 'oktoberfest' celebration...someone had the 'bright idea' to have a fireworks display at the celebration and, well, needless to say, no one was in the mood. everyone was depressed, paranoid, jumpy, with each 'bang' people jumped, kids cried....the whole thing was a bit of a disaster for the organizers....

and now i am here in bethlehem, five years later, and feeling a little bit the same way....some people are firing off firecrackers to celebrate the high school exam results, and with every 'bang', people jump. here, the chance that the 'bang' this time might be 'the real thing' is much higher than in my parents' town a month after september 11th.

every day i have to listen to the bang-bang-bang of the israeli training camp just over the hill in the nearby israeli settlement.....it's non-stop.....training to head into gaza and start shooting palestinians. or the F16s that sometimes whiz overhead....on training missions before they head into lebanon to drop bombs on the heads of civilians.....over 100 killed, and only one of them is a fighter with hezbollah. the rest: men, women and children.....

i doubt that my friends in the USA are able to view this footage that we are watching on the arabic tv stations - they've stopped reporting, even, they don't have to say anything, just hour after hour of video footage of charred childrens' bodies, destroyed bridges, convoys of evacuees (two of which have been hit by Israeli missiles, killing over 30 people who were trying to head north away from the missiles), burning buildings....

beirut is known as 'the paris of the middle east'....known for its music, its singers, its nightlife and western culture, its sidewalk cafes and television dramas.

but now, the images of beirut i remember from a childhood in the eighties, when israel and lebanon were at war, come flashing back to me as i see the footage of beirut today.

on the streets of palestine, things are tense......israeli forces are setting up new checkpoints all over the place (and yesterday, a group of internationals, israelis and palestinians took non-violent direct action and removed a roadblock of dirt and boulders that israeli soldiers had placed on a street near qalqilia)....

people greet each other with anxious looks and talk of 'haarb...fi labnon...' -- 'war...in lebanon...'

but underneath the concern, the overwhelming worry and concern for the safety of their homes, families, children, many eyes hold a little spark of something else....

a little spark saying, "hezbollah....has finally come to our aid"......

hezbollah.....

'the party of god', in arabic.

to palestinians, hezbollah represents: the only armed force that has ever beaten israel. what palestinian does not remember the images of just 6 years ago, of Hezbollah fighters standing at the Israeli border driving the Israeli troops in a retreat backward, back into their own sovereign territory, cheering and shooting into the air? They had done what Palestinians had never, in the 40+ years of Israeli occupation, been able to do: push the Israelis back onto their sovereign state, stop the Israeli expansion and the creeping further and further outward beyond its borders and onto Palestinian land.

So of course, Palestinians have a special kind of respect for these fighters who, with guerrilla warfare, beat the fourth-largest army in the world......something Palestinians, with all their non-violent marches, their appeals to the United Nations, their begging for support from the Arab world, even with their flimsy, disorganized resistance of old rifles and sticks of dynamite, have not been able to do.

but in the US, 'Hezbollah' is equivalent with "terrorism"....and indeed, Hezbollah were the ones responsible for what could be called the first 'suicide bombing', when the US had marines stationed in lebanon back in the eighties, helping Israel in their invasion of that neighboring sovereign nation.....when a hezbollah fighter drove a van full of explosives into a marines barrack and killed over 100 US Marines....

Bush got caught on tape at the G8 summit today saying to Tony Blair, "See, the irony is what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit and it's over", just after Blair had publicly called for UN peacekeepers to go to Lebanon.

His faux-pas revealed the level of his understanding of the region: absolute zip. "It's over"? if Hezbollah stops? Israel will absolutely roll over Lebanon, re-occupy it, as they did in the eighties, with full US military support, if 'Hezbollah stops', as he suggests. But then, Bush has no historical political memory. He was drunk at the time, and failed his classes on the subject at Yale. Meanwhile I, as an elementary schooler interested in politics, probably learned more about the conflict than Bush ever bothered to find out. So all he has are briefs from his advisors, telling him, "Syria funds Hezbollah", and that's all he needs to know to be able to say to his fellow world-leader, "They need to get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit and it's over". Ah, my dear Bush, if only things were that simple. But as leader of 'the free world', I guess one does not need to bother finding out the reality of the fragility of the Middle East. One can just keep pounding war drums, and invading more countries, and supporting Israel's invasion of more countries, and forget about the ones you've already invaded.....
and meanwhile innocent people keep dropping, left and right. 50 more people were killed in Iraq today, in a market. But I guess they don't matter....they are, after all, just Iraqis.

