Thursday, September 29, 2005
In the beginning I was as happy as a tourist. But I was riding on newness of being and adrenaline and my conceptions of Israel were empty and raw. Then darkness washed over the Darren, darker than a steer's tucus on a moonless night; but what the darkness hid was the deep that had come. I looked at the darkness, then plunged in and searched with extended arms, stumbling around looking for my way; I stumbled into the deep. The Spirit of God was moving all around me, like wind through city streets. Then, I realised I could see. The darkness was dissolved by light. The light is good.
Two months in Tel Aviv has come and gone and I didn't even notice the exact day; it's nearly three since I left BC. I have been really busy and exploring the deep that the darkness hid. I have developed a fondness for my fellow city-dweller. A very small sense of understanding and insight does much to dispel confusion and be a salve for the negative emotions that use confusion as a ladder to climb into the mind. The expression, "If you don't understand it - kill it," seems appropriate for the negativity that arises through perpetual confusion.
Realising you are lost always brings a sense of panic and when you try to run and your legs don't work; it' s supposed to mean that you are dreaming. But when you feel like PacMan and you are awake, the trouble comes. The biggest trouble is trying to learn how to be confused in the best possible way. Once I learned that, I started to feel better.
As an extrovert, I found that too much time alone took its toll on me. I found that I became agoraphobic. Especially of the marketplace. That's what agoraphobia means: fear of the marketplace. But even just parties or meetings or conversations about how I was or "the situation" here or just normal socialisation began to seem frightening. After some days, I said Forget It, and then I met some friends. My buddy Mattan did much explaining to me about the culture of Israel and how much the military service affects the people here. I had wondered why people talk to each other like they've known each other for years and are arguing over the last beer; and his insights to me have made that clearer.
Oh, speaking of the meaning of words, how 'bout this one: Baal means husband, it is also the name of a Caanaite god from the old-school. But what does it REALLY mean? Owner. Amazing. That is why some women, these days, in Israel, don't like to refer to their husbands as "husband" or "Baal" (owner).
Things always happen when one is not frantically searching for it. At least to me. With friends, I have been able to feel like I'm not invisible and see that there is more to people here than mad drivers and pushy people. I got so busy with homework and the friends I've met, from Zochrot, from school and from just living here, that I didn't even notice the darkness disappearing. I just noticed over the space of a couple of days that I like the breeze in my apartment; I like the (relative) coolness of the morning bike ride to school; I like riding or walking around the streets; I like watching people. I noticed my laugh once again causing people to turn their heads to see the source. I noticed a smile on my face and a joke on my lips. I still hate the car alarms and blaring techno; but hey, at least I can hear them. I'm glad to be able to hear.
Hebrew is coming along well. I am still too shy to speak to people when they look at me and say, ma shlom kha? with a fun look on their face. I know they are just playing a game with me, to hear the student speak. But I do say stuff when I'm in a store or in the market or just out. Not much, just a few words, usually, maybe a couple of sentences. I can't hear people here very well, because of their speed, so when they find out I suck at Hebrew they switch to English. Very rarely do I switch them back unless I am in an extended conversation and the words come to me in Hebrew of what I want to say in English.
I find it amazing, though, to look back on those first couple weeks of class when I felt like I just got a super-duper bad concussion and couldn't understand a thing. Now, I can understand what the teacher says and she talks for five hours in nearly all Hebrew. She talks faster now than she did, too. When she really motors I get lost and am grateful for her repeating for us beginner folks.
I am having lunch with Eitan Bronstein on Sunday to discuss the next couple of months at Zochrot. I think they want to have me in the office a day or two a week for whatever reason. I only really get a couple hours of social time per day because of how much studying is required for each class, so I don't know how much time they want. I also am not sure why they want me to go there right now. I have never been given responsibility. The work I did for them was extra stuff they hadn't had before and so when I started school their operation is not affected. Maybe they just miss my mug around the office space.
Oh, I shaved. Just 'cause. It'll grow back. It's a nice change-up. My beard had never been so bushy - the Osama beard wasn't even close.
If you had noticed at the beginning of this letter that I said I lived in Israel, rather than saying Israel / Palestine, it is because Tel Aviv is so far away from Israel / Palestine that it really is only Israel. People here talk about poverty and homelessness and how those things should be non-existent and I just want to tell them about Palestine. I usually don't say anything. Today, I entered a conversation about how poor people are poor because they choose it and I talked about Vancouver and gave a perspective that my brother taught me about "choice" for some people, rather the lack of it. One girl, in the conversation, told me it was very rare to be abused and broken and born into hopeless situations. I shook my head at her ignorance and told her it is much more common than she thinks.
I got in an interesting conversation today with this same girl: a New Yorker turned Israeli Immigrant, who is in my class. She was asking me about my "NGO" since I had explained about MCC and Zochrot to her in the past. I told her that I was the only one from MCC living in Israel, although there were half-a-dozen, or so, volunteers in Palestine.
She looked surprised and said, "Oh, after being here for a couple months you must really have a
different opinion than them." I shrugged my shoulders and said, "Sure, about a lot of stuff, but not about the political or human rights issues in Israel / Palestine." She looked at me very suspicously and I followed up with, "I absolutely believe that Israel has a right to exist....on the 1948 borders.....and they should STICK to the Greenline and not build their wall on Palestinian land."
She seemed a little assured that I wasn't a hater and she said, "Well, it's a good thing we have the wall; we need it to protect our homes." She said, "I mean, if someone was killing my family and bombing my house, I'd want a wall too."
I said, "But it was Israel who built the wall."
She looked at me like I was crazy and said, "Yeah, I was talking about my house."
"Yeah," I said, "But Israel has been killing Palestinian families and destroying their houses for sixty years; they never put a wall up."
Her eyes narrowed and she said condescendingly, "Well, I can see that you and I don't agree about the historical FACTS." She really said FACTS strongly and loudly. I was so tempted to enter that avenue and take her for a walk and talk about her FACTS, but I thought to myself, later, later, I will know her for the next four months.
Tonight I am going to James' apartment, who is an Irish dude from class. He's having a "mess-eBah." I think most of the class is coming as well as other students from the ulpan, plus his girlfriend's friends and their roomate's friends. Sounds like it will a bash. Interesting! I wonder what the French guys will be up to; not to mention the Brazilians! Maybe I'll wear my Zochrot shirt and get the crap beat out of me!
Okay,
Burro D-Block OUT
Thursday, September 29, 2005
Saturday, September 24, 2005
How Can There Be Peace When Everyone is Shooting Each Other?
Hey,
I found the following article at http://www.alternativenews.org/
I think it is interesting how there is much accusation and speculation over what caused the exposion at the disengagement celebration in Gaza yesterday (Friday). I also thought that the other skirmishes, including Palestinian police and Hamas fighters shooting at each other, is just plain sad. Anyway, read the article if you feel like it....
http://www.alternativenews.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=261&Itemid=1&lang=ISO-8859-1
photo from al-jazeera.
Many killed in Gaza blast
Several people, including children, have been killed and many more injured in northern Gaza today after a car exploded at a military parade organized by the Islamic resistance group Hamas to celebrate the Israeli withdrawl from the Gaza strip.
Haaretz reported that at least 19 people were killed and 80 are wounded. Ten of the wounded were in serious condition, hospital doctors said.
The explosion occurred as thousands of Hamas members and supporters attended a rally in the impoverished Jabaliya refugee camp to celebrate Israel's pullout from the Gaza Strip, witnesses said.
The blast ripped through the camp just before one of the main leaders of Hamas, Ismail Haniya, was to address the crowd.
Israel or Accident?
AP quoted witnesses as saying the truck carried homemade weapons, and Palestinian security officials as saying that the blast apparently was caused by the mishandling of explosives.
Hamas blamed Israel, saying Israeli aircraft flew overhead during the rally. Israel denied it was involved.
Witnesses said participants crowded around the pickup truck carrying fighters when the explosion went off. The witnesses added that the truck carried homemade weapons, but did not know whether they were rockets or grenade launchers.
Earlier on Friday, Israeli soldiers killed three Palestinian fighters in Tulkarim in the West Bank, drawing strong condemnation from another Palestinian resistance group, Islamic Jihad.
The three fighters from al-Quds Brigades, the military arm of Islamic Jihad, were killed just hours after Israeli soldiers evacuated an army base.
Afterwards, Aljazeera reported that nine rockets were fired from Gaza towards the Israeli township of Sderot, in the first such incident since Israeli forces completed a pullout from the territory 10 days ago. No casualties or damage were reported from the rocket.
Israeli Military radio confirmed only one rocket impact. "Other explosions were heard in the region but no (other impact in Israel) has been confirmed," a source said.
Khalid al-Batsh, a spokesman for Islamic Jihad, held Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Defence Minister Saul Mofaz responsible for what he called "a deliberate assassination".
Also on Friday, Palestinian police and Hamas fighters briefly exchanged fire, leaving an armed Hamas man wounded, security officials and hospital doctors said.
At talks between Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas and Gaza representatives of the main factions on Wednesday, fighters agreed to stop by Saturday all armed rallies and marches celebrating Israel's pullout from Gaza.
I found the following article at http://www.alternativenews.org/
I think it is interesting how there is much accusation and speculation over what caused the exposion at the disengagement celebration in Gaza yesterday (Friday). I also thought that the other skirmishes, including Palestinian police and Hamas fighters shooting at each other, is just plain sad. Anyway, read the article if you feel like it....
http://www.alternativenews.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=261&Itemid=1&lang=ISO-8859-1
photo from al-jazeera.
Many killed in Gaza blast
Several people, including children, have been killed and many more injured in northern Gaza today after a car exploded at a military parade organized by the Islamic resistance group Hamas to celebrate the Israeli withdrawl from the Gaza strip.
Haaretz reported that at least 19 people were killed and 80 are wounded. Ten of the wounded were in serious condition, hospital doctors said.
The explosion occurred as thousands of Hamas members and supporters attended a rally in the impoverished Jabaliya refugee camp to celebrate Israel's pullout from the Gaza Strip, witnesses said.
The blast ripped through the camp just before one of the main leaders of Hamas, Ismail Haniya, was to address the crowd.
Israel or Accident?
AP quoted witnesses as saying the truck carried homemade weapons, and Palestinian security officials as saying that the blast apparently was caused by the mishandling of explosives.
Hamas blamed Israel, saying Israeli aircraft flew overhead during the rally. Israel denied it was involved.
Witnesses said participants crowded around the pickup truck carrying fighters when the explosion went off. The witnesses added that the truck carried homemade weapons, but did not know whether they were rockets or grenade launchers.
Earlier on Friday, Israeli soldiers killed three Palestinian fighters in Tulkarim in the West Bank, drawing strong condemnation from another Palestinian resistance group, Islamic Jihad.
The three fighters from al-Quds Brigades, the military arm of Islamic Jihad, were killed just hours after Israeli soldiers evacuated an army base.
Afterwards, Aljazeera reported that nine rockets were fired from Gaza towards the Israeli township of Sderot, in the first such incident since Israeli forces completed a pullout from the territory 10 days ago. No casualties or damage were reported from the rocket.
Israeli Military radio confirmed only one rocket impact. "Other explosions were heard in the region but no (other impact in Israel) has been confirmed," a source said.
Khalid al-Batsh, a spokesman for Islamic Jihad, held Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Defence Minister Saul Mofaz responsible for what he called "a deliberate assassination".
Also on Friday, Palestinian police and Hamas fighters briefly exchanged fire, leaving an armed Hamas man wounded, security officials and hospital doctors said.
At talks between Palestinian leader Mahmud Abbas and Gaza representatives of the main factions on Wednesday, fighters agreed to stop by Saturday all armed rallies and marches celebrating Israel's pullout from Gaza.
Monday, September 19, 2005
To the Movies?
Hey There,
I wanted to invite you guys to go see a movie, if you're bored or if you are already going to go and don't know what to see.
THe EXorcism Of Emily Rose.
See if you can see me on the jury.
I am not endorsing the content, nor am I NOT endorsing the content; I was simply on the jury and wanted to see it and it's not out, here, yet.
DB
I wanted to invite you guys to go see a movie, if you're bored or if you are already going to go and don't know what to see.
THe EXorcism Of Emily Rose.
See if you can see me on the jury.
I am not endorsing the content, nor am I NOT endorsing the content; I was simply on the jury and wanted to see it and it's not out, here, yet.
DB
Saturday, September 17, 2005
enjoy Yasself
Next time you are in a tacky bar, with sticky tables and a lonely discoball spinning, and Oasis' Champange SuperNova comes on, think of me; you'll smile and enjoy yasself. Burro
Article About Sharon
Does a man need to answer for everything he's done? Can good deeds erase the bad? Is there any good done in highlighting a political leader's participation in atrocities? Or is it just gossip and character maligning?
Decide for yourself.
The following article was passed on to me by the Seidels in Bethlehem. It was written over a year ago, but I thought that it offers some insight into the ongoing juggling act of trying to establish peace in Israel / Palestine.
Sharon addressed the UN the other day, and I only heard part of his speech. It sounded lofty and peace-oriented. I started to wonder if in his ageing years, he is experiencing a change of ideology for humanity and Israel's place in Palestine (or vice-versa). I am rather confused because everything I know about the man makes his speech at the UN seem like a joke.
The following article is a little choppy at points, but if you can get through it, delivers some decent information and perspective about what it is that makes the man of peace, as Bush called Sharon after he won the election in 2004.
DB
“Thanking Sharon” April 24th, 2004 By Mike Odetalla www.hanini.org
According to our thoughtful and intelligent president, George W. Bush, the world owes Ariel Sharon a "Thank You" for his “courage” and “Vision”!
Well, I happen to agree. The world owes Sharon many "Thank Yous".
Let examine the history of Sharon and what we should be "thanking" him for:
Sharon's first documented sortie in this role was in August of 1953 on the refugee camp of El-Bureig, south of Gaza. An Israeli history of the 101 unit records 50 refugees as having been killed; other sources allege 15 or 20. Major-General Vagn Bennike, the UN commander, reported that "bombs were thrown" by Sharon's men "through the windows of huts in which the refugees were sleeping and, as they fled, they were attacked by small arms and automatic weapons".
In October of 1953 came the attack by Sharon's unit 101 on the Jordanian village of Qibya, whose "stain" Israel's foreign minister at the time, Moshe Sharett, confided to his diary "would stick to us and not be washed away for many years". He was wrong. Though even strongly pro-Israel commentators in the West compared it to Lidice, Qibya and Sharon's role are scarcely evoked in the West today, least of all by journalists such as Deborah Sontag of the New York Times who recently wrote a whitewash of Sharon, describing him as "feisty", or the Washington Post's man in Jerusalem who fondly invoked him after his fateful excursion to the Holy Places in Jerusalem as "the portly old warrior".
Israeli historian Avi Shlaim describes the massacre thus: "Sharon's order was to penetrate Qibya, blow up houses and inflict heavy casualties on its inhabitants. His success in carrying out the order surpassed all expectations. The full and macabre story of what happened at Qibya was revealed only during the morning after the attack. The village had been reduced to rubble: forty-five houses had been blown up, and sixty-nine civilians, two thirds of them women and children, had been killed. Sharon and his men claimed that they believed that all the inhabitants had run away and that they had no idea that anyone was hiding inside the houses."
The UN observer on the scene reached a different conclusion: "One story was repeated time after time: the bullet splintered door, the body sprawled across the threshold, indicating that the inhabitants had been forced by heavy fire to stay inside until their homes were blown up over them." The slaughter in Qibya was described contemporaneously in a letter to the president of the United Nations Security Council dated 16 October 1953 (S/3113) from the Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary of Jordan to the United States. On 14 October 1953 at 9:30 at night, he wrote, Israeli troops launched a battalion-scale attack on the village of Qibya in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan (at the time the West Bank was annexed to Jordan).
According to the diplomat's account, Israeli forces had entered the village and systematically murdered all occupants of houses, using automatic weapons, grenades and incendiaries. On 14 October, the bodies of 42 Arab civilians had been recovered; several more bodies were still under the wreckage. Forty houses, the village school and a reservoir had been destroyed. Quantities of unused explosives, bearing Israel army markings in Hebrew, had been found in the village. At about 3 a.m., to cover their withdrawal, Israeli support troops had begun shelling the neighboring villages of Budrus and Shuqba from positions in Israel.
And what of Sharon's conduct when he was head of the Southern Command of Israel's Defense Forces in the early 1970s? The Gaza "clearances" were vividly described by Phil Reeves in a piece in The London Independent on January 21 of this year.
"Thirty years have elapsed since Ariel Sharon, favorite to win Israel's forthcoming election, was the head of the Israel Defense Forces' southern command, charged with the task of 'pacifying' the recalcitrant Gaza Strip after the 1967 war. But the old men still remember it well, especially the old men on Wreckage Street. Until late 1970, Wreckage, or Had'd, Street wasn't a street, just one of scores of narrow, nameless alleys weaving through Gaza City's Beach Camp, a shantytown cluttered with low, two-roomed houses, built with UN aid for refugees from the 1948 war who then, as now, were waiting for the international community to settle their future. The street acquired its name after an unusually prolonged visit from Mr Sharon's soldiers. Their orders were to bulldoze hundreds of homes to carve a wide, straight street. This would allow Israeli troops and their heavy armored vehicles to move easily through the camp, to exert control and hunt down men from the Palestinian Liberation Army.
"'They came at night and began marking the houses they wanted to demolish with red paint,' said Ibrahim Ghanim, 70, a retired labourer. 'In the morning they came back, and ordered everyone to leave. I remember all the soldiers shouting at people, Yalla, yalla, yalla, yalla [let's go]! They threw everyone's belongings into the street. Then Sharon brought in bulldozers and started flattening the street. He did the whole lot, almost in one day. And the soldiers would beat people. Can you imagine soldiers with guns, beating little kids? By the time the Israeli army's work was done, hundreds of homes were destroyed, not only on Wreckage Street but throughout the camp, as Sharon ploughed out a grid of wide security roads. Many of the refugees took shelter in schools, or squeezed into the already badly over-crowded homes of relatives. Other families, usually those with a Palestinian political activist, were loaded into trucks and taken to exile in a town in the heart of the Sinai Desert, then controlled by Israel."
As Reeves reported, the devastation of Beach Camp was far from the exception. "In August 1971 alone, troops under Mr Sharon's command destroyed some 2,000 homes in the Gaza Strip, uprooting 16,000 people for the second time in their lives. Hundreds of young Palestinian men were arrested and deported to Jordan and Lebanon. Six hundred relatives of suspected guerrillas were exiled to Sinai. In the second half of 1971, 104 guerrillas were assassinated. 'The policy at that time was not to arrest suspects, but to assassinate them', said Raji Sourani, director of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights in Gaza City".
Israeli complacency leading to their initial defeat by the Egyptians in the 1973 war was in part nurtured by the supposed impregnability of the "Bar Lev line" constructed by Sharon on the east bank of the Suez Canal. The Egyptians pierced the line without undue difficulty.
