I'll do it.
Showing posts with label colonialism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label colonialism. Show all posts
Friday, April 18, 2008
Saturday, March 29, 2008
In Commemoration of Land Day
Sunday is Yom al Ard, or Land Day, in Palestine and Israel. The activities held on the 30th of March each year mark the anniversary of protests in 1976 against the theft of Palestinian-owned land inside of Israel by the state. Six people were killed in the Galilee, and hundreds injured.
To my knowledge, not even the anniversary of the Nakba is recognized as popularly throughout the West Bank, Gaza and Israel as Land Day. The Nakba happened in 1948. Land Day is used to address the ongoing arbitrary confiscations of Palestinian property since that time, whether in Israel, the West Bank, or Gaza.
For Land Day, demonstrations are organized in cities, towns, villages, and refugee camps throughout all of historic Palestine. They are especially pertinent in areas where new confiscations are taking place. This year, the focus is on Jaffa, where 500 families have been issued eviction notices before the neighborhood is razed to make way for Jewish development. (Notice the grounds for eviction: that the residents "invaded the properties." Many Jaffa residents are internally displaced persons who have been deprived once of their property, and were forced to take up residence in the homes of Palestinians who fled before them.)
Check out this interview with Father Shehadeh Shehadeh, an organizer of the original Land Day protest in 1976.
Unrelated to Land Day, I would also like to bring your attention to this article on the assassination of the four men in Bethlehem a few weeks ago. I am sorry that I did not take a picture of their martyr poster when I had the chance. It shows the four, who are from different political factions, all standing together with weapons raised. I find it ironic, considering the way that they died: unarmed, sitting in a car waiting for their food order. As if the poster, like so many others, is an attempt to bestow some meaning on their deaths, which are no more than cold-blooded murders for which no investigation will ever take place and no justice will ever be served.They did not even have the chance to move. Their bullet-ridden bodies were still sitting upright when passersby pulled them from the car.
It was the moral equivalent of a team of Palestinians, disguised as Israelis, driving an Israeli car into Tel Aviv and gunning down four off-duty Israeli soldiers.
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
The Unrecognized
I mentioned this video (by Adalah) once before as an afterthought to this post. I am posting it again because I want to bring your attention to the awesome woman interviewed near the end of the film.
Please click here to stream the video from the Adalah site so you can actually read the subtitles.
After all of the lawyers and such who give their professional information about the situation of the Bedouin in the unrecognized villages in Israel, and all of whom speak with varying levels of proper, Modern Standard Arabic, we hear this woman. She is Amal ElSana AlH'jooj, the Director of AJEEC, The Arab-Jewish Center for Equality, Empowerment and Cooperation. She speaks with passion that would blow all the rest out of the water, and in dialect, and comes across with simultaneous rawness and eloquence regarding the most fundamental problem driving just about the entire conflict here. She is speaking of the Palestinians inside of Israel, but the sentiment applies to the whole darn thing. She hits it right on the nose:First of all, and this is a fundamental point, the state must start changing its attitude toward Palestinian citizens of Israel. This is a difficult issue. The state must stop seeing us as a security threat. The state today sees us as a security and demographic threat.
To this day, when an Arab woman gives birth, it frightens the Israeli Interior Minister and the Israeli Foreign Minister. This is the first thing that must change.
Secondly, the state cannot consider itself a 'democratic' state in the Middle East while 72,000 of its citizens are without drinking water.
Either the state decides to be democratic with equal rights for all, or it is not democratic. If it is not democratic, then we will know how to relate to it. But Israel can't have it both ways.
In completely unrelated news, I would also like to bring your attention to my new phrase of the day: 7elli 3an 6eaz aboui. Used to express 'leave me alone.' Translates to 'get off my dad's ass.'
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Finally the UN Gets it Right...
After four decades of whitewashing Israel's military occupation, the UN has finally figured it out: Palestinian violence is a RESPONSE to Israel's arrogant military rule. I am surprised that I am applauding this light bulb moment for the UN but given the recent trends on the part of the UN to try to get the Palestinians to accept Israel's colonial rule, this is a refreshing change.
The comments will appear in the UN's Human Rights Council report authored by Professor John Dugard, a South African lawyer who fought against apartheid. In the report he notes that Palestinian acts of violence, "must be understood as being a painful but inevitable consequence of colonialism, apartheid and occupation."
Expect Dugard to lose his job.
Wednesday, February 20, 2008
IT WAS THE GAYS
When I found myself grabbing my desk last week while the earth shuddered and the building shook, I had no idea what caused it. Thanks to Israeli Member of Knesset Shlomo Benizri, I've since been enlightened. It was the gays.
Clearly there is an orgy of monumental proportions going on that I'm missing out on, big time.