Bush, in his faux-pas today with Blair, also said, "What about Kofi Annan[head of the United Nations]? I don't like the sequence of it. His attitude is basically ceasefire and everything else happens." Bush, of course, is NOT in favor of a ceasefire. it doesn't matter that those killed are, all but one, civilians.....it doesn't matter that more and more dead babies are going to pile up under the bombs -- if Israel doesn't want to back down, well then by golly, the US will stand with Israel, and, in another notable Bush quote, "Bring it on".

Although in this case Israel's arrogance and stubbornness in continuing to blow up innocents for the sake of two captured soldiers, threatens to bring the whole Middle East into conflict. It didn't matter for Bush in Afghanistan, or in Iraq, where warlords run the streets, and dozens are being killed every day.....it doesn't matter to Bush that his path of destruction may lead the world into nuclear war.....with the instability in afghanistan caused by the massive US destruction of the country, most of the country is back in the hands of the taliban, or taliban-supporting local warlords. and, in case you didn't notice, that war has spilled over into pakistan....and even into india, where a train explosion killed several hundred last week. pakistan and india are, you may recall, nuclear powers. as is israel (though israel refuses to admit it, the international atomic energy agency has estimated their cache to be about 30 nuclear warheads). as is, if you believe kim jong-il, north korea. So Bush's 'Bring it on!' attitude, combined with Israel's trigger-happy expansion onto its neighbors' land, may well bring this whole region, and beyond, to the precipice of the most dangerous thing on this earth: nuclear war.

but then, Bush doesn't care about that. He's got a bunker inside a mountain in West Virginia for him and his cronies that can supposedly withstand a nuclear blast. As for the rest of us....well, I guess we're supposed to be the ones that Bush means to Bring It On to.....because whatever it is that Bush and his buddies bring on....you can bet the consequences are gonna fall on us, the people.

and particularly, the kids.

nearly 100 israeli kids and 900 palestinian kids have been killed in the last five years. and now on the arabic tv i am watching 11 charred bodies of children being brought to a makeshift morgue in lebanon.....23 killed today in a bus that was trying to head north, away from the bombs.....

and all this...the latest blow-up, started because palestinian fighters grabbed a soldier as a prisoner-of-war in what would, in any other place on earth, be considered a legitimate military operation in a battlefield. but here it is considered by israel to be a justification for a massive invasion, in which 74 people have been killed in gaza, and now more than 100 in lebanon.....and the israeli military operation just expands and expands

is there a way out of this?

with idiots like bush putting fingers on triggers, I'm afraid the whole thing will just get worse and worse.

in the end, the solution here is the same as in any other case: the initial injustice (in this case, the seizure of palestinian land in 1948 and the massacres and displacement of the residents) must be addressed for there to be justice, and with justice, the ability to truly forgive.

i envision a 'truth and reconciliation' commission like the one in south africa, with israelis having to watch hour after hour, day after day of testimony of the injustices, the outright barbarities, that have been conducted in their name, and with their implicit consent. for most israelis, despite having served their term in the israeli military, are truly not aware of the massive injustices being carried out on a daily basis against the palestinian people in the name of 'israeli security'.

Here's what the blogger anomalous says:
"Today, and for the last three weeks, Israel has been bombing the Gaza Strip from air, land, and sea, supposedly as a "response" to the capture of a single israeli occupation soldier. Supposedly as a security "response", Israel has destroyed the only electricty source for over 800,000 people; no replacement is possible for at least a year, dooming unknown thousands - particulalry the most vulnerable - to death from disease and nonfunctional medical equipment. As a "security response" Israel has murdered over 60 people in the last ten days, inlcuding women and children and entire families. As a "security response," this morning a quarter-ton bomb was dropped on a home in Gaza City, killing an entire family of nine - mother, father, and all seven children - injuring dozens and damaging dozens of adjacent residences. As a "security response", this morning, Israeli fighter jets launched a missile into a playground; 3 children were killed playing soccer. As a "security response," about half of the democratically elected government has been abducted and imprisoned.

"Israel says all of this collective torture, all of which is absolutely illegal [under international law], is a necessary response to the capture of one of its soldiers.