In 1981 Sharon, then minister of defense, paid a visit to Israel's good friend, President Mobutu of Zaire. Lunching on Mobutu's yacht the Israeli party was asked by their host to use their good offices to get the US Congress to be more forthcoming with aid. This, the Israelis managed to accomplish. As a quid pro quo Mobutu reestablished diplomatic relations with Israel. This was not Sharon's only contact with Africa. Among friends he relays fond memories of trips to Angola to observe and advise the South African forces then fighting in support of the murderous CIA stooge Jonas Savimbi.
As defense minister in Menachem Begin's second government, Sharon was the commander who led the full dress 1982 assault on Lebanon, with the express design of destroying the PLO, driving as many Palestinians as possible to Jordan and making Lebanon a client state of Israel. It was a war plan that cost untold suffering, around 20,000 Palestinian and Lebanese lives, and also the deaths of over one thousand Israeli soldiers. The Israelis bombed civilian populations at will. Sharon also oversaw the infamous massacres at Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps. The Lebanese government counted 762 bodies recovered and a further 1,200 buried privately by relatives. However, the Middle East may have been spared worse, thanks to Menachem Begin. Just as the '82 war was getting under way; Sharon approached Begin, then Prime Minister, and suggested that Begin cede control over Israel's nuclear trigger to him. Begin had just enough sense to refuse.
The slaughter in the two contiguous camps at Sabra and Shatila took place from 6:00 at night on September 16, 1982 until 8:00 in the morning on September 18, 1982, in an area under the control of the Israel Defense Forces. The perpetrators were members of the Phalange militia, the Lebanese force that was armed by and closely allied with Israel since the onset of Lebanon's civil war in 1975. The victims during the 62-hour rampage included infants, children, women (including pregnant women), and the elderly, some of whom were mutilated or disemboweled before or after they were killed.
An official Israeli commission of inquiry - chaired by Yitzhak Kahan, president of Israel's Supreme Court - investigated the massacre, and in February 1983 publicly released its findings (without Appendix B, which remains secret until now).
Amid desperate attempts to cover up the evidence of direct knowledge of what was going on by Israeli military personnel, the Kahan Commission found itself compelled to find that Ariel Sharon, among other Israelis, had responsibility for the massacre. The commission's report stated: "It is our view that responsibility is to be imputed to the Minister of Defense for having disregarded ["entirely cognizant of" would have been a better choice of words] the danger of acts of vengeance and bloodshed by the Phalangists against the population of the refugee camps, and having failed [i.e." eagerly taken this into consideration"] to take this danger into account when he decided to have the Phalangists enter the camps. In addition, responsibility is to be imputed to the Minister of Defense for not ordering appropriate measures for preventing or reducing the danger of massacre as a condition for the Phalangists' entry into the camps. These blunders constitute the non-fulfillment of a duty with which the Defense Minister was charged". (For those who want to refresh their memories of Operation Peace for Galilee, of the massacres and the Kahan cover up I recommend Noam Chomsky's The Fateful Triangle.)
Sharon refused to resign. Finally, on February 14, 1983, he was relieved of his duties as defense minister, though he remained in the cabinet as minister without portfolio.
Sharon's career was in eclipse, but he continued to burnish his credentials as a Likud ultra.
Sharon has always been against any sort of peace deal, unless on terms entirely impossible for Palestinians to accept. As Nehemia Strasler outlined in Ha'aretz on January 18 of this year, in 1979, as a member of Begin's cabinet, he voted against a peace treaty with Egypt. In 1985 he voted against the withdrawal of Israeli troops to the so-called security zone in Southern Lebanon. In 1991 he opposed Israel's participation in the Madrid peace conference. In 1993 he voted No in the Knesset on the Oslo agreement. The following year he abstained in the Knesset on a vote over a peace treaty with Jordan. He voted against the Hebron agreement in 1997 and objected to the way in which the withdrawal from southern Lebanon was conducted.
As Begin's minister of agriculture in the late 1970s he established many of the West Bank settlements that are now a major obstruction to any peace deal. His present position: Not another square inch of land for Palestinians on the West Bank. He will agree to a Palestinian state on the existing areas presently under either total or partial Palestinian control, amounting to merely 42 per cent of the West Bank. Israel will retain control of the highways across the West Bank and the water sources. All settlements will stay in place with access by the IDF to them. Jerusalem will remain under Israeli sovereignty and he plans to continue building around the city. The Golan Heights would remain under Israel's control.
It can be strongly argued that Sharon represents the long-term policy of all Israeli governments, without any obscuring fluff or verbal embroidery. For example: Ben-Gurion approved the terror missions of Unit 101. Every Israeli government has condoned settlements and building around Jerusalem. It was Labor's Ehud Barak who Okayed the military escort for Sharon on his provocative sortie that sparked the second Intifada and Barak who has overseen the lethal military repression of recent months. But that doesn't diminish Sharon's sinister shadow across the past half century. That shadow is better evoked by Palestinians and Lebanese grieving for the dead, the maimed, the displaced, or by a young Israeli woman, Ilil Komey, 16, who confronted Sharon recently when he visited her agricultural high school outside Beersheba. "I think you sent my father into Lebanon", Ilil said. "Ariel Sharon, I accuse you of having made me suffer for 16 some odd years. I accuse you of having made my father suffer for over 16 years. I accuse you of a lot of things that made a lot of people suffer in this country. I don't think that you can now be elected as prime minister".
Well, Sharon is the "elected" Prime Minister of Israel and true to his ghoulish blood soaked history, he continues to slaughter, destroy, and torment the Palestinian people. His policy of death, murder, and oppression has earned him the title of "A Man of Peace" and a “visionary” according to George W. Bush. In fact, according to our "wise and noble" president George W. Bush, we all should be very thankful to Ariel “The Butcher of Beirut” Sharon.
-Mike Odetalla..."A seed in the eternal fruit of Palestine"
Decide for yourself.
The following article was passed on to me by the Seidels in Bethlehem. It was written over a year ago, but I thought that it offers some insight into the ongoing juggling act of trying to establish peace in Israel / Palestine.
Sharon addressed the UN the other day, and I only heard part of his speech. It sounded lofty and peace-oriented. I started to wonder if in his ageing years, he is experiencing a change of ideology for humanity and Israel's place in Palestine (or vice-versa). I am rather confused because everything I know about the man makes his speech at the UN seem like a joke.
The following article is a little choppy at points, but if you can get through it, delivers some decent information and perspective about what it is that makes the man of peace, as Bush called Sharon after he won the election in 2004.
DB
“Thanking Sharon” April 24th, 2004 By Mike Odetalla www.hanini.org
According to our thoughtful and intelligent president, George W. Bush, the world owes Ariel Sharon a "Thank You" for his “courage” and “Vision”!
Well, I happen to agree. The world owes Sharon many "Thank Yous".
Let examine the history of Sharon and what we should be "thanking" him for:
Sharon's first documented sortie in this role was in August of 1953 on the refugee camp of El-Bureig, south of Gaza. An Israeli history of the 101 unit records 50 refugees as having been killed; other sources allege 15 or 20. Major-General Vagn Bennike, the UN commander, reported that "bombs were thrown" by Sharon's men "through the windows of huts in which the refugees were sleeping and, as they fled, they were attacked by small arms and automatic weapons".
In October of 1953 came the attack by Sharon's unit 101 on the Jordanian village of Qibya, whose "stain" Israel's foreign minister at the time, Moshe Sharett, confided to his diary "would stick to us and not be washed away for many years". He was wrong. Though even strongly pro-Israel commentators in the West compared it to Lidice, Qibya and Sharon's role are scarcely evoked in the West today, least of all by journalists such as Deborah Sontag of the New York Times who recently wrote a whitewash of Sharon, describing him as "feisty", or the Washington Post's man in Jerusalem who fondly invoked him after his fateful excursion to the Holy Places in Jerusalem as "the portly old warrior".
Israeli historian Avi Shlaim describes the massacre thus: "Sharon's order was to penetrate Qibya, blow up houses and inflict heavy casualties on its inhabitants. His success in carrying out the order surpassed all expectations. The full and macabre story of what happened at Qibya was revealed only during the morning after the attack. The village had been reduced to rubble: forty-five houses had been blown up, and sixty-nine civilians, two thirds of them women and children, had been killed. Sharon and his men claimed that they believed that all the inhabitants had run away and that they had no idea that anyone was hiding inside the houses."
The UN observer on the scene reached a different conclusion: "One story was repeated time after time: the bullet splintered door, the body sprawled across the threshold, indicating that the inhabitants had been forced by heavy fire to stay inside until their homes were blown up over them." The slaughter in Qibya was described contemporaneously in a letter to the president of the United Nations Security Council dated 16 October 1953 (S/3113) from the Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary of Jordan to the United States. On 14 October 1953 at 9:30 at night, he wrote, Israeli troops launched a battalion-scale attack on the village of Qibya in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan (at the time the West Bank was annexed to Jordan).
According to the diplomat's account, Israeli forces had entered the village and systematically murdered all occupants of houses, using automatic weapons, grenades and incendiaries. On 14 October, the bodies of 42 Arab civilians had been recovered; several more bodies were still under the wreckage. Forty houses, the village school and a reservoir had been destroyed. Quantities of unused explosives, bearing Israel army markings in Hebrew, had been found in the village. At about 3 a.m., to cover their withdrawal, Israeli support troops had begun shelling the neighboring villages of Budrus and Shuqba from positions in Israel.
And what of Sharon's conduct when he was head of the Southern Command of Israel's Defense Forces in the early 1970s? The Gaza "clearances" were vividly described by Phil Reeves in a piece in The London Independent on January 21 of this year.
"Thirty years have elapsed since Ariel Sharon, favorite to win Israel's forthcoming election, was the head of the Israel Defense Forces' southern command, charged with the task of 'pacifying' the recalcitrant Gaza Strip after the 1967 war. But the old men still remember it well, especially the old men on Wreckage Street. Until late 1970, Wreckage, or Had'd, Street wasn't a street, just one of scores of narrow, nameless alleys weaving through Gaza City's Beach Camp, a shantytown cluttered with low, two-roomed houses, built with UN aid for refugees from the 1948 war who then, as now, were waiting for the international community to settle their future. The street acquired its name after an unusually prolonged visit from Mr Sharon's soldiers. Their orders were to bulldoze hundreds of homes to carve a wide, straight street. This would allow Israeli troops and their heavy armored vehicles to move easily through the camp, to exert control and hunt down men from the Palestinian Liberation Army.
"'They came at night and began marking the houses they wanted to demolish with red paint,' said Ibrahim Ghanim, 70, a retired labourer. 'In the morning they came back, and ordered everyone to leave. I remember all the soldiers shouting at people, Yalla, yalla, yalla, yalla [let's go]! They threw everyone's belongings into the street. Then Sharon brought in bulldozers and started flattening the street. He did the whole lot, almost in one day. And the soldiers would beat people. Can you imagine soldiers with guns, beating little kids? By the time the Israeli army's work was done, hundreds of homes were destroyed, not only on Wreckage Street but throughout the camp, as Sharon ploughed out a grid of wide security roads. Many of the refugees took shelter in schools, or squeezed into the already badly over-crowded homes of relatives. Other families, usually those with a Palestinian political activist, were loaded into trucks and taken to exile in a town in the heart of the Sinai Desert, then controlled by Israel."
As Reeves reported, the devastation of Beach Camp was far from the exception. "In August 1971 alone, troops under Mr Sharon's command destroyed some 2,000 homes in the Gaza Strip, uprooting 16,000 people for the second time in their lives. Hundreds of young Palestinian men were arrested and deported to Jordan and Lebanon. Six hundred relatives of suspected guerrillas were exiled to Sinai. In the second half of 1971, 104 guerrillas were assassinated. 'The policy at that time was not to arrest suspects, but to assassinate them', said Raji Sourani, director of the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights in Gaza City".
Israeli complacency leading to their initial defeat by the Egyptians in the 1973 war was in part nurtured by the supposed impregnability of the "Bar Lev line" constructed by Sharon on the east bank of the Suez Canal. The Egyptians pierced the line without undue difficulty.
In 1981 Sharon, then minister of defense, paid a visit to Israel's good friend, President Mobutu of Zaire. Lunching on Mobutu's yacht the Israeli party was asked by their host to use their good offices to get the US Congress to be more forthcoming with aid. This, the Israelis managed to accomplish. As a quid pro quo Mobutu reestablished diplomatic relations with Israel. This was not Sharon's only contact with Africa. Among friends he relays fond memories of trips to Angola to observe and advise the South African forces then fighting in support of the murderous CIA stooge Jonas Savimbi.
As defense minister in Menachem Begin's second government, Sharon was the commander who led the full dress 1982 assault on Lebanon, with the express design of destroying the PLO, driving as many Palestinians as possible to Jordan and making Lebanon a client state of Israel. It was a war plan that cost untold suffering, around 20,000 Palestinian and Lebanese lives, and also the deaths of over one thousand Israeli soldiers. The Israelis bombed civilian populations at will. Sharon also oversaw the infamous massacres at Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps. The Lebanese government counted 762 bodies recovered and a further 1,200 buried privately by relatives. However, the Middle East may have been spared worse, thanks to Menachem Begin. Just as the '82 war was getting under way; Sharon approached Begin, then Prime Minister, and suggested that Begin cede control over Israel's nuclear trigger to him. Begin had just enough sense to refuse.
The slaughter in the two contiguous camps at Sabra and Shatila took place from 6:00 at night on September 16, 1982 until 8:00 in the morning on September 18, 1982, in an area under the control of the Israel Defense Forces. The perpetrators were members of the Phalange militia, the Lebanese force that was armed by and closely allied with Israel since the onset of Lebanon's civil war in 1975. The victims during the 62-hour rampage included infants, children, women (including pregnant women), and the elderly, some of whom were mutilated or disemboweled before or after they were killed.
An official Israeli commission of inquiry - chaired by Yitzhak Kahan, president of Israel's Supreme Court - investigated the massacre, and in February 1983 publicly released its findings (without Appendix B, which remains secret until now).
Amid desperate attempts to cover up the evidence of direct knowledge of what was going on by Israeli military personnel, the Kahan Commission found itself compelled to find that Ariel Sharon, among other Israelis, had responsibility for the massacre. The commission's report stated: "It is our view that responsibility is to be imputed to the Minister of Defense for having disregarded ["entirely cognizant of" would have been a better choice of words] the danger of acts of vengeance and bloodshed by the Phalangists against the population of the refugee camps, and having failed [i.e." eagerly taken this into consideration"] to take this danger into account when he decided to have the Phalangists enter the camps. In addition, responsibility is to be imputed to the Minister of Defense for not ordering appropriate measures for preventing or reducing the danger of massacre as a condition for the Phalangists' entry into the camps. These blunders constitute the non-fulfillment of a duty with which the Defense Minister was charged". (For those who want to refresh their memories of Operation Peace for Galilee, of the massacres and the Kahan cover up I recommend Noam Chomsky's The Fateful Triangle.)
Sharon refused to resign. Finally, on February 14, 1983, he was relieved of his duties as defense minister, though he remained in the cabinet as minister without portfolio.
Sharon's career was in eclipse, but he continued to burnish his credentials as a Likud ultra.
Sharon has always been against any sort of peace deal, unless on terms entirely impossible for Palestinians to accept. As Nehemia Strasler outlined in Ha'aretz on January 18 of this year, in 1979, as a member of Begin's cabinet, he voted against a peace treaty with Egypt. In 1985 he voted against the withdrawal of Israeli troops to the so-called security zone in Southern Lebanon. In 1991 he opposed Israel's participation in the Madrid peace conference. In 1993 he voted No in the Knesset on the Oslo agreement. The following year he abstained in the Knesset on a vote over a peace treaty with Jordan. He voted against the Hebron agreement in 1997 and objected to the way in which the withdrawal from southern Lebanon was conducted.
As Begin's minister of agriculture in the late 1970s he established many of the West Bank settlements that are now a major obstruction to any peace deal. His present position: Not another square inch of land for Palestinians on the West Bank. He will agree to a Palestinian state on the existing areas presently under either total or partial Palestinian control, amounting to merely 42 per cent of the West Bank. Israel will retain control of the highways across the West Bank and the water sources. All settlements will stay in place with access by the IDF to them. Jerusalem will remain under Israeli sovereignty and he plans to continue building around the city. The Golan Heights would remain under Israel's control.
It can be strongly argued that Sharon represents the long-term policy of all Israeli governments, without any obscuring fluff or verbal embroidery. For example: Ben-Gurion approved the terror missions of Unit 101. Every Israeli government has condoned settlements and building around Jerusalem. It was Labor's Ehud Barak who Okayed the military escort for Sharon on his provocative sortie that sparked the second Intifada and Barak who has overseen the lethal military repression of recent months. But that doesn't diminish Sharon's sinister shadow across the past half century. That shadow is better evoked by Palestinians and Lebanese grieving for the dead, the maimed, the displaced, or by a young Israeli woman, Ilil Komey, 16, who confronted Sharon recently when he visited her agricultural high school outside Beersheba. "I think you sent my father into Lebanon", Ilil said. "Ariel Sharon, I accuse you of having made me suffer for 16 some odd years. I accuse you of having made my father suffer for over 16 years. I accuse you of a lot of things that made a lot of people suffer in this country. I don't think that you can now be elected as prime minister".
Well, Sharon is the "elected" Prime Minister of Israel and true to his ghoulish blood soaked history, he continues to slaughter, destroy, and torment the Palestinian people. His policy of death, murder, and oppression has earned him the title of "A Man of Peace" and a “visionary” according to George W. Bush. In fact, according to our "wise and noble" president George W. Bush, we all should be very thankful to Ariel “The Butcher of Beirut” Sharon.
-Mike Odetalla..."A seed in the eternal fruit of Palestine"
Sunday, September 11, 2005
Gideon Levy, The real uprooting is taking place in Hebron, Haaretz, 11Sept.2005
Hey folks,
The following two articles come to me via the Seidels in Bethlehem. They are very disturbing but I think important because we need to know what is happening now, these days, in this "Holy Land." I think that it is our responsibilities as peacemakers and people of light to peer into the darkness. Please don't let these articles cause hatred in you; that only feeds the evil. Let them anger us and challenge our thinking; let them make us more aware of suffering and of our places of power and privilege in this world. What can we do, in response? I suppose it starts with a plea to "don't believe the hype," that western media gives us. Anyway, enough of me talking, let these articles speak for those whose voices need to be heard.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/623227.html
Last update - 09:48 11/09/2005
The real uprooting is taking place in Hebron
By Gideon Levy
Israel cannot be considered a state ruled by law, or a democracy, as long as the pogroms continue in Hebron. A state is judged by what takes place in its own backyard, and in the case of the "City of the Patriarchs" this is a particularly dark yard. What is involved here is not a political-diplomatic issue touching upon the existence or nonexistence of a particular settlement, but rather the character of the regime in Israel. This abscess should be uprooted immediately, unconditionally, before its malignancy spreads.
What is happening in Hebron is different than everything else in the occupied territories. In Hebron, the most severe atrocities of the settlement enterprise are being perpetrated. While the settlers are lamenting "their uprooting" from Gush Katif and the knights of sorrowful tears are preaching for reconciliation with them and empathy for their plight, the expulsion of Palestinians from Hebron is continuing at an alarming rate. There can be no reconciliation with these people, kin and kindred of the settlement enterprise, who treat their neighbors this way.