The epicenter turned out to be in southern Lebanon, which blows my theory that the feature in Haaretz Magazine a few months ago about Israeli gay tourism in Amman (and the 'Arab world') spawned some hott coexistence action at Books@Cafe's Friday brunch. Leave it to the Lebanese to throw the most awesome party that's been seen in these parts for the last century or so, and not invite me.
The Haaretz article basically lays out Amman's gay scene from the Roman amphitheater to Books to RGB and Culture Street. Books, ok that's a given. But the Roman amphitheater? Seriously? Joseph Massad, please step in here so we can all get our panties in a tizzy discussing whether the young men apparently selling sex to foreign tourists are actually 'gay.' And whether that makes the Roman amphitheater also 'gay.' (Though didn't the Romans kind of start the whole orgy thing?)
The article is seeing gay in places where I've been a thousand times and just saw West Amman. But I guess that's kind of the point, isn't it, for the tourists in the article looking for sex in the Middle East-- finding a place that is in a separate space altogether where men touch men in public all the time, where sex lurks behind every corner and under every veil and/or kuffiyeh, and where sex is exotic, exciting, and a conquest. Where gay sex isn't really gay sex. It's one big orgy, people! Veiled, of course. (That's why they cause earthquakes but we didn't actually see the orgy.)
For an Israeli gay man who might be mistaken for Mossad (not Massad),
The fear of being exposed as an Israeli heightens the thrill, some of the visitors say.Now let's all chant Edward Said to conjure his presence.
It is absolutely a type of conquest or operation in enemy territory and a speedy withdrawal. I came, I experienced a few things, I pulled out. The moment I have collected intelligence, withdrawal back to the hotel as quickly as possible.
Another person interviewed in the article says that being gay essentially makes you "international."
Gays have a tool that allows them to enter deep into communities that are rooted in the local culture. ...You can see the house, meet the friends, have breakfast with them.And that tool is, you guessed it, the one night stand. Sorry to let you down, dude, but that isn't 'internationalism.' You enter deep but for a superficial interaction (possibly followed by breakfast at Books). That's just good old Flaubert-style penetration of and experiencing the natives.
I sincerely hope you're using a condom.
Wednesday, January 02, 2008
Metaphor of the Month
Tariq Ali compares American efforts to create a Bhutto-Musharraf power-sharing government in Pakistan to an arranged marriage.
Friday, November 30, 2007
2 Interesting Quotes aaaand a D-Bag...
I really have no commentary to add to the following two quotes that stem from this week's substantive and highly successful (does the sarcasm punch you in the face?) Annapolis Conference. I just think they're deserving of some analysis, if not a brain-fart…
Olmert implicitly compares the current state of the Palestinian Territory to Apartheid-era South Africa...
"If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights (also for the Palestinians in the territories), then, as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished," Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told Haaretz Wednesday, the day the Annapolis conference ended in an agreement to try to reach a Mideast peace settlement by the end of 2008.
Condoleezza Rice explicitly compares Arab discrimination in Palestinian Territory to the Jim Crow-era American-South...
In other news, this guy is doing wonders for the Israeli people...U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told a closed meeting of Arab and Israeli envoys in Annapolis this week that her childhood in the segregated U.S. south helped her to understand the plight of Palestinians and the fear felt by Israelis, the Dutch representative to the summit, Franz Timmermans, told the Washington Post on Thursday.
"I know what its like to hear that you can't use a certain road, or pass through a checkpoint because you are a Palestinian. I know what it is like to feel discriminated against and powerless," Rice was reported as saying.
Peep the awesome terrorist photo in the background. This douche-bag makes Al-Qaeda look like the cast of Sesame Street. I love it!
Saturday, November 24, 2007
On Thanksgiving I went to the Naqab
This double rainbow greeted Haifa Thursday morning after the rainstorms. It stretched up from Haifa University and touches down here, in the middle of the chemical plant from which waft carcinogenic fumes for the noses of all who drive by. This was actually a Hezbollah target during the war in 2006- if a rocket hit here a lot of people would die from poisoning. Makes you wonder what they're manufacturing.
Naqab is the Arabic word for the Negev Desert. I was taken on a driving tour Thursday of a few of the 47 unrecognized Bedouin villages, the majority of which are located there. The people living here are the remainder of the indigenous Bedouin Arab population that somehow avoided expulsion in 1948 to Gaza, the West Bank, or Jordan. They have Israeli citizenship, many serve in the army, and they pay taxes. About 76,000 people are currently living in the unrecognized villages, any of which has more residents than your average Kibbutz. To be unrecognized by the State of Israel means that you do not have the services that people whose existence is recognized are entitled to- water, electricity, schools, health centers. Ambulances even don't go there- they just stop on the highway.