"If that is true, then let's be fair. Palestinians are holding ONE captured Israeli, and Israel has killed over 60 people in response. So let's be even-handed. In all fairness, since Israel is holding over NINE THOUSAND captured Palestinians - most of them, unlike our single israeli, civilians, and many of them children as young as twelve - then how many
Israeli civilians can Palestinians legitimately murder in response? Let's see: if 1 captured Israeli justifies 60 murdered Palestinians, then by an unbiased, fair judgement we have to say that Palestinians are free to randomly kill 540,000 Israelis. (9,000 x 60). But let's err on the side of caution - let's say that Jewish lives are worth ten times that of Arab lives, a concept most racist israelis seem to earnestly believe, so in fact Palestinians can only legitimately murder 54,000 Israelis. Sound fair to you?

"This is the logic of terror. Israel has murdered over 4000 people, the vast majority of them civilians, by this logic. Israel has justified the murder of over 900 children by this logic, and the shooting of over 10,000 other children."

......is this really the logic that we want in our world?

how about the logic of justice, instead? is that possible?

well folks, it's up to me and you. the first step, i'd say, is to get rid of bush. he's corrupt to the bone - i'm sure that some smart lawyer can look through his massive list of crimes and find at least one impeachable offense. but his cabinet is just as bad as bush is.....the congress not much better. only a few shining examples of civic responsibility come to mind as possible replacements - cynthia mckinney (D-GA) could perhaps be up to the job. what do you think -- impeach bush, and replace him with mckinney? then we'll at least be able to begin trying to talk about peace in the middle east.

crossing the jordan river with a paralyzed palestinian

2006-07-08T07:00:00.000-07:00

here is the story of me (an american) and my fiance (palestinian - t6 para) crossing the jordan river:

a little while back, my visa for israel reached an expiration, and the interior ministry said i had to leave the country and then come back to get a new visa. so my fiance (a paralyzed palestinian) and i decided to make a short vacation out of it - go to jordan, visit his aunt and uncle, spend a few days, and come back again.

but all that is much easier said than done. the only place palestinians are allowed to cross into jordan is an israeli-controlled border crossing (well, every inch of the border is controlled by israel) called 'allenby bridge'.

i just read a blog entry by an american traveller who recently crossed the allenby and said "By the time we got through customs, the entire process from the taxi drop-off till then was less than two hours - amazing, for one of the most notorious border crossings in the world, I thought." (see: http://www.andycarvin.com/archives/1995/11/crossing_the_allenby.html ). but he wasn't travelling with a palestinian (let alone a palestinian in a wheelchair).

the israeli border authority states very clearly in their policy:
"The border terminals were planned to be accessible to passengers with disabilities, taking into consideration and providing solutions for the unique needs of assisted travelers, so as to enable them to receive services in person and independently. As part of the service, passengers may apply to the terminal’s personnel for assistance and help. Passage through the terminal, both on departure and on arrival, is uncomplicated, accessible to the disabled and unimpeded in all directions."
-http://www.iaa.gov.il/Rashat/en-US/Borders/Alenbi/UsefulTerminalInfo/Accessibility

again, while this may all be true for tourists, it doesn't apply to palestinians. soo......in planning our trip, we anticipated a lack of accessibility, and called the allenby bridge management office to see what we could do to make it easier. after the usual bureaucratic run-around, i managed to piece together that we had three options:
1. get permission from the local Israeli military authority to go by taxi (known as the "District Coordination Office" - located in an Israeli military base, alongside an Israeli settlement, a half-hour drive away from the Palestinian district it serves -- this is the place Palestinians must go for any type of permission, permits, licenses, or to present evidence on charges made against them - there is no court available to palestinians)

2. get permission from the Israelis (same way) to go by ambulance.

3. go the same way able-bodied palestinians go - with three bus transfers, no access to his wheelchair, and long hours of waiting in the hot sun.

we decided to try option #1 - since my fiance is handicapped, NOT sick, there is no reason for him to take an ambulance (and no hospital would give the required permission for him to go by ambulance anyway, due to the fact that he's not sick), and taking a taxi across would bypass the non-accessible buses. the only other time he crossed the border, in 1998, he was allowed to go by taxi due to his being in a wheelchair.

so, we figured, since the Israeli authorities are so insistent that their facilities are handicap-friendly, surely they will give permission for him to go by taxi. we drove down to the DCO (District Coordination Office), waited for an hour outside the gate of the military base with a number of other palestinians waiting for various permissions, were told that the commander we needed to see was busy eating, and we would have to wait a bit longer, and finally he came to the gate and took the papers, explaining to him that we needed to cross the bridge by taxi, as the normal method (by buses) is not handicap-accessible. he said he would call us with the answer that night.