Anyone who calls for compassion for the settlers evacuated from Gaza, yet remains silent about the action of the settlers in Hebron, exposes a distorted and sanctimonious sense of morality.
But the brutal behavior of the settlers is not the main thing that should be raising a storm, but rather the behavior of the state that does not stop them and even lends them assistance. Now there is talk about anarchy in Gaza? In Hebron, anarchy reigns under the malevolently closed eyes of a state that possesses sophisticated mechanisms for enforcing the law. The focus now is on the tragedy of uprooting people from their homes in Gush Katif? The act of uprooting and expulsion in Hebron is incomparably crueler. The number of people expelled is much larger, and they remain without anything. No one is worrying about their plight.It is a bit difficult to believe that the reality in Hebron is hidden from the eyes of most Israelis and is not rocking Israel to its very core. During the past five years, some 25,000 residents have been transferred from their homes, less than an hour's drive from Israel's capital. And daily harassment continues under the auspices of the IDF and Israel Police, disregarded by the media. This harassment is aimed at expelling the remaining Palestinian residents from an area that until recently had a population of about 35,000 Palestinians and 500 Jews.
Those who have not visited the city in recent years would not believe their eyes. In the territory under Israeli control - H2, or Israeli territory, according to the Hebron accord - they will discover a ghost town. Hundreds of abandoned homes, like after a war, dozens of destroyed stores, burned or shuttered, their gates welded closed by the settlers, and an all-pervasive, deadly silence. According to unofficial assessments, no more than 10,000 residents remain in this place. The rest have left their homes and property after no longer being able to bear the harassment from the settlers and their children. This is the largest disengagement in recent years; this is the real expulsion.
Every day the settlers torment their neighbors here. Every walk to school for a Palestinian child has become a journey of harassment and fear. Every shopping outing by a housewife is a journey of humiliation. Settler children kicking old women carrying baskets, settlers siccing their dogs on the elderly, garbage and feces thrown from the settlers' balconies into the courtyards of Palestinian homes, junk metal blocking the entrances of their houses, rocks thrown at any Palestinian passerby - this is the routine of life in the city. Hundreds of soldiers, border policemen and cops witness these actions and stand by idly. They occasionally exchange jokes with the rioters, and almost never stand in their way. Residents' attempts to file complaints with the police are rejected outright under various and sundry pretexts. Even when there are mass pogroms with hundreds of settlers participating - as was the case about four months ago when hundreds of settlers entered the home of Dr. Tayser Zahadi in Tel Rumeida and destroyed everything they could lay their hands on - the security forces stood on the sidelines without intervening. The rioting was documented on videotape, but no one thought to broadcast it on Israeli television.
In the Tel Rumeida neighborhood, where only about a 10th of the Palestinian residents remain - 50 out of 500 families - this reality takes on monstrous proportions: The residents walk hunched over in their back yards, keeping close to the walls, whispering for fear of being heard. Children sprint home in a mad dash and neighbors move from house to house on rickety ladders. It is a haunted ghetto life - all because of a handful of rioters who live above them at the top of the neighborhood.Ultimately, they have succeeded: The settlers' violence has proved itself, and Hebron is becoming more Judaized. To be more precise, Hebron is becoming emptier. Five-hundred violent residents have demonstrated that they have the power to expel tens of thousands of their neighbors thanks to the sponsorship the state has extended to them. None of the Yesha Council leaders has ever spoken against this phenomenon, and Yesha has thus become a partner in crime. The awful mistake of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, who lacked the courage to uproot this settlement immediately after the slaughter in the Cave of the Patriarchs, continues to bear its rotten fruits. Ever since then, each day that the wild settlement in Hebron continues to exist is another day of shame for the State of Israel.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/622803.html
Last update - 21:12 08/09/2005
Twilight Zone / Mean streets
By Gideon Levy
It ought to be mandatory in the school system: an annual field trip to Tel Rumeida. This is where every student in Israel - every citizen, in fact - should be brought. This is the place to bring all those who felt compassion for the settlers and preached their cause, all the good people who cringed at the "trauma" of the disengagement, all those who were anxious to console the evacuees, all those who voice empty calls for a national reconciliation. They should all be brought here, to the Tel Rumeida quarter of Hebron. This is where civics and social studies lessons should be held.
About 500 Palestinian families once lived here; now barely 50 are left. What is going on here, far from the public eye, isn't just a cruel 'transfer,' but a reign of terror imposed by the settlers on the handful of residents who haven't left yet. This is where they built a settler stronghold that grew to frightening proportions, a multi-story building constructed with state sponsorship, surrounded now by a virtual ghost town, save for the small group of residents still clinging to their homes despite all the horror visited upon them by these violent lords of the land, these unwanted neighbors.
Here is where Israeli schoolchildren should be shown the dark side of their country, their state's violent and law-flouting backyard. A military barracks under whose cover exists the purest evil that the settlers inflict on their neighbors. There is no other neighborhood like this one. Not a day passes without violence, not an hour passes without the throwing of stones, garbage and feces at the frightened neighbors cowering in their barricaded houses, afraid even to peek out the window. Neighbors whose way home is always a path of torment and anxiety. All this is happening right under the noses of the soldiers and police, representatives of the legal authorities, who merely stand by.
For the average, reasonable Israeli, to visit Tel Rumeida for the first time is be to have your picture of the world turned upside down. This is the gutter of the settlement enterprise, whose leaders have never disavowed it, and to which many have even paid glowing tribute in recent weeks.
All the grapevines in the garden have been cut. The entrance to Hashem al-Gaza's house is blocked with piles of garbage and junk tossed by his neighbors from above. For several years now, he hasn't been able to enter his house from the street. He has to take a rocky path up a hill that is hidden from the neighbors, hurry inside through the back door and hope for the best. Every trip outside to the yard is rushed and anxious. Talking is done in a whisper, lest the neighbors hear.
Al-Gaza is the chairman of the neighborhood committee, or what's left of it.He shows his guests a videotape filmed here four months ago. You won't see it on any of the Israeli television stations: The images are those of a pogrom. Here a row of schoolgirls from the Cordoba elementary school is returning home, young girls dressed in the same school uniform, while young settlers - female ones in particular - wait in ambush for them every day to violently attack them. You see the schoolgirls fleeing, and the settler girls kicking them and throwing stones and garbage at them. The soldiers watch the scene with bored expressions, though one can see them smile sometimes.
Now the mini-pogrom arrives at the home of Dr. Taysir Zehadi. Hundreds of settlers in white Shabbat shirts, as befitting the festive occasion, break into his house and wreak havoc and terror. The desperate doctor tries to call for help on the telephone as hundreds of settlers close in on the house. Finally, they break down the gate and burst inside. Soldiers from the Nahal Brigade and a company of Border Police look on without lifting a finger. Now the settlers are inside, wrecking whatever they can get their hands on, as the doctor watches and hoarsely describes the mayhem as he speaks into the telephone receiver. "Everything is destroyed," he says quietly from inside his home, which a gate and iron gratings couldn't protect.
After the settlers vent their anger in the doctor's house, they leave, smiling, on the way to the next target. No one stops them. Except for the iron door of neighbor Ayoub Awawi. The door doesn't give in to them and they remain outside. Meanwhile, the camera shows the destruction in the doctor's home: From the solar panels on the roof to the potted plants in the living room, everything is smashed and shattered.
The movie ends and we come back to reality. Al-Gaza's daughter comes running into the living room. A third-grader in pigtails, on her second day of the school year, she looks terrified. She always crosses the road at a run. Yesterday, on Saturday - the day of the Sabbath Queen - the settlers threw stones at them. One student was hurt in the arm. But today she completed the trip in peace. A small group of international volunteers escorts her and her friends to school and back every day. This morning the IDF issued an order declaring the neighborhood a "closed military zone" in a move aimed at the international volunteers two American women and a British citizen in their 20s, who came to live here as brave human shields. The IDF claims they constitute a "provocation."
Yesterday the settlers threw stones at the residents until 9 P.M. The summer vacation actually passed quietly: The settlers were busy with the anti-disengagement struggle. But now Al-Gaza is very worried: Maybe they've come back frustrated.
We are sitting in the room where Al-Gaza's father used to stay. The elderly man was moved out of here long ago. The elderly and the sick can't live here anymore, in a building that can only be reached by ladders and up steep hills, where a sick person could not be evacuated by ambulance or obtain equipment and supplies except by means of an exhausting journey on foot. Most of the houses in the neighborhood are abandoned. Stone houses once surrounded by lovely gardens stand empty, like most of the houses in the parts of Hebron that are under Israeli control. The houses are empty; the occupants took out all their belongings and fled, out of fear. Which was exactly the goal of the settlers, who do everything for the sake of the Land of Israel.Baruch Marzel is the upstairs neighbor.
From the Marzels' mobile home, right over our heads, we can hear the voice of a woman speaking on the telephone. "I'm Baruch's neighbor," Al-Gaza mumbles with a bitter smile. The screensaver on his computer shows a routine photograph: a settler boy of about six or seven attacking an old Palestinian woman carrying baskets in Gross Square, adjacent to the Avraham Avinu neighborhood, as smiling soldiers look on from their post.
When Al-Gaza's wife was ready to give birth, he had to take her down the steep hill behind the yard to get her to the city by the back way. The garden of his house is strewn with junk like old washing machines that the neighbors have put there. What they won't do for the Land of Israel.
A family visit: We go to see Hashem al-Gaza's brother in the house next door. You have to keep your voice down and stick close to the stone wall that offers a bit of protection from the settler's quarters above, and walk quickly under cover of the grapevines. An IDF position has been placed on the roof of the brother's house, so the owners of the house are of course forbidden from going up to the roof. The way to the house of the closest neighbors, a short distance away, passes over a ladder. One must climb this rickety ladder in order to pass through, in the shade of the trees and the grapevines, out of the neighbors' line of vision. We walk hunched over.
The brother isn't home, so we go to the home of the Sharbati family next door. Wa'al opens the door and greets us warmly. She has six children. Her husband works at a gas station. There's an IDF position on her roof and mobile homes visible out the window.
She never opens the window in the children's room. An iron shutter protects the window. The rest of the windows in the house are protected with iron latticework and bars. Wa'al opens the window for just a moment, to show us the garbage that the soldiers in the position on the roof throw into the yard. Sometimes they urinate in there, too.
The yard, which once held a grape arbor, is now strewn with empty bottles and leftover scraps of IDF rations. Wa'al says that this morning, she heard the soldiers trying to pierce a hole in the water tank on the roof. "Most of the soldiers are nice," she emphasizes, "but there are always bad soldiers, too.?Every three months the unit is replaced. The previous group was kinder than the present one maybe as a consequence of the lessons of the sensitive evacuation in Gaza.
Yesterday, they urinated into the yard again. Wa'al and the other residents all have more horror stories to tell than could fit into this column. The house's windows have been shattered by the settlers' rocks. The household dwells in dimness because the shutters are always kept closed. They hang the laundry on the balcony and sometimes the settlers soil it there, too. Tonight, the soldiers on the roof were making a lot of noise.
When we go out into the yard, a rock lands beside us, thrown from the settlers' homes above. No one except us gets excited. It's routine. Only the registered residents can enter this neighborhood, and only on foot. No spontaneous visits from friends or relatives. The road passes by an electronic inspection station. If the washing machine goes on the blink you can't bring in a technician, nor can you drag a new machine up by the ragged back road. Lately there have also been problems with getting gas canisters past the checkpoint, and cooking gas is running low.
The home of the Sa'ad family, the next house in line, is protected with tin barrels filled with cement the kind of fortifications you see only in war zones. The Sayaj family's house was expropriated by the IDF to serve as a defense position for protecting the settlers. The settlers' permanent structure four floors of concrete and green iron shutters, looms like a fortress above the neighborhood homes.
We walk through the ancient vineyard that goes down the slope toward the city's Muslim cemetery. The vineyard is in ruins, its soil dried up. It's impossible to work it; the settlers don't allow it. Al-Gaza is also worried about the planned route of a new road to be built here for the settlers; it will pass through this vineyard and the old cemetery. These plans have got everyone here upset, but they all know that this battle, like all their battles, was decided long ago.
"From here, it's dangerous to go any further," says Al-Gaza. I'm reminded of the escape paths I trod in besieged Sarajevo in 1993. The noise of the city on the other side of the IDF checkpoints grows louder, as if defying the deathly silence that envelops the area under Israeli control, which has become a ghost town. Volunteer Luna Ruiz from the United States asks softly what could bring the Israeli media to give some coverage to the horrifying reality here."If one of us were to be killed, do you think it would shock anyone in Israel?" She asks dryly. She says she is very frightened.
It is as though the children on the street that leads to Tel Rumeida are playing Russian roulette. They cross the street barefoot in a mad race. Avihai Sharon of the Shovrim Shtika (Breaking the Silence) organization, which has been working here for a while to protect the residents, says that it has been months since he has seen any Palestinian children dare to cross this deserted street, which is open to Jews only. A woman peeks out of her yard, an anxious expression on her face.
A few people walk up this desolate street that leads up from the Avraham Avinu neighborhood to Beit Hadassah. This is the Street of the Martyrs, about which long and exhausting negotiations were conducted, with the involvement of the U.S. administration, with the aim of restoring and rehabilitating it. The agreement went the way of all such agreements: All the doors of the renovated shops are now locked and soldered shut, the work of the settlers, and the street is deserted. Every so often, a settler child passes by. Every so often an armored military jeep cruises the street.
The group of three people comes closer. "How do you do? My name is Mario Vargas Llosa,?says a tall, elegant man. In fashionable Prada sunglasses, and an equally fashionable photographers' vest, he looks younger than his age. Accompanied by his photographer daughter and Yehuda Shaul of Shovrim Shtika, the acclaimed Peruvian writer, author of ?The City and the Dogs," has come to see these streets of fury and disgrace.
The following two articles come to me via the Seidels in Bethlehem. They are very disturbing but I think important because we need to know what is happening now, these days, in this "Holy Land." I think that it is our responsibilities as peacemakers and people of light to peer into the darkness. Please don't let these articles cause hatred in you; that only feeds the evil. Let them anger us and challenge our thinking; let them make us more aware of suffering and of our places of power and privilege in this world. What can we do, in response? I suppose it starts with a plea to "don't believe the hype," that western media gives us. Anyway, enough of me talking, let these articles speak for those whose voices need to be heard.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/623227.html
Last update - 09:48 11/09/2005
The real uprooting is taking place in Hebron
By Gideon Levy
Israel cannot be considered a state ruled by law, or a democracy, as long as the pogroms continue in Hebron. A state is judged by what takes place in its own backyard, and in the case of the "City of the Patriarchs" this is a particularly dark yard. What is involved here is not a political-diplomatic issue touching upon the existence or nonexistence of a particular settlement, but rather the character of the regime in Israel. This abscess should be uprooted immediately, unconditionally, before its malignancy spreads.
What is happening in Hebron is different than everything else in the occupied territories. In Hebron, the most severe atrocities of the settlement enterprise are being perpetrated. While the settlers are lamenting "their uprooting" from Gush Katif and the knights of sorrowful tears are preaching for reconciliation with them and empathy for their plight, the expulsion of Palestinians from Hebron is continuing at an alarming rate. There can be no reconciliation with these people, kin and kindred of the settlement enterprise, who treat their neighbors this way.
Anyone who calls for compassion for the settlers evacuated from Gaza, yet remains silent about the action of the settlers in Hebron, exposes a distorted and sanctimonious sense of morality.
But the brutal behavior of the settlers is not the main thing that should be raising a storm, but rather the behavior of the state that does not stop them and even lends them assistance. Now there is talk about anarchy in Gaza? In Hebron, anarchy reigns under the malevolently closed eyes of a state that possesses sophisticated mechanisms for enforcing the law. The focus now is on the tragedy of uprooting people from their homes in Gush Katif? The act of uprooting and expulsion in Hebron is incomparably crueler. The number of people expelled is much larger, and they remain without anything. No one is worrying about their plight.It is a bit difficult to believe that the reality in Hebron is hidden from the eyes of most Israelis and is not rocking Israel to its very core. During the past five years, some 25,000 residents have been transferred from their homes, less than an hour's drive from Israel's capital. And daily harassment continues under the auspices of the IDF and Israel Police, disregarded by the media. This harassment is aimed at expelling the remaining Palestinian residents from an area that until recently had a population of about 35,000 Palestinians and 500 Jews.
Those who have not visited the city in recent years would not believe their eyes. In the territory under Israeli control - H2, or Israeli territory, according to the Hebron accord - they will discover a ghost town. Hundreds of abandoned homes, like after a war, dozens of destroyed stores, burned or shuttered, their gates welded closed by the settlers, and an all-pervasive, deadly silence. According to unofficial assessments, no more than 10,000 residents remain in this place. The rest have left their homes and property after no longer being able to bear the harassment from the settlers and their children. This is the largest disengagement in recent years; this is the real expulsion.
Every day the settlers torment their neighbors here. Every walk to school for a Palestinian child has become a journey of harassment and fear. Every shopping outing by a housewife is a journey of humiliation. Settler children kicking old women carrying baskets, settlers siccing their dogs on the elderly, garbage and feces thrown from the settlers' balconies into the courtyards of Palestinian homes, junk metal blocking the entrances of their houses, rocks thrown at any Palestinian passerby - this is the routine of life in the city. Hundreds of soldiers, border policemen and cops witness these actions and stand by idly. They occasionally exchange jokes with the rioters, and almost never stand in their way. Residents' attempts to file complaints with the police are rejected outright under various and sundry pretexts. Even when there are mass pogroms with hundreds of settlers participating - as was the case about four months ago when hundreds of settlers entered the home of Dr. Tayser Zahadi in Tel Rumeida and destroyed everything they could lay their hands on - the security forces stood on the sidelines without intervening. The rioting was documented on videotape, but no one thought to broadcast it on Israeli television.
In the Tel Rumeida neighborhood, where only about a 10th of the Palestinian residents remain - 50 out of 500 families - this reality takes on monstrous proportions: The residents walk hunched over in their back yards, keeping close to the walls, whispering for fear of being heard. Children sprint home in a mad dash and neighbors move from house to house on rickety ladders. It is a haunted ghetto life - all because of a handful of rioters who live above them at the top of the neighborhood.Ultimately, they have succeeded: The settlers' violence has proved itself, and Hebron is becoming more Judaized. To be more precise, Hebron is becoming emptier. Five-hundred violent residents have demonstrated that they have the power to expel tens of thousands of their neighbors thanks to the sponsorship the state has extended to them. None of the Yesha Council leaders has ever spoken against this phenomenon, and Yesha has thus become a partner in crime. The awful mistake of prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, who lacked the courage to uproot this settlement immediately after the slaughter in the Cave of the Patriarchs, continues to bear its rotten fruits. Ever since then, each day that the wild settlement in Hebron continues to exist is another day of shame for the State of Israel.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/622803.html
Last update - 21:12 08/09/2005
Twilight Zone / Mean streets
By Gideon Levy
It ought to be mandatory in the school system: an annual field trip to Tel Rumeida. This is where every student in Israel - every citizen, in fact - should be brought. This is the place to bring all those who felt compassion for the settlers and preached their cause, all the good people who cringed at the "trauma" of the disengagement, all those who were anxious to console the evacuees, all those who voice empty calls for a national reconciliation. They should all be brought here, to the Tel Rumeida quarter of Hebron. This is where civics and social studies lessons should be held.