It was the proximity that surprised me. These people aren't out in the boondocks. Far from it. Five minutes outside of Beer Sheva, a thriving university town, we passed the first tin shacks that serve as family homes. The shacks were yards from the city water pipe emerging from underground, and underneath electric lines, but forbidden to connect to either.
Wadi Al Na'am:
In this village, just outside of Beer Sheva, 8,000 people live in a small sea of tin shacks, next to an electricity generating plant. They are not allowed to access the electricity. They have to bring their own water from elsewhere in tanks that aren't inspected and may not be clean. A strong chemical smell hung in the air around the plant. Wadi Al Na'am has one of, if not THE as I was told, highest cancer rates in the entire country. If you didn't see the numbers, you could just feel in the place that it wasn't good for your health. Every breath had that smell to it. Then, a BOOM made us all look around to a mushroom of smoke about 3/4 of a mile to our left, on the other side of the sea of shacks. The military was conducting a test. (In the Negev, where no one lives, of course!) The thing about Wadi Al Na'am is that people KNOW they are getting sick from living there, and they have told the government that they want to leave. Now that they want to leave, the government is telling them wait. When we left to the highway, yards from the last house, the sign for the turnoff was for the electric plant only. No sign for the village of 8,000. [I grew up in a town of about 4,000 and we had a lot of signs and also three stoplights and a McDonald's.]
A note on signage: our driver stopped by one of those electric grid things that come out of the ground that was surrounded by fence and on the fence there were signs warning of mortal danger- only in Hebrew. This is in a place surrounded by 8,000 people who speak Arabic.
Bir Haddaj:
One day, 3,000 people from Wadi Al Na'am decided they weren't going to take it anymore. On this particular Friday morning in the 1980s, the state woke up and there were more than 1,000 tents housing 3,000 people in the area now known (and recognized!) as Bir Haddaj. What to do what to do?! It's not very easy to just remove 3,000 people! The people of Bir Haddaj gave the government ultimatums. They said, if you don't give us another place to live, in 6 months we will build tin houses. After another 6 months, if you still don't give us a place that you recognize, we will build proper houses. Now, the village is recognized. (And as such, they have a school, a mosque that has an actual minaret, and of course the black water lines snaking across the ground and electricity that mark the 'recognized.')
There is a major problem with the way the government tries to settle the Bedouin in towns that they set up for them. The Bedouin know how to live a rural lifestyle, cultivating and herding animals. When they are crammed together in a place where the houses are all in single square lots, they suffer from an increase in poverty and there is a rise in all different kinds of diseases. But as it is with land in all of Mandate Palestine, if you don't have the power then you don't have access to the land. The guide pointed out that Jewish people can choose to live wherever they want- in Haifa, Jerusalem, Beer Sheva, or even Nablus or Hebron. But the Bedouin are stuck in places like Wadi Al Na'am breathing carcinogenic fumes that get into their food and water.
The story of Bedouin land ownership pre-1948 is also indicative of the greater history of land confiscation, whereby the state would prevent farmers from cultivating their land, and then declare it unused and usurp it. The 1950 law was used not only to bring absentee property (that of refugees who'd fled) under state ownership, but it also was used to take Bedouin land even if the owners hadn't fled. Under the British, if you made a land sale, you would have had to travel all the way to Tel Aviv to register the transaction with the colonial authority. That cost time and a lot of money. So, people settled on written contracts between themselves. Then come Israel. Since the person whose name the land is under on the books can't be found, the land MUST be absentee property that is for the State of Israel now (even though there are people farming it- just a small snag, nothing major).
For more on the unrecognized, I recommend THIS FILM by Adalah.
Sunday, November 04, 2007
The following quote alone has made this week's 773 pages of assigned reading good times:
What we end up having [in Palestine] is the most unusual situation. The Israelis monopolize everything. They monopolize nuclear weapons, they monopolize tanks, planes, what else ... They monopolize the land, they monopolize the water ... what else ... They even monopolize moral virtue ... you know, democracy and freedom of speech, and they monopolize the capacity to write the history of our land ... But they are not only content with this; after monopolizing all this and colonizing us to the bones, they also monopolize victimhood! To my knowledge, no colonizer has ever succeeded in monopolizing even victimhood ... just our luck! We say: "Hey, you're hurting us", and they say, "Don't you know how hurt we are? Haven't you heard of the Holocaust!" They are suffocating us, and when we try to push them away a little bit so we can breathe, they say, "We're being victimized. You don't recognize we exist." How on earth can you not recognize the existence of someone as fat as Sharon sitting on top of you suffocating you, I don't know!
Palestinian man interviewed in Sydney, from Ghassan Hage's Against Paranoid Nationalism (2003), Chapter 8 - pg 133.
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