when a day went by with no reply, we tried calling the commander ourselves. after several hours of busy tones and no reply, we managed to get through, and he said "Taxi service is only for VIPs. You're not a VIP, so you have to go by bus", (!) as if he hadn't understood our WHOLE REASON for applying for permission to go by taxi! when I told him that, yes, there was a problem to go by bus, because the buses are not handicap-accessible, he said 'this conversation is over', and hung up the phone. and of course we couldn't reach him again.

we looked into going by ambulance, but the hospitals told us that this was only possible if my fiance were going to jordan for specialized treatment at a hospital there -- but since he is handicapped, NOT SICK, and the trip to Jordan was for vacation, not treatment, they couldn't arrange for an ambulance for him.

so we were stuck with option #3 - to go with the rest of the people by bus. we left the house at 6 am and arrived into Jericho at 8. There were already several buses full of people waiting for their turn to cross. But we had called ahead to the Palestinian guards there and they let us go in front, which saved about two hours of waiting. But this was still on the Palestinian side.....our journey across the border had not yet even begun.

we had to leave our bags, the guards insisted that the Israelis would not allow us to have ANYTHING with us (even my fiance's wheelchair and his medicine -- ie. things needed for him to catheterize and use the toilet - which he needs to do every three hours), and they loaded the bags onto a truck along with everyone else's. we arrived to the first checkpoint and they wheeled out a chair for him.

he transferred from the taxi into their chair, and we entered the checkpoint. as we got to the desk, an israeli soldier checked our passports, then said, "You can't go by bus. You have to get permission to go by ambulance." I explained to her that the Commander at the District Coordination Office had said that we couldn't have permission to go by taxi, that we would have to go by bus. She insisted that we couldn't go by bus, and that we'd have to go back to the District Coordination Office and get permission to go by ambulance. A male soldier, much more aggressive and agitated than the woman (or shall I say, girl -- all of them looked to be about 18 years old), then literally pushed us back across the gate where we had come in, saying we couldn't stay in the checkpoint, we had to go back.

Sitting in the hot sun outside the gate, I called the Administration office of the Allenby Bridge Border Crossing and told them the situation - that I was with a palestinian in a wheelchair at the Jericho checkpoint, and we needed to cross to Jordan. The person I spoke to must have been unaware of what the soldiers at the checkpoint had told us, because he said, "Okay, I will send a car over to fetch you right now." Well, he must have then checked with someone, who must have told him not to do that, because an hour later, no car had arrived, and we were still waiting in the hot sun outside the gate to the checkpoint. So I called again, and spoke to someone who was familiar with our situation already, and she said, "I thought you had said it was impossible for him to go by bus"....I answered, "no, not impossible, just extremely difficult." I guess she then called someone, because the next thing I knew, the first soldier, who had told us we couldn't go by bus, was opening the gate and motioning us to enter the checkpoint. As we arrived at the desk where she was standing, she said quietly, "OK, you can go by bus". And the soldier who had aggressively pushed us out of the checkpoint was nowhere to be seen.

This was now 10:00, four hours since my fiance had used the toilet - our luggage (his toilet necessities) was nowhere to be seen, probably it had crossed the border already without us - and we were just making it through the first checkpoint! With the help of an Israeli soldier with a gun on his shoulder, I managed to lift my fiance into the empty bus (basically like a greyhound bus, with several steep steps to enter). When the next busload of Palestinians arrived, they all had to pile in through the back door because he was sitting in a front seat that was blocking the door - but none of them seemed to mind, they were all very friendly, just thirsty and hot (the Israelis won't even allow people to carry food and water during the many hours of waiting, and you can guess the children were feeling antsy and the old people were moaning of thirst).

Three checkpoints later (with a delay at each one), we were entering the terminal! Some of the guys on the bus helped carry my fiance out of the bus and set him on a tree planter full of gravel until a porter came out wheeling the most sorry excuse for a wheelchair I think I've ever seen. The backrest, made of mesh, was coming off, and was torn off halfway already. One footrest was gone, the other bent down, dragging along the ground as it wheeled. The wheels were screwy, not wheeling straight, and loose, and the thin mesh seat was caved in.