About 500 Palestinian families once lived here; now barely 50 are left. What is going on here, far from the public eye, isn't just a cruel 'transfer,' but a reign of terror imposed by the settlers on the handful of residents who haven't left yet. This is where they built a settler stronghold that grew to frightening proportions, a multi-story building constructed with state sponsorship, surrounded now by a virtual ghost town, save for the small group of residents still clinging to their homes despite all the horror visited upon them by these violent lords of the land, these unwanted neighbors.
Here is where Israeli schoolchildren should be shown the dark side of their country, their state's violent and law-flouting backyard. A military barracks under whose cover exists the purest evil that the settlers inflict on their neighbors. There is no other neighborhood like this one. Not a day passes without violence, not an hour passes without the throwing of stones, garbage and feces at the frightened neighbors cowering in their barricaded houses, afraid even to peek out the window. Neighbors whose way home is always a path of torment and anxiety. All this is happening right under the noses of the soldiers and police, representatives of the legal authorities, who merely stand by.
For the average, reasonable Israeli, to visit Tel Rumeida for the first time is be to have your picture of the world turned upside down. This is the gutter of the settlement enterprise, whose leaders have never disavowed it, and to which many have even paid glowing tribute in recent weeks.
All the grapevines in the garden have been cut. The entrance to Hashem al-Gaza's house is blocked with piles of garbage and junk tossed by his neighbors from above. For several years now, he hasn't been able to enter his house from the street. He has to take a rocky path up a hill that is hidden from the neighbors, hurry inside through the back door and hope for the best. Every trip outside to the yard is rushed and anxious. Talking is done in a whisper, lest the neighbors hear.
Al-Gaza is the chairman of the neighborhood committee, or what's left of it.He shows his guests a videotape filmed here four months ago. You won't see it on any of the Israeli television stations: The images are those of a pogrom. Here a row of schoolgirls from the Cordoba elementary school is returning home, young girls dressed in the same school uniform, while young settlers - female ones in particular - wait in ambush for them every day to violently attack them. You see the schoolgirls fleeing, and the settler girls kicking them and throwing stones and garbage at them. The soldiers watch the scene with bored expressions, though one can see them smile sometimes.
Now the mini-pogrom arrives at the home of Dr. Taysir Zehadi. Hundreds of settlers in white Shabbat shirts, as befitting the festive occasion, break into his house and wreak havoc and terror. The desperate doctor tries to call for help on the telephone as hundreds of settlers close in on the house. Finally, they break down the gate and burst inside. Soldiers from the Nahal Brigade and a company of Border Police look on without lifting a finger. Now the settlers are inside, wrecking whatever they can get their hands on, as the doctor watches and hoarsely describes the mayhem as he speaks into the telephone receiver. "Everything is destroyed," he says quietly from inside his home, which a gate and iron gratings couldn't protect.
After the settlers vent their anger in the doctor's house, they leave, smiling, on the way to the next target. No one stops them. Except for the iron door of neighbor Ayoub Awawi. The door doesn't give in to them and they remain outside. Meanwhile, the camera shows the destruction in the doctor's home: From the solar panels on the roof to the potted plants in the living room, everything is smashed and shattered.
The movie ends and we come back to reality. Al-Gaza's daughter comes running into the living room. A third-grader in pigtails, on her second day of the school year, she looks terrified. She always crosses the road at a run. Yesterday, on Saturday - the day of the Sabbath Queen - the settlers threw stones at them. One student was hurt in the arm. But today she completed the trip in peace. A small group of international volunteers escorts her and her friends to school and back every day. This morning the IDF issued an order declaring the neighborhood a "closed military zone" in a move aimed at the international volunteers two American women and a British citizen in their 20s, who came to live here as brave human shields. The IDF claims they constitute a "provocation."
Yesterday the settlers threw stones at the residents until 9 P.M. The summer vacation actually passed quietly: The settlers were busy with the anti-disengagement struggle. But now Al-Gaza is very worried: Maybe they've come back frustrated.
We are sitting in the room where Al-Gaza's father used to stay. The elderly man was moved out of here long ago. The elderly and the sick can't live here anymore, in a building that can only be reached by ladders and up steep hills, where a sick person could not be evacuated by ambulance or obtain equipment and supplies except by means of an exhausting journey on foot. Most of the houses in the neighborhood are abandoned. Stone houses once surrounded by lovely gardens stand empty, like most of the houses in the parts of Hebron that are under Israeli control. The houses are empty; the occupants took out all their belongings and fled, out of fear. Which was exactly the goal of the settlers, who do everything for the sake of the Land of Israel.Baruch Marzel is the upstairs neighbor.
From the Marzels' mobile home, right over our heads, we can hear the voice of a woman speaking on the telephone. "I'm Baruch's neighbor," Al-Gaza mumbles with a bitter smile. The screensaver on his computer shows a routine photograph: a settler boy of about six or seven attacking an old Palestinian woman carrying baskets in Gross Square, adjacent to the Avraham Avinu neighborhood, as smiling soldiers look on from their post.
When Al-Gaza's wife was ready to give birth, he had to take her down the steep hill behind the yard to get her to the city by the back way. The garden of his house is strewn with junk like old washing machines that the neighbors have put there. What they won't do for the Land of Israel.
A family visit: We go to see Hashem al-Gaza's brother in the house next door. You have to keep your voice down and stick close to the stone wall that offers a bit of protection from the settler's quarters above, and walk quickly under cover of the grapevines. An IDF position has been placed on the roof of the brother's house, so the owners of the house are of course forbidden from going up to the roof. The way to the house of the closest neighbors, a short distance away, passes over a ladder. One must climb this rickety ladder in order to pass through, in the shade of the trees and the grapevines, out of the neighbors' line of vision. We walk hunched over.
The brother isn't home, so we go to the home of the Sharbati family next door. Wa'al opens the door and greets us warmly. She has six children. Her husband works at a gas station. There's an IDF position on her roof and mobile homes visible out the window.
She never opens the window in the children's room. An iron shutter protects the window. The rest of the windows in the house are protected with iron latticework and bars. Wa'al opens the window for just a moment, to show us the garbage that the soldiers in the position on the roof throw into the yard. Sometimes they urinate in there, too.
The yard, which once held a grape arbor, is now strewn with empty bottles and leftover scraps of IDF rations. Wa'al says that this morning, she heard the soldiers trying to pierce a hole in the water tank on the roof. "Most of the soldiers are nice," she emphasizes, "but there are always bad soldiers, too.?Every three months the unit is replaced. The previous group was kinder than the present one maybe as a consequence of the lessons of the sensitive evacuation in Gaza.
Yesterday, they urinated into the yard again. Wa'al and the other residents all have more horror stories to tell than could fit into this column. The house's windows have been shattered by the settlers' rocks. The household dwells in dimness because the shutters are always kept closed. They hang the laundry on the balcony and sometimes the settlers soil it there, too. Tonight, the soldiers on the roof were making a lot of noise.
When we go out into the yard, a rock lands beside us, thrown from the settlers' homes above. No one except us gets excited. It's routine. Only the registered residents can enter this neighborhood, and only on foot. No spontaneous visits from friends or relatives. The road passes by an electronic inspection station. If the washing machine goes on the blink you can't bring in a technician, nor can you drag a new machine up by the ragged back road. Lately there have also been problems with getting gas canisters past the checkpoint, and cooking gas is running low.
The home of the Sa'ad family, the next house in line, is protected with tin barrels filled with cement the kind of fortifications you see only in war zones. The Sayaj family's house was expropriated by the IDF to serve as a defense position for protecting the settlers. The settlers' permanent structure four floors of concrete and green iron shutters, looms like a fortress above the neighborhood homes.
We walk through the ancient vineyard that goes down the slope toward the city's Muslim cemetery. The vineyard is in ruins, its soil dried up. It's impossible to work it; the settlers don't allow it. Al-Gaza is also worried about the planned route of a new road to be built here for the settlers; it will pass through this vineyard and the old cemetery. These plans have got everyone here upset, but they all know that this battle, like all their battles, was decided long ago.
"From here, it's dangerous to go any further," says Al-Gaza. I'm reminded of the escape paths I trod in besieged Sarajevo in 1993. The noise of the city on the other side of the IDF checkpoints grows louder, as if defying the deathly silence that envelops the area under Israeli control, which has become a ghost town. Volunteer Luna Ruiz from the United States asks softly what could bring the Israeli media to give some coverage to the horrifying reality here."If one of us were to be killed, do you think it would shock anyone in Israel?" She asks dryly. She says she is very frightened.
It is as though the children on the street that leads to Tel Rumeida are playing Russian roulette. They cross the street barefoot in a mad race. Avihai Sharon of the Shovrim Shtika (Breaking the Silence) organization, which has been working here for a while to protect the residents, says that it has been months since he has seen any Palestinian children dare to cross this deserted street, which is open to Jews only. A woman peeks out of her yard, an anxious expression on her face.
A few people walk up this desolate street that leads up from the Avraham Avinu neighborhood to Beit Hadassah. This is the Street of the Martyrs, about which long and exhausting negotiations were conducted, with the involvement of the U.S. administration, with the aim of restoring and rehabilitating it. The agreement went the way of all such agreements: All the doors of the renovated shops are now locked and soldered shut, the work of the settlers, and the street is deserted. Every so often, a settler child passes by. Every so often an armored military jeep cruises the street.
The group of three people comes closer. "How do you do? My name is Mario Vargas Llosa,?says a tall, elegant man. In fashionable Prada sunglasses, and an equally fashionable photographers' vest, he looks younger than his age. Accompanied by his photographer daughter and Yehuda Shaul of Shovrim Shtika, the acclaimed Peruvian writer, author of ?The City and the Dogs," has come to see these streets of fury and disgrace.
Friday, September 09, 2005
an article/ interview on my favourite band!
I love this interview / article and wanted to share it with atem (plural "you" in Hebrew)! This article was from March, I think, and was published in the Calgary Sun in anticipation of Welkin's show in Calgary AB at the Night Gallery, which Portuerhus called the Night Crawler when he and Schmidy snuck into the cashier's booth after the bar closed and reopened it and started charging cover to people who had no idea they were being fooled. The Night Crawler, come to the Night Crawler!
Anyway, it was an amazing show and all who saw it will remember it for years to come! At one point I was running around in circles doing these incredible balet leaps, then I got on my knees and introduced myself to a little person and D Block and I lit up the dance floor while Godin fell asleep in the tourism pamphlet rack! It was one of the best times I ever had at a Welkin show!
Enjoy the article/ interview.
http://jam.canoe.ca/Music/2005/03/26/973117-sun.html
Welkin out of the wilderness
B.C. act shows naked ambition on new CD
By MIKE BELL -- Calgary Sun
It's something we all do, right? Strip naked and sing?
Right?
Maybe in the morning, when no one's around, we shut the curtains -- not all the way, mind you -- remove every article of clothing, and proceed to sing in front of a full-length mirror a medley of Kenny Rogers' classic storytelling songs beginning with Lucille, segueing nicely into The Gambler and winding up with a heart-wrenching, yet ultimately empowering version of Coward of the County.
Right?
Oh, come on. I'm the only one who does this?
Hardly.
Geoff Birch is with me -- except for the whole Kenny Rogers thing.
The frontman for Vancouver band welkin professes to being a great believer in singing in the buff, admitting all of the vocal tracks on their latest release Strangers & Exiles were recorded sans pantaloons.
"It was something I stumbled across," Birch says a little sheepishly.
"It's sort of a concentration thing, and the vocal booth is hot, and I thought I'd try it when we were recording our first EP (2004's No Ordinary Elephant).
"I found that turning off all the lights and being nude and singing all of the vocal tracks it was absolutely just me and the music ...
"I've found that it's incredibly freeing -- and it's also good for some laughs.
"When the producer's like, 'Uh, Geoff, I've got to come in and adjust the mic -- you're going to put your pants on, right?'
"I always promise and sometimes I don't."
Well, hopefully he and his band will be fully clothed and all mic adjustments will be done without fear of mixup -- or cold hands -- when welkin performs this evening at the Night Gallery.
The show is part of a tour to celebrate the release of Strangers & Exiles, a massive, ambient art rock record full of gorgeous, often exhausting epics.
It's a mostly successful attempt at an organic Pink Floydian, Radioheadian album -- a 70-plus minute journey inside of your mind, meant to take you far, far away from where you sit and into the furthest reaches of that wide open space.
"That's the goal," says Birch.
"Someone comes home late at night, throws on some headphones, puts one of our records on, and it takes them to another place.
"We also hope, too, it takes them to a good place."
Escaping to a better place is something that the thoughtful songwriter knows a great deal about.
He currently lives and writes with his wife in a somewhat secluded cabin in British Columbia's Cascade Mountains -- where naked singing won't unnerve neighbours, mail carriers, churchgoers, etc.
It's a thousand miles mentally away from the place and job he held before heading for the hills.
For half a decade, Birch was a youth outreach worker in Vancouver's notorious east side.
His duties mainly included walking the streets and alleys at night dealing with what many would consider to be the hopeless cases -- those kids trapped in a world of drugs and the sex trade.
Obviously, the experience affected him as a human being and an artist, and, despite walking away from it, still greatly affects both who he is and what he does.
"When I started that job I had my own ideas and I was a certain person at that point, and then after five years I think that it profoundly changed me," he says.
"I think I got more out of it than the people I helped.
"You felt like you were at the heartbeat of human suffering sometimes ...
"I did that for five years, and then my wife and I moved out to the mountains," he says.
"We left behind a little of the madness."
Anyway, it was an amazing show and all who saw it will remember it for years to come! At one point I was running around in circles doing these incredible balet leaps, then I got on my knees and introduced myself to a little person and D Block and I lit up the dance floor while Godin fell asleep in the tourism pamphlet rack! It was one of the best times I ever had at a Welkin show!
Enjoy the article/ interview.
http://jam.canoe.ca/Music/2005/03/26/973117-sun.html
Welkin out of the wilderness
B.C. act shows naked ambition on new CD
By MIKE BELL -- Calgary Sun
It's something we all do, right? Strip naked and sing?
Right?
Maybe in the morning, when no one's around, we shut the curtains -- not all the way, mind you -- remove every article of clothing, and proceed to sing in front of a full-length mirror a medley of Kenny Rogers' classic storytelling songs beginning with Lucille, segueing nicely into The Gambler and winding up with a heart-wrenching, yet ultimately empowering version of Coward of the County.
Right?
Oh, come on. I'm the only one who does this?
Hardly.
Geoff Birch is with me -- except for the whole Kenny Rogers thing.
The frontman for Vancouver band welkin professes to being a great believer in singing in the buff, admitting all of the vocal tracks on their latest release Strangers & Exiles were recorded sans pantaloons.
"It was something I stumbled across," Birch says a little sheepishly.
"It's sort of a concentration thing, and the vocal booth is hot, and I thought I'd try it when we were recording our first EP (2004's No Ordinary Elephant).
"I found that turning off all the lights and being nude and singing all of the vocal tracks it was absolutely just me and the music ...
"I've found that it's incredibly freeing -- and it's also good for some laughs.
"When the producer's like, 'Uh, Geoff, I've got to come in and adjust the mic -- you're going to put your pants on, right?'
"I always promise and sometimes I don't."
Well, hopefully he and his band will be fully clothed and all mic adjustments will be done without fear of mixup -- or cold hands -- when welkin performs this evening at the Night Gallery.
The show is part of a tour to celebrate the release of Strangers & Exiles, a massive, ambient art rock record full of gorgeous, often exhausting epics.
It's a mostly successful attempt at an organic Pink Floydian, Radioheadian album -- a 70-plus minute journey inside of your mind, meant to take you far, far away from where you sit and into the furthest reaches of that wide open space.
"That's the goal," says Birch.
"Someone comes home late at night, throws on some headphones, puts one of our records on, and it takes them to another place.
"We also hope, too, it takes them to a good place."
Escaping to a better place is something that the thoughtful songwriter knows a great deal about.
He currently lives and writes with his wife in a somewhat secluded cabin in British Columbia's Cascade Mountains -- where naked singing won't unnerve neighbours, mail carriers, churchgoers, etc.
It's a thousand miles mentally away from the place and job he held before heading for the hills.
For half a decade, Birch was a youth outreach worker in Vancouver's notorious east side.
His duties mainly included walking the streets and alleys at night dealing with what many would consider to be the hopeless cases -- those kids trapped in a world of drugs and the sex trade.
Obviously, the experience affected him as a human being and an artist, and, despite walking away from it, still greatly affects both who he is and what he does.
"When I started that job I had my own ideas and I was a certain person at that point, and then after five years I think that it profoundly changed me," he says.
"I think I got more out of it than the people I helped.
"You felt like you were at the heartbeat of human suffering sometimes ...
"I did that for five years, and then my wife and I moved out to the mountains," he says.
"We left behind a little of the madness."
Give Yourself the Gift of some live Dead
Hello,
I wanted to share a special something was passed onto me in the past couple weeks.
There is a site, called www.archive.org which contains more things than any explanation could offer. BUT, I will say this: you can type in Grateful Dead in the search box and gain access to stream yourself nearly three thousand live Dead shows.
That is, if you like the Grateful Dead.
This site is a real gold mine, though; check it out if you want.
DB
I wanted to share a special something was passed onto me in the past couple weeks.
There is a site, called www.archive.org which contains more things than any explanation could offer. BUT, I will say this: you can type in Grateful Dead in the search box and gain access to stream yourself nearly three thousand live Dead shows.
That is, if you like the Grateful Dead.
This site is a real gold mine, though; check it out if you want.
DB
The Ulpan, The Drivers,The Darren
Begin Transmission....
Friday, September 09, 2005
Hello Everyone,
Eifo Darren? Hee-nay ah-nee. (phoentic spelling for "Where's Darren? Here I am.")
It has been nearly a week since I wrote anything down. I can explain with three words and a hyphen: Hebrew-language school.
Wow! What a week. Sunday through Thursday at the ulpan. I have felt many emotions over the past week, including excitement, hopelessness and the feelings associated with being overwhelmed. Mostly what it is is how lost I am feeling in class. Nearly all the students are Jewish and growing up had much exposure to the Hebrew language in their homes and schools. I feel close to the bottom of the pile and for those of you who know my school habits, it is very difficult for me to feel at the bottom of the class. I am having a difficult time with the speed of speech and my lack of vocabulary. I realise that I have access to a dictionary and that the science of grammar and verb conjugation is more important than learning words, at this point; but when the teacher asks the class questions, I have discovered that most of the students know the words because of their backgrounds, where I am radiply looking through my vocab sheets, trying to figure out she's saying. Usually, before I find the word, she is on to something else and my feelings of confusion and being lost are just compounded.
Yesterday, however, I tried a new strategy. Instead of trying to keep up with the words and understand what she and others were saying, I just concentrated on listening to the conjugations of the verbs and adjectives, etc., listening for how they change according to masculine, feminine, singular or plural, and different forms thereof. I found that even if I didn't know what was being said, much of the time, I was able to follow how it was being said.
I am sure, however, that as the weeks progress, I will feel more confident with the language and be able to follow the speed of speech and the finer points of suffixes and prefixes on words. I have found that to be the most confusing, thus far: thinking that I hear some kind of new word and futilely looking through my vocab sheets for this mystery word, when really it is a prefix on a word I already know.
I have also been busy working at Zochrot, putting in close to thirty hours this week. I am not working so much because I am trying to be a hero or to impress anyone. Rather, there is just much that can be done and I wanted to finish the video clip of our tour and sign-posting to Akka this week. I did get it finished, which is good because it was a mess. It won't be posted on the site until next week and also by next week I hope to have a streaming option on our website. Needless to say, there is much to keep me busy and I have only found time to write to you today, Friday is my Saturday.
My Hebrew class runs from Sun through Thurs, 8am to 1pm. There close to forty students in my class and perhaps several hundred students in the school, in various levels. I am in the kindergarten class and it certainly is humbling to be one of the clueless students of the kindergarten. Most of the students in my class are Jewish (the others have Jewish girlfriends or boyfriends they live with) and there is a pile of students who are new immigrants in the class - the rest of us call ourselves tourists. Other than the occassional explanation of a word in English, the teacher teaches exclusively in Hebrew. I suppose it is only fair, since there are some french folks and a half-dozen Russians who cannot understand English. There are folks from South America, North America and Europe in my class. A real diverse bunch. As tempted as I am to have a pity party and feel discouraged, I know that compared to what little Hebrew I knew last week, after one week of classes I know much, much more. And after five full months, I am sure that I will be doing okay. I don't know if I will be fluent after this course is over; but I am hoping that I will be able to understand and communicate when I need to.
I had myself an epiphany this week regarding the quality of driving in Tel Aviv, which I will get to in a moment. I have been to many countries in the world and seen much poor driving. But by far, the worst driving I have ever witnessed is here in Tel Aviv. It blows my mind how little thought is given to safety, basic courtesy or defensive driving. And the constant, aggressive horn blowing drives me nuts. I have heard some internationals tell me that honking your horn is not an offensive thing to do; it is just run of the mill driving practice. Yeah, well, I have heard Tel Avivers make fun of Palestinian drivers because they use the horn as a "hello, here I am" signal (by Palestinians, I mean WestBank residents, primarily, since that was the conversation), whereas in Tel Aviv it is a weapon of war used to assault people. I have seen hundreds of incidents where the horn is used to punish someone or to express the absolute impatience of the drivers here. Before the lights go green, here, there is a flash of the red and yellow together to let people know the green is coming. As SOON as that yellow lights flashes on, drivers are laying on their horns or honking repeatedly. If you look at their faces, which I do, they are angry and stressed out and have zero patience for any kind of politeness.
It is very rare that people do shoulder checks, which causes me to have to squeeze my brakes a lot, sometimes skidding into car's bumpers or being pushed into oncoming traffic. Cars don't bother to look for bicycles and last week I was pushed into an oncoming bus. I got out of the way just in time, but my left arm still wiped down the side of the bus as it passed me while the car to my right hemmed me in. I can't believe I wasn't hurt or that I didn't fall off my bike. I am learning that in order for me to stay safe, I have to ride more offensively and quickly. I can't just mosey down the street because I'll get overrun by the vehicles on the road. If I pedal really hard and ride fast, then I am quicker than the cars and can choose my line with less interruption. And I cannot just ride on the sidewalk, because the lack of ecological sensitivity means that the sidewalks are riddled with bits of broken glass. I have been through two innertubes since I got my bike and I have been told by several people that riding on the sidewalk will only result in popped tires.
What really gets me, though, is the lack of shoulder checking, especially from taxi drivers. When I am speeding along I am not getting pushed around by the cars in the way I would if I were taking my time; but the risk is that cars will swerve erradically without looking over their shoulders. Many times I have nearly rammed full speed into cars or have slammed on my brakes to avoid being pushed into another car. And it was making me more and more angry.
After a week of fighting my way across the city to school during morning traffic, then fighting my away across town to the office during noon-hour traffic, I was getting really grumpy. I would show up at school and the girl beside me asked two days in a row, "what's wrong, you look really stressed out?" I found myself yelling at cars but definitely avoiding doing things I would feel comfortable doing in Vancouver, such as kicking cars or giving them communicative hand signals. Well, Wednesday afternoon, it came crashing down upon me that I cannot expect the drivers in Tel Aviv to ever match my standards of proper driving, in fact, it is downright ethnocentric to get upset about it.
So, I realized, I need to just change my anger and annoyance into laughter and light-heartedness; that was my epiphany. I found that when I rode to school on Thursday morning, I had a laugh when I was rudely cut off; and when I was riding to work that afternoon, I again laughed when a man approached from behind me honking his horn repeatedly as we were approaching a RED light. There was no where for him to go but he just wanted to speed up to the red light. He didn't even catch up to me, either, he just didn't want a bicycle on his road, I guess.
My epiphany may seem minor to you, not worthy of being called and epiphany; but in light of how much I ride my bike and how much the standard of driving could stress me out or cause me to be upset, I think that a flash of insight changing my whole attitude towards drivers does me good to not be sucked into the same road rage that so infects the drivers here. I also want to add my own speculation that because Israelis are constantly living in a paranoid state that they might be blown up at any moment, this affects many areas of their lives, such as basic courteousness and patience towards strangers. I suspect that people keep their kindness reserved for who they know and forget the idea for those who they don't. I could be dead wrong; but those are the observations I have made as an outsider looking in.
This week I spent some time with Eitan Reich one evening, talking over some things about work and giving me a break from Hebrew study. He and his wife are expecting a baby in November and he was telling me that he is scared to death. His wife's cousin and her husband were on a bus that was blown up by a suicide bomber some time ago and they lost their one-year-old child. They both lived, emigrated to the United States, and had another baby. Eitan, in the face of the tensions here, is very nervous about raising a child in such an environment and wonders if he should get out, like his wife's aunt keeps telling them. I must confess I do not know what it is like to live with this kind of looming fear. I cannot even intepret it as I'm living here. It isn't a part of my psyche. Sure, I'm paranoid and cowardly; but I do not live with a constant fear of being killed or maimed in a terror attack. It just has never been a part of my life.
As a result of being overwhelmed at school this week and feeling the burden of living in a stressed-out and celebratedly rude city, a toll has been taken on my morale. The new, glossy, exciting feeling I have had is gone and I have been feeling really homesick. I think that must be perfectly natural, so I am not panicking like I would if I didn't expect to feel this way. I just really miss family, friends, church, Christian fellowship. I miss understanding my surrounding culture and being able to read things and follow along. I am tired of feeling like such an outsider all the time; but this is normal, I keep telling myself; it will pass. I also think that these feelings of wanting to disappear from here and reappear in Vancouver are also a result of the steep learning curve I am experiencing right now. I tend to be a little bit of a baby and a wuss, so I am not letting my emotions determine my actions - I just wish I could laugh more (which I probably still do, alot, since the people in my class all laugh whenever I laugh and the teacher stops teaching and turns and smiles and says something about how she loves my laugh).
I am not pathetically depressed; please don't interpret things that way. I am just missing my home communities of fellowship, that's all.
Alright, that's enough for today, eh? Besides, I have got to study my Hebrew materials and spend some significant time with the alphabet, both the formally written version (newspapers, menus, signs, etc) and the informally written version (personal writing, unpublished writings, etc.) before I go to my dinner party tonight. I am joining Norma and her Maxist commune for dinner tonight for a potluck and have prepared a terrific veggie stew. "Dinner" is at 9pm; I have three hours to work on Hebrew before leaving.
Have a Lovely Day!
Burro D Block OUT
ps. for ALI G fans (real name, Sacha Baron Cohen) - I heard at school this week he is Jewish, Cohen proves it, and I learned that "Yekh Shamesh" means "longlive sunshine." Or, he could be taking off from "yesh shemesh," which means "it is sunny." And when he says, "Buyakasha," he is taking off from "Bevakasha," which means "please" and "you're welcome."
End Transmission....
Friday, September 09, 2005
Hello Everyone,
Eifo Darren? Hee-nay ah-nee. (phoentic spelling for "Where's Darren? Here I am.")
It has been nearly a week since I wrote anything down. I can explain with three words and a hyphen: Hebrew-language school.
Wow! What a week. Sunday through Thursday at the ulpan. I have felt many emotions over the past week, including excitement, hopelessness and the feelings associated with being overwhelmed. Mostly what it is is how lost I am feeling in class. Nearly all the students are Jewish and growing up had much exposure to the Hebrew language in their homes and schools. I feel close to the bottom of the pile and for those of you who know my school habits, it is very difficult for me to feel at the bottom of the class. I am having a difficult time with the speed of speech and my lack of vocabulary. I realise that I have access to a dictionary and that the science of grammar and verb conjugation is more important than learning words, at this point; but when the teacher asks the class questions, I have discovered that most of the students know the words because of their backgrounds, where I am radiply looking through my vocab sheets, trying to figure out she's saying. Usually, before I find the word, she is on to something else and my feelings of confusion and being lost are just compounded.
Yesterday, however, I tried a new strategy. Instead of trying to keep up with the words and understand what she and others were saying, I just concentrated on listening to the conjugations of the verbs and adjectives, etc., listening for how they change according to masculine, feminine, singular or plural, and different forms thereof. I found that even if I didn't know what was being said, much of the time, I was able to follow how it was being said.
I am sure, however, that as the weeks progress, I will feel more confident with the language and be able to follow the speed of speech and the finer points of suffixes and prefixes on words. I have found that to be the most confusing, thus far: thinking that I hear some kind of new word and futilely looking through my vocab sheets for this mystery word, when really it is a prefix on a word I already know.
I have also been busy working at Zochrot, putting in close to thirty hours this week. I am not working so much because I am trying to be a hero or to impress anyone. Rather, there is just much that can be done and I wanted to finish the video clip of our tour and sign-posting to Akka this week. I did get it finished, which is good because it was a mess. It won't be posted on the site until next week and also by next week I hope to have a streaming option on our website. Needless to say, there is much to keep me busy and I have only found time to write to you today, Friday is my Saturday.
My Hebrew class runs from Sun through Thurs, 8am to 1pm. There close to forty students in my class and perhaps several hundred students in the school, in various levels. I am in the kindergarten class and it certainly is humbling to be one of the clueless students of the kindergarten. Most of the students in my class are Jewish (the others have Jewish girlfriends or boyfriends they live with) and there is a pile of students who are new immigrants in the class - the rest of us call ourselves tourists. Other than the occassional explanation of a word in English, the teacher teaches exclusively in Hebrew. I suppose it is only fair, since there are some french folks and a half-dozen Russians who cannot understand English. There are folks from South America, North America and Europe in my class. A real diverse bunch. As tempted as I am to have a pity party and feel discouraged, I know that compared to what little Hebrew I knew last week, after one week of classes I know much, much more. And after five full months, I am sure that I will be doing okay. I don't know if I will be fluent after this course is over; but I am hoping that I will be able to understand and communicate when I need to.
I had myself an epiphany this week regarding the quality of driving in Tel Aviv, which I will get to in a moment. I have been to many countries in the world and seen much poor driving. But by far, the worst driving I have ever witnessed is here in Tel Aviv. It blows my mind how little thought is given to safety, basic courtesy or defensive driving. And the constant, aggressive horn blowing drives me nuts. I have heard some internationals tell me that honking your horn is not an offensive thing to do; it is just run of the mill driving practice. Yeah, well, I have heard Tel Avivers make fun of Palestinian drivers because they use the horn as a "hello, here I am" signal (by Palestinians, I mean WestBank residents, primarily, since that was the conversation), whereas in Tel Aviv it is a weapon of war used to assault people. I have seen hundreds of incidents where the horn is used to punish someone or to express the absolute impatience of the drivers here. Before the lights go green, here, there is a flash of the red and yellow together to let people know the green is coming. As SOON as that yellow lights flashes on, drivers are laying on their horns or honking repeatedly. If you look at their faces, which I do, they are angry and stressed out and have zero patience for any kind of politeness.
It is very rare that people do shoulder checks, which causes me to have to squeeze my brakes a lot, sometimes skidding into car's bumpers or being pushed into oncoming traffic. Cars don't bother to look for bicycles and last week I was pushed into an oncoming bus. I got out of the way just in time, but my left arm still wiped down the side of the bus as it passed me while the car to my right hemmed me in. I can't believe I wasn't hurt or that I didn't fall off my bike. I am learning that in order for me to stay safe, I have to ride more offensively and quickly. I can't just mosey down the street because I'll get overrun by the vehicles on the road. If I pedal really hard and ride fast, then I am quicker than the cars and can choose my line with less interruption. And I cannot just ride on the sidewalk, because the lack of ecological sensitivity means that the sidewalks are riddled with bits of broken glass. I have been through two innertubes since I got my bike and I have been told by several people that riding on the sidewalk will only result in popped tires.
What really gets me, though, is the lack of shoulder checking, especially from taxi drivers. When I am speeding along I am not getting pushed around by the cars in the way I would if I were taking my time; but the risk is that cars will swerve erradically without looking over their shoulders. Many times I have nearly rammed full speed into cars or have slammed on my brakes to avoid being pushed into another car. And it was making me more and more angry.
After a week of fighting my way across the city to school during morning traffic, then fighting my away across town to the office during noon-hour traffic, I was getting really grumpy. I would show up at school and the girl beside me asked two days in a row, "what's wrong, you look really stressed out?" I found myself yelling at cars but definitely avoiding doing things I would feel comfortable doing in Vancouver, such as kicking cars or giving them communicative hand signals. Well, Wednesday afternoon, it came crashing down upon me that I cannot expect the drivers in Tel Aviv to ever match my standards of proper driving, in fact, it is downright ethnocentric to get upset about it.
So, I realized, I need to just change my anger and annoyance into laughter and light-heartedness; that was my epiphany. I found that when I rode to school on Thursday morning, I had a laugh when I was rudely cut off; and when I was riding to work that afternoon, I again laughed when a man approached from behind me honking his horn repeatedly as we were approaching a RED light. There was no where for him to go but he just wanted to speed up to the red light. He didn't even catch up to me, either, he just didn't want a bicycle on his road, I guess.
My epiphany may seem minor to you, not worthy of being called and epiphany; but in light of how much I ride my bike and how much the standard of driving could stress me out or cause me to be upset, I think that a flash of insight changing my whole attitude towards drivers does me good to not be sucked into the same road rage that so infects the drivers here. I also want to add my own speculation that because Israelis are constantly living in a paranoid state that they might be blown up at any moment, this affects many areas of their lives, such as basic courteousness and patience towards strangers. I suspect that people keep their kindness reserved for who they know and forget the idea for those who they don't. I could be dead wrong; but those are the observations I have made as an outsider looking in.
This week I spent some time with Eitan Reich one evening, talking over some things about work and giving me a break from Hebrew study. He and his wife are expecting a baby in November and he was telling me that he is scared to death. His wife's cousin and her husband were on a bus that was blown up by a suicide bomber some time ago and they lost their one-year-old child. They both lived, emigrated to the United States, and had another baby. Eitan, in the face of the tensions here, is very nervous about raising a child in such an environment and wonders if he should get out, like his wife's aunt keeps telling them. I must confess I do not know what it is like to live with this kind of looming fear. I cannot even intepret it as I'm living here. It isn't a part of my psyche. Sure, I'm paranoid and cowardly; but I do not live with a constant fear of being killed or maimed in a terror attack. It just has never been a part of my life.
As a result of being overwhelmed at school this week and feeling the burden of living in a stressed-out and celebratedly rude city, a toll has been taken on my morale. The new, glossy, exciting feeling I have had is gone and I have been feeling really homesick. I think that must be perfectly natural, so I am not panicking like I would if I didn't expect to feel this way. I just really miss family, friends, church, Christian fellowship. I miss understanding my surrounding culture and being able to read things and follow along. I am tired of feeling like such an outsider all the time; but this is normal, I keep telling myself; it will pass. I also think that these feelings of wanting to disappear from here and reappear in Vancouver are also a result of the steep learning curve I am experiencing right now. I tend to be a little bit of a baby and a wuss, so I am not letting my emotions determine my actions - I just wish I could laugh more (which I probably still do, alot, since the people in my class all laugh whenever I laugh and the teacher stops teaching and turns and smiles and says something about how she loves my laugh).
I am not pathetically depressed; please don't interpret things that way. I am just missing my home communities of fellowship, that's all.
Alright, that's enough for today, eh? Besides, I have got to study my Hebrew materials and spend some significant time with the alphabet, both the formally written version (newspapers, menus, signs, etc) and the informally written version (personal writing, unpublished writings, etc.) before I go to my dinner party tonight. I am joining Norma and her Maxist commune for dinner tonight for a potluck and have prepared a terrific veggie stew. "Dinner" is at 9pm; I have three hours to work on Hebrew before leaving.
Have a Lovely Day!
Burro D Block OUT
ps. for ALI G fans (real name, Sacha Baron Cohen) - I heard at school this week he is Jewish, Cohen proves it, and I learned that "Yekh Shamesh" means "longlive sunshine." Or, he could be taking off from "yesh shemesh," which means "it is sunny." And when he says, "Buyakasha," he is taking off from "Bevakasha," which means "please" and "you're welcome."
End Transmission....
Saturday, September 03, 2005
Remembering the nakba in Akka
Saturday, September 03, 2005
Today was the kind of day that makes me so glad to be in Israel / Palestine and especially in the capacity that I am, i.e. with Zochrot. I am really developing a deep fondness (love?) for the organisation and the people in it. With pride, today, I wore my Zochrot shirt, with "Remembering the Nakba" scrolled across the back in three languages. We had a tour in Akka today, which was incredible. Out of all the places I have been in Israel / Palestine, thus far, Akka is what most filled me with awe of its grandeur and beauty. Although the Old City of Akko (which is Akka) is not nearly what Akka used to be before the Nakba in '48, there is still a whole "city" of Arabic structures and indwelt by Palestinians. They are not the same Palestinians that lived in Akka before the Nakba; they were transplanted Palestinians from other destroyed villages. Out of over 700 villages in Palestine, more than 500 were destroyed in 1948 and out of the million+ Palestinians, between 750,000 and 900,000 were driven out of their land. The others were shifted to different cities, towns and villages in "Israel," in order to be the labourers for the zionists.
There were about two hundred people on our tour today. It was great to see all the faces I have already met, have friendly conversations with people and joke around. I love joking around and my laugh seems to make others laugh, which only makes me laugh more. There was a healthy mix of Palestinians, Israelis and internationals. There were dozens of us wearing the shirts. I rode up with Eitan Bronstein in his mini-van because there were way too many to just fit on the bus. As soon as we arrived, he led us to a humous place and he and I broke bread there, before joining the rest of the group. I had the coolest day with Eitan. The walking tour and sign posting (we posted two signs) lasted nearly two hours and then everyone convened in a hall where there was a Palestinian woman singing to us and then testimonies and a lecture.