Well, we got him into the wheelchair and were promptly separated -- in keeping with the apartheid system in place in the rest of Israel, there are two separate terminals - one for Palestinians, one for Israelis and internationals. I was brought to the Israeli/international side, and my fiance was wheeled into the Palestinian side. Distraught at being separated, we were told, "Don't worry, it's only for fifteen minutes."

Four hours, three searches, and a long interrogation later, I was beginning to lose my patience. Instead of simply stamping my passport, the Israeli officials (should I say 'officials'? They were all under 20 years old) took my passport, made me wait and wait, and move to another building, searched me, searched me again, searched me a third time, made me wait, and then took me to a little room. I was taken into the office of a bespectacled, bald man who looked at me with suspicion and began to question me. He seemed to be the only 'official' over 20 years old in the whole place! He asked me lots of questions about who I knew, what work I did, what languages I knew, what Arab countries I had been to, whether I had ever been to a protest, if I was a member of any organizations, and typed everything into a computer as I answered. At one point during the interrogation, he said to me, "Arabs don't like foreigners in their immediate surroundings - so, they've been talking to us about you." I thought this statement was extremely racist, and obviously not true - I think he was just trying to gauge my reaction. I was questioned and questioned, and then made to wait some more. When I asked to call the American Consulate, I was told, "No", but five minutes later, I was told I was "finished", and brought back to where my poor fiance was waiting for me, still sitting in that horrible broken chair, having gone ten hours without using the toilet. I was given my passport back, stamped, and told I could proceed to the Jordanian side.

So we recruited a couple of young Palestinian guys who helped lift my fiance out of that awful chair and onto the second bus, which was like a city bus, which brought us out of the Israeli terminal and to an outdoor bus depot where bags and luggage were strewn everywhere on the street and sidewalk, and told to get out of the bus and retrieve our luggage. Luckily it was all there, and my fiance was able to use the toilet - filthy, basic, unsanitary, but when you gotta go (after 10 hours of waiting), well, ya gotta go.

We then lifted him into the third bus and made it across the Jordan river to the Jordanian terminal, where the people were friendly and helpful, and he was allowed to sit in his own wheelchair. Fifteen minutes later, we were in a taxi on our way to Amman.

What to do? Well, one thing to do would be to contact the ombudsman of the Israel Airports Authority, the government department that controls the borders, and complain about the lack of accomodation for handicapped Palestinians crossing the border at Allenby Bridge, and asking that people who are confined to wheelchairs be allowed to go by car instead of by bus, and sit in their own wheelchairs while crossing through the terminal.
email: telmas@iaa.gov.il, aviaa@iaa.gov.il
The Director-General of the Israel Airports Authority is Gabi Ophir (former chief of the Home Front Command in the Israeli Army). I haven't been able to find any contact information for him, but it might be worth emailing the Director-General of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Aharon Abramovitch, at:
mankal@mfa.gov.il

And as for the interrogation I was subjected to, I guess it is for the 'horrible crime' of being engaged to a Palestinian.

Journalists have also complained of the long, invasive interrogations at borders and airports.
see: https://lists.resist.ca/pipermail/project-x/2003-July/004147.html
and: http://www.fpa.org.il/?categoryId=422

And 'Arab-Israelis' (that is, Palestinians who have Israeli citizenship and constitute 20% of the Israeli population, and are no longer considered to be Palestinians) have complained of the 'racial profiling' that they are constantly subjected to throughout Israel, but especially upon entry and exit from the country:
see: http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3238101,00.html

sigh. so now i am back in the prison called palestine. stay tuned for my next entry in this exciting saga, in which an entire population is punished for the taking of an israeli soldier two weeks ago in a military ambush that would be considered perfectly legitimate in normal warfare but in this case, because it was carried out by palestinians, is considered 'kidnapping' by 'terrorist cells', and 1.2 million palestinians living in Gaza are being punished for the deed. electricity cut, water contaminated, surrounded on all sides by thousands of israeli tanks, airplanes, war ships, 500 shells a night, over 40 killed this week - families killed in their homes, kids shot down, run over by tanks in the street......and the hope for peace that was extended by hamas in their recognizing israel for the first time last week, making a concession in order to move toward peace, has been dashed......palestinian kids in gaza are picking up their slingshots, and the few rusty kalashnikov rifles from russia left over from the 67 war, and preparing to take on the fourth-largest army in the world (israel) that is once again invading (what's left of) their land.