As soon as I plugged in the camera and got it set up on the tripod, Eitan and I met eyes and slipped out the back door as per our prearranged plans; for we had another thing to do. It may sound awful, but we left the hall and went to the restaurant below to watch Israel and Switzerland duke it out on the soccer pitch. It is World Cup qualifiers right now and Israel is barely hanging on. I was happy to hang out with Eitan and watch some soccer and he was happy to have the company. I videotaped the proceedings in the hall, above us, but with it all in Hebrew I wouldn't have understood any of it. Anyway, "we" tied with the Swiss and have to do some serious maneouvering to make it to the World Cup.
The group was done before the first half even ended and everyone started off on the two hour drive home. Eitan and I stayed in the restaurant, finished the game and took a walk at the Akaa port in the coolness of night; breathtakingly beautitul. I could see churches and mosques and the beautiful arches that are staples in Arabic architecture. There were fishermen and some tourists and people dining at a seaside restaurant. Locals were very interested in our shirts and Eitan gave out some of the Zochrot booklets made up for this Akka tour. I am amazed at how delighted Palestinians are when they see Jews remembering the Nakba - even just wearing such messages on t-shirts. Their faces light up and one man even asked Eitan if he was afraid for wearing the shirt. He said no.
I was a little paranoid about the tour today. It went absolutely fine and smoothly; but we were all preparing ourselves for Jewish protestors and harrassment. You see, some of the eyes in Haifa and Akko that noticed the signs advertising the tour belonged to people in high position. The first two Palestinian tour guides we had hired had been threatened by the Israel Ministry of Tourism and out of fear for their safety cancelled on us. It was really last minute (I think as of yesterday) that we were actually able to find a tour guide that the Ministry of Tourism didn't "get" to. There were also threatening phone calls to Zochrot staff in Haifa and intimidation of speakers on the bill - but amazingly (and probably Sabbath helped) no Jews showed up to cause problems.
Well, not exactly. At one point while Eitan and I were watching the footy match, he had to step out and I heard him say to me, "Ah, there's yelling outside." I never did find out what happened; but obviously some kind of tension. It also helped that we were in an Arab neighbourhood and there are no Jews around (which is why I find it incredulous that the Ministry of Tourism would freak out over our plans when there are no Jews living in the Old City of Akka...which the tourism signs call Acre and advertise it as a Crusader town....omitters!). In fact, regarding tourism, Eitan told me over our humous that you can't even find a tour guide that will tell tourists about the Nakba either because they don't know or they refuse to talk about it. Obviously, our tour was specifically about the Nakba, and we aren't tourists, so that is a different story altogether. We also have many connections with the Israeli-Palestinians.
So, this morning, when I was checking the camera and making sure it was in working order, it wouldn't even turn on. Somehow the battery had been entirely drained and there was no juice at all. I felt the red creeping up in my face and my sweating increased - I apologised to Eitan for not double checking before I went to Bethlehem. That was one of the benefits of stopping for humous - we were able to charge the battery for about fifteen minutes. It only lasted for 10 minutes of me filming stuff - and died just before the sign posting. I was rather upset at not being able to capture on camera much of the beauty around me and the importance of our sign posting. Then I realised that the digital camera that Norma was (wo)manning has video capabilities. I borrowed it off of her for the two signs we posted and I hope that I can use the footage from it to put in my video clip. I just don't know; but I tried and I can hope, right? Anyway, the reactions I got from Eitan and Norma about me thinking I might be able to use the digital camera footage was funny. They were impressed that I was able to attempt to redeem myself for my non-charging blunder.
All in all it was a fabulous day. I really enjoyed hanging out with Eitan so much. He is really a brilliant dude and we had some terrific discussions. We talked a lot, which is great. I got to ask him about his belief system and he asked about mine. He is a wealth of information regarding destroyed Palestinian villages and the covering-up of such things. And we both love humous. I am so grateful that my boss and I get along so well. It really frees me up to experience Zochrot as a supportive and exciting environment to work in.
Tomorrow I start language study (8am-1pm) then I am off to the office to work on the video clip for Akka. The Bir'im clip is finished (finally). I had to learn the software, which is why this clip took so long. I hope to have the Akka clip done this week. If you want to see the Bir'im clip, go see http://zochrot.org/index.php?id=228 It shouldn't take too long to load up...although I am going to set up the streaming deal as soon as I can find the time.
I am going to be so busy with school and work. I have tonnes to do at work, from video editing to fixing up the website, to figuring out how to stream the videos so people can watch them that much faster. I am spreading this slogan around Zochrot: "user friendly." I haven't done anything with the website, itself, since coming here; but have found out that those who are writing code want help with the graphic design and those who are updating it and doing Admin stuff want help with that. I am really starting to fit in well with Zochrot and feel very happy to be so busy. I can barely remember my Krameric life in Vancouver's film industry where I celebrated doing nothing for so long.
Anyway, maybe tomorrow I'll be miserable. Right now I feel fabulous!
All for now,
Burro D Block OUT
Today was the kind of day that makes me so glad to be in Israel / Palestine and especially in the capacity that I am, i.e. with Zochrot. I am really developing a deep fondness (love?) for the organisation and the people in it. With pride, today, I wore my Zochrot shirt, with "Remembering the Nakba" scrolled across the back in three languages. We had a tour in Akka today, which was incredible. Out of all the places I have been in Israel / Palestine, thus far, Akka is what most filled me with awe of its grandeur and beauty. Although the Old City of Akko (which is Akka) is not nearly what Akka used to be before the Nakba in '48, there is still a whole "city" of Arabic structures and indwelt by Palestinians. They are not the same Palestinians that lived in Akka before the Nakba; they were transplanted Palestinians from other destroyed villages. Out of over 700 villages in Palestine, more than 500 were destroyed in 1948 and out of the million+ Palestinians, between 750,000 and 900,000 were driven out of their land. The others were shifted to different cities, towns and villages in "Israel," in order to be the labourers for the zionists.
There were about two hundred people on our tour today. It was great to see all the faces I have already met, have friendly conversations with people and joke around. I love joking around and my laugh seems to make others laugh, which only makes me laugh more. There was a healthy mix of Palestinians, Israelis and internationals. There were dozens of us wearing the shirts. I rode up with Eitan Bronstein in his mini-van because there were way too many to just fit on the bus. As soon as we arrived, he led us to a humous place and he and I broke bread there, before joining the rest of the group. I had the coolest day with Eitan. The walking tour and sign posting (we posted two signs) lasted nearly two hours and then everyone convened in a hall where there was a Palestinian woman singing to us and then testimonies and a lecture.
As soon as I plugged in the camera and got it set up on the tripod, Eitan and I met eyes and slipped out the back door as per our prearranged plans; for we had another thing to do. It may sound awful, but we left the hall and went to the restaurant below to watch Israel and Switzerland duke it out on the soccer pitch. It is World Cup qualifiers right now and Israel is barely hanging on. I was happy to hang out with Eitan and watch some soccer and he was happy to have the company. I videotaped the proceedings in the hall, above us, but with it all in Hebrew I wouldn't have understood any of it. Anyway, "we" tied with the Swiss and have to do some serious maneouvering to make it to the World Cup.
The group was done before the first half even ended and everyone started off on the two hour drive home. Eitan and I stayed in the restaurant, finished the game and took a walk at the Akaa port in the coolness of night; breathtakingly beautitul. I could see churches and mosques and the beautiful arches that are staples in Arabic architecture. There were fishermen and some tourists and people dining at a seaside restaurant. Locals were very interested in our shirts and Eitan gave out some of the Zochrot booklets made up for this Akka tour. I am amazed at how delighted Palestinians are when they see Jews remembering the Nakba - even just wearing such messages on t-shirts. Their faces light up and one man even asked Eitan if he was afraid for wearing the shirt. He said no.
I was a little paranoid about the tour today. It went absolutely fine and smoothly; but we were all preparing ourselves for Jewish protestors and harrassment. You see, some of the eyes in Haifa and Akko that noticed the signs advertising the tour belonged to people in high position. The first two Palestinian tour guides we had hired had been threatened by the Israel Ministry of Tourism and out of fear for their safety cancelled on us. It was really last minute (I think as of yesterday) that we were actually able to find a tour guide that the Ministry of Tourism didn't "get" to. There were also threatening phone calls to Zochrot staff in Haifa and intimidation of speakers on the bill - but amazingly (and probably Sabbath helped) no Jews showed up to cause problems.
Well, not exactly. At one point while Eitan and I were watching the footy match, he had to step out and I heard him say to me, "Ah, there's yelling outside." I never did find out what happened; but obviously some kind of tension. It also helped that we were in an Arab neighbourhood and there are no Jews around (which is why I find it incredulous that the Ministry of Tourism would freak out over our plans when there are no Jews living in the Old City of Akka...which the tourism signs call Acre and advertise it as a Crusader town....omitters!). In fact, regarding tourism, Eitan told me over our humous that you can't even find a tour guide that will tell tourists about the Nakba either because they don't know or they refuse to talk about it. Obviously, our tour was specifically about the Nakba, and we aren't tourists, so that is a different story altogether. We also have many connections with the Israeli-Palestinians.
So, this morning, when I was checking the camera and making sure it was in working order, it wouldn't even turn on. Somehow the battery had been entirely drained and there was no juice at all. I felt the red creeping up in my face and my sweating increased - I apologised to Eitan for not double checking before I went to Bethlehem. That was one of the benefits of stopping for humous - we were able to charge the battery for about fifteen minutes. It only lasted for 10 minutes of me filming stuff - and died just before the sign posting. I was rather upset at not being able to capture on camera much of the beauty around me and the importance of our sign posting. Then I realised that the digital camera that Norma was (wo)manning has video capabilities. I borrowed it off of her for the two signs we posted and I hope that I can use the footage from it to put in my video clip. I just don't know; but I tried and I can hope, right? Anyway, the reactions I got from Eitan and Norma about me thinking I might be able to use the digital camera footage was funny. They were impressed that I was able to attempt to redeem myself for my non-charging blunder.
All in all it was a fabulous day. I really enjoyed hanging out with Eitan so much. He is really a brilliant dude and we had some terrific discussions. We talked a lot, which is great. I got to ask him about his belief system and he asked about mine. He is a wealth of information regarding destroyed Palestinian villages and the covering-up of such things. And we both love humous. I am so grateful that my boss and I get along so well. It really frees me up to experience Zochrot as a supportive and exciting environment to work in.
Tomorrow I start language study (8am-1pm) then I am off to the office to work on the video clip for Akka. The Bir'im clip is finished (finally). I had to learn the software, which is why this clip took so long. I hope to have the Akka clip done this week. If you want to see the Bir'im clip, go see http://zochrot.org/index.php?id=228 It shouldn't take too long to load up...although I am going to set up the streaming deal as soon as I can find the time.
I am going to be so busy with school and work. I have tonnes to do at work, from video editing to fixing up the website, to figuring out how to stream the videos so people can watch them that much faster. I am spreading this slogan around Zochrot: "user friendly." I haven't done anything with the website, itself, since coming here; but have found out that those who are writing code want help with the graphic design and those who are updating it and doing Admin stuff want help with that. I am really starting to fit in well with Zochrot and feel very happy to be so busy. I can barely remember my Krameric life in Vancouver's film industry where I celebrated doing nothing for so long.
Anyway, maybe tomorrow I'll be miserable. Right now I feel fabulous!
All for now,
Burro D Block OUT
Friday, September 02, 2005
02-09-05
Hey there everybody!
I am back from Bethlehem.
I bet you enjoyed your Darren-free inboxes from the past couple of days! Well, vacation is over and it's back to life....
I start school on Sunday. I am eager and nervous. I really want to learn Hebrew; I really am unsure if I want to understand what people say....ignorance is bliss.
Bethlehem was a really good time. I found it so good to be with Chris and Tim. We shared about our lives and we deepened our relationship. I feel more known and knowing. I also was able to meet with more Palestinian partners of MCC. Enjoyable; informative; inspiring.
Did I mention that i am a volleyball special olympian...you can call me Droonick!
let's talk about "inspiring." I asked Tim today about the per capita of scholars and academics within Palestinian population. I meet these Palestinians and I am constantly blown away at how much more they know than my "educated" Canadian ass. It makes sense since the west always calls them terrorists, that they should learn so much to overcome it. I am humbled and inspired.
And by inspired, I mean overwhelmed, too. I don't have a Master's degree. I haven't read the books that are on their shelves. I don't know "much" in the face of what they know. I don't want you to misunderstand: it's not like they flaunt their knowledge, at all; it's just that I become aware of my own ignorance and I feel embarrassed or ashamed. Maybe it's a good exercise...although there were a few times I craved the safety of my computer terminal and my video editing.
Speaking of video editing, go see http://www.zochrot.org/index.php?id=228 to see my debut. Please understand, I am not bragging by inviting you to see it; i am only fulfilling the only point of putting something on-line (to get people to see it).
Just a note to Art Birch (pops) and Dan Cody - I am constantly having a "failure" notice appear when I try to send my e-mails to you. I can't figure it out from my end, but I get tired of trying and failing a dozen times before it goes through...
Talk to your webmaster and maybe the problem is that you are using a WYSIWYG web program instead of real html coding....I don't know. But if this keeps up, it'll drive me nuts and I surely don't want to go nuts (I have enough problems).
Zochrot has a tour in Akha tommorrow (if you pay attention to my spelling you'll notice I use different spelling for the same places all the time...I am trying to use Arabic spelling but i am dealing with my own ignorance a lot). I am supposed to video tape the tour.
If you are the praying type please pray that I video the right moments (especially of people speaking stuff I don['t understand).
Peace out, Darren
I am back from Bethlehem.
I bet you enjoyed your Darren-free inboxes from the past couple of days! Well, vacation is over and it's back to life....
I start school on Sunday. I am eager and nervous. I really want to learn Hebrew; I really am unsure if I want to understand what people say....ignorance is bliss.
Bethlehem was a really good time. I found it so good to be with Chris and Tim. We shared about our lives and we deepened our relationship. I feel more known and knowing. I also was able to meet with more Palestinian partners of MCC. Enjoyable; informative; inspiring.
Did I mention that i am a volleyball special olympian...you can call me Droonick!
let's talk about "inspiring." I asked Tim today about the per capita of scholars and academics within Palestinian population. I meet these Palestinians and I am constantly blown away at how much more they know than my "educated" Canadian ass. It makes sense since the west always calls them terrorists, that they should learn so much to overcome it. I am humbled and inspired.
And by inspired, I mean overwhelmed, too. I don't have a Master's degree. I haven't read the books that are on their shelves. I don't know "much" in the face of what they know. I don't want you to misunderstand: it's not like they flaunt their knowledge, at all; it's just that I become aware of my own ignorance and I feel embarrassed or ashamed. Maybe it's a good exercise...although there were a few times I craved the safety of my computer terminal and my video editing.
Speaking of video editing, go see http://www.zochrot.org/index.php?id=228 to see my debut. Please understand, I am not bragging by inviting you to see it; i am only fulfilling the only point of putting something on-line (to get people to see it).
Just a note to Art Birch (pops) and Dan Cody - I am constantly having a "failure" notice appear when I try to send my e-mails to you. I can't figure it out from my end, but I get tired of trying and failing a dozen times before it goes through...
Talk to your webmaster and maybe the problem is that you are using a WYSIWYG web program instead of real html coding....I don't know. But if this keeps up, it'll drive me nuts and I surely don't want to go nuts (I have enough problems).
Zochrot has a tour in Akha tommorrow (if you pay attention to my spelling you'll notice I use different spelling for the same places all the time...I am trying to use Arabic spelling but i am dealing with my own ignorance a lot). I am supposed to video tape the tour.
If you are the praying type please pray that I video the right moments (especially of people speaking stuff I don['t understand).
Peace out, Darren
New MCC Palestine Update
Hey There fine feathered folks,
I want to pass this along. It is another labour of love from Chris and Tim Seidel. "You're doing it, Dudes!"
-Burro-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MCC Palestine Update #113
1 September 2005
Welcoming new colleagues
Greetings from Bethlehem! MCC Palestine is excited about the growth of our program, in more ways than one. This month, we are welcoming Andrea and Mark Stoner-Leaman of Pennsylvania who have accepted a teaching position at the Latin Patriarchate school in the northern West Bank village of Zababdeh. MCC has had a long relationship with this school in Zababdeh, both by placing North American volunteers there as well as by offering support through MCC’s Global Family program.
This past month another new MCC worker has been getting used to his new “home.” Darren Birch of Vancouver, British Columbia has been working full-time with one of our Israeli partners, the Zochrot Association in Tel Aviv. This is a very new and different move for this program. MCC Palestine, as its name portrays, has been very intentional about its position of advocacy for Palestinians as an oppressed people, working here since responding to the refugee crisis in 1949. But we are excited about this opportunity and are already seeing how this can contribute to the work of MCC here.
We are looking forward to the growth that MCC Palestine is experiencing. And to our new colleagues, welcome!
Disengagement from Justice
The disengagement process continues as does the ubiquitous media coverage of it. If only the situation here in the West Bank or those not-so-nice parts of Gaza like the shelled-out refugee camps received the same amount of media coverage.
It is difficult to communicate the frustration of seeing all of the coverage of tears shed for the removal of individuals who knowingly decided to oppose the international community and participated in decades of oppression and murder of a whole people (most of whom are refugees). But when four Palestinian day laborers are murdered by a settler in the West Bank or when four Palestinians are murdered on a bus by an Israeli soldier in northern Israel—the victims’ families of whom will not be recognized and therefore will not be compensated as victims of terrorism—very little coverage is given (“Four killed in Shilo terrorist attack, four injured,” 18 Aug. 2005, http://www.imemc.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=13373&Itemid=1; “Shfaram victims won't be recognized by terror law,” 30 Aug. 2005, http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/618627.html). It is nothing but blatant racism, the devaluing of darker skin and anything that sounds Arabic. We should be so ashamed of ourselves.
Unfortunately, though there are definitely some positive elements to this “disengagement” scenario, things do not look different from where we are standing here in Bethlehem. Still the same checkpoints, the same “settler-only” roads, and the same Separation Wall imprisoning this community and closing off Palestinians’ hopes for their children's future.
Whatever optimism that could have been salvaged has been duly shattered by last week’s news of the order handed down by the Israeli courts to expropriate more Palestinian land to make room for the construction of this Wall, expanding to accommodate the expansion of illegal colonies such as Ma’aleh Adumim, the largest in the West Bank. (“Israel to expand Ma’aleh Adumim barrier,” Aug. 25, 2005, http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1124850018436; “Israel to seize land for barrier,” Aug. 25, 2005, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4180050.stm; “Livni: Israel can expand Ma'ale Adumim,” Aug. 22, 2005, http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1112754019224; “Settlers from Gaza going to Ariel in West Bank,” Aug. 23, 2005, http://www.palestinenet.org/english/archive2005/aug/week4/230805/23augariel.htm)
Not to mention recent reports about the potential humanitarian disaster in Gaza. (“Palestinians’ ongoing humanitarian crisis deepening in Gaza,” Aug. 19, 2005; http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/RWB.NSF/db900SID/RMOI-6FH3BK?OpenDocument&rc=3&emid=ACOS-635PFR)
It unfortunately appears that instead of reviving a peace process, this praise that Israel is receiving for their unilateral action is only emboldening them to continue on the path they choose, intransigent in the face of international law, and irrespective of basic Palestinian rights. (“Olmert to Rice: No peace moves for now,” Aug. 25, 2005; http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1124850021438)
Moving toward action: New resources for advocacy
Many of you may remember the video project MCC Palestine was working on last year. Well, this new documentary, Children of the Nakba, has been released. In it, a look is taken at the “Nakba” or “Catastrophe” that led to the Palestinian refugee crisis in which 500 Palestinian villages were destroyed and between 700,000 and 900,000 Palestinians were expelled from their lands. The ongoing dispossession that defines so much of Palestinian life today is also examined as well as the efforts of those Palestinians and Israelis who believe that a peace in this land built on justice requires an honest grappling with that history. The documentary should soon be available in MCC’s Online Resource Catalog: http://www.thenovgroup.com/MCC/catalog/. For more information on these refugee issues, please visit MCC’s partners the Badil Resource Center at http://www.badil.org and the Zochrot Association at http://www.nakbainhebrew.org.
As we mentioned in our last update, the July-September 2005 edition of the MCC Peace Office Newsletter titled “Christian Zionism and Peace in the Holy Land” is now available online at http://www.mcc.org/respub/pon/PON_2005-07-01.pdf.
And as another reminder, the MCC discussion paper “Peacebuilding in Palestine / Israel: A Discussion Paper” meant to help facilitate a conversation in communities back in North America about stewardship, divestment, and economic justice can be found online at http://www.mcc.org/papers (as well as a paper titled “Frequently Asked Questions: Economic Pressure as a Tool for Establishing a Just Peace in the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict”).
Always a good source of theological reflection on the situation here is our partner the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center (http://www.sabeel.org). The summer edition of their quarterly newsletter Cornerstone is available: “Morally Responsible Investment: You Were Faithful in Little Things...” (http://www.fosna.org/pdf/Cornerstone%20Issue%2037.pdf). Also, for a perspective on the Gaza pullout from a Palestinian Christian perspective, see their “Reflections on the Gaza Disengagement” at http://www.palestinemonitor.org/nueva_web/updates_news/pngo/gaza_disengagement_reflections.htm.
Attentiveness and Hope…
Something as simple and mundane as home repair can be a risky undertaking in a place like this. For here, even the routine cannot be separated from other realities of daily life. For example, our neighbor is fixing up their home for their son and future daughter-in-law. A few weeks ago, our neighborhood was pretty “active”—the Israeli military came into Bethlehem during the day to detain a local man. There was much shooting and explosions into the night. A friend of ours who is painting for our neighbors (who has not had consistent work over the past year) painted throughout the whole incident. He did not skip a beat and just kept on working—and out on their balcony nonetheless! As I talked with him he laughed and said, “this is not bad; this is normal.”
In the midst of such distress, we continue to struggle to affirm the notion, described by LeRoy Friesen in his Mennonite Witness in the Middle East (MBM, 2000), that “the restorative, salvific activity of God is operative throughout creation,” seeking to discover how to bear witness to “God’s drawing up together in Christ of all parts of creation,” a movement that, as Christians, we “hopefully and joyfully declare to be en route” (105). Maintaining an attentiveness to the “evidences that God always and everywhere is working to make all things new” (111; Revelation 21:5) is our challenge and our hope.
We are looking forward to the coming months and the changing season here when the barren, sandy hills of this desert landscape will miraculously turn green. What a wonderful witness to the beauty and persistence of life—green and verdant—breaking through an oppressive and cruel climate. How apropos for this place.
Peace to you all,
Timothy and Christi Seidel Peace Development Workers Mennonite Central Committee – Palestine
Attachments and Links:
· “State: W. Bank settler population grew by 12,800 in past year,” Haaretz, 27 August 2005 · Scott Wilson, “In West Bank, Israel Sees Room to Grow: Government Moves Swiftly to Capitalize On Pullout From Gaza Despite Criticism,” Washington Post, 28 August 2005 · Dr. Azmi Bishara, “Deconstructing disengagement,” Arabic Media Internet Network, 25 August 2005 · Amira Hass, “The remaining 99.5 percent,” Haaretz, 24 August 2005 · Tanya Reinhart, “How We Left Gaza,” DissidentVoice.org, 19 August 2005 · Amira Hass, “Cheap labor, cheap deal,” Haaretz, 17 August 2005 · Paul Beran, “On Divestment, Even Failure Breeds Success,” MIFTAH, 9 August 2005 · Amira Hass, “What business is it of Chirac?” Haaretz, 3 August 2005 · International Crisis Group, “The Jerusalem Powder Keg,” 2 August 2005
_________________________________________________________
Haaretz State: W. Bank settler population grew by 12,800 in past year By News Agencies
27 August 2005
The population of West Bank settlements grew by 12,800 people over the past year, a government official said Friday.
Thousands of Israelis have streamed into West Bank settlements from June of 2004 to June of this year, increasing the number of Jews living in the West Bank to 246,000, said Gilad Heiman, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry.
Heiman said that even after factoring in Israel's evacuation of 21 settlements in Gaza and four in the West Bank this week, the overall number now living in the West Bank has grown by about 12,800 Jews.
"When you factor in the removal of settlers and take into account about 10,000 newcomers, mainly ultra-Orthodox Jews, you arrive at a figure of about 246,000 settlers. This is correct as of June 2005," he said.
Read more at http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/617643.html
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Washington Post In West Bank, Israel Sees Room to Grow: Government Moves Swiftly to Capitalize On Pullout From Gaza Despite Criticism Scott Wilson
28 August 2005
MAALE ADUMIM, West Bank -- In the tan hills a few miles east of Jerusalem, construction cranes dangle over a string of red-roofed neighborhoods that make up the largest Jewish settlement in the West Bank. It is here that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is reengaging with his electoral base following Israel's efficient but divisive exit from the Gaza Strip.
Enjoying a moment of international sympathy, Sharon's government is moving swiftly to capitalize on its unilateral withdrawal and ongoing demolition of 25 Jewish settlements. The government's efforts are focused largely in the West Bank, land of far more religious and strategic importance to Israel than the remote slice of coastline it has left behind.
A little more than 31,000 Israelis live in Maale Adumim, a suburban settlement built on land captured by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war. Israeli officials say it will grow to more than 50,000 people and eventually touch the edge of East Jerusalem, even though the U.S. government and Palestinian leaders have said that such growth would severely complicate efforts to establish a viable Palestinian state.
Last week, as the world watched settlers being hauled from their homes in Gaza, government officials ordered the confiscation of 400 acres of West Bank land for a barrier that will separate Maale Adumim from Palestinian-populated territory. Just east of the main settlement, where construction plans had been frozen because of U.S. opposition, Israel will soon break ground on a new police headquarters serving the entire West Bank.
Read more at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/27/AR2005082701113.html?referrer=emailarticle
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Arabic Media Internet Network Deconstructing disengagement Dr. Azmi Bishara
25 August 2005
Sharon's disengagement plan opens as follows: "The State of Israel is committed to the peace process and aspires to reach an agreed resolution of the conflict based upon the vision of US President George Bush. The State of Israel believes that it must act to improve the current situation. The State of Israel has come to the conclusion that there is currently no reliable Palestinian partner with which it can make progress in a two-sided peace process.
Accordingly, it has developed a plan of revised disengagement, based on the following considerations: "One: The stalemate dictated by the current situation is harmful. In order to break out of this stalemate, the State of Israel is required to initiate moves not dependent on Palestinian cooperation.
"Two: The purpose of the plan is to lead to a better security, political, economic and demographic situation.
"Three: In any future permanent settlement, there will be no Israeli towns and villages in the Gaza Strip. On the other hand, it is clear that in the West Bank, there are areas which will be part of the State of Israel, including major Israeli population centers, cities, towns and villages, security areas and other places of special interest to Israel." (Disengagement Plan of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon -- revised, 28 May 2004).
I cite the foregoing passage because with all the fanfare surrounding the withdrawal people may have forgotten what it is really about. Let me clarify.
Sharon's disengagement plan is a bid to sideline the roadmap. It is an attempt to pre-empt anyone else from taking the initiative to break the "stalemate" -- a product of Israeli intransigence or, otherwise put, of the non-existence of a Palestinian partner prepared to accept Israeli dictates for a permanent settlement -- and compel the US, if only to improve its PR in the region following the occupation of Iraq, to pursue the roadmap as it was originally devised.
Read more at http://www.amin.org/eng/uncat/2005/aug/aug25-2.html
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Haaretz The remaining 99.5 percent Amira Hass
24 August 2005
What talent it takes to live for 35 years in a flourishing park and splendid villas just 20 meters from overcrowded, suffocated refugee camps. What talent it takes to turn on the sprinklers on the lawns, while just across the way, 20,000 other people are dependent on the distribution of drinking water in tankers; to know that you deserve it, that your government will pave magnificent roads for you and neglect (prior to Oslo, before 1994) to the point of destruction the Palestinian infrastructure. What skill it takes to step out of your well-cared-for greenhouse and walk unmoved past 60-year-old fruit-bearing date trees that are uprooted for you, roads that are blocked for you, homes that are demolished for you, the children who are shelled from helicopters and tanks and buried alongside you, for the sake of the safety of your children and the preservation of your super-rights.
For the sake of about half a percent of the population of the Gaza Strip, a Jewish half-percent, the lives of the remaining 99.5 percent were totally disrupted and destroyed - worthy of wonderment indeed. And also amazing is how most of the other Israelis, who did not go themselves to settle the homeland, suffered this reality and did not demand that their government put an end to it - before the Qassams.
A big, well-fed goat was removed from the Gaza Strip this week. And therefore, the sense of relief felt by many of the 99.5 percent is understandable - although it is a far cry from the reality emerging from the so-superficial media reports that are focusing on the celebrations of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. In the words last week in the Khan Yunis refugee camp of a former worker at one of the settlements: "The settlements divided the Strip into three or four prisons. Now, we will live in one big prison - a more comfortable one, but a prison nevertheless."
Read more at http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/616309.html
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DissidentVoice.org How We Left Gaza Tanya Reinhart
19 August 2005
We will never know with certainty what took place in the mind of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in February 2004, when he first declared, without consulting anyone, that he is ready to evacuate the Jewish settlements in Gaza. But if we try to put together the pieces of the disengagement puzzle, the scenario that makes the most sense is that Sharon believed that this time, as before, he would find a way of evading the plan. This would explain, for example, why the Gaza settlers have not yet received compensation money and why, as the Saturday Supplement of Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot revealed on August 5, almost no steps have been taken to prepare for their absorption into Israel. (1)
Sharon had good reason to believe that he would succeed in his avoidance tactics. In the previous round, when confronted with the Bush administration’s “Road Map”, he committed himself to a cease-fire, during which Israel was to revert to the status quo of pre-September 2000, freeze settlement construction and remove outposts. None of this was carried out. Sharon and the army claimed that Mahmud Abbas (in the previous round) was not trustworthy and had failed to rein in Hamas. The army continued its assassination policy and succeeded in bringing the Occupied Territories to an unprecedented boiling point, followed by the inevitable Palestinian terror attacks that shattered the cease-fire. During the entire time, the first-term Bush administration stood by Sharon’s side and dutifully echoed all his complaints against Abbas.
Read more at http://www.kibush.co.il/show_file.asp?num=7241
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Haaretz Cheap labor, cheap deal Amira Hass
17 August 2005
Omar had a reason to laugh: Good people from Tel Aviv are agitated that the Evacuation Compensation Law passed by the Knesset discriminates against Palestinian and foreign workers, on the one hand, compared to Israeli workers. The good people are the Kav La'Oved organization and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, which gave up on the idea of petitioning the High Court of Justice because it expected the court would not get involved in this piece of legislation.
Omar is a 28-year-old resident of Khan Yunis who has worked for an Israeli employer in the hothouses in Gush Katif since 1996. ACRI and Kav La'Oved are troubled by the fact that he, as a Palestinian, won't receive the "acclimation payment" the law assures to workers who lose the source of their livelihood as a result of the evacuation. But Omar is laughing because he never even received his basic rights: His last salary was NIS 50 for a full workday - slightly more than a third of minimum wage, which is NIS 145 a day. And he didn't get vacation or sick leave. According to Omar, the most workers could earn in Gush Katif was NIS 60 for a full workday. But even if it is NIS 80, as Israeli inspectors in Gush Katif reported, it is still a lot less than minimum wage.
The Evacuation Compensation Law, without shame, explicitly states that only Israeli workers have the right to the acclimation payments, up to six months worth, based on the average monthly salary for every year worked. Neither the Palestinians nor foreign workers (Thais, Chinese, Nepalese) have the right to acclimation payments. The same law also gives Israeli workers the right to quit and be considered laid off for the purposes of severance pay. Omar, on the other hand, is going home, after nine years of labor, without any severance pay.
Read more at http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/613498.html
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MIFTAH On Divestment, Even Failure Breeds Success Paul Beran 9 August 2005
In the last six months, civic groups and churches in the United States have independently launched campaigns to divest financially from companies profiting from the Israeli military occupation of Palestinian lands. These groups have targeted town governments, university boards and religious bodies in an effort to publicly spotlight the low standards that human rights have been accorded in the U.S.-dominated "peace process" between Israel and the Palestinians. The American Presbyterian Church, a body of some 2.5 million followers, last summer decided to selectively divest its pension funds from companies profiting from the Israeli military occupation. The church has paid a price for daring to criticize Israel's human rights record. In November, church leaders were threatened with violence, called anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli for their stance. One hate message the church received said: "I promise violence against Presbyterian churches, they will go up in flames - that's a terrorist threat." Beside these words was a hand-drawn swastika. In addition to these attacks, the church has been publicly rebuked by such ardent pro-Israel supporters as high-profile law professor Alan Dershowitz.
In addition to the Presbyterian churches' activities, the first municipality in the U.S. to publicly be asked to divest its funds from Israel was Somerville, Massachusetts, near Boston. In November, a local group, with over 1,000 citizen signatures in hand, asked the town council to divest their pension funds from companies benefiting from the Israeli occupation. Passage of the resolution, which is non-binding, should have been easy: Somerville has a tradition of using its pension funds to uphold human rights, for example when it banned investment in Burma due to its human rights abuses.
Read more at http://www.miftah.org/Display.cfm?DocId=8148&CategoryId=5
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Haaretz What business is it of Chirac? Amira Hass
3 August 2005
Why should Chirac and the other European leaders take an interest in the millions of trifles of the calculated dispossession, which dictate the lives of the Palestinian people? Trifles that add up to a clear picture: Sharon is determinedly striving to realize the master plan - integrating most of the West Bank into the sovereign State of Israel.
The Jordan Valley, the settlement blocs that continue to merge into each other, the monumental Jews-only roads, the demilitarized zone long since annexed to Israel, the area annexed to Jerusalem in 1967, the de facto annexations of the fence - these already cover most of the West Bank. They will call the densely populated Palestinian pockets that will remain a state, and the world will applaud.
Reasons abound for not taking an interest in the trifles of this dispossession: a mere three and a half million people are at stake, with no oil and no support from any international power; their brethren in the Diaspora and in Israel do not constitute a lobby. There are places in the world where tens of millions are being wronged far more cruelly, and nobody makes a peep. And, after all, Israeli colonialism doesn't even come close to the murderousness of the European variety.
But Europe does take an interest. The billions of dollars it's pouring in here prove that it knows that this "little" usurpation is being perpetrated at a highly sensitive juncture. Perhaps European leaders are hoping that the money being showered on the Palestinian Authority - and effectively on Israel, which thus escapes its responsibility as the occupying power - will compensate for their impotence. It was they, after all, who failed to implement international decisions regarding the illegality of the settlements.
Read more at http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/607926.html
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International Crisis Group The Jerusalem Powder Keg
2 August 2005
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY AND RECOMMENDATIONS
While the world focuses on Gaza, the future of Israeli-Palestinian relations in fact may be playing itself out away from the spotlight, in Jerusalem. With recent steps, Israel is attempting to solidify its hold over a wide area in and around the city, creating a far broader Jerusalem. If the international community and specifically the U.S. are serious about preserving and promoting a viable two-state solution, they need to speak far more clearly and insistently to halt actions that directly and immediately jeopardise that goal. And if that solution is ever to be reached, they will need to be clear that changes that have occurred since Israelis and Palestinians last sat down to negotiate in 2000-2001 will have to be reversed.
Since the onset of the Arab-Israeli conflict, control over Jerusalem has fluctuated, as have the city's contours. Speaking of the city today, one refers to substantial areas, some Jewish, others Arab, that were part of the West Bank and that no one would have recognised as Jerusalem prior to 1967. Stretching municipal boundaries, annexing Palestinian land and building new Jewish neighbourhoods/settlements, Israel gradually created a municipal area several times its earlier size. It also established new urban settlements outside the municipal boundary to surround the city, break contiguity between East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and strengthen links between these settlements, West Jerusalem and the rest of Israel.
Settlement expansion has been pursued by Labour and Likud governments alike and has always been highly problematic and deemed unlawful by the international community. But Prime Minister Sharon appears to be implementing a more focused and systematic plan that, if carried out, risks choking off Arab East Jerusalem by further fragmenting it and surrounding it with Jewish neighbourhoods/settlements:
Read more at http://www.crisisgroup.org/home/index.cfm?l=1&id=3588
I want to pass this along. It is another labour of love from Chris and Tim Seidel. "You're doing it, Dudes!"
-Burro-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
MCC Palestine Update #113
1 September 2005
Welcoming new colleagues
Greetings from Bethlehem! MCC Palestine is excited about the growth of our program, in more ways than one. This month, we are welcoming Andrea and Mark Stoner-Leaman of Pennsylvania who have accepted a teaching position at the Latin Patriarchate school in the northern West Bank village of Zababdeh. MCC has had a long relationship with this school in Zababdeh, both by placing North American volunteers there as well as by offering support through MCC’s Global Family program.
This past month another new MCC worker has been getting used to his new “home.” Darren Birch of Vancouver, British Columbia has been working full-time with one of our Israeli partners, the Zochrot Association in Tel Aviv. This is a very new and different move for this program. MCC Palestine, as its name portrays, has been very intentional about its position of advocacy for Palestinians as an oppressed people, working here since responding to the refugee crisis in 1949. But we are excited about this opportunity and are already seeing how this can contribute to the work of MCC here.
We are looking forward to the growth that MCC Palestine is experiencing. And to our new colleagues, welcome!
Disengagement from Justice
The disengagement process continues as does the ubiquitous media coverage of it. If only the situation here in the West Bank or those not-so-nice parts of Gaza like the shelled-out refugee camps received the same amount of media coverage.
It is difficult to communicate the frustration of seeing all of the coverage of tears shed for the removal of individuals who knowingly decided to oppose the international community and participated in decades of oppression and murder of a whole people (most of whom are refugees). But when four Palestinian day laborers are murdered by a settler in the West Bank or when four Palestinians are murdered on a bus by an Israeli soldier in northern Israel—the victims’ families of whom will not be recognized and therefore will not be compensated as victims of terrorism—very little coverage is given (“Four killed in Shilo terrorist attack, four injured,” 18 Aug. 2005, http://www.imemc.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=13373&Itemid=1; “Shfaram victims won't be recognized by terror law,” 30 Aug. 2005, http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/618627.html). It is nothing but blatant racism, the devaluing of darker skin and anything that sounds Arabic. We should be so ashamed of ourselves.
Unfortunately, though there are definitely some positive elements to this “disengagement” scenario, things do not look different from where we are standing here in Bethlehem. Still the same checkpoints, the same “settler-only” roads, and the same Separation Wall imprisoning this community and closing off Palestinians’ hopes for their children's future.
Whatever optimism that could have been salvaged has been duly shattered by last week’s news of the order handed down by the Israeli courts to expropriate more Palestinian land to make room for the construction of this Wall, expanding to accommodate the expansion of illegal colonies such as Ma’aleh Adumim, the largest in the West Bank. (“Israel to expand Ma’aleh Adumim barrier,” Aug. 25, 2005, http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1124850018436; “Israel to seize land for barrier,” Aug. 25, 2005, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4180050.stm; “Livni: Israel can expand Ma'ale Adumim,” Aug. 22, 2005, http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1112754019224; “Settlers from Gaza going to Ariel in West Bank,” Aug. 23, 2005, http://www.palestinenet.org/english/archive2005/aug/week4/230805/23augariel.htm)
Not to mention recent reports about the potential humanitarian disaster in Gaza. (“Palestinians’ ongoing humanitarian crisis deepening in Gaza,” Aug. 19, 2005; http://www.reliefweb.int/rw/RWB.NSF/db900SID/RMOI-6FH3BK?OpenDocument&rc=3&emid=ACOS-635PFR)
It unfortunately appears that instead of reviving a peace process, this praise that Israel is receiving for their unilateral action is only emboldening them to continue on the path they choose, intransigent in the face of international law, and irrespective of basic Palestinian rights. (“Olmert to Rice: No peace moves for now,” Aug. 25, 2005; http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1124850021438)
Moving toward action: New resources for advocacy
Many of you may remember the video project MCC Palestine was working on last year. Well, this new documentary, Children of the Nakba, has been released. In it, a look is taken at the “Nakba” or “Catastrophe” that led to the Palestinian refugee crisis in which 500 Palestinian villages were destroyed and between 700,000 and 900,000 Palestinians were expelled from their lands. The ongoing dispossession that defines so much of Palestinian life today is also examined as well as the efforts of those Palestinians and Israelis who believe that a peace in this land built on justice requires an honest grappling with that history. The documentary should soon be available in MCC’s Online Resource Catalog: http://www.thenovgroup.com/MCC/catalog/. For more information on these refugee issues, please visit MCC’s partners the Badil Resource Center at http://www.badil.org and the Zochrot Association at http://www.nakbainhebrew.org.
As we mentioned in our last update, the July-September 2005 edition of the MCC Peace Office Newsletter titled “Christian Zionism and Peace in the Holy Land” is now available online at http://www.mcc.org/respub/pon/PON_2005-07-01.pdf.
And as another reminder, the MCC discussion paper “Peacebuilding in Palestine / Israel: A Discussion Paper” meant to help facilitate a conversation in communities back in North America about stewardship, divestment, and economic justice can be found online at http://www.mcc.org/papers (as well as a paper titled “Frequently Asked Questions: Economic Pressure as a Tool for Establishing a Just Peace in the Palestinian-Israeli Conflict”).
Always a good source of theological reflection on the situation here is our partner the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center (http://www.sabeel.org). The summer edition of their quarterly newsletter Cornerstone is available: “Morally Responsible Investment: You Were Faithful in Little Things...” (http://www.fosna.org/pdf/Cornerstone%20Issue%2037.pdf). Also, for a perspective on the Gaza pullout from a Palestinian Christian perspective, see their “Reflections on the Gaza Disengagement” at http://www.palestinemonitor.org/nueva_web/updates_news/pngo/gaza_disengagement_reflections.htm.
Attentiveness and Hope…
Something as simple and mundane as home repair can be a risky undertaking in a place like this. For here, even the routine cannot be separated from other realities of daily life. For example, our neighbor is fixing up their home for their son and future daughter-in-law. A few weeks ago, our neighborhood was pretty “active”—the Israeli military came into Bethlehem during the day to detain a local man. There was much shooting and explosions into the night. A friend of ours who is painting for our neighbors (who has not had consistent work over the past year) painted throughout the whole incident. He did not skip a beat and just kept on working—and out on their balcony nonetheless! As I talked with him he laughed and said, “this is not bad; this is normal.”
In the midst of such distress, we continue to struggle to affirm the notion, described by LeRoy Friesen in his Mennonite Witness in the Middle East (MBM, 2000), that “the restorative, salvific activity of God is operative throughout creation,” seeking to discover how to bear witness to “God’s drawing up together in Christ of all parts of creation,” a movement that, as Christians, we “hopefully and joyfully declare to be en route” (105). Maintaining an attentiveness to the “evidences that God always and everywhere is working to make all things new” (111; Revelation 21:5) is our challenge and our hope.
We are looking forward to the coming months and the changing season here when the barren, sandy hills of this desert landscape will miraculously turn green. What a wonderful witness to the beauty and persistence of life—green and verdant—breaking through an oppressive and cruel climate. How apropos for this place.
Peace to you all,
Timothy and Christi Seidel Peace Development Workers Mennonite Central Committee – Palestine
Attachments and Links:
· “State: W. Bank settler population grew by 12,800 in past year,” Haaretz, 27 August 2005 · Scott Wilson, “In West Bank, Israel Sees Room to Grow: Government Moves Swiftly to Capitalize On Pullout From Gaza Despite Criticism,” Washington Post, 28 August 2005 · Dr. Azmi Bishara, “Deconstructing disengagement,” Arabic Media Internet Network, 25 August 2005 · Amira Hass, “The remaining 99.5 percent,” Haaretz, 24 August 2005 · Tanya Reinhart, “How We Left Gaza,” DissidentVoice.org, 19 August 2005 · Amira Hass, “Cheap labor, cheap deal,” Haaretz, 17 August 2005 · Paul Beran, “On Divestment, Even Failure Breeds Success,” MIFTAH, 9 August 2005 · Amira Hass, “What business is it of Chirac?” Haaretz, 3 August 2005 · International Crisis Group, “The Jerusalem Powder Keg,” 2 August 2005
_________________________________________________________
Haaretz State: W. Bank settler population grew by 12,800 in past year By News Agencies
27 August 2005
The population of West Bank settlements grew by 12,800 people over the past year, a government official said Friday.
Thousands of Israelis have streamed into West Bank settlements from June of 2004 to June of this year, increasing the number of Jews living in the West Bank to 246,000, said Gilad Heiman, a spokesman for the Interior Ministry.
Heiman said that even after factoring in Israel's evacuation of 21 settlements in Gaza and four in the West Bank this week, the overall number now living in the West Bank has grown by about 12,800 Jews.
"When you factor in the removal of settlers and take into account about 10,000 newcomers, mainly ultra-Orthodox Jews, you arrive at a figure of about 246,000 settlers. This is correct as of June 2005," he said.
Read more at http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/617643.html
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Washington Post In West Bank, Israel Sees Room to Grow: Government Moves Swiftly to Capitalize On Pullout From Gaza Despite Criticism Scott Wilson
28 August 2005
MAALE ADUMIM, West Bank -- In the tan hills a few miles east of Jerusalem, construction cranes dangle over a string of red-roofed neighborhoods that make up the largest Jewish settlement in the West Bank. It is here that Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is reengaging with his electoral base following Israel's efficient but divisive exit from the Gaza Strip.
Enjoying a moment of international sympathy, Sharon's government is moving swiftly to capitalize on its unilateral withdrawal and ongoing demolition of 25 Jewish settlements. The government's efforts are focused largely in the West Bank, land of far more religious and strategic importance to Israel than the remote slice of coastline it has left behind.
A little more than 31,000 Israelis live in Maale Adumim, a suburban settlement built on land captured by Israel in the 1967 Middle East war. Israeli officials say it will grow to more than 50,000 people and eventually touch the edge of East Jerusalem, even though the U.S. government and Palestinian leaders have said that such growth would severely complicate efforts to establish a viable Palestinian state.
Last week, as the world watched settlers being hauled from their homes in Gaza, government officials ordered the confiscation of 400 acres of West Bank land for a barrier that will separate Maale Adumim from Palestinian-populated territory. Just east of the main settlement, where construction plans had been frozen because of U.S. opposition, Israel will soon break ground on a new police headquarters serving the entire West Bank.
Read more at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/08/27/AR2005082701113.html?referrer=emailarticle
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Arabic Media Internet Network Deconstructing disengagement Dr. Azmi Bishara
25 August 2005
Sharon's disengagement plan opens as follows: "The State of Israel is committed to the peace process and aspires to reach an agreed resolution of the conflict based upon the vision of US President George Bush. The State of Israel believes that it must act to improve the current situation. The State of Israel has come to the conclusion that there is currently no reliable Palestinian partner with which it can make progress in a two-sided peace process.
Accordingly, it has developed a plan of revised disengagement, based on the following considerations: "One: The stalemate dictated by the current situation is harmful. In order to break out of this stalemate, the State of Israel is required to initiate moves not dependent on Palestinian cooperation.
"Two: The purpose of the plan is to lead to a better security, political, economic and demographic situation.
"Three: In any future permanent settlement, there will be no Israeli towns and villages in the Gaza Strip. On the other hand, it is clear that in the West Bank, there are areas which will be part of the State of Israel, including major Israeli population centers, cities, towns and villages, security areas and other places of special interest to Israel." (Disengagement Plan of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon -- revised, 28 May 2004).
I cite the foregoing passage because with all the fanfare surrounding the withdrawal people may have forgotten what it is really about. Let me clarify.
Sharon's disengagement plan is a bid to sideline the roadmap. It is an attempt to pre-empt anyone else from taking the initiative to break the "stalemate" -- a product of Israeli intransigence or, otherwise put, of the non-existence of a Palestinian partner prepared to accept Israeli dictates for a permanent settlement -- and compel the US, if only to improve its PR in the region following the occupation of Iraq, to pursue the roadmap as it was originally devised.
Read more at http://www.amin.org/eng/uncat/2005/aug/aug25-2.html
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Haaretz The remaining 99.5 percent Amira Hass
24 August 2005
What talent it takes to live for 35 years in a flourishing park and splendid villas just 20 meters from overcrowded, suffocated refugee camps. What talent it takes to turn on the sprinklers on the lawns, while just across the way, 20,000 other people are dependent on the distribution of drinking water in tankers; to know that you deserve it, that your government will pave magnificent roads for you and neglect (prior to Oslo, before 1994) to the point of destruction the Palestinian infrastructure. What skill it takes to step out of your well-cared-for greenhouse and walk unmoved past 60-year-old fruit-bearing date trees that are uprooted for you, roads that are blocked for you, homes that are demolished for you, the children who are shelled from helicopters and tanks and buried alongside you, for the sake of the safety of your children and the preservation of your super-rights.
For the sake of about half a percent of the population of the Gaza Strip, a Jewish half-percent, the lives of the remaining 99.5 percent were totally disrupted and destroyed - worthy of wonderment indeed. And also amazing is how most of the other Israelis, who did not go themselves to settle the homeland, suffered this reality and did not demand that their government put an end to it - before the Qassams.
A big, well-fed goat was removed from the Gaza Strip this week. And therefore, the sense of relief felt by many of the 99.5 percent is understandable - although it is a far cry from the reality emerging from the so-superficial media reports that are focusing on the celebrations of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority. In the words last week in the Khan Yunis refugee camp of a former worker at one of the settlements: "The settlements divided the Strip into three or four prisons. Now, we will live in one big prison - a more comfortable one, but a prison nevertheless."
Read more at http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/616309.html
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DissidentVoice.org How We Left Gaza Tanya Reinhart
19 August 2005
We will never know with certainty what took place in the mind of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in February 2004, when he first declared, without consulting anyone, that he is ready to evacuate the Jewish settlements in Gaza. But if we try to put together the pieces of the disengagement puzzle, the scenario that makes the most sense is that Sharon believed that this time, as before, he would find a way of evading the plan. This would explain, for example, why the Gaza settlers have not yet received compensation money and why, as the Saturday Supplement of Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot revealed on August 5, almost no steps have been taken to prepare for their absorption into Israel. (1)
Sharon had good reason to believe that he would succeed in his avoidance tactics. In the previous round, when confronted with the Bush administration’s “Road Map”, he committed himself to a cease-fire, during which Israel was to revert to the status quo of pre-September 2000, freeze settlement construction and remove outposts. None of this was carried out. Sharon and the army claimed that Mahmud Abbas (in the previous round) was not trustworthy and had failed to rein in Hamas. The army continued its assassination policy and succeeded in bringing the Occupied Territories to an unprecedented boiling point, followed by the inevitable Palestinian terror attacks that shattered the cease-fire. During the entire time, the first-term Bush administration stood by Sharon’s side and dutifully echoed all his complaints against Abbas.
Read more at http://www.kibush.co.il/show_file.asp?num=7241
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Haaretz Cheap labor, cheap deal Amira Hass
17 August 2005
Omar had a reason to laugh: Good people from Tel Aviv are agitated that the Evacuation Compensation Law passed by the Knesset discriminates against Palestinian and foreign workers, on the one hand, compared to Israeli workers. The good people are the Kav La'Oved organization and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, which gave up on the idea of petitioning the High Court of Justice because it expected the court would not get involved in this piece of legislation.
Omar is a 28-year-old resident of Khan Yunis who has worked for an Israeli employer in the hothouses in Gush Katif since 1996. ACRI and Kav La'Oved are troubled by the fact that he, as a Palestinian, won't receive the "acclimation payment" the law assures to workers who lose the source of their livelihood as a result of the evacuation. But Omar is laughing because he never even received his basic rights: His last salary was NIS 50 for a full workday - slightly more than a third of minimum wage, which is NIS 145 a day. And he didn't get vacation or sick leave. According to Omar, the most workers could earn in Gush Katif was NIS 60 for a full workday. But even if it is NIS 80, as Israeli inspectors in Gush Katif reported, it is still a lot less than minimum wage.
The Evacuation Compensation Law, without shame, explicitly states that only Israeli workers have the right to the acclimation payments, up to six months worth, based on the average monthly salary for every year worked. Neither the Palestinians nor foreign workers (Thais, Chinese, Nepalese) have the right to acclimation payments. The same law also gives Israeli workers the right to quit and be considered laid off for the purposes of severance pay. Omar, on the other hand, is going home, after nine years of labor, without any severance pay.
Read more at http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/613498.html
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MIFTAH On Divestment, Even Failure Breeds Success Paul Beran 9 August 2005
In the last six months, civic groups and churches in the United States have independently launched campaigns to divest financially from companies profiting from the Israeli military occupation of Palestinian lands. These groups have targeted town governments, university boards and religious bodies in an effort to publicly spotlight the low standards that human rights have been accorded in the U.S.-dominated "peace process" between Israel and the Palestinians. The American Presbyterian Church, a body of some 2.5 million followers, last summer decided to selectively divest its pension funds from companies profiting from the Israeli military occupation. The church has paid a price for daring to criticize Israel's human rights record. In November, church leaders were threatened with violence, called anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli for their stance. One hate message the church received said: "I promise violence against Presbyterian churches, they will go up in flames - that's a terrorist threat." Beside these words was a hand-drawn swastika. In addition to these attacks, the church has been publicly rebuked by such ardent pro-Israel supporters as high-profile law professor Alan Dershowitz.
In addition to the Presbyterian churches' activities, the first municipality in the U.S. to publicly be asked to divest its funds from Israel was Somerville, Massachusetts, near Boston. In November, a local group, with over 1,000 citizen signatures in hand, asked the town council to divest their pension funds from companies benefiting from the Israeli occupation. Passage of the resolution, which is non-binding, should have been easy: Somerville has a tradition of using its pension funds to uphold human rights, for example when it banned investment in Burma due to its human rights abuses.
Read more at http://www.miftah.org/Display.cfm?DocId=8148&CategoryId=5
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Haaretz What business is it of Chirac? Amira Hass
3 August 2005
Why should Chirac and the other European leaders take an interest in the millions of trifles of the calculated dispossession, which dictate the lives of the Palestinian people? Trifles that add up to a clear picture: Sharon is determinedly striving to realize the master plan - integrating most of the West Bank into the sovereign State of Israel.
The Jordan Valley, the settlement blocs that continue to merge into each other, the monumental Jews-only roads, the demilitarized zone long since annexed to Israel, the area annexed to Jerusalem in 1967, the de facto annexations of the fence - these already cover most of the West Bank. They will call the densely populated Palestinian pockets that will remain a state, and the world will applaud.
Reasons abound for not taking an interest in the trifles of this dispossession: a mere three and a half million people are at stake, with no oil and no support from any international power; their brethren in the Diaspora and in Israel do not constitute a lobby. There are places in the world where tens of millions are being wronged far more cruelly, and nobody makes a peep. And, after all, Israeli colonialism doesn't even come close to the murderousness of the European variety.
But Europe does take an interest. The billions of dollars it's pouring in here prove that it knows that this "little" usurpation is being perpetrated at a highly sensitive juncture. Perhaps European leaders are hoping that the money being showered on the Palestinian Authority - and effectively on Israel, which thus escapes its responsibility as the occupying power - will compensate for their impotence. It was they, after all, who failed to implement international decisions regarding the illegality of the settlements.
Read more at http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/607926.html
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International Crisis Group The Jerusalem Powder Keg
2 August 2005
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY AND RECOMMENDATIONS
While the world focuses on Gaza, the future of Israeli-Palestinian relations in fact may be playing itself out away from the spotlight, in Jerusalem. With recent steps, Israel is attempting to solidify its hold over a wide area in and around the city, creating a far broader Jerusalem. If the international community and specifically the U.S. are serious about preserving and promoting a viable two-state solution, they need to speak far more clearly and insistently to halt actions that directly and immediately jeopardise that goal. And if that solution is ever to be reached, they will need to be clear that changes that have occurred since Israelis and Palestinians last sat down to negotiate in 2000-2001 will have to be reversed.
Since the onset of the Arab-Israeli conflict, control over Jerusalem has fluctuated, as have the city's contours. Speaking of the city today, one refers to substantial areas, some Jewish, others Arab, that were part of the West Bank and that no one would have recognised as Jerusalem prior to 1967. Stretching municipal boundaries, annexing Palestinian land and building new Jewish neighbourhoods/settlements, Israel gradually created a municipal area several times its earlier size. It also established new urban settlements outside the municipal boundary to surround the city, break contiguity between East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and strengthen links between these settlements, West Jerusalem and the rest of Israel.
Settlement expansion has been pursued by Labour and Likud governments alike and has always been highly problematic and deemed unlawful by the international community. But Prime Minister Sharon appears to be implementing a more focused and systematic plan that, if carried out, risks choking off Arab East Jerusalem by further fragmenting it and surrounding it with Jewish neighbourhoods/settlements:
Read more at http://www.crisisgroup.org/home/index.cfm?l=1&id=3588